This twist on Dionne Warwick’s hit might be the most important question facing government transportation. Because plans to bring California into the 21st century depend on turning the city of 1 million into our state’s railroad capital.
But can these plans stay the course?
Why San Jose? Because it’s home to Diridon Station, a Renaissance Revival station where the past, present and future of California transportation converge.
The high-speed rail plan envisages Diridon as perhaps the most important hub where regional rail lines bound for San Francisco meet bullet trains bound for Fresno, Bakersfield, and eventually Los Angeles. Diridon is already the western terminus of the Altamont Corridor Express trains serving Stockton and is planned to be expanded throughout the Central Valley. And it’s the southern terminus of Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service to Sacramento.
Diridon is also a Bay Area connector. It is a hub for the Caltrain service from San Francisco across the peninsula to Gilroy. It is a key stop on the Santa Clara County Valley Transportation Authority light rail system. And it’s a goal of decades of multibillion-dollar efforts to bring BART to downtown San Jose.
Add to this Google’s massive development plan for the Diridon area — a downtown village with parks, housing units, office space, and a community center — and the ambition for the place is high.
The concern is that San Jose and the California carriers will not be able to support the weight.
With so many different constituencies pinning their hopes on Diridon, several government failures are converging there as well.
The high-speed rail plan is such a jumble of delays, consultants, and overspending that state officials are focused on only one small part of the project: Bakersfield to Merced. The most optimistic plans call for the high-speed rail to reach San Jose in 2031. It’s a better bet that the entire project will be mothballed by then.
There are also reasons to worry about regional lines. Plans are underway to extend ACE trains to Sacramento and beyond Stockton to Modesto and Merced. But BART extension to downtown San Jose is becoming increasingly time consuming and expensive.
Originally approved by voters in 2000, this 6-mile, four-station project is becoming one of California’s largest and most challenging infrastructure projects. Its main problem is local officials’ insistence on using an expensive and less proven method to build one of the largest subway tunnels in the United States. What was once described as a $4 billion project due for completion by 2026 is now a $9+ billion project that won’t be completed until 2034.
The debate over the troubled BART expansion has become divisive, distracting San Jose from what should be a focus: integrating transit into Diridon. Various agencies involved in the planning — from Caltrain to the High-Speed Rail Authority to the City of San Jose — don’t seem to be on the same page when it comes to redesigning the station to improve connections. And beyond Google’s plan, there is no clear vision to make Diridon and its surroundings a real tourist destination. The train station has to be a beautiful and distinctive place in itself to lure Californians there.
More worrying than the planning difficulties is the current traffic situation in San Jose. The new San Jose BART station is a ghost town left empty due to the pandemic shift to remote work.
And San Jose’s light rail, which was shut down for months after a mass shooting last year, has been called “a colossal bad system” by the city’s mayor, who has wisely proposed replacing it with electric buses.
Traveling the various VTA lines on a weekday, the few passengers I saw appeared to be homeless people living on the train. At several points I was the only passenger on board. That made sense. The trains are so slow and stop so often that driving is more than twice as fast as driving.
When it comes to that, the transformation of San Jose into a transportation capital may not be so sluggish. All Californians have a part in San Jose that connects us, especially the railroad.
The state must intervene, take responsibility and remove regulatory barriers. The remodeling of Diridon Station should receive the same exemptions from environmental and other laws that the state grants to new sports stadiums. The state should set up a single government agency to take over the San Jose transportation hub and require the high-speed rail and local authorities to defer their decisions.
Timelines must be accelerated and plans simplified so that a new Diridon with all working connections is in place before the end of this decade.
Let’s remove the obstacles blocking our way to San Jose.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for the Zócalo Public Square.