Streetsblog San Francisco

Photo: bhautik joshi/Flickr

For what’s intended to be a relatively quick, cost-effective transportation solution, San Francisco’s first Bus Rapid Transit route on Van Ness Avenue has been a long time coming. Planners first conceived the project in 2004, and as late as two years ago, it was scheduled to open in 2012. Since then, construction has been pushed back to 2016.

The agonizing wait has left many frustrated transit advocates asking, “What’s the hold up?”

Tilly Chang, the deputy director for planning at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) leading the planning effort, says answering that question opens “a huge can of worms.”

“We understand the frustration,” she said, citing a slew of factors contributing to the delay of the massive project.

Van Ness BRT is in many ways the first of its kind in the United States, and its scope has grown to include a complete overhaul of the street. The project’s environmental impact report/statement, released last month in compliance with state and federal requirements, also included a burdensome level of analysis.

“Trust me, for those of us going through this process, we would love to have it move as fast as possible,” said Michael Schwartz, the SFCTA’s project manager.

“The fact that there really isn’t an example in the city, and in North America, of full-featured BRT in a dense urban environment like San Francisco is part of what makes the project really exciting, but also means there are significant policy decisions to work out,” he said. “I think there’s a trade-off where there’s a really good process that happens in California and San Francisco to involve stakeholders and do good coordination, but that does take time.”

One major impediment, said Chang, has been the extensive impact analysis required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) using the automobile-centric transportation metric known as Level of Service.

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The best choice for transit riders comes down to two center-running options for Bus Rapid Transit on Van Ness Avenue. Images courtesy of SFCTA

After years of delay, the 2016 target date for the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit project seems more tangible than ever. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority recently released its draft environmental impact report and will select one of several proposed design alternatives in the spring.

The SFCTA is asking for public input on the different options and the draft report, which includes a trove of information for planners and transit advocates to consider when weighing each design.

Last week, the San Francisco Transit Riders Union’s Rapid Transit Working Group met to discuss the alternatives.

“Ultimately, we’re looking at what is going to create the best, 21st-century riding experience for transit riders on Van Ness Avenue,” said SFTRU board member Rob Boden. SFTRU members are considering which design to endorse, but the organization hasn’t taken a stance yet.

The group’s top priorities, said Boden, are improving transit reliability and passenger comfort. The EIR analyzes those factors along with everything from median widths and greenery to bus weaving.

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The T-Third Street Light Rail project's Central Subway extension has nearly tripled from its baseline cost. Photo: Marcin Wichary/Flickr

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) received a low score in an audit of its performance in delivering construction projects. Millions are reportedly wasted annually in delays and management inefficiencies.

“Some of these findings are very disturbing,” said Supervisor David Campos after hearing the report at today’s San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) Board meeting. ”We have heard repeatedly how there are limited resources that the MTA has available, but this audit points out… that a big part of the problem is that we’re not doing enough with the resources we do have.”

As the SFMTA seeks new revenue sources to fill budget gaps for the coming fiscal years, it is considering unpopular fee increases like a hike in Muni fares, which was quickly taken off the table by the SFMTA Board of Directors yesterday.

The SFCTA Board, which approves much of the funding for the SFMTA’s capital projects, requested the audit from CGR Management Consultants.

The numbers reported were sobering. In the third quarter of 2010, 29 projects with a total baseline budget of $800 million had gone over-budget by an estimated $90 million, excluding the Central Subway, and averaged 592 days in delay.

The consultants estimated that 5 to 10 percent, or up to $15,000,000, of the SFMTA’s capital budget could be saved with better project execution. Among the causes for waste, they listed weak oversight of capital projects, inadequate staff reports to the SFMTA Board of Directors, and the board’s own leniency towards granting extra time and money to projects.

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The Masonic Avenue redesign. Image: SFCTA

The Masonic Avenue Streetscape Project took another step forward today after the board of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority approved funding to conduct an environmental impact report (EIR). The board also gave the green light to funds to construct the city’s first on-street two-way protected bike lane on Cargo Way in Hunter’s Point.

