Hello! I must be going. I’m glad I came but just the same — I must be going! — Groucho
Two years, one month and 20 days after its grand opening, San Francisco’s Central Subway underwent a less-grand closing. The rail line was shuttered on Wednesday to address the noisy water intrusion issues that render a trip to Chinatown-Rose Pak Station reminiscent of a visit to the famous men’s room at the Madonna Inn.
If everything goes as planned, the closure will last for 17 days and cost just under $6.5 million. God willing, that comes to pass. But if everything went as planned on this project, this subway would’ve opened four years earlier and would’ve cost nearly $400 million less. Voters, in fact, approved the Central Subway in 2003, when the price tag was a svelte $647 million (up from $530 million only a few years prior). That cost estimate later swelled to $1.58 billion, with the final cost now tabbed at $1.95 billion.
The estimated cost kept soaring, while the estimated ridership used to justify this project kept plummeting; if you made a chart, it would resemble the escalators to heaven and hell. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency reports that not quite 9,500 people a day now board a train at one of the new Central Subway stations, and not quite 12,700 people de-board here.
When you prorate those modest ridership numbers against the billions of dollars expended to build this subway line and the tens of millions of dollars in operating costs now required to run it — well, it’s not great. To put things in context, Muni’s pandemic-battered daily ridership is still more than 479,000 a day. The No. 28 bus line, which is slated for potential suspension, boards just under 10,000 riders a day, and it didn’t require the years-long creation of a costly tunnel for it to deliver these moderate numbers.
During the ongoing closure, Central Subway riders are being urged to take the 30-Stockton and 45-Union/Stockton buses. It’s lost on few that these bus lines can get you to many of the same places that subway riders want to go. Both lines existed eons before the subway’s creation, and neither of them has experienced a drop in ridership since the subway’s grand opening.
So, think about that for a moment. Because that’s the real tragedy here: This subway line was a boondoggle, and it’s an additional boondoggle to require significant repairs after barely two years. But wildly overspending and delivering a project years late would fade from memory if it produced practical infrastructure that people use.
It didn’t. The Central Subway is closed down, and the biggest shame is that nobody even notices. And nobody cares.
Nadeem Tahir was the final project director for the Central Subway, and the one who got it built. Was the water intrusion responsible for the subway’s closure a known problem when the politicians cut the ribbon with oversized scissors just over two years ago? Yes.
“They had designed waterproofing systems, but not everything is 100 percent perfect,” he says. “There was water leaking, but it should’ve been fixed during construction. The reason it wasn’t is because we didn’t have the money. Then they said, ‘Oh well, we’ll do it later.’”
Will the 17-day (we hope), $6.5 million (we hope) project solve the problem? It’s hard to say; water is pretty much undefeated when it comes to finding weak points and wearing things down: Given time, that’s how we got the Grand Canyon.
“I worked on the Washington Metro System,” says Tahir. “That system still has water that comes in. Every now and then, they just need to do more fixing. Water is a strange thing, and I don’t know of any tunnel that doesn’t leak. The question is: How much leaking?”
“Hopefully,” he continues, “this won’t happen every couple of years.”
On the whole, Tahir says of the Central Subway, “The thing works. The train runs. The operations are good.” That’s for the best. That’s more than you can say about every pricey new transit project. But there are problems: “There are water leaks in Chinatown. And, No. 1, we don’t have enough riders.”
But that’s because, in its present ($1.95 billion) iteration, the Central Subway is a semi-built and stunted thing. It’s onerous to transfer on and off of the subway, and it doesn’t go nearly far enough north to be worthwhile. The Central Subway feels a bit like trying to assemble Voltron with just three lions.
“The line needs to be extended all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf. This is basically a line that is just partially built,” says Tahir. “I wanted to do that while I was here. Right now, the tunnels are all the way up to Columbus. You can build a station over there right now with minimal expense. The tunnel is there. The line is there. Everything is there. If you put in a station right on the existing line at the end, that would bring in a lot of ridership.”
