Included in the transit funding are the New and Small Starts grants, which set aside a total of over $1.8 billion for capital investments in transit around the nation. The bulk of the New Starts funding is proposed for major transit projects outside of California.  Three major projects serving New York City (Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access, and ARC) are allocated $612 million.  Other allocations include those for Salt Lake City projects ($180 million), Houston projects ($150 million), Denver projects ($120 million), Seattle University Link ($110 million), Dulles Metrorail ($96 million), Dallas Northwest/Southeast light rail ($86 million), Honolulu Rail Transit project ($55 million), Hartford busway ($45 million), Twin Cities Central Corridor ($45 million), and Orlando’s Central Florida Commuter Rail project ($40 million).  A total of $200 million of Small Starts funding is also included for distribution to several other projects, mostly bus rapid transit.

Although the Bay Area was not in a position this year to receive as much funding as some other parts of the country, the budget nonetheless recommends $50 million for use on three major Bay Area transit projects.  The Central Subway, Van Ness BRT, and East Bay BRT are all considered by FTA to be priorities for funding:

• Central Subway: The $20 million New Starts sum in this budget is a small portion of roughly $950 million in federal funding that the Central Subway is ultimately slated to receive, amounting to 60% of the $1.57 billion project cost.
• Van Ness BRT: The $15 million sum in this budget is a partial allocation of up to $75 million Small Starts for which this BRT corridor would be eligible, assuming that San Francisco opts to construct one of the two serious center lane BRT alternatives (rather than side lane BRT, which would be cheaper to build but would provide only diluted transit benefits).  The maximum $75 million federal contribution would represent 57-63% of the total capital cost of $118-132 million.
• East Bay BRT: The $15 million sum in this budget is a partial allocation of up to $75 million Small Starts for which this BRT corridor would be eligible.  The maximum $75 million federal contribution would represent about one-third of the total capital cost of $235 million.  The exact status of the project is uncertain, in light of a requested swap for operations money. Nonetheless, AC Transit continues to move forward with environmental work and has not abandoned the project.  A match of local funding has also been retained for the time being, so it is good to see that FTA has prioritized this BRT corridor.

Install photovoltaic capacity to generate “green” hydrogen: Install multiple PV modules at its Central Maintenance Facility in Hayward. Combined with AC Transit’s already-installed solar capacity, this solar installation will produce the renewable electricity equivalent to what will be required to produce 180 kg/day of “green” hydrogen.

Separately, the FTA also announced that the Central Subway has received a $9.9 million grant, which will the SFMTA will apply toward carrying out further design of the T-Third Street light rail extension from 4th & King, through South of Market to Chinatown. The federal government will ultimately supply roughly $950 million toward this project (about 60% of  the $1.57 billion that is now believed will be the total cost). To date, the Central Subway has received $66 million of federal New Starts funding.

Finally, no hard cash, but some good news, for the Transbay Transit Center. The most recent dispute between the TJPA and the CHSRA about where high-speed rail should terminate in San Francisco may have jeopardized our chance to secure a $400 million high-speed rail discretionary grant to build to the Transbay subway station box, but that is not the only piece of federal funding that the TJPA has sought. Since long before the stimulus plan, the TJPA planned to pursue a Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan as one of many sources of money for the transit center. (The TIFIA loan is the same funding mechanism that BART will use so that it can build everyone’s favorite transit project, the Oakland Airport Connector. This recent post on the OAC is an illustrative cross-reference for those who delight in the minutiae of TIFIA.) Anyway, in October 2008, the TJPA applied for a $171 million TIFIA loan, which would cover a little over 14% of the capital costs for the first phase of this two-phase, $4.2 billion project. And just last week, the Credit Council unanimously recommended approval of the $171 million TIFIA loan. The Secretary of Transportation will produce a term sheet and loan agreement, which the TJPA Board is expected to approve this November.

