Reimagine Dumbarton

Reimagine Dumbarton is the first step toward repurposing the unused Dumbarton Corridor. The project aims to bring fast, reliable, zero emission bus service and better walking and biking facilities to the communities of Southeast San Mateo County including East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, Atherton, and North Fair Oaks.

The Reimagine Dumbarton study area includes the Dumbarton Corridor between University Avenue in East Palo Alto and Redwood City Transit Center. The feasibility study will determine how to best use the Corridor to create new bus, walking, and biking connections.

The Dumbarton Corridor is currently unused for transportation and is a barrier between communities.

This project offers a unique opportunity to reconnect communities. Since 2020, the number of trips on an average day between Redwood City and East Palo Alto has increased by more than 30%. These local trips, coupled with increases in regional traffic, result in congestion along roadways such as State Route 84.

A high-quality bus service responds to the community’s travel patterns and can be delivered more quickly and at lower cost than rail projects, while still providing fast and reliable travel. Busway projects are flexible as travel needs change and have been successful in attracting riders in many other regions.

Reimagine Dumbarton is focused on using the Dumbarton Corridor to provide high quality bus service and multimodal connections. Building off community input received during previous studies,

Reimagine Dumbarton focuses on creating safer, faster, and more sustainable connections in the near-term, without a new Bay crossing, to meet the needs of communities in southeast San Mateo County and regional travelers alike.

Bus service on the Dumbarton Corridor would include stops within Peninsula communities and will be operated with quieter and more sustainable zero emission vehicles, reducing noise and greenhouse gas emissions. While this study focuses on near-term bus, pedestrian, and bicycle improvements, it does not prevent train service from being explored along the Dumbarton Corridor in the future.

Reimagine Dumbarton will include extensive study of the potential to incorporate multimodal connections both along and across the Corridor to enhance mobility for as many users as possible and reconnect communities currently separated by the Corridor. This project will seek to incorporate active transportation connections and crossings, when possible.

SamTrans will combine both technical analysis and community input to select a preferred alternative. Technical analysis will include review of existing mobility activity, ridership projections, existing and planned land use, and projected transit travel time savings. Community input will be used to identify current transportation needs, refine the draft alternatives, and understand community priorities.

Reimagine Dumbarton is a multi-phase project. The current phase is a feasibility study, anticipated to be completed in early 2027.

Reimagine Dumbarton will define and evaluate the potential options for the Corridor. It is anticipated that it will result in the selection of a preferred alternative. Pending funding availability, the preferred alternative would then advance into environmental clearance, preliminary engineering, and eventually final engineering design and permitting, followed by construction.

In 2018, SamTrans kicked off a process with Cross Bay Transit Partners, LLC (Facebook and Plenary Americas) to evaluative the technical and financial feasibility of a transit project along the Dumbarton rail bridge, connecting the Caltrain corridor at Redwood City to the East Bay. In Spring 2020, the project was put on hold due to the global pandemic.  Facebook and SamTrans compiled and documented pre-environmental work of the alignment and technology options under consideration for the DRC Project.

This effort followed the completion of the 2017 Dumbarton Transportation Corridor Study, a feasibility study that evaluated potential multimodal transportation improvements within the Dumbarton Corridor.