Planning for a new “multi-modal facility” to link Caltrain, Muni, a new Bus Rapid Transit line, traffic lanes, bike lanes and pedestrian paths serving Visitacion Valley, Candlestick Point, Hunters Point, Brisbane and other southern neighborhoods is underway with the first public open house to discuss options and locations for the future facility – which could include a proper Bayshore station – is scheduled for this evening at 6PM.
The Conceptual drawings for the proposed Bayshore Multi-Modal Facility should be ready for review by spring 2016.
What is missing is the LRT from this station up to Balboa Park via direct link… BRT will only delay, the inevitable need for more capacity as these projects lead to more and larger projects (ex: cow-palace, and other sites along Geneva) This also needs to link up to Candlestick, and the shopping area, executive park, and perhaps a ferry boat system to get people on water-transit to the east bay and south bay.
What we do not need is an overly expensive loop of the T-Line vs. directly running it up to Balboa Park Station and out to the Candlestick and BVHP areas to get the loop to gather people in the future Hunter’s View, and Alice Griffith areas, so that they can access transit back over to the T-Line and not take cars. That would be the best planning endeavor…
If they stick with bus systems they need to look at larger capacity bus lines, with double door access. The Balboa Park station, and proposed intermodal facility will be bumper to bumper as it currently is up the T-Third Line from Vis-Valley currently. Traffic already is stuck daily in this area, so transit lines need to be built and developed up front. Unfortunately as noted in the SF Examiner Joshua Sabatini’s article “developer’s spared larger transit fee” is the premature capitulation of the need of the public vs the needs of the private sector.
Any T-line extension to CP/HP would occur as a direct branch off the line just north of this area. The T-line was supposed to loop around to connect with Bayshore Caltrain, but the delays in demolishing the Schlage site and the usual SFMTA antics have kept them separate 10 years after the T opened for service.
BRT? LMAO. Even the Geary BRT study that was released today pointed out that BRT will only shave off a max of 15 min. So, instead of taking an hour it will take 45 min to travel down Geary. Meanwhile, the same distance is covered by BART in 17 min from Embarcadero to Daly City.
Geary BRT is an absolute joke and waste of money. save it and invest for a subway
Would LOVE a subway, but the costs are pretty different, right? BRT is tens of millions, subway is in the billions. Love the idea of more underground rails, but wow, the money necessary for them.
my mom always taught me to save pennies and buy big high quality toys, instead of continuing to buy small crappy toys.
i worked on a farm from age 11-15, and bought my 1st motorcycle with cash at age 15. I could;ve bought a home in SF 10 yrs ago, but instead i waited and saved (no nights drinking, no expensive dinners) and bought a 2500 sq ft flat.
save the money and invest in teh future for big transformative projects. why spend money on band aids?
The classic comparison of government budgets to household budgets, still classically myopic. We can’t save our pennies and end up with billions of dollars. A subway line, though obviously preferable, isn’t limited to vision. It’s limited by budgets.
But it *is* limited by vision. Governments have a unique ability to build now by issuing bonds – currently at historically low interest rates – and then pay the bonds later. And a project such as the Geary subway would have incredible multiplier effects – obviously the short-term one of creating construction jobs; but also the effect of people being able to move about more quickly and easily – property values in the inner and outer Richmond would go up, businesses along Geary would thrive, etc. And as a result, the city’s property tax base would go up, meaning more revenue to the city.
To me it’s a no-brainer. But regardless, it is *not* an issue of “there’s not money in the budget for it today”. It’s instead very much “there’s not vision in our leaders for it today”.
There have been plans for subways across town for decades. The vision is there. If you’re talking about political will or the ability of the city to convince taxpayers to pony up for it, then you’re talking reality. I’d doubt a single politician in the city isn’t drooling over the possibility of creating all those jobs and putting his or her name on such a project, but try to get another few pennies on sales tax or another .2% more in property taxes (and pass-throughs to renters), and you’re looking at a much bigger tunnel to bore. The vision is there, and always has been. The money isn’t, and likely won’t be.
Geary BRT should cost $200-500 million, depending on which option gets built. A subway stub out to Van Ness or Japantown or Divis might cost ten times that.
Speaking of future transformative projects, for about the cost of the Geary BRT we could pull fiber into all of the ~80k households served by this bus route. For the cost of a Geary subway to Divis we could about pull fiber into every residence and business in SF. Cheaper to move bits than bodies.
I didn’t realize that everyone along the Geary corridor works from home.
Mark, they don’t have to ALL work from home for fiber to be a lower cost way to improve transit than BRT or subway. The BRT will only defray the added transportation load of about 5% growth. Shifting the same 5% to work-from-home or work from small offices near home, would accomplish the same plus everyone would benefit. We’ve already seen a similar increase in the work-from-home share in other parts of SF that have more bandwidth. And once the fiber is installed, the OPEX is also much lower than for buses. The BRT is estimated to cost an additional $10+/year in OPEX vs the do nothing option.
This is solving for the lifestyles and economy of the 21st century with 21st century tech, instead of mid-20th century tech.
That’s an extra $10+ million per year in OPEX for the BRT.
I see your point, but it does very little to address the transit problems the city/region face.
Of course they are expensive to build, but it’s amazing how cities across the globe are able to build massive state of the art transit and HSR projects, yet the auto-centric, 1950s US mindset is totally fine with substandard, early 20th century modes of public transit. SF, a supposed cutting edge tech hub, has an inferior streetcar system posing as a real transit system. LMFAO. Grow a pair, SF. Set your sights on what you should do versus what you are actually doing.