There have been two flavors of discussion lately about the Central Subway — one, which exposes the unsurprising revelation that this exercise in burrowing underground is already going over budget; and the other, as at SPUR’s recent forum on the Central Subway, which pushes forward, dreaming for a bigger, and hopefully better line. (By the way: many thanks to Tom Prete for his Twitter coverage of the SPUR event, and be sure to also check out his excellent recent piece on Muni’s express buses.) Is bigger always best, or is it better to be short and sweet? Thanks to the subway’s somewhat awkward stub end at Chinatown, both might be partially true. That we would expand rail to Chinatown, daylight the tunnel-boring machines near Washington Square, and then not bring rail service to North Beach would indeed seem to be a missed opportunity, even for Central Subway skeptics like yours truly. But then, where to extend the tracks? To Fisherman’s Wharf, as some suggest — or to Fort Mason, the Marina District, the Presidio, and even the Golden Gate Bridge, as others have suggested? Surface light rail through North Beach might be more than Columbus Avenue streetscape planners have bargained for, but our hunch is to side with the Fisherman’s Wharf supporters on this one. Not because we feel a pressing need to add a third track connection between Union Square and the Wharf, on top of cable cars and the F-line — but because it is a natural point of extension that would add value without requiring too lengthy an extension; we might dare even to call it “damage control.” Van Ness will have dedicated bus lanes by this point in time, and terminating the rail extension there near North Point would facilitate a transfer to more robust service on that corridor. Besides, we would rather see historic streetcars go to Fort Mason, and we’re not convinced that both services are needed. As for the Presidio, an extension of the 30-Stockton trolley — and perhaps, eventually, historic streetcars as well — to the Presidio Transit Center strikes us as the more reasonable plan. The benefit gained by extending the Central Subway from Chinatown to Washington Square is considerable; but a westward extension, into the Marina and beyond, seems to carry much less benefit per dollar spent. For one, try convincing certain Marina folk that, really, more overhead wires might not reduce their property values. Okay, we jest (sort of), but setting that aside, ridership in the northwest corner of town is less than well-demonstrated: the 30 and 45 buses are not thoroughly used in the Marina and Cow Hollow. They sometimes run largely empty until they arrive at crowded Chinatown stops on Stockton Street, which suggests that building such an extension would not yield the best bang for buck. The peak hour 30X Marina Express buses to the Financial District are well-used, but — short of the SFMTA cutting popular express bus routes to increase Central Subway ridership — why would downtown-bound Marina commuters choose to ride the Central Subway and then execute a several-minute transfer at the inexpertly designed Union Square/Market Street station, when a one-seat express bus ride could take them directly downtown? We don’t know, either. And, to be frank, there are other corridors where the transit capital dollars would be a better investment.

The Board’s vote to certify the EIR overrided an appeal that pointed out some key flaws we have previously discussed, including the EIR’s misleadingly stated travel time improvements and inflated ridership estimates. It is abundantly clear that Chinatown would benefit immensely from a commitment to embrace robust transit solutions for the Stockton Street corridor, and a better planned subway tunnel could well be worth the investment. But, as proposed, there is a large proportionality disconnect between the project’s extreme cost — $1.4 billion now, but almost certain to go over budget — and its actual benefits. Just as frustrating is the EIR’s willingness to either dismiss or ignore compelling project alternatives, such as building a tunnel that could accommodate joint bus and light rail service, similar to that in downtown Seattle. Such an alternative would divert more transit operations to the tunnel, thereby reducing operating costs and allowing thousands of daily bus riders to benefit from the tunnel by avoiding surface street congestion. But in the end, attempts to displace the flawed analysis in the EIR were overshadowed by the iron strong political motivations underpinning the Central Subway.

The agenda of this afternoon’s MTA Board meeting included the Central Subway project, and, unsurprisingly, the Board voted 6-0 in support of the current locally preferred alternative, Alignment 3B. (See this earlier post for more details about 3B and all the other alignments under consideration.) Alignment 3B includes four new stations: a surface station at 4th/Brannan, and three subway stations at Moscone, Union Square/Market Street, and Chinatown. Trains would run on the surface of 4th Street between King and Bryant Streets, north of the existing T-Third station at King, with the subway portal located underneath Interstate 80. Although the possibility of running trains in mixed flow with autos between King Street and the portal was considered, the Board correctly approved the semi-exclusive alternative, which separates train and auto traffic on the surface of 4th Street.

The Board’s vote signals its desire to move forward with this incarnation of the project, but it does not seal the deal. The MTA must now prepare a final impact report incorporating responses to the public commentary it has obtained via community presentations. That report will be submitted to the FTA, which has already given the Central Subway project an approving medium-high rating. The FTA will evaluate the report and is expected to issue a Record of Decision later this fall, with construction targeted to begin in 2010.

The Board’s unanimous vote notwithstanding, several imperfections and cloudy issues remain with this project, which have been discussed here on this blog in the past. Simulations suggest that transferring between the proposed Union Square/Market Street platform and the existing platform at Powell — a crucial transfer that would be required of all T-Third riders wanting to take BART or any other Muni Metro line — could require a whopping four-and-a-half minutes. The MTA is investigating the use of moving walkways to improve the transfer, but it is the deep Central Subway tunnel, combined with distance between the platforms, that poses the problem. Another issue is the fact that the Chinatown and Moscone stations are currently planned to have only a single off-street entrance, rather than multiple entrances on both sides of the street.

One last point that has proved to be problematic for both the Citizens’ Advisory Council and various Chinatown community organizations is that although subway stations were once planned to be 250 feet long to accommodate the eventual operation of three-car trains, platform lengths were reduced to 200 feet to cut costs. Because 200 feet can only accommodate two-car trains, there has been another push to investigate platforms that are 225-230 feet long — the bare minimum needed to accommodate three-car trains; but the $40 million (at least) extra needed to carry out the additional excavation is not currently available. Even if the Central Subway were built with longer platforms, the current surface stations along the T-Third only support two-car service. A short line three-car service could be investigated, but the question remains if future demand will really require that the whole line be reconfigured.

