Fixing Santa Clara County

Today, Caltrain is hardly recognizable with regular and punctual half-hour service all day, every day, using swift and comfortable trains that are the envy of any North American regional rail system. This unequivocal success sets the agency on the best possible trajectory out of the pandemic doldrums. Unfortunately, that won't be enough.

Most of what is still wrong with Caltrain is concentrated in Santa Clara County, where the wrong priorities are hurting Caltrain's finances. Revenue comes from a good product: a passenger experience of fast, frequent, and regular service. Here's what should be fixed in Santa Clara County:

Frequency is freedom 

It is a well-established research finding that short and regular headways result in a faster-than-linear positive response in ridership and revenue. Unfortunately, Caltrain planners have decided that an end-to-end trip under the one-hour mark (known in the diesel era as the Baby Bullet) is worth sacrificing regular headways. Once an hour during the morning and evening peaks, a train will skip five stops to make this stunt possible: Santa Clara, Lawrence, San Antonio, California Avenue and Menlo Park, just across the county line. Fixing this error at a grand total of eight minutes of run time would unlock 15-minute clockface frequency throughout Silicon Valley, at zero added operational cost. The ridership induced by this tweak will dwarf the tiny number of long-distance riders who abandon Caltrain due to a longer trip, recalling that the average Caltrain ride is ~25 miles.

Re-imagine connecting shuttles 

With 15-minute peak service throughout Silicon Valley, connecting services can be reconfigured so they no longer need to reach "major" stops (known in the diesel era as Baby Bullet stops). Silicon Valley always was a continuous employment and housing blob, and "major" stops were an artifact of diesel service patterns where the tradeoff between frequency and trip duration was far more pronounced than it is with swift EMUs. To reach "major" stops, shuttles spend precious minutes stuck in gridlocked traffic sewers that run parallel to Caltrain, such as El Camino Real and Central Expressway. Ditching this gridlock not only speeds each connecting trip, but allows the same number of shuttle drivers and vehicles to be redeployed towards more frequent trips; both effects will generate Caltrain ridership. The vast fleets of luxury coaches that ply highway 101 can be viewed as an indictment of Caltrain's service pattern; major employers will respond if Caltrain upgrades to a compelling 15-minute product.

Ditch diesel

Operating and maintaining a separate diesel fleet to provide infrequent part-time service to the small towns south of San Jose generates less than one percent of weekday Caltrain ridership (see chart). This astonishing under-performance persists even after the addition of a fourth daily round-trip to Gilroy in late 2023.

While transit agencies aren't profit-seeking businesses and their purpose isn't always to maximize ridership, the Gilroy branch is one of those cases where the cost of providing the service is very far out of proportion with the public benefit. While Caltrain doesn't break out the cost of Gilroy service, the marginal cost of the fourth train is quoted as ~$3M, so we can extrapolate at least $12M plus the fixed operating and maintenance costs of separate tooling, training, parts, etc. associated with sustaining the diesel fleet. Caltrain would be better off spending this money on contracting with VTA for more frequent 568 rapid bus service. Between Gilroy and Blossom Hill, this south county bus is already much more frequent (~every half hour) and barely any slower (~8 minutes in peak traffic) than Caltrain.

Divesting of the remaining diesel fleet (9 locomotives and 41 cars) is a one-time source of income, but has some strings attached because the FTA funded its original purchase. Hanging on to diesels for "fleet resiliency" is becoming less critical as the electrified system demonstrates increasing reliability. The Trump administration is unlikely to care either way, and there are plenty of operators who might be interested, such as a potential new agency based in Monterey County.

Is this poking south county in the eye? No, because there's a much better plan. Read on.

Acquire UPRR's Coast Subdivision and electrify to Blossom Hill

As compensation for deleting service to Gilroy, Caltrain should extend electrification and frequent EMU service by six miles from Tamien to Blossom Hill. This portion of the corridor has high residential density to support significant new ridership if well-served, which it currently isn't. Caltrain likes to argue that a railroad has high fixed costs, and that cutting service can't save much money. The converse must also be true: adding more EMU service, using the existing fleet, can't cost all that much.

