San Jose's Light Rail Network Evolution 

They could have routed it to Santa Teresa, Winchester, Diridon, or St. James, but they just abandoned it instead

Nobody was riding it. It was one train on about 10 min headway. I agree it could've been handled differently. The tracks are furloughed but not abandoned. They're going to be used for training.

@@AVeryRandomPerson they needed to reroute it to serve new areas

THIS!!!!

The purple was initially proposed to go to Mountain View. Not once has the idea of extending to San Jose Diridon ever been considered

I'm sorry, but what happened? I'm not from the USA so I am a bit lost about the matter

@@portugueseeagle8851 I wondered that too. There was a shooting. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting

@@portugueseeagle8851 There was a HORRIBLE mass shooting at the Depot for the light rail trains.

@@parker6227 oh I see

Hey man…❤ thanks for

Omg yes the s train is so good

I found you. It’s Bird.

Watched the whole video, BART is up next.

True, if you live in/near San Jose you can easily see

They can’t extend it only to Milpitas because there is no place to turn around and there are no nearby crossover tracks. If the line went to the Milpitas station it would have to go all the way to Alum Rock Station, which was actually planned a few years ago. There would have been blue line and orange line service to Alum Rock. Too bad that didn’t happen. Maybe in the near future?

Yep, superficially that seems like a no brainer. On such a little used system with infrequent service the last they need is another transfer for such an obvious trip scenario.

@@danos2544 That may be the case, but that isn't the way it should be. They should look into retrofitting the station at Milpitas with a crossover track or running on a more creative service pattern there to make this work. They have ridiculously low frequencies anyway. They could just run on the wrong side of the track until the closest crossover track section. If they run with 20 minute headway at best then this shouldn't even be an issue. People really underestimate how important these transfer opportunities are. We have a lot of low-density, low frequency transit networks so the value of transfers is not as well understood as it should be. But once people get used to it, these kinds of transfer opportunities become instrumental in maintaining strong ridership. BART will probably end up being a major transit ridership driver for San Jose in the future. But if they don't have good transfers they'll just waste all of that potential.

@@TohaBgood2 I think they might be planning on extending the Blue Line after they finish building the Eastridge extension down Capitol Expwy. If that’s the case it would seem that this would be the solution. An extended Blue line could end at Alum Rock or Eastrridge. My understanding is that the only reason they shortened the Blue Line is the lack of operating funds. If they don’t have the money for it, it’s moot point IMHO.

@@danos2544 Well, then I hope that they get the money for it. Not leveraging that BART connection seems borderline criminal in my opinion. If only this network could survive for just another decade or so! There is such a ridiculous amount of transit-inducing development all around their stations. If they could just fend off shuttering the network for long enough I’m convinced that it will become successful. Downtown is exploding. There’s all kinds of TOD everywhere. It would be extremely silly to kill this network now.

You people just love it when something goes wrong with transit in the Bay Area. Has it ever occurred to you that the very reason you can still get anywhere on highways in the Bay Area is that a lot of people choose to take transit? I don't understand, do you want more congestion? Is the highway situation not crazy enough for you?

I don't think any of the colleges have Light Rail access except SJSU and Mission. De Anza, City and evergreen are not rail connected.

@@LawAcieIV I think SJCC's closest light rail connection is the green line, and there is bus 31 from Evergreen Valley College to Eastridge which will have a direct link to the orange line after the Eastridge light rail extension is complete, but De Anza does not have one, so that is why a light rail line along Stevens Creek Blvd would be something to consider.

@@y.k.2726 I used to take the bus from Tamien to De Anza it passes through city and Valley Medical. Also they should have rail access to Valley Med since its the largest hospital in the county. I think the new green line goes near City but they should still be connected to Colleges by light rail. The Bus to De Anza takes like an hour. Only West Valley is to out of the way for rail connection.

@@LawAcieIV True, but West Valley has its own bus transit center with buses to the Ames Center, Old Ironsides, Capitol Station, and Eastridge.

@@y.k.2726 yea but san jose is too wide spread for bis service it kinda sucks. West Valley is too out of the way for rail so bus is fine.

san jose is one of the strangest cities i’ve ever visited. It definately doesn’t feel like a city of 1 million people- it felt like a larger suburb like bellevue, or mesa in parts. it felt very car centric.

@@urbanpreppie05 Fun fact: San Jose is the only large American city to have a higher nighttime population than daytime, as it is essentially a huge Silicon Valley bedroom community that happens to have a CBD/ downtown

Even some of the board members have recently admitted this.

Has a construction tender been awarded yet?

