Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog

The Bookend Approach

2012-01-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of turmoil surrounding the California High-Speed Rail Authority these days. Some want to forget the whole thing, while most sensible politicians (as well as the peer review group) seem to want to re-plan the project to start with the ends rather than the middle, so as to end up with something useful sooner--not to mention spending the federal money already allocated. What if this actually happened in the coming months?

The first thing you can be sure of is that a tug of war would occur between the SF Bay Area and the LA Basin, with maybe just a sprinkle of money to placate the Central Valley. Out of the six billion of federal and state monies currently available, let's assume that $2.65 billion ends up here. Let's further assume that the money is actually spent in ways that enable high-speed rail, rather than poured down the usual black hole of BART extensions, never to be heard from again. What could and should be built in the San Francisco Bay Area for $2.65 billion of high-speed rail funding?

The bookend approach, in order of priority:

NUMBER ONE: Deploy ERTMS, the train control system that will be used for HSR. The peninsula corridor, which happens to be in need of a federally-mandated positive train control system but has nowhere near enough money to pay for it, could serve as the perfect testbed to import this key enabling technology of HSR to the United States. In exchange for full HSR funding, Caltrain would agree to abandon their unfunded and HSR-incompatible CBOSS project.

HSR benefit: pilot deployment of ERTMS standard in the US, ready for expansion to the state-wide HSR network. All regulatory hurdles cleared.
HSR funding share: $150 million (Caltrain can pay for other items such as the backup control facility)
Environmental Clearance: not required
Timeline: easily completed before 2015, following the example of Rio de Janeiro or Auckland.
Independent Utility: fulfills federal PTC mandate for Caltrain

NUMBER TWO: Electrify the peninsula rail corridor, exactly as already planned. 25kV overhead lines are 100% compatible with HSR and will enable a one-seat ride to San Francisco as soon as HSR reaches the peninsula. Out of the $1.2 billion budget for the electrification project, $400 million is for a new fleet of Caltrain electric trains, and $800 million is to string up the wires. It would seem fair to use HSR money for 50% of the fixed infrastructure, and let Caltrain / MTC come up with other funding sources to pay for the trains and the other half of the shared infrastructure.

HSR benefit: one-seat access to San Francisco and SFO, without changing trains in San Jose
HSR funding share: $400 million (50% of infrastructure cost)
Environmental Clearance: Complete and shovel-ready. Federal clearance is in hand, and state clearance is a simple matter of Caltrain certifying their EIR. Preliminary engineering well underway.
Timeline: completed by 2016.
Independent Utility: provides faster, better, quieter, less polluting peninsula commute for over 10 million riders a year, and helps "ring the bay" with electric rail transit, relieving highway 101 congestion

NUMBER THREE: Build a mid-line overtake facility. This 6.5 mile section of four-track railroad would expand the rail corridor from 9th Avenue through southern San Mateo, Belmont and San Carlos, ending at Whipple in Redwood City, by adding a new pair of tracks outboard of the existing tracks. This adds just 15 feet on each side of existing grade separations. The overtake would include new grade separations at 25th, 28th and 31st Avenues in San Mateo, and new stations with central island platforms at San Carlos, Hillsdale and Hayward Park. Belmont already has a suitable island platform. The mid-line overtake has already been identified as an important enabler of blended operations, by providing an opportunity for faster trains to pass slower trains.

HSR benefit: 20 minute shorter travel time to San Francisco
HSR funding share: $600 million (100% of the cost)
Environmental Clearance: not started.
Timeline: probably not complete by 2017 spending deadline of federal HSR funding, unless environmental clearance is fast-tracked.
Independent Utility: provides reliable overtaking of Caltrain locals by Caltrain expresses, at a four-platform Hillsdale station where passengers may conveniently transfer between a local and an express that dwell simultaneously on either side of the same island platform (see diagram above). This improves service frequencies and trip times for millions of riders a year.

NUMBER FOUR: Build the downtown extension (DTX). This 1.2-mile tunnel would extend the peninsula rail corridor to the Transbay Transit Center in the heart of San Francisco's business district. This is a very pricey project at $3 billion YOE dollars, and one additional complication is that MTC recently gave it a very low benefit/cost ratio--most likely to protect BART ridership on the Millbrae line, and future plans to ring the bay with BART. (A very frank, adult conversation will soon have to be had regarding unspoken aspirations for BART to ring the bay.)

HSR benefit: Direct access to the jobs-rich San Francisco central business district, with excellent transit connections to the East Bay to maximize the HSR ridership catchment area on the first day of service. Realizes full benefit of $400 million investment of HSR funds already made in the Transbay Center train box.
HSR funding share: $1.5 billion (50% of the cost)
Environmental Clearance: Complete and shovel-ready. Both EIS and EIR are cleared, and preliminary engineering is well underway.
Timeline: could be completed by 2017 spending deadline of federal HSR funding.
Independent Utility: provides commuter access to San Francisco's central business district, where there are more jobs than near all the other Caltrain stations combined. This would most likely result in a system ridership gain of 25% or more, easily 3 million new riders a year.

Some high-speed rail supporters will doubtless see this as a wish list of projects that benefit Caltrain at the expense of true high-speed rail. However, these are exactly the four projects you would start with in order to build a modern standard-gauge electric railroad into the heart of San Francisco, just what is needed so HSR can run directly to San Francisco's business district from day one. Insofar as Caltrain happens to also aspire to become a modern, standard-gauge electric railroad, yes, Caltrain benefits greatly. But let us not forget that the non-HSR funding share to complete these four projects would be well over $2 billion; this is not a shameless and wasteful diversion of HSR funding, but a cost-effective investment in a compatible system that is more than the sum of its parts.

The very high level of "independent utility" for peninsula commuters should not detract from the fact that each of these four projects is a direct enabler of HSR service to San Francisco, effective as soon as the backbone of the system is completed using later tranches of funding. In the meantime, the earliest investment would pay off immediately, in a way that it never could if a raceway to nowhere were built in the Central Valley.

Peninsula Rail Corridor Census

2012-01-06T21:43:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Census Bureau provides an astonishing array of fine-grained statistics on population and jobs along the peninsula rail corridor. When thinking about the future of peninsula rail service, and especially in deciding quantitatively how good a proposed timetable might be, or where stations should be placed, or how HSR should mesh with Caltrain in a 'blended' scenario, the basic consideration should be where people live and work.

Annual ridership counts provide one way of planning your timetable: simply add more service to the stops that get a lot of ridership. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with ridership patterns becoming distorted by the timetable, as observed with the Baby Bullet Effect. Teasing apart the timetable-induced distortion from the underlying (and often untapped) ridership demand is impossible, so it is necessary to go back to the raw population and jobs data to build the full picture. That is where the census really delivers.

Where People Live

Figure 1

The 2010 census provides the most recent snapshot of the population distribution on the peninsula, on a block-by-block basis that includes over 45,000 locations in the three Caltrain counties. By tallying up how many people live within 1/4, 1/2, 1 and 2 miles of each Caltrain station location, you can build Figure 1. This chart reveals where the population is densely concentrated around stations (e.g. San Mateo), or sprawled out (e.g. Sunnyvale).

Observations on the population numbers:

The new Oakdale station long proposed by San Francisco (with little support from Caltrain) could tap into more residential population than just about any other stop along the peninsula, or even 22nd Street.
The population density doesn't suddenly drop off at the southern end of the Caltrain-owned right of way in San Jose, where service suddenly drops off. There are large concentrations of under-served population within a mile of the Tamien and Capitol stops, accounting for more than 3 times as many people as live within a mile of the San Jose Diridon station.
A stop like Broadway (Burlingame) with zero weekday rail service has more people living near it than Millbrae, site of the all-important BART intermodal station. Other stations with poor Caltrain service (San Antonio, Cal Ave, San Bruno, Burlingame, Belmont, Santa Clara) have more people living nearby than stops with the best service, such as Palo Alto.

Figure 2

To assign to each station location a single weighting factor that quantifies that station's accessibility for nearby residents, regardless of distance, one can sum up each person divided by the square of how far away they live. This inverse-square relationship is empirical, but captures the fact that people who live far away from a station are less likely to use it; its use in ridership modeling is not unprecedented. A 1/r law would fall off too slowly, with the same number of people using the station from 1/2 mile away as 2 miles away (assuming constant population density). A 1/r cubed law would fall off too quickly, with only 1/16th as many riders from 2 miles away as from 1/2 mile away. As it turns out, the precise value of the exponent--if not exactly two--doesn't really drive the relative weights that strongly. Only one small tweak has been applied to prevent people who live very close to a station from skewing the results: anyone living closer than 1/4 mile is considered 1/4 mile away. The resulting inverse-square population weights for each station location are shown in Figure 2.

