BART to Ocean Beach: needed, or nonsense?
BART Board of Directors member James Fang is talking about taking the regional transit system on a decidedly 
intra-urban turn with a new line with an underground route through the Richmond District.
“I’ve always said you could get to downtown San Francisco quicker from Richmond city than from the Richmond district,” Fang told the San Francisco Examiner.
Fang’s plan could include stops in the Western Addition, Arguello Boulevard, 25th Avenue, 48th Avenue and a last one at Ocean Beach. The train should run north of Geary Boulevard, since construction would be too disruptive for the businesses on that busy corridor, Fang said. He said he’s working with volunteer architects to come up with a preliminary design.
The desire to run a tunnel to the north of Geary Boulevard — where some neighborhood merchants have wondered about the impact on business of the City’s plan to run buses down the median — leaves few options. The much narrower Clement Street is the only obvious option, and locating stops on 48th Avenue and at the beach would seem to require trains running north of Geary to take sharp, speed-sapping turns, particularly if the route skirts federally managed lands near Lands End.
Planning Association for the Richmond president Ray Holland was supportive of the idea, telling the Examiner, “We’ve been paying for BART all these years and have nothing to show for it.”
But Eric Mar, who represents the Richmond District on the Board of Supervisors, and BART board member Tom Radulovich questioned the idea.
Radulovich pointed out that BART needs billions of dollars in repairs, and noted that a number of other San Francisco transit projects already are in line for limited federal funds.
Mar was even more doubtful:
San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar, whose district includes the Richmond, said Fang’s idea sounded more like a campaign slogan than a real potential project. He said if there was a realistic and feasible possibility of bringing BART to the beach, he’d be behind it, but he is skeptical of that possibility.
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Wasn’t MUNI planning a N Judah style train down Geary already… or at least a “Bus Rapid Transit” system where they would have a single dedicated lane in the middle of Geary separated by a median? At least that was the plan 5 or so years ago.
http://www.sfcta.org/content/view/40/143
I briefly worked at SPUR http://www.spur.org/ and they were always on top of all of these issues…
I always thought a light rail or BRT system would be amazing but seems that BART and MUNI have separate agendas.
BART was originally supposed to run down Geary, and then cross the Golden Gate to Marin, either on a lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge (as originally planned, the bridge was supposed to be double-decked) or in a deeeeeep tunnel. Marin opted to nix that chunk of the project.
The E-line streetcar, which ran on Geary at the time, was ripped out for this BART line that never got built. Since then, the Richmond has been, in a sense, underserved by transit. I’d support finishing this project once and for all, even if the line never leaves San Francisco.