(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 548: Wonders of the South Bay

This week we’re joined by Sam Sargent of VTA for part 1 of a conversation about transit agencies and special projects and programs. This week Sam chats with us about VTA’s history, current projects and future prospects in the South Bay.

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA or in our archive.

Below is a full AI generated transcript of this episode:

Jeff Wood: Sam, Sergeant, welcome back to the Talking Head based podcast.

Sam Sargent: Thank you. Excited to be back and a whole other part of my transit life.

Jeff Wood: We’re glad to have you back. We had you on the 2020 election night show that we had on YouTube, but you’re here in the studio now, which is awesome.

So before we get started, can you tell folks that might not be familiar with your work, a little bit about yourself?

Sam Sargent: Absolutely. Well, thank you again for having me, Sam Sargent. I am. Uh. Transit professional and when we first met ourselves, I was back in my hometown of Austin, Texas. I’m a lawyer and a planner by training, and I got my start in public transportation in my hometown agency, capital Metro, which was a very exciting, very fulfilling thing to get to do.

Do it in your own backyard. Get to implement some of the things that you dreamed of as a kid, or if you’re a transit nerd kid like I was then. Even better. We had a successful election to pursue light rail there in the city, and then I got an [00:03:00] opportunity to come out your way and joined up with Caltrain in 2022, serving as the director of strategy there.

Very exciting time to be at Caltrain. They were wrapping up electrification. Recovering from some serious pandemic ridership losses, but things began really heading in the right direction. And then I got an opportunity about four months ago to join VTA in Santa Clara County, San Jose as their first ever director of strategy and transformation.

I can get into a little bit more on what exactly that means, but here

Jeff Wood: I am. Yeah, we’ll get that in a second. I wanna go back to like when you were a little kid and you said you were interested in transit and stuff, but what was it that kind of caught your eye to start with and got you down this path?

Sam Sargent: I come from a long line of railroad buffs and ultimately my dad, who worked for the newspaper in Austin actually wound up being part of a group that pulled a steam locomotive, a Southern Pacific steam locomotive out of a park where it was on static display, got some money together, had a nonprofit formed, and then created an excursion [00:04:00] railroad, the Austin Steam Train Association.

And so I would’ve been. Three or four years old when your dad is pulling off that. And it was incredibly exciting. And I think beyond just the physical machine, the look, the feel, the smell, the sounds of it. I remember my first trip to Washington DC when I was probably about five years old, and it was the first time that I had ever.

Been around real mass transit growing up in Austin, you know, it was a smaller place than it is now. I remember riding the bus and being very excited, but then I come to Washington, DC at a very tender age, and we just rode that system. End to end over and over. I mean, the Smithsonian and the usual sites were one thing, but I was just obsessed.

And so I think at first it starts with a genuine love for this exciting machine and everything about it. And then as I got a little bit older, not that much older, this would’ve been the era of, uh, the first edition of Sim City. I started thinking more about transit, being more [00:05:00] fascinated about transit.

Transit maps and just the interplay of what it is, these trains and these buses, and eventually maybe ferries and monorails and whatever it was. I encountered how it interacted with systems and with human beings and with the people who would go into offices and then come home. And that really fascinated me.

Probably from late elementary school on, and I was hooked.

Jeff Wood: Did you have Sim City sit open on your computer so you can rack up money like I did? Oh, absolutely. Yes.

Sam Sargent: Yes. I did that on both Sim City and I think Sim City 2000, and then Railroad Tycoon. All of them were perfect to get me hooked on that. But I will say though, and I think a lot of people in this business and maybe generally might have experienced this, where as I got older and as I moved into high school and then eventually college.

I was still in love with transit and in transportation generally, and in cities, but I didn’t exactly know how one made that [00:06:00] into a career, and so I went down a different path and I, I didn’t realize what people inside of those buildings where transit agencies are run. What they did. I think in my mind, I thought they were operations folks and engineers and something a little bit more technical than I was.

But come to find out, there’s kind of one of every job in those places and eventually I was able to get my foot in the door in Austin.

