NBC Bay Area: Safety concerns about plans for deep BART tunnel in San Jose

October 10, 2024June 26, 2025

NBC Bay Area: Safety concerns about plans for deep BART tunnel in San Jose

BART officials warned VTA leaders that the single-bore tunnel planned for BART in San Jose poses safety risks. Photo courtesy of NBC Bay Area.

BART officials warned the head of the Valley Transportation Authority in 2017 that the single-bore tunnel design planned for the San Jose extension posed “serious risks to safety.”

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Comments (2)

Harry Devlin Oct 11, 2024 at 12:27PM

The story is here: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/bart-officials-warned-vta-of-serious-risks-of-san-jose-tunnel-design/3675817/

There are many studies on the difficulty of evacuations from deep tunnel subways. Here is one:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705816001028/pdf?md5=17b8e401a05a0b07a104b7ef82334f87&pid=1-s2.0-S1877705816001028-main.pdf

The single-bore tunnel was a very poor decision.

Of course the whole BART to downtown San Jose was a poor decision. Ridership will be very low since there is little demand to go to downtown San Jose, and Caltrain from Diridon to San Francisco is a better way to travel to San Francisco.

That BART money would be much better spent on finishing the buildout of the light rail system on the 85 corridor to Mountain View, and another line up the median of 280 to Palo Alto, and then down Page Mill Road or Sand Hill Road to El Camino.

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Myth Dispulsion Oct 13, 2024 at 3:05PM

It has been said before: Why not just build it like the rest of BART tunnels? Noooooo, we need something truly special in San Jose.

By the way, the whole East Bay won’t have commuters going on BART to and from the Google village with massive numbers of jobs any time soon, will it? Which will arrive first, the trains or the village with jobs?

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