(The following editorial appeared on the Sacramento Bee website on August 21.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Imagine that 50,000 people (nearly half as many as now live in Roseville) commuted to the Bay Area every day. That won’t be imaginary for long. By 2030, that many people or more will be commuting from the Sacramento region to the counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay on an average weekday.
Even larger numbers of commuters, more than 60,000 a day, will make the trip from San Joaquin Valley cities such as Stockton and Modesto to jobs in the Bay Area. These commuters will join millions more who live in the nine Bay Area counties and also must travel to work on freeways, buses, trains and ferries.
To prevent traffic from coming to a complete standstill and to help keep the region livable, Bay Area planners unveiled a draft report last week. The San Francisco Bay Area Regional Rail Plan is the first such plan produced in the region in the last half century.
It concludes, among other things, “that freeways alone can’t solve the Bay Areas traffic problems,” hardly a novel notion. Given the crush of people and goods that will need to be moved into and around the region, planners say improvement in mass transit and specifically rail is essential.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, BART, will remain the backbone of the region’s mass transit plan, but BART’s outward expansion potential is limited.
In the draft plan, rail systems — including the Sacramento region’s Capitol Corridor and the Altamont Commuter Express, a passenger rail service that runs between the cities of Stockton and San Jose — will play big roles in solving the Bay Area’s transportation problems.
To serve Bay Area traffic demands, rail service planners foresee an urgent, immediate need to expand and improve the Sacramento Capitol Corridor’s passenger and freight rail service. Currently, passenger rail shares the tracks with freight trains, an arrangement that causes long delays for both and is likely to get much worse.
Freight traffic across the San Francisco region is expected to grow even faster than passenger, 350 percent over the next 50 years. The Capitol Corridor will carry a good portion of the increased freight.
With the corridor already approaching capacity, the draft report says two main tracks will have to be added to the existing two tracks to allow freight and passenger service to run essentially parallel operations.
The Capitol Corridor is only one slice of the Bay Area rail plan. The plan includes, among other things, more tracks and passenger service in the North and South Bay, more BART stations and a new BART tube under the San Francisco Bay.
The estimated price tag for the ambitious regional rail plan is $46 billion. If a statewide High Speed Rail Corridor is added, the cost would jump another $17 billion.
What portion of the rail plan is feasible and financing options will be debated in the months ahead. No doubt the draft plan will be modified substantially before it is adopted.
However, one thing is certain: The importance of rail in moving people and goods through the Bay Area and other parts of the state will grow. An investment will have to be made and made soon. No one should imagine otherwise.