7 ms·

How the Transbay Transit Center Is Reshaping San Francisco

cjensen 9y ago
If you go with optimistic assumptions, and you seldom say "no" to feature requests, your project will go badly. They could have said "no" or "later as money allows" to a rooftop park, or to a beautiful facade, or to an additional review just two years after the previous review. A building paid for by a region ought not be redesigned just because the voters of SF ask that the building accommodate rail unless the same voters also pay for the accommodation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pmoriarty 9y ago
"The budget for the huge complex has climbed from $1.6 billion to $2.259 billion." ... "$4 billion is the rough estimate solely for the rail extension from Mission Bay, for a total of more than $6 billion." So how much is SF spending to help the homeless again? It's pretty clear where the city's priorities are.
- mjevans 9y ago
  Apples and oranges. Civic infrastructure takes decades to build and could theoretically be utilized for a hundred years or more with only (comparatively) minor maintenance. Also the best way to help the homeless would be at a national scale where integration, mental and physical health, and "new deal" programs could address the root cause instead of trying to apply rubbing alcohol and a bandaid to a deep cut to a thigh.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > So how much is SF spending to help the homeless again? More, over the life of the Transbay Transit Center project than on the Transit Center. Why?
- spikels 9y ago
  SFGov's latest annual budget has $305 million for homeless programs but this doesn't include lots of homeless related spending, mostly medical but also police, fire, cleaning, etc. There are also lots of non-profit, religious and private orgs spending on homeless plus costs borne by local residents and businesses. I bet homelessness costs SF close to $1 billion a year. And the problem is not getting much better. In fact increased spending over past 5 years has been associated with even more homeless and problems. http://www.sfchronicle.com/aboutsfgate/article/Despite-money-and-work-homelessness-in-SF-as-bad-11242946.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/aboutsfgate/article/Despite-money...
  - mikeyouse 9y ago
    > In fact increased spending over past 5 years has been associated with even more homeless and problems. I think your causation line is drawn the wrong way there.. Housing prices in San Francisco have dramatically increased in the past 5 years, which leads to more people being at risk of homelessness. Of course money and services will need to increase to accommodate the newly displaced.
    - wahern 9y ago
      Because of rent control, the _vast_ majority of renters are effectively immunized from increases in housing costs. The number of yearly evictions attributable to tear-downs or move-ins is miniscule. When you hear that evictions have "doubled", the absolute numbers are still in the single or double digits, in a city of over 800,000 people. And most of those are otherwise legitimate reasons, like failure to pay rent. The city has something like 20,000+ "homeless", most of whom are housed and only homeless in a legal sense, for purposes of state and federal aid. Development isn't causing the homeless problem... no way, no how.[1] At most it makes it more costly to address the problem, because it increases the cost of government funded housing projects; but it doesn't appreciably contribute to the growth. And don't forget, people are free to move _out_ of the area. I grew up in trailer parks for much of my childhood. For the amount of subsidies people are afforded in California, compared to living on the streets you could live an infinitely better life outside the city in a trailer park--much nicer than the trailers I grew up in rural Florida and Alabama. So a large part of the problem is mobility and a willingness to move. That implicates complex social and psychological issues, but it diminishes the culpability and relevance of housing prices. I support rent control wholeheartedly, but too many supposedly "progressive" people in this town have a penchant for looking a gift horse in the mouth. Nowhere in the country do tenants enjoy such incredible benefits. Newcomers look at the insane rents and just assume it creates homelessness, but things look completely different on the other side of 10 or 20 years. [1] A recent study purported to show that a majority of street homeless were evicted tenants. But they did this by asking tenants whether whether they had previously rented in the city. Somebody who moves here, rents a place for 2 months before being evicted for failure to pay, would count, even though they were for all intents and purposes they were immigrants. And of course it assumes they're telling the whole truth--such as not conflating sleeping on somebody's couch with being a renter. The lack of detail and substance in that survey was very conspicuous, especially the fact that it would be nearly impossible to square with eviction board statistics.
- jmcgough 9y ago
  We're spending a quarter billion a year on a homeless population of about 7,500, so about $33,000 per person per year. Just because we have a problem doesn't mean that we should ignore all of our other problems. They can both be addressed independently.
- Apes 9y ago
  I mean, they just spent over $2 billion on what is likely to soon become the world's most expensive homeless shelter, so that's something at least.
mjevans 9y ago
