- Owen Thomas | Examiner Columnist |
- Aug 11, 2023 (SFExaminer.com)
It’s hard to take the doom loop seriously at 5 o’clock in the afternoon when you’re staring out of a downtown office window at a line of cars backed up several blocks on Battery Street on their eventual way to the Bay Bridge.
More people are working in offices again and that means traffic has returned with a vengeance to downtown. But there’s still a problem: The private automobile will never be able to bring enough people downtown to fill all those vacant offices.
If downtown is going to thrive, San Francisco needs to commit now to more and better public transportation. To make the return to office a reasonable proposition, we have to make getting there as painless as possible.
In a 2018 report to Congress, BART estimated that about 14,000 people an hour could cross the Bay by car, versus 27,000 an hour on its trains. More people could be taking BART, but they aren’t — for a variety of reasons, but the most likely one is that their employers aren’t insisting on their presence at the office.
BART isn’t anywhere near capacity now, though you might not know it if you try to sardine yourself into a downtown-bound train from the Mission at rush hour or queue at the escalator at Montgomery. Yet ridership keeps inching up. It topped 170,000 several weekdays in July, and about a third of those riders exit at one of the four Market Street stations BART shares with Muni.
Muni, too, has shown signs of recovery. It even beat The City’s target of 422,000 daily boardings in May and June, but is still only at 59 percent of its pre-pandemic ridership.
Given all that, it’s hard to argue for more investment in underused resources. The Central Subway and Salesforce Transit Center are embarrassing monuments to planning excess, with far more capacity than currently use the grandiose and expensively built spaces.
Ride hailing, scooters and bike rentals are nice, but venture capitalists and the traveling public have figured out that they’re not the revolution in urban transportation we were promised. At best, they supplement public transit and make it marginally more efficient.
San Francisco’s public transportation system was among the most efficient among its peer cities before the pandemic, spending $4.75 per trip in 2017. More recent data wasn’t available, but it’s safe to assume that figure has gone up as fixed costs are spread over fewer rides. But that’s part of the point here: Luring riders back into the system only makes it better for everyone.
Travel time is the key here. Muni could be far bolder in restoring downtown express service, for example. Nearly a dozen express routes remain suspended since the pandemic. A pilot program for the 1X California Express offers three round trips a day. At that rate, if you miss your bus, you might as well turn around and work from home.
I’ve heard complaints about schedule changes at Golden Gate Transit that are unfriendly to commuters. A June schedule update added all of one roundtrip. Other transit operators — the Bay Area has a total of 27 distinct systems — could do more to bring people back downtown
One transit system that’s poised to beef up foot traffic downtown is Caltrain. It’s making progress on a key improvement — electrifying its system. New electric trains have already made test runs, and passenger service is expected next year. A trip to The City from San Jose could take as little as 45 minutes, even with express stops.
The problem is that the trip will end at 4th and King streets, a 17-minute ride on the N from downtown. The City and Caltrain have long planned for an extension to the Salesforce Transit Center at a cost of about $3.9 billion. There’s even a train hall in the basement of the center, waiting for tracks to be laid. Right now, that looks like sometime in the next decade, with funding yet to be secured.
Minutes of a recent committee meeting to discuss the extension bore the logos of six separate agencies — and also bored the reader with an interminably bureaucratic discussion of who was even supposed to be in charge of the project.
The only thing we need to bore here are tunnels.
Tunneling downtown will be expensive; the project promises to be more complicated than the Central Subway, which faced years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns. But voters approved the project almost a quarter of a century ago.
I’d argue that waiting has its own costs. Downtown can’t motor its way back to health, and at some point commuters tired of being stuck in traffic will remember there’s a smarter way to get to The City.
