Let’s Admit It: “The Grand Central of the West” FIDI Transit Center is an Obsolete Fiasco

And Stop Wasting $Billions On It!

1972 Prophecy Come True

Let’s admit it: The 1960’s “Manhattanization” vision for downtown San Francisco that brought us BART and dozens of now-partly-empty office towers is as obsolete today as that era’s dial-up telephones. It’s ultimate Manhattan-esque centerpiece, a Downtown Transit Center that would unite East Bay Transbay bus and Peninsula CalTrain rail terminals (one long block from the BART/MUNI Metro subway, alas) for hundreds of thousands of daily commuters. And then most of all, for Bullet Trains To Los Angeles!

not exactly New York

So now, after 15 years of piecemeal construction using $2.4 billion of local, state, and federal transit funds, San Francisco has a little used bus terminal, a mostly-empty multi-story retail mall, a lovely new but little used downtown rooftop park, all named Salesforce Transit Center thanks to the $110 million paid for the naming rights. And, 40 feet below ground, a 1000 foot long huge and now-empty concrete box for a hoped-for future combined CalTrain, Bullet Train station.

As Far As It’s Gotten

But let’s admit it: The California High Speed Rail bullet train ain’t gonna happen in any foreseeable future. Always a sounds-great, financially infeasible, pork-barrel, mega $billion “public/private” project scam it’s really just a bullet train to nowhere (Bakersfield to Merced). The $50-$100 billion of additional State and Federal funding need to finish it is totally unavailable and impossible to justify (our existing California air travel network actually works quite well after 60 years of public and private investment).

CalTrain Station today with adjacent MUNI/Metro E-Line, T-Line, and Central Subway platforms at Fourth and King Street

And let’s admit it: Spending $2+ billion more of precious local/federal transit funding  on a “Portal” tunnel from today’s Mission Bay Caltrain station to the Transit Center, in addition the $billions already spent for that giant hole in the ground, just to save several thousand Peninsula office rail commuters 20 minutes a day, compared to using the easy MUNI Metro E-Line connection to the Market Street subway and the FiDi, or the new Central Subway route to Union Square, is absurd on its face. Even worse, digging that tunnel will require the demolition of a substantial part of Second Street, setting that part of Downtown’s recovery back a decade or more!

To Be Demolished

The Van Ness Busway Really Works!

Finish The Job!

The straightforward alternative to this obsolete Grand Central Of The West project is obvious: To build instead a new first class Caltrain station on the existing Mission Bay railyards with room – if it ever really happens – for a future San Francisco High Speed Rail terminal. The cost of that is already included in the Portal tunnel package. And then those $2 billion of precious transit dollars can be spent where San Francisco really needs them: to build a Geary Street Busway like the very successful Van Ness Ave Busway just completed. And then, even maybe on making the third-rate new Central Subway (another City transit boondoggle) really useful by extending it to North Beach and Fishermen’s Wharf.

Knowing when to Stop Throwing Good Money After Bad, like the $multi-billion Downtown Transit Center, and admitting bad mistakes like the Portal tunnel plan, is real civic leadership. Do we have any of that in San Francisco? I don’t know.

- John Elberling, Editor