A stack train under the wires;
it's really no big deal.
(Samuel Walker photo)

 

Land owner Union Pacific is notoriously difficult to negotiate with, but there is no reason for Caltrain or VTA to fight alone. The state should get involved since this corridor forms part of the future high-speed rail system and is already slated for acquisition. Freight trackage rights would be preserved, and the tallest freight trains could operate under the wires as they already do elsewhere in the U.S. (see photo). Bridge clearances are already above 23 feet to clear Plate H at Almaden Expressway and Blossom Hill Road, and above 22 feet at Curtner Ave. and Capitol Expressway, nothing that would require expensive bridge reconstruction.

If this sounds like a megaproject, it isn't. It does not require any new traction power facilities; no new paralleling station is needed at Blossom Hill if this short extension is initially built as basic 25 kV without feeders. It does not require environmental clearance, thanks to new laws (Alex Lee's AB2503). It does not require any new trains, as Caltrain's EMU fleet will soon swell to 23 trains, where today's service pattern only requires 14. It's about as basic as electrification projects come: string up 15 track-miles of wire.

To get VTA interested in helping to fund this capital project, you would call it the "South County BART Connector." Since San Jose Diridon station would then require two tracks and a single island platform to support all Caltrain service, there could be savings in postponing the gold-plated Diridon Integrated Station Concept, a megaproject that costs $3-$6 billion while providing no identifiable service benefit for Caltrain passengers.

Failure of Imagination

With pandemic-era federal subsidies expiring and a new transit-hostile federal administration, Caltrain needs to show more creativity and imagination in adjusting its offering. The success of the initial electrified service shows that the best prescription for financial health is to focus relentlessly on the product: fast, frequent and regular service. Anything that doesn't contribute to the product is a distraction.

March 2025 Open Thread

The comment section from the last post is about to overflow, so here is an open thread to keep the discussions going. Some noteworthy developments fished out of the previous comments:

• Caltrain's corridor-wide grade separation strategy continues to evolve towards its final form, with a prioritized list of grade separations due for adoption this summer. Of note, grade separations are now allowed 2% grades without a design exception, which removes the need to design an entire 1% project before seeking the exception. Steeper grades are a good start for shorter grade separations, but we also need to reduce freight train speeds to 45 mph throughout the corridor to tighten up vertical curve radii. A freight train requires the same vertical curve radius at 45 mph as a passenger train at 110 mph, such that freight speed limits any higher than 45 mph result in freight-driven designs that are longer and more expensive to build. An important but neglected part of the grade separation strategy should be to reduce the freight train speed limit from 50 mph to 45 mph.
   
• Speaking of grade separations, costs continue to rise out of control, with the Broadway project in Burlingame (see agenda item 11 of the March 3rd city council meeting) flirting with $900 million. It's not just inflation. A grade separation cost model discussed a few years ago predicted that, after adjusting for inflation, the Broadway project should cost $120M all-up, including the "soft cost" category that today forms a metastasizing cancer on these projects. The city is now considering deleting the Broadway station (not a bad decision, due to proximity to Bvrlingame) to bring costs down to the still eye-watering sum of $600M. This is a prime example of the transportation industrial complex's capture of a project designated as safety-critical, where cost becomes no object because you just can't put a price on safety. In this abject fleecing, the city and Caltrain are just along for the ride.
   
• Development of the BEMU continues, in spite of the looming "fiscal cliff" where one of the most logical cost cutting moves will be to suspend Gilroy service and dispose of the diesel fleet and its attendant operating & maintenance expenses. The BEMU has fewer seats (280) and more batteries (2.3 megawatt-hours) than previously understood, making it even more of a turkey for the $80M pricetag.
   
• On the bright side: Caltrain's EMU service is holding up nicely!  Well done to all involved. Ridership should continue to increase as the freeways rapidly return to pre-pandemic levels of congestion misery. The way this works: 101 overflows onto 280, which overflows onto Caltrain. 280 is starting to get congested again, which augurs well for Caltrain.

