In light of the SFMTA meetings offered this month in connection with the Central Subway, this seemed as good of a time as any to start the discussion here about this major project. Towards that end, there will be a series of posts on the Central Subway this week, starting today:
- Central Subway: An Introduction
- Central Subway: Alternative Alignments
- Central Subway: Stations
- Central Subway: Visionary Project or Colossal Boondoggle?
- Central Subway: Thinking Outside the (Station) Box
The goal of these posts is to introduce, describe, and analyze the Central Subway and its role as a component of San Francisco’s rapid transit vision. I hope that these posts will serve as a foundation and reference point for future discussion about this project.
Transbay Blog 
Nicely explained, yes, the current “locally preferred” is a disaster in several respects. As pointed out the Market St transfer will be an abomination. Station platforms deliberately too short are just dumb. BTW Chicago is in the midst of extending platforms to upsize from 6 to 8 cars on a route which they thought about closing in the 60’s. Also missing is a connection for the Geary route. The plan hashed out at Rescue Muni several years back had the tunnel ABOVE Muni at Market & 4th making it directly accessible southbound from the fare mezzanine. This alignment allows the tunnels to shift to stacked adjacent Union Square which makes possible turnouts to/from a Geary route–say ballpark service!
Long ago the earliest parts of the New York Subway were deliberately a single flight up/down from the street thus minimizing the time from sidewalk to train.
The low/high plat issue is IMHO set in concrete. The more serious issue is evictling auto interference from surface tracks. It would be really dumb to build a new piece of the system incompatible with what exists (installedbase rules).
Posted by david vartanoff | 18 November 2007, 5:48 pmDavid: yes, I agree the low/high issue is set in stone. I realize, looking back at that post, my wording there was perhaps not clear. Ideally, I’d like to see consistency, and universal low floors seemed like the better option, given the rest of the Metro system. Really, though, this issue should’ve been addressed before we built 18 new high floor stations for the T-Third, not after. The comment in that post about low floors was really just my venting about yet another example of poor planning.
The Geary connection is another good point; it’s an issue I was toying with raising in that “boondoogle” post, but the post was already getting quite long, so I cut it out and replaced the words “hypothetical Geary subway” with “38-Geary.” That said, I doubt this will be the last post on the Central Subway, so there will be ample time to raise these and other issues in the future. Thanks for writing in.
Posted by Eric | 19 November 2007, 12:32 am