Published Thursday, June 17, 2004, in the Sacramento Bee

Courts, cost could derail S.F.'s transport terminal

By Herbert A. Sample

After years of voluminous studies and discussions, San Francisco's
plans to build a grand new downtown bus and rail terminal appear
headed for years of court proceedings.

And even if a new Transbay Terminal gets off the ground, it will take
piles of money to pay for it.

The Board of Supervisors, working to early Wednesday after several
hours of public testimony, unanimously approved the environmental
review documents required to kick-start the $4 billion project.
But that was after a lawyer for an owner of property adjacent to the
proposed terminal hinted he would go to court to stop it, and a long
line of nearby residents voiced their disapproval.

"This is an environmental document that is enormously inadequate,"
attorney Tim Tosta told the Board of Supervisors. "An accommodation
can be made here. It certainly is going to be better for the city
that that accommodation be made than to spend the next 2-1/2 years
in court."

"Mr. Tosta, we'll see you in court," Supervisor Chris Daly said later.

The idea of replacing San Francisco's 65-year-old Transbay Terminal
at Mission and First streets has floated around for more than three
decades, but only in recent years has it gained traction.

The terminal, which serves local, commuter and interstate bus lines,
is dilapidated and, it was discovered after the 1989 Loma Prieta
earthquake, a potential seismic danger. It also is connected to no
other mode of transportation, save cars.

So in the late-1990s, it was decided that a replacement should be a
destination not only for buses but also for Caltrain, the rail line
that carries commuters from as far as San Jose and that now stops
near SBC Park, 1-1/2 miles away.

The new terminal, to be constructed by 2012 on the site of the
existing facility, also is to link via a pedestrian tunnel with light-
rail and subway lines a block away, and accommodate high-speed rail
and a cross-bay rail line, if they are built. By 2020, 26 million
passengers a year are expected.

"The new terminal is therefore destined to become the largest
transit-integrating center west of New York City," boasts
http://www.transbayproject.org -- the Web site of the Transbay
Joint Powers Authority, which oversees the terminal project.

This "intermodal" concept has caught fire with transit advocates as a
way of increasing ridership by facilitating transfers among different
transit modes. Sacramento, for example, is considering a $160 million
facility at the downtown railyard that would combine bus, light-rail
and Amtrak services.

But bringing Caltrain to a new Transbay Terminal through a tunnel
would cost nearly $1 billion, according to projections that factor
in inflation and wage hikes throughout the construction period. The
terminal itself would require another billion dollars and financing
expenses may total $1.8 billion.

That money is to come from a variety of sources, including the sale
of nearby government-owned land, a passenger ticket tax, sales tax
proceeds, Bay Bridge toll revenues, federal loans and funds from a
statewide high-speed rail bond that is on the November ballot. But
the bond measure may be delayed until 2006.

While building a new terminal is laudable, the huge cost of the
project seems unjustifiable, said John Landis, chairman of the
department of city and regional planning at the University of
California, Berkeley.

"It's not certain that the amount of money that will be spent on the
project will dramatically increase ridership," he said. "A lot more
people have to use rail or buses, and it's not clear that this will
do it."

[BATN suggests that the extraordinarily rare honesty of the Transbay
project sponsors in including financing costs is working against them
in the sound-bite court of press opinion. Consider, for example, that
the BART to San Jose scheme has never mentioned interest costs of
well over a billion dollars, nor has the MTC-promulgated cost of the
BART Millbrae/SFO extension included the cost of extensive borrowings
which continue to be repaid.]

But supporters say that is exactly what will happen. Margaret Okuzumi
of the Bay Rail Alliance <http://www.bayrailalliance.org>, which
represents peninsula-area commuters, said more people will be enticed
onto the train if it traveled into downtown San Francisco.

"We see it as fixing a broken link, a critical gap, in our transit
system," she said.

As of now, though, significant legal hurdles are threatening. For
one, an informal group of residents, engineers, architects and others
that offered a much cheaper alternative is likely to sue, said their
lawyer, Lock Holmes.

"There are some obvious deficiencies in the environmental impact
report," he said. "The most glaring is, by fiat, (the city)
eliminated consideration of the principal alternative."

Then there is Tosta's client, Myers Construction Co., which wants to
build a 51-story office tower on its parcel next door to the terminal
site. But the joint powers authority needs space underneath for the
train tunnel.

The two sides are at loggerheads over how both can accomplish their
goals, and the city has, at least temporarily, halted work on the
Myers site.

"We're hopeful that the sponsors of 80 Natoma will work something
out with us," Maria Ayerdi, executive director of the joint powers
authority, said, referring to the Myers project. Nonetheless, she
added, lawsuits are common for such large public works projects.

In the meantime, transit advocates hope any delay is short.

"There's still people trying to shoot it down," said Norman Rolfe,
transportation chairman of San Francisco Tomorrow, which calls itself
an urban environmental group. "We all have our fingers crossed and
our hopes up."


The Bee's Herbert A. Sample can be reached at (510) 382-1978 or
hsample@...