The Board’s vote today brings us one step closer to the conclusion of the environmental review period. Of course, we will continue to follow the progress of the subway as noteworthy developments occur.

The 30-Stockton and 45-Union/Stockton buses are undeniably crowded, with an especially dense crush load in the mile-long stretch between Market Street and Chinatown. The current situation — in which buses are entangled in congestion caused by private autos, delivery trucks, heavy pedestrian traffic overflowing from bus stops, and narrow sidewalks filled to capacity — must be amended. Here is a miniature pictorial representation from the last time I dropped by Chinatown (click through for full size images):

These pictures do not necessarily show Stockton Street congestion at its worst, as they were taken in the evening, but they do provide a fair representation of the problem. Stockton is clearly in need of substantial transit improvement, but the last post gives several reasons why we ought to be skeptical that the Central Subway will be the envisioned cure-all — particularly for its immense price tag — and that list was not even really comprehensive. What are the alternatives?

Back in the summer, Howard Strassner put forward the idea of eliminating the Central Subway altogether and building bus rapid transit instead. Of course, we already have so-called “bus only” lanes in this corridor, but they are neither respected nor enforced. In order for BRT to provide time savings comparable to a subway tunnel, you would need to go the whole nine yards: a complete dedicated lane, use of low-floor buses with multiple doors and implementation of Proof-of-Payment to facilitate faster boardings. Of course, you would also need to implement signal priority to minimize the time that buses spent stopped at red lights. Strassner’s plan suggests the usual BRT characteristics, so I won’t go into a full description here, but you can read more about the plan through articles posted this past summer on Rescue Muni and the Examiner.

I’ve already pointed out that over long distances, particularly for trips between Visitacion Valley and Chinatown, the T will bring little (if any) time savings over the current 9X bus. That said, the time savings are more apparent for short trips between 4th/King and Chinatown. Currently, depending on the time and day, a ride on the 30 or 45 bus from 4th and King to Chinatown takes a solid 15-20 minutes, a trip that would be reduced to 6-7 minutes in the Central Subway, if we make the unlikely assumption that there are no delays associated with passing through the 4th and King intersection. For the stretch between Market Street and Chinatown, in which the 30 and 45 buses turn into claustrophobic sardine tins, a 6-8 minute trip would be reduced to about 2 minutes. For either short trip, you’re looking at a 60-70% time savings. Of course, this figure only includes travel time. Once you add in the time spent walking to the station and accessing the deep underground tunnel, the time savings do not look quite so impressive, particularly over such a short distance.

For a route of similar length (just one-half mile longer), a center-lane BRT on Van Ness would reduce travel times in that corridor by 30%, from about 19 minutes to 13 minutes; this figure assumes 11 stops, but if Muni operates different versions of express BRT, as I’ve recommended before, travel times would be further reduced. Strassner’s guesstimates of BRT travel times in the Central Subway corridor suggest a comparable level of time savings to Van Ness BRT. Even so, the subway travel times might look better, but at what cost? The Central Subway will cost us $650-700 million per mile, while Van Ness BRT will cost about $45 million per mile. For these short stretches, the Central Subway might offer double the time savings over BRT, but at 15 times the cost. And in the greater T-Third corridor, the time savings are nominal or nonexistent.

A BRT implementation in the Central Subway corridor might work fairly easily on wide South of Market streets, but surely it could not work on narrow, congested Stockton Street — right? Well, no, not necessarily. It could work, but it would require a redesign of the street. Currently, the space on Stockton Street is occupied by the following uses: (1) pedestrians, (2) buses, (3) commercial delivery vehicles, (4) private auto lanes, and (5) private auto parking. Really, though, there are three main things that add to the liveliness of Stockton Street: the businesses, the pedestrians, and the buses that deliver more pedestrians. Private automobiles occupy space, but they do not really contribute much vitality, and parked cars definitely do not add any vitality — so car priority is automatically bumped down to the bottom of the list. In such a dense environment, something has to give, and on-street parking is, quite frankly, a criminal waste of very limited space. Two nearby garages, Portsmouth Square and St. Mary’s, combined offer 1,143 parking stalls. I have no idea about the extent to which these parking garages fill up. If they do not fill up, this would be a natural place to direct Stockton parking, but even if they do fill up, building replacement off-street parking would be preferable to having parking occupy valuable space on Stockton itself.

The first step — no matter what transit you put on or under Stockton — is to widen the sidewalks. Stockton is such a thoroughly pedestrian-oriented street, more so than almost any other street in the Bay Area, and yet the sidewalks are so narrow, a situation that is not helped by the merchandise of various markets overflowing onto the sidewalk. The width of Stockton Street is 68 feet, which could provide ample space for pedestrians, BRT lanes, and commercial deliveries. You could probably even fit in a single southbound lane for car traffic. In any case, the street setup needs to be revisited. Whatever we do with Stockton, the key is to get out of the political rut and demonstrate some actual leadership and creativity.

