VTA to Resume Running Light Rail — Someday

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) announced that it is going to resume running its light-rail trains. It doesn’t know when it is going to do it, but it has a plan. The plan is pretty vague but it hints the trains might be accepting passengers again by the end of July, although the agency’s CEO admits that mid-August is more likely.

As Antiplanner readers will remember, on May 26, a disgruntled employee killed nine other VTA workers at the light-rail maintenance center and then shot himself. The shut-down of the maintenance center meant no light-rail trains could run while police were doing their investigation.

To make matters worse, VTA said it didn’t have enough bus drivers to replace light-rail service. What buses and drivers it had were dedicated to the “regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most,” the agency said.

You’d think the agency would be better prepared to deal with light-rail shut-downs, as this wasn’t the first one to take place in recent months. In April, 2020, San Jose light-rail trains were shut down for two weeks when an operator tested positive for COVID-19. As late as April, 2021, buses were operating at just 78 percent of pre-pandemic levels, so the agency should have had plenty of extra buses and drivers available, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Interestingly, I can’t find any media reports about stranded riders or extra congestion due to the most recent light-rail shut-down. Apparently, VTA’s judgment that it didn’t need to replace light rail with buses was correct: nobody really needs it.

This is all the more surprising because agencies like VTA are supposed to build rail transit to serve their trunk routes, the ones that generate the most transit riders. But Silicon Valley is so decentralized that VTA doesn’t really have any trunk routes. Its location of light-rail lines was based more on random factors such as where it could find right-of-way than on ridership needs.

Meanwhile, no one really knows what triggered Samuel Cassidy to murder nine of his fellow employees. He started working for VTA as an electro-maintenance worker in 2001, and worked his way up to a substation maintainer earning $114,000 a year (including overtime) plus $46,000 in benefits in 2019.
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He had a few minor incidents of insubordination in the past two years. For example, he refused to sign his name to a form needed to document when he used an agency radio. He was briefly suspended for that, but when other employees complained about other insubordinate acts, they were told by his supervisor that he “was a great worker” and that the agency had a shortage of employees already so it couldn’t afford to suspend or fire Cassidy.

Insubordination wasn’t the most important of Cassidy’s problems. In 2016, he was detained by federal agents on his return from a trip overseas due to notebooks they found that described his hatred of VTA as well as “books on terrorism and manifestoes.” The Customs and Border Protection agency has not responded to requests for more information.

Apparently, he let his hostility to other employees show in recent months and some said he frightened them. After he accused a co-worker of corruption in January, 2020, another said, “If someone was to go postal, it’d be him.” The agency ignored reports of such problems from this and other employees.

After the shooting, the agency claimed that its hands were tied because Cassidy was a member of the transit union. “There is a formal progressive disciplinary process that must be followed based on the union’s bargaining contract,” VTA said, but apparently it made no attempt to do so because it was too much trouble. In fact, VTA and the union together went out of their way to deny that Cassidy was facing a disciplinary hearing that might have set him off.

What would make someone who was making well above a median salary, who owned their own home in San Jose (which would be worth a lot of money), who traveled around the world, to become so hostile to their workplace that they would undertake a mass shooting? I’ve frequently called VTA one of the worst-managed transit agencies in the country. Could its mismanagement and apparent corruption have led to some of Cassidy’s anger? Even if not, could better management have detected the problem and given him the help he needed rather than continuing to overwork him due to a shortage of maintenance workers?

We’ll probably never know the answers to these questions. But one thing we do know: light rail made no sense in San Jose when it was built, and the fact that it has been shut down for seven weeks and hardly anyone has noticed shows that it makes no sense today.