Transbay Blog

The Bay Area Council Economic Institute (BACEI), in response to a request from the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, has released its Bay Area Economic Recovery Workplan. This is essentially a compendium of regional priorities and projects (submitted by MTC and local governments) that strategizes potential targets for ARRA stimulus money. The proposals fall into several categories — transportation, housing, water, energy/climate, workforce, business, and science/innovation — generally emphasizing projects of regional or multi-jurisdictional significance that will update the Bay Area’s infrastructure to promote future economic prosperity and sustainability. Some $31 billion of stimulus funds will be allocated to California, of which some of these Bay Area projects will certainly receive a share. California is also positioning itself to receive up to $20 billion more, factoring in awards coming in through discretionary grant programs.

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Transbay: courtesy of Pelli Clarke Pelli.

During the discussion at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission over how to allocate Bay Area transportation stimulus funds, MTC proposed applying for $195-$400 million of funds to build the train box at the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco. This money would come from the $8 billion of high-speed rail grant money that was ultimately integrated into the final stimulus bill. Then, the California High-Speed Rail Authority made public its concerns that the Transbay Transit Center, as currently designed, would be inadequate to satisfy its new needs for 12 trains per hour, increased from six trains, for each of the six peak hours everyday. Under the current plan for the Transbay station, tracks would transition underground west of 4th Street, leading to a new subway station at 4th and Townsend, where Caltrain currently terminates. A three track tunnel would then curve off Townsend and north onto 2nd Street, turning once more and splaying out to a six track throat leading to the Transbay underground rail station. The station had been planned to include three island platforms and six platform tracks: two tracks for Caltrain, and four for high-speed rail. According to ridership projections, 2030 Transbay ridership for Caltrain might be 31,500 and 4th/King Caltrain ridership at 17,100. Daily high-speed rail ridership at Transbay by 2030 was projected to be in the vicinity of 26,500.

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This Wednesday, February 25, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission expects to approve its proposed allocation of the federal stimulus money that will be made available to the Bay Area for transportation purposes. The stimulus package that was ultimately approved changed since our last post on this subject, and so MTC has accordingly made changes to its plans. What follows in this post is a more complete description of the altered proposal.

According to the most recent estimates, the Bay Area will receive approximately $490 million of transportation stimulus money, which MTC has discretion to allocate within defined categories. $340 million are FTA transit formula funds pursuant to Section 5307/5309, and $150 million are FHWA/Surface Transportation Program funds.

Of the $340 million for transit, $270 million will be allocated to operators for transit rehabilitation: AC Transit ($25.7 million), BART ($65.3 million), Caltrain ($10.3 million), Golden Gate ($9.4 million), SFMTA ($67.2 million), SamTrans ($7.9 million), VTA ($47.2 million), and $36.4 million for the smaller transit operators.

Rendering of Coliseum BART station; courtesy of BART.

And as for the rest of the FTA funds? MTC plans to allocate the remaining $70 million to the Oakland Airport Connector. In November 2000, Alameda County voters approved by an overwhelming 81.47% Measure B, a 1/2-percent sales tax for transportation that rejuvenated 1986 Measure B. The proceeds from 2000 Measure B were to be allocated to many projects, including highways, BART to Warm Springs, ACE improvements, and the Oakland Airport Connector: a 3.2-mile automated guideway transit system that would connect Oakland International Airport to Coliseum BART, the closest BART station; this function is currently filled by AirBART shuttle buses. The people mover, which would complete the trip between BART and the Airport in under ten minutes, is expected to increase transit share to the Airport — to about 13% (13,540 daily riders), increased from 9% in 2007 — and it could accommodate any future market growth at the Airport. And yet, while it seems like it would be a good idea to improve BART access to Oakland Airport, this particular project is in a sickly state. The cost has ballooned to $529 million, and a large funding gap remains. The project was intended to be a public/private partnership, but the private partners who might have filled the funding gap are no longer interested in pursuing the project. $288 million of public funds are allocated to the project, but $241 million more are needed. Some of that additional money might eventually be obtained from other sources: including $71 million from BART and $50 million saved from seismic retrofit of the Transbay Tube. MTC would now like to apply $70 million of FTA stimulus funds to rescue the people mover and close the funding gap.

