Dumbarton effort enters its public outreach phase

Representatives of each of the partners have been introducing themselves to the public and fielding questions at a series of meetings, including one in Newark last week and another in Redwood City on Wednesday.

“If we can get this done it will transform the region’s transportation network,” San Mateo County Supervisor Warren Slocum said to kick off the Redwood City meeting. “For all the folks leaving San Mateo County and moving to less expensive housing in the East Bay, Modesto and Tracy who still work here — imagine what this missing link would mean for them. Imagine what it would mean for the environment. It has many benefits.”

Slocum noted that San Mateo County sees 100,000 daily car trips from the East Bay and Central Valley and it’s common knowledge that the two existing connections — the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge and Dumbarton car bridge — are regularly congested.

According to the project website, the vision for the Dumbarton corridor is high-capacity public transit between Redwood City’s Caltrain station and Union City’s BART station with facilities for bikes and pedestrians. But nothing has been decided at this point, including station sites or the mode of transit to operate in the corridor. Buses or trains are options and some residents living along the tracks expressed interest in light rail.

Extending the corridor beyond Newark will be challenging, as track east of that city is Union Pacific right-of-way, said Winsome Bowen, Facebook’s head of regional transportation strategy.

“We’ve started a conversation with [Union Pacific],” she said. “That’s going to be the big negotiation challenge here because their criteria for operations, construction and design are pretty stringent. … If we were to get to Union City, we will be connecting with the BART station but that’s highly dependent on the outcome of discussions with the freight railroad.”

Dale Bonner, executive chairman of Plenary Group, said it will cost about $1 billion to open the corridor and funding could come from Regional Measure 3 or Measure W, San Mateo County’s sales tax hike for transportation as well as East Bay governments and other companies beyond Facebook, which has already kicked in $1 million for a study in 2017.

“We’ll aggressively pursue all opportunities for how this will occur,” he said.

Bonner said the next 18 to 24 months will be spent studying the financial and technical feasibility of opening the corridor and Facebook and Plenary will collectively spend as much as $10 million on that phase of work.

“We’re aware that there’s some chance of course that we may do the studies and analysis and for any number of reasons we may conclude that it’s not feasible at this point in time for us to go to the next step and actually deliver the project,” he cautioned. “But we do have sufficient reason at this stage to believe that it’s more likely than not that we will establish there’s a technical solution appropriate for the corridor and that it’s financially feasible.”

Redwood City resident Adrian Brandt said the schedule should be determined first.

“The first and most important thing to do is decide the schedule. If you’re going to run a poor schedule, as was proposed in some of the prior studies with a very paltry commuter-style schedule, you need very little infrastructure,” he said. “If we want to run a really competitive service that’s used for more people here and have a true bidirectional service then we need to have a schedule and that drives the infrastructure. That’s the very first question you have to nail down.”

While feedback has been overwhelmingly positive thus far, officials said, not everyone is on board with the plan.

Most of the people in [North Fair Oaks] are opposed to the Dumbarton rail train,” said Mike Morris, a longtime resident of that neighborhood. “It’s going to go through a very densely populated area with a lot of families, a lot of children and a lot of schools. … I went to the meetings that Facebook had about a year ago and at no time did they mention anything about the accidents, the crime and problems that a train will bring to the North Fair Oaks area.”

Other North Fair Oaks residents were worried that the train would just pass through the neighborhood without a stop and that residents would see no benefit from it.

The Dumbarton rail bridge once transported freight, but has been out of commission since the early 1980s. The transit district purchased the bridge in 1994 for $7 million, said SamTrans CEO Jim Hartnett, and there have been unsuccessful efforts to restore the bridge for passenger service since then.

Another meeting on the plans for Dumbarton was held in Fremont Feb. 29 and a fourth is scheduled in Menlo Park on March 2.

zachary@smdailyjournal.com

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