There is no doubt that Chinatown is in need of much more efficient, streamlined, and faster transit service than it now receives, but we have gotten so locked into this subway tunnel that we have suspended common sense. With Chinatown’s density, a subway serving the neighborhood should be investigated, but there is nothing to say that such a subway should take the politically-driven alignment that the Central Subway has now assumed. For better or for worse, we are pretty much stuck with the Central Subway, but there are some lessons to take away from this experience already, even though we are still a few years away from beginning construction. Fundamentally, it comes down to this: once the Central Subway is completed, sure, we’ll have a “sexy” subway underneath Stockton Street, and riders traveling between Chinatown and 4th/King would enjoy substantially shorter trips. But what about riders on Geary, Van Ness, Mission, Fillmore, Haight, 19th Avenue, Potrero/San Bruno, Geneva, and other corridors? Where’s the love for them? The quality of service in those corridors would remain unchanged, or even deteriorate in time as traffic increases, unless we actively take steps to improve service. By putting a huge sum of money into a short stretch of Stockon and Fourth Streets, we are putting long-overdue improvements to the rest of the system on hold. Even if we ignore for the moment the federal matching funds that will be applied towards paying for the Central Subway, $700 million of local and state funding would buy a lot of BRT and streetscape improvements — not just on Van Ness and Stockton, but also Geary, 19th Avenue, and other congested streets with intolerably slow bus service — and those improvements could be implemented much more quickly.

75% of Muni’s ridership is focused on the rail lines and ten key bus corridors. By contrast, the 30 and 45 lines carry about 6-7% of Muni’s daily ridership. If substantial time and reliability improvements are carried out on all of the key corridors, we would capture a greater number of new riders than the 15,000 new riders that the Central Subway is projected to pick up by the year 2030. We would also have a holistically superior system on which people could trust and rely to transport them throughout their day. And in the process, we would touch far more people than we ever could with a short subway tunnel under Stockton Street.

In the last few posts, we introduced the Central Subway project and its potential alignments and stations. The MTA is fond of explaining why San Francisco so desperately needs the Central Subway, and the offered justification goes down the standard checklist of factors that usually come into play when rail upgrades are studied, notably: (1) faster, more reliable, and more comfortable service; (2) potential to increase ridership and decrease congestion; and (3) land use potential. However, this is an expensive investment: $648 million for the initial operating segment, and $1.2-1.4 billion for the subway tunnel. Are we getting our money’s worth? The purpose of this post is to highlight some of the potential difficulties with the Central Subway:

• Chinatown Stub End: An often-noted problem with the Central Subway is the unnatural terminus in Chinatown. Although the 30 and 45 lines tend to empty out after leaving Chinatown and moving on to North Beach, the subway would enjoy better ridership with even just a one-stop extension into North Beach. As it stands, the Central Subway covers the minimum distance necessary to help relieve sardine-can loads on the 30 and 45 lines (between Market Street and Columbus Avenue), but it fails to address the rest of the corridor.

• Inconvenient Transfer at Market Street: The Union Square/Market Street Station will be the crucial transfer point between the T-Third and all of the BART and Muni trains that operate in the Market Street subway. Under Alternative 3B, the MTA projects that by the year 2030, anywhere from 9,500 to 12,300 riders will transfer every day between Union Square/Market Street and Powell Street Stations, but the transfer will not be as clean and direct as it should be. As I remarked in the last post, the Union Square/Market Street Station will be centered at O’Farrell/Stockton, but the station will be considerably longer than its 200-foot platform in order to facilitate transfers. However, the distance between the T-Third platform and nearby transfer points is nontrivial, whether it is Powell Station to the south, or the 38-Geary to the north. Combined with the depth of this station (about 90-100 feet below ground), walking and riding escalators and elevators to execute what should be an easy, direct transfer will actually require a nontrivial chunk of time, a burden which is especially difficult for the elderly and disabled to bear. In the end, whatever time savings you gain by riding the subway might be lost while getting to and from the deep tunnel. In addition, there is no easy transfer between paid fare zones. A transfer from the T-Third to another Muni Metro line requires exiting the fare zone at Union Square/Market Street and subsequently re-entering the fare zone at Powell. This is counterintuitive because the entire trip is carried out within the Muni Metro system. In short, the entire design of this crucial transfer point was not thought out carefully, and the difficult transfer actually degrades the connection between downtown and the Third Street corridor. Under the current configuration, T-Third riders have full access to Market Street. Under the Central Subway configuration, T-Third riders may access all of Market Street, but only via this inelegant transfer.

