Work Starts on Oakland’s Train-to-Plane Link

Bay Area residents who regularly use Oakland International Airport have something to celebrate this week – the ceremonial groundbreaking for the long-awaited Oakland Airport Connector project.

Billed as a “train-to-plane” connection, the elevated people-mover system will be automated and driverless, and will link BART’s Coliseum Station in Oakland with the airport. It will feature cable-car technology by Austrian-based DCC Doppelmayr Cable Car.

As now planned, the trains will arrive at the Coliseum BART Station every 4.5 minutes and will quickly transport air travelers to the airport in just over 8 minutes. Once it opens in the spring of 2014, the 3.2-mile connector will replace the AirBART buses that often are bogged down by Hegenberger Road traffic, Coliseum sporting events, freight trains and the like.

The $484 million project is expected to create between 2,500 and 5,000 direct and indirect jobs during the 3.5-year construction phase.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) headlined the event. “As we celebrate both the short-term and long-term benefits of the BART Oakland Airport Connector, its job creation component stands out as an important means of growth and opportunity for many of our local community members still struggling with hardship," she said.

Also on hand were a number of local officials, including MTC Vice Chair Adrienne Tissier, who is also a San Mateo County supervisor. Tissier compared the project’s potential impacts with the beneficial impacts of San Francisco International Airport’s BART rail connection, which is in her home territory.

“Just seven years after the opening of the BART-SFO extension, SFO now ranks #1 among all major U.S. airports in the percentage of passengers using public transit, with fully 23 percent of all passengers using BART, buses or shuttle vans to get to and from the airport,” Tissier said. “And SFO ranks close to top in the percentage of passengers using rail transit — behind only Reagan National in Washington; Hartsfield in Atlanta; and JFK in New York.”

More than three decades in the making, the BART-Oakland Airport Connector was included in the Regional Transit Expansion Program that MTC adopted in 2001 and reaffirmed in 2006. MTC contributed $155 million in funding from the Regional Measure 2 bridge toll program approved in 2004 by voters throughout the Bay Area, along with $31 million from Regional Measure 1, an earlier bridge toll program. The final piece of the financing puzzle fell into place last month when MTC voted to concur with a state action to shift $20 million from a pair of Interstate 880 highway projects to the Oakland Airport Connector. Read more about the project here.