The $8.25 Billion San Francisco Train that Couldn’t (or at least Shouldn’t)
The California High-Speed Rail Authority has finally recognized the obvious: there is no path to connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco with trains running at 220mph. With state rail officials now accepting reality, the question is whether northern California transit planners will do so as well by cancelling their plan to extend California High-Speed Rail into the heart of downtown via a new a tunnel from Caltrain Station at 4th and King Streets to the Salesforce Transit Center.
If it cost nothing to dig this tunnel, it might make sense, but nothing in San Francisco is free or even cheap. The Federal Transit Administration’s latest profile of the project (formerly known as DTX but now marketed as the Portal) instead places its cost at $8.25 billion, making it the most expensive transit project ever on a per mile basis.
It would be much more expensive that the $2 billion San Francisco Central Subway which has achieved minimal ridership after closing a portion of Stockton Street for seven years. To construct the Portal, it will be necessary for the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) to dig up large portions of Townsend and 2nd Streets, necessitating street closures with attendant disruptions to business and traffic. TJPA is also planning to acquire numerous parcels along the route possibly through the use of eminent domain and potentially displacing 28 residents.
Do the benefits of digging this tunnel offset the high costs? For anyone commuting from the Peninsula to Salesforce Transit Center, it will save 1.3 miles of walking or a change to Muni Metro. But the number of people in that category declined greatly because of COVID.
One source of riders might have been California High-Speed Rail, but this project is running well behind schedule and way over budget. The bullet train has now become a political football, with the Trump Administration cutting federal funding and Sacramento politicians supporting the project as an act of resistance.
But the federal funding cut, which the State is vainly fighting in court, was likely the final nail in the coffin. In its August 22nd Project Update Report Supplement, California HSRA stopped providing cost and schedule information for the full Phase I scope, which would have involved connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles Union Station and Anaheim. Instead, the Authority presented multiple options, the most expensive of which connects Gilroy (in southern Santa Clara County) with Palmdale (in northern Los Angeles County) for $90 billion. This project would allow riders to get from downtown LA to SF by train, but it would involve a transfer to LA Metro in the South and bullet trains operating at standard speeds (perhaps 79 mph) on Caltrain’s tracks between Gilroy and San Francisco.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s ridership projection is now half of what it was in 2022, partly because the proposed segment will be less useful and partially due to California’s stagnating population.
Despite these adverse developments, most of the news flow about the Portal is relentlessly positive. Big transit projects thrill the car haters while lining the pockets of transit consultants, contractors, and labor unions. Together with a compliant mainstream Bay Area media, the local “transit-industrial complex” fills the web with positive coverage focusing on the need for various insanely expensive projects.
Most recently, Adam Van de Water and Rafael Mandelmann wrote an opinion piece in the San Francisco Examiner. These officials insisted that the short subway extension is necessary because “it will tie together the state’s largest economic regions and reinforce San Francisco’s role as a regional and global center of commerce, culture and connection.” Yet somehow San Francisco thrived in previous decades without this costly tunnel.
Many readers are aware of wasteful spending at Muni and BART, but transit waste is a widespread problem across the Bay Area. Rather than rein in unnecessary spending, politicians want residents of five Bay Area counties to accept a half-cent sales tax which will be on the ballot next November with the passage of SB 63.
Instead of spending even more taxpayer money on transit, now is the time to rethink costly transit projects like The Portal.
Marc Joffe is a Visiting Fellow at California Policy Center and president of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association.