The Masonic Avenue redesign will transform the dangerous corridor with traffic calming, greening, and other improvements for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit. The project’s EIR will be completed by the SFMTA and the SF Planning Department by June 2012, according to memos accompanying the resolution passed by the SFCTA [PDF]. Once cleared, the SFMTA would approve the report as an addendum to the San Francisco Bicycle Plan before beginning a 12- to 18-month phase of “detailed design work” on the project.

The $41,000 required for the EIR, as well as the $94,000 for the Cargo Way bikeway construction, come from Prop K sales tax funds.

The SFCTA is still seeking funding for the project’s estimated $18 million construction, but potential sources include the Proposition B bond measure and grants from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Caltrans, the agency memos state.

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A rendering of the JFK Drive bikeway. Image: SFBC

The expected construction of a physically-separated bikeway along a stretch of John F. Kennedy (JFK) Drive in Golden Gate Park will now come no sooner than December, according to a report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA).

“All parties involved in the project recognize that they underestimated the complexity of the planning and design process…and agree that additional planning and design work is needed to move the project forward,” said a resolution [pdf] adopted by the SFCTA Board today which granted further planning funds to the SFMTA, the agency overseeing the project.

It was originally expected to be completed in December 2010 but the SFCTA now projects a full year of delay in the implementation schedule, with several different timeline and cost scenarios laid out. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), which has been working with the various city agencies to prioritize the project, had hoped to see the project done by this spring.

One reason for the delay, according the report, is an expansion of the project’s scope. Initially, it only involved the section of JFK Drive from 8th Avenue to Transverse Drive, but it now includes bike facilities along the more complicated stretch east to Stanyan Street at end of the park.

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Flickr photo: Michaelangelo van Dam

The study analyzing numerous options for congestion pricing in San Francisco touched off such a political furor in San Mateo County, you’d have thought San Francisco was about to moat up and charge a fee for admission. Politicians and planners from Daly City and San Mateo spoke about the plan today as though they were jilted lovers getting a mandate from the beautiful city to their north without being allowed to get a word in edgewise.

“It hasn’t been a conversation with San Mateo County, it has been a monologue with San Mateo County,” said State Assemblymember Jerry Hill, who testified with numerous San Mateo officials at the board meeting of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), which conducted the study. Hill said he and others from San Mateo County were supportive of efforts to reduce congestion and deal with climate impacts, but not if it included charging drivers to cross the county line.

In case San Francisco didn’t move affirmatively to drop the Southern Gateway option from the study, said Hill, he was prepared to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for one county charge other counties “punitive measures” like pricing.

“I am a professional supporter of appropriate congestion pricing,” said Richard Napier, executive director of the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County (C/CAG). But Napier warned that congestion pricing worked in cities like London and Stockholm because the charging areas were dense and transit was good, much like the northeast portion of San Francisco. Of the southern gateway option, Napier said, “I don’t think it would meet the criteria” for significantly reducing traffic.

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Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

You’d think the Tea Party had descended on San Mateo County, what with the piqued rhetoric in the media over San Francisco’s congestion pricing study. I don’t like to invoke Sarah Palin’s jargon, but I keep coming back to her horrible phrase “lamestream media” when I see yet another story that paints San Francisco transportation planners as greedy car-hating vampires and gets the facts on the pricing study so terribly wrong.

Take John Horgan, a columnist for the San Mateo County Times, who calls San Francisco the Boondoggle by the Bay and the Duchy of Dysfunction, while lamenting that the poor “plebians” on the other side of the city’s “moat-like pay gate” should boycott San Francisco businesses and frequent those in San Mateo if the pick-pocket plan ever passes..

