Some say that BART should stop at Santa Clara because people don’t want to transfer between trains.
However the reality is that…
- Transferring is part of realities of taking transit. Successful transit systems don’t promise direct trips for all riders. Successful transit systems offer convenient and seamless transfers.
- If riders to Santa Clara deserve a billion in expenditure to save them from the hassles of transferring, what about riders to Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto?
- If a billion is saved by not duplicating service, a billion can be reinvested into buses, light rail, and Caltrain to offer better connection to more areas.
- Part of hassles with transferring is the high cost of fares between two separate transit systems. Such impact can be reduced with integrated fares. Technical infrastructure to implement fare integration is in place with Clipper cards. All it needs is institutional agreements between transit properties. Integrated fares is common in Europe and Japan.
The cost of implementing integrated fares is far lower, and the benefits are far greater, than building a redundant line to one station.