Airport Link San vFrancisco Oakland

Well there is going to be money if tolling is adopted wherever major new building or major renovations are needed. If people really need it they will pay the tolls. Let’s be blunt and assert: money solves most problems. It can buy space to build new highway lanes or buy the means to make them acceptable, like putting them underground. It can buy off a lot of opposition by incorporating into the project some of the things that the more practical opponents want. Give ‘em the bike paths! Give ‘em better looking sound walls. Give ‘em lots of landscaping and give ‘em substitute swamps. If necessary bury the thing: make it a subway. They are showing the way in Paris, Tokyo, Scandinavia, Holland and Australia where multiple underground highways are under way. Of course there still will be some opposition but too often these days American highwaymen won’t even fight for needed projects. Where there is a fight the highwaymen can win, and win in the most unlikely projects — think of the splendid Central Artery and Third Harbor Tunnel projects (largely an undergrounder!) now being built smack in the middle of Boston.

Most places however there is a fatalistic sense that it just can’t be done anymore in America. Take the San Francisco Bay area. It desperately needs an extra Bay crossing, most obviously midway between the San Mateo and Bay bridges. It could be called the Airports Link Crossing since it would link the San Francisco and Oakland airports and improve access to each, but it would do a lot more for area transportation. It would be an extension of I-380 on the San Francisco Peninsula with direct access to the airport independent of overloaded US-101, and on the Oakland side of the Bay after interchanging at the airport would go along the Nimitz I-880 a short distance before hooking into the I 238 link which takes Castro valley traffic from I-580. Yet such an obvious project is never even discussed so far as I can gather. It doesn’t even figure in 25 year “visions.”

In Europe and Asia they are building stuff like this all over the place. The San Francisco Bay Airports Link described above is a 10 mile stretch of mostly shallow bay. In Toyko Bay a Japanese toll agency is in the middle of construction of a combined tunnel and bridge of similar length (9.4 miles) and in similar conditions (see report on Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway.) In the Øresund strait between Copenhagen Denmark and Malmo Sweden a bi-national authority is using prospective tolls to build a 10 mile bridge-tunnel link for road and rail. Simultaneously 65 miles west on the other side of the island of Zeeland on which Copenhagen is situated, the Danes are building 8.3 miles of bridge over the Storebaelt channel to the Jutland peninsula. Within four years trucks and cars will be able to drive between Norway and Sweden in tunnels under, and bridges over, the channels of the Baltic Sea into Denmark and Germany. Scandinavia will be united with Europe by fixed crossings! Reliance on those costly and unreliable Baltic Sea ferries will be at an end. In Hong Kong four huge bridges are being built to provide access to the new airport on Lantau Island. In China a 10 mile bridge is being built across the Pearl River delta at Humen in Guangdong province.

The adventurous highway crossings spirit is not entirely dead in North America. An 8 mile bridge is being built across the Northumberland Strait between New Bruswick and the island province of Prince Edward Island. And we have the Wilson Bridge replacement just a few miles from the White House. But that’s about it.