Given Dan Richard’s involvement in BART-SFO, perhaps someone in the media should connect-the-dots between CHSRA ineptitude and BART-SFO ineptitude:
MYROW: You used to serve on the board of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System and right around the time they were trying to connect the city with the San Francisco International Airport. Do you see similarities with that experience and the challenge you see now?
RICHARD: I was very involved in the construction of BART to the San Francisco Airport and getting the funds for that. We heard many of the same things like ‘Where are you going to get the money? Why don’t you do it this way or that way?‘ So I have really been through this before in a smaller scale and my view is that if the fundamentals make sense then it’s really important to have civic leaders come together and persevere to get things done.
This is too funny. The “do it this way or that way” line presumably refers to the EIR lawsuit by the Coalition for the One Stop Terminal (COST). The COST lawsuit uncovered many fabrications in the project regarding cost and ridership.
More importantly, COST wanted the line to accommodate future HSR. The Millbrae “Y” track configuration (as pushed by Richard and most of the BART Board) precludes CHSRA trains from ever connecting with the SFO PeopleMover. Heckuva job Dan!
Yep, thanks to the ridiculousness of the Millbrae Wye, the SFO terminals are now a good half hour and three transfers away from the future HSR (and current Caltrain) transfer at Millbrae. I can’t imagine that just having a shuttle bus would be any slower, and that would only take one transfer. As an added bonus, transfers introduce an element of uncertainty: if your Caltrain is 3 minutes late and misses the BART connection, you’re now 15 minutes late, and if that BART train is just a couple minutes late, you miss your BART connection and are another 15 minutes late. If you’re catching a flight to India, that potentially makes you 24 hours late and out $200 for a change of ticket fee.
http://mly.users.sonic.net/caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/Millbrae-with-three-Caltrain-tracks-refused-by-SamTrans.jpg