$6 billion tunnel to get $100 billion train to $2 billion bus station

From the SF Examiner last week:

After more than a decade of planning — with some studies and approvals dating back to 2004 — San Francisco officials have finally settled on a route for a Caltrain extension that could also eventually bring high-speed rail into downtown San Francisco.

The first major step toward actually running trains to the Salesforce Transit Center from the current Caltrain station at 4th and King streets was taken Tuesday, when a city transportation board granted a key first approval for a plan to dig a subway tunnel connecting them.

Once constructed, the tunnel, known as the downtown extension, will connect the $77 billion high speed rail system and newly electrified Caltrain cars to the gleaming new transit center, which so far only serves city and regional bus lines.

With the future in mind, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority voted unanimously to adopt the downtown extension along Pennsylvania Avenue as its preferred tunneling route...

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who chairs the transportation authority board, said The City moved cautiously and “deliberately” in approving the downtown extension, as Phase 1 of the project — the transit center itself — was rife with “massive cost overruns and delays. We are aware if we don’t succeed,” he said, “we will have built the most expensive public works project since the Egyptian pyramids — a bus terminal.”

The route the transportation authority approved Tuesday will run the $6.1 billion construction project along Pennsylvania Avenue. That alignment was the second most expensive of the available options but also the one with the least construction impact on the street level in the growing Mission Bay area.

All three of the rail alignments the Planning Department considered would have terminated with a tunnel at the Salesforce Transit Center, traveled underground between Mission and Howard streets, veered southeast down Second Street, and turned south at Townsend Street...

The Pennsylvania Avenue alignment has an expected completion date of 2027. This option will impact 12 city blocks with surface construction, versus 53 blocks which would have been impacted by the surface alignment...

The vote by the transportation authority board, whose members also make up the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is not the only approval needed for the project to move forward (emphasis added). [Planning Director]John Rahaim told the San Francisco Examiner that multiple regional, state and city partners will need to give their stamp of approval.

But, he noted, Tuesday’s vote is “the important first step in the process.”

Rob's comment:

Add up the tunnels required to get high-speed rail to San Francisco's Transbay Terminal: The tunnel described above, plus a 13.5 mile tunnel under Pacheco Pass, and a 1.5 mile tunnel from Chowchilla to Gilroy.

To get the train to Los Angeles, 45-50 miles of tunnels under the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains! 

Where will the money come from? No one has any idea. We can only hope Governor Newsom quickly puts an end to this foolishness.

Matt Davies