Running with a similar trope, Mike Sugarman of CBS 5 calls the proposal a “border war,” while erroneously painting a scenario where he drives across the charging zone line, forgets something back in Daly City and ends up paying $12 for crossing the line four times (in each of the four pricing zones being studied, a daily charge to a driver would be capped at $6). Sugarman then sticks his microphone in the face of a bunch of drivers and asks them if they would pay for something they currently get for free. Hmm, can you kids guess what the answer is going to be?

You have to wade through 2:20 of bad reporting to get to the first two factual items in Sugarman’s piece, when he says San Francisco is only studying congestion pricing and it wouldn’t go into effect before 2015 at the earliest.

Ken Garcia at the San Francisco Examiner takes the crusade on factual reporting even further, misrepresenting almost everything about the congestion pricing study, conflating the various options for congestion zones into one big tax-happy, driver hating city of lunatics. And on a stylistic quibble, I don’t think Garcia could have stuffed any more puns into his day-after Thanksgiving report (see Jon Stewart’s recent bit on media abuse of puns), from trotting turkeys to gravy to squash and communal platters. If the Examiner had editors, they could have trimmed several hundred words worth of fat from that holiday bird and left us merely with specious claims about money grubbing supervisors “taxing” the “privilege” and “pleasure” of driving.

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Image: SFCTA

The Presidio Parkway/Doyle Drive project will move into the second phase of construction early next year, but planners are already touting a unique public-private partnership, or P3 in their shorthand, which they say forges a new model for delivering massive infrastructure projects for less money and greater financial oversight.

Assuming all the necessary approvals are in place by the end of the year, the Presidio Parkway P3 contract will be awarded to a consortium called Golden Link Partners and will rely on significant foreign investment from two European companies.

As SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained to Streetsblog recently, the P3 is the first of its kind in California and resembles P3s that have worked well in Canada and Europe for years.

“We are well on our way to creating, through the Doyle Drive project, essentially a new paradigm for delivering these big, monster projects in the state,” said Moscovich. “It’s a paradigm where you take into account the entire life-cycle of the project, the design, the construction, the operations and the maintenance. We’re ensuring the project will be well-maintained and there will not be a gap in the maintenance commitment to the project.”

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Traffic on Octavia Blvd at Market Street. Image: SFCTA

The Central Freeway sections damaged by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989 have been replaced by such a distinctive Octavia Boulevard, for many San Franciscans the double-decked behemoth that used to dominate the neighborhood has become a distant memory. Most of the traffic the freeway carried, however, has not disappeared and now city planners are tracking its displacement on city streets and devising scenarios for reducing it to make surrounding neighborhoods more hospitable to transit, pedestrians and cyclists.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) this week released baseline traffic information as part of the ongoing Central Freeway and Octavia Circulation Study and proposed solutions for improving the situation locally and regionally [pdf].

The most obvious finding in the study is that traffic levels, while somewhat reduced on Octavia Boulevard itself since the freeway came down, nonetheless continue to choke the study neighborhoods and affect numerous areas further afield.

The Central Freeway Circulation study area is roughly from Noe Street and 18th Street to the southwest, up to Turk Street and Franklin Street to the northeast, with some of the numbered streets in SOMA to the east and as far as Scott Street to the west. The neighborhoods include Hayes Valley, SOMA, The Mission, Duboce Triangle, Civic Center and the Upper Market/Castro, though it also attempts to measure impacts in neighborhoods as far south as Glen Park and the Mission, which have been dealing with commuter traffic that started using detour routes like San Jose Avenue and Guerrero Street to access downtown after the earthquake.

Despite the ubiquity of transit lines serving the Market Street/Octavia and Hayes Valley neighborhoods, most people traveling to and through the area use a car. While slightly below the city average for auto trips (59 percent), 50 percent of the study area’s 340,000 daily trips are by car, 21 percent by transit, and 29 percent by foot or bicycle.

“This study is like a microcosm of the city’s challenges,” said Tilly Chang, SFCTA Deputy Director for Planning. “If you look at mode share, it’s under-performing even the citywide average in terms of auto modes and non-auto modes.”

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