Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
San Diego, considering the massive decentralization, weak downtown, and difficulty of walking anywhere, has decent ridership. They could probably spend 5% of what it costs to build this asinine plan and get much higher ridership gains by simply investing in buses.
Also, San Diego has such pleasant year-round weather than it isn't unreasonable to ask people to wait at stops that are nothing more than a sign and maybe a bench. Can't do that year-round in blazing hot/sunny Phoenix, rainy Seattle, cold Chicago, humid Miami, etc.
Any transit planner who believes an RER style system makes sense for San Diego should find another line of work. It's absurd.
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Issues like yours have been brought up many, many times with the leadership pushing this. So for instance, the centerpiece of this whole plan is a "Grand Central Station" at the disused aircraft factory just north of the airport. Take a look at these renderings:
Now, anyone is going to look at these renderings and think this looks amazing. I mean look at that architecture, this is public transportation pornography. But then we get down down to the cost. The minimum estimate for this one station, serving one major destination (the airport) is
$4.7 billion dollars. MTS has a plan to renovate the city's buses, increases frequency on the the major bus lines and the trolley, and build a whole new trolley line through one of the densest corridors in the city, and that only is going to cost ~$2 billion dollars. Just this one station is going to cost double the amount it takes to renovate and expand the entire city's current transit network, and that $4.7 billion dollar figure still doesn't take into account:
-cost of moving the rail lines up and over the 5 freeway
-need to strengthen the proposed tunnel to the airport because it runs right underneath the airport's runway and terminal
-adding connections with downtown (which is over 2 miles away)
-eminent domain issues with the surrounding neighborhoods due to blocked sunlight and need to expand roadways
-need to redo the entire community plan of the surrounding region, which primarily an industrial area with a 30 foot height limit (changing the latter will require a countywide ballot)
-legal costs of potential Brown Act violations because the landowner (the US Navy) is demanding planning move as such a rapid pace that there's hardly any time for community engagement
Meanwhile, SANDAG director Ikhrata has been so obsessed with this one project (which he doesn't even have the funding for yet) that he failed to engage with the SANDAG board, giving road advocates there an opening to push their own agenda. Thus when earlier this month when he came to the board for approval of the next 5 year budget plan, they overruled his proposal and instead accelerated expansions of the 67 and 78 highways. So the only measurable impact of all this transit dreaming has been an increase in planning for auto infrastructure.
