 |
Re: Muni Central Subway needs more money
Author: OldPoleBurner
Date: 11-16-2010 - 23:24
I too have many current well informed "informants" at BART (fellow colleagues actually), and was in fact directly involved back then; but not quite early enough to do much of anything except help clean up the mess. Mostly, they are honorable people. And besides, I have no reason to believe they would mislead me. Maybe if I was paranoid, I would have reason to believe as you do - Frankly, I resent the implication about these people.
As I recall the original blue prints, the upper gallery along Market street was originally intended as a 3rd & 4th BART track, splitting off from the two Transbay Tube tracks in the vault where Embarcadero Station is now (A station there was not in the original plan). From there they were to run along Market St - separating from tracks 1 & 2 near Van Ness - through an enlarged Twin peaks tunnel - turning northward around 19th Ave or Sunset Blvd (can't remember which) - Then to the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, that route crossed Geary St out in the neighborhoods.
When the GG Bridge District kyboshed trains on the bridge as being to heavy, BART at first thought to cut back to the Geary St area. But then for inexplicable reasons scrapped the whole line all the way back to the Embarcadero switching vault. And it wasn't to save money either, as virtually all of that same money, plus a whole lot more, went into rebuilding muni under Twin Peaks, and building new muni tracks on the upper gallery of Market St. Indeed, it was BART's own staff (by then overseeing PBTB) that administered that whole project. BART paid for it!
The grand stupidity of this decision was that, without multiple BART platforms in each direction under Market St, the promise of trains every 90 seconds through the Transbay Tube were FOREVER dashed. Yes! The transbay tube was and still is, designed to easily handle 90sec. headway. And still could, except for the bottleneck at the platforms. A stupid politically driven decision - indeed!
There has been occasional idle talk at BART about connecting a new route through the city to the west end of the tube, but it appears to be quite impractical. In order to construct it, a huge cofferdam under the Ferry Building would be needed, exposing in-service trackage to great risk of deep flooding - an exceedingly dangerous plan indeed. No one should take any of that talk seriously - no one at BART is - it is only a wishful thinking pipe dream - wishing to undo stupidities of the past.
The deliberate choice of a non compatible track gauge probably did not have much engineering value, but it has made virtually NO difference in costs whatsoever. Not when you realize that for darn good marketing reasons, BART was going to use all new car designs and specs anyway; the difference in cost between custom built standard gauge cars, and custom built broad gauge cars, being less than nil. This is evidenced by WMATA's first standard gauge cars, which were nearly identical to BART's first broad gauge cars, but actually costing a bit more than BART's.
Indeed the difference is still nil, much to BART's present horror. In an effort to save money based upon this widely dispersed urban myth, the BART extension to Pittsburg / Antioch is being built as standard gauge. Too bad though, that track construction contracts and car procurements are coming in significantly more expensive than the rest of BART's Eastbay extensions. The only real problem with broad gauge is that BART cannot run on other people's tracks. A really really big deal I'm sure - really! The gauge issue is unimportant hogwash.
As to Automatic train control ("ATO") and other engineering "Challenges" that BART endured, it should be remembered that BART had zero engineering talent on the payroll at first - only three systems engineers - that they promptly fired when they got in the way of the politics. BART's planners relied wholly upon the likes of PBTB, a consortium dominated by Bechtel, along with the Westinghouse Transportation Div. and their construction subsidiaries. None had any real rail experience in what they were doing for BART. But what they decided - went (or else).
Westinghouse did have traction motor experience, but no signaling experience whatever. They were nearly defunct by that time anyway; due to the very poor reliability record of their traction motors. I even heard a Sacramento Northern official refer to them once as "We Sting youss". BART fared no better than any other railroad outfit with Westinghouse stuff; and were in fact double whammied by critically serious inadequacies of the train control design; and crappy traction motors (20-30 on road failures per week).
These outfits weren't even the low bidders on BART. But all this was arranged anyway, by a lot of dirty back room politicking. Those two companies were tight with the the Army Corp of Engineers, which did the original transit studies that eventually brought about BART. So why the H was the Army Corp doing such a study in the first place? - Politics, Politics, Politics, and then even more Politics.
It was not until BART in desperation, hired its own engineering staff; very late in the game and mostly still inexperienced in actual railroad technology. Their learning curve was steep indeed. But significant technological improvements and safety corrections eventually came. True enough, BART had a tough startup, but it is going great guns now, and is now highly respected nationally within the industry. Their main problem now remains the excessive cost of construction (10-20 times private rail costs). But that is a pandemic disease in public transit almost everywhere.
