It’s election season, and your candidates are hitting the campaign trail—shaking hands, kissing babies, pitching billion dollar transit projects at the local Safeway. You know, the usual.
Local attorney Josh Arce is one candidate among many jockeying to become supervisor of District Nine come November. David Campos, sitting supe for the district that includes the Mission and Bernal Heights, is termed out at the end of the year.
You’ve got to think big if you want to stand out from the pack. So how about a nine-figure transit stop between 24th Street and Glen Park? That’s Arce’s pitch for a 30th and Mission Street BART station, made this morning at a press conference in the parking lot of the Safeway just a few feet from where the would-be station would be.
Assemblyman David Chiu and BART Board Director Nicholas Josefowitz showed up to back Arce. This is not a new idea: BART assessed an "in-fill station" at that same intersection back in 2003, at which point the general pitch had already been percolating for more than five years.
The 8,500-foot stretch between 24th Street and Mission Station and Glen Park Station is the longest in the city. Filling it in would give Bernal Heights, Fairmount, and parts of Noe Valley and the Outer Mission a short hop to the system.
Obviously, nothing ever came of that 2003 notion, but the idea has floated around ever since. SPUR threw their backing behind it in 2013. (They also proposed a Van Ness stop, which given the buildup around that intersection now seems almost inevitable in its own right.)
At the time, the cost was estimated at more than half a billion dollars. With inflation and soaring construction costs since then, it would now be much closer to the full billion. SFist notes that Arce’s morning comments didn’t include any reference to where the money would come from. But it’s more than three months until election day, so maybe that will get filled in soon as well.
- New BART Station Proposed for 30th [SFist]
- Arce press release [Twitter]
- 30th Street Feasibility Study [BART]
- Ambitious BART Expansion Mulled [Curbed SF]
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