Jeff Wood: I feel like that’s the hard thing for a lot of folks is to figure out kind of how to insert themselves into planning, you know, cities or transportation or anything along those lines.

When I was in school at ut, I had no idea that this was like a profession. I was just like, oh, maps, that’s cool. So let’s do geography. Right? My initial idea was kinesiology, because I was running track and cross country, but I was like, eh, I don’t, I don’t think coaching is for me, but you know, I looked up the majors and I was like, oh, I like maps.

Let’s do geography. Not history because my dad and my sister both did history and didn’t really do much with it, but maybe can do something with geography, which was really kind of funny because my mom was like, whatcha are gonna do with geography? But it turns out you can be a city planner by going to planning school after that.

So it’s really interesting to see how people get [00:07:00] into the system. And a lot of people take many different ways to get to the system. I’m sure you’ve met a lot of people that go many different ways to get to where they are now. And it’s not always a straight path, especially in planning.

Sam Sargent: Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

And I honestly think that that’s one of the joys of call it planning, but certainly in my transit world where I’ve been for a decade plus, it’s sort of the land of misfit toys. It’s people who, occasionally you’ll find somebody who had a very linear path somehow, but by and large, everyone had a previous professional life.

And I think that that makes it stronger. And I think the agencies that have the most previous lives, it’s even better. Yeah. And I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I thought I wanted to be a prosecutor in Austin and then come to find an entry point into this business through government affairs, and that turns into planning, and then that turns into something much broader.

It’s been quite a journey.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Well, so you’re at Capital Metro for Project Connect. During the election of 2020, you’re a Caltrain for electrification, and now you’re heading to VTA. So what’s gonna happen now, like exciting stuff has happened wherever you’ve been so. What’s next? I’ve been very [00:08:00] fortunate.

Yeah.

Sam Sargent: I seem to have hit so many of these places at the exact right time. I came into Capitol Metro a couple of months after the failed 2014 urban rail election, and I think that that agency at the time was kind of picking up the pieces, trying to assess what next. Thankfully the economy was recovering, so it gave that agency some breathing room, and we focused on a comprehensive bus network redesign, which ultimately was very successful.

Randy Clark became our CEO and became my boss and a mentor. We have a successful election and then set in motion a multi multi-billion dollar, you know, federally supported CIG program of projects and also stand up the Austin Transit Partnership, which was a really fascinating thing to get to be a part of.

And now that’s moving under its own power and they’re continuing to advance in a very challenging landscape. The Project Connect light rail, bus and all other things program. But yeah, and then I get to come to the very. End of a decade plus long multi-billion dollar federally and state funded [00:09:00] project in Caltrain electrification, which has borne incredible fruit now that it’s been up and running since last.

September, I guess it is. Their ridership at Caltran has just gone through the roof, especially on weekends, which is wonderful to see. There are financial challenges that are in the offering that maybe we can touch on in a bit. But then I come into VTA, I think at a really interesting point in the life of that agency.

And for those who don’t know, VTA is also a really fascinating agency in a quiet way. And in large part because of the many tools that are in its mobility toolbox in California, at least. It’s one of three agencies, LA Metro, orange County, which is also called OCTA and VTA, which have the transit operations function, as well as the congestion management agency function.

And they also serve as the transportation authority for the county. And so they are not only in the, you know, higher profile, let’s say transit operations business with light [00:10:00] rail and bus and para transit, which they operate directly. They also build on behalf of the state. They build certain highway projects, express lanes whose revenues are then invested back into the transit operation.

And then also things like ED and a pretty large and impressively large actually TOD program. And so there’s a lot going on there. And I, I should have mentioned at the outset, a 12 plus billion dollar delivery of the BART Silicon Valley project, which is a really unique role that VTA is playing. Bart into the South Bay before handing it back over to Bart for operations.

