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Interview: Nathaniel Ford, Part Four
Part the fourth in our multi-part conversation with Nathaniel Ford, the Executive director of Muni. See part one here, part two here, and part three here.
Eve Batey: Well, this is going to kind of put you on the spot, and, frankly, I don't know how honest you can be, but I have to ask: Is the Central Subway really a good idea? I’ll bet two thirds of the people who voted for it don’t even live here anymore, and the prevailing wisdom, if our site's readers are any indication, is that it's something we should get out of.
Nathaniel Ford: Well, I think four months in, to talk about getting out of Central Subway, I don’t think I would really recommend that or suggest that. Right now at the federal level, we have 15 projects that have received a medium, which is the highest rating you can get right now, at this juncture, a medium rating in terms of constructability, its impact on travel trips, air quality issues, those types of things, they top criteria that factor into this. We’re one of 15 nationwide they approved, in that 1 of 15, a $1.4 million profit.
Image of the proposed Central Subway project
Do you – now after all of that and all the work that went into that, and I think it’s -- right now I haven’t seen anything that’s told me that that project has fallen or it doesn’t deserve the ranking that it received.
I don’t think at this juncture we need to start really talking about -- second guessing ourselves -- and handing back $1.2, $1.4 billion in federal money. Third St., which was the beginning project, was Phase 1, and then you had Phase 2, the central subway. Third St. was built with local dollars, $600 million in local dollars. That money is leveraged, or the match, for the federal dollars on central subway. So if that’s the case, we also hurt ourselves in terms of if now we’re talking about not going with central subway, we lost an opportunity for the $600,000 on Third St. to be matched with federal dollars.
So I was not here during that decision process but we are at a point that we are very far down the track to even start considering about, “Well, let’s not do it.” That will be $1.2 to $1.4 billion that would basically be handed back to be spread across the country, to other cities.
I see it as a good project. I’ve had the planning people come in to me time and time again, the construction people. We’ve reworked the numbers, did some value engineering to try and deal with some of the cost escalation issues, and the ridership is there. We see the travel pattern coming from Visitation Valley into central subway, in some ways on the highway as well as on our route.
Fifteen, I believe it is. Fifteen. There’s heavy ridership making that trip. Another piece of this too, and I mean this is just in terms of vision, my vision on some of these situations. I’ve worked around the country. I’ve worked New York, I’ve worked BART, Atlanta, here. Sometimes when we look at today, sometimes a project may take, in terms of looking at today and what’s needed today, but we also have to look at, that central subway’s going to be here for the next 100 years.
What will that mean for the city when we look at it at that time, and what will it cost then to build a central subway? So I look at some cities that took on transit very early on and made that investment before either you or I were even born. And what has it meant for that city, versus cities now that are clamoring and scratching and fighting to put in rail systems and subway systems? This city is ahead of the curve. Let’s stay ahead of the curve. So, you know, that’s my feeling about central subway. I’m not the author of it. I inherited the project, but right now I haven’t seen anything that says, “This is a bad, bad project that doesn’t need to be explored.” The feds think it’s a good project, our staff thinks it’s a good project, there was a community out there and I think they’re still out there that thinks it’s a good project. That’s my two cents.
Tomorrow: Transit 511! It ain't pretty!