Am I the only one irked by not using the same precision for numbers that should be compared... E.G. "The budget for the huge complex has climbed from $1.6 billion to $2.259 billion." Should be: The budget for the huge complex has climbed from $1.600 billion to $2.259 billion. However in many places the article quotes individual costs in the hundreds of millions. Even though it might be considered less grammatically correct a more reader friendly approach would be to focus on a standard unit of measure (millions of dollars) and present /all/ cost numbers in that scale over the entire article.
- rpowers 9y ago
  I was thinking the less precise number would force 2.259B to 2.3B.
breckinloggins 9y ago
Does anyone know why this sounds like it was written as a hit piece on Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan? I'm interested in the back story there, because the tone is quite nasty (not that I should expect anything else from our media today).
- mathperson 9y ago
  because a major infrastructure project is WILDLY overbudget..
- CalChris 9y ago
  Unlikely a hit piece. This is the Chronicle and Willie Brown writes for the Chronicle. Hard to overstate that. Further, Ayerdi-Kaplan got ousted last year and given a $400,000+ parachute that Brown negotiated for her. http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Ousted-Transbay-Center-exec-exits-with-big-perks-7253934.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Ouste...
jakelarkin 9y ago
unless they complete the Caltrain DTX this is just a $3billion bus station. SF supes keep punting because it doesn't buy them local votes. DTX has been consistently surveyed as the most desired transit infrastructure by commuters and the business community for decades. Politicians of course would rather steal the funds for ineffectual projects that pander to some narrow progressive pet-causes. The $1.6 billion Central Subway should have been funneled into DTX. But of course Rose Pak delivered the votes, so thats why that's getting built and DTX is not.
- erentz 9y ago
  Even if DTX is built it is still primarily a bus station. By design it was a bus station first, with the afterthought of also catering to trains (and badly at that, with passenger circulation issues and too few platforms). The mere idea of having a transbay bus station is flawed. Passengers should transfer from there busses to BART and cross the bay on BART. And if you say “well BART is crowded and has problems”. Yes it is and those should be fixed and a second teansbay tube should’ve been built instead of a $3billion (?) bus station.
  - sbuccini 9y ago
    What about those coming from Marin on GGT or those coming from the Oakland hills, where it's easier to get on Hwy 24 than it is to drive through residential traffic to a BART station?
    - pmiller2 9y ago
      Marin blocked BART from coming through in the 60's, so it's their own damn fault.
      - mjg59 9y ago
        This is a grossly oversimplified version of the story. The Golden Gate bridge authority asserted that the additional weight of BART on a lower deck would reduce the clearance underneath the bridge sufficiently that naval vessels wouldn't be able to pass. The study supporting this was paid for by the bridge authority, who had a financial incentive to prevent BART from going ahead - nevertheless, there was a risk that Marin might never have got BART even if the population had voted for it, and would still have been on the hook for payments. This depressed support in Marin sufficiently that it might have dragged the regional vote below the 60% threshold required for the entire system to be built, and the other counties pressured Marin to drop out against their will. If San Mateo hadn't chosen to drop out earlier, there's a decent chance that Marin would have service today.
mmanfrin 9y ago
The absurdity of this thing not being directly connected to BART nor Caltrain is so, pardon my language, unbelievably fucking stupid. This could have been the nexus between local transit, local tain, local bus, and interstate train (HSR). But instead it's a bus station.
- natoliniak 9y ago
  wow. so I imagine Amtrak also will not connect there?
  - sxates 9y ago
    The closest Amtrak connection is on the other side of the bay in Emeryville.
    - nielsbot 9y ago
      I understand Amtrak used to come across the former Bay Bridge, but that was removed for car use... hence the ridiculous thing where you have to get off the train, take an Amtrak bus to Oakland, and then catch another train.
      - robbiet480 9y ago
        I believe you are thinking of the Key System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System) which crossed the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. Amtrak never crossed it.
        nielsbot 9y ago
        Ah.
- CalChris 9y ago
  I think the BART to SFO is a good idea and should have been built in from the start. I'm not convinced that BART, Caltrain, bus, HSR, local rail all have to converge on one spot in San Francisco. CalTrain has 55,000 daily riders. AC Transit 15,000. BART, a lot. Are there any economies of scale of putting all those people in one place? Does this density bring anything useful? CalTrain connects with BART in Millbrae. AC Transit connects with BART in many places. The Capitol Corridor connects with BART in Richmond. Does this need duplication in SF?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bassman9000 9y ago
The TTC is going to be a glorified mall.
johngalt 9y ago
I always viewed bus/rail transit centers as a place outside of downtown where all the bus traffic meets up to catch the train. Fewer stops for your train, and you are only sending the full trains downtown. At the downtown hub there are still a few circulator buses, but not commuter. Seems odd to put a rail-fed bus station in the middle of downtown. Wouldn't that just clog downtown with all the buses?

