Rail “expert” Rod Diridon on the need for a new transbay rail crossing:
Rod Diridon, executive director for the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State, has long argued for a second BART tunnel under the bay, one that would have allowed BART to keep operating yesterday. And Diridon says the cost–estimates range from 2 billion to as much as 10 billion dollars–would be worth it considering how fast the Bay Area is growing. “Those amounts of funds are chicken feed,” Diridon says, “when you compare it to what happens to the economy of the Bay Area when those access routes are interdicted for any period of time.”
For the record: Diridon strenuously opposed the Altamont alignment for high-speed rail — which would have provided a new Bay crossing. Oh, at a cost much less than $10 billion too.
The Dumbarton rail crossing and a useful bay rail crossing are two entirely different things. Yes, the Altamont route is better than Pacheco but it won’t do anything to address capacity issues with the transbay tube for the simple reason that nobody that far south rides BART. For the transbay tube related clusterfuck, look at the bay bridge which could have been retrofitted for ~2billion leaving $4b to either build a new transbay tube or to build subways in San Francisco and the East Bay (the parts of the bay area that are dense enough to support transit) that could cross on the existing bridge using some of its excess traffic lanes*.
*The Bay Bridge has a good more capacity than the freeways in San Francisco that it serves, meaning that taking two lanes from the bridge itself can be done without increasing delays to motorists.
The Fremont and Dublin lines use up a considerable number of transbay train slots. With the Altamont alternative, some passenger traffic could have been diverted so as to free up valuable train slots.
And might also add that any new transbay line should be compatible with HSR (not BART).
I can’t really see HSR diverting much traffic from the Dublin line at all. It probably would be faster for some folks in Fremont depending on exactly what their destination in SF is (as well as getting the handful of people commuting from BART to south of the city). I can’t really see eliminating transbay service on either line, based on the small number of people who would use HSR to San Francisco. And reducing transbay service on either line is also out of the question as they are both running at 4 trains per hour, which is just about the minimum frequency you can run and still provide useful service.
As for what kind of trains to run in a new transbay tube that is located near riders, that is a good question. Building a tube to support the enormous loading guage of CAHSR wold be much more expensive than building a new subway tube and if you’ve building a subway you’ve got to consider making it compatable with BART. Really you need to ask what kind of service you want to run and build accordingly.
I think you’re missing a verb in the last paragraph.
Thanks.
Winston,
The Altamont proposal offered an opportunity to overlay regional/commuter service using the HSR infrastructure (call it an upgraded “ACE” if you will). Travel time from Pleasanton, Fremont, etc. to SF would have been very good — so yes it would add considerable transbay capacity taking some pressure off BART.
Also note that the current 15-minute headways is all BART can manage with the Dublin-SF service. What if, 40 years from now, they need 5-minute headways (like on the C-line). What then?
It would take some pressure off BART, but not much. I figure such a service would take about 40 mins to go from Fremont to San Francisco (since it would make intermediate stops), which is marginally faster than BART. Unfortunately you would drop people at the transbay terminal which is in general worse than what you get from BART. My guess is that you would probably divert 1/3 of the riders who board at Fremont and smaller number of those who board at Dublin. I do think this line would get good ridership, but it wouldn’t be current BART riders. What Altamont really does is eliminate the need for BART to San Jose as well as provide a very useful connection between the East Bay and Peninsula. However, none of this eliminates the need for a second transbay subway tube which will be needed based on likely ridership growth farther north, especially if growth happens where ABAG’s plans say it will happen.