The 38-Geary is the busiest bus route in the country. It’s also one of the slowest routes in the city. While ideas about creating a future BART line under Geary are plausible, they are no reason to oppose the Geary BRT.
Geary Boulevard is the busiest bus route in the United States. The 38-Geary bus route, on its local and rapid variations, carries 58,000 riders per weekday. This is even higher than any Muni Metro branch (the busiest, the N-Judah, has 41,000). For such a key transportation artery, Geary's service is poor. The local buses crawl at 7 miles per hour, and even the rapids only average 9.
For decades, there have been plans to speed up traffic on Geary using rail. The original BART plan included a branch under inner Geary, turning north to use the Golden Gate Bridge to serve Marin County. In the last decade, the mode of public transportation that Muni chose was bus rapid transit rather than light rail or a subway—BRT, not BART. The project has high cost for its scope: $300 million, which would deliver light rail in most cities. But the benefits are considerable: Muni expects the project to increase average bus speed by 20-24%.
Even though BRT offers the Richmond District better connectivity to the rest of the city, there is local opposition to the plan. Merchants are opposing BRT on the usual grounds: loss of parking space, loss of car travel lanes, and construction impact. This is not new: in 2009 already there was opposition. The same grounds are used today, by San Franciscans for Sensible Transit, which opposes all construction in the Geary corridor and sued to stop the project. District 1 Supervisor Sandra Fewer, an opponent of the project, now wants money for a study of a BART subway under Geary.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a subway under Geary. In fact, in a city with reasonable construction costs, it would be a top priority. However, San Francisco has high construction costs. Plans to bury the M-Oceanview Muni line are estimated to cost about a billion dollars per mile. At that cost, a Geary subway would approach $6 billion. At the more typical European costs, it would cost $2 billion.
While there are many reasons American construction costs are so high, one of these reasons is that NIMBYs force cities to use more expensive methods. The cheapest way to build a subway under a wide, straight street like Geary is called cut-and-cover. This means that workers open up the street, lay tracks underground, and cover it. This creates massive disruption, as half of the width of the street is shut at a time.
Indeed, Vancouver built the Canada Line using cut-and-cover last decade, at a cost of about $160 million per mile for a line that's half underground, and the street disruption was so great the merchants are still suing. Vancouver will not build future subways using this method. The next subway on its list, under Broadway, will use tunnel boring, and is estimated to cost $500 million per mile. In New York, the Second Avenue Subway, which opened at the beginning of this year, involved no cutting except at the end: even the stations were drilled and excavated, to reduce street disruption. The cost of that project, $2.7 billion per mile, is the highest of any subway line ever built.
The same local interests that are fighting better surface transit would also fight any attempt to build an affordable subway.
In the future, a subway under Geary could be a useful transit project. The buses on Geary and parallel streets crawl, but still get a combined 110,000 weekday riders between the Richmond and Downtown. A subway can expect to improve on this, getting perhaps 200,000 riders, even justifying $6 billion. But it would be a long process; there is no reason to use a future subway to fight current BRT plans. It appears that there is a game of NIMBY whack-a-mole going on, in which local opponents use each potential transit mode as an excuse not to build the others.
Alon Levy is a mathematician with a strong interest in urbanism and mass transit, and currently works as a freelance writer. He contributes to the Bay City Beacon as a weekly transit columnist for Pedestrian Observations. You can find more of his writing supporting walkability and good transit at https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com
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Photograph by Nabinut.