Could Dumbarton rail link finally be built?
Local leaders are hopeful the idea will take off and ease traffic ‘nightmare’
SAN CARLOS » For roughly two decades, transportation planners and local leaders have advocated for a rail crossing along the Dumbarton Bridge corridor that would connect Caltrain in the South Bay to the Altamont Corridor Express and Capitol Corridor in the East Bay.
And for roughly two decades, the idea has gathered dust.
But a Facebook-funded and SamTrans-led study set to be released Tuesday is again floating the idea of a southern rail crossing, and local leaders are hopeful that this time, the project’s fate will be different.
That’s because over the past decade or so jobs have become increasingly concentrated in the mid-Peninsula with housing increasingly moving further east from the Tri-Valley into places like Tracy, Stockton and Modesto, said Michael Cunningham, a public policy expert for the Bay Area Council.
“So, the result is, we have more and more people coming from further and further away, but we don’t have the transportation infrastructure and services to support that,” he said.
And, traffic along that corridor, says San Mateo County Supervisor Warren Slocum, “is a nightmare.”
SamTrans, the bus service operator in San Mateo County, owns the Dumbarton rail bridge, which runs parallel to and lies just south of Highway 84. Built in 1910, the single-track rail bridge was actually the first to span the San Francisco Bay and was used mostly for freight, with limited passenger service, said Melissa Reggiardo, a principal planner for SamTrans. It fell out of service and was then damaged in a fire in the 1990s, she said.
But interest in rehabbing the bridge persisted, and an environ-