He’s right. An underground train to Fisherman’s Wharf would be the biggest thing for the fleece-vest and soup-in-a-bread-bowl industries since the inventions of fleece vests and soup in bread bowls. Hungry, inadequately dressed tourists hoping to visit Fisherman’s Wharf are presently directed to the F-Market & Wharves line, which is adorable, until you actually consistently need it and it’s made to serve as practical transit. (That said, its ridership numbers exceed the boardings and de-boardings on the Central Subway.)
Extending the subway to Fisherman’s Wharf or even Washington Square would change everything.
Ay, there’s the rub: In a bit of regrettable value engineering, the platforms within the Central Subway were designed so only a two-car train can fit.
The vast ridership numbers that were used to justify the gaudy costs of this subway cannot be met by two-car trains. In the event that such ridership ever materialized, these trains would be packed well before the trip through the Central Subway was complete.
The city’s stunted and impractical $1.95 billion subway line is getting hardly any ridership. But if we spent millions or even billions more to make the line complete and practical, and heavy ridership materialized, it wouldn’t be able to accommodate it.
It’s like O. Henry, but with transit. But nobody even notices. And nobody cares.
Selective Door Operation is a proven technology used for underground tram systems like London’s Docklands Light Railway. Indeed, it is specifically used to serve underground stations built for two cars that now take three.
The train stops partway beyond the platforms, and the most central doors of cars 1 and 3 open, along with all doors in car 2. Similar systems have been used in other parts of the U.S. for many years.
It’s a solved problem, and there is zero reason why this couldn’t be used to extend trains on the T Third with relatively minor modifications.
This project was a political payback to Rose Pak for letting the Embarcadero Freeway be torn down, not a transit driven project. Imagine if these funds had been used to extend our light rail system out Geary Blvd, practical versus political, with the usual cost overruns tossed in, wonder why people don’t vote?
Ian, the way I heard it was that the central subway was political payback for the “streetcar to nowhere” 3rd Street line. That was a fine idea for serving the new baseball and basketball stadii, and Mission Bay. But running it another 3 or so miles south thru a low population density area out to the city dump was not economically justifiable.
But yes, race probably played a role in both.
@Ron (and @Ian) – Order of events was that the 1989 earthquake hurt businesses all over the city, some Chinatown merchants claimed they were especially hurt because of the Embarcadero Freeway, research disproving this was discussed in a Board of Supes meeting.
At some point in the interim, Art Agnos was running for reëlection and wanted to trade keeping the Freeway for Chinatown support, but was rejected.
Willie Brown got into office and T-Third was prioritized and indeed billed as racial justice for the Bayview (a refurbished campaign message from an earlier stadium/mall ballot measure), but in practice it better serves newly-built live/work units rather than any existing community. Brown also spun the rejected deal that Agnos offered as “our promise to the Chinatown community” when colluding with Rose Pak.
Chinatown businesses were hurt by the Embarcadero Freeway closure. Making it sound like this was some sneaky deal makes your spin on the events truly wild. Your “research” is nothing but the common urbanist lies spreading around.
I’ve used it twice. The escalator rides from the Chinatown entrance to the platform take longer than the train ride to Union Square.
It would be far cheaper to take the trains out and put in moving sidewalks like at SFO.
As an object lesson to drive home the moral hazard of political powerhouses commanding public policy to waste billions to serve their narrow vision and egos, San Francisco should rename Chinatown Station from Rose Pak Station to Bruce Lee Station, a native of Chinatown.
San Francisco should have kept the tunnel boring machines buried at the end of the tunnel under Washington Square, so that when funding became available, the line could be continued to the Wharf and onto Fort Mason and Van Ness.
