Geary: Time to go straight to BART.
It’s now been TWENTY years since the Four Corridors Plan initially recommended Geary BRT (transbayblog.com/2008/08/20/a-tale-of-geary-street/), FOURTEEN since Rescue Muni proposed it in our newsletter (www.rescuemuni.org/tr_0801.pdf), TWELVE since it was approved by the voters in 2003 Prop K (http://www.sfcta.org/funding-opportunities/proposition-k-home), and a decreasing number of years since every subsequent meeting, workshop, charette, charade, advertisement, grassroots lobbying effort, and even live visualizations to entertain you while you wait for the 38 (http://www.sfcta.org/geary-brt-owl), but there is still NO construction anywhere in sight. The latest estimate from SFCTA is that construction will begin in 2019, but does anyone believe that?
Enough already. We can keep up this farce as long as we like, and surely tax dollars can be worse spent than on the detailed plans, but it’s time to focus on real mass transit on this corridor. BART has already begun to study the corridor (http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/bart-will-study-second-transbay-tube-west-side-extension/). It’s time for SF to put its full support behind it. Of course it will need a massive new funding source, but clearly the argument that BRT saves time on planning has been proven comprehensively false by SF’s leaders, so why not go for the real thing?