• Exaggerated Ridership Projections? According to MTA projections, just shy of 100,000 people will ride the T-Third daily by 2030, after the Central Subway has been in operation for 14 years. Of those, 2/3 would be riding the full long line, and 1/3 would ride the short loop between Chinatown and Mariposa. Without having full detail on the models it is difficult to know for sure, but I think there are good reasons to be suspicious of these projections, in part because any such projection will be based on yet more projections about the growth of jobs and population that will occur in Mission Bay and on Third Street in general. In addition, MTA has predicted that by 2030, as many as 89% of riders at the 4th/King station will be using that station to make a transfer to Caltrain — in other words, over 17,000 rides daily. However, the ridership projections for the T-Third do not take into the account the plan to extend Caltrain to the new Transbay Transit Center. It is very fair to say that once Caltrain directly serves downtown, a significant number of people who now transfer to Muni Metro at Mission Bay will simply stay put and ride Caltrain to its new terminus at Transbay. Assuming that funding is obtained to carry out the Caltrain downtown extension, the T-Third ridership projections are artificially buoyed by at least this one significant factor, but really, the numbers are quite high in general. The 2030 projection for just the T-Third line is over 60-70% of the total Muni Metro and F-line ridership in 2007. Even in 2030, in which year the MTA projects that there will be over 320,000 rail line riders daily, the T-Third alone would account for over 30% of the total Muni rail ridership.

• Continued Use of High-Floor LRVs: The Central Subway has been designed under the assumption that Muni will continue to use its bulky, high-floor Breda cars, despite an increasing trend across the United States to use low-floor vehicles for new light rail projects. High-floor cars complicate and slow down service, while making the system inaccessible to the disabled except at certain locations. A universal system-wide conversion from high-floor to low-floor is admittedly a large proposition, but it is a poor idea to pour more money and resources into building new infrastructure for high-floor vehicles, when a long-term goal should be to convert Muni Metro into a universally low-floor system.

• A Rat at 4th and King: You don’t need to tell any Mission Bay rider or resident what a mess the intersection of 4th and King turned into after the T-Third was launched in April. The intersection of 4th and King features a mass of transportation alternatives: entry onto and exit off of Interstate 280, the terminus of the Caltrain commuter rail line, frequent heavy pedestrian activity due to its proximity to the ballpark, the crossing of two surface light rail lines, and median rail stations forcing dozens of people to cross intersections unsafely in order to rush to meet their trains. Faulty signal “priority” forced crush-loaded trains to wait for literally minutes on end while single-occupancy autos sped with relative ease onto and off of the freeway. As the interests of pedestrians, transit riders, and drivers competed, this intersection quickly became one of the most dangerous and poorly managed intersections in the city shortly after the T-Third launch, and the best solution was constant human supervision of the intersection. T-Third trains currently turn from 4th onto King, but when the Central Subway opens, they will cross the whole width of King Street when moving north or south on 4th Street. The MTA plans to operate both a short line and a long line on the T-Third track; while the long line would travel the entire distance between Chinatown and Bayshore, the short line would turn around at Mariposa, providing additional service to downtown, South of Market, and Mission Bay. At peak, both lines might run on 5-minute headways, with the possibility of adding another short loop for peak trips. In other words, the planned headways are actually quite short, which will likely cause trains to bunch up once they emerge from the tunnel. According to one version of Alternative 3B, the trains would run in mixed flow with automobiles on 4th between Brannan and King, creating further potential for backup and bunching. Moreover, by 2016, the E-Embarcadero line will be in operation, terminating at 4th and King, and the N-Judah will run all the way to Mariposa Station. With this increase in rail activity, and no promise on the horizon to execute any substantial upgrade to the traffic signals, it does not seem like we are out of the water yet on the 4th/King issue.

• The 9X Factor: One of the primary motivations behind the Central Subway is to provide a rail link between Visitacion Valley and Chinatown, a key component of the “Connecting People, Connecting Communities” slogan for the T-Third. Still, we should not forget that these two neighborhoods are already connected via the 9X, a popular express bus that runs locally on both ends of the line but uses Highway 101 for the middle portion. How will the T fare, when compared to the 9X? Understanding that Muni schedules should be taken with a barrel (or so) of salt, let’s take a quick glance at them in any case, just to have a basis for comparison. A trip from Washington/Stockton to Bayshore/Arleta on the 9X (this trip covers almost all of the future T-Third route) takes roughly 35-40 minutes, depending on the time of day. According to the current schedule, a T-Third trip from 4th/King to Arleta takes about 28 minutes. The MTA projects that under Alternative 3B, trains traveling in the Central Subway would take 6.3 minutes to travel from Chinatown to 4th/King. Even if we assume there is no delay at 4th/King station (which is unlikely, for reasons explained above), the trip from Chinatown to Arleta on the T would take about 35 minutes. Even a small delay would push the trip over 35 minutes, and riders may still have to spend additional time walking to and from a T station, while the 9X bus has more stops and provides more direct service; in that sense, the 9X could actually be more convenient than the T. In the final analysis, T-Third trains, even using a Central Subway, will prove no faster than the 9X bus. The difference, of course, is that we will have spent $2 billion to build the whole T line, with no time savings for the Visitacion Valley rider market that was especially singled out as benefiting from this project.

