By Thomas K. Pendergast

Talk of Muni expanding its underground light rail system to the west side of the City got some traction from San Francisco County Transit Authority (SFCTA) officials during two Zoom meetings last month. 

The SFCTA is exploring the extension of Muni’s subway system to run beneath Geary Boulevard in the Richmond District and then south under 19th Avenue through the Sunset District.

“Our current study phase aims to lay out the strategic framework for the project in terms of broad benefits, costs and planning issues, and to identify the road map for advancing the project over time,” said SFCTA’s Rail Program Manager Jesse Koehler, referring to the Geary/19th Avenue Subway Regional Connection Study.

“We are in the very early stages of discussion and analysis for this project, and the community’s input and engagement are critical to shape this work.”

The study was first requested by District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar.

“The west side still has a long way to go in terms of developing our infrastructure for so many things, including housing and transit to serve future generations and to help take us along on this climate crisis,” Melgar said. “A regionally connected rail subway under Geary Boulevard and 19th Avenue has the promise and the potential to transform how this future development all over the west side will shape our area. It will connect our city and the west side to the rest of the Bay Area and beyond. 

“It will attract new riders,” she said. “It will connect new residents to the rest of the world. And it will provide us an opportunity to design this into the future, to fund it, to think and dream of the future for our community, to engage the community and to make sure that it reflects our needs and our priorities and that it will connect us to the rest of the (SF Bay) areas.”

Project Manager Andrew Heidel is the principal transportation planner for SFCTA and the project manager.

“Aligning a Geary subway with a new Transbay Rail Crossing in the east and connecting it with a 19th Avenue connection to San Mateo County in the south allows the project to act as a broader part of the regional East Bay to Peninsula connection, while also serving parts of San Francisco that today are not well connected to the regional transit network,” Heidel said.

He noted that the Geary Boulevard corridor is one of the busiest in San Francisco, and 38-Geary buses now serve an average of about 40,000 people a day, while the 28-19th Avenue buses average another 12,000 each day. 

The SFCTA projects that, after 2050, a regionally connected subway would have ridership of about 300,000 passengers per day, with up to a third of those riders traveling to or from places outside of San Francisco.  

Heidel said 300,000 is also about the equivalent number of BART riders per day that were riding through the Transbay tube before the pandemic.

“We recognize that more housing is coming to western San Francisco,” he said. “The recently adopted Housing Element Plan by the San Francisco Planning Department has called for nearly half of San Francisco’s over 80,000 new housing units to be built in areas that could be served by a potential Geary/19th Avenue subway. That would make the area one of the fastest growing population centers in Northern California.”

He suggested that street buses alone would not be able to handle that many new residents. 

At this point, the estimated cost of the project is somewhere between $15 billion and $25 billion. 

“Today, southwest San Francisco has some of the highest rates of driving in the City and 19th Avenue is one of the City’s most perpetually congested corridors,” he said. “We know the people’s choice to drive is also often because of the fact that many trips are to and from northern San Mateo County – trips that aren’t well served by transit today, so people choose to drive.”

The eastern end of the new subway would probably connect somewhere around Montgomery Street or the Salesforce Transit Center. 

But why turn south down 19th Avenue instead of extending it to the Outer Richmond? 

Previous Geary subway studies had proposals to build yards, storage and cleaning facilities out toward the end of Geary Boulevard. 

“There’s really not a great place to put that all the way out at the western end of Geary Boulevard or truly anywhere along Geary or 19th Avenue,” Heidel explained. “That underscores the importance of being able to tie back in to the regional rail system at both ends, so that we can leverage, potentially, some places elsewhere along the regional transit corridors that are existing, such as the yard at Colma, to help us meet the needs of the system.”

They are exploring how a direct connection might be made to BART at Daly City to tie into the regional rail system. And on the other end they might possibly connect at Salesforce Tower Transit Center or an adjacent facility. 

It would not replace the Geary BRT because both will be needed to meet future demand.

Although research shows that light rail systems have a positive long-term effect on economic development, the impact on businesses along the route during construction is more uncertain. 

“As we zoom in to the Geary/19th Avenue corridor specifically, a lot will come down to the design of the project, the land-use planning decisions that are made and other supportive policies, both in construction and operation, that ensure we leverage the maximum benefits from the project and manage some of the constraints and challenges,” Koehler said. 

But why not go further out under Geary but then turn south and run the rest of the route under Sunset Boulevard instead?

Previous studies showed that ridership on the 38-Geary buses started to drop off once they went further west than Park Presidio Boulevard in the Richmond, according to Heidel. 

As for 19th Avenue versus Sunset Boulevard, if they use 19th Avenue instead of Sunset, fewer people who live between the two in the Sunset District are likely to “backtrack” to make it to the subway, and because of the sandy soil, construction of underground tunnels gets more difficult the further west out into the Sunset as they go out toward the beach and the Great Highway.