On Monday evening, Palo Alto City Council is going to review a Council Rail Committee recommendation to do additional design analysis of grade separation options for the City’s at-grade crossings of the Caltrain tracks.

The staff recommendations studying two options:

1) submerging the roadway at Churchill, Meadow, and Charleston, while leaving Alma at-grade
2) trenching the corridor from San Antonio under Adobe creek, Charleston,  Meadow, and Barron Creek before coming back to the surface just prior to Matadero creek with preliminary analysis of creek impacts

None of the options include any track elevation, because Palo Alto’s policy is to keep tracks at grade or depress tracks.

The goal of the study would be to show the differences in cost and construction between submerging the  roadway and a trench.  The proposed study would update earlier work conducted before High Speed Rail plan incorporated the blended system, in which Caltrain and HSR will share tracks, and won’t use four tracks in Palo Alto.  The study would be conducted in two phases. The first would use about $60,000 already appropriated and left over from earlier work, and the second would require an additional $68,000, which Council could decide on later.

If you live or work in Palo Alto, or are interested in grade separations on the Caltrain corridor, it would be good to attend or write Palo Alto City Council.

Meanwhile, Mountain View voters showed weak support for infrastructure bond measures including a Caltrain grade separation at Rengstorff in a September poll commissioned by City Council.  The grade sep project ranked the highest of seven projects, including a new emergency operations center, rebuilding the city’s oldest firestation, and an upgrade to the Rengstorff Park Aquatics center.  City Council will discuss the survey on Tuesday evening.  If anyone attends the meeting or watches online, reports are welcome.

The Rengstorff grade separation in Mountain View does have $71 million in funding planned from Santa Clara County, according to the VTA 2040 Strategic Plan, which is expected to be reviewed by the VTA board by the end of the year (it’s not on Thursday’s board agenda).

Santa Clara County doesn’t yet have plans or funds for other Caltrain at-grade crossings in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale.   VTA staff tells Green Caltrain that additional grade separations will be considered for the next update of the VTA Strategic Plan two years from now.

Caltrain’s grade crossing study this past Spring showed that electrification, planned for 2019, would have relatively minor impacts, or improvements, at the at-grade crossings in Santa Clara County.  But adding High Speed Rail service, planned for the late 2020s – if all goes to plan – will put a lot more stress on the at-grade crossings according to the study.

It is good to see increasing awareness and consideration of Santa Clara County grade separations.  Another bit of good news – in updating the Transportation Element of the Comprehensive Plan, Palo Alto’s Planning and Transportation Commission revised the most recent draft, eliminating a provision requiring that grade separations must be funded exclusively with funding from outside sources. The ability to bring  local money to the table might help prioritize and shape options.

A centerpiece of the  South San Francisco Station Area Plan in progress is a proposal to extend the Caltrain station further south, upgrade the bleak waiting area, and – importantly – to connect the station more directly to the downtown with an underpass.  Currently Caltrain users need to climb several flights of stairs, emerge at a freeway offramp, and then walk at a sidewalk down the offramp to get downtown; or roll bikes, luggage or wheelchairs up a narrow sidewalk adjacent to another freeway ramp.

South City is attempting to accelerate one of the major benefits of the station changes, by applying for a Safe Routes to Transit grant. The grant would pay for a feasibility study for the pedestrian/bike tunnel, in advance of the rest of the station upgrade.   The feasibility study would update existing plans to accommodate future possible platform and passing track configurations. The ped/bike tunnel would improve the accessibility of the Caltrain station to and from downtown and workplaces.

The Station Area Plan seeks to revitalize South City’s downtown and upgrade the industrial/office park area within a half-mile radius of the train station. Better access to the train station is an important part of the Station Area Plan, a point often reinforced by City Council Member Karyl Matsumoto, who also serves on the boards of SamTrans and the San Mateo County Transportation Authority.

Artists rendering of tunnel and entry plaza

According to Brian McMinn, Assistant Director of Public Works and City Engineer, the tunnel is expected to cost $10million to complete in a new estimate submitted with the grant, and the full station rebuild was forecast to cost $20 million when plans were drawn up in 2008.  The City has already invested $1.8 million in right-of-way, property acquisition, and environmental remediation for the entry plaza and tunnel entrances and has about $100k remaining in the Capital Improvement Program for the station improvements.

The Station Area Plan also includes designs for streetscape improvements at the entrance to South San Francisco downtown, including a public plaza.  Currently the entrance experience is dominated by the 101 offramp.   The traffic calming measures would create a safer and more pleasant walk to and from the train station.

City entrance streetscape improvements

The full station upgrade would extend the platforms further south to more nicely connect with the tunnel. It would also add barriers disallowing crossing tracks when the train is in the station and therefore eliminate the “holdout rule” that prevents trains travelling in the opposite direction from stopping in the station at the same time for safety reasons.  Caltrain has budgeted some funds in its 2014 budget for design, but would need additional money to rebuild the station.