Even if we assume that the travel time and ridership projections are correct, and that the project will be completed with no cost overruns — flying in the face of past experience that advises us to consider all of the above very cautiously — even then, the $2 billion total cost for the T-Third initial operating segment and the Central Subway extension is disproportionately high, compared to the service it offers, especially considering its problems and limitations. In some sense, Chinatown looks like a textbook case for a subway, since it is a dense, heavily trafficked neighborhood with so much surface street congestion that buses running in mixed flow are simply not doing the job, but that does not mean that this particular subway is the answer.

The Central Subway is clearly expensive, and the price tag is often dismissed by project supporters because half of the funds are of federal origin. But the mere existence of federal matching funds does not, on its own, turn a flawed project into a good project. If we are going to invest $1.2-1.4 billion in a subway tunnel, we should be as certain as we can be that the money spent is a valuable investment that will offer great returns in the future. In particular, we should be certain that this investment presents the opportunity to reduce operating costs and to increase the efficiency and quality of service. What we have here, though, is an expensive project that does not increase efficiency, nor does it effectively address the needs of riders in the corridor. As much as we are told to believe that the Central Subway will deliver long-overdue transit improvements, its numerous built-in flaws cast doubt on these claims.

The previous post outlined the route for the three Central Subway alignments being studied, with mostly cursory mentions of station locations. The purpose of this post is to flesh out the context and provide a photo tour for the stations. (As usual, you can click through any of the images below to see the full size.) The modified Locally Preferred Alternative for the Central Subway is Alternative 3B, so I will focus on the stations proposed in connection with this alignment. Alternative 3B includes four new stations: one surface and three subway. Under Alternative 3B, subway platforms are standardized to be 200 feet long and 26 feet wide, which will accommodate two-car high floor LRVs. More details on the stations after the jump.

4th and Brannan Station (Surface): Traveling north from 4th/King (top left picture) in either a semi-exclusive right-of-way or in mixed flow with autos, trains will first stop at one additional surface station on 4th, between Freelon and Brannan, essentially in the location of an island used for the 30 and 45 lines (top right picture). This station does not exist under Alternative 3A. The design of the station would be consistent with the existing T-Third surface stations (bottom picture):

Moscone Station (Subway): Traveling north from 4th and Brannan, trains will enter a subway portal underneath Interstate 80 and descend into a deep tunnel, stopping next at Moscone Station. This station will be about 50-60 feet below ground. Since platforms have been reduced from 250 feet to 200 feet under Alternative 3B, there is no opportunity to provide direct access to the northern end of the station from the Moscone Center West complex at 4th and Howard (top left picture). The station entrance will be located off-street, on the first floor of a new building that will be constructed on site of what is now a gas station at 266 Fourth, between Folsom and Clementina (top right picture). Current zoning would allow an 85-foot setback tower on this site.

Union Square/Market Street Station (Subway): After Moscone, trains will continue to descend in a deep tunnel burrowing underneath the existing BART/Muni Market Street subway. Just on the north side of Market, trains will stop at a joint Union Square/Market Street station some 90-100 feet below the ground, centered on the intersection of Stockton and O’Farrell. This station is the transfer point between the T-Third and all other Muni and BART lines running on and under Market Street, but the transfer is not as clean and direct as it should be, given its importance. Despite the short platform, the length of the station will be extended to span the two blocks between Geary and Ellis. There will be three entrances: the southeast corner of Union Square (top left picture), on Geary, just east of Stockton (top right picture), and at the Apple Store building at Stockton/Ellis (bottom picture):

Chinatown Station (Subway): In approaching the T-Third terminus at Chinatown, the tunnel would ascend to match the topography of Nob Hill. The station, originally planned at Clay/Stockton has been shifted north to Washington/Stockton, since the initial location at Clay was at the edge of Chinatown, rather than the center. Washington Street does not provide as clean of a transfer to the 1-California, but it is at least a bit closer to the heart of the neighborhood. The shift north also allows for a shallower station, about 50 feet or so below the ground. Like Moscone, Chinatown Station would have only one entrance, once again in the first floor of an off-street building. Currently, the targeted off-street location is at 933-949 Stockton, on the west side of Stockton, just south of Washington:

Although Chinatown is the last station, there is an option for an extended tunnel, so that the tunnel boring machines can be extracted near Washington Square Park. This could be the site of a North Beach station at some distant point in the future, after Central Subway construction is complete. Any extension of this sort would be a separate project, with a separate review process and funding base.

