Last year San Francisco’s Transbay Joint Powers Authority rolled the dice by modifying construction plans for San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center.
The modified plan to pre-build the train station component of the center will save an estimated $100 million in construction costs but banks on $400 million in federal stimulus funds, without which the move will likely end up burning $15 million worth of engineering and design and delay the project by at least four months.
Tomorrow morning President Obama will formally announce $8 billion in stimulus funds to 13 U.S. rail corridors ($50 billion was requested). But according to a White House pre-release, California’s high-speed train project is getting $2.25 billion of that eight.
Exactly how that $2.25 billion will be divvied up between California’s four corridors still needs to be determined. Will San Francisco’s $15 million bet payoff or crap out?
Stay tuned (and plugged-in).
UPDATE: And it’s lucky number seven (or rather four hundred) for the TJPA and San Francisco:
Department spokeswoman Maureen Knightly said the $2.25 billion includes a reservation of $400 million for construction of an underground train station at the Transbay Transit Center.
Cheers!
∙ Transbay Terminal: Banking On Stimulus Funds And Opening In 2015 [SocketSite]
∙ Obama to Give 13 Areas $8 Billion for High-Speed Rail [Bloomberg]]
∙ Scoop: Transbay Interactive Map (And New Transit Center Website) [SocketSite]
∙ High-speed train project gets $2.25 billion from Obama [mercurynews.com]
∙ $400M to go toward Transbay Transit Center train station [San Francisco Examiner]
So the $400mm for the train box was not mentioned….hmmmm…..
We need to learn who will have control of the $2.25 billion first … then figure out how to get at least a portion of the Transbay JPA’s $400 million request. Seems like it would be a common sense, no-brainer to save taxpayers $100 million … .but then again, there’s no IQ test for any elected or appointed officials in general.
Hell, they should try to get funds for a 12-platform 2-level trainbox, just to shut Kopp up, as long as the federales are paying.
UPDATE: It’s a lucky number seven (or rather four hundred) if the San Francisco Examiner is correct:
“Department spokeswoman Maureen Knightly said the $2.25 billion includes a reservation of $400 million for construction of an underground train station at the Transbay Transit Center.”
Cheers!
Good, because otherwise it’d just be the most expensive bus station on earth. As a bus station, TransBay only serves around 12-13K daily TransBay AC Transit passengers, at most 4-6K daily riders (if that, since not all buses to SF terminate at TransBay) on 3 peak+4 general GGTransit lines, some number of Muni passengers, and token numbers of other passengers on local transit authority buses, in addition to Greyhound.