San Francisco Should Always Have a Subway Under Construction
A couple of years ago, I was with my friend Adam Cohn when he made this simple yet important declaration — “San Francisco should always have a subway under construction.” My first reaction was to think of every possible objection to the concept — too expensive, too disruptive, too controversial, too many difficulties siting subway stations and determining alignments. But, I quickly realized that the statement was both insightful and correct.
San Francisco is experiencing unprecedented growth. The city has 200,000 more people than in the early 1980s and 100,000 more than in the early 2000s. We are growing by about 10,000 people a year and are projected to add another 150,000 residents by 2040. We see the results of this growth on our streets every day, with more and more auto congestion and a harder time for our extensive bus network navigating the streets and meeting schedules. Indeed, Muni buses travel at the slowest average speed of any urban bus system in the country, at just over eight miles per hour on average.
We are working hard to make our surface transit system run more efficiently — reducing the number of cars on the road, increasing the number of buses and light rail vehicles, creating transit-only lanes and bus rapid transit lines. Yet, as important as this work is for our city, it isn’t enough. We need to move more transit underground, meaning we need more subways.
Subway construction is a critical part of the future of dense urban centers all over our country. New York, which is already served by an extensive subway system, is building the Second Avenue Subway to serve the east side of Manhattan. Los Angeles is expanding the Purple Line Subway, which will extend the city’s growing metro system from Downtown all the way to Westwood. Internationally, we have seen aggressive investments in subway systems pay off in places like Santiago, Chile, which has the second largest network in Latin America, after Mexico City.
San Francisco has a lackluster history of subway construction. BART was built forty years ago as a regional transportation carrier and bored a tunnel along a short section of Market Street, from the Embarcadero to Civic Center, and then extending south through the Mission to Daly City. Muni’s Metro tunnel, which serves as Muni’s only subway line, runs up Market Street and through Twin Peaks to West Portal. That’s it. One Muni subway line in forty years. Neither San Francisco’s west side, north side, nor southeast has subway service, instead relying on slow and traffic-obstructed service by bus or above-ground light rail.
San Francisco’s lack of extensive subways has significant negative impacts on our transportation system. Far too many San Franciscans who want to take transit find they cannot rely on it, since it simply takes too long on our gridlocked streets. It shouldn’t take longer to commute downtown from the Sunset or the Bayview than from the East Bay, yet it does.
This inadequate subway service is finally starting to change thanks to forward thinking by our Municipal Transportation Agency, County Transportation Authority, Planning Department, and regional transit partners. We need to take aggressive, forward-thinking, visionary steps to continue and accelerate that change:
- The Central Subway is currently under construction, taking the T Third line underground at the Fourth and King Caltrain station and north to Chinatown. Building this new subway line is an extraordinary step forward. When the Central Subway opens, it will immediately become the highest ridership light rail line. When the Central Subway tunnel was bored, it was extended past Chinatown to North Beach. Once the subway is complete to Chinatown, we must not let inertia set in, and we need to quickly extend the line to North Beach. The City must acquire the site of the old Pagoda Theater in North Beach, where the tunnel ends, and build a station there. Muni has made many excuses for not acquiring the Pagoda Theater site, the cost of which is pixie dust in the overall Central Subway budget, not to mention Muni’s overall budget. Muni needs to develop a can-do attitude about this critical site acquisition. Ultimately, the Central Subway should be extended north to Fisherman’s Wharf, at which point its ridership will dwarf every other light rail line.
- The downtown rail extension of Caltrain and High-Speed Rail, from Mission Bay to the future Transbay Transit Center, will be a critically important subway connecting southern San Francisco, San Mateo County, San Jose, and Los Angeles to our downtown. Recent conversations have focused on routing this extension along Third Street, which would significantly benefit the southeastern neighborhoods and ease traffic concerns around the future Warriors arena.