Just one final note for now on the stations: around the world, grand, aesthetically pleasing subway stations are a point of civic pride. Although the newer Peninsula BART stations built during the 2003 Millbrae/SFO extension integrate a measure of artistic sensibility, most Bay Area stations — subway or otherwise — are functional boxes, rather than works of art. The Central Subway presents an opportunity to craft beautiful stations that reflect the spirit and diversity of San Francisco. As you might expect, the process of developing art for the subway is one that will involve heavy public input. Anyone with a vision as to how we might beautify this transit corridor is encouraged to contact Judy Moran from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Studies carried out for the past several years gave rise to a few different alignments of the Central Subway. Although the SFMTA now prefers a plan that would tunnel under Fourth and Stockton Streets, the alternatives are all still officially being considered and studied. This post will describe each of the alignments. Each description is accompanied by a map; for a full sized map, please click through the image links.

Alternative 1: This is the standard no-project alternative, used for comparison purposes. Under this plan, the T-Third initial operating segment from 4th/King to Visitacion Valley is the only capital improvement, but additional improvements would be made to bus service. Depending on the time and day, headways on the short line 30-Stockton would be 3-10 minutes; the 30 long line headways would be 7.5-10 minutes. Headways would also be reduced on the 45-Union/Stockton, except on Sunday evenings. More notably, though, the 22-Fillmore would be extended along 16th Street to serve Mission Bay, and the 45-Union/Stockton would be extended through Mission Bay to a terminal point at 3rd and 20th Streets. Both trolley bus lines would thus connect to the T-Third.

The project alternatives are:

Alternative 2 (Enhanced EIS/EIR): Alternative 2 contains the changes made to the original FEIS/FEIR plan from 1998 and is the most convoluted of the three project alternatives. T-Third trains bound for Chinatown would pass through the existing T station at 4th/King, turn right onto King Street as they do now, and then turn left on 3rd Street, stopping at a new surface station at 3rd/King. (This station would be close to, but different from, the existing ballpark station on King between 2nd and 3rd.) After stopping at 3rd/King, trains would travel northward on 3rd in a semi-exclusive right-of-way and enter the single-track subway portal between Bryant and Brannan. In the southbound direction, trains traveling south in the tunnel under 3rd Street would swing west under Harrison and then continue south on 4th Street, exiting the subway at a single-track portal on 4th, between Bryant and Brannan. Trains would stop at the existing 4th/King station and then proceed southward as they do now.

Northbound and southbound tunnels would join up at 3rd/Harrison in a stacked configuration, with the northbound track on top of the southbound. This creates a two-level platform configuration for Moscone Station, located on 3rd between Howard and Folsom, with station entry points on Tehama. North of Moscone, tracks would transition to a side by side setup to allow a shallow crossing above the existing BART/Muni tunnel under Market. The Market Street Station would be located on 3rd between Market and Mission and would feature a 440-foot underground pedestrian walkway to Montgomery BART/Muni Station. After crossing Market, the tunnel would veer west onto Geary, returning to a stacked track configuration, and then veer once more onto Stockton. The Union Square Station would be centered on Post/Stockton and would have a two-level platform setup similar to Moscone Station. Station entrances would be located in Union Square and on Stockton. After Union Square, the stacked tunnel configuration would return once more to a side-by-side configuration as trains travel north under Stockton, terminating at Chinatown Station, on Stockton between Clay and Sacramento, accessible via an off-street station entrance on the first floor of a new building on Stockton. The station would have two side platforms, as well as the necessary storage and crossover track extending as far as Jackson. Here is a map of the Alternative 2 alignment:

Both versions of Alternative 3 (options 3A and 3B) shift the the South of Market part of the alignment off 3rd Street and onto 4th Street, permitting one turn of the tunnel to align underneath Stockton Street, as opposed to the more convoluted route in Alternative 2. Both 3A and 3B share a side-by-side double track configuration for the entire length of the project.

Alternative 3A (Locally Preferred Alternative): Alternative 3A was developed in response to the increasing costs of Alternative 2. A semi-exclusive right-of-way would extend north of the existing 4th/King station, and trains would enter and exit the subway via a double-track portal between Townsend and Brannan, just north of the Caltrain Depot. Traveling north, the first subway station is Moscone, which is now located on 4th between Howard and Folsom. The main entrance to Moscone Station would be an off-street entrance, the first floor of a new building; the site currently houses a gas station. Other station entrances would be located on the north side of the station, in front of Moscone Center West. North of Moscone Station, the tracks continue side-by-side but descend, to prepare for a deep tunneling underneath the current BART/Muni subway. The next station is a combined Union Square/Market Street Station, centered on O’Farrell/Stockton. Northern entry points are in Union Square and along Stockton; on the south side, the station would be accessible via current entry points to the Stockton/Ellis corner of the Powell BART/Muni station. After Union Square, trains continue north to Chinatown Station, in the same location as in Alternative 2. There is also an option to extend the construction tunnels into North Beach to extract the tunnel boring machines. The TBMs would emerge in the middle lanes of Columbus Avenue, between Union and Filbert, right next to Washington Square. This option would add $54 million to the cost of the project. Here is a map of Alternative 3A including the optional tunnel to North Beach:

Alternative 3B (Modified Locally Preferred Alternative): Alternative 3B is a revised version of Alternative 3A, designed to further cut costs from 3A. The tunnel is still aligned underneath 4th and Stockton Streets, but the portal and station configurations are different. Although 3B does respond to certain problems in 3A, station platform lengths were reduced from 250 feet to 200 feet, which is long enough to accommodate two-car trains.