Many SF Politicos are looking at the BoS (and other boards) as a springboard to the next gig. That’s the underlying reason why we arrive at situations like this. Example: While construction of the Central Subway was ongoing, the BoS voted down a purchase of the Pagoda Theater for a build out of a North Beach station. OMG we don’t have the funds (at the time, estimated around $250m for the whole shebang) . Weeks later they had no apparent problem covering a cost overrun at the Transbay Center construction, $238m if memory serves me right. Why? Because of the bigwigs at the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. And if the supes play nice, they know they’ll land a cushy gig somewhere in the Bay Area once they term out from the BoS.
The whole thing is stupid.. but would be more complete to understand the backstory. Yes, rose pak wanted access to Chinatown, and the city wanted a contention between cal train and Moscone convention center. The f’n line should have been extended to Washington square, then fisherman’s wharf.
But north beach opposed it. As did several supervisors, including David chui.
No one wanted to tell them to pound sand…
Feels like a miss by Joe. I use the T all of the time as do a lot of my coworkers. It being down has a huge impact on my day to day
Cory —
Lots of people liked the New Coke as well, or bought Edsels. I’m glad the subway is working for you and I’m sorry your ride has been inconvenienced but the ridership numbers speak for themselves. The number of riders needed to justify the investment we’ve made (and continue to make) would need to be many times higher. And if we were to expand the subway — and attempt to attract more riders — the subway’s design makes it difficult if not impossible to accommodate them.
Best,
JE
Joe,
Muni could double the capacity of the subway by running 2 car trains every 4-5 minutes which the ATC systems will support. There would be no incremental labor savings that would present if station platforms were long enough for 3+ car trains. But even on Market Street, Muni only runs two car consists, so it is not like even overcrowded lines like the N Judah get that treatment.
They promised a much higher ridership than what we’ve seen in reality. Just because you personally use it doesn’t mean it’s meeting those goals. Also the 1 line comes more frequently than the subway, so I’m not sure what your niche commute is that benefits from going 5 stories underground, but it’s not a common one.
Central Subway: Why not have a stop in front of Caltrain?? 10 minutes from Chinatown to Townsend and 4th, 10 minutes to cross King, 5 minutes to walk back across King again.
@Ben – Indeed, having the N-Judah separated from Caltrain by what is essentially a freeway onramp is bad enough, but the T-Third means doing that twice in addition to crossing 4th Street. The opposite priority from our voter-mandated Transit-First policy.
The 280 stub has got to go, too. All that onramp/offramp traffic is what makes the street crossings so onerous — and dangerous. Tear down 280 as far back as Mariposa at least; better, as far back as the interchange with 101.
You think transit-first means nothing else matters because you are a zealot, not a pragmatist, not a city planner. You are an unelected bicycle coalition groupie. Voters don’t sign off on all your BS sorry liars, and you didn’t push back against the 2.5B subway either. You get what you get after we make cuts, deal with it.
@BS (at least your moniker is accurate) – I’m not even a member of the bicycle coalition. Instead of personal attacks, why not focus on the substantive content? Do you really think having the N-Judah separated from Caltrain by a freeway onramp and the T-Third separated by an offramp AND an onramp is a good way to make a transfer?
BECAUSE THEY ALREADY WASTED 2.5 BILLION DOLLARS ON A LIE.
> But if we spent millions or even billions more to make the line complete and practical, and heavy ridership materialized, it wouldn’t be able to accommodate it.
Can you expand on this a bit? Maybe it was covered in the other article you linked. Wouldn’t twice as many one-car trains handle the same number of passengers as the two-car trains they’re replacing (while lowering the mean time to wait)? Is the concern that twice as many drivers are needed, or is there another operating cost that I’m overlooking?
The main transit economy of rail is that you can string cars together into trains to add capacity without adding labor, the major operations cost.
there’s a maximum throughout (number of trains per hour) the system can handle. once frequency reaches a certain point, you can’t add more trains. for Muni, this number is probably about 20 trains per hour, given that the trains must operate on the unreliable surface segments. this is the deep irony of the Central Subway: if it’s ever successful, inadequate capacity is baked into its literal concrete design.
ironically, Muni learned this lesson the hard way in the late 90s. facing crush loads from the dotcom boom, Muni installed a fancy new signaling system that increased the tph capacity of the market street subway. but simultaneously, Muni cut train lengths from 3 (NJ) or 4 (KLM) to 1 or 2, so the total capacity of the tunnel didn’t actually improve.
