Dumbarton
Rail is a proposed project that would build a commuter rail bridge to
connect the Union City BART station with the Redwood City Caltrain
station.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the Dumbarton Rail
project, as presented in one of the recent public meetings on the
project, is viable nor a wise use of public funds. I’m a huge public
transit fan, especially rail. However, one of the things I learned in
getting my Masters degree in Transportation Engineering, is that very
expensive rail projects are not a panacea to solving traffic problems.
First, rail lines are expensive – BART costs $780 million per mile to
build! No specific financial figures were given in the meeting I
attended, only the vague promise that this would be a public/private
partnership with Facebook contributing towards the project.
The
rough estimates I’ve seen put the cost of this project at one to two
billion dollars. While Regional Measure 3 (the recent transportation
measure) funds might pay for some of it, it wouldn’t come anywhere close
to funding the whole thing.
We need to ask, “What else could
we do with that amount of money?” The Bay Area is plagued by a lack of
coordinated planning which results in expensive, disconnected, piecemeal
projects that do little to alleviate the region’s traffic.
Indeed, the presenters at the public meeting mentioned the large jobs /
housing imbalance that is the cause of the traffic on the Dumbarton
Bridge. This project does nothing to alleviate the jobs / housing
imbalance – if anything, it will exacerbate it, making it easier for
Facebook to avoid any responsibility for the lack of housing affordable
to its workforce in its own backyard.
Even if this project was
able to get some people out of their cars to commute from the East Bay
to the Peninsula, how will people get to and from the East Bay stations?
Most of them will drive, creating even more gridlock on our streets at
rush hour.
This project will add yet one more piece to the
already complex public transportation infrastructure of the Bay Area.
Anyone who has to transfer from service operated by one agency to
another knows that even our existing services are not well coordinated
with each other. Let’s get our current public transportation
infrastructure right before spending another $1-2 billion on yet another
boondoggle that does little to solve our traffic nightmare.
Source: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-train-rail-costs-price-bart-muni
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