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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
The new Lockheed/Martin light-rail station, which will serve job-rich north Sunnyvale, may just begin to pull some rush-hour commuters out of their cars.
On the right track?
Businesses rave, neighbors rage about new light-rail line
The new light-rail line that stretches across north Sunnyvale is a journey through the Silicon Valley that the world knows, and through one that it doesn't.
By Sam Scott
Shiny glass-covered tech buildings dot the landscape. Construction efforts on the future homes of more of them, built on spec, hum along as the train travels the 7.6 miles from San Jose to Mountain View.
Farther down the tracks, mobile homes, peeking over sound walls on Tasman Drive, hint at a way of life away from stock options.
These are different worlds with different views of the railway passing by.
A year early and, at $327 million, on budget, the Tasman West branch of the Valley Transportation Authority's light rail system arrives Dec. 20. From San Jose, trains will run every ten minutes across north Santa Clara and Sunnyvale to Mountain View. Connection points with the existing San Jose light rail line, the Caltrain route, and the ACE trains from Stockton expand its range considerably.
It is a development that delights employers in the area.
VTA light rail pilot Steve Hawkins accelerates along a new stretch of track, which parallels Tasman Drive in north Sunnyvale.
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Linda Mandolini says she estimates 110,000 working hours are wasted in traffic every day in the Bay Area. Mandolini works for the Silicon Valley Manufacturer's Group, an organization that represents the concerns of some of the biggest businesses in the valley.
"Every year we poll our CEOs, and every year we ask them the most important issues, and every year for as long as any one can remember, those issues are transportation and housing."
The two, as everybody knows, are entwined. Expensive housing pushes people farther away and into longer and longer commutes.
Thom Bryant of Network Appliances--one of the nine fastest-growing companies in Sunnyvale last year--says the presence of the light rail helped determine where the company would place two new buildings.
"That's one of the reasons we picked this location," he says referring to a site along the Tasman West line. "We get queried all the time about when it is going to start. People are sort of fed up with the commute."
Jack Collins, director of the light rail project, says the Jay Paul Company, which is developing a commercial project near Moffett Field, values the light rail so much, it has offered to pay to build a new station midpoint between two existing ones.
In the mobile parks, however, the light rail doesn't get the same reception. Neighbors, many of whom protested the routing of the line so near their homes, view it with suspicion.
Bob Smith lives in Casa de Amigos, a Sunnyvale mobile home park located along Tasman.
"I don't know anybody that wants to use it. Who wants to go to downtown San Jose?" he asks. "Ten years from now, I see them pulling out the rails with the excuse that they are going to need another lane for cars."
Carol Lee, who lives in the same complex as Smith, shares his dim view of the rail. She says she used to work next to the light rail in San Jose and was not impressed.
"It's a lot of money that is going to be wasted. I could have seen better place for it to go," she says. "Sunnyvale has got all kinds of homeless. Something on that order could have been helpful."
(Sunnyvale contributed $2.1 million to the project, mainly to make aesthetic changes to the wires and poles in the city, says Jack Witthaus in Public Works.)
Photograph by Skye Dunlap
County Supervisor Blanca Alvarado (left) and San Jose council member Margie Matthews chit-chat with a VTA worker on the first trainfull of civilians to make the trip along the extended light rail route from north San Jose to Mountain View.
Lee says that the stations near the mobile home parks lack parking spaces. Indeed, only the Evelyn and Mountain View Stations in Mountain View have Park and Ride locations. Lee says the elderly folks who predominate in the mobile home parks won't be able to walk to the stations and carry shopping.
"I don't see what it can do for me." she says. "In the first place in order to get on it you have to drive down to the end. You can't go shopping on the darn thing because everything will be too heavy."
Those in favor on the line admit it won't have much effect on people outside the 30,000 estimated to take light rail.
"It won't have a large impact [on traffic problems]," says Witthaus of Sunnyvale Public Works. "It's a pretty specialized market that light rail serves. At this point throughout the valley it is not comprehensive enough to capture a lot of traffic."
Mandolini from the Silicon Valley Manufacturers Group, a strong supporter of the systems, concedes the new rail is only a first step.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