At last week’s Friends of Caltrain panel on opportunities for level boarding and platform height compatibility between Caltrain and High Speed Rail, Marian Lee of Caltrain and Brian Dykes of Transbay said that they were working together on studying  capacity issues at Transbay Terminal.   Transbay is expected to be one of the constraints to the capacity of the blended system, where Caltrain and High Speed rail share facilities.

On the panel, Dykes said that he believes that compatible platform heights would likely help Caltrain and High Speed Rail provide more service into Transbay.   He also stated that dwell time, and the amount of time it takes to turn around trains, would likely affect capacity.

Caltrain’s earlier round of capacity studies modeled sending only two of Caltrain’s expected six trains per hour into Transbay.  With the pre-blended system, expecting to send 10-12 high speed trains per hour to San Francisco, the limit to Caltrain access may have been the proposed high level of High Speed Rail service.  However, with the blended system, Caltrain isn’t physically limited to two trains per hour, and will be modeling more trains.

At the event, Clem Tillier presented a slide showing that there are more jobs within walking distance Transbay than the rest of the Caltrain line combined. Caltrain will benefit substantially by sending as many trains as it physically can to Transbay.

The results of the upcoming capacity studies will be potentially helpful for efforts to reduce the limits to capacity in Transbay.  How much would shared platforms help? How would reducing dwell time help? How much could dwell time be reduced with level boarding, and how much by turning trains efficiently at a terminal station?  Marian Lee of Caltrain did not say specifically what topics were being studied, but answers to these questions would be welcome. These answers will help Caltrain and the region’s rail supporters make the case for eliminating barriers.

Clem Tillier’s excellent analysis of the decisions needed to support level boarding and compatible platform heights are at his blog here.

Last month, Mountain View’s Environmental Planning Commission advanced a four-story 160 unit apartment building, with 4,400 feet of retail space, at 1984 El Camino Real West at the location of a current motel.   In accordance with Mountain View’s new policies for buildings in locations with good transit access, the development will offer $25 per month on residents’ Clipper cards for the first year of a resident’s lease, plus free VTA EcoPasses for the first 10 years of the building’s operation.

1984 El Camino Real Site Plan with pedestrian path through the site

The Commission wrestled for over 45 minutes trying to come to grips with why the development would offer both a Clipper benefit, which can be used on Caltrain, VTA and other area transit services, plus a VTA EcoPass.   Commissioners speculated that the tenants of the market-rate units (there will also be seven below-market units) will be unlikely to use the bus, and proposed consolidating to an all-Clipper benefit.  The Commissioners also considered the amount of the benefit paid by the developer, but didn’t consider the discount to the end user, since the Clipper benefit is provided as cash to buy retail or monthly discount service, whereas the VTA EcoPass provides a deep discount for the bus and light rail.

Despite the commissioners’ discomfort with the complexity of the transit benefit, they eventually approved the transit benefit as proposed, for reasons related to Mountain View’s approval schedule for the project.     Mountain View will do a more thorough review of its residential transportation benefit policies in the development of its El Camino Real Precise Plan, which is under development.

The transit passes are part of a set of transportation benefits offered to residents: the El Camino development also provides 160 bicycle parking spaces, 16 guest and 10 retail spaces, as required by Mountain View city code, and two car sharing vehicles onsite. The developer is also making the site much more pedestrian friendly, by building a pedestrian path through the site from Latham to El Camino.

Mountain View, and other Caltrain corridor cities, are making gradual progress toward evening out the incentives for driving and alternatives to driving.  This development provides one free parking space per apartment bedroom, a benefit that is worth hundreds of dollars per month if residents needed to pay for the space.

The discussion raised a fundamental issue with the Bay Area’s fragmented transit services.  Currently, employers and residential developers wanting to provide transit benefits need to make a decision about which agencies their constituents happen to use.   One place might have users who take Caltrain, BART, VTA, SamTrans, Muni, and AC Transit.  Providing transit passes requires navigating a tangle of different benefits and price structures.

For our region to encourage greenhouse gas reducing alternatives, instead of encouraging driving as we do today, would it be possible to consolidate transit benefit prices and offers?

Update:  The Caltrain Citizens’ Advisory Committee chose three goals to focus on in the coming year, providing a venue for customer community feedback on:

• Caltrain’s capacity issues
• Incident response, including communication with riders
• Caltrain’s strategic plan, including operating funding, capital planning (including grade separations), service strategy, and more

There will be regular staff presentations and CAC discussion on these topics, and opportunities to provide your feedback at public meetings on the third Wednesday of every months.

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What goals should Caltrain Citizens’ Advisory Committee have? What are the most important areas where Caltrain needs community input in the next year?

The Caltrain CAC will discuss and make decisions tonight.  If you’re interested in shaping the agenda, come tonight at Caltrain’s headquarters, 1250 San Carlos Avenue, at 5:40pm.

Ideas on the table include:

Operational topics, such as managing capacity and bicycles
Incident response, including contingency planning and communications with riders
Caltrain stable funding
Caltrain strategic plan input, including Caltrain’s capital plan
Proposed improvements such as wifi and level boarding
Caltrain station area planning
The agenda is here: http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/CAC/Agendas/2013/10-16-13+JPB+CAC+Agenda+Packet.pdf