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The Goals of the Santa Clara VTA Riders Union
At the Santa Clara VTA Riders Union, we strive to ensure that the Valley
Transportation Authority, its Board of Directors, and our elected officials
achieve the following service improvements for every transit rider in Santa
Clara County:
- Overall increases in bus service midday, at night, and on weekends.
- Rapid express bus service along every major highway, every state highway,
and every county expressway throughout Santa Clara County and up to Fremont
BART, operating 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 365 days a year.
- Better timed intermodal connections between VTA buses, light rail,
Caltrain, BART, and ACE.
- Proper state and federal funding for service and infrastructure
improvements on VTA buses, light rail, Caltrain, and ACE within Santa Clara
County, and the Bay Area region.
- A "rider-oriented" Valley Transportation Authority where policy is
mandated by riders, and members of the VTA Board of Directors are directly
elected by Santa Clara County voters. In other words, full and
direct accountability to the public.
- Construction or renovation of one transit mode should never come at
the sacrifice of another.
To further expand the last point, 70% of
Santa Clara County voters backed Measure A - a transit improvement measure whose
main selling point was that BART would be expanded from Fremont to San Jose and
Santa Clara. What many of those voters may not realize, is that
historically, BART expansion has resulted in cutbacks in service wherever BART
expansion has occured. The most obvious current example is BART's
extension to San Francisco International Airport and Millbrae in San Mateo
County. As a result of cost overruns that have nearly tripled the
estimated cost of the extension from $600 million to $1.6 billion, BART had to
borrow over $70 million in zero-interest loans from SamTrans. To help
finance the loans to BART, SamTrans cut a
lot of midday, night and weekend bus service on numerous routes by $7 million in
1999 - bus service cuts that were cleverly disguised to the public as changes in
route numbering. The Santa Clara VTA Riders Union believes that the same
scenairo should never occur in Santa Clara County and will fight to make
sure this does not occur.
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Disclaimer: We are NOT affiliated with, nor is maintained by, the
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