No Central Subway until 2022 at earliest
Progress on Chinatown route delayed by pandemic ‘ and other complexities’
Muni’s Central Subway, once scheduled to run beneath downtown San Francisco to Chinatown by the end of 2018, won’t start carrying passengers until at least spring of 2022.
The most recent delay was blamed on the coronavirus “and other complexities,” according to a post on the Municipal Transportation Agency’s website. The opening most recently had been scheduled for mid2021.
But the coronavirus pandemic has slowed progress on the subway. Tom Maguire, the agency’s deputy director, said large construction crews who often work shoulder to shoulder had to be quarantined after three separate outbreaks of the coronavirus. Delivery of materials and equipment was delayed, with many suppliers shut down or slowed by coronavirus
restrictions.
Muni officials and politicians broke ground for the 1.7mile subway in 2010 and for the first several years the project remained on schedule and budget. But conflicts with contractor Tutor Perini, troubles with unexpected soil conditions and a problem when a subcontractor installed the wrong type of rail pushed the 2018 opening back to 2019 and then the middle of next year.
With fewer people riding Muni and problems with overhead power cables in the Metro subways, all rail service has been halted until at least early next year. Still, the continued delays on the subway project are bothersome, Maguire acknowledged.
“It is frustrating,” he said. “We made the decision to build the Central Subway long before COVID, and it was the right project, bringing subway service to Chinatown and the most congested part of the city. And it’s still the right project,” he said. “But every day we don’t deliver service is another day we’re not serving our customers.”
Maguire said the agency settled disputes with the contractor through September 2019, and the subway’s cost has increased to $ 1.6 billion, up from $ 1.5 billion originally, and is likely to continue to grow with the coronavirus delays. Despite the repeated slowdowns, construction is about 97% complete, Maguire said, with workers mostly putting on the finishing touches — things like glass elevator doors and fixtures on the walls.
So why will it take until 2022 to catch a subterranean transit ride to Chinatown? Once construction is completed, possibly in March, the contractor will turn over the subway to the transit agency, which will spend about a year testing everything from fire alarms and ventilation systems to the computerized train control systems to make sure it all works properly. The subway’s systems also need to be certified by regulators.
“Heavy construction projects in San Francisco are so complicated and take such a long time,” Maguire said. “That’s no excuse, but it is a factor.”
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents Chinatown, acknowledged the complexity of building beneath the densest part of the city but said he is fed up with the continual delays and the agency’s failure to announce them in a timely manner.
“I get the fact that major projects like this are complicated and take a long time and sometimes come in late,” he said. “But this is an abject embarrassment.”
The delays have not only slowed the arrival of highcapacity transit to Chinatown, one of the nation’s densest neighborhoods, but the protracted construction has also driven customers away from some Chinatown businesses. The city has offered financial assistance to affected businesses.
Peskin said the transit agency should have been better at projecting construction times, more transparent in acknowledging delays and quicker to announce them.
“They’ve run out of excuses,” he said. “It’s not like I can go down there with my hammer and nails and make things go faster, but this is unconscionable.”