Where People Work

Figure 3

The Census Bureau publishes extensive statistics on local employment dynamics, providing block-by-block data on the number and distribution of jobs, pay levels, and industries. The latest data set as of this writing is from 2009 (based on geographical data from the 2000 census covering over 32,000 locations in the three Caltrain counties). The analysis presented here is based on raw data files, but the data can also be analyzed interactively using the Census Bureau's On The Map application. Figure 3 shows how many jobs are located within 1/4, 1/2, 1 and 2 miles of each Caltrain station location. Only the jobs worth more than $40k a year are shown, since lower-income jobs are less likely to require commuting (only about 15% of Caltrain riders earn less than $40k, and the average household income of a weekday peak Caltrain rider is over $100k).

Observations on the jobs numbers:

Not so surprisingly, there is a concentration of jobs in the vicinity of the future Transbay Transit Center, adjacent to the financial district. What is more surprising is just how massive that concentration is: Transbay has more jobs within a half-mile radius (over 100,000) than all the other Caltrain stations combined, from 4th & King all the way down to Gilroy!
Job sprawl shows up in Santa Clara and southern Palo Alto (and most of Silicon Valley, really) in the form of few jobs near stations but many jobs within a mile or two. Mountain View, despite its status as a major Baby Bullet stop, and home of Google, is not a particularly large job center.

Figure 4

Again, assigning to each station a weighting factor that quantifies that station's accessibility to nearby jobs, we apply the same inverse square relationship to obtain the job weights for each station location shown in Figure 4. Note that Transbay goes way off the chart.

The Ridership Potential Matrix

Since 86% of riders during the weekday peak are commuters, the distribution of population and jobs can be used to construct a relative weight for the ridership that could potentially be generated between any given origin and destination (O&D) pair. This is the ridership potential matrix. The eventual purpose of this matrix is to help derive a single figure of merit for timetables, on an apples-to-apples basis, for how much of the potential ridership is tapped based on the service metrics for each O&D pair. When considering any given timetable, this weighting scheme ensures that O&D pairs that have a lot of population and jobs at each end (such as 4th & King and Palo Alto) are given more importance compared to O&D pairs with lower population and fewer jobs (such as Atherton and Bayshore).

It is important to note that this ridership potential matrix is completely independent of how each O&D pair is connected by rail service; it holds true for any timetable. It is solely a product of census data and the geographic location of each station. A timetable must then be designed to unlock the maximum potential ridership.

The ridership potential matrix works like this: take for example station 1 and station 2, with respective population and job weights P1, P2, J1 and J2. The weight for morning peak trips from origin 1 to destination 2 is P1*J2 (for people living near station 1 and working near station 2). Conversely, the weight for morning peak trips from origin 2 to destination 1 is P2*J1 (for people living near station 2 and working near station 1). When you multiply all the population weights from Figure 2 by all the job weights from Figure 4, you get a basic ridership potential matrix. But there's a bit more to it than just people and jobs.

Distance Considerations

Regardless of where people live and work, there are upper and lower limits to how far they will typically commute by rail. Extremely short trips are less likely because of the overhead of access and egress to and from the station, at each end of the journey. Conversely, extremely long trips are less likely because of their sheer duration; regional commute patterns are not just a factor of train service considered in isolation, but also driving times. That's why we will make the assumption that the distance distribution of commutes, generally speaking, is independent of the quality of train service--and that no foreseeable rail service pattern could significantly alter it. Good service might lead to greater market share for rail, but the underlying distance distribution will be assumed not to budge. This allows us to apply a (timetable-independent) distance distribution to the ridership potential matrix.

Figure 5

Caltrain ridership surveys show that the average trip length on the peninsula rail corridor during the weekday peak is about 25 miles. The distance weighting function will be modeled as a Rayleigh distribution with a value of 0 at 0 miles and a peak of 1 at 25 miles-- for no particular statistical reason other than it ends up looking about right, as shown in Figure 5.

Each element of the ridership potential matrix is now the product of three factors: the distance weight based on the distance between origin and destination; the population weight at the origin station; and the job weight at the destination station. This simple formulation yields the morning peak values shown in Figure 6 as a bubble graph (numerical values are available as a tab-delimited text file). The evening peak is described by the transpose of the matrix, i.e. origin and destination switch places. The distance-weighted ridership potential matrix is now ready for use in the quantitative analysis of past, present and future timetables, a topic that will be covered in upcoming posts revisiting the topic of service metrics.

Figure 6

Figure 8

Figure 7

In the meantime, we can explore other interesting aspects of the ridership potential matrix. For example, summing the nth row together with the nth column of the matrix allows us to build a single weighting factor for the potential ridership at each stop including both the morning and evening peaks, i.e. a measure of the ridership distribution that could exist if it were tapped with excellent service, shown in Figure 7. These weights can then be compared to the actual Caltrain ridership realized in 2011, yielding the scatter plot in Figure 8. This comparison provides another more fundamental way (much better than historical ridership patterns) to visualize which groupings of Caltrain stops are under-served, and is amazingly accurate considering that it was constructed without ever looking at a timetable.

Key conclusions:

Access to Transbay would provide a step-change improvement in Caltrain service, with probable ridership gains of more than 25%. Terminating any weekday peak train at 4th & King, as is inexplicably planned by Caltrain, is a huge mistake. Agency turf battles with BART and the CHSRA regarding whether or how to pay for the downtown extension tunnel, and how to share platforms at Transbay, must be fought and won.
Underlying ridership demand is not accurately reflected by realized ridership, which suffers from severe timetable distortion. Future service planning, and in particular the timetables assumed for the ongoing 'blended' operations analysis, must be based less on realized ridership and more on fresh census data--even if not using the simplified approach described here.
For the same reason that every Caltrain should serve Transbay (the huge concentration of jobs in San Francisco), HSR service that does not provide a one-seat ride into Transbay is a non-starter.

The Baby Bullet Effect

2011-12-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

For many years prior to 2004, including throughout the dot-com boom, Caltrain operated ~~an all-stops~~ a timetable with less stop-skipping (see February 2000 example) that fairly well revealed the underlying ridership demand at each station. In 2004, that all changed with the advent of the Baby Bullet. While the Bullet was a marketing triumph and remains a successful source of ridership and revenue, there was an under-reported flip-side to this new service: many small (and not-so-small) stations lost service.

Caltrain publishes annual ridership counts for each station, which can be distilled into a single table of historical counts of weekday boardings for each station reaching all the way back to 1992 (download 55kB Excel spreadsheet). This data reveals interesting patterns.

The share of ridership at each station, which was fairly stable over several years leading up to the 2004 launch of the Baby Bullet, settled into a new pattern that has shown itself to be fairly stable in the years since 2004. The change in each station's share is shown in the figure at right (also available as a 141kB PDF file), where 100% represents each station's average ridership share over the period 1999 - 2003, or the initial size of its slice of the ridership pie back in the pre-bullet days. Following 2004, some slices got bigger, while other slices got smaller. The entire pie also got a bit bigger, although that is not shown in this figure of the proportional trends for each station; ridership has only recently exceeded the 2001 peak. The Baby Bullet Effect has divided stations into two groups: winners and losers. Most of the losers were small and could justifiably be dispensed with. Some were not, and are under-served to this day:

California Avenue in Palo Alto, 1376 weekday boardings in 2001, down to just 895 at last count
Lawrence in Santa Clara, 1309 weekday boardings in 2001, down to just 531 in 2011
Santa Clara, 1124 weekday boardings in 2001, down to just 656 in 2011
Burlingame, 985 weekday boardings in 2001, down to just 675 in 2011
Belmont, 892 weekday boardings in 2001, down to just 369 in 2011
San Bruno, 844 weekday boardings in 2001, down to just 403 in 2011

All of these places have more residents and jobs than implied by today's poor ridership, and are consistently under-served by Caltrain.

Planning for the Future

The future timetable plans revealed so far by Caltrain, including their notional electrification timetable and the timetables evaluated in the blended operations analysis, consist of an all-skip-stop service pattern as illustrated at left which "bakes in" the ridership pie slices as they exist today. While the Baby Bullet is slated to be discontinued, its negative impact will live on at the places listed above, which will continue to be served by only two trains per hour (out of six). Stakeholders at those stations should not allow this to happen.

As they plan their future operational concept, it is important that Caltrain base their stopping pattern on raw population and jobs data and not on the highly distorted ridership patterns induced by the Baby Bullet Effect.

