Lessons from the Oakland Airport Connector

An image from BART of the now defunct Coliseum transfer station

On Friday afternoon I got word that the Federal Transportation Administration had shot down the BART Oakland Airport Connector for good. A few calls to Washington produced the letter confirming that this was true. If we'd had a show that night, KALW would have broken the news, but I had to content myself with a tweet and this blog post.

There are still some big questions left to be answered in this story though, namely what went wrong? This is precisely the sort of job-creating, legacy-leaving project that the Obama administration was looking for. If you've been following this you know that BART didn't get the money because it was out of compliance with Title VI, the civil rights law. But the deeper question is, why was BART out of compliance? Members of nonprofit groups brought this to BART's attention back in June, pointing out that BART had never done a study to show how the planned doubling of fares would impact low-income and minority transit riders. That's precisely the reason the FTA has refused to fund this project, so why didn't BART address this last summer when it had a chance? I'll be getting to the bottom of that question in my follow-up story.