I think it would require four car trains which the platform doesn’t seem to accommodate
All those years our House representative was the most powerful member of Congress, and unfortunately she spent all of her bring-home-the-bacon capital on this debacle. Sigh.
Well, water over, under and on top of the bridge.
or water in the new subway tunnel
Very true. Thank you for covering this article. We talk about this in North Beach. The stop on Washington St and Stockton is only half way there. The other questions “does anyone really care?”. The city spent almost $2bn of tax money. Hardly anyone uses it compared to the 30, 45 and 8 buses. Why was not one ever accountable for wasting all that tax payer money? or at least extending it to Washington sq, Fishermans wharf or Marina so people use it for popular places? 🙂
More like 2.5B of BORROWED money. The interest payments alone are insane.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/great-highway-closure-sets-dangerous-sf-politics-precedent/article_846d6bfc-eef7-11ef-8a24-6f58683cd2ae.html
They lie to get these projects started then rely on inertia to drain the budgets to nill. Tumlin mismanaged MUNI for years then took off when the bill came due.
Does Jeff Tumlin get so much criticism because he tried to accomplish too much? I have known him for over 20 years as a vocal and creative advocate for the primacy of transit, bikes, and pedestrians as well as for efficiency in moving cars through a city. Central Subway was under construction long before he was recruited by SFMTA and detail decisions were made under his predecessor–who gets no criticism because he didn’t do much (except shrug whenever our community groups asked him to make good on promises). I believe he left SFMTA to manage the fortunes of the City of Oakland.
Oh please. He tried to blame a 3rd party company for the “wrong rails” in the underground MUNI rail replacement debacle when HE KNEW his agency was the source of the mistake. The cost of replacement was in the millions and he couldn’t accept responsibility for the failure like a proper manager knows how to, he tried to make it “someone else’s problem” – it didn’t fly far.
One example of hundreds of can kicks and lies.
@SD – An off-topic factually-bereft opinion piece by a Trump appointee is one way to gripe about an imaginary “they” and malign Tumlin, I guess.
Non-profit graft ^ on display
Tumlin’s bicycle clowns are on display despite the deficits. I guess we know where all the money went?
The project specification required the dewatering wells along Stockton street to be turned off and the waterproofing system to be tested prior to project completion. Maybe a dig into the Tutor Perini QC program and the owners’ consultant QA oversight is due.
The vast majority of riders still use the 30 Stockton anyway. This would have been a great project but the massive failure started where the tunnel ends at north beach and Washington square. There should have been a station there in the first phase of this project anyway. With the 30 Stockton still running south bound, nobody gets off to use a station that was tbm-bored too deep. I just noticed the other day that the 14 bus has no connection to the Moscone station where they should have included a mission street entrance at another little used station. Most of the riders on the 14 transfer to the number 30 at third. The list of mistakes goes on and on. So much of this goes back to designers. planners and engineers who aren’t transit riders and using it.
**I cut and pasted this from a post I did on YouTube the other day. Awesome to hear that someone knows about the north beach station being important. The whole thing doesn’t work without it. Sadly. With the tbms still in the ground, it would have cost next to nothing to have daylighted the machines at fisherman’s wharf.
Ben, There is a stop at Caltrain, on 4th Street between King & Berry.
Cory, agree. This is a valuable part of the transit system which reduces transit time substantially for a lot of low-income people commuting between stops in the Bayview and SOMA, Union Square and Chinatown. Many of my neighbors frequently use the Central Subway and we notice that it’s currently out of service.
Joe, you’re extremely cavalier in your response to Cory, one of your readers, especially with regard to a transit line you don’t live near enough to use.