Holiday Required Reading

2011-12-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

HSR Done Right

Sometimes, it's useful to look beyond the peninsula for context on what works best locally. Here's a graphic from Richard Tolmach (in the latest TRAC Newsletter) that pretty much says everything that needs to be said about the California High Speed Rail Project.

As can be observed, the route that Tolmach and other organizations (including the plaintiffs in the Atherton lawsuits) have been advocating for years is very different from the route that the CHSRA is stubbornly advancing through the environmental clearance process. In the Bay Area, the notable departure from the official plan is that HSR would branch off from the peninsula rail corridor at Redwood City, head over a new Dumbarton crossing, and zoom across Altamont Pass along the SETEC Alignment.

What does this have to do with anything peninsular? Plenty, as it turns out. Read on.

Caltrain's Blended Analysis

Caltrain recently published its analysis of the "blended" proposal, where Caltrain and HSR would share the peninsula rail corridor using less ambitious and expansive infrastructure than the four-track viaducts originally envisioned by the CHSRA. This analysis concludes that it's feasible to run mixed Caltrain / HSR operations, although Caltrain service would be bunched up (with irregular skip-stop service patterns limited to six trains per hour) and HSR would need to slow down (about 40 minutes, rather than the planned 30 for SJ-SF) and be limited to 4 trains per hour. On page 46, the document mentions that

The increased two-trackshared use corridor distance from Whipple Avenue to San Jose Diridon, makes itvery difficult for a 110 mph train to leave San Jose without encountering delay priorto reaching the overtake, and for a southbound HSR train to keep from beingdelayed by the Caltrain train it follows after the overtake.

Translation: sharing tracks should be done for the bare minimum distance, and certainly not 50 miles from SF to SJ. Branching HSR off the corridor in Redwood City is a scenario that was NOT analyzed because it runs against Pacheco orthodoxy. There is little doubt that it would make for an operationally superior solution (as computed by our free service pattern generator) with more Caltrain service, more Caltrain expresses, better transfer opportunities, easy-to-memorize clockface service patterns, and 125 mph HSR speeds... better in every way than the best scenarios LTK could come up with given the flawed assumptions of the study.

Speaking of better service planning...

The Swiss Take On California

Switzerland arguably has the most advanced, integrated and optimized rail service planning in the world. The Swiss rail operations consultancy SMA+Partners supported a doctoral thesis analyzing the California rail network (including HSR) from an operations perspective.

Ulrich Leister's thesis (see executive summary) "applies a lean and rational approach to planning that is network and schedule-based. A precise computer model is used to test different ideas such as infrastructure layouts or train types. Gradually, the schedule is refined and optimized until the required rolling stock and the minimal amount of infrastructure needed to operate all the scheduled trains is determined."

This operations-first approach will likely come as a breath of fresh air to readers bewildered by our local experts' cost-maximizing ways. A full copy of the thesis will be linked here as soon as it is made available. Note in the network diagram at left that the Altamont route is identified as operationally superior, which will come as a surprise to CHSRA consultants who stubbornly insist Pacheco is the only way to go.

The Japanese Take On California

About a year ago, the East Japan Railway Company gave the CHSRA a peer review of their operations and maintenance approach. Section 2.1.2.6 of this document addresses mixed service with other rail carriers. It is reproduced in full below, with links added to relevant articles that echo the exact same points on this blog.

Based on JR East's experience of operating conventional train and Shinkansen train on the same track, following three aspects should be carefully considered.

First, the timetable should be carefully planned. The shared operation segment is likely to be the bottleneck of the high speed train timetable since delay in the conventional line will affect the entire high speed trains network. Therefore, if transport capacity is required, 'parallel' timetable (that is, High Speed Train and conventional train operate at the same speed) or increase the capacity of the commuter trains and reduce the frequency will be the solution. To establish a more flexible timetable, additional facilities will be required both in high speed train and the conventional lines. For example, siding tracks are required in stations in this segment, commuter train vehicles with good acceleration should be implemented, speed restrictions on curves should be reduced, more signals should be allocated, etc.

Second, rolling stock should be taken account. If the High Speed Train vehicle width is different from that of conventional trains, platforms must be trimmed, and/or boarding steps must be installed either on the high speed train or on the commuter train. These boarding steps may exceed the loading gauge at some areas, so they should be stowed away while the train is running. The difference in height of the doors of the rolling stock should also be taken into consideration.Finally, compatibility of Automatic Train Control system for high speed train and conventional train should be considered. Since the safety equipment is indispensable for either train, multiple safety equipments must be installed on the rolling stock, and radio communication system must also be shared. These must be switched at the border station. Preventing malfunction both on the wayside and on-board is also important.

All this good advice has clearly fallen on deaf ears. For example, platform interface coordination is not even remotely on Caltrain's radar, and the HSR project is actively working against it.

ERTMS Coming To California

2011-11-18T19:34:00.001-08:00

The CHSRA recently added to its collection of technical memos a White Paper on train control technology for California's high-speed rail system. The selected train control system will likely be deployed on the peninsula rail corridor later this decade or in the early 2020's, regardless of what "solution" Caltrain may pursue in the interim. The CHSRA's experts looked far and wide for the best technical solution, and as longtime readers of this blog may have guessed, they conclude as follows:

The sole technology that is fully compliant with all of the CHSRA project and technical requirements is the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) European Train Control System (ETCS) Level 2 with Global System for Mobile Communications – Railway (GSM-R). ERTMS is service-proven and its attributes are highly applicable to CHSTP automatic train control (...)

The biggest technical obstacle for importing ERTMS to the U.S. is the lack of available radio frequency spectrum. The White Paper delves into great detail about possible ways to overcome this, making several important policy statements along the way:

The choice of train control technologies will be limited to solutions that have been successfully demonstrated at high speeds for a period of at least 5 years, to minimize implementation risk and enable a strong safety case to be made to the FRA.
The CHSRA requires that it not be locked into a single source for procurement, bidding, and supply. Interoperable, interchangeable, open standard and multi-vendor solutions are required and will provide the CHSRA with several sources of supply for extensions, upgrades, and maintenance spare parts in the present and future, thereby lowering risk and cost. (Are you listening, Caltrain?)
Other alternatives to ERTMS are not technically compliant, not compliant with the project requirements, or present too much risk to implementation.

As it happens, the coveted ERTMS / ETCS Level 2 is transparently compatible with ERTMS / ETCS Level 1, which the White Paper describes as follows:

ETCS level 1 is designed as an add-on to or as an overlay on a conventional line alreadyequipped with wayside signals, and possibly as a fallback solution from ETCS level 2.Communication from the track to the train is ensured by dedicated balises located on thetrackside adjacent to the wayside signals at required intervals, and connected to thenearby interlocking and/or wayside signals.. The balises have a data connection to theATC equipment which provides movement authorities for transfer to the train. Receivingthe movement authority through balises, the ETCS onboard equipment automaticallycalculates and indicates to the train engineer maximum permitted speeds of the trainand the next braking points if needed, taking into account the train brakingcharacteristics and the track description data. This information is displayed to the trainengineer through a dedicated screen in the cabin. The speed of the train is continuouslysupervised by the ETCS onboard equipment.

This is of course precisely the same thing as CBOSS, which Caltrain and their vendor Parsons Transportation Group are now kludging together for us for a hefty wheel-reinvention fee.

We've already seen Caltrain work with FRA bureaucrats to avoid re-inventing a double-deck EMU train. Why can't they also work with CHSRA, FRA and FCC bureaucrats to avoid re-inventing a train control system? The CHSRA is already putting together a plan for scaling the regulatory mountain, with more detail on radio frequency spectrum acquisition provided in TM 300.03 EMT Radio Frequency (RF) Spectrum Acquisition Strategy.

It's no longer just a blogger saying it (bloggers don't know what they're talking about): the high-speed rail project is now firmly on the record as preferring ERTMS as the sole solution, and is already working with government and private entities to obtain the necessary radio spectrum to deploy GSM-R in California. ERTMS is the best solution for the peninsula, because it would allow high-speed trains to use Caltrain tracks with no special equipment or modifications. As a side benefit, it would also allow Caltrain to meet their PTC requirement at minimal cost and risk.

ERTMS is coming. Your move, Caltrain.

