Supervisor Danny Sauter is trying to resurrect the old idea of extending the Central Subway out to North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, but officials realize there’s no way this gets funded while Trump is still president.
Our headline above declares that Supervisor Danny Sauter’s new campaign to extend the Chinatown Central Subway out to North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf got its “first City Hall hearing” on Monday. That’s technically true, but the idea has been floating around for decades, and the SF Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) produced a serious amount of work on the proposal in 2014.
Since then, we instead got the Central Subway to Chinatown, which arrived a full five years behind schedule, and with insane cost overruns that sent its original $650 million price tag up to $2 billion. And right now Muni is running a $322 million deficit, so… Why are we even talking about this pipe dream of a Muni mega-project? We absolutely can’t afford it right now!
But as Supervisor Sauter stressed at Monday’s Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation committee meeting, we’re doing the early planning now so that we can build the thing someday later — a day when Donald Trump is no longer in office, because the project would be very much reliant on federal funding (perhaps needing as much as 50% of the money from the federal government).
“I am under no illusion that there is a clear path to construction of the subway in the next few years, not with this administration in Washington,” Sauter said at Monday’s hearing. But after Trump's term ends, Sauter felt “we will have a good case ready to compete for the funds at a federal level.”
A Monday Chronicle article on the Central Subway extension pegged the estimated cost of this North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf subway extension at $1.3 billion. But that number is from the outdated 2014 analysis. SFMTA senior manager of service planning Sean Kennedy gave some new and updated numbers (or he almost did).
“As of 2020, we were assuming this project was going to be $1.6 [billion]. Of course, construction has gone nothing but up since then.” Kennedy told the committee. “That $1.6 [billion] is a placeholder, a best guess at this point.”
The Central Subway is also derided as a little-used route with low ridership. But that has apparently changed. We got the surprising news Monday that the Central Subway’s T-Third line is now the second busiest Muni light-rail line.
“The fact that this is now the second-busiest rail line, that’s remarkable to me,” Sauter said Monday. “It gives me a lot of hope that if we were to extend it, or when we extend it, we would see that same boost in ridership."
But these books might be slightly cooked. The T-Third line’s ridership numbers are surely inflated by Chase Center events. And we also see the footnote above that the "busiest section (between Union Square and 4th and King) [is] rarely at more than 50% capacity.”
The T-Third also has other problems to worry about before it goes building expensive new North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf stations and tunnels. As Supervisor Myrna Melgar rather diplomatically put it, “The frequency of this line is really not what most of us hoped it would be.”
And Supervisor Chyanne Chen said of any Central Subway expansion project, “I am also very concerned about the construction impact to small businesses.” The Van Ness bus lane construction project certainly destroyed a few small businesses.
And maybe the ridership numbers are good, but the T-Third line still has some kinks to work out. As discussed Monday, it generally takes 45 minutes to get from Fourth and King streets to Sunnydale, with 68 (!) traffic stops, and 20% of its time stopped in traffic. These are the kinds of things that line needs to get worked out before even thinking of expanding to Fisherman’s Wharf.
Image: Baghdad By The Bay San Francisco via Facebook
