Happy Birthday, VTA Light Rail ~ Tuesday, September 03, 2013

We've had a few transit system birthdays in the Bay Area lately; Muni just turned 100 and BART is 40. The VTA light system, in Santa Clara County (aka, Silicon Valley) is about to reach 25 years of operation.

The system's ridership growth has been somewhat slow (more, in my opinion, to odd choices of routes than to lack of interest!) but it probably deserved a lot of credit for turning downtown San Jose from a ghost town (back in the 80's we passed through a few times and had trouble even finding a place to get dinner) into an actual city, and lately development seems to be picking up around stations all over the system. Trains on the Tasman West line, which I use sometimes to get between my office and CalTrain, seem a bit fuller than the were a just few years ago.