Quote:
Originally Posted by bmfarley
Well, I am not 100% certain... more like 90%... but I believe that blue line near the BART crossing is to illustrate a connection. I have never hear of CHSR crossing the Bay except at the Dumbarton BRIDGE.
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First thing is that it is quite likely to be cheaper and faster and safer and higher capacity to bore a new Dumbarton rail link than to waste money on a slow and fraught and compromised bridge. The technology exists, and in fact is moderately close to being applied in exactly the same corridor, courtesy of the
Hetch Hetchy aqueduct.
On the other hand, there's
ultra-foamy talk of another SF-Alameda rail crossing: see the nutty lines-on-a-map under "SF-Oakland Transbay Crossing" at Javascript-infested
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/pu...lternative.asp.
(Despite the URL, this is all coming from the Bay Area Rail Plan people.)
My take is that Steve Heminger and pals at MTC (you know, the ones personally responsible for the $5 billion Bay Bridge budget blowout,
the multi-hundred-million FasTrak(tm) fiasco and the multi-hundred-million TransLink(tm) fiasco) decided we aren't going to have another rail crossing in 1999 as part of their Bay Bridge "design" "process", so now we have to live with it, which means squeezing all we can (which isn't much) out of BART, and putting a LOT more people into Transbay buses.
A new rail crossing is so
extraordinarily expensive (circa $10 billion in 2002) -- not to mention technically infeasible because of Transbay Terminal mis-design -- that it is a complete distraction to even think about it.
But tails always wag the dog, nobody is ever responsible for anything, and nothing ever makes any sense in the Bay Area Transit Wonderworld...