Well, a local bond measure would do the trick. How about an increase in, say, 5% on the sales tax plus a doubling of property taxes? We want European transit, we’ll have to pay European taxes. Everyone gets to grow a pair.
I have no problem paying more for something that is actually good. Also, force developers to pay more for transit initiatives. Oh wait, that failed. Thank you, SF.
Thanks for underscoring my point for me. Listen, I’m not against the things you’re for. I’m just skeptical the majority of the people in town are actually willing to pay for it.
Agree Geary BRT will be like 19th Ave BRT, Van Ness BRT, and Geneva Harney BRT, money pished out the window as it wont solve the longer term issues. But why bury transit, bury the roadways, make transit for the public enjoyable, and not just a secondary and “poor-peoples” method of transit. Its PUBLIC transit as in the best and most positive for ALL of us…
Absolutely NOTHING like Balboa Station would be a good start. Make sure high-rise housing is on top of whatever is built.
Far from highrise.
I don’t want to speak for the people who live out here but to me this would have been a perfect area for a high rise mixed with mid-rise area if the economy could support the development. But then I think they should have done the same in San Bruno next to BART so I am pretty out of sync with the Dave’s of the world. That is an excellent housing option for many people. And I preemptively acknowledge and reject the coming Geneva Towers reply
That’s been my issue with this plan all along. It’s a site with direct connections to billions of dollars worth of transit infrastructure and should be one of the densest new developments in SF, but is instead 4-6 stories. It should have been required to be at least ten to twelve 40+ story towers, if not more.
SF voters will not allow an expansion of the hi-rise zone. Period. The effort to up-zone central SOMA is running into trouble and will likely face an initiative challenge. The flower Mart proposal is probably DOA for that very reason.
If you want 40 story new neighborhoods go to LA or Seattle. It will never happen in SF. IMO.
its already happening. what the heck are you talking about?
as long as we have adequate transit intermodal station redevelopment of Balboa Station, linking the J-M and the K-T lines, we could have a lot more density along with more housing. If we leave it as BRT along Geneva Harney, and ignore the LRV terminus at Balboa Park Station with the Balboa Reservoir and Upper Yards projects we are losing the longer race to get the transit in place prior to the housing build out and domino effect of the Excelsior being revised as a PDA zone.
If there’s a plan for “adequate transit intermodal station redevelopment of Balboa Station”, I’d love to hear about it. Right now, SFMTA and BART aren’t even interested in adding bus shelters or NextBus signs.
Nice that all this new development will result in a multimodal station right next to Recology. Oh, and according to the supporting documents, there are plans for a new Caltrain stop at Quint, right next to the sewage treatment plant. Looks like no change in the policy of treating public transportation as the “shame cab”.
I think there are alternatives to move the Caltrain stop north into Schlage, so it meets the T.
Can’t. There’s a tunnel there just north of the current Bayshore station. The T was supposed to wrap around from the south and join up with Caltrain at Bayshore. The Schlage site wasn’t razed until 2009 and then there was the economic crisis that set everything back even more.
makes sense because our transportation is 3rd world TRASH
In Communist Cuba people ride in trailers that look like cattle cars pulled by a semi trucks so it could be worse.
The Quint stop would also be well located to serve the (up & coming / redeveloping) neighborhoods of Bayview and Hunter’s Point.
But that said, it also essentially parallels and reproduces the T line, so query why we’d slow down Caltrain further (even if only just the “local” trains) to add a stop, when the T line could service the need just as well if only it intersected Bayshore…
This does bring up the issue that the T line in general is a huge waste of money that could have been spent on Caltrain with a stop in Bayview and access downtown. That helps locals here much more to be connected. Local service could have been in bus only lanes
Real dumb
I’m confused. ONE stop in Bayview isn’t a transit line serving that part of the city–and besides, it’s not like both weren’t possible.
If resources where infinite we could all have a heavy rail station on our block.
Would you rather have a streetcar ride downtown that is hardly faster than the bus or a stop in your neighborhood on a electrified interuban rail line like other modern countries have? With access downtown that ride might be less than 10 minutes?
or you could take a rapid bus that would be about the same as the T is you didn’t like that option
I vote for interurban. While you’re at it, get rid of the streetcars on Taraval and Judah and replace them with, oh I don’t know, maybe a real LRT system?
Honestly, still confused. Interurban? Great! But that’s not intraurban, which is what the T does. Again, they can still build a Caltrain station and keep the T for stops Caltrain doesn’t make–basically everywhere but 22nd Street and 4th.
As for replacing the streetcars, great! Where’s the cash for that, though?
If we turn the T-Third Up Geneva to Balboa Park Station, and loop it eastbound out to candlestick, executive park, and BVHP back up to cargo way and back to the T-Line and loop it in a wide arc, we would actually be doing a major improvement for the D10 density and capacity issues.
Where transit goes, land values will increase and support denser development. In a few years the area will be unrecognizable I’m sure.
This would’ve been perfect site for 49er stadium. Caltrain, Muni, Freeway, in the City….. Now they can’t win cuz they lost the SF mojo
Olympic Sized Swimming pool and energy creation system alongside the bay 101 and rising sea water, could be another “fleischhacker” swimming pool or a new Sutro Baths on the east side of SF?
So where is the repair and storage yard for the new High Speed Rail going to go, hmm? Right where the old one was in Brisbane- no other location is close enough and big enough to the end of the line. The biggest local story that is getting no press whatsoever.
The HSR would be going through at 100-200 MPH… This requires those rails to be lower, and reduce resonance. Their would be intermediate regional and local city tracks, another person at the intermodal meeting had such a drawing and it would place LRV and BRT proposals at grade across Geneva east-west.
They would need a HSR repair and storage yard, but that could be done alongside, or under the recology site?