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Originally Posted by ardecila
There's no available ROW? It looks like there are several, including the one that BART uses, or the one that the Capitol Corridor uses. The BART alignment already has many underpasses and overpasses (because of, well, BART) and excess room for new tracks.
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The one that the Capitol Corridor uses is owned by UP. Unless our federal congressional delegation is ready to help out in some way, that one is a non-starter. UP has stated specifically that they want NOTHING to do with HSR sharing ROW and will not sell that ROW under any circumstance.
I'm not sure where you're looking on the BART ROW, but I don't know of many spots on it where there is room for two
at-grade tracks. Now, if you're talking about elevated structures or tunnels, sure, that could be done, but I'm not sure how that would be cheaper or easier than the Caltrain ROW. The BART ROW has residential neighborhoods sandwiched up against it for most of its route, where the Caltrain ROW has busy commercial streets and industrial areas for most of its route. The East Bay neighborhoods may not be as rich as the ones in Palo Alto and Atherton, but they're not exactly lower income areas for much of the stretch.
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The new transbay tunnel would probably have to extend through downtown Oakland to a point east of the Lake Merritt Channel, which brings the length to about 8.2 miles. The ARC Tunnel in NYC (8.7 miles) is costing $8.7 billion, and a substantial portion of that is the underground station in Manhattan. Plus, it's my understanding that the submerged tunnel process is cheaper than bored-tunnel, which ARC Tunnel is using.
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I'd be very doubtful if a submerged tunnel in a seismic zone would be cheaper than a bored tunnel in a non-seismic zone. Who knows? You may be right, I'm mostly just looking at the fact that the eastern half of the new Bay Bridge is going to end up costing more than $6 billion, and assuming that a tube crossing the whole way would cost much more than that (as well as looking at the cost of other recent tunnels in the Bay Area - tunnels tend to end up being ridiculously over budget, where at-grade and aerial have a better record at coming close to projected cost).
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If you built the line along the BART corridor after the tunnel portal, the costs of grade-separation would be minimal - you'd just have to lay tracks and build wider bridges over existing underpasses. You could get the whole line between SF and SJ done for about $11 billion. I doubt you could tunnel the entire route on the Peninsula so cheaply.
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Well, to be clear, no one is talking about tunneling along the whole peninsula except for a couple crazies. The majority of the peninsula cities aren't even asking for a tunnel, as many of them understand that disruption from tunnel construction would be an absolute nightmare. The primary cities pushing the tunnel-or-nothing position are Atherton, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto - that's less than 7 miles of tunnel, I believe.
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Another advantage for an East Bay alignment is that the Caltrain route goes through quite a few pedestrian-heavy town centers (since it's been a commuter route for ~100 years) while the East Bay alignments are mostly fronted by suburban development. The majority of growth in the Bay Area is expected to happen to the east anyway, so more capacity across the Bay is an inevitable thing.
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Sure. And a new bay crossing will be needed at some point in time, but your proposal would require an entirely new proposition to nullify prop 1A and start from scratch with a new one. It would also require starting a new EIR and CEQA process on the East Bay side, which would probably add at least five to seven years to the process (the EIR for the SF to Merced leg was started in 1999, certified in 2008, de-certified last year, and will likely be re-certified this summer - because recertification only requires fixing what was wrong with the first one). We're like halfway through a 20 year process, and picking a new route would restart the clock (AFTER a new proposition were passed, which could take years - if one could even be passed in the first place).
Also - part of the reason for the Caltrain corridor being chosen is the fact that the improvements made can be leveraged for Caltrain as well (building next to BART wouldn't provide any benefit to BART). There is a significant amount of new development in SF, SJ, Redwood City, San Mateo, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and a few other cities going up or planned around the Caltrian line (we're talking 50,000+ units in the pipeline between those six cities within a half mile of a Caltrain station right now). With the improvements funded primarily by HSR, we'd basically be building the equivalent of a BART line up and down the peninsula (connecting with BART in SF and SJ) - only
better than BART, because limited and express services will be possible. You're correct that more population growth is going to occur in the east, but more transit-oriented growth is likely to occur from SJ to SF - if the Altamont overlay HSR project proceeds as planned, I don't really see any benefit running up the east side of the Bay - there isn't really a good spot for an intermediate station that is in an urbanish area or even an area that has the potential to be.
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I understand the desire to stick it to NIMBYs, but that's no reason to ignore the full range of options.
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It's the timing that's the problem. This has been a work in progress for more than a decade - and for the most part, the public review part of the process has long since passed. Just because they weren't paying attention to the process five years ago when these things were decided doesn't mean that we have to bend over backward to accommodate them now, unless it can be shown that they were deliberately deceived or kept in the dark. The judge tossed out those complaints last summer under the lawsuit because all public review processes were followed - but the press will continue to report on these "issues" as long as people are interested in them. I know that it's easy to assume that there is momentum building for some kind of disastrous fallout simply by reading some of these articles, but that really doesn't match reality.