If you go with optimistic assumptions, and you seldom say "no" to feature requests, your project will go badly. They could have said "no" or "later as money allows" to a rooftop park, or to a beautiful facade, or to an additional review just two years after the previous review. A building paid for by a region ought not be redesigned just because the voters of SF ask that the building accommodate rail unless the same voters also pay for the accommodation.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

pmoriarty 9y ago

"The budget for the huge complex has climbed from $1.6 billion to $2.259 billion." ... "$4 billion is the rough estimate solely for the rail extension from Mission Bay, for a total of more than $6 billion." So how much is SF spending to help the homeless again? It's pretty clear where the city's priorities are.

mjevans 9y ago
Apples and oranges. Civic infrastructure takes decades to build and could theoretically be utilized for a hundred years or more with only (comparatively) minor maintenance. Also the best way to help the homeless would be at a national scale where integration, mental and physical health, and "new deal" programs could address the root cause instead of trying to apply rubbing alcohol and a bandaid to a deep cut to a thigh.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> So how much is SF spending to help the homeless again? More, over the life of the Transbay Transit Center project than on the Transit Center. Why?
spikels 9y ago
SFGov's latest annual budget has $305 million for homeless programs but this doesn't include lots of homeless related spending, mostly medical but also police, fire, cleaning, etc. There are also lots of non-profit, religious and private orgs spending on homeless plus costs borne by local residents and businesses. I bet homelessness costs SF close to $1 billion a year. And the problem is not getting much better. In fact increased spending over past 5 years has been associated with even more homeless and problems. http://www.sfchronicle.com/aboutsfgate/article/Despite-money-and-work-homelessness-in-SF-as-bad-11242946.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/aboutsfgate/article/Despite-money...
- mikeyouse 9y ago
  > In fact increased spending over past 5 years has been associated with even more homeless and problems. I think your causation line is drawn the wrong way there.. Housing prices in San Francisco have dramatically increased in the past 5 years, which leads to more people being at risk of homelessness. Of course money and services will need to increase to accommodate the newly displaced.
  - wahern 9y ago
    Because of rent control, the _vast_ majority of renters are effectively immunized from increases in housing costs. The number of yearly evictions attributable to tear-downs or move-ins is miniscule. When you hear that evictions have "doubled", the absolute numbers are still in the single or double digits, in a city of over 800,000 people. And most of those are otherwise legitimate reasons, like failure to pay rent. The city has something like 20,000+ "homeless", most of whom are housed and only homeless in a legal sense, for purposes of state and federal aid. Development isn't causing the homeless problem... no way, no how.[1] At most it makes it more costly to address the problem, because it increases the cost of government funded housing projects; but it doesn't appreciably contribute to the growth. And don't forget, people are free to move _out_ of the area. I grew up in trailer parks for much of my childhood. For the amount of subsidies people are afforded in California, compared to living on the streets you could live an infinitely better life outside the city in a trailer park--much nicer than the trailers I grew up in rural Florida and Alabama. So a large part of the problem is mobility and a willingness to move. That implicates complex social and psychological issues, but it diminishes the culpability and relevance of housing prices. I support rent control wholeheartedly, but too many supposedly "progressive" people in this town have a penchant for looking a gift horse in the mouth. Nowhere in the country do tenants enjoy such incredible benefits. Newcomers look at the insane rents and just assume it creates homelessness, but things look completely different on the other side of 10 or 20 years. [1] A recent study purported to show that a majority of street homeless were evicted tenants. But they did this by asking tenants whether whether they had previously rented in the city. Somebody who moves here, rents a place for 2 months before being evicted for failure to pay, would count, even though they were for all intents and purposes they were immigrants. And of course it assumes they're telling the whole truth--such as not conflating sleeping on somebody's couch with being a renter. The lack of detail and substance in that survey was very conspicuous, especially the fact that it would be nearly impossible to square with eviction board statistics.
jmcgough 9y ago
We're spending a quarter billion a year on a homeless population of about 7,500, so about $33,000 per person per year. Just because we have a problem doesn't mean that we should ignore all of our other problems. They can both be addressed independently.
Apes 9y ago
I mean, they just spent over $2 billion on what is likely to soon become the world's most expensive homeless shelter, so that's something at least.

mjevans 9y ago

Am I the only one irked by not using the same precision for numbers that should be compared... E.G. "The budget for the huge complex has climbed from $1.6 billion to $2.259 billion." Should be: The budget for the huge complex has climbed from $1.600 billion to $2.259 billion. However in many places the article quotes individual costs in the hundreds of millions. Even though it might be considered less grammatically correct a more reader friendly approach would be to focus on a standard unit of measure (millions of dollars) and present /all/ cost numbers in that scale over the entire article.

