This just in: Van Ness BRT project is a fiasco!

Public Press

Of course everyone who lives in San Francisco has long known that the hed on this post is mockery. 

The first sentence in the Chronicle's story brings us this not-very-new news: 

When construction started on Van Ness Avenue in 2016, the city said the transit improvement project would be completed by 2019. It is now June 2021, and construction is ongoing.

No shit! Construction will keep going for months---maybe years---who knows? The recent stories acknowledging this ongoing disaster in the middle of the city are pegged on the June 21 Grand Jury report listing the failures in pre-project planning, the contract problems, and then poor project management.

The Chronicle:

The report traces the problem to three issues: It says that planning and design processes "failed to capture the scope of the project adequately;" contracting processes did not instill accountability; and ongoing project management "failed to remediate problems efficiently and effectively."

Otherwise, the city got it just right!

The major pre-project "scope" failure: the city had only a hazy notion of the location of the electrical and plumbing infrastructure lines underneath the middle of Van Ness Avenue. 

So why put this "improvement" project---it would help, by the way, if the media stopped using the city's happy-talk terminology on its projects---in the middle of Van Ness in the first place? Why not keep all of the traffic on the sides of the street? (Van Ness BRT "will be very exciting.")

More importantly, why was this project deemed necessary in the first place? There are only two minor Muni lines on Van Ness, the #47 and the #49. At least the Geary BRT project is on a major city street and Muni bus line. (The #38 Geary bus carries more than 50,000 people a day.)

The Chronicle:

The Van Ness corridor is a vital connector between neighborhoods. It serves as the main artery between the southern center of the city and Marin, and it's dotted with restaurants, car dealerships and banks, among many other businesses.

One wonders how any business on Van Ness has survived. (See City Hall's contempt for neighborhood business.) 

The Chronicle talked to a business:

"Oh my god, since we opened two-and-a-half years ago, we are in the middle of the construction," said Wael Naber, whose son Shadi Naber owns Salty's at 748 Van Ness. "It's really, really, very bad for business." Wael Naber said customers intentionally avoid the restaurant given the construction. Online orders sometimes cancel because delivery drivers don't want to deal with the hassle that is Van Ness. "What are you going to do?" asked Naber.

This blog posted a comprehensive analysis by Mary Miles of the potential problems with this proposed project way back in 2013: Comment on the FEIS and the FEIR on the Van Ness BRT project.:

Once past the verbiage, the Project’s actual “purpose and needs” are twofold: 1) to obstruct and slow all traffic except Muni buses on routes 47 and 49; and 2) to marginally increase the speed of Muni buses on routes 47 and 49. 

Without all those stops for passengers and by delaying all other traffic, the two Muni lines will supposedly increase their speed to 7 miles per hour, while other vehicles would be delayed not just on Van Ness Avenue but on cross streets and on parallel streets, particularly Franklin and Gough Streets. 

Thus, the Project’s improper purpose is in fact to deliberately create traffic congestion throughout the area to make the two Muni lines “competitive” with other travel modes.

The Examiner's recent story on the project.

A good Examiner op-ed on the Geary BRT in 2017.

See also Van Ness Avenue: Two-mile long disaster,

Randal O'Toole is skeptical of BRT projects.

Foolishness about Geary Blvd. back in 2008.