Supes endorse need for subway master plan

San Francisco transportation planners will be busy over the next year coming up with a plan to find neighborhoods in The City that could possibly benefit from a subway system.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved legislation requiring The City to have a comprehensive subway master plan completed in 12 months and updated every four years.

Supervisor Scott Wiener, who sponsored the legislation, said that The City has grown by more than 200,000 today than in 1980 and that the streets are becoming more congested:

“Our streets are more and more congested, which all sorts of impacts including impacts on our public transportation system and we need to move more of our transit systems underground to avoid this congestion entirely.”

Wiener said to the board that before construction of the Central Subway, which opens in 2019, The City had not added any new subway capacity since the opening of BART in 1973 and the Market Street subway opening in 1980.

He said The City needed to keep planning process going and not stop once a project is complete:

“We need to keep the momentum going and not make the mistake that we made in the late 1970s by just allowing everything to grind to a halt once we open that subway line.”

Supervisor Norman Yee gave his support for the legislation and said he is advocating for a project that partially put the M-Ocean View underground, which currently being studied by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

Supervisor London Breed also gave her support and said to make sure that Geary Boulevard was on the list in the subway master plan.

Jerold Chinn

Jerold serves as a reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief for SFBay covering transportation and occasionally City Hall and the Mayor's Office in San Francisco. His work on transportation has been recognized by the San Francisco Press Club. Born and raised in San Francisco, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in journalism. Jerold previously wrote for the San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit, noncommercial news organization. When not reporting, you can find Jerold taking Muni to check out new places to eat in the city.