High-speed rail was supposed to signal S.F.’s downtown renaissance. Now it feels like a mirage
When Gavin Newsom served as mayor of San Francisco, he imagined the city not only as a Paris of the West, but as the terminus of an epic rail line that stretched from Anaheim to South of Market.
“We’re going to be building ... something that is arguably a generation overdue,” Newsom said during the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for what’s now the Salesforce Transit Center, where trains were supposed to glide into a busy concourse on the subterranean level.
- Related: Trump administration pulls $4 billion in federal funding for California high-speed rail
Today, 15 years later, the center is a large bus station with an art-decked terrazzo and a rooftop park, its basement still an empty concrete vault. With the Trump administration announcing Wednesday that it would yank $4 billion in federal funding from California’s high-speed rail project, it’s unclear when, or whether, that vault will be filled.
While it may seem like a maddening mirage, high-speed rail was once considered an element of San Francisco’s downtown renaissance. It was the linchpin for a new high-rise neighborhood that bloomed around the transit center, its sidewalks lined with cylindrical buildings.
More importantly, the train system would help shape a transportation network aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A well-operated rail, anchored by two urban metros, would allow people to move through California without relying on airplanes and cars.
“Let’s call it a multimodal California,” said Tom Radulovich, senior policy manager at the nonprofit think tank Livable City. He conceptualizes the state as a massive transit ecosystem: Small communities that embrace walking and biking would nest into bigger metropolitan areas with robust rail lines, all threaded together by “longer-haul transit” — namely, passenger trains.
High-speed rail completes that picture. And to a certain extent, the long-gestating project informed plans to build out transit infrastructure in the Bay Area. BART’s past discussions of a second Transbay Tube focused partly on whether to choose a track rail gauge to accommodate bullet trains. Caltrain spent years electrifying the corridor between San Francisco and San Jose, on the assumption that high-speed rail would share it.
Perhaps the most tragic example of a dream deferred is the $2.2 billion Transbay transit center in San Francisco, which opened in 2018 as an end point for business travelers whisked from Southern California. The transit hub concept was captivating: Merchants leased the center’s retail space to sell coffee and empanadas . City planners promised that once the train tracks extended downtown, Caltrain commuters who are currently dropped off in Mission Bay could step right onto Mission Street.
Instead of fulfilling Newsom’s vision, however, the transit center became a very expensive bus station.
Radulovich and other transit advocates are confident that high-speed rail will eventually reach the finish line, overcoming lawsuits, ballooning costs, blown deadlines and Trump’s efforts to kneecap the project.
“As long as the political will exists (in California), we’ll get there,” Radulovich said.
In the end, it may be a patched-together system in which people have to make multiple transfers during a trip.
Older maps of high-speed rail had trains running from Los Angeles to San Jose and linking to Caltrain’s newly electrified commuter rail on the Peninsula. More recently, state leaders have focused on constructing the Central Valley segment between Merced and Bakersfield.
Ultimately, they hope to extend the track south toward Palmdale, where high-speed rail would plug into two other bullet train lines in progress, the High Desert Corridor in Los Angeles, and the privately owned Brightline West route from Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga.
Believers in urban transit still embrace that dream of a fully connected state, with no need to widen freeways or build additional runways at airports.
“Some of the original justifications for high-speed rail that I thought were most compelling were looking at the trade-offs that were required if you had to expand airport capacity, or invest in Highway 99, which runs through cities in the Central Valley,” said Sebastian Petty, a senior transportation policy adviser at the public policy nonprofit SPUR.
To be fair, California’s population growth hasn’t quite kept pace with the estimates of early high-speed rail plans. Still, the economy is booming and traffic already clogs the roads, noted Adina Levin, executive director of the organization Seamless Bay Area, which aims to better integrate the region’s transit lines.
Levin and others view a vast, branching rail network as the most “environmentally sustainable” option to move people through the state.
If California doesn’t grind ahead with high-speed rail, the state might have to contend with worsening traffic in the Central Valley, or more strain on airports, Petty said.
Or, he added, future Californians might just have limited mobility.
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