Business Plan Impressions

2011-11-12T16:25:00.000-08:00

The CHSRA's Draft 2012 Business Plan is out. First impressions:

Sticker Shock. In apples-to-apples 2010 dollars, the cost has soared from $4.7 billion (2008 Business Plan) to $5.4 billion (2009 Business Plan) to a jaw-dropping $13.6 billion (2012 Business Plan). And that's just the start. The $13.6 billion estimate is for Option A from the Alternatives Analysis, which is the all-viaduct-and-no-tunnel option. Community demands for trenches and tunnels will only bid up the price from there. Toss in the San Francisco DTX tunnel and convert to YOE dollars, and the cost goes right off the charts. Amazingly, the business plan does not actually specify how the new peninsula costs break down. The changes in each sub-total have to be backed out from available information, as shown below from 2009 to 2012:

Until Hell Freezes Over. Under the phased implementation plan described in the Business Plan, the peninsula rail corridor might not get improved until the late 2020's, so any hope that Caltrain had to get HSR money for capital projects, blended or not, is pretty much on hold for a long, long time. A solid plan B will be required for Caltrain, without relying on the HSR tooth fairy.

Three Things: Concrete, Concrete, and Concrete. The most significant cost increases, on the peninsula and statewide, are due to a breathtaking increase in the scope of concrete-pouring. The $13.6 billion peninsula figure includes $3.9 billion for viaducts, $3.1 billion for tunnels, about $2 billion for buildings and stations, and nearly a billion for earthwork and retaining walls (the dreaded berms). Oh, and by the way, the business plan was prepared based on cost estimates from civil engineering firms, firms that get to define the scope of the project on which they may later bid.

Atherton Real Estate is Cheap. The feared eminent domain battles for whatever corridor expansion might be planned barely show up in the bottom line, with a mere $830 million or six percent of the peninsula budget allocated to Right of Way acquisition.

The Astronomical Cost of Accommodating Caltrain. While the current paradigm may be that HSR would operate in the Caltrain corridor, the business plan cost numbers (and especially the must-read cost increase numbers) suggest quite the opposite, with Caltrain cast in the role of the expensive interloper. There are surprisingly high cost numbers built into the 2012 Business Plan to build over/under/next to Caltrain even while it continues operating. For example:

$2.3 billion (2010$) of additional viaduct construction expenses, "associated with staged construction, loss of efficiency, and allowance for force account and premium pay - all to account for continuous support of rail operations in the corridor."
$1.9 billion (2010$) for a single-track tunnel to squeeze four tracks through Millbrae between neighborhoods, planned developments, and BART, in an area where "soils are very poor"-- a tunnel that would have no reason to be built without Caltrain. The cost of this tunnel was previously decried at $0.5 billion, but this is something else entirely: the single-track tunnel, built in the same "very poor" soils as the triple-track Millbrae BART tunnel, would cost significantly more than the entire BART to SFO extension project.
$0.75 billion (2010$) to build a duplicate set of tunnels along the Bayshore Cutoff into San Francisco-- multiple tunnels that would have even less reason to be built without Caltrain.

You can see the planets slowly starting to line up: in due course, somebody, somewhere is bound to point out, in the upcoming "Value Engineering" phase, that a $5+ billion premium to keep Caltrain operating is far more expensive than simply extending BART down the peninsula from Millbrae to Santa Clara to ring the Bay.

That a peninsula BART extension would be suggested as a cost-saving measure is flabbergasting indeed, but this Business Plan fairly well guarantees it.

Blended Like Oil and Water

2011-10-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Caltrain-HSR blended proposal, initiated by State Senator Simitian, Congresswoman Eshoo and Assemblymember Gordon to break an impending political impasse on the peninsula rail corridor, has now been evaluated by the HSR Authority's consultants.

Their version of it, submitted in a recent report to the legislature, would cost an astonishing $5.3 billion, even more than the $4.2 billion that the entire peninsula section was estimated to cost back in 2008. This stunning price tag could have several possible explanations:

a repudiation of the blended approach, accomplished by deliberately inflating the budget.
an effort to pour the largest possible amount of concrete, regardless of actual operational benefit.
sheer engineering incompetence and complete disregard for the new fiscal reality.

A Closer Look At Costs

While the detailed breakdown of that project budget is not provided, it's not too hard to back it out based on what is described. Here's how it might approximately add up, including project management and contingency costs:

$0.3 billion to build grade separations at 25th, 28th and 31st Avenues in San Mateo, and to expand the corridor to four tracks from the southern border of San Mateo up to the vicinity of 9th Ave (milepost 18.3), with new four-track stations built at Hillsdale and Hayward Park
$0.3 billion to expand the existing grade separations in Belmont and San Carlos to four tracks. This would include new stations built at San Carlos (south of the current location) and Belmont.
$1.0 billion to fully grade-separate the rail corridor through Redwood City, with expansion to four tracks and an elevated station. New grade separations would be created at six locations: Whipple, Brewster, Broadway, Maple, Main, and Chestnut. The new four-track section would tie in to the existing four-track section at Redwood Junction. Should the Redwood City grade separations be built below grade, costs would be even higher.
$0.5 billion to burrow a single-track tunnel under the Millbrae station to "save" the existing Caltrain / BART station from complete demolition. As described in the Alternatives Analysis, the station itself would be re-arranged to accommodate a segregated HSR platform at grade and the southbound Caltrain platform underground. The tunnel approach would require two new grade separations at Center St. and Santa Paula.
$1.0 billion to build a six-mile (yes, six miles!) 60-foot tall elevated viaduct from Lawrence Expressway (milepost 40.9) all the way into the upper level of a massive new elevated HSR station complex in San Jose.
$0.2 billion to demolish existing overpass grade separations at De La Cruz (Santa Clara) and Hedding (San Jose), to be replaced with underpasses to make way for the six-mile viaduct.
$1.5 billion to electrify the entire corridor, an estimate based on Caltrain's latest electrification budget but discounting the cost of Caltrain's new electric train fleet.
$0.3 billion for positive train control and technical integration with the HSR system's train control system, which will differ from the PTC solution adopted by Caltrain.
$0.2 billion for reconfigured station facilities at San Francisco and San Jose.

TOTAL: $5.3 billion

All of these individual investments must be examined in the context of their operational utility, i.e. the value they add to creating a blended Caltrain / HSR rail corridor that is as flexible and efficient as possible and best meets the service expectation of rail passengers. And on that basis, most of the above list falls woefully short.

Let's Do Some Value Engineering

The six-mile (yes, six miles!) 60-foot tall viaduct to approach San Jose adds little operational value compared to cheaper alternatives such as laying additional track at grade from CP Coast (milepost 44.6) into San Jose. The corridor is mostly 100 feet wide in this area, so the need for a viaduct--let alone a six-mile long viaduct that requires demolishing some perfectly fine grade separations that already exist--is highly questionable. It is almost an insult to Simitian et al., who specifically requested that aerial structures be minimized. This viaduct is the outcome of lazy engineering, the sort that avoids inter-agency coordination issues by using megatons of concrete to build over Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak, VTA, BART, UPRR, Caltrans, and everybody else. Bottom line: with some hard negotiations and minimal takes of a few slivers of industrial property, four tracks can be built at grade all the way into Diridon Station. Savings: - $1.1 billion
A four-track mid-peninsula overtake facility is the key enabler of a blended solution. However, the bulk of the cost of this mid-line overtake is a massive Redwood City grade separation project that would eliminate one of the clusters of grade crossings on the peninsula rail corridor. Is it truly necessary to do so right away in the first phase of the blended project? Consider these two options:
1. The CHSRA's proposed overtake facility: 9 miles long with 5 stations (potentially including the HSR stop at Redwood City, which does not help with overtaking)
2. A somewhat shorter overtake facility: 6.5 miles long ending at Whipple Ave (milepost 24.8) with 4 stations.
Option 2, while only 3/4 as long, entirely avoids the need to grade-separate an expanded four-track corridor clear through downtown Redwood City. It also delays a fight against the city's inevitable demands to burrow the rail corridor inside an astronomically expensive tunnel. The shorter overtake might make operations slightly less flexible and robust, but at the very worst, every Caltrain could be held or slowed for just two minutes to make up for that. Bottom line: with minor timetable adjustments, the lion's share of the cost of the mid-line overtake can be avoided. Savings: - $1.0 billion
The half-billion tunnel in Millbrae is the wrong answer to the question of how to fit four Caltrain / HSR tracks through this station. The entire Millbrae complex, including 3000-car parking garage, cost about $100 million in today's dollars. Portions of it can be torn down and reconfigured with four tracks at grade for far less than that sum. Bottom line: whatever the engineering constraints, you simply don't build a $500 million tunnel to "save" a $100 million station--at worst, you tear it down and start over. Savings: - $0.4 billion
The need to integrate Caltrain's CBOSS train control system with the HSR train control system will drive unnecessary costs, most likely resulting in what is known as "dual fitment" of train-borne signaling equipment. Each high-speed train, California-wide, would need to be fitted with CBOSS hardware and software, with the appropriate interfaces to allow a seamless change-over when entering or leaving exclusive HSR tracks. This is not a trivial expense, since safety-critical signaling computers approach the cost of aircraft avionics. Bottom line: deploy ERTMS, not CBOSS. Savings: - $0.2 billion

TOTAL SAVINGS: $2.7 billion

The very bottom line is this: we can get 95% of the bang for 50% of the buck. Somebody needs to inject a little bit of sanity into the planning process if a blended solution is ever going to be feasible, if for no other reason that in these times, affordability determines feasibility. That's why the CHSRA's proposal for the blended system is a disgrace, larded as it is with operationally dubious viaducts, tunnels, bridges and underpasses; in short, a project dreamed up by civil engineers writing their own checks.