And so within all of that context, I think there is a lot going on. There’s a really strong team. We’ve got a great general manager and a strong board chaired by Sergio Lopez, who’s a a, a young, articulate, sort of visionary guy who’s, who’s at the helm of our board, along with Mayor Mahan from. San Jose, and not only do we have these huge projects along with, you know, [00:11:00] recovering from the pandemic, although VTA like so many bus heavy operations is, you know, at about 85% recovery, much stronger than a commuter or regional rail operation.

But the agencies also, I think, at an inflection point just in terms of its own kind of climate and culture and its internal organizational health. And so that’s a lot of what I am gonna be embarking on along with. A role in the, uh, regional measure that’s still whining its way through Sacramento right now.

And so it’s, it’s really interesting. There’s a lot going on all at once, all under one roof.

Jeff Wood: There’s been a tension though between VTA and the rest of the region. Right. I mean, that’s something that comes up too, is I know that they’re now on board for the regional measure, which is really exciting. I know that Santa Clara County and then also San Mateo County, that was kind of a, a bit of a lift for transit advocates.

They’re now on board, but there has been a tension between the two because, you know, it is so far south and it is, you know, people don’t quite maybe understand like where San Jose in Santa Clara County are as compared to like San Francisco. It’s obviously, [00:12:00] usually you, you tell people you’re from the San Francisco Bay area, but it’s like an hour drive to get down to there.

It’s like going to San Antonio from Austin, right? Yes. It’s like Exactly. It’s a whole different place, but it’s also in the same, it’s not in the same MSA, ’cause it’s weird. We have two MSA. Right. But it is in the same like CMSA. Right. So, you know, how does that play into things like the discussions about what VTA does as the transportation management agency or the congestion management agency as compared to like, you know, what happens in the North Bay?

Sam Sargent: Yeah, no, I think that’s a great point. And just for, yeah, for those who do not live or or track on sort of San Francisco Bay, you know, either geography or politics, or especially the politics around transportation. This region, what’s called the South Bay, which is really Santa Clara County, which includes Silicon Valley to the north as well as Santa Jose, and then South County, which is both.

Suburban and in some areas rural, it’s very full of garlic. Very, yes. Full of garlic. Exactly, yes. And it’s uh, it’s very large physically and it’s also got 2 million people. It’s incredibly diverse. It’s got some of the [00:13:00] wealthiest companies and people to the north. It’s got a very mixed city of San Jose.

And then it’s got sort of a growing South County area, like I mentioned. And I think in many ways it’s almost. It’s more self-contained than a lot of other areas in the Bay Area, and I think that that’s allowed it to set itself apart a bit. You know, we often talk at VTA about the fact that compared to, say, a Caltrain or a BART or a number of other agencies in this region, over 90% of our trips or maybe even 95% of the trips on vta, a stay within vta.

A, it’s, it’s kind of self-contained. People work and play and live. More or less within that county. It’s not that people don’t have reason to go in and out of it, because that’s gonna be a huge part of the benefit of Bart Silicon Valley and was of the Caltrain program. But I think because of that self-contained nature, Santa Clara County has also taxed itself many times over.

And so it also has a relative level of fiscal stability [00:14:00] that’s. Kind of envious, I think, when you’re not in Santa Clara County. But then you’ve got the very complex, very dense, very high ridership transit world of San Francisco and the East Bay, and then the North Bay as well. And so I think for the longest time there was more tension and personally being a relatively new person of ETA into the county.

I am glad that VTA has leaned into the regional measure. It is not facing down the type of fiscal crisis that Bart and Caltrain and Muni and AC trains that are all looking at, and yet it saw the benefit both. For its own investments, which include a visionary network to greatly expand frequency and hours of service on our light rail and bus network, and to make sure that we don’t down the road, run into some deficits.

But I also think it’s a recognition that. This whole ecosystem, all 27 agencies that operate within the Bay Area. If one fails in San Francisco or in the East Bay, it’s [00:15:00] a problem for Santa Clara County. It’s a problem for the greater ecosystem of this region. And so I’m glad that we’re on board. I’m glad that San Mateo County is on board too, because they were.