rpowers 9y ago
I was thinking the less precise number would force 2.259B to 2.3B.

breckinloggins 9y ago

Does anyone know why this sounds like it was written as a hit piece on Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan? I'm interested in the back story there, because the tone is quite nasty (not that I should expect anything else from our media today).

mathperson 9y ago
because a major infrastructure project is WILDLY overbudget..
CalChris 9y ago
Unlikely a hit piece. This is the Chronicle and Willie Brown writes for the Chronicle. Hard to overstate that. Further, Ayerdi-Kaplan got ousted last year and given a $400,000+ parachute that Brown negotiated for her. http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Ousted-Transbay-Center-exec-exits-with-big-perks-7253934.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Ouste...

jakelarkin 9y ago

unless they complete the Caltrain DTX this is just a $3billion bus station. SF supes keep punting because it doesn't buy them local votes. DTX has been consistently surveyed as the most desired transit infrastructure by commuters and the business community for decades. Politicians of course would rather steal the funds for ineffectual projects that pander to some narrow progressive pet-causes. The $1.6 billion Central Subway should have been funneled into DTX. But of course Rose Pak delivered the votes, so thats why that's getting built and DTX is not.

erentz 9y ago
Even if DTX is built it is still primarily a bus station. By design it was a bus station first, with the afterthought of also catering to trains (and badly at that, with passenger circulation issues and too few platforms). The mere idea of having a transbay bus station is flawed. Passengers should transfer from there busses to BART and cross the bay on BART. And if you say “well BART is crowded and has problems”. Yes it is and those should be fixed and a second teansbay tube should’ve been built instead of a $3billion (?) bus station.
- sbuccini 9y ago
  What about those coming from Marin on GGT or those coming from the Oakland hills, where it's easier to get on Hwy 24 than it is to drive through residential traffic to a BART station?
  - pmiller2 9y ago
    Marin blocked BART from coming through in the 60's, so it's their own damn fault.
    - mjg59 9y ago
      This is a grossly oversimplified version of the story. The Golden Gate bridge authority asserted that the additional weight of BART on a lower deck would reduce the clearance underneath the bridge sufficiently that naval vessels wouldn't be able to pass. The study supporting this was paid for by the bridge authority, who had a financial incentive to prevent BART from going ahead - nevertheless, there was a risk that Marin might never have got BART even if the population had voted for it, and would still have been on the hook for payments. This depressed support in Marin sufficiently that it might have dragged the regional vote below the 60% threshold required for the entire system to be built, and the other counties pressured Marin to drop out against their will. If San Mateo hadn't chosen to drop out earlier, there's a decent chance that Marin would have service today.

mmanfrin 9y ago

The absurdity of this thing not being directly connected to BART nor Caltrain is so, pardon my language, unbelievably fucking stupid. This could have been the nexus between local transit, local tain, local bus, and interstate train (HSR). But instead it's a bus station.

natoliniak 9y ago
wow. so I imagine Amtrak also will not connect there?
- sxates 9y ago
  The closest Amtrak connection is on the other side of the bay in Emeryville.
  - nielsbot 9y ago
    I understand Amtrak used to come across the former Bay Bridge, but that was removed for car use... hence the ridiculous thing where you have to get off the train, take an Amtrak bus to Oakland, and then catch another train.
    - robbiet480 9y ago
      I believe you are thinking of the Key System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System) which crossed the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. Amtrak never crossed it.
      - nielsbot 9y ago
        Ah.
CalChris 9y ago
I think the BART to SFO is a good idea and should have been built in from the start. I'm not convinced that BART, Caltrain, bus, HSR, local rail all have to converge on one spot in San Francisco. CalTrain has 55,000 daily riders. AC Transit 15,000. BART, a lot. Are there any economies of scale of putting all those people in one place? Does this density bring anything useful? CalTrain connects with BART in Millbrae. AC Transit connects with BART in many places. The Capitol Corridor connects with BART in Richmond. Does this need duplication in SF?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bassman9000 9y ago

The TTC is going to be a glorified mall.

johngalt 9y ago

I always viewed bus/rail transit centers as a place outside of downtown where all the bus traffic meets up to catch the train. Fewer stops for your train, and you are only sending the full trains downtown. At the downtown hub there are still a few circulator buses, but not commuter. Seems odd to put a rail-fed bus station in the middle of downtown. Wouldn't that just clog downtown with all the buses?