The Green Caltrain blog is sponsored by BayRail Alliance, an all-volunteer non-profit organization supporting green rail transit in the Bay Area. This blog and BayRail have no affiliation with Caltrain.Caltrain to form a new bicycle advisory committee
After last year’s rocky episode over onboard bike capacity, Mark Simon, Caltrain’s Executive Officer of Public Affairs, said the agency will form a new Bicycle Advisory Committee to formalize dialogue between rail staff and bike advocates, as well as to help Caltrain on how to better serve bike riders.
The new bicycle advisory committee will have 9 members, 3 from each county. Of those 3 county representatives, one of them would be a public agency staff member responsible for bicycle planning, another would represent either SFBC or SVBC, and the last member would be a Caltrain bike rider selected from the general public. The new advisory committee would hold meetings that are open to the public.
In 2008, Caltrain released a “bicycle master plan” to focus on bicycle storage needs at stations to reduce bumping. However, the bicycle community insisted that Caltrain should increase onboard bike capacity because many of them ride bikes on both ends of the train trip. After an evaluation of bike storage alternatives on trains, Caltrain took out seats and increased the bike capacity from 32 bikes to 40 bikes per gallery cab car, and from 24 bikes to 32 bikes on selected Bombardier cars.
The new bicycle advisory committee could play an important role in the design of the future electrified train sets that would replace the current fleet.
