Broadway grade separation rolling ahead

“Raising rail is expensive and unsightly,” Bolon said at the meeting Wednesday, Aug. 9. “On the road side, the more you lower the road, the more you impact local businesses and access so the key in this design phase is to find that sweet spot where we minimize the impact to the surrounding area and we don’t have this large wall.

“Aesthetically we hope to create something that can be a nice gateway feature that we can all be proud of,” he added.

He also said the project will mean less train horn noise as honking is only necessary with at-grade crossings.

The City Council agreed to lower the road for the project last year and Public Works Director Syed Murtuza said that’s being done to keep the overpass as low as possible. He said the height of the tracks is one of the primary concerns he hears from residents.

Murtuza said the project was deemed necessary as far back as 1963 because of the state of traffic then, but the community rejected it at the time. The California Public Utilities Commission has ranked this particular at-grade crossing second in terms of grade separation priority statewide, and first in Northern California. There are 10,000 at-grade crossings in the state.

The project will also construct a new, elevated Broadway station with a center board platform that will do away with the current holdout rule that only allows one train at the station at a time.

The project is currently in the preliminary stages of the design phase while the environmental clearance work is underway and will continue throughout the year and into the next. The transit agency expects to complete 35 percent of the project’s design by the spring of 2019 and wrap up the environmental work by the summer of that year.

But the project is hardly funded as of now. The 2017 cost estimate is $250 million, and so far just $4.35 million has been secured for design and environmental work: the city of Burlingame has pitched in about a half a million dollars and $3.85 million in Measure A funds has been earmarked for the project.

Vice Mayor Donna Colson said the city is planning to ultimately contribute about $10 million to the project.

Bolon said construction cannot begin until electrification is complete, so that means 2022 at the earliest, but breaking ground that early does not appear to be likely and the residents who attended the meeting predicted a completion date of 2035.

“It would take a miracle to have the money by 2022,” said Dave Pine, president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, who was in attendance. “There is no identified source of funding so this is not in the foreseeable future.”

But Murtuza said officials up and down the state know about the project, as if to say momentum is building.

Bolon also said the San Mateo County Transit Authority, which oversees the revenue produced by a half-cent sales tax measure, has a lockbox for grade separation projects, adding that everyone wants to come through with the last million and not the first million so “it’ll look like nothing and then all of a sudden you’ll see some stuff come together.”

As officials work out a funding strategy, the design work will continue to move forward.

“We’re trying to get the project shovel-ready so when federal and state grants are ready we can compete,” Bolon said.

zachary@smdailyjournal.com

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