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BART’s first San Jose station is set to open later this year, but the latest new stop approved in the system is in Fremont, a city with two working stations, but also a longstanding plan to fill in the gap between them.
On Thursday, the BART Board of Directors approved the latest, scaled-back version of the proposal for Irvington Station, 40 years after the station plan’s original genesis.
Per an announcement on the BART site, this (presumably) final plan is “a smaller, more cost-effective and neighborhood-friendly station” than ones that had been considered in the past.
According to the city’s site, “The future Irvington BART Station will be located in the Irvington District at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Osgood Road, approximately halfway between the existing Fremont BART Station and the Warm Springs/South Fremont BART Station.”
Originally Irvington Station was going to be part of the same construction timeline as Warm Springs Station, but “insufficient funding for the station delayed its development.”
Ten years ago, Fremont hoped to raise the money for the station via bonds through the California Redevelopment Agency, but the state dissolved the agency and left the city to come up with an entirely new funding plan.
The project has an estimated budget of $120 million, funded via Measure BB, a voter-approved 2014 law in Alameda County that upped the sale tax “to generate approximately $8 billion in revenues from April 2015 to March 2045 for transportation improvements.”
The transit agency and the city of Fremont have mulled the Irvington Station proposal for decades, with the BART board adopting the earliest version of the project in 1992 as part of the larger Warm Springs Extension Plan. However, according to the city, the original idea dates to 1979.
Measure BB passed with over 70 percent of the vote, in part because of promises to expand BART service in the county.
Construction is set to begin in 2022, with a projected completion date in 2026.
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