We Can Work It Out...Or Can We?

There was an Examiner editorial on Tuesday telling BART and Samtrans to work out the long standing dispute over who will pay for the San Francisco Airport BART extension:

BART insists SamTrans owes it $11.2 million next year to repay operating losses of the extension line to San Francisco International Airport. SamTrans counters that it won’t pay a cent more than $5 million and will never make another payment after next year.

Of course, it was BART that gulled Samtrans into making a ridiculous deal based on numbers that were wildly out of whack. An article on SFO BART ridership from BayRail Alliance states:

The BART/SFO Final Environmental Impact Report/Final EIS projected that the four stations of the SFO extension (not including Colma ) would be used by 62,000 riders in the year 1998. 1998 was the originally planned year of opening of the extension, which was repeatedly delayed due to problems that arose during the construction of the project. This projected ridership is more than three times what the extension carries now. The June 1996 EIR /EIS document has a table on page 3.1-14 which also predicted that the four stations of the SFO extension, if it had been in operation in 1993, would have carried 56,100 riders, and that it would carry 68,600 riders in the year 2010.

The BayRail analysis estimates that the BART SFO line carries 13,000 new riders. This is a high estimate, because many of the SFO line riders moved from other public transit-- Samtrans and Caltrain.  To be fair, the dot-com bust and 9/11 happened between the time the line was planned and when it was built, which caused SFO passenger trips to nosedive.  But that can't be entirely to blame, because in 1996, when the EIR/EIS was written, there was no dot-com boom let alone a dot-com bust.  As time passes, it becomes increasingly clear that BART's figures were arrived at by the time-honored method of WAG (wild-ass guessing).

So what to do?

The Examiner takes a moderate approach:

The most reasonable new approach might be for BART to delay collection of a substantial portion of the operating subsidy. Then, if and when the SFO extension ever begins turning a profit, those revenues would first go toward paying the uncollected subsidies before SamTrans gets a cent. For the sake of the riders, the agencies must get their act together and move forward with a realistic plan.

That would be nice for starters.  But considering how BART took Samtrans to the cleaners, Urbanities suggests that it the time for moving forward with realistic plans is long past.  BART cruelly hoodwinked the Peninsula transit agency; We recommend that Samtrans file a lawsuit to keep BART from sucking any more of its revenue.