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On September 18, representatives of cities along the Caltrain corridor gathered at Caltrain HQ in San Carlos to help plan the Blended System. Marian Lee, head of Caltrain’s modernization program, presented on the program. Caltrain invited representatives of the 17 cities that will experience an electrified Caltrain. The group hold monthly meetings, that will be open to the public, to exchange ideas about Caltrain modernization. The group will have an advisory role, and will not have authority to make policy.
The formation of this group is a positive development, since earlier coordination efforts had been hampered by the challenge of coordinating multiple, overlapping groups of city officials.
Neither San Jose nor San Francisco were represented at last week’s meeting although they are invited. Representatives from San Francisco and San Jose were invited; there was staff-level representation from San Francisco. The group does not include the cities south of San Jose, where tracks are not scheduled for electrification.
If after the billions of dollars spent on this, the Caltrain commute between SF and MV still takes as long as today, I’m going to be mighty disappointed. Whenever officials talk about electrification, I hear things like “Now we can make 11 stops between SF & SJ under an hour”, but never things like, “baby bullets will go between SF & SJ in 45 mins instead of 57 mins like today.”
Martin, that topic is one of the very important decisions and tradeoffs. Caltrain needs feedback from the community to make those decisions.
The initial draft schedule for electrification had *only* increased service and did not have any baby bullet service, but due to public feedback they will propose service plan options with baby bullet service.
On the other hand, there are stations like San Antonio and Cal Ave that are seeing a lot of development despite poor train schedules today. How much will Caltrain improve service to these station areas so that development takes place without horrible traffic impact?
It is important for the public discussion to include these service plan questions.
Martin,
Electrification will not increase maximum speed of Caltrain right of way. Use of EMU train will have higher accerelation rate which is disadvantage of current diesel locomotive haul train. So, local train will get more advantage from electrfication. Express train may get shorter traveling time but other factors – Board level boarding, multiple door acesss – may improve overall traveling time. I think 45 min run between SJ&SF is archiveble but with several restrictions: – more bypassing tracks, full board level boarding, very short dwell time (means no bicycle), less stop (only Mountain View and Palo Alto).