Something of a question mark up until recently, and I’m hoping that that makes it for a more cohesive region going forward, at

Jeff Wood: least in the transportation space. Yeah, I mean, it is tied into the rest of the region by Caltrain. It’s tied in by what’s gonna be the new Bard extension, and so there are those connections that are starting to like come into play when it comes to connecting the region as a.

Sam Sargent: Yeah.

Jeff Wood: And then high-speed rail too. And then high speed rail. Yeah,

Sam Sargent: no, absolutely. And then we’ve got, you know, cap Corridor, and we’ve got ACE and there’s other inner city services. But I think it’s an important recognition that the reason why, this is kind of summarizing at a high level, but the reason why we’ve got 27 transit agencies is that at one point in time, each of those 27 had some kind of need and someone decided to create tax of some variety.

And oftentimes that then led to a board. Here we are with a less than consolidated [00:16:00] region in terms of transit, but. You think about the average person and the average transit customer, people don’t live their lives within taxing jurisdictions. And that’s true everywhere and, and especially here. And so I think that this is a huge step in the right direction of recognizing that fact.

And that’s, you know, separate. But the regional measure is also gonna fund money for the transit transformation projects that MTC, with the support of the Bay Area transit operators are really leaning into like. Fair integration, like open loop payment systems, more integrated way finding and mapping and all of those things to make it so that people don’t have to really think when they’re moving between these many jurisdictions.

Jeff Wood: How does VTA interface with like that kind of greater Silicon Valley area? I mean, it’s just interesting to look at like how San Francisco works, how the East Bay with AC transit works. You have downtowns that are very central, San Francisco’s obviously very dense and kind of this big, uh, gravity. Well, what becomes the commuters and Oakland’s a little bit [00:17:00] of the same way.

But downtown San Jose is not quite the same in that way. And Silicon Valley as a whole, the money is there and the jobs are there, but they’re all spread about the region and so it makes it harder to serve. So I’m wondering how that interface happens and works between the service that the county is providing and the people who live there and work there.

Sam Sargent: Yeah, it’s a great point because, you know, going from, you know, Caltrain where most of the areas around those stations, and certainly in the city, but also in some of the peninsula cities where for those who have not visited the peninsula south of San Francisco and north of San Jose, it’s dense in a way, like you might find on the mainline outside of Philadelphia or like a Boston commuter line.

There’s relatively high. Amounts of density for not being in the middle of a center city. But you’re right, once you get down to Santa Clara County, it’s a lot more like what I was used to in Austin. Although Austin’s downtown growth is so [00:18:00] supercharged and it is very vertical these days that. It’s not really an apt comparison.

Even then, I mean the densities and the land use is somewhat similar to Austin or maybe to a Phoenix or a number of other Sunbelt cities. Certainly very different than the East Bay or San Francisco, but you’re exactly right. Downtown San Jose does have a lot of activity centers. It’s got the county complex to the north.

It does have some large employers still downtown, but then you’ve got Santana Row, which is a large employer and retail. Destination that has a lot of apartments and it’s off to the side. And then you’ve got the West Valley cities that are kind of nestled up in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Mil, which has really healthy amounts of TOD, certainly for a city of its size. And that’s where our BTA light rail currently connects to Bard, phase one of that extension. And then you’ve got the area around Stanford and the Stanford Medical Center and all of the tech companies in the northern cities.

And so it is really interesting when you see the routes that have the most [00:19:00] productivity and the highest ridership. It’s a tricky system to plan around because it doesn’t have that one in and out central activity point. And so you’ll see these ties between some retail locations, some major employers, certainly universities.

San Jose State is a very reliable source of ridership. Stanford to some degree, although Stanford is a much bigger source of ridership for Caltrain, and so planning for that. Requires having your ear really to the ground of where people are going and where employment centers and apartments are popping up.

I wish there were more apartments popping up in the South Bay or in in the Bay Area generally. And then you’ve really gotta figure out Yeah, how, how is that gonna work? And I think also a big part of what VTA is hoping to do with new revenues from a regional measure. Is to implement what we call the Visionary network, which again is getting our bus and light rail network back to 2001.

