Sent to Columnist Gary Richards and published in the San Jose Mercury:

Dear Mr. Richards,

A couple of your readers are a little mixed up about the Caltrain extension to the Salesforce Transit Center. In 1999, 69.3% of the San Francisco voters voted for Proposition H approving this extension to downtown San Francisco. The cost of getting the trains up and running into the waiting Salesforce Transit Center was recently reported as being $5 billion, a significant portion of which has already been raised from San Francisco, regional and State sources.

Unfortunately, a handful of greenhorn planners in the San Francisco Department of City Planning have for years been trying to slip their proposed but unvoted-upon $3 billion Pennsylvania Avenue subway quietly under the umbrella of the Caltrain extension project. If this uniquely ill-conceived “add-on” were ever built, it would become the single most expensive grade-separation in the entire world. There is no reason for creating two to three miles of subway 100 feet west of the at-grade tracks where Caltrain currently operates. Given the fact that these tracks north of Potrero Hill are appropriately located directly under the massive I-280 freeway viaduct, the tracks and trains blight nothing. The 16th Street/ railroad grade crossing is troublesome, but it could be eliminated by depressing a short section of 16th Street for as little as five percent the cost of the subway.