Caltrain's Plan for Level Boarding

Some good news: Caltrain is working on a level boarding plan, as documents requested under the Public Records Act attest. Their "Level Boarding Roadmap: Technical Task Force Platform Report" dated April 2024 is a reasonably well-written document that discusses how the system might be converted to level boarding using the European 550 mm platform standard. After reading it, three questions arise:

1. Why are 48" level boarding platforms never discussed? The roadmap takes for granted that Caltrain's solution is 550 mm (22") platforms. It mentions "Caltrain EMUs have doors (...) at the mid-level (currently these doors are plugged)" and never again mentions how these doors got there, what else might be done with them, or why it shouldn't. While every solution has pros and cons, how is such a fundamental decision of system architecture presented with no context as a done deal, without the slightest technical rationale or public discussion?
    
   
2. Why is the preferred solution allowed to violate HSR specifications?
   
   22" platforms are discussed with two lateral offset alternatives: 64" (preserving today's platform offsets) and 68". The safety argument presented in favor of a 64" offset does not contemplate that such platforms would encroach into the high-speed rail vehicle body dynamic envelope, and that wide-body HSR cars would extend over the platform. These issues are shown in the precisely scaled graphic at right, using dimensions from the HSR vehicle RFP. Neither of these conditions seems safe and neither is addressed in the hazard analysis, unless an unstated assumption is being made that the high-speed rail project should fix Caltrain platform design errors at the public's expense.
    
   
3. Why was this work not done ten years ago, before EMU procurement? There is no value added by testing platform mockups with a real EMU as done in the report, versus testing with a plywood vehicle mockup. Everything discussed in Caltrain's report was known ten years ago and the Stadler EMU fleet could have been delivered with a platform interface solution for level boarding at 22" had Caltrain specified one. Now, we're stuck with a retrofit situation, but better late than never.

The next steps discussed in Caltrain's report are good ones, and should be expedited. Specifically, developing a technical solution for an automatic step arrangement compatible with both 8" and 22" platforms is of the highest urgency. ("Funding a prototype for an estimated $3M lowers technical risk and also shortens the timeframe to begin fleet implementation should funding become available.") This small investment is among the most important and valuable projects that Caltrain should undertake immediately.

A bit over a month of electric service has made it abundantly clear that dwell times are long and on-time performance is systematically poor due to the rosy performance assumptions baked into Caltrain's timetable. The trains are fast, but much of their performance is wasted on long dwells. Level boarding can't come soon enough.

Another Path to Level Boarding

A complication in Caltrain's coming transition to level boarding is found in the train's bathroom, an amenity that requires equal access for passengers with reduced mobility under ADA regulations. During the procurement and design phase of the EMUs, the original plan was to fit in-vehicle wheelchair lifts to enable passengers with reduced mobility to move between the lower level and mid-level, for level boarding compatibility with future high-speed rail platforms (48" above rail, 73" from track center) and to enable bathroom access regardless of boarding level.

This plan fell apart because of practical considerations of cost and vehicle packaging: the bulky 800-pound capacity lifts would have impeded passenger flows in the lower-level vestibules, without providing any value until some distant future where Caltrain would need to dock at high-level platforms in stations shared with high-speed rail. Even then, the lifts would have been required indefinitely, to provide equal access to the bathroom on the lower level. The idea was so unappetizing that it was scrapped, and Caltrain has since focused its nebulous level-boarding strategy around European-like 550 mm platforms.

The EMUs are nevertheless designed for future conversion to high platforms. A different solution is available that would facilitate a transition to 48" platforms: a new single-level, high-floor bathroom car that would take the eighth slot in the consist. The EMUs were always planned to be eight cars long, as their numbering attests by skipping from 1, 2, 3 to 5, 6. Missing car number 4 could have this configuration, as modified from a Stadler drawing:

The new high-floor bathroom car would triple bathroom capacity of the trainset from one to three bathrooms, provide 60 seats with up to six wheelchair spaces, and enable a gradual transition to 48" level boarding using car-borne wheelchair lifts (such as the FRA and ADA compliant PowerLift by Rincon) to board passengers with reduced mobility from legacy 8" platforms, without the need for precise positioning of train doors relative to mini-high platforms. Once the transition to level boarding is completed, these lifts could be removed.

With the bridge plates already engineered for the EMUs (shown in photo at right but not fitted to the fleet as delivered) passengers with reduced mobility could board step-free without any crew assistance, greatly improving the predictability of dwell times and thereby increasing train speeds and corridor capacity.