Notably, 3B adds an additional surface station at 4th/Brannan, providing service to to a growing section of South of Market that was skipped over by Alternative 3A (in which trains did not stop between 4th/King and Moscone Stations). The 4th/King and 4th/Brannan stations could be connected either via semi-exclusive right-of-way, or possibly mixed flow operations with private autos. Mixed flow would add a little more parking and permit a landscaped median but would also force trains to compete with autos for street space. Under either plan, 4th Street would be one-way southbound only north of Bryant, returning to two-way operation between Bryant and King.

With the introduction of a new surface station at Brannan, the subway portal shifts northward to the block between Harrison and Bryant, underneath Interstate 80. (Recall that this location is right next the storage facility that will be used to temporarily store Golden Gate Transit buses during construction of the Transbay Transit Center, a project concurrent with the Central Subway.) North of the portal, Alternative 3B is very much like 3A, only with shorter station platforms. The major difference is that the terminal Chinatown Station is shifted slightly north, centered on Washington Street, a bit closer to the center of Chinatown. The option to extract the TBMs in North Beach is the same as described in 3A. Here is a map of Alternative 3B:

Although Alternative 3B is currently the preferred plan, all three alignments are technically under consideration until one is finally chosen.

Alignment maps courtesy San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

On April 7, 2007, Muni’s 15-Third Street bus was officially retired and replaced with a new light rail line, the T-Third Street, which features over five miles of new track and 18 new stations. The T-Third, however, is only a first phase, the initial operating segment of a two-phase project to build a rail connection between Chinatown and Visitacion Valley, and also to provide rail for the Mission Bay, Dogpatch, and Bayview neighborhoods, all designated as prime spots for active development in the next few decades. The second phase is the Central Subway, a 1.7-mile extension of the T-Third which, in its broad outline, would start near the Caltrain Depot at 4th and King Streets, tunnel underneath South of Market, Market Street, Union Square, and finally terminate in Chinatown. Currently, T-Third trains follow the existing track along the Embarcadero and enter the Market Street subway through the Embarcadero Portal, but once the Central Subway is completed, the T-Third line will tunnel northward directly through South of Market, rather than following the broader curve of King Street and the Embarcadero. It will also be the only Muni Metro line that does not run underneath Market Street.

The idea of a Central Subway is not new. Decades ago, a subway tunnel underneath Kearny Street was conceived, straddling the border between the Financial District to the east and Chinatown and Union Square to the west. This alignment in many ways makes a great deal of sense, as it would serve both the transit-dependent Chinatown rider market and central business district workers. However, under former Mayor Willie Brown’s watch, the Central Subway was manipulated into a prime political tool. Not only would a rail line along Third Street connect the long-neglected Bayview neighborhood to downtown, but once it became clear that the Embarcadero Freeway was not going to be rebuilt after it was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a subway tunneling into the heart of Chinatown would pacify Chinatown power brokers and merchants who alleged that the loss of the freeway would discourage people from visiting Chinatown, thereby hurting their businesses. Through these political dealings, a project which initially was a pretty good idea became convoluted and foggy. As such, this project has morphed over the past several years, and in this time period, projected costs have increased, design errors were made, and compromises were hatched in order to keep down the price.

Nonetheless, the Central Subway persisted through these trials, and the SFMTA is now supposedly just a couple years away from completing the design and review process. As it stands now, the project is estimated to cost $1.2-1.4 billion in YOE dollars, which amounts to approximately $700 million per mile. The funding comes from a mixture of local, state, and federal sources, which include: California Proposition 1B, the half-cent sales tax approved by San Francisco voters in the 2003 Proposition K, and $762 million of FTA Section 5309 matching funds. According to the currently planned schedule, the environmental and engineering process would be completed, along with the FTA Record of Decision, during 2008. Right-of-way acquisition and the final design process would take place in 2008-2010. Construction would begin in 2010 and would be completed in 2015, with an official start to revenue service in 2016.

The purpose of the next few posts is to describe the different alignments and station configurations that are currently being studied, and also to reflect on the efficacy of this expensive transit investment. I plan on adding a new post each day, so please check back throughout the week for the rest of the posts in this series.