The long-awaited San Jose BART extension is facing significant delays and a whopping new price tag of $12.2 billion, more than twice the original estimate, officials said on Wednesday.
The transit project, already considered one of the most expensive in the country, will now be completed in 2036, a full decade later than initially expected.
The six-mile extension will run from the Berryessa Transit Center in north San Jose, looping through the downtown core and up towards Santa Clara, collectively adding four stations to its portfolio and creating a ring of rail service around the region. The route is expected to carry over 50,000 each weekday to other locations in the Bay Area by 2040, according to VTA.
Officials blamed the project’s ballooning cost on skyrocketing construction material rates, labor prices, and persistent inflation — and said updated engineering and risk assessments have pushed out the project’s timeline.
“I know it’s taking a long time,” said Valley Transportation Authority’s General Manager and CEO Carolyn Gonot while taking questions from reporters on Wednesday. “We don’t build as fast as other areas of the world. But once we get it done, people will reap those benefits and not regret having that project.”
It’s not the first time that the megaproject, decades in the making, has faced delays and budget increases. An initial estimate in 2014 set a target date of 2026, at a cost of $4.7 billion. Those figures were revised again in 2020, with the timeline adjusted to 2030 with a budget of $6.9 billion.
Last year, federal officials determined in an independent analysis that the extension project could be pushed out to 2034 and cost $9.1 billion. The federal government’s study centered around the project’s tunneling method, calling the timeline for the process “overly ambitious.” The underground path will cut through a 4.7-mile stretch of San Jose and is the largest single-bore tunnel for transit in the country, according to officials.
The four new stations include underground stops at 28th Street/Little Portugal, Downtown San Jose, Diridon Station and an above-ground platform in Santa Clara near the city’s Caltrain terminal.
Gonot maintained that the new budget estimate still fits into the project’s funding plan and promised local taxpayers no future ballot measures are anticipated to raise additional money. Since 2000, residents have approved multiple sales tax measures to help cover the project’s costs, and the federal government announced in 2021 that it would also step in with additional funding. Officials said Wednesday that revenue from the measures is increasing compared to previous projections.
In a statement, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said the project’s contractors “will have to live within their means to get it done.”
“We are not going back to the voters on this one,” he said.
Former San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery, a skeptic of the BART proposal, said he would like for Mahan and the City Council to conduct its own analysis of the project.
“It’s so predictable,” said McEnery about Wednesday’s update on the plan. “It’s something that I really want the community to take a hard look at.”
But Jason Baker, a trustee for Campbell Union High School District and former mayor of the city, said unpredictable events have challenged the BART extension. Still, he said, leaders shouldn’t quit on it.
“A couple of years of COVID and inflation and the cost increases were something we couldn’t project a long time ago,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we’ll keep marching forward. We just have to. With climate change showing its face every day, we need to keep going forward. That helps take cars off the road and reduce what is the biggest cause of pollution, which is the transportation sector.”
The project is part of a two-phase plan, the first connecting Alameda to Santa Clara County through stops in Milpitas and Berryessa. The connection opened in 2020 and was $120 million under budget.