Meanwhile, in Rio...

2011-10-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

It finally happened.

Last Thursday, Caltrain's board authorized the award of the first phase of a $138,135,673 contract to Parsons Transportation Group to design, procure and install the Caltrain-specified CBOSS train control system (see staff presentation). This Parsons contract forms the lion's share of a total project budget variously reported as $231 million to $251 million, or a whopping $5 million per route-mile. According to a project schedule, the final acceptance of the system is planned for February of 2016 (52 months from now), but that assumed contract award at the May board meeting (5 months ago).

Viewed in the framework of the U.S. transportation industrial complex, where public agencies such as Caltrain transfer huge sums of taxpayer dollars to large private corporations that thrive on custom-engineering, re-engineering and over-engineering everything, this contract is business as usual, and Caltrain will probably end up, years late and millions over budget, with a partially functional PTC system. That sets the stage for more years and millions spent to make it work with high-speed rail.

Meanwhile, in Rio...

Meet SuperVia, a commuter rail operator in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. SuperVia is one busy system, even busier than BART. Here's a quick comparison between Caltrain and SuperVia:

	Caltrain	SuperVia
Route Miles	77	140
Routes	1	5
Trains	about 25	about 160
Stations	31	89
Weekday Ridership	~45,000	~540,000

Like Caltrain, SuperVia is modernizing. Among other improvements, SuperVia is installing a sophisticated positive train control system to enforce speed limits, prevent collisions, and reduce the headways between trains. Unlike Caltrain, SuperVia chose to adapt their requirements to what suppliers already had on the shelf, and is procuring an ERTMS Level 1 overlay system from Bombardier Transportation through a contract worth 125 million Real, or about US $70 million. (Note that the unknown scope of this contract makes it difficult to compare directly to CBOSS; for example, Bombardier's contract is unlikely to include the train-borne components.) ERTMS, to remind everyone, is a train control standard that is quickly catching on worldwide, except here in the protected U.S. signaling market.

ERTMS Level 1 is exactly the sort of standardized train control system that would be transparently compatible with high-speed rail, which will most likely operate on its own dedicated high-speed trackage using ERTMS Level 2, a much more sophisticated version of the standard that does away with wayside signals.

The kicker? Bombardier promises to put this new overlay signaling system into service on SuperVia's various lines from November 2012 to July 2013. Here's how that stacks up against Caltrain's CBOSS:

	Caltrain CBOSS	SuperVia ERTMS
Contract award	October 2011	May 2011
Initial service entry	October 2015	November 2012
Final delivery	February 2016	July 2013
Time from award to initial service	48 months	18 months
Time from award to final delivery	52 months	26 months

It's too late now to do anything about CBOSS, but it sure will be interesting to see what PTG and Bombardier will deliver for each respective rail system. Can PTG and Caltrain come up with an ersatz-ERTMS by 2015 for the promised sum?

Port Scores Pork

2011-09-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Port of San Francisco recently received $3 million from the FRA to upgrade the 1-mile Quint Street lead track that connects the port to the peninsula rail corridor. The government's press release states (with emphasis added) :

Port of San Francisco, California – Quint Street Yard Track and Signal Improvements – $2,970,000 to improve an approximately one mile-long spur connecting a Caltrain mainline track to the San Francisco Rail Yard. The mainline is under consideration for use as part of the California high-speed rail project, and the current condition of the spur track limits the frequency, weight and length of trains that can use the track, causing delays. The improvements will allow freight trains to operate at higher speeds and clear the mainline more quickly, significantly reducing delays to Caltrain commuter trains and future high-speed rail trains.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Caltrain has been granted a waiver of compliance from certain FRA crashworthiness regulations that enables the operation of lightweight electric rolling stock from European manufacturers. The same waiver would presumably be extended to any high-speed trains that might use the peninsula rail corridor. The FRA's waiver decision letter states (with emphasis added) :

JPB additionally explains that the Caltrain 2025 program will temporally separate freight and passenger operations between San Francisco and Santa Clara, CA (Mileposts 0.2 to 44.6). Temporal separation between these mileposts will be achieved by limiting freight movements to the exclusive freight period hours of midnight - 5 a.m.

That's right, temporal separation means that freight trains will not operate in the same hours as passenger trains, making the need to "clear the mainline more quickly, significantly reducing delays to Caltrain commuter trains and future high-speed rail trains" nothing more than a specious pretext. Nice play for $3 million, nonetheless!

Temporal separation, by the way, is the best way to avoid the expenditure of millions upon millions of dollars to make Caltrain's positive train control system compatible with Union Pacific freight PTC (and thus, incompatible with the HSR train control system).

Development Oriented Transit, Again

2011-09-04T17:24:00.000-07:00

Protecting the peninsula rail corridor right of way from crowding or outright encroachment, whether by private developers or other agencies, has evidently not been a high priority for Caltrain. Examples abound: a movie theater built right next to the tracks in San Mateo, a "Transit Village" planned right next to the corridor in San Carlos, a Millbrae station that constricts the number of tracks. All of these examples complicate the task of outfitting the corridor for high-speed rail service, and may add tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of doing so.

Here we go again!

Depot Circle, a large residential/commercial development authorized by Redwood City's recently updated Downtown Precise Plan, threatens to encroach on a vital piece of station real estate in Redwood City. The city recently released a Request for Qualifications that outlines the project and describes its role as a future focal point for Redwood City's downtown.

Here's the problem: the railroad right of way is only 60 feet wide in this area, but the station is nearly certain to be expanded to four tracks with two island platforms to accommodate the following likely operational scenarios:

the mid-peninsula high-speed rail stop, since neither Palo Alto nor Mountain View seem likely to welcome a station, and also because Redwood City has the best freeway access of all three corridor locations under consideration;
Dumbarton commuter service, long planned but unlikely to be left with sufficient track capacity to continue beyond Redwood City under a constrained "blended" Caltrain + HSR plan--thus forcing passengers to transfer at Redwood City, hopefully across a common platform;
a mid-line overtake location, where Caltrain express trains could exchange passengers with Caltrain local trains, across a common platform. One of the most promising mid-line overtake scenarios now being considered under Caltrain's corridor capacity analysis assumes that four tracks would be built right through the Redwood City station.

The Depot Circle RFQ asks prospective developers to address the rail corridor issue only tangentially, without offering specific design constraints: "Describe your strategy for dealing with the potential widening of the Caltrain railroad to accommodate High Speed Rail. In particular, explain how far, if at all, would you set the project structures from the current railroad, and any other site design strategies that might be employed to minimize effects of a potential future widening of the railroad." What are developers supposed to know about railroads?

Here are some specific constraints, which are based on detailed HSR technical requirements and Caltrain engineering standards:

A four-track elevated station with two island platforms will be at least 125 feet wide (if built as narrow as possible), more than 200 feet wide (if built to the CHSRA's elephantine station design standards), and over a quarter mile long.
A four-track underground station, however unlikely to be built because of the astronomical price tag, would need even more space to accommodate temporary shoo-fly tracks during construction (30 feet), space outboard of the trench walls for construction equipment movement (15-20 feet each side), as well as clearance for trench wall tie-backs that can't interfere with nearby building foundations.
Even if the station were moved north or south from its current location, away from Depot Circle, the tracks would still need to spread apart gradually (in conformance with the track alignment standards) and would occupy a wide swath well before and after the station itself.

The upshot of all this: including reasonable building setback clearances, a prospective developer should make an allowance of at least 150 feet for the future expansion of the rail corridor. A 150-foot corridor is shown overlaid on the Depot Circle parcel map in the graphic at left (see also overlay on original map, 1.1 MB PDF), and takes a significant bite out of the parcels now offered for development--including the project's namesake traffic circle.