Levels of service. That was something that sort of shocked me when I first joined [00:20:00] VT A, which is that there was a period in the late nineties when the level of service or hours of service per capita where on par with an AC transit. You know, maybe, you know, not necessarily a Portland, but certainly a Sacramento.

It was a healthy amount of service, and then during the.com bust, it dropped back and it didn’t really recover. And so getting to a point where we can really invest back in finishing our zero emissions fleet plans, expanding the hours of service, and certainly expanding the high frequency network. Is gonna be big because the way that many of those trips work, it’s gonna require a transfer.

And so how do we make that a much more simple proposition for the folks riding us? And one statistic out of VTA that really kind of lit my eyes up in a good way was that nine out of 10 of our bus trips are on our 16 high frequency routes, outta 59 routes total. And so, so much of the demand for our transit already there.

And so I’m hoping we can beef. [00:21:00] You know, far better serve a place that otherwise may slip back into car dependency.

Jeff Wood: It might be beneficial in the long run, the grid network that you all have been able to put together and because of where the jobs are, where you can connect people, the grid allows people to go from one place to another, and it’s not so dependent on a downtown like San Francisco, which we’ve seen some suffering because of the downtown, you know, recovery that hasn’t taken place yet.

It’s coming along, but it’s not to where it was before and it’s not the center of gravity that it was before because of work from home and just kind of the nature of jobs in the Bay Area. I feel like there’s also frustration maybe with some of the tech companies that have built these campuses that are very insular as well.

I wish that the spaceship, uh, apple was actually another mini downtown. They took a whole big old property and they could have made another urban core that was served by transit and had mixed uses and things like that. But then they chose to be insular. And, you know, keep to themselves. And so there’s decisions like that to happen that are very frustrating, that I think affect how transit serves the region as well.

I hope that state housing [00:22:00] policy can kind of fix some of that stuff, but there are lots of decisions that have been made by private actors that have affected the public, you know, access to those places.

Sam Sargent: Yeah, you’re exactly right, because sometimes I’ll go by, whether it’s the Nvidia campus or, or Apple, and you think, you know, remote work, no remote work, 50 50, whatever it might be for that company.

I’ll just look at it and think of the fact that there are tens of thousands of human beings there and the fact that, you know, it may or may not be on one of our light rail lines or even one of our high frequency routes, or, you know, even Caltrain, it’s, it is frustrating. And, um, you know, every city makes decisions like that and oftentimes market forces drive those things.

But you’re right, it’s trying to figure out a way. Either through policy, but also just through telling our story VTA story and providing a better product. That was something that I was doing at Caltrain as well as part of our ridership recovery and growth strategy, as well as our non fair revenue strategy, which was how do we tell our story, tell the benefit of what these transit agencies [00:23:00] do, how it does it, and explain to people how we can be a part of their lives because.

Santana Row again, I mentioned that earlier. It’s a big source of sales tax revenue, which is great for VTA. It’s a big employment center. It’s got folks who live there, and yet it is off to the side. It’s not downtown. It’s on one of our high frequency, on one of our rapid bus routes, but it’s still not ideally placed for high amounts of transit ridership there.

But I do think because VTA was very fortunate. When it was founded, and I think this is similar of bart, I believe that it’s similar of MARTA and of dart, which is in the seventies when these systems were starting to plan out light rail in particular. They assumed that they were gonna need huge footprints for parking.

And then there were also some legacy parcels that were acquired by VTA early on just because of where light rail was gonna be in particular. And those now make up our 28 site TOD portfolio. Some of them built out [00:24:00] into market rate and affordable and a hundred percent affordable depending on the place housing.

But then there’s also a bunch of places that are just. Ready to be developed and I’m hoping that we can get to a place. Dear Don, really being the crown jewel that, for those who don’t know, San Jose is the main intermodal center. It’s the main rail station in the west part of downtown San Jose. Beautiful jewel box of a southern Pacific station.

