Envision Silicon Valley projects ranked

Envision Silicon Valley – the long-term planning process that may lead to a transportation sales tax on the November ballot – is moving along full steam. Since I last wrote about Envision, a number of cities have weighed in with council votes to say how they would like to see the money spent. Several Peninsula cities, including Mountain View and Palo Alto, have voted to endorse an expenditure proposal that allocates $500 million for bicycle and pedestrian projects. In San Jose, the council voted on a package that would dedicate $400 million of the measure’s revenues to bicycle and pedestrian projects, half of that within San José.All of these votes are supplemental to the official process Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has been undergoing to analyze a giant list of proposed projects against 32 board-approved criteria – things like collision history, gap closures, enhancing pedestrian facilities, greenhouse gas emissions, and accessibility to job centers. Since the official project list was approved by the VTA board last October, staff at that organization has been running projects and groupings of projects (such as the projects in the Countywide Bicycle Plan), that exceed $100 million in cost, through a model that takes into account all 32 criteria.The result of all this work is a significantly narrowed list of projects, each ranked in seven broad categories, which is now available from VTA. We haven’t had a chance to look everything over closely yet, but it's no surprise that projects like the Countywide Bicycle Superhighway program rank high. We welcome your input in the comments below as we digest the project rankings and what they might mean for an eventual tax measure.Next steps? VTA staff will take their latest work to all the agency’s advisory committees this month, and bring a draft transportation plan to the Board of Directors in April. At SVBC, we’ll be weighing in to make sure projects and programs that fulfill the goals of the measure get included and are given the funding they need!