The robbery occurring in SF transit planning

All aboard!

Governor Gavin Newsom‘s statements earlier this year regarding high-speed rail (HSR) not terminating in San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center put into rather sharp focus the lack of vision and concern on the part of politicians for prior promises made to the citizens of San Francisco. There is no real consideration of the environmental impacts we will soon see due to ignoring the premise and promise of the Transbay Transit Center.

Years of blocked streets, traffic gridlock, and countless concrete mixers and contractor trucks helped to build the current Transbay Transit Center.  Its planning was years in the making and was premised on the idea that a new skyline being developed in SF  would generate enough taxes to make it the most successful development in the country. Big real estate organizations would profit handsomely from the new leasable floors of these gleaming new towers.

The “Grand Central Station of the West,” as the Transbay Transit Center was often touted by planners, is currently a big bus station with a lovely garden terrace roof deck, an incomplete gondola system, some major cracking steel members, and an empty concrete box deep in the ground  below a series of high-rise towers greenlighted by planners and the SF Board of Supervisors, under the assumption that a real, viable solution to the transit impacts of office, housing and population growth would materialize with the Downtown Extension (DTX): finalization of HSR with its terminus at the Transbay Transit Center. These new workers and SF denizens would be able to “commute” via HSR to Los Angeles, and not add to existing traffic woes. The towers are built but where are the trains?

San Francisco Planning Director John Rahaim spoke at a prior meetings of the SF Planning Department on the rail alignment and completion of the connection between  the Caltrain Fourth & King St station and the “DTX as a 100-year decision,” noting its complexity and a possible second wave of development that could occur. He said that it was “important that we get this right.” Seems like some people like our Governor are not getting why the transit connection is so important, or so critical environmentally.

Nobody is discussing why the current outlook and lack of vision by our Governor is so so wrong. The studies and efforts on alignment, routing and completion mean we have problems to solve to get the trains into that concrete box under the towers. Not to complete the system is akin to ignoring the last 500 feet of the new Bay Bridge and leaving it up to the drivers to figure out how to get from the end of the roadway into the city.

The lack of financing or vision to complete the DTX means that developers can profit from the new towers while ignoring their impacts, and that environmental impacts and assessments on buildings are being ignored in favor of kicking the can down the road on this major infrastructure project and its proper completion. The effects will be felt beyond the downtown area, as many other transit connective projects in SF languish while these mega-projects stall. Much of the needed funding for other, simpler line extensions or route connections is not even planned, because much of the money went to the downtown central station and central subway planning – both projects which our current governor and prior mayors all supported. Many other parts of SF need new transit planning but now may never see the needed funds or proposals supported, especially when the public sees how poorly the city and its agencies complete and finalize a project and a mission. Do we dare add or allow more housing, when we cannot handle the existing transit and infrastructural needs of a growing city?

The ability to complete projects, and finalize a great engineering feat, are often recorded in history. Some projects are declared “white elephants” or seen as money-pits that drain needed funds from other less-costly and more equitable fixes. The longer the DTX box remains empty under San Francisco, the more likely its citizens will begin to realize that they have been fleeced again like they were with the Twitter tax break, and that the modern-day robber barons have managed to pull a fast one on them.

~~ Aaron Goodman