That badly needs fixing; but to fix it will require that we the people get our politician's snoots totally out of it. (It is an industrial enterprise after-all!) But given the sheeple that are seen frequenting voting booths lately in Kaliphonyia, I see very little chance that we will soon be getting politician's snoots out much of anything at all - not even our own private toilet tanks.
OPB
As I recall the original blue prints, the upper gallery along Market street was originally intended as a 3rd & 4th BART track, splitting off from the two Transbay Tube tracks in the vault where Embarcadero Station is now (A station there was not in the original plan). From there they were to run along Market St - separating from tracks 1 & 2 near Van Ness - through an enlarged Twin peaks tunnel - turning northward around 19th Ave or Sunset Blvd (can't remember which) - Then to the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, that route crossed Geary St out in the neighborhoods.
When the GG Bridge District kyboshed trains on the bridge as being to heavy, BART at first thought to cut back to the Geary St area. But then for inexplicable reasons scrapped the whole line all the way back to the Embarcadero switching vault. And it wasn't to save money either, as virtually all of that same money, plus a whole lot more, went into rebuilding muni under Twin Peaks, and building new muni tracks on the upper gallery of Market St. Indeed, it was BART's own staff (by then overseeing PBTB) that administered that whole project. BART paid for it!
The grand stupidity of this decision was that, without multiple BART platforms in each direction under Market St, the promise of trains every 90 seconds through the Transbay Tube were FOREVER dashed. Yes! The transbay tube was and still is, designed to easily handle 90sec. headway. And still could, except for the bottleneck at the platforms. A stupid politically driven decision - indeed!
There has been occasional idle talk at BART about connecting a new route through the city to the west end of the tube, but it appears to be quite impractical. In order to construct it, a huge cofferdam under the Ferry Building would be needed, exposing in-service trackage to great risk of deep flooding - an exceedingly dangerous plan indeed. No one should take any of that talk seriously - no one at BART is - it is only a wishful thinking pipe dream - wishing to undo stupidities of the past.
The deliberate choice of a non compatible track gauge probably did not have much engineering value, but it has made virtually NO difference in costs whatsoever. Not when you realize that for darn good marketing reasons, BART was going to use all new car designs and specs anyway; the difference in cost between custom built standard gauge cars, and custom built broad gauge cars, being less than nil. This is evidenced by WMATA's first standard gauge cars, which were nearly identical to BART's first broad gauge cars, but actually costing a bit more than BART's.
Indeed the difference is still nil, much to BART's present horror. In an effort to save money based upon this widely dispersed urban myth, the BART extension to Pittsburg / Antioch is being built as standard gauge. Too bad though, that track construction contracts and car procurements are coming in significantly more expensive than the rest of BART's Eastbay extensions. The only real problem with broad gauge is that BART cannot run on other people's tracks. A really really big deal I'm sure - really! The gauge issue is unimportant hogwash.
As to Automatic train control ("ATO") and other engineering "Challenges" that BART endured, it should be remembered that BART had zero engineering talent on the payroll at first - only three systems engineers - that they promptly fired when they got in the way of the politics. BART's planners relied wholly upon the likes of PBTB, a consortium dominated by Bechtel, along with the Westinghouse Transportation Div. and their construction subsidiaries. None had any real rail experience in what they were doing for BART. But what they decided - went (or else).
Westinghouse did have traction motor experience, but no signaling experience whatever. They were nearly defunct by that time anyway; due to the very poor reliability record of their traction motors. I even heard a Sacramento Northern official refer to them once as "We Sting youss". BART fared no better than any other railroad outfit with Westinghouse stuff; and were in fact double whammied by critically serious inadequacies of the train control design; and crappy traction motors (20-30 on road failures per week).
These outfits weren't even the low bidders on BART. But all this was arranged anyway, by a lot of dirty back room politicking. Those two companies were tight with the the Army Corp of Engineers, which did the original transit studies that eventually brought about BART. So why the H was the Army Corp doing such a study in the first place? - Politics, Politics, Politics, and then even more Politics.
It was not until BART in desperation, hired its own engineering staff; very late in the game and mostly still inexperienced in actual railroad technology. Their learning curve was steep indeed. But significant technological improvements and safety corrections eventually came. True enough, BART had a tough startup, but it is going great guns now, and is now highly respected nationally within the industry. Their main problem now remains the excessive cost of construction (10-20 times private rail costs). But that is a pandemic disease in public transit almost everywhere.
That badly needs fixing; but to fix it will require that we the people get our politician's snoots totally out of it. (It is an industrial enterprise after-all!) But given the sheeple that are seen frequenting voting booths lately in Kaliphonyia, I see very little chance that we will soon be getting politician's snoots out much of anything at all - not even our own private toilet tanks.
OPB
