Central Subway fuels hopes for Chinatown
Costly project faces test as limited shuttle service starts
“We have been suffering a lot. Not only the stores, but the people around here.”
Edward Siu, chairman of the Chinatown Merchants United Association of San Francisco
Every weekend, Raymond Zhang and his family visit San Francisco’s Chinatown from their home in Bayview, and every weekend the commute is a pain.
The long drive past a maze of heavily congested streets to a neighborhood with a dearth of parking is stressful, he said. Commuting by transit hasn’t been much better. While bus service improved in recent years, the journey requires transfers, making it inefficient.
But the Central Subway, San Francisco’s $1.95 billion, 1.7-mile extension of Muni’s T-Third Street rail line, will alter that reality, Zhang said.
“This new transit line will forever change our lives as Bayview residents,” Zhang told a crowd of about 200 residents from the lobby of Muni’s Chinatown-Rose Pak Station to thunderous applause in mid-October.
On Saturday, that theory will be put to the test as the first riders flood into San Francisco’s new subway, the city’s first large-scale transit expansion since the initial segment of the T line premiered in 2007. Thousands will probably crowd the platforms at the four new stations — above surface at Fourth and Brannan streets, and underground at Moscone Center/Yerba Buena Gardens, Union Square and Chinatown — when limited weekend shuttle
service begins Saturday.
Once full service starts on Jan. 7, the T-Third Street line will take riders from Bayview-Hunters Point to Dogpatch, Mission Bay and Caltrain’s Fourth and King Station before heading north on Fourth Street and descending into the new Central Subway. By 2030, city transportation leaders envision more than 40,000 people riding San Francisco’s first north-south subway each day.
The opening also means that, after a decade of construction and years of anticipation, and amid San Francisco’s sluggish downtown pandemic recovery, transit riders and city residents will finally get an answer to a long-burning question: Will the Central Subway be worth the decades of pain that came with building it?
It’s a question that seems to come with preordained answers.
Many following the Central Subway saga have viewed the project as an enormous, poorly thought-out boondoggle and unnecessary political giveaway to Chinatown interests as delays and cost overruns piled up and design pitfalls came into sharp relief. Several experts have warned that the project, planned long before the pandemic altered San Francisco’s transit travel patterns, could pile on operating costs for a struggling Muni system.
But dreams of bringing speedy rail transit to one of the country’s densest and most transit-dependent neighborhoods west of the Hudson River go back to at least the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Chinatown residents, many of them older, have consistently been some of San Francisco’s most loyal transit riders but have long endured crowded and slow bus service. City planners warned that those buses — often snarled by the traffic congestion plaguing the area — are maxed out in capacity and unable to meet burgeoning transit demand projected before COVID.
If it works out as city officials planned, the Central Subway will connect one of San Francisco’s most famous neighborhoods with its booming Asian American community in Bayview and Visitacion Valley while creating a vital rail connection to San Francisco’s northeast neighborhoods.
If it doesn’t, the new subway could strain Muni operations and dim voters’ hunger for such ambitious transit projects while further sinking their confidence in the city’s ability to deliver them.
“The benefits for an investment like this are not just about ridership and infrastructure,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the Municipal Transportation Agency. “It’s about the impact on people’s lives, particularly people who have the fewest mobility choices.”
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The “envisioning” of a Chinatown subway goes back to at least February 1984, when political power broker Rose Pak and city transportation staffers discussed a Third Street lightrail project that would one day extend to Chinatown.
But some of the city’s darkest days — in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — injected urgency into the plan.
The 6.9 magnitude temblor badly damaged the Embarcadero Freeway, which motorists once used to travel to North Beach and Chinatown. The freeway was demolished in 1991 despite opposition from Pak and other Chinatown leaders who feared losing the road would make it more difficult for people to reach the neighborhood, sinking its economy.
The first plans that emerged pictured a subway running up Third Street into Kearny Street, where it would serve both Chinatown and the Financial District.
When it opens Saturday, the Central Subway’s trains will take a different route, zipping deep underneath South of Market to Chinatown in about four minutes, according to projections, shaving transit commutes by 15 minutes. Muni’s 30 and 45 buses are expected to become far less crowded. Transit congestion at the Fourth and King intersection, one of the Muni system’s pain points, will see ease, Tumlin said.
Pak died at age 68 in 2016, six years before her dream would be realized.
Project leaders envision a subway running trains every 3.75 minutes with an average weekday ridership of 43,500 by 2030 — well above the 2019 high of any of the six Muni Metro lines.
Still, engineers, planners and some elected officials who have been familiar with the undertaking since its early days are quick to point out its major flaws.
The subway project, for instance, reached full completion more than 20% over budget and almost 3 times its initial cost estimate of $645 million at the start of the century. Originally projected to begin service in December 2018, the Central Subway will fully open four years later.
And it was built to handle only two-car trains, instead of three, hamstringing its ability to handle heavy ridership demand.
Critics also point out that the T line will no longer connect to the Market Street subway. Instead, riders will have to take a very steep escalator and walk for several minutes — roughly the length of three football fields — to transfer from the subway’s Union Square station and to the existing Muni and BART Powell Stations in the Market Street subway.
Years before shovels broke ground, an independent study commissioned by the SFMTA warned that the Central Subway would bring the agency “higher operating costs” while falling short of efficiently improving transit service.
“This does not increase our operating costs,” Tumlin told The Chronicle. “We’re not worried about this project causing any negative impact. If anything, we believe it will cause a significant positive impact on our (pandemic) recovery.”
Another critical report, done by the city’s civil grand jury in 2010, cast doubt on the agency’s ability to deliver frequent, reliable service because the subway would “add to an existing operating deficit and could stretch the existing maintenance environment to the breaking point.”
Tom Radulovich, a former longtime member of the BART Board of Directors who became one of the Central Subway’s earliest critics, said he wished the subway had been built with more capacity to carry large numbers of passengers. But the system could make up for its capacity by running trains more often, he said.
While the T line is primed to
see an immediate boost in ridership, capacity isn’t likely to be a big problem — at first. Trains will be running every 12 minutes when the Central Subway opens for weekend shuttle service Nov. 19, with “more frequent service” starting in January, Tumlin said.
Though Muni has recovered 60% of its pre-pandemic ridership, downtown transit lines are still seeing stunted patronage. Nearly three years since the start of the pandemic, transit planners are still grappling with what long-term transit demand looks like as the city and region embrace telework.
“The good news is that the Central Subway corridor is already a 24-hour city, and if folks feel like it’s reliable, if it’s fast, if it’s convenient, if the connections up to the surface and surface transit are well thought out, then it could be a real boon,” Radulovich said. “We’ll see.”
While demand is unlikely to immediately exceed the Central Subway’s capacity, a potential expansion to Fisherman’s Wharf that city planners have always envisioned for the project could see more traffic than the subway could handle.
Though it will create an “important new transit link” for San Francisco, it was “very shortsighted” to make the Central Subway accommodate only twocar trains, said Jon Bate, an activist with Streets for People.
More frequent trains can help the system handle a possible future extension to North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, but the additional ridership growth that would come with extending the subway west into the Marina could “overload the system,” Bate said.
The subway should take people farther north for it to reap its peak benefits, said Peter Straus, a former Muni service planner at SFMTA. Mayor London Breed recently championed the idea to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg while touring the subway. The federal government spent more than $1 billion funding the project.
Tunnels on Stockton Street extend to Washington Square Park, near where city transit planners unsuccessfully lobbied the feds to terminate the first phase of the Central Subway.
Any proposed Central Subway extension would require an environmental review to proceed.
“I don’t think anyone in their right mind would build a project like this to permanently end in Chinatown,” Straus said.
Gwyneth Borden, chair of the SFMTA Board of Directors, said she “absolutely” wants to see the Central Subway reach farther north but that project leaders made the right call at the time to keep the subway project alive.
“Had there been work to try to create greater consensus to go further, we might be 10 more years away from the Central Subway being realized,” Borden said.
The new subway will shorten travel times and attract more riders, Borden said, to the point where the T line “is going to be our most popular line” by the end of next year.
On a recent windy October afternoon, hundreds of neighborhood residents toured Rose Pak Chinatown Station as construction workers in hard hats installed light fixtures on escalators.
They snapped pictures of the modern art that adorns the station. They made their way to the station platform — 12 stories beneath the surface — down the three sets of escalators that will be critical in making the subway accessible. They gleefully smiled as they entered the Muni train parked at the platform.
The feeling in the air that afternoon was evident: After decades of waiting, the Central Subway was finally coming to Chinatown.
Construction delays made the wait more agonizing.
Edward Siu, chairman of the Chinatown Merchants United Association of San Francisco, said disruptions caused by construction of the subway hurt local businesses and deterred some customers from visiting the neighborhood. Much of that foot traffic never came back, especially after the pandemic began, but the arrival of the Central Subway fuels hope for Chinatown’s re-emergence.
“We have been suffering a lot,” Siu said. “Not only the stores, but the people around here.”
Malcolm Yeung, the executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, described the Central Subway as “a true transit equity project” that will expand travel options for a community that for so long has lived with so few of them.
Like several others, his involvement in Central Subway advocacy stretches more than a dozen years. He has a photo of his son, now a teenager, wearing a subway hard hat at age 4.
“The subway has been a part of my life for the last 13 years,” Yeung said. “For those of us who have witnessed this thing for the time period I have ... it’s hard not to be excited about this.”