2023

Central Subway – San Francisco’s Great Loss 

admin 2023, Transit Systems, Uncategorized

Central Subway evolved as the product of an insufferable lack of insight, common sense and competence, from beginning to end and top to bottom.

For Willie Brown it was a handshake.  He neither knew nor cared how his agreement with Rose Pac would be carried out.

As Mayor, Gavin Newsom let it all happen without knowing or caring about either the outcome or the cost.

For Speaker Pelosi, it was strictly political pork.

So the project was left to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA), which gummed things up from start to finish.  Back in 2008 and 2009 it began with a big lie.  MTA sold its project to the public and elected officials based upon grossly inflated ridership projections and absurdly exaggerated trip time savings, coupled with a real whopper about how the Central Subway was going to save Muni $23.8 million a year in annual operating costs.

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BART’s Link 21 Project: Questions in Need of Answers

admin 2023, Transit Systems

BART began work on the Link 21 program in 2019. As of the end of 2022, $82 million been spent…with little to show for the effort but a preliminary marketing plan subject to significant revision and the sketchy sketch plans shown below. Mostly we hear of lofty goals and projections and vague conclusions.

On January 14, 2023 the Bay Area Transportation Working Group (BATWG) sent an open Letter to the BART Board. Here are extracts from that letter; graphics added:

“BATWG has now completed an initial review of the six alternatives your staff placed on the Link21 website in January of this year.

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Looking Forward

admin 2023, Transit Systems

The Bay Area transit agencies were not always so dysfunctional as they now seem to be. Here are three successful transit improvement projects all of which proceeded efficiently and without fanfare,

Baby Bullets: Caltrain’s new Baby Bullet system opened in 2004. This successful project was created with minimum cost by the simple act of rearranging the train service to better fit the needs of local, middle-distance and long-distance riders. The new system was instantly popular and Caltrain ridership surged.

E-BART Extension: BART’s e-BART extension from the Pittsburgh/Bay Point BART terminal to Antioch was completed in 2018. By using Diesel Multiple Units (DMU’s) and existing standard gauge track, BART completed the 10-mile extension at moderate cost. The result is a fast and reliable e-BART service that today links the DMU’s to regular BART trains via a convenient cross-platform transfer. The system was an immediate success, to the point where the size of the access parking lots had to be doubled.

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The Folly of Adding Lanes

admin 2023, Roadways and Traffic

“Why Adding Highway Lanes in the Bay Area NEVER Reduces Congestion”

On November 17, 2022 MTC made a video presentation of highways and their future relevance in the Bay Area. https://mtcdrive.app.box.com/s/s1hvkzwn94sc7l0p7h0yspmecugopger

During the presentation MTC planner Alex Eisenhart, using many interesting photos and video clips, carefully explained the problem in an unusually clear and forthright manner. His main point was that adding lanes to roadways does not reduce congestion. The presentation is well worth a look and we recommend it.

Caltrans has a long and storied history of adding lanes to solve traffic problems. In a dynamic and densely built-up area such as the Bay Area, this has never worked for more than a short period of time, but which did and still does do is keep thousands of highway planners and engineers happily engaged in carrying out their “mission”.  However, it wasn’t long before the folly of Caltrans’ approach began to be recognized.

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Swimming Through Seaweed

admin 2023, Transit Systems

Automobile use has risen to pre-COVID levels. But transit ridership has remained at roughly half of what it was pre-COVID. Moreover, it is far from certain that the lavish State and federal largess of the last two years will continue.

For these reasons, now would be a good time for the Bay Area’s Transportation Establishment to think about tightening its belt and putting every available dollar to maximum public benefit. To maintain its economic viability the Bay Area continues to need to put a high priority on mobility. People need ways of getting around and it can’t all be by automobile.

But things are not going that way, in part because of the inefficient and counter-productive policies and practices of the Region’s large and entrenched bureaucracies, for whom spending the tax payer’s money often seems to have become an end unto itself. Here are some of the unacceptable results of the current system:

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Another State Attempt to Grab Control over Local Zoning

admin 2023, Regional and Local Governments

It’s deja vu all over again…

SB4 initiates yet another inept attack by State Senator Scott Wiener on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in order to promote “Affordable Housing”, this time using “churches, synagogues, and mosques” (not Buddhist temples?) and non-profit colleges as his current “feel good” set of honey traps.

Opinions and warnings about the disastrous shortage of housing in California abound. Here’s what the U.S. Census Bureau has to say on the subject:  As of July 1, 2021 California had a population of 39,237,836 and contained 14,512,281 housing units, occupied by 13,217,586 households with 2.92 persons per household. On the face of it, that does not read as a State housing shortage.

But here’s the rub. There aren’t enough houses located where people want to live. A few decades ago, if you couldn’t afford to live somewhere, you found digs elsewhere. But that’s all changed. Now the clamor seems to be: “if I want to live there, I should be able to live there!”

Senator Wiener is at the forefront of all this. In previous years, Wiener has tried to legitimize his obsession with cramming in new residential units wherever possible by latching onto such nice-sounding catch phrases as “protecting the environment” and “transit-oriented housing”. It is necessary to remind the Senator that cramming excessive density into a well established and well-functioning community does NOT help the environment of the neighborhood.

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