- A second transbay tube, connecting the East Bay to Mission Bay, will address massive BART overcrowding, allow BART to run twenty-four hours, link Caltrain to the Capitol Corridor, and ultimately provide High-Speed Rail service to the East Bay and Sacramento. This important project will require significant investment and political will.
- Subway service to the west side of San Francisco is long overdue, will improve the quality of life of many residents, and will allow for increased housing production in a portion of the city that has not had enough transit access. Possibilities include a Geary Boulevard line, a 19th Avenue line, and a line through the Sunset.
- Subway service to southeastern San Francisco is also overdue. This area — long neglected in terms of strong transit access — is at the heart of much of our future planned housing production. Faster and more reliable transit connectivity must accompany this development.
We will hear every objection in the book to these ideas — that they’re too expensive, that they will take away from maintaining our current transit systems, that in a city where it takes years to make small transit improvements it’ll take forever to do any of this, that transit leads to gentrification, that a focus on subways will undermine bus service (it doesn’t have to, as London and New York show), and so on and so forth.
Yes, revolutionizing our transit systems will be hard and expensive. Yes, there will be political and funding fights with the forces (both local and beyond) that couldn’t care less about funding good transit. Yes, there will be ups and downs over this lengthy process. Yet, with a forward-thinking, aggressive, can-do attitude — the same attitude that got us the interstate highway system, the Golden Gate Bridge, BART, and the world’s great subway systems — we can get it done.
To do so will require:
- Funding transit adequately at the local, state, and federal levels. We have a sorry history of defunding transit and allowing it to limp along. This problem isn’t unique to our region. We are starting to see change locally, and we need to continue that momentum here and extend it to Sacramento and Washington. After years of people raiding transit funds in San Francisco, a broad coalition of transit and environmental groups came together to demand better prioritization of transit investment. As a result, voters passed a ballot measure I authored to tie transit funding to population growth and the first transportation bond in a very long time. We are on the verge of passing legislation to require development to pay transit impact fees, and next year we will go to the ballot with a local vehicle license fee to fund transit and roads. Other counties are passing transportation revenue measures, and BART will go to the ballot in 2016 with a very significant and important infrastructure bond. The state is starting to think bigger in terms of transportation funding, and we need to make sure that this focus is permanent and not limited to road and highway investment. While Washington, DC, is a mess when it comes to transportation funding, with Congress incapable of passing more than short-term status quo extensions, the Republicans won’t control Congress forever. When the tides shift in Washington, we need to be prepared to force a radical transformation of how the federal government funds transit.
- Making it easier and faster to approve transit projects. California requires significant process around big projects and even small ones. San Francisco has taken California’s focus on process to the next level. Even small projects here can take years and years to approve. Public process is important, and projects frequently are better with broad public participation and feedback. Yet, process should not go on forever. It’s not acceptable that the environmental process for the Geary and Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit projects took more than ten years each. Transit projects should receive efficient, expedited review, allowing for public input in a reasonable timeframe.
- Engaging in a subway master planning process. I’m introducing legislation to require a master-planning process for subways in San Francisco. While our transit agencies are engaging in very strong planning around various aspects of our transportation system — and they deserve lots of credit for doing so — we need a long-term roadmap specific to subways so that we are constantly planning for the next subway project, rather than completing a project, only to enter into a period of political inertia.
- Showing a willingness to think big. Transit projects are highly susceptible to small thinking. The most legendary example is BART. If you want to be thoroughly depressed, take a look at a map based on an early proposal for the BART system:
Due to political fights and small thinking, this concept was never implemented. Imagine if the Bay Area had had the foresight, will, and commitment to build that system. We need to avoid that mistake, think big, and stick to our guns. We can find the money. We can get through the process. And in doing so, we can make our city and region a better place — a place that is more livable, economically vibrant, and environmentally sustainable.
Let’s commit ourselves to getting this done.
Scott Wiener is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He chairs the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and represents San Francisco on the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
