Posted May 11, 2022, 4:48 PM
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你的媽媽
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: The Bay
Posts: 9,001
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This to me has always been a no brainer. It's time to get it done.
Quote:
S.F. could one day have a Geary subway. Here’s what it would mean for the west side
Ricardo Cano
May 11, 2022
Rail on Geary has been a dream since before BART’s inception.
BART originally planned to build a line from downtown San Francisco through most of the Richmond and up north to Marin County through a lower deck added to the Golden Gate Bridge, but the idea never materialized. Decades later, San Francisco planners highlighted the Geary corridor in the 1995 Four Corridors Plan that called for surface rail on Geary and expansions on three other major roadways.
Now, the possibility of rail on Geary has again been revived, if only faintly, with a new study by the County Transportation Authority that will examine a potential subway that runs east-west on a portion of Geary and north-south on 19th Avenue.
The study, expected to be finalized by the middle or end of 2023, will be the launching point of what will likely be a decades-long attempt to bring rail to two of the west side’s oft-congested corridors and could coincide with other ambitious Bay Area transit projects under the planning pipeline, such as a second Transbay Tube.
City leaders view a Geary subway as a transformational project that could link riders to major city job centers and attractions, such as UCSF and Golden Gate Park, and connect San Francisco’s west side neighborhoods to the rest of the Bay Area’s rail network while adding more housing density.
A conceptual rendering by the CTA illustrates a potential alignment that would connect the subway from Salesforce Transit Center in Transbay and cover part of Geary Boulevard from Van Ness Avenue to the Inner Richmond before snaking under Golden Gate Park and down the 19th Avenue corridor to BART’s Daly City station.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who requested the study, said building a subway would aid plans to transform Stonestown Galleria’s parking lot into 2,900 residential units and allow San Francisco State to expand its campus and build more student housing. She envisions a subway that would host a Stonestown station where riders could directly access the development through an underground concourse similar to the one at the Powell Street station that connects to Westfield Mall.
“Imagine our conversations around access to Golden Gate Park if we had a subway stop there under the (music) concourse. It would be completely different,” Melgar said at a recent CTA meeting in reference to the car-free JFK Drive debate that city supervisors settled last month. “I am excited about this.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, a proponent of building more rail in San Francisco, said the project would have to come with more housing development on the corridors and surrounding blocks of the subway to justify the investment — likely costing billions of dollars and several years of construction.
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Now is the time to study a Geary subway with BART and Amtrak planning for a second Transbay rail crossing, said Tilly Chang, executive director of the County Transportation Authority.
“One of the reasons why we need to look at the Geary/19th Avenue subway is because if it is a BART Transbay link, the BART link cannot go right into the existing BART corridor in San Francisco because it’s already at capacity,” Chang said. “So it has to go into a new line.”
If realized, the project would give San Francisco’s west side its first north-south rail line and make public transit more appealing, said Supervisor Gordon Mar, who represents the Sunset. The city’s Muni system is oriented around downtown travel, and Richmond and Sunset residents looking to travel to the Peninsula by transit must first take a bus or train eastward to a connecting BART station.
More than 75% of the 345,000 trips originating or ending in the Sunset District are taken by car, according to a recent study, with transit making up only 11% of trips.
“It’s become clear that there’s a need to provide more convenient and affordable transportation options for residents as really the best way to get them to move away from driving their cars, especially driving alone,” Mar said.
Planners are adamant the Geary corridor will need rail transit to keep up with future demand, even as the pandemic depressed transit ridership and changed travel patterns in San Francisco.
Before COVID, Muni’s 38-Geary lines transported more than 55,000 riders each weekday — similar to Caltrain’s total pre-pandemic daily ridership — and were bursting at the seams. They remain among the Muni system’s most popular lines.
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https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...y-17163707.php
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