And how the VTA increases traffic

An interesting VTA Workshop document can help shed light on what goes on in the minds of transit planners in Santa Clara county.

It's amazing how much money the VTA would like to throw away on expressways. Where to start... $13 million to widen an uncongested portion of central expressway. (Perhaps an attempt to make congestion on other portions even worse) A few hundred thousand here and there to convert HOV lanes to mixed flow (so much for encouraging car pooling). Half a million to reduce access on Lawrence. And that's just the expressways.

The criteria for selecting these is stated as "increasing LOS F intersections and keep them from downgrading back to LOS F by 2025". Many of these involve reducing access, thus they can be expected to accelerate degradation of other intersections. Focussing on intersection LOS can also degrade facilities for non-car travelers, and thus cause additional increases in travel. And even if it is a long-term success, the increased travel speeds can result in longer travel distances, and thus greater miles traveled and worse environmental conditions.

This document projects $32 million for bikes with $1.9 billion for freeways. We can hope things have come along a little in the past few years. With the money spent on expressways, all VTA transit service could easily be fare-free for the entire span of the program.