If Redwood City wants to become what Palo Alto could have been, it's time for the city, Caltrain, and developers to make the station itself the focus of downtown, provide it with enough land, and build it to be as architecturally striking as the elevated Amsterdam Bijlmer Arena station. If there isn't enough vision to do that, please just avoid hemming in the rail corridor.

CBOSS vs. Metrolink PTC

2011-08-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

UPDATE 8/22 - There are a couple of additional points that require clarification.

(1) It is claimed that Caltrain's CBOSS budget is so high because it is a turn-key system provided entirely by the vendor, whereas Metrolink's PTC is being done partly in-house. But Metrolink's in-house PTC costs are included in the $202 million estimate (see page 7: $77M Metrolink, $90M vendor, $30M contingency). This does not make the comparison any more favorable to Caltrain.

(2) It is claimed that the standards for high-speed rail PTC are immature. Not so; the requirements are found in pages 723 to 825 of the HSR system requirements report (as of August 2010) as well as in HSR technical memoranda TM-3.3.1 ATC System Concept and others in the 3.3.x series. The kicker (as far as Caltrain is concerned) is that those documents clearly state that "the technology must already exist as part of an operating system with proven experience worldwide on at least one high speed passenger railway"... in other words, CBOSS need not apply, and ERTMS (now being installed by sensible commuter rail operators in places like Rio de Janeiro and Auckland) is most welcome.

ORIGINAL POST - The FRA's push to impose positive train control on all U.S. passenger railroads was triggered by the 2008 Chatsworth collision on Metrolink, in which 25 people died and 135 were injured. Not surprisingly, Metrolink's effort to meet the FRA's December 2015 deadline for PTC implementation is in the national spotlight. If a PTC success story was ever needed, it would surely have to be in Los Angeles.

Metrolink is very much like Caltrain, in that it operates diesel-powered double-decker commuter trains that occasionally intermingle with freight trains. Weekday ridership is similar at about 40,000 trips. Being in the same state, Metrolink's regulatory environment is the same as Caltrain's. One struggles to think of "unique local conditions" that might make Caltrain materially different from Metrolink.

According to Metrolink's funding plan for the project, the total budget for Metrolink's PTC system is $202 million, an amount now fully funded. Not to be outdone, Metrolink plans to complete the system a year before the federal deadline.

Here is a summary comparison table of Caltrain and Metrolink.

	Metrolink	Caltrain
System Route Miles	512	77
Fleet Size (Locomotives + Cab Cars)	112	65
Weekday Ridership	~41,000	~41,000
PTC Total Budget	$202 million	$250 million
PTC Planned Completion	end 2014	end 2015
PTC Funding Status	$202M (100%)	<$100M (<40%)
PTC Interoperable with Freight	yes	yes

You might think that for the quarter-billion dollar price tag of CBOSS (Caltrain's PTC project), one would get something extra, like future-proof compatibility with high-speed rail. But alas, no. At a recent Friends of Caltrain meeting, deputy CEO Chuck Harvey confirmed that due to schedule pressure, CBOSS development would forge ahead without any regard to high-speed rail, and that HSR would have to "pay to play," with a possible requirement of "dual fitment," i.e. two separate PTC installations on-board each high-speed train in all of California. Never mind that the statewide HSR fleet would dwarf Caltrain's.

So, if HSR compatibility is not on the agenda, then what makes Caltrain any different than Metrolink? Why is CBOSS going to cost millions more than a PTC system for six times the route length and nearly twice the fleet size, to be delivered a year earlier? Why not realize economies of scale and pattern Caltrain's PTC project after Metrolink's, which has far more stakeholders in a successful outcome?

That is a quarter-billion dollar question.

Corridor Capacity Study, Free Edition

2011-08-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

You may have heard that Caltrain is working on a corridor capacity study, to see how much high-speed rail traffic could be accommodated on the corridor without adding too many passing tracks or destroying commuter service quality.

While we wait for the outcome of this study, below is a decomposition of the problem into a range of possible solutions.

Some solutions have very little downside for HSR or Caltrain service:

Get HSR off the peninsula corridor as much as possible, by using an Altamont alignment that joins the corridor in Redwood City (see Example 3 for details)
Electrify the corridor
Implement level boarding (not even on Caltrain's radar!)
Put commuter platforms in the middle, with express passing tracks on the outside
Put in a modern shared signaling system

Other solutions require compromise between the needs of high-speed rail passengers, the needs of commuter passengers, and the needs of surrounding communities.

Slow down HSR, with lower top speed and all stops (Millbrae and Redwood City) made by all trains
Close low-traffic Caltrain stations such as Atherton and Hayward Park
Make peak-hour trains skip more stops-- which unfortunately denies frequent commuter service to communities precisely at the times when it is most needed
Build additional grade separations wherever four tracks are required

Before we make any of these painful compromises, however, the most effective measures that do not require compromising service quality should be prioritized and vigorously pursued.

If one had to bet a six-pack of one's favorite microbrew (worth several orders of magnitude less than LTK Engineering's consulting contract), the outcome of the capacity study is likely to be:

With 6 Caltrains per hour during the rush, spare capacity available for HSR is minimal on the existing tracks
Capacity can be increased most effectively by matching train average speeds, i.e. slowing down HSR and/or speeding up Caltrain
HSR trains will probably average no more than 60 mph between SF and SJ
A mid-line overtake facility between Whipple @ Redwood City and 9th Ave @ San Mateo (requiring minimal new grade separations) would improve peak corridor capacity from 6 to 8 tph

We shall soon find out if we got our money's worth.

The Truth About CBOSS

2011-06-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

$16 million was recently awarded by the FRA for the CBOSS project, Caltrain's Communications-Based Overlay Signal System. Caltrain CEO Michael Scanlon states in a Caltrain press release: "This initial federal investment will enable Caltrain to take an important step forward in our efforts to provide Bay Area communities with a modernized, sustainable commuter rail system that is fully compatible with future high-speed rail service". His counterpart at the California High-Speed Rail Authority, Roelof van Ark, intones in a CHSRA press release: "This latest step forward in federal support for California’s project means that we’ll be able to improve safety and service in the near term and integrate our project with local systems in the long term."

Fully compatible with high-speed rail service? Integrate HSR with local systems? Really?

Let's take a closer look. As regular readers know, CBOSS has often been criticized on this blog. Rather than rehash extensive previous commentary on CBOSS, let's rely on cold, hard facts obtained solely from primary source documents. You get to decide!

The Evidence

Exhibit A: Caltrain CBOSS Request For Proposal Package, Questions Received and Answers No. 3, dated 6 October 2010. Question #20 from a prospective bidder: "What assumptions should me made in terms of HSR? (Interoperability, Operations, sharing track, etc.)" The answer from Caltrain: "Under current RFP Scope of work, HSR Operations is not considered for this phase of PTC implementation."

Exhibit B: Caltrain CBOSS Request for Proposal Package, Questions Received and Answers No. 4, dated 9 October 2010. Question #16 from a prospective bidder: "Part 2, Section 3, Exh B, Spec 21001, 1.03D requires the system to be interoperable with California HSR signaling. HSR is undefined at this stage. As this solution is not known, Contractor cannot assess any effort associated with this interoperability requirement. Please clarify how Contractor should assess." The answer from Caltrain: "Interoperability with HSR signaling is not part of the Scope of work for Caltrain PTC system RFP."

Exhibit C: Caltrain CBOSS Request for Proposal Package, Questions Received and Answers No. 6, dated 15 October 2010. Question #31 from a prospective bidder: "The RFP addresses HSR. What assumptions should the proposer make in order to address HSR requirements?" The answer from Caltrain: "Evaluation of the potential for the proposed solution to meet future HSR needs will not be part of the proposal evaluation."

Exhibit D: Caltrain's Positive Train Control Implementation Plan, a 183-page document required by law to be submitted to the FRA and detailing how Caltrain will implement its new signaling system, mentions HSR exactly once in the introduction on page 1-1. That's a slight improvement over a previous revision of the document, rejected by the FRA, which did not mention HSR at all. Section 5.1 of the document, discussing Interoperability with other railroads, does not mention or discuss HSR. Appendix D, containing letters of understanding to coordinate PTC implementation with other rail entities, does not include the CHSRA.

Exhibit E: Caltrain's Positive Train Control Notice of Product Intent, a 50-page document that describes how CBOSS will operate, explains in Appendix A section 12 the interoperability with other rail entities. Out of five paragraphs, four mention the Union Pacific, and zero mention California high-speed rail.