This would be an unwise allocation of the money. We literally just got through lamenting that the State of California has yanked five years of State Transit Assistance operating funds from transit agencies; these agencies must now put fare hikes, service cuts, or a combination of the two on the table to close their own deficits. To the extent that MTC can help agencies in need, it should, by allocating the money directly for agencies to use for purposes of rehabilitation and preventive maintenance. The plan to withhold $70 million of valuable stimulus money — only to insert it into the funding pot for a project that is basically a luxury item, at a time when we can scarcely afford necessities let alone luxuries — is frivolous. In any case, we have long believed that the sensible course of action would be to at least revisit the less glamorous option of a rapid bus system with signal priority on the amply wide (6-8 total lanes) Hegenberger Road and Airport Drive. This would provide a link between BART and the Airport that is quicker and more reliable than current AirBART service, at a fraction of the cost of the proposed people mover.

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900 Folsom and 260 Fifth, two mixed-use projects that are currently up for consideration, would occupy adjacent parcels South of Market, at the corner of 5th and Folsom Streets, with the northern edge of the project just one-half block south of the new Intercontinental Hotel. Together, they promise 466 homes and 10,396 square feet of ground level retail, with spacious 19-foot ceilings for the retail storefronts. (I did not bother to add the renderings to this post, but if you are interested, you can check out this PDF, which has design details.) The two projects combined intend to pursue a LEED Gold rating, and the project website is eager to point out the many green benefits of the buildings. The graphics on the project website emphasize the plethora of nearby transit options, including pictures of a Breda LRV, a BART train, and an F-Market historic streetcar. There are also pictures of people looking quite happy while walking and biking. But let’s just cut to the chase. If this project is really so green and transit-friendly, why must the proposal include slightly more than 1:1 parking, with 470 parking spots for 466 units — encouraging future residents to drive and thus ignore all of the pictured transit options?

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Over a year ago, before this website was born, the conceptual proposals were released for Bay Area regional rail expansion projected for the next 50 years. Included among the plans is a second tube for the San Francisco-Oakland Transbay corridor, providing additional core capacity for a crucial regional link that is already a bottleneck point and which will one day reach capacity. There should be four tracks to accommodate both high speed rail and BART, but there is still the question as to what the alignment of San Francisco’s new BART line should be. As is often the case for plans associated with BART and MTC, the proposals leave something to be desired:

For reference, the current BART line and stations are marked in blue. One alternative (pink) connects the Transbay Transit Center to the Presidio Transit Center via Folsom, Van Ness, and Lombard. The second alternative (purple), connects 4th & Townsend to Geary & 33rd Avenue, via Townsend, Division, Van Ness, and Geary. Both routings serve the intersection of Van Ness and Market (the station marked in yellow), as they were designed to facilitate an awkward transfer to the existing BART line at Civic Center Station. Routes were also designed to serve destinations that have emerged as regional destinations in the 35 years that have elapsed since BART’s debut — notably Mission Bay, Phone Company Ball Park, and South of Market.

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A long-awaited cultural building has finally joined the ranks of the ever-growing collection of museums in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena District — a new home for the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The Museum was originally founded in 1984, but ten years ago, the Museum chose architect Daniel Libeskind to design a new structure to house the Museum in South of Market’s clustered quarter of museums. Libeskind is renowned for his work on museums across the world, including the Jewish Museums in Copenhagen and Berlin. Other work that Libeskind has done includes the recent expansion of the Denver Art Museum and the master plan for redevelopment of the World Trade Center Memorial site in Lower Manhattan.

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Preparations for the replacement temporary Transbay Terminal are well underway and proceeding according to schedule, with a start to construction planned for later this year. The terminal is planned to be at least partially open for business starting in the summer of 2009. When the aerial structure hovering over a small portion of the site is demolished, the whole terminal should be operational by late 2009 and will remain in use for about five years, until the new Pelli Transit Center is completed. The temporary terminal site — the entire block bounded by Howard, Main, Folsom, and Beale Streets — is south of the current Transbay Terminal, further removed from the Market Street transit core. Several Muni lines will be rerouted and extended to accommodate this shift in terminal location. Because the existence of the aerial loop necessarily phases terminal construction, reroutes will change slightly to accommodate the construction schedule. The details:

• The 5-Fulton will use the two-way pair of Main and Beale to serve the northern border of the terminal at Howard.
• During the short first phase, the 38/38L-Geary and the 71/71L-Haight/Noriega will serve the northern border of the terminal at Howard, but for most of the life of the temporary terminal, both the 38/38L and 71/71L will loop to the southern border of the site at Folsom, also using the two-pair of Main and Beale.
• Because the 71/71L will be rerouted to the terminal, the 6-Parnassus will terminate at Ferry Plaza.
• The 108-Treasure Island (now extended to the Caltrain Depot afternoons and evenings) and the 76-Marin Headlands will serve the temporary terminal. Several other routes (1-California, 12-Folsom/Pacific, 20-Columbus, 30X-Marina Express, 41-Union) that currently run on portions of Howard and Folsom will continue to do so, accessing the northern border of the terminal site.
• Unlike its current configuration, the route of the 10-Townsend will not directly serve the temporary terminal, with southbound buses using 2nd Street and northbound buses using Folsom and Fremont before aligning onto Sansome.
• The 14/14L-Mission route will not be changed, so it will miss the temporary terminal by one long block.

For visual learners, here is a PDF map of the final phase reroutes.

Because most of the general interest in the Transbay redevelopment process seems to focus, quite understandably, on the Pelli Transit Center and its signature tower, it is easy to forget how much planning is required to deal with the rest (really, most) of the redevelopment zone — now-vacant lots once occupied by the Embarcadero Freeway, mostly located north of Folsom, with a couple slivers to the south. To jumpstart the various threads of the greater development process, each of these former freeway parcels will be treated to a separate RFP. Building a neighborhood from scratch in modern times is no easy task, and even small, peripheral parcels should be lavished with as much care and attention as we can give. Currently up for consideration is Block 11, whose RFP is in the drafting stage. Hugging the eastern corner of Folsom and Essex, Block 11 (outlined in red in the Google satellite image at right) is a more peripheral site, in the sense that it is not slated for a tower or a particularly high density of new homes. But to current and future residents of the neighborhood, it could prove more controversial than new additions to the skyline.

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Extensions of Muni lines 44 and 108 start this Saturday. February 23, Muni will start running permanently extended service on the 44-O’Shaughnessy and 108-Treasure Island bus routes. The 44 will be rerouted off of Fairfax and onto Evans, terminating at Bayview Plaza, near the Evans T-Third station. The 108 will be extended to serve the Caltrain depot at 4th and Townsend, facilitating a more direct connection between Treasure Island and the Peninsula. The extension will operate every day, between approximately 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm, with express service between the Transbay Terminal and the Caltrain depot. More details are provided on the SFMTA’s website. But the most exciting piece of news coming out of this story might be that contrary to its usual procedure of including blocks of ambiguous and confusing text, the MTA actually included clear maps depicting the rerouted service.

One of my favorite features of San Francisco’s downtown street map, two grids meeting at a diagonal, is that looking down just about any street yields a view not only of a streetwall, but also of a cross-sectional sliver of the skyline, offset at an angle. Now that Rincon Hill and South of Market are quite literally on the rise, these cross-sectional views from streets north of Market are being accentuated in new ways, as blank spaces of sky above older mid-rise buildings are captured and brought within the urban form:

555 Mission (from Geary and Jones)

301 Mission (from Jackson Square)

Thirty-three story office tower 555 Mission topped off a couple months ago. The 645-foot Millennium Tower at 301 Mission, to be the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi River, just topped off last week. These may be the newest examples, but they represent only the beginning of the wave that will wash over South of Market in the next couple of decades, reinventing the identity of a neighborhood once better-known for its parking lots and ramps leading on and off the Bay Bridge.

Manhattanization? Some continue to cling to a knee-jerk disdain of high rises, but as we work to embrace ever-smarter growth, this concept seems increasingly embittered and outdated. But rest assured: San Francisco will never be Manhattan, and Rincon Hill is more directly inspired by Vancouver in any case. Then again, partial emulation of one of this country’s most successful urban locales is not really such a bad thing either. Whatever label you want to attach, the densifying city can be a beautiful sight.