@@AVeryRandomPerson its probably delayed due to Covid and the May 26th incident. I haven't heard anything on it in a while. They were supposed have started it by now I think. From what I understand, it's going to be all elevated. Two new stops, Story Rd and Eastridge.

@@JediTev it’s been delayed for decades. I’ve heard since 2004 that it was suppose to begin construction sometime in the future

Correction, construction begin in 2025 and finish in 2030.

The next extension has been in the works for a while (utility relocation has been underway): they are adding two more stations (Story and Eastridge) to the Orange line. The line will now terminate at Eastridge Mall. The other extension that was planned to from Winchester to Vasona is currently dead though.

BART's silicon valley extension into Downtown San Jose is using up all of the available political capital for transit funding at the moment. Hopefully this picks up pace soon, so they can focus their planning efforts on other system improvements.

I thought the yellow line was finished and was using the Siemens cars now

@@anareel4562 most of the work is finished on the expansion of the gold line streetcar which is like 10 miles now i believe and they are testing the new cars. there are also plans to extend it much further as well

Sorry I meant folks I meant to say let’s get on VTA light rail, BART and CalTrans! We can learn from our mistakes and treat our beautiful planet we love and respect.

Hasn't had a construction tender awarded yet

They left the tracks for retired light rail cars/ training cars and bus replaced the purple like with 64A route

Yea the city is too spread out. I used light rail as a teenager. But its still faster by car almost everywhere unless you are going straight downtown. But most people don't work down town. The new developments are getting more high density so hopefully they can solve this.

@@LawAcieIV It's wild to look at how close all the SF businesses are together (downtown SF/fidi/SOMA and how BART and Caltrain effectively funnel thousands of people to work in the city. Then SJ/silicon you have major fortune 500 companies distanced by many miles with their own massive campuses in the middle of random neighborhoods, basically where there was free land not consumed by suburban sprawl. Even look at the new building @ google campus, not by any major mass transit. Only way to get there is by a slow bus or drive your car.

9 of them were murdered in a shooting in May 2021.

do you live in san jose? i’m curious to see what people’s experiences are riding it- i rode it for a few days and thought it was just...ok.

@@urbanpreppie05 I don't live there but have taken it many times as I used to go there often. It's bad. There are other cities with similar problems (Portland MAX, Salt Lake City TRAX) but San Jose combines all of the worst issues together. For instance, like Portland it has the problem of a slow downtown street-running segment, making crosstown trips needlessly slow, but Portland has a sane topology at least. Plenty of cities have U-shaped lines, but the U is focused on the core area. San Jose commits the cardinal sin of an *inverted* U where the center of the U is at noplace in particular. This has only now been somewhat alleviated with an (awkward) BART transfer in Milpitas. Cities like Boston, Philly, and San Francisco (SF in particular) have slow street-running segments, but they are at the periphery of a fast core spine. San Jose's Mountain View line has these slow segments between two major transfer points, as well as the aforrmentioned slow downtown segments. Worse yet, the Mountain View line positively *meanders* in the same way slow bus routes do in sprawling suburbs where they try to provide comprehensive bus service with only a few bus routes. Diridon, the main transfer point to regional service, is connected to the rest of the system by a windey awkward right of way through multiple intersections. If/when the BART tunnel gets built, it will immediately replace light rail as a means to get from Diridon to downtown (though the Santa Clara station will probably be a more popular transfer given the much shorter distance between the BART and mainline rail platforms) The only high quality segment with no drawbacks is the Winchester extension. The one overriding feature of VTA light rail is that it bends over backwards to function within automobile infrastructure, aside from the Winchester right of way and a small segment of the Mountain View line. In some parts this is not too bad, but results in deference to cars at intersections. In other parts the line contorts itself to fit into automobile rights of way in some of its most critical sections. The freeway segments aren't particularly noteworthy as they're the typical American approach to urban rail. Fast travel but abysmal, unpleasant stations with poor walksheds.

@@urbanpreppie05 I used to live in San Jose so I can tell you first hand the experience. It is very slow and underutilized. Light rail seems to lack common core destination outside of Downtown San Jose

@@brtv3058 from what i saw when i was there- it seems like it functions more as a commuter rail- in light rail form.

I think BART will pump riders onto the VTA system when we're going back to offices. I think we'll see it at Milpitas, but this will be especially true when BART cross the light rail lines in Downtown SJ. It's remarkable how many riders go from BART to Muni, for work as well as for events at the ballpark. Sure, it's SF, where people expect to ride transit, but most of these transferring BART-Muni riders are from the suburbs,

It makes more sense to connect it to Convention Center via Yellow express.

under an hour before someone demanded a new video. new record.

Coming in September