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Comment by jakelarkin | Hacker News Reader

unless they complete the Caltrain DTX this is just a $3billion bus station. SF supes keep punting because it doesn't buy them local votes. DTX has been consistently surveyed as the most desired transit infrastructure by commuters and the business community for decades. Politicians of course would rather steal the funds for ineffectual projects that pander to some narrow progressive pet-causes.

The $1.6 billion Central Subway should have been funneled into DTX. But of course Rose Pak delivered the votes, so thats why that's getting built and DTX is not.

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Even if DTX is built it is still primarily a bus station. By design it was a bus station first, with the afterthought of also catering to trains (and badly at that, with passenger circulation issues and too few platforms).

The mere idea of having a transbay bus station is flawed. Passengers should transfer from there busses to BART and cross the bay on BART. And if you say “well BART is crowded and has problems”. Yes it is and those should be fixed and a second teansbay tube should’ve been built instead of a $3billion (?) bus station.

What about those coming from Marin on GGT or those coming from the Oakland hills, where it's easier to get on Hwy 24 than it is to drive through residential traffic to a BART station?

Marin blocked BART from coming through in the 60's, so it's their own damn fault.

This is a grossly oversimplified version of the story. The Golden Gate bridge authority asserted that the additional weight of BART on a lower deck would reduce the clearance underneath the bridge sufficiently that naval vessels wouldn't be able to pass. The study supporting this was paid for by the bridge authority, who had a financial incentive to prevent BART from going ahead - nevertheless, there was a risk that Marin might never have got BART even if the population had voted for it, and would still have been on the hook for payments. This depressed support in Marin sufficiently that it might have dragged the regional vote below the 60% threshold required for the entire system to be built, and the other counties pressured Marin to drop out against their will. If San Mateo hadn't chosen to drop out earlier, there's a decent chance that Marin would have service today.

There lots of places in the East Bay where taking a bus is the fastest public transit. There are Transbay Bus stops in places, like Montclair, that are far from BART stations.

counterpoint: buses have greater reach and are potentially cheaper to add and operate than BART trains on the margin. If the primary transbay tube goes down in a quake we'll benefit from the diversification.

buses have greater reach and are potentially cheaper

I know you're counterpointing here, but really it nets out the same. Connecting transport increases it's potential.

It baffles me that SF chooses not to integrate Bus, BART and Caltrain.

> It baffles me that SF chooses not to integrate Bus, BART and Caltrain.

SF does not choose that. In fact SF has long chosen to integrate bus, Muni rail, and BART, and more recently also Caltrain, though getting the Caltrain part done has been hampered by a number of problems, including the cost overruns of Transbay Transit Center’s first phase, which have eaten up the money for the second phase.

How can you even say that with a straight face? None of {Muni bus, Muni rail, BART, Cal Train, AC Transit} coordinate transfers with each other. Unless you have that, you can't say the systems are "integrated" by any means.

Edit: by "don't coordinate," I mean there are no timed transfers between systems.

Suspect we have a different experience -- and pretty different expectations in terms to integration.

Rose Pak wasn't a progressive. She was a local politician narrowly focused on Chinatown. She formed alliances with other politicians (Pelosi, Willie Brown, Newsome, Peskin, ...) to achieve her goals but she was no progressive. She was basically Beijing's woman in San Francisco; she was very PRC.

Yep, the Central Subway was a deal. Pak was able to turn out votes to defeat the progressive candidate, Matt Gonzalez, in 2003 and Pelosi delivered the Central Subway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_mayoral_election...

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Pelosi-secures-federal...

Local politics are local.

Lets compare to the same thing in NYC; 2.6B for some reason doesn't look out of line:

Port Authority unveils finalist proposals for Bus Terminal redesign 8 The cost of these proposals range from $3.7 billion to a staggering $15.3 billion https://ny.curbed.com/2016/9/22/13022514/port-authority-bus-...

This is bad framing. The central subway extends transit service to one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the US in return for taking down part of 101. Problems completing train connections to the new Transbay station will be resolved some other way.

Do you mean in return for taking down the Embarcadero Freeway?

Yeah and what is it connecting? It's connecting a low income community (BVHP) to retail jobs downtown. What got lost? A direct link (15-Third Street) from BVHP to City College.

The Embarcadero Freeway (Highway 480) was originally built to connect with the Golden Gate Bridge. Citizens hated this and the Board of Supervisors agreed to stop further construction. It ended on Broadway if I remember, convenient for Chinatown.

The Embarcadero Freeway came down with the 1989 freeway. Tearing it down vs rebuilding it was a 6-5 vote for tearing it down. Chinatown deeply resented it not being rebuilt and Agnos lost re-election. That probably led to the Central Subway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_480

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