By “existing TBT design, produced through a fairly intensive planning process” do you mean “scribbled on the back of a paper napkin by grotesquely incompetent and ignorant and unprofessional sub-cretins with no knowledge of or concern for passenger terminal design, rail operations, passenger circulation, or architecture?”

Because then you might be half-way right.

First, I’d like to correct my quote that appeared in today’s Chronicle story (this always seems to happen when I talk to reporters – the copy editors seem to eliminate words) … I had said that if I had to sell my home today due to a job loss, it would not be worth AS much (because of the remote possibility that it along with my 287 neighbors at BayCrest Towers and another 136 folks on the other side of the Bay Bridge at Watermark may be subject to eminent domain).

I also wanted to mention that the Caltrain extension from 4th and King to 1st and Mission (TBT) means there will be rail at the Transbay Transit Center … and that alone is going to knock out some historic buildings (about 25 businesses and another 26 or so residences, I believe) over on 2nd Street near Howard/Natoma. This year, anything that looks like government waste is going to get kicked in the teeth .. and how …. so, why would CHSRA’s Board continue to float this notion of building a second train station just one block away from the Transbay Transit Center which is already about to start turning dirt, so-to-speak?

Like I said during public comment at the CHSRA board meeting yesterday, I support high-speed rail terminating primarily at the Transbay Transit Center and secondarily at the existing Caltrain station at 4th and King (if they really need that much capacity in 2030 or whatever), but the CHSRA Board is creating hundreds of enemies in Rincon Hill and South Beach in the meanwhile … shouldn’t they be more worried about increasing friends and building goodwill at a time when the State and most local governments will be cutting and eliminating programs – hitting the politically unpopular ones first?

Anyway … I hope the CHSRA Board changes their mind soon … I’d rather spend the year campaigning and lobbying in favor of something instead of putting energy into restoring my home’s value by any means necessary.

To all the people who are foaming about CHSRA studying terminii other than beneath the TBT: CEQA REQUIRES THEM TO STUDY THE FEASIBILITY OF ALL ALTERNATIVES BROUGHT UP. Even if they don’t want to, they are required by law to study it, in case it turns out to be a better option.

Personally, I think that, at least operationally, a Beale station would be preferable. A TBT station would be politically easier. So, the choice will be likely come down to between operations versus political expediency.

The AG’s memo certainly will hurt the efforts to secure the $400M for the train box. It confirms Kopps strategy to study something that will never happen. If the FRA doesn’t approve the $400M, the best case scenario is we will have to spend $100M extra to build the train box later. The worst case is it will be too difficult to come back and excavate a box under an operating $1B bus terminal and shopping center and downtown SF will never get a HSR or Caltrain station, destroying great amounts of ridership for both systems. SF is not going to just blow off all their redevelopment plans and start demo large buildings for this beale alternative. It just won’t happen. Transport Politic has this one dead wrong.

Also, the Beale street alternative is much farther from Market street for the great number of riders than the Transbay Center due to its north-south configuration. Also I question the assumption that the Authority is legally bound to study other alternatives. Two EIRs have been produced cover the site and the project-level EIR is suppose to tier off the previous work, at least for the program-level eir and maybe there is some legal basis for tiering off the Caltrain work in terms of site selection. Since the program level EIR for HSR has been temporarily decertified, that does complicate the argument for tiering, though I would image there is some legal wiggle room for this as well given the fact that SF is not at issue in ruling.

It should never have come to this.

TJPA is quite right that CHSRA’s actions jeopardize their $400M. The ARRA HSIPR funds are explicitly not to be used for commuter rail. If the TBT trainbox is not for California HSR, FRA is not supposed to fund it. It is very likely that TJPA’s darker suspicion, that CHSRA is ostentatiously studying Beale St. in order that TJPA be denied HSIPR funds, has some validity: there’s some degree of Southern California vs. Northern California going on.

But this sort of bureaucratic infighting is likely to backfire. If FRA is anything like every other federal grant making organization I’ve ever been involved with, its reaction is likely to be that California should have resolved its issues itself instead of exporting the conflict to FRA — a pox on both their houses.

Is there any way of redefining TBT to be a revamped 4th and King station?

Here’s a dose of reality. First, this is Chris Daly’s district. If you don’t live in SF you may not be familiar with our BOS. Chris Daly in particular, and the BOS in general, are not going to allow the destruction of that much housing in sf, housing that is nearly impossible to come by to begin with. Its not going to happen. Not now, not next year. Not ever. So you may as well forget it.

