The ‘Grand Central of the West’ or a Glorified Bus Terminal?

We will probably always call it Silicon Valley. But the steady move of technology companies into downtown San Francisco is shifting the center of gravity of what is arguably the United States’ most innovative industry from the rambling, suburban streets of the Valley to the tightly concentrated and increasingly vertical neighborhood behind San Francisco’s Embarcadero.

Facebook’s decision last year to lease more than 400,000 square feet in a skyscraper across from the newly opened Salesforce Tower will put offices of the biggest names in tech — Google and LinkedIn among them — within walking distance of each other.

In the middle of all this is the Transbay Transit Center, which opens in June and is advertised as the Grand Central of the West.

“The building is starting to come to life,” said Dennis Turchon, senior construction manager for the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the public organization charged with building the structure.

To critics it is a glorified bus terminal, and an expensive one at that — the cost hovers around $6 billion, according to the authority.

Yet the transit center has ambitions to be much more. A 5.4-acre park on the roof has a half-mile walking loop, an outdoor theater and gardens populated by dozens of mature trees. It’s an elevated park that has been compared to the High Line in New York. The tech offices that surround the center connect directly with the park, as does a gondola that will whisk visitors to the park for the sidewalk below.

During a week in which President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to put infrastructure on the agenda, the transit center, which was built with close to $600 million in federal money from the stimulus package during the Great Recession, is a rubber-meets-the-road test for the United States’ infrastructure plans. The center was built on top of a giant underground concrete box designed to be the San Francisco terminus for both CalTrain, the railway that runs through Silicon Valley to San Jose, and high-speed rail, which is meant to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles.

Building the 1.3-mile tunnel that will bring the tracks into the station will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars. San Franciscans are waiting to see whether there is both the political will and the financing to get the job done.