Exhibit F: The California High-Speed Rail Authority's extensive collection of technical memos includes Technical Memo 3.3.1, released 25 June 2010, detailing the concept of the system that will be used to control trains on the high-speed rail network. Section 1.2.4, Automatic Train Control Specification Requirements, states "The prime requirement for the CHSTP ATC system is that the technology must already exist as part of an operating system with proven experience worldwide on at least one high speed passenger railway." CBOSS clearly does not fall into this category, which means CHSRA will necessarily use another train control system than CBOSS on its own tracks.

Serious Questions

In light of all this evidence, the happy talk about CBOSS paving the way for HSR rings hollow, and raises some serious questions:

Is the Caltrain leadership (board and CEO) even aware of the details of the program being carried out by staff and consultants? Do they know that interoperability with HSR is explicitly excluded from the CBOSS RFP?
What is the plan for making CBOSS interoperable with HSR? Might it make sense to develop such a plan before awarding the CBOSS implementation contract, which may happen in the next couple of months?
Does the $251 million budget for CBOSS include the cost to make CBOSS interoperable with high-speed rail, as specifically excluded in the current RFP, or will taxpayers be asked for even more money?
Does the Caltrain and CHSRA leadership (respective CEOs and Boards) know that California HSR is slated to use a different train control system than CBOSS?
If California high-speed trains will use another train control system than CBOSS, why is federal HSR money being spent on the development of CBOSS? Can or should Caltrain expect HSR monies to cover the remaining 90% of the CBOSS cost that is not yet funded?
How, why and when were existing train control technologies, such as ERTMS, the standard that shows the strongest signs of being favored for HSR in California (see TM-3.1.1 section 6.1), eliminated from consideration on the peninsula corridor?

The local press has spent numerous column-inches, sometimes even two-page spreads, covering the Caltrain CEO's compensation package. But this is $16 million we're talking about, heading rapidly for $251 million. And not a peep from the press.

The Root of the Problem, Visualized

2011-05-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

All of the engineering design work for HSR on the peninsula is predicated on a future service plan described in Appendix K of the Alternatives Analysis, featuring 10 commuter trains per hour per direction and 8 high-speed trains per hour per direction, with no timetable coordination whatsoever. The service pattern generator can now display this for you graphically, showing where four tracks would be needed to operate this particular service pattern. We already knew the answer: four tracks everywhere along the entire length of the peninsula.

Where Four Tracks Will Be Needed

2011-05-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

"Phased Implementation" is really about asking where will four tracks actually be needed? Before this concept was floated, the basic idea was to lay four tracks all the way up the peninsula, a solution that requires little intelligent thought, but gobs of money.

The way to answer this question objectively is to play with timetables. Actually, a sequence of timetables, each of which represents a "Phase." For Phased Implementation, a "Phase" could be defined as follows:

Phase: a coherent set of capital improvements that enable a new timetable that provides better service, by some agreed-upon set of metrics, as compared to the old timetable.

We already described one example of how you might define service metrics for Caltrain, and these could be expanded to measure HSR service quality. The metrics, regardless of how they are defined, need to be timetable-independent, clear, concise, and transparent to the public. Discrete capital improvements, i.e. construction projects, can then be priced out on an individual basis and examined in the context of the new timetables that they enable. The idea is to pick the low hanging fruit first, and to build the improvements that produce the biggest improvement in the service metrics for the least construction cost or community disruption, i.e. the biggest bang for the buck.

The Service Pattern Generator

To exemplify the phased planning process and to make it more accessible to the armchair service planner, we can take the train performance calculations previously presented and fold them into an automatic service pattern generator that generates a graphical representation of a timetable and immediately highlights where additional tracks will be needed on the peninsula corridor.

Try it for yourself: Service Pattern Generator

Rather than work with tables of departure times, this tool specifies intuitive clockface timetables as graphical position-versus-time string diagrams, based on a few basic parameters for each type of train on the peninsula corridor:

Train type, as described in the train performance calculations, which determines how many seconds it takes a train to travel from one stop to the next;
Speed limit of the track, which can be considerably lower than the train's capability and also determines stop-to-stop times;
Station stopping pattern and dwell times, strongly influenced by whether or not level boarding is provided;
Frequency in trains per hour, or conversely, the clockface interval. For example, 4 trains per hour = 15 minute interval;
Time offset in minutes from the top of the hour. This offset determines where this train meets other trains in the service pattern, and ultimately determines where you need overtaking tracks;
Schedule padding, in percent of the overall end-to-end run time. 10% padding is a reasonable value.

Using these parameters, the various overlapping service patterns that describe Caltrain locals, Caltrain expresses, and high-speed trains can quickly be specified. While the service pattern generator may initially take a while to grasp, it is worth experimenting with it to develop an intuition for how a blended service plan could actually work.

The key output of the service pattern generator is the yellow highlighting that indicates where trains will catch up and overtake. In these locations, triple or quadruple tracks will be required. The challenge is to develop service patterns that provide good service for both peninsula commuters and long-distance travelers, while minimizing the cost and community disruption that comes with additional tracks.

Professionals do this using much more powerful software that can quantify how resistant these timetables are to cascading delays, but the ultimate results might not be too far off from what this simplified tool produces, when using conservative values for dwell and padding. Far from trying to do the pros' job for them, this exercise empowers the public to understand the trade-offs that must be contended with.

Working Smarter, Not Harder

Using the service pattern generator, we can explore a few examples of how to produce maximum bang for the buck.

Example 1: here's what Caltrain might look like with a mid-line overtake, often mentioned on this blog as the next logical step after (some would even say before!) electrification. Expresses meet locals at Hillsdale to exchange passengers across the same platform. Only one new grade separation is required at 25th Ave. The local holds for three minutes at Hillsdale so that downtown San Mateo can remain with two tracks. This is a typical illustration of cost vs. benefit: the hundreds of millions needed to quadruple-track San Mateo have to be weighed against the two-minute savings for the local. In this particular example, your metrics would tell you that it's not worth it.

Example 2: here's what things might look like with 3 high-speed trains per hour thrown into the mix. We now assume the entire corridor has been upgraded for 100 mph operation, which presumably implies major grade separations and crossing improvements. Introducing HSR requires quadruplication from South San Francisco (well, probably Bayshore) to Burlingame. The bottleneck at San Mateo is allowed to remain with two tracks. Further south, Atherton and Menlo Park are spared while Palo Alto and Mountain View require quadruple tracks. These two new overtake sections illustrate what would be required to provide a reasonable starting level of HSR service via Pacheco. Notice how no enormous civil works are required anywhere in the terminal areas, whether in San Francisco (no expensive tunnels starting at Bayshore) or San Jose (no hulking multi-level station). Transbay to SJ HSR trip time is less than 45 minutes; this can be reduced by increasing the HSR speed limit to 125 mph, but as you'll see if you try it, considerably more construction would be required. Are the few minutes saved worth the extra investment?

Example 3: in the never ending Altamont vs. Pacheco debate, Pacheco proponents often point out that this route is clearly best for Caltrain because it "improves" Caltrain all the way to San Jose. Try this for improvement: here's a service pattern where high-speed trains don't gum up the corridor and head for Altamont from Redwood City. This pattern assumes 4 trains per hour Caltrain local, 4 tph Caltrain express, 4 tph HSR to San Francisco, 4 tph HSR to San Jose via the East Bay, and 4 tph of Dumbarton local commuter rail. 20 trains per hour is a very high level of peninsula train service, probably more than the region will ever need... and look!

No expensive new SF tunnels starting at Bayshore
All Caltrain service terminates at Transbay
Two tracks through Burlingame and San Mateo
Two tracks through PAMPA (Palo Alto Menlo Park Atherton) and all the way south to Santa Clara

All this is enabled by only two overtake sections, grade separation of the northern half of the corridor, and punchy 6000-kW Electric Multiple Units (and also, to be fair, a new Dumbarton crossing).

Announcing: the Peninsula Blended Plan Contest

If you like the power of experimenting with service patterns, there's a contest you can enter! Entries may be made in the comments section below by copying and pasting (or better yet, linking) the URL string of your favorite service pattern, with a short paragraph to describe why you think this is the best balance of service, cost, and community impact. Entries will be judged by an impartial panel of armchair experts consisting of Clem and Richard Mlynarik (the brains behind the tool), whose own service patterns will not count for the contest.

The grand prize, a big shiny ASCII trophy known as the Takt Cup, will be awarded in two weeks.

