2nd BART transbay tube: Leaders say it’s a matter of when, not if

Presented with those figures, the transit agency’s Board of Directorsmostly supports the idea of a second rail crossing, which would cost billions of dollars and require BART to make many complex engineering decisions. But a couple of directors had reservations, fearing that the new piece of infrastructure would only further cement a regional housing and jobs imbalance that has made commutes longer and longer.

“What we’re doing is reinforcing this paradigm,” said board Director Joel Keller, who represents suburban east Contra Costa County. “We’re saying, ‘It’s OK for San Francisco to provide more jobs without housing, and it’s OK for the East Bay to build more housing without jobs.’”

He and another Contra Costa director, Debora Allen, wondered whether the agency shouldn’t invest in new “carrots” to draw companies into Concord or other outlying cities, so that fewer people would have to commute to the urban core.

But others saw the growth pattern as inevitable, and said BART has to react.

“我们正在处理你的扩展banism over the past 200 or 300 years — separation of the workplace from the home,” said board Director Robert Raburn, who represents Oakland.

In the future, he added, work and housing will move farther away from the ancient model of a shopkeeper living upstairs from his shop. Commutes are already extraordinary, he said, and the best way for BART to alleviate the problem is to connect the region with transit, which mayspread economic growth to the suburbs and discourage sprawl. A new state law will also empower BART to fill its parking lots with housing.

Raburninvoked the devastating Camp Firein Butte County to underscore that point.

“I don’t want more people living in these places that are prone to fires,” he said.

The goal of the second tube — or rail crossing — isn’t just to increase the number of people rolling across the bay during peak hours. It also has the potential to extend BART service around the clock, said board Director Thomas Blalock, whose district includes Hayward and Fremont.

And if the tunnel includes tracks that use a standard-gauge rail — a term denoting the international norm of 1,435 millimeters between rails — then other systems, such as Caltrain, Amtrak and bullet trains, could also use it to cross between San Francisco and Oakland. BART will evaluate that option as plans inch forward, said Ellen Smith, the agency’s manager for strategic and policy planning.

“This is the biggest thing we’re doing since we built the BART system” in the 1960s, Smith said.

Even so, the project comes with monumental challenges. Besides the complexities of engineering, transit officials will have to decide where to put the end points of the new crossing, which could spawn new neighborhoods on either side of the bay.

“It’s a game-changer for the next hundred years,” said General Manager Grace Crunican, who nonetheless hesitated to champion the second tube as the most significant expansion in BART’s history.

Equally important is the work the agency is doing now to lay 90 miles of track and 135 miles of cable, while replacing an obsolete train control system —effectively giving the system a new liver and a new set of lungsbefore it plans another big leap.

The board will revisit plans for a second transbay tube in June, when it votes on a contractor to study the proposal.