Now that Caltrain electrification is moving forward, what do we want electric Caltrain service to become? Â This summer, starting with the July 6 board meeting there will be important discussions about the business plan for electric Caltrain.
This business planning exercise offers riders, community members, funding partners and stakeholders a chance to consider what we want to get out of Caltrain in the future.
Friends of Caltrain’s mission statement says this about our goals for Caltrain service and the corridor:
Friends of Caltrain is dedicated to a financially stable, electrified rail system, with frequent all-day service, easy access via transit, walking and biking, and well integrated into a regional transit network and transit-supportive land uses, serving people of all ages and all walks of life.
In a recent white paper on the future of the Caltrain corridor, SPUR articulated a vision of frequent, all-day service serving nearly 5 times today’s ridership:
Develop reliable, frequent all-day rail service with enough capacity to meet demand. … Caltrain should plan to grow its ridership to nearly five times what it is today by offering an attractive, competitive rail schedule, pursuing system and infrastructure upgrades that support additional capacity, and extending the rail corridor to reach downtown San Francisco.
What do you think? Should electric Caltrain:
- Provide all-day BART-like service?
- Increase market share compared to driving, for maximum congestion relief and environmental benefit?
- Support infill development in station areas, providing more choices for car-light lifestyles and helping with the housing shortage?
- Provide faster service for long-distance trips?
- Provide sustainable commute options to lower-income service workers and contractors who are disproportionately driving today?
- Take Caltrain off taxpayers hands by operating the service to break even?
- Support convenient, integrated, regional and statewide transportation?
And what should the priorities of these goals be? Â If there are tradeoffs, should Caltrain optimize for the highest financial return, or for taking more cars off the road? Making it faster to longer-distance trips, supporting more transit and less traffic in walkable areas near transit, or supporting all stations regardless of use?
These service goals would translate into requirements for customer service in the short and long-term:
- Peak hour frequency
- Service frequency in the mid-day, evening, and weekend
- Schedule quality (clockface schedule)
- Station stop pattern
- Fares designed to achieve business goals
And these service plans would translate into specific scenario options for operating and capital funding.
Step by step toward much better service
Electric service in 2021 is only the first step – it will take multiple steps for electric Caltrain to reach its full potential.
The business goals and priorities will help define the capital needs over time to provide the desired service levels. For example, these are the investments that SPUR recommends, to achieve the goal of increasing ridership 3-5x over (see report appendix for details).
Good decisions for blended system with High Speed Rail
These goals can help with decisions that are being made as part of planning for the blended system with High Speed Rail.   Conventional wisdom says that Caltrain’s deal with High Speed Rail locks Caltrain into 6 out of 10 trains per hour forever, but 10 trains per hour isn’t a technical limit, and 6 trains per hour arguably shouldn’t become a business contract limit.
Ballot measure goals – advance vision or prevent decline?
One of the goals of the business planning is to enable Caltrain to articulate its needs for a ballot measure in the short term to help provide stable funding.
Stable funding is essential, as we see again this year, when one partner’s financial challenges triggers risky fare hikes and cutbacks to maintenance of aging equipment.
For voters, what would provide the greatest motivation?  A vision of greatly improved, fully electrified transit service, with short, medium, and long-term goals? Or the ability to provide modest service improvements and prevent service cuts, while taking $5Million per year off of the bottom line of partner transit agencies?
Your input will be needed
The business plan for Caltrain offers community members a chance to write a blueprint to guide Caltrain into the 21st century.  See this new SPUR blog post for more ideas to shape the business plan.
What do you want electric Caltrain to become? Â Can you participate in shaping that vision and the goals to achieve the vision?
With a doubling of ridership due to electrification and presumably a significant increase in the number of trains, grade separation becomes a very big issue. The side effect of more trains and better service comes at a cost of snarling more intersections at the grade crossings.
What are the proposals to address these issues ?
Does any of the electrification tie into the Union City BART connection? If it does, given that its the Fremont/San Jose line…and given what San Jose is morphing into…and given even further that there is going to be a aTri Valkey San Joaquin Valley Regoinal Rail Authority later this year working on getting a Dublin/Pleasanton BART to Manteca service (connecting with ACE in the Manteca area)…the main point I am making is that CT should be looking at Case Histories of similar situations for ultra-regional service and eeally get after it. The Tri Valley San Joaquin Valley Regional Rail Authority is just being proposed by Assemblywomen Susan Eggman from Stockton and Catherine Baker (last name correct) in Assembly Bill 758. The biggest thing right now that Caltrain could do for this new Authority us to guide them with what CT has gone through so that they can learn and get a service set up that will ultimately be able to link up with High Speed Rail when the Sacramento-Stockton-San Jose-Merced segment(s) open.
