S.F.'s $50 million plan to fill Geary underpass at Fillmore Removing underpass would rejoin Fillmore, Japantown

Benches on Fillmore Street as it passes over Geary Boulevard. A bus plan would reshape Geary from Market to 33rd Avenue. Benches on Fillmore Street as it passes over Geary Boulevard. A bus plan would reshape Geary from Market to 33rd Avenue. Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close S.F.'s $50 million plan to fill Geary underpass at Fillmore 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

A plan to spend as much as $50 million to fill in a Geary Boulevard underpass is getting serious consideration from city officials and community leaders eager to repair some of the damage from San Francisco's ill-conceived urban renewal projects of the 1950s and '60s.

The project calls for eliminating the underpass beneath Fillmore Street and restoring the boulevard to the flatter, narrower, more pedestrian-friendly Geary Street that existed before 1961, when it was turned into an eight-lane expressway by the bulldozers that dug the underpass and razed the adjoining homes and businesses in the name of progress.

Former Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who proposed in 2008 what's now known as the "Fillmore Fill" project, called the widened thoroughfare "the invisible Berlin Wall that's separated Japantown from the Fillmore." Eliminating the underpass would bring back the street-level connection that long linked the two neighborhoods.

The engine driving the proposed change is the bus rapid transit system planned for Geary Boulevard, one of the city's busiest transit corridors.

The plan would reconfigure the street to provide bus-only transit lanes from Market Street to 33rd Avenue, running on the curbside lanes of the street until past the tunnel under Masonic Avenue and then moving to the center of the boulevard for the rest of the run through the Richmond District.

The Geary transit plan could shave 25 percent off the end-to-end travel time for the 38-Geary bus, increasing both its efficiency and dependability, Colin Dentel-Post, a transportation planner for the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, told about 70 people at a meeting last week at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in Japantown.

Fill was in the original plan

That's a big boost for San Francisco's busiest bus line, which carries about 50,000 riders a day, despite what Dentel-Post admitted was its well-deserved reputation for being slow and often unreliable.

Original plans called for the fill to be part of that transportation project, allowing the buses to run on what would become a flat neighborhood street and slowing the traffic that now barrels past.

But filling in that deep hole on Geary Boulevard requires not only a lot of dirt, but also plenty of money the city doesn't have. Even though the draft environmental impact report on the Geary proposal is slated to be completed this summer, with the two-year construction phase expected to start in 2016, the city is still more than $110 million short of the project's $240 million cost. That doesn't leave any room for the estimated $50 million it would take to fill the underpass, relocate utilities and rebuild the street.

The fill has plenty of benefits, said Tilly Chang, executive director of the transportation agency. Besides the neighborhood upgrades, the only way to have a center-running bus line would be to fill the underpass, because it doesn't have enough flat space for a 185-foot-long bus stop.

"We started with the idea of doing everything at once," she added. But after seeing the cost, "we decided to look at phasing."

But with no money for the fill project and no timetable for the work, pulling it out of the already scheduled transit project could spell the end for the effort.

"The underpass has unleashed a lot of the community interest in filling in the underpass and replacing it with a surface street," Dentel-Post said at last week's meeting on the transit plan. "But it's a community project about land use and livability," work that would be better handled in the future by the city Planning Department.

The transit agency supports the fill project, but wants it to move on a separate track so as not to delay the Geary bus plan, he added.

There's no doubt that much of the community wants to see the last of the underpass, both to improve urban life in the two neighborhoods and as the end to a constant reminder of what the city did to the Western Addition a half century ago.

What redevelopment did

Supervisor London Breed, whose district includes the area, grew up in the Western Addition. Born in 1974, she is too young to remember the most heated redevelopment battles that split that part of the city, but she saw the results.

"Growing up in the neighborhood, I remember sitting on the sidewalk and watching as homes were picked up and moved from place to place," she said. "What redevelopment did to create Geary Boulevard ... changed the community," she said.

Filling the underpass would be a start toward changing it back, she added.

The fill also could be a boon to local businesses, which are often ignored by motorists speeding past, added Richard Hashimoto, president of the Japantown Merchants Association.

"We would like to see the underpass filled so that traffic is calmed and drivers can see more of the community," he said. "Geary Boulevard and the underpass are a barrier between the two communities, which once shared a rich, healthy relationship. Bring the barrier down and we can reunite once again to share that same relationship we once enjoyed."

Even without the money to start work on the fill, the community pressure is having some effect. The latest plan for Geary includes efforts to slow traffic and make it easier for even elderly and disabled pedestrians to make it across one of the city's widest streets. Corner sidewalk bulb-outs to shorten crossing distances, improved traffic lights and mid-street "safe refuge areas" for slow-walking pedestrians are all designed to make it easier to move between Japantown and the Fillmore.

Seamless transition

Transit officials also pledged to design the new bus lanes so that there could be a seamless transition if and when money becomes available for the Fillmore fill.

"Our plans would not prevent a future fill project," Dentel-Post said.

That's good news for both Breed and fellow Supervisor Eric Mar, who co-sponsored a committee hearing on the fill project last September. That sort of high-level interest also means the plan is unlikely to disappear without some serious study.

"It's an important aspect," admitted Chang of the transportation agency. "We want to rebuild Geary to meet neighborhood needs."