CALIFORNIA - BART is still on track to have its Antioch extension up and running by 2015, but the new station won't be where city officials and transportation advocates had hoped.

Joel Keller, a member of BART's board of directors, confirmed that BART can afford to build a station at Hillcrest Avenue in Antioch but cannot pay to bump it 700 feet down the line the city's preferred location, which had been dubbed the "eastern alternative."

The 10-mile eBART extension from Pittsburg is estimated to cost $462 million; building the Hillcrest station 700 feet farther east would cost upward of an additional $50 million. That locale would have been a better fit for a future transit village, advocates have said. BART officials say a transit village will still work at their chosen location.

"There's just a reality out there that money is not as available as people once thought it was," Keller said. "We're just in a different environment than we were when we started all this."

Antioch officials said they're disappointed by the eastern alternative's demise but admitted they don't have the leverage to press for it nor the money to fund it.

"It's clearly BART's decision to make," Antioch City Manager Jim Jakel said.

This disappointment is just the most recent for Antioch in rapid transit. Many residents wanted to see traditional BART in eastern Contra Costa and were upset by eBART's light rail model, which will include self-propelled diesel battery rail cars and require passengers to transfer at the Pittsburg-Bay Point station. Many people also think it's been too long coming and that local commuters should have gotten relief by now.