Reminds me of their $2.4B bus terminal, which opened in 2018, closed a month later when they noticed structural cracks, reopened in 2019, then closed in 2020 for covid19. Had to walk under its unfinished skeleton every day going to work.
And is presently open and pretty cool actually, most notably the way the transbay buses have a direct link to the bridge. And I believe the full price tag included the park on top of it, which remained open (though vendors did not) during COVID. I don't have a strong opinion about whether it was all worth $2.4B, but at least it wasn't quite as much of a disaster as you are portraying.
You are making light of things for your own delight and political leanings which is exactly the kind of thing that leads to all this nastiness. The station you are talking about is multimodal and is going to get Caltrain even though it takes a long time. It has a unique structure that makes it essentially a big floating barge and the problems that came with that have since been fixed. Lots of stuff got closed for COVID that could probably have been kept open with precautions. Your pointed criticism needs to be balanced against alternatives and you provide none.
About that Caltrain connection...the terminal was built before the connecting tunnel was planned. It is still unclear how the terminal will accommodate the required number of trains without the tunnel backing up. The latest workaround being studied is to make it a Through-station -- which would be great except these same city officials allowed a bunch of skyscrapers to be built east of the terminal (i.e. where the through-tracks would go).
As for the bus-station-in-the-sky...talk to any AC Transit planner and they will say (privately) the agency would have much preferred for transbay buses to continue down Market St (i.e. similar to how BART works). But AC Transit is not allowed to compete with SF Muni, so instead a giant bus parking lot was built above some of the most pricey real estate in the world.
So yes, the station is yet another example of Bay Area dysfunction.
There's the obvious alternative of just building a regular terminal instead of an overdone mall-like thing with an artificial park on top. What they did was excessively costly and time-consuming, and during its long construction (effectively 9 years) the area was much less ped and bus friendly. It's like they wanted an iconic transportation structure like GG Bridge, except GG Bridge's form actually serves its function.
Since $2.6B can be too big to think about, Salesforce Tower (tallest building in SF) cost $1.1B to build around the same time and in the same location. It took 5 years to build.
Why did I mention Covid, to illustrate the point that things are more valuable now rather than later, cause you don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to hear that it's going to be useful eventually when they could've KISS'd and made something useful years ago.
This is laughable. So poking fun at a projects cost overruns and failures is actually the reason for the failure in the first place? I guess then Jon Stewart is responsible for the failures of the Bush administration then?
Why did your project take 2x as long and cost 5x as much?
Because somebody on the internet made snarky comments...
No, this is grift, red tape and incompetence. Go look at other cities in the US, they don't have these costs that are anywhere near SF for the same amount of work.
