Central Subway – San Francisco’s Great Loss

March 2023October 2023 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

March 2023March 2023 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

March 2023March 2023 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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Swimming Through Seaweed

January 2023January 2023 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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San Francisco’s Central Subway Opens

January 2023January 2023 admin 2023, Regional and Local Governments, Transit Systems

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) says its 1.3 mile long Central Subway (originally called the Chinatown Subway) is scheduled to begin commercial operations on January 7, 3023.

The project is now officially four years late and $400 million over budget. (In 2003 San Franciscans voted for a Chinatown Subway project that was to cost $647 million and be completed by 2009. In 2012 the price was raised to an FTA-approved total of $1.578 billion, with a new completion date of December, 2018 established. Since 2012 the projected cost of the project, now four years behind the 2018 completion date, has risen to over $2 billion. In the process the MTA’s effect on Muni operating costs has gone from the promised $23.9 million a year saved to “$25 million a year added”.*

The fact that the project has massively overrun its budget is no longer a secret. What still seems unknown is exactly how the $400 million debt is to get paid off. No matter what the answer turns out to be, it’s the San Francisco taxpayer who going to get burned.

*Source: Western Observer, December 6, 2022

Coordinating Across County Lines

January 2023January 2023 admin 2023, Transit Systems

The pace of planning, designing and building new public transit projects has slowed down to a creep. Most of the wasted time occurs before construction ever starts. Once in construction things tend to pick up because, while having zero inclination to police themselves, the agencies often hold suppliers and construction contractors to high standards of quality and schedule adherence.

A case in Point: Waiting for MTC to eventually come up with an all encompassing plan for solving the Region’s connectivity ills is an exercise in futility. Most of what needs to be done could be accomplished better and certainly faster through cooperation and coordination between and among the affected transit agencies, with support from the impacted cities and counties. It bears repeating that riders don’t care a whit about the color of their bus or train, they just want to get there.

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