Calling All Service Planners

2011-05-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

The recent talk of phased implementation and a "blended" Caltrain + HSR system has some people proposing new service patterns and new timetables. That's a healthy thing: service planning should always drive infrastructure decisions. To ground this discussion in reality, these proposed service patterns must reflect realistic train performance that doesn't require Star Trek warp drives (or, for that matter, four tracks everywhere from San Francisco to San Jose...)

Using a Train Performance Calculator, we can find out how long any given train will take to travel from point A to point B, taking into account grades, rail adhesion, aerodynamic drag, traction and braking curves, line speed limits, etc. The results of such calculations are presented below for four key types of rolling stock on the peninsula rail corridor. With these run times, you've got all the building blocks you need to build your own strings, and from those strings, your own timetable.

The trip times can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet (82 kB) or a PDF document (106 kB) with eight separate tables (each in its separate worksheet) corresponding to the scenarios described below. They are reasonably accurate, but perhaps not down to the second.

Caltrain Diesel Train

The prototype for the first set of run times is a standard Caltrain consist, with one F40 locomotive and five gallery cars. The diesel locomotive is rated at 3200 hp, and the entire train weighs 420 metric tons fully loaded with 500 passengers. The train is technically capable of reaching a top speed of 100 mph, although signal system restrictions (planned to be removed) constrain it to 79 mph today.

Note: despite their bullet nose, the Baby Bullet trains have essentially the same performance.

Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU)

The prototype for the following run times is a Siemens Desiro Classic DMU. This DMU is in common use around the world, including here in the United States (although it is not compliant with FRA crash regulations). The train performance specs are based on San Diego's Sprinter, with a four-car consist as shown in the photo. Total power output is 1680 hp total for a train weighing 392,000 lb fully loaded. Top speed is 75 mph; because of this limitation, the run times are valid regardless of the track speed limit.

Electric Multiple Unit (EMU)

The next set of run times is for a Stadler KISS EMU. This six-car double-deck EMU, similar to the types under consideration for Caltrain's electrification project, has a top speed of 125 mph. The spec sheet shows that the train weighs about 325 metric tons fully loaded with 500 passengers, and is rated at 4000 kW (5300 horsepower).

The EMU's secret weapon is the ability to unleash a short-term (few minutes) burst of 6000 kW (over 8000 horsepower), which takes it into the same performance league as a high-speed train. This is handy for performing overtakes on the express tracks without disrupting high-speed traffic--a key capability for a "blended" Caltrain + HSR plan. This trick is not possible with a DMU, which is more akin to a moped entering a freeway. The run times below are for the same train using its 6000 kW short-term rating, to be used sparingly.

High-Speed Train

The final set of run times is for a state-of-the-art high-speed train of the sort that might someday be used in California. It is an 11-car Alstom AGV with a top speed of 220 mph, but used in this case at far lower speeds. The train weighs 404 metric tons and has a very high power output of 9120 kW (over 12,000 hp) as is common for high-speed trains. Generic high-speed train specifications have been compiled by the CHSRA.

If you missed the download link above, here it is again for all the above scenarios: Excel spreadsheet (82 kB) or PDF document (106 kB)

Rules of Thumb

These run times are start-to-stop times only, with no intermediate stops, and do not include dwell or padding. Think of them as the fastest possible timing from Point A to Point B without stopping.
Dwell time at stations is not included, and must be added separately. Caltrain dwell times can generally be assumed to be about 45 seconds if level boarding is not provided (i.e. there are steps into the train), or 30 seconds if level boarding is provided. Reduced dwell times can provide enormous savings for frequent-stop commuter trains. High-speed train dwell times should be (per TM-4.2 Phase I Service Plan) 90 seconds at intermediate peninsula stops, and 120 seconds in San Jose.
Padding is not included, and must be added separately. Without padding, a timetable can only be run under perfect conditions. In the real world, stuff happens, and padding ensures that the entire timetable doesn't collapse like a row of dominoes. A good rule of thumb is 20 seconds of padding per stop.
Speed limits ought to be selected carefully. It is unlikely that speed limits will increase where grade crossings are still present. (While this is technically permissible under FRA regulations, state regulations are more restrictive, based on the risk profile of each individual crossing. On the peninsula these crossings typically have a lot of road traffic.)

Building Strings for a Timetable

With the preceding rules of thumb in mind, it becomes a reasonably straightforward exercise to build a "string" that describes the position versus time of any given train, whether it be local, limited, express or long-distance HSR--based on the prevailing speed limit, train type, and stopping pattern. For example, we can construct the timetable for Caltrain 216, departing 4th & King at 7:19 AM, using the following building blocks:

4th & King to San Bruno: 691 seconds
Station dwell at San Bruno + padding: 45 + 20 = 65 seconds
San Bruno to Burlingame: 314 seconds
Station dwell at Burlingame + padding = 65 seconds
Burlingame to San Mateo: 148 seconds
etc.

By the time you get to San Jose, it all adds up to an 8:25 AM arrival... three minutes early by Caltrain's timetable, but that has some extra generous padding at the end of the run, in order to juice their on-time statistics.

Once you've built a few "master" strings for the basic Caltrain and HSR service patterns that you envision, you can put them on a spreadsheet and slide them around to build the best-possible clockface timetable. When you do this, make sure that no two strings in the same direction of travel ever come within less than about 3 minutes of each other--otherwise, passing tracks will have to be added to allow the strings to touch or cross. This process illustrates how a timetable can tell you where the four-track sections are actually needed.

Bear in mind the limitations of this simplified approach. The most beautiful timetable can fall apart when things don't go according to plan. The pros use expensive software that can figure out how robust a particular timetable will be to the inevitable perturbations, something that factors heavily into service planning. That particular aspect of the problem isn't dealt with here.

Happy timetable building.

The Small Print

The trip times were calculated in Octave using numerical integration of the differential equations of motion. Traction, friction and drag curves are taken from train specification sheets; where not available, these are calculated based on weight on drivers and power (for traction) and the modified Davis equation (for friction and drag). Curve and terminal area speed restrictions are included. The speed limit assumptions include: 35 mph in the Transbay Transit Center; 40 mph out to 4th & King; 65 mph at Bayshore; 70 mph at Sierra Point; 75 mph at San Bruno (assumes new grade separation); 75 mph at Millbrae; 85 mph at Hayward Park; 80 mph at Palo Alto; 70 mph at Lawrence / Bowers; 45 mph in the San Jose approach. All trip times take into account the 0.6 mile discontinuity in the milepost numbering near CP Coast. All trip times assume that the train accelerates and brakes at the maximum service rate, and maintains a margin of 2 mph below the speed limit at all times. Small (few-second) differences in northbound vs. southbound trip times are ignored. Results should be accurate to about ten seconds. Your Mileage May Vary.

Phased Implementation

2011-04-16T09:38:00.001-07:00

UPDATE 4/30: A more detailed memo has now been posted for approval by the CHSRA board this Thursday. It describes the first phase, the last phase (full four-track build-out), but nothing in between describing what all these intermediate phases might actually look like.

Original Post: The California High-Speed Rail Authority has now posted their description of what 'phased implementation' means for the peninsula. The Phased Implementation Fact Sheet and Phased Implementation Q&A are the first documents posted to the CHSRA's San Francisco - San Jose document library following an eight-month dry spell. Look for this to become the new buzzword.

Mind The Service Gap

2011-04-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

Having cobbled together additional funding for the next fiscal year, Caltrain has published a revised 76-train timetable that is now proposed to go into effect this summer. This timetable is an improvement over the previous proposal, a controversial 48-train peak-only timetable (previously analyzed here) that caused an outcry up and down the peninsula. To save $3.3 million in annual operating costs, the 76-train timetable cuts ten trains from today's peak service by eliminating the Baby Bullet express trains and substituting fewer limited-stop trains.

How does this new 76-train timetable stack up? We put it through the Metricator to extract key rush-hour trip time statistics, using the same methodology as before... with the expectation that the results might not be so great.

First, as a reminder, we consider the current timetable. The basis of comparison is today's 86-train-per-day, 5-train-per-hour timetable, to which we assign a score of 100.

Input timetable file (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (318 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (35 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (539 kB PDF)
Overall rush hour service quality score: 100

And now, the proposed 76-train timetable:

Input timetable file (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (344 kB PDF) -- also compared with Caltrain 2010 (328 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (35 kB PDF) -- also compared with Caltrain 2010 (38 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (165 kB PDF)
Overall rush hour service quality score: 104

Wait, is that right? One-hundred-and-four?

Did You Say Better?

Four trains per hour with no Baby