The Central Subway is a forward-thinking project. There will be more development coming to parts of the City served by the Central Subway. It was a worthy investment, regardless of current ridership numbers.
One would hope a local news outlet like Mission Local would be a voice in support of public transit options, especially on routes that serve so many low-income riders, and even when those routes don’t directly benefit the editor.
Bettina – certainly, the Central Subway benefits some riders. I don’t think Joe disagrees. (I also think it’s well within his purview to disagree with a commenter, and we all benefit from more debate rather than less)
The problem is this: money spent on the Central Subway is money that’s no longer available for other, more impactful transit projects. By committing to the Central Subway, SFMTA essentially de-prioritized every other potential capital project for years. And while the Central Subway benefits *some* riders, it’s not benefiting enough riders to justify a $2 billion price tag.
Which would you rather: $2 billion for a line that benefits 15,000 San Franciscans? Or (for example) $4 billion for a light metro down Geary that benefits 100,000 San Franciscans?
Because we built the former, the latter is a no-go for decades more. By using up all of our capital budget inefficiently, the Central Subway has *damaged* the cause of good transit in San Francisco.
Or put differently: sure, I’d love it if the city poured $2 billion into community projects that benefited only the 15,000 residents in my corner of the Mission, and no on else. But that would be an irresponsible use of city funds.
Small town politics with a big city budget. A lot of money was made by some people, regardless of whether or when this works.
I actively avoid the central subway since it’s slow to go all that way down especially with the added poor frequencies of every 15 minutes (which are also unreliable because of the on-street portions of the line). You’re better off taking the 30 or other options to get to Chinatown or to walk to Moscone center or maybe get on the N to get to Caltrain since it may come first.
They should’ve made it all underground from 4th and King and had it *not* go on any city streets at all, added platform screen doors and used driverless trains that arrive every 2 minutes (as well as at least extending it to North Beach to encourage more ridership north from market street).
I get that people from UCSF mission Bay, dogpatch and Sunnydale like a one seat ride, but a transfer with almost zero waiting isn’t bad and it would make people in the central area more willing to take it rather than gambling on a long wait while waiting for a “subway” which is just as much an underground streetcar as all the rest of SFs “Metro” as designed in the 1970s and earlier.
They had a chance to do something better with the line, but choose to go with more of the same which isn’t particularly great to begin with.
If you want to spend $2 billion to rejuvenate Fisherman’s Wharf, a subway that nobody will ride, and which involves construction that would kill off thriving businesses in North Beach, is absolutely the last thing you want to do.
The promise to Chinatown merchants was that the economic destruction they endured at the hands of SFMTA would pay off in the end. That never happened.
There’s never been a boondoggle that the Lords of SF didn’t love. Past is prologue, so we can assume Lurie will followup with his own, in the name of cracking down on the homeless progressive mentally ill drug addicts that rule our streets and send such luminaries as Musk and Sacks scurrying off to Austin. Maybe the can get a ride on the Central Subway
What’s the story of the cover pic on this article? (looks like a train that went through the second story wall of some building)
It’s a bummer that it’s broken but I don’t think it was a boondoggle. I rode the 30 a few times and it was packed full of elderly Chinese going to Chinatown all the time. There was plenty of justification at the time but everything is struggling from the shrinking of SoMa/Downtown business. Transit projects are inherently tough and it takes time to shift patterns and behavior. We shouldn’t let grumpy people steer us from ambitious projects like this.
Loved the Voltron comment, hilarious, although accurate.
Campers,
The entire thing is one of the best bomb shelters in the World and could literally withstand all but a direct hit from a one megaton hydrogen bomb.
Just a thought.
I loved riding the thing all around by myself and feeling like I was in an mc escher photo with everything telescoped weirdly cause you don’t have figures to give you balance.
Yeah, take it as a picnic ride with friends to your future nuclear getaway spot.
go Niners !!
h.