Recently renovated by Caltrain, currently served by Caltrain. Corridor to Sacramento, ACE to Stockton, VT a light rail bus bus to Santa Cruz. It will be a BART station, and then eventually it will have high speed rail, and yet it sits in a sea of parking owned by a number of different entities right next to the NHL stadium, and it’s just ripe for redevelopment.

There’s a great team that’s all working on that. We’re hoping to secure some additional funds to try to spark more private investment in that space. It can and will be something special. It’s just how [00:25:00] do we incentivize the market to react?

Jeff Wood: Wasn’t Google buying up a bunch of properties around that? They were, and they were gonna make that kind of another center, and I think that was a smart strategy, but they’ve kind of backed off.

Maybe a little bit of that.

Sam Sargent: Yeah. I think maybe the market softened in San Jose, or maybe it was a larger corporate decision, but unfortunately the, uh, downtown West Vision that Google was a huge part of, along with the city of San Jose. Caltrain, mtc, HighSpeed Rail, other partners. Right now, their portion of it is on pause, but the rest of us are moving forward with the things that we can control.

Jeff Wood: There’s been a discussion about Bart and the extension into Dear Dawn, and further the discussion about the tunnel boring and whether it’s gonna be deep bore or whether it’s gonna be cover the costs related to that. And so I’m curious about the future of that and how that’s moving forward, because I know that that’s something that’s on the minds of a lot of transit advocates in the Bay Area, but around the country as well.

Sam Sargent: Yeah. No, it’s, it’s an incredibly exciting project and you’re, you’re right, there’s been a lot of discussion around the technology and [00:26:00] the technique to do the tunneling there. You know, this is a huge project. I mean, it’s 12 plus. Billion dollars. It’s, it’s been in the works for some time. Phase one, which is ESSA and Milpitas to the east of San Jose is complete, and then it’s gonna involve six miles and five of them underground.

That’s a very complicated and very expensive thing to do. Our board has a BART Silicon Valley Oversight Committee that has outside advisors, and they have been advising on tunneling techniques and everything is really focused on how to stay within schedule, within scope, and certainly within budget.

There’s a significant amount of uncertainty on the federal side, but I think that our team and the city of San Jose’s team and Mayor Mahan and our Chair Lopez, have really been doing everything they can to keep that moving. ’cause this is another multi-billion dollar CIG capital investment grant, federally funded project.

And so all of those things are in the works. The project is still moving forward. But yeah, there has [00:27:00] been a debate about, you know, the most effective means of tunneling. I know a huge part of that decision is both cost and minimizing disruption on the surface. So Santa Clara Avenue, which is where the tunnel will be beneath, is sort of the main street of downtown San Jose, and there are a lot of small businesses that are up on the surface.

It’s also an area that is not really recovered from the pandemic. And so the city of San Jose. Correctly understands that, you know, there’s only so much that downtown San Jose can take in terms of construction disruption. And so we’re moving forward with tunneling methodology that our expert team, including our chief of mega projects, Tom McGuire, who was the lead on the central subway here in San Francisco, to try to get this done and try to get into revenue service by 2038.

And then, like I mentioned, it goes through downtown San Jose. Station and then will emerge and there will be a small yard at Santa Clara station, which is shared with a number of standard gauge rail operators. [00:28:00] So yeah, there’s been a lot of, uh, a lot of debate over that. But I think at the end of the day, you know, the people who are more technical, uh, than I are really just focused on.

Can we do it within the budget that we currently have? And that’s tricky whether you’re in the Bay Area or whether you’re back in Austin or in New York. And it’s a challenge. And we also find ourselves in a region with a lot of people, with a lot of expertise. And so that’s going to trickle into this discussion.

Jeff Wood: And opinions.

Sam Sargent: Right. And opinions.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Hey everybody. We split this up into two episodes because there was so much content, it went over an hour. So next week we’ll be talking again with Sam about Caltrain electrification, where those diesel engines went to Randy Clark at wada, and much, much more. So join us next week for part two.