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At the VTA Workshop on November 8, 2002, a report from a Task Force consisting of VTA Board members, the business community, and the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group (SVMG). Here is an analysis of that report, filed by Andy Chow.
The report by the Business Review Task force was a joke. The recommendations are nothing new. The team did not suggest anything substantial as to what the business community can do to help VTA, but they still expect VTA to use even more scarce revenue on their pet projects. (i.e. BART and freeway expansion). One must beg the question: where's the corporate responsibility?
The report has 5 recommendations:
Raising fares and cut costs is pretty much as expected. Do you think that they would recommend to delay capital program, such as BART, which is a big drain of VTA's revenue? Instead of looking everything holistically, they only look at areas where they won't feel the impact.
While they recommend marketing, they didn't mention what they can do to help VTA. The business community can do a lot to boost ridership. San Jose State has a transportation demand management program that performs very heavy marketing on VTA, even through SJSU don't get any special dedicated service from VTA. And because of the special marketing, the ridership from SJSU actually boosted. It is disappointing that the hi-tech industries are doing nothing to increase transit shares, but doing every in opposite, such as draining VTA revenue on useless capital intensive projects.
The most insulting from the report is the recommendation to have VTA have more control over the JPBs budget. It seems that VTA doesn't like Caltrain doing something it should do: upgrade Caltrain. Because Caltrain is run by a different administration, VTA don't have as much control to restrain the system. VTA obviously want to restrain Caltrain because VTA, and the SVMG, want to spend the money on BART instead.
The report totally blame the problem on someone else. Poor people get too much discount, no one wants to ride the bus, disabled get too much benefit, pro-Caltrain folks get too much funding for their projects. Where's the corporate responsbility as for all the expenditures that the SVMG has forced upon VTA?
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