49ers Stadium: Draft EIR, Pt. 3 - Mass Transit

Dear Santa Clarans,


The Draft EIR presumes a 26% usage of mass transit for 49ers game day traffic (See pp. 175-6, Section "4.8.2.3 Existing Transit Service").

Quick. By a show of hands: Do you believe that number?

One of the ways to rationalize the figure you like is to work backward - not only from the total number of seats in the stadium you want - but also with an eye on the stadium with which your own will be compared.

That's Candlestick Park, of course. As you can imagine, any mass transit utilization significantly lower than San Francisco's on 49ers game days pushes your number of auto trips up.

You can't afford that perception.

This concern isn't new - it was raised as a significant objection by several speakers at the original EIR scoping sessions moderated by City Planning Department Staff back on September 2, 2008. This writer was one of them. Very few people believed the "one-quarter-will-ride-the-bus" claim even then.

That's why it's a little disconcerting to find it yet unchallenged by the consultants who produced this section of the Draft EIR almost eleven months later.

See "Table 15" on page 176, and note that the occupancy is estimated at 2.7 persons per vehicle.

If we were truly to see that in practice, fine - but the price of being wrong will be yet another unsustainable increase in the vehicular 49ers traffic described in the previous blog post. If the seventeen Northside intersections serving those vehibles are already completely degraded to Level E and Level F already, then for any miscalculation in the mass transit figure, we'll have to invent a whole new Level of Service (LOS) for those intersections: Level G, for "Gummed up".

And it will take only an incremental increase in private vehicles to cause that kind of bedlam.

Considering that the Draft EIR's explicit "mitigation" of that jammed traffic is in fact NO mitigation at all, we're running a real risk if we uncritically accept numbers such as the ones in the report.

To their credit, the authors were quite honest about the fact that no firm commitments for game-day service were made by any transit agencies. With the extremely difficult fiscal state both of our County government as well of of our VTA, this should not be in the least surprising.

Forty-Niners transit service may yet be implemented in the fashion dreamed of in the Draft EIR - but we may be assured that it will be subsidized by County residents far less than we Santa Clarans are expected to subsidize the stadium. If riders find themselves using such a service, they will probably be covering as much of its cost as the VTA feels that they can bear.

To close, I'd like to offer a rather stark thought exercise. It should make us challenge any overly-optimistic figures for bus, light-rail, (and even chartered-coach) usage figures - and it goes like this:

Are the people who can afford $3,000.00 to $6,000.00 for a Personal Seat License in a one-billion-dollar NFL stadium really the ones you're going to see on the 57 bus?




Thank you for your continued support,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer

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