All these goals are important. And quality of the ride is essential. Riders must feel safe, have a quiet ride in a clean, well maintained train that moves as effieciently and swiftly as possible. What can we learn from other regions’ attempts to upgrade?
GRETCHEN’s last sentence nails it! Ultimately everything needs to be linked seamlessly together because there will be a day when High Speed Rail will manifest itself in x format and all of the Bay Area will want to connect to it no matter the cost. Of course the biggest challenge will be to get just ONE type of train to connect to HSR and not multiple ones, i.e, BART to Livermore, then ACE to Merced or ?)
Its pseudo insane right now to think Caltrain-HSR but does it have to be?
Re the 2 to 6 billion dollars for grade separations, two existing advanced structural technologies are being integrated into a breakthrough in structural design and cost-effective performance. It should be possible to provide grade separations for a third to a half of the cost projected with current construction methods. So please keep pushing for it, and tell people who object about cost that it will be much lower when the new technology is commercialized, well before the 2021 launch of the CalTrain Modernization program. It will also be cost-effective to provide solar photovoltaic canopies above the trains, so that a large portion of the energy required to power them can be provided by the sun.
Once the control systems for maintaining separation and preventing collisions between trains are in place, it will also be possible to introduce very light-weight self-powered cars, originally designed for a proposed monorail system, which will cost a fraction as much, and use a fraction of the building materials and the electricity to operate that today’s heavy technology requires.
Re the article at http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/BART-loops-in-riders-with-hearing-loss-11192230.php — When BART was built, management chose to use cheaper wheels and scrimp on noise insulation, and severely misled health and safety regulators by claiming that each ride segment is shorter than the maximum exposure duration for noise levels that are damaging to hearing. The deception is that they would have known from the design and ridership studies that probably over 90% of riders travel over more than one segment. Hearing damage is and has long been known to be cumulative, so actually, the BART management deliberately damaged the hearing of tens or hundreds of thousands of riders since its beginning. There should also be a study to establish the extent of their tort liability for this harm. Since we will eventually either have a unified system with BART linking to CalTrain, or have systems such as bi-directional monorail linking the two, CalTrain riders who need to go to the East Bay will be exposed to this extreme noise. Therefore, I ask that you consider pressuring BART directors, both publicly and through direct contact with the Board, to ensure that they acknowledge the ethical violation of the past, and provide the best available technology for minimizing noise going forward.
As a resident that lives close to Caltrain, my biggest concern is noise. Its hard to imagine the trains being louder than the current diesel engines and their blaring horns but anyone that has ridden BART knows of the screeching tone of the train from the steel wheels on the tracks. I am very excited to see this long overdue improvement to Caltrain with more trains and faster service including a huge reduction in emissions but please insure we have proper engineering of the rails to allow us to sleep at night and enjoy this much improved service.
@Mark
I wanted to give you some background on wheels… IIRC, BART didn’t go “cheap” on the wheels, but they were pushing technology forward. At the time, the Control System was state of the ART. Even today, most NYC lines don’t have Automatic Train Operation. One area they pushed forward was the flat wheel design. The problem with conical (cone shaped) wheels is that they can lead to “hunting” which results in cars swaying left to right even on the straight track. Since most of BART track is straight, it was believed flat wheels will provide a smoother ride with less sway. They actually do and BART cars actually sway very little compared say Muni in the subway. Even with Muni running at lower speed.
The big downside of the flat wheels was the loud noise – which was underestimated or discovered way too late in development.
One thing to note is that ‘state of the art’ suspension in trains at the time was springs with dampers. Springs result in bouncing which anyone who’s ridden on Caltrains older Gallery cars can attest to. Those cars were made in 80’s and also have same design speed of about 80mph as BART cars.
Today’s state-of-art is air-suspension. If you’ve ridden on Caltrain’s Bombardier cars, you’d think train is using completely different track than Gallery cars. It’s that much smoother.
Fast forward to today, trains can achieve same stability with (quieter) conical wheels when paired with air-suspension as BART wheels with springs from 1960’s.
[…] scenarios are further reaching than those envisioned by Caltrain itself, which is only beginning to plan for service improvements beyond electrification in 2021. The electric trains the agency is […]