Saratoga News
Columns
Point of View
Daylong transit ride an adventure that takes a while
By Carl Heintze
A while back, three friends and I took a daylong ride around the valley's light rail system.
The idea, I hasten to add, wasn't mine, but rather one of the three who has been a member of the Valley Transit Authority's committee dealing with the disabled.
Despite his handicap (he can't see much), he knows the light rail and bus schedules of the VTA like the back of his hand--or maybe, more accurately, the back of his mind. Following his instructions, we started by boarding a bus at Valley Fair, rode to the Santa Clara Caltrain station, boarded a San Francisco-bound train and rode to Mountain View, where we got off and walked to the northern terminus of the light rail system.
There we got on a light rail train. It carried us to N. First Street, where we transferred again. On this, our third train, we traveled all the way to the site of what used to be the IBM campus in south San Jose.
There we got off, got on a returning train and went to the Civic Auditorium station where we detrained, had lunch at a downtown restaurant and then took a bus back to Valley Fair.
The whole journey, including lunch, took most of a day, although we had a little time left over when we got back to Valley Fair had we wanted to go shopping.
I'm not sure what this journey proves. I suppose, for one, that travel by public transport may not be as rapid as by automobile, but that it can take you a lot of places if you really want to get there--although not at top speed.
The light rail is neither as convenient nor as speedy as your own car, but then I've traveled Highway 85 to and from the southern terminus of the light rail system at rush hour and that's certainly not a speedy trip.
We also made our journey before the new additions to light rail were completed. These include the line that runs to Vasona Junction and back and another which I understand takes in some of the East Side.
Taking either one of these would have added to the sights we saw and also, of course, to the time we spent.
For instance, had the Vasona line been available we could have traveled to what you could call our own Hollywood: television station KICU headquarters and the home base of Netflix, the online CD movie rental company.
They are near the end of the Vasona line.
Or, if we had been willing to walk a little, we could have followed Los Gatos Creek Park to Vasona Dam or meandered down past the percolation ponds and its ducks, geese and mudhens.
We didn't do any of these things, but then neither do most VTA riders.
Few of those who use the light rail system venture as far as we went. Most are traveling either north or south to or from work or from the suburbs to downtown or beyond. And no matter where they go, it isn't the sights they're after. For most of the light rail system, the sights aren't all that much anyway. The line from Mountain View meanders around through the back yards of a lot of North County, the line from N. First Street is pretty much follows First Street for a good part of its journey and then it rides down the center of Highway 85. Not much to see there but automobiles.
But then the light rail wasn't supposed to be for sightseers, but for people going to work or to shop.
As in the days when railroads were the chief method of getting around the country, their tracks usually didn't follow scenic routes. (One could except the Coast Daylight and some of the Rocky Mountains traveled by the Denver and Rio Grande.)
What else can one say about light rail travel?
Well, it is geared to handle the disabled, including those in wheelchairs, something railroads weren't very good at. It is safe because it doesn't travel very fast, and in any confrontation with an automobile, the light rail car tends to come up winners. With the rising price of gasoline, it is probably cheaper in the long run than maintaining and driving a car--if not always very convenient to where one is going.
And yet I can't say that I have ridden a light rail train since our all day journey around the system, and I am not quite sure why. One reason surely is that its lines don't often coincide with where I want to go. Another is that to use any of its various branches, I have to drive a car or take a bus to complete the journey.
And finally I suppose it's because I was brought up in a generation that grew up with the automobile. We thought both it and its complicated system would last forever.
Global warming, the growing shortage of oil and the increasing congestion on streets and highways, though, tells us that's just not so.
Sooner or later, convenient or not, we're going to have to go back to trains. And like it.