The transition to high platforms would then entail the following steps:

• Extend all platforms and yards to support eight-car trains
• Incorporate new single-level bathroom cars to all trains
• Commission high level doors and install bridge plates
• Build new 48" platforms!
  

High platforms have the advantage of compatibility with high-speed rail, enabling any train to dock at any platform as needed and making optimal use of future corridor and station capacity. They allow high-speed trains to make stops at important places like Redwood City or Palo Alto with zero additional infrastructure. They allow Caltrain to operate like BART, with brief and predictable station dwell times, something that remains out of reach today even as our swift and modern EMUs must wait for extended periods at low platforms, in the manner of a Ferrari driven on a rutted dirt road.

Cars on the Tracks

Cars turning off from a grade crossing onto the tracks are a perennial problem for Caltrain, often resulting in multi-hour cascading delays or worse, dangerous collisions. The statistics are shocking: from 2020 through 2023, there were 183 recorded incidents of "vehicle track incursions," of which more than half occurred at just five crossings as shown in the Caltrain bar chart at right.

Caltrain has tried mightily to take measures against this human error. It's useful to view these attempts through a risk management lens: the risk is the product of the probability of a vehicle entering the tracks, multiplied by its consequence.

Reducing Probability

We can do a little bit of Street View tourism to see what solutions have been attempted so far to reduce the probability of a vehicle track incursion:

	Paint stripes give visual feedback, but such road markings are often not observed by the sort of driver who might not see that they are turning onto tracks.
	Reflectors and Botts Dots keep a low profile to fit under passing trains, while giving visual and steering wheel feedback. In the gauge, they get beat up by equipment dragging under freight trains. This example is at Castro Street in Mountain View.
	Rumble strips, similar to above solution, at Mission Bay Drive in San Francisco.
	Solar reflectors go one step further by lightning up at night. The small solar cell at the top charges a battery that powers red LED lights when it is dark. This example is at 16th Street in San Francisco.
	Speed bumps provide slightly more steering wheel feedback. This example is at Mission Bay Drive in San Francisco.

All of these measures are probably effective to some extent, but they won't stop a vision-impaired or inebriated or inexperienced driver, especially when they are mindlessly following GPS directions to turn onto a street that immediately parallels the tracks, a common feature of the grade crossings with the highest incidence of vehicle track incursions.

Reducing Consequence

Before we can discuss reducing the consequence of a vehicle track incursion, we need to acknowledge just what the consequence is: at a minimum, the vehicle becomes stranded on the tracks, requiring extrication by a tow truck. At worst, there is a dangerous collision with a train.

Most vehicles will end up high-centered if they blunder onto the tracks because the rail is 7" 5/16 tall and the center of concrete ties dips lower, resulting in easily 9" of height difference between the surface of the ties and the top of the rail. This height exceeds the ground clearance of most SUVs. Once high-centered, a vehicle with open differentials (i.e., not-Jeep) loses traction and becomes stranded. The driver is unable to correct their mistake, and when they try, they often just make it worse by driving further onto the tracks.

Currently, Caltrain applies no mitigation to this consequence. Their entire risk mitigation approach to vehicle track incursions relies on prevention, by reducing the probability while accepting the consequence that a stranding is inevitable. It is not!

Anti-trespass panels in New York, on Metro North.
Photo by Daniel Case.

Anti-trespass panels can mitigate the consequence of a vehicle track incursion through two mechanisms: 

1) very strong vibratory feedback that the vehicle has departed the road, likely to induce brake application on a reflexive basis and avoiding a deeper incursion.

2) reduced height difference between the rail and surrounding surfaces, enabling a vehicle with low ground clearance to maneuver without becoming high-centered. The driver can self-extricate the vehicle.

While these rubber panels are primarily intended to prevent pedestrian trespassing, they would likely also work for cars if laid down for about 30 feet beyond the edge of a crossing. They are a passive solution with low operating cost, certainly a much more effective mitigation than CCTV or intrusion sensors with alerts integrated into the signalling system. All these expensive and technology-heavy solutions may prevent a collision, but do nothing about the need for a tow truck or the resulting service disruption. This makes anti-trespass panels an ideal solution that best addresses the need of Caltrain riders to arrive on time.

The south side of Churchill Avenue in Palo Alto would make an excellent location for a pilot installation.