Who’s got the appetite for another billion-dollar transit overhaul that would tear up North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf with construction for years on end? Because the push to add more stops to the Central Subway begins today.
As we learned with the Central Subway project and the Van Ness Bus Lane Rapid transit project, San Francisco can have nice things — as long as we accept that fact that these nice things will take five or six years longer to complete than they were supposed to, and their costs will explode to two or three times their original budget. And what with the SF Municipal Transportation Agency that runs Muni looking at about a $322 million deficit, you would think there would be no more talk of expensive, pie-in-the-sky Muni projects when the agency is talking about layoffs and cutting service.
Oh, there is talk of expensive, pie-in-the-sky Muni projects alright. The Chronicle reports that District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter is pushing for Chinatown's Central Subway to be extended with more new stops and stations in North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf. “We know the subway will never meet its full potential until it’s extended to North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf,” Sauter says in his Instagram video from last week.
Sauter further defended the pricey and ambitious idea in an interview with the Chronicle. “Imagine someone at Moscone Center having the option to ride up to Fisherman’s Wharf in eight minutes, and grab a bowl of cioppino,” Sauter told the Chronicle.
Okay, that’s a thoroughly silly theoretical that would never happen in reality. The convention-goer who suddenly craves cioppino who would bolt from Moscone Center to the Wharf to satisfy this craving merely because of some new subway is a specimen that simply does not exist. There are certainly use cases where someone downtown would want to head to Fisherman's Wharf as quickly as possible, but that ain’t one of them.
The Chronicle reports that Sauter has “called a hearing at City Hall on Monday [that’s today] to gather momentum” for the idea. Sauter’s Instagram post announcing the meeting merely calls it a “Central Subway hearing” and brands it with a “Danny Sauter for Supervisor" logo. A Facebook post from the neighborhood group North Beach Neighbors uses a different graphic, but still just calls it “Central Subway hearing. Is this even a real City Hall meeting?
It is. What none of these tell you is that this is the weekly meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee, it actually starts at 1:30 pm this afternoon (it will be broadcast live on SFGovTV), and the item “Hearing - Central Subway Performance and Extension Plans” is the final item (Item Number 8) on the agenda. It will likely be well past 2 pm until there is any discussion of this. But it’s at Room 250 in City Hall if you want to attend!
The above map shows where the extended Central Subway might go, but these drawings are more than ten years old and are from a scrapped version of the project. Regardless, they are Sauter's current working version. It takes the Central Subway line that currently goes as far as Chinatown, then adds a new station at North Beach, and then two more stations in Fisherman’s Wharf at Powell and Beach streets plus Columbus Avenue and Beach Street. That train would then head back to North Beach station.
And the Chronicle estimates the price tag of this Central Subway extension at $1.4 billion, but again, that price estimate is from 2014 and is more than ten years old. That cost will skyrocket when updated for today’s dollars. And this is a Muni system that says its teetering on a fiscal cliff and is begging voters to accept a tax increase to fund its own survival.
Plus Muni doesn't even want this!
“We thank Supervisor Sauter for the opportunity to engage in discussions,” says SFMTA spokesperson Parisa Safarzadeh told the Chronicle. “Given our financial situation and the limited funding resources currently available to us, prioritizing cost-effective improvements to existing services and projects remains our top priority. The SFMTA faces a financial crisis resulting in a $307 million budget shortfall, which is projected to grow to more than $430 million over the next five years.”
Add to this the fact that the project would completely tear up the neighborhoods of North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf with small-business-killing construction mayhem for a period of years on end, and it seems an inopportune time to be extending the Central Subway.
But maybe Sauter and his supporters of the Central Subway extension are playing the long game here, and stealthily building support for the extension until someday, when San Francisco is back in surplus times, the city actually has the money to do things like this.
Related: Central Subway Will Be Shut Down Next Month For Water Leak Repairs [SFist]
Image: San Francisco, United States - May 5, 2016: Orange vintage Swiss F Market streetcar rolls by large sign at entrance to the tourist attraction of Fisherman's Wharf on the corner of Beach and Jones Street. Horizontal