After seeing the cost of Central Subway, the cost and incompetence of the Caltrain Electrification project, why would we want to give Caltrain or any of the other transit agencies billions of dollars to extend their current systems. Extending Caltrain to the transit center is a waste of money and may convenience some of the Caltrain riders. Most visitors are going to take BART to the airport and most daily commuters probably don’t get on at Mission or Market. Time to stop waste, fraud and abuse. The designers of these projects are rarely held accountable for their poorly coordinated and inept designs and the public agencies are rarely held accountable for their inept and incompetent project delivery and project management processes. If public agencies want to continue to get funding, whether it be Federal, State, or local, they should have to show that they can competently deliver projects. Very few agencies, such as Caltrain, are. The funding agencies need to be held accountable to assure that funding is being spent wisely and not on costly delays due to incompetently prepared designs or incompetent project management.
> During the ongoing closure, Central Subway riders are being urged to take the 30-Stockton and 45-Union/Stockton buses. It’s lost on few that these bus lines can get you to many of the same places that subway riders want to go.
This statement is so poorly researched. The T spans Bayview to Chinatown. Both the 30 and 45 terminate at 4th and king. They are not replacements. The central subway has plenty of issues but trying to erase neighborhoods is disappointing journalism.
Its such a shame that people continue to put the Central Sbway down. Maybe it was expensive but it has shortened the ride of everyone coming from the Bay View to Downtown. Some people traveling from North Beach to the Bay View say it is 30 minutes shorter than the above-ground ride. The train is full during rush hour. Tourists do use it, maybe not at the level predicted but what about the tourism of the future? And the escalators feel modern and cinematic.
It seems to me that the trains they run on the central line could still carry many more people than the F-line street cars.
I have been meaning to, but never have, ridden this line. (And my interest is/ was purely “recreational “ … I wouldn’t have need to take this line to Chinatown.)
Maybe it’s time to learn a lesson (hey – no one’s using this line!) and cut the losses.
This is short-sighted drivel.
The T line will eventually run through North Beach to Pier 39 and likely down union street to the Presidio.
This connects a large swath of SF that is currently underserved by rail.
Look at a map of where housing is going in over the next 10 years. It’s going in on the south-east waterfront in the Dogpatch and down to hunters point. We’re adding like 10k units down there, and I expect an additional 10k units will be added as the area develops. The T line is the main service along that route.
Project this forward 15 years and you have a lien servicing an additional 20k people, service to some of the hottest spots in S.F. and a much faster connection for people headed downtown from the Marina and surrounding areas..
At least try to do some research before writing op-eds. These kinds of posts are embarrassing.
Daniel – read the article more carefully. Northward extensions are covered in depth. Part of the complaint is that these extensions were not built as part of the original package. Do you have any idea how long we’ll need to wait now for a North Beach station, let alone a Fisherman’s Wharf or (god willing) Marina station?
Regarding future ridership prospects, this is exactly one of the article’s arguments: the platforms are not long enough for 3+ car trains, which will put a ceiling on the usefulness of this line if and when those greater ridership numbers come.
They couldn’t afford the existing one but they did it anyway for politics, and now you want everything and are upset the politics nor the budget support that? Get in the Billion dollar line.
You didn’t fund either package, the 2.5 B waste or the XB dollar extension that may or may not ever be feasible. The Geary subway is not feasible for 10-20 years and the techies and urbanists are furious about the math not working in their fantasy favor, again. Meanwhile Tumlin creeps out as the bills come due for his folly.
@Daniel Adelberg – 15 years? We voted for this 35 years ago, so I’m not particularly sanguine about the “eventually” part.
Nobody paid for it and nobody can pay for it. So not happening.
Watch this space for a similar story about the Great Highway “park” a few years from now. Just another in a long line of wasteful SF projects…
The local news was telling the public that Tumlin’s ideas were the work of a genius, and me owe him a vote of gratitude, but as Shakespeare said “ the truth will out”. N ow we taxpayers are expected to fund SFMTA….hell no
Mission Local once again complaining about things that can’t be changed instead of offering solutions.