Second, the tbt is moving forward on sked. With a train box if they get the arra funds, and without the train box if they don’t get the arra funds.

If they dont get the arra funds and they move ahead, and they will move ahead, without the box, it will be entirely up to CHSRA to figure out how to get the train into SF and where to put it.

They won’t be allowed to put it on beale or main and there options will be to term at 4th and build a station on their own dime and against the will of the voters, or to fund an after the fact, train box under TBT which will be the only place the city of SF will allow them to be. At that point CHSRA will be stuck with the full cost of of building a train box at a much higher post tbt construction price.

Those are the options. You dont believe me. But I know this is the way it is. Youll see. Youll see. I know my city. CHSRA is gonna shoot themselves in the foot if they arent careful.

They’d better watch their step.

You are forgetting that the same players who opposed the TBT tunnel in the early 90′s are still around. BART, in particular, has always proceeded from the postition that it deserves all of Bay Area transit funding. Good luck with this station. I thought that Feinstein had put the fix in months ago. But if no box, then certainly no station.

Prop 1A could in time be seen by the courts as too restrictive. All it would take is a few compliant judges and the CHSRA could do all kinds of tinkering, as long as it was also politically acceptable.

if caltrain had 8 trains departing (christ its like the infamous word problem) sf per hour and hsr had 8 trains departing hsr per hour – what time would I get to chicago?

no for real that would be 16 trains per hour departing tbt. thats one every 3.75 minutes. and that would only happen at peak times and would assume that every caltrain went all the way in.

A single outbound track can take single file, 4 minute headways. from tbt to forth where the trains fan out onto the 4 track row and are shuffled accordingly by computer program and dispatch. youre talking about running trains single file at 3 or 4 minute headways for 6 blocks.

In addition to the demolition of hundreds of homes, the Beale Alternative will also eliminate huge swath of land already programmed for high rise development. This redevelopment plan has been in the works forever and many from outside SF don’t seem to fully understand the 20 years of context that created this redevelopment plan (in association with the rail extension to the Transbay Transit Center). The land cost will be astronomicall because the Authority would have to pay it value based on super high rises. Then with the likely restrictions on how high you can build immediatly above a wide open train station, the Authority will not be able to recover most of its costs.

It is quite amazing how folks are actually taking the bait on this Beale alternative and giving it serious consideration in the face of evidence (and also the political realities that make it impossible anyway). I keep reminding folks that Kopp has repeatedly stated his preference publically for a terminal at 4th and King. What is not obvious about this? Everyone in SF knows that this is scam. SF’s congressional delegation knows it is a ploy. Go talk to their staff. It is so obviously transparent.

Finally, I invite all those skeptics of the TBT design to go meet with TJPA engineers to discuss everyones concerns. It is easy to judge what is happening from our armchairs, but to get a full understanding of design constraints as well as solutions that are likely being developed as we speak by the TJPA, I implore those that continue to claim the TBT design is a disaster to to sit around a table with TJPA engineers and have a discussion (even if you already have met them in the past, things have likely changed). I am will to arrange such a meeting for all those interested.

And wait a minute, I mean even in a worst case scenario. Say they could only bring one train in, one train out, one train in, one train out. all day long. Its like maybe three minutes from 4th to tbt so you can still get trains in and out an acceptable headyway, even if you do them one at a time, and since theres more room than that to spot trainsets,
train one arrives, off boards, move to tail/switchback
train two departs outbound side of platform
train one pulls up to outbound planform
train two clears outbound tunnel
train three enters tunnel
train one, boards pax at outbound platform
train three clears tunnel and arrives at inbound side
train one departs outbound.
train three pulls up to tail/swtichback

and there you go.

Unless you think you are going to run caltrain like an urban metro/subway with 2 minute headways,…
but caltrain is a commuter line. Every 15 is more than enough, but you could do every 6 minutes, even at one at a time.

and thats only at rush hour. a lot of the reverse commute crowd, in fact there is a large reverse commute crowd, but guess who they are, they are the (ugh) hipster types who, have jobs in silicon valley, but live up here just to be, well, hip, (ugh) and guess where they all live….. the mission and noe valley. and guess where you access that population… via 4th and king and the 16th street corridor planned upgrades. So every thrid or fourth train would turn at 4th anyway.

Then you have the events. The biggest events are the games and the parades/fairs and the majority of events do not have people headed for the FI DI, they go to civic center and the hoods… again, that would be a 4th street transfer to central subway.

Putting a separate hsr/caltrain station at beale would make the whole mess even worse. I went down there and walked it and that site is three times the walk to the financial district and montgomery bart, than the exisitng tbt. its a hike. I just did it. it is. I mean why move the station closer to downtown, but still short of downtown. ” oh look we still arent downtown but we can see it better from here”

Another thought. I have noticed a tendency of transit advocates to end up opposing most major transit projects, especially in the Bay Area. I have a theory about this. All the folks expressing concern about the design of TBT for example, are all well-intentioned folks that really care about quality transit, myself included. We study the issues in detail, we pour over maps, and as result we understand all the little problems that arise in a project design, its imperfections, etc. We also understand how government often makes decisions that aren’t ideal because they are trying to save money or deal with the stupid politics of the day, or worse, we see the workings of of our crony system of capitalism at work in a real project. All these things get under our idealistic nerves. So given these facts, I am theorizing that by the time we learn all the unpleasantries and compromises of a project, we have a feeling of being besieged. Then we decide to oppose the project, or claim it is a disaster. However, this is the problem. It is the old problem of not seeing the forest from the trees problem. We tend to let the little stuff cloud our judgement on the overall good of projects that are imperfect. I believe this is the case with the Transbay project (as well as the Central Subway project in SF). Is it perfect or ideal? No. Does it have significant contstrainsts? Yes. Is the best we can do given the imperfect world we live in? Probably. Can we try to make it a little better? Maybe. Let’s put our focus on trying to make an imperfect project as best it can be (even though it will most certainly be imperfect). I believe it will serve people well enough and will be a great asset to the the HSR system, Caltrain, and the State of California.

One thing that hasn’t been discussed is that the plans the TJPA leaked of CHSRA’s beale/main alternative show a 6-platform track station with an future expansion to 12 platform tracks, presumably when a new transbay tunnel is constructed and room is needed for more trains coming in from the east bay.

Given that the CHSRA seems to think that four platform tracks isn’t enough for their operations, and that caltrain feels constrained even with two platform tracks plus tail tracks, I wonder if the CHSRA is actually working on a HSR-only station under beale, and plans on leaving the TTC trainbox entirely for caltrain, as it was originally designed.

That would mean the TJPA would need to find funding from elsewhere to build the DTX and the train box, but it might throw an interesting twist into the argument.

Hi everyone, I’ve been reading this blog for about a year and it has become quite interesting what has been posted. I thought I’d finally make a post.

While there has been some very interesting bantering about the state of the Transbay Terminal and what platforms Caltrain should use, here are my two cents. One, Caltrain should use the middle platform and make use of the tail tracks as proposed in the 2nd addendum in FEIS/FEIR (SCH #95063004), which are also slated to be part of the Embarcadero loop to 4th/Townsend, assuming that is built; although additional crossovers should be added to the tail tracks to increase their usefulness. That might reduce the fighting over Caltrain’s lead track access that presumably preserves Caltrain’s ability to have increased downtown service and maintaining CAHSR’s ability to have trains arrive/depart the station. Also, by having Caltrain on the middle platform, you can have 2 “security theaters” in the mezzanine level which will speed up the checking of High Speed Rail passengers while Caltrain riders will have 1 platform to quickly embark/disembark from in the middle. “Security theaters” can mirror the track assignments as the southern platform could be for short trains or the regional/all-stop trains while the northern platform could be for longer, express or limited stop trains.

Second, if the “train box” is built, it should be built with the intention of adding an additional lower level later on. By only digging a hole now then 30 years later deciding to excavate even more, that would simply be ridiculous and extremely expensive. Now, the tunnel doesn’t have to be built to a lower station level now, but it will be easier in the future if the train box is already excavated. Although, if the lower level and tunnels are built now, wouldn’t that solve all problems (with the exception of the station throat, etc)?

Lastly, and this is a pet peeve, but the TJPA Board of Directors should actually hold to its schedule of meetings instead of constantly canceling them, like the 6 meetings they canceled last year and the meeting they have already canceled for this month. If they are to be considered an “important” Board, then they should hold their meetings or else others won’t take the the TJPA Board seriously which feeds into the current predicament.