Riders would have to climb the equivalent of eight flights of stairs in an emergency under the current design of the proposed BART-to-San Jose stations, and some officials are waving red flags that this is not feasible emergency planning.Now in the planning for nearly ten years, the most controversial aspect of the BART-to-San Jose project has been its ever-jumping price tag, currently slated at $12.7 billion. And NBC Bay Area has the news that the federal government just cut more than $1 billion from a share that they’d pledged to pay, so that’s just more cost getting soaked locally. But there is much bigger news in that NBC Bay Area report. That outlet also has a new investigation into current and former BART officials sounding the alarm that there are serious safety concerns over the BART-to-San Jose tunnel design. This project is being managed by Santa Clara County’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) as much as it is by BART. And the VTA has chosen a “single bore” tunnel design that’s one big tunnel, unlike the two-tunnel system you see at most SF and Oakland stations, with trains going in both directions.Image: VTAThat means the tunnels need to run twice as deep as they do at traditional BART stations, not unlike the very deep Chinatown Muni station. In the case of an emergency, the escalators would stop working, and would function as stairs. So in the event of, say, an equipment fire in the station, NBC Bay Area points out that riders would have to climb “the equivalent of eight flights of stairs to get out.”"There's probably six or seven major, major red flags there," retired BART engineer Barney Smits, told NBC Bay Area. "When there's 2,000 people on a BART train, that's a lot of lives at risk."Oh, and there would be firefighters going down the same stairs at the same time, so that complicates matters further.The retired Smits is not the only person sounding alarm bells. "To me, this is untested," current BART board member Liz Ames said to the station. "We haven't seen any analysis that shows that this system would actually work and that you would have a point of safety inside the tunnel."National fire safety standards generally call for a "six-minute rule" for passengers to get off a transit vehicle and out of a station. Smits told NBC Bay Area, "There's no way of them reaching the six-minute rule — of reaching the surface within six minutes."But current BART engineers and managers feel the system design will be adequately safe. "We are not cutting corners in safety or design — I can promise you that," BART operations manager Shane Edward said at an August BART board meeting.Related: BART to San Jose ‘Likely’ Delayed Until 2034, If We Should Even Live That Long [SFist]Image: VTA