300: Tunnel to connect SFO, Oakland Airport, 2001?

300.

Published news story by Lurene Helzer, June 28, 2001, Bay City News, “Tunnel Idea for Service between SFO, Oakland Airport”. The story was about discussions for a high-speed ferry or rail service to link Bay area airports to other transport lines in the region. When I wrote this brief story, Lea+Elliott and URS Associates were presenting their ideas to the media in Oakland’s Jack London Square.

Reviewing this short item in January of 2009, it seemed like a set of brilliant but expensive public transportation ideas being discussed. As of now, many of the ideas even for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) improvements remain in need of public financing and completion. It at least demonstrates how long public transportation improvements take. If public transportation waits years for necessary structural repairs or upgrades, then the major roads and mass-transit systems remain vulnerable during California's earthquakes.

This is a big issue in the Golden State – transportation maintenance -- because earthquakes do not provide helpful hints beforehand. People think there are obvious signs preceding earthquakes, but there are not. You get an idea a massive one is approaching if you haven’t had one in a region for a century or so, but that’s not very helpful for your average politician. He/she can mention it after a quake and gain votes, but before the disaster, the warning is widely ignored.

People even want to find psychic miracles. It gets ridiculous. You might read about birds behaving erratically before earthquakes, for example. This is supposed to serve as notice. It’s comic to take this as useful insight, though. The train-riding man of January 26, 2009 on his way to work at 6 a.m. is not birding. He’s playing with his cellular phone on the platform or reading stock market quotes under the ground or water. In 1996, if you’d had a big quake and that poor man was under San Francisco’s bay, you might not have seen him alive again. California’s various transportation networks remain vulnerable to earthquakes, engineers warn.

On a more positive note, though, projects to improve the strength of BART’s Transbay Tube are today complete. The fantastic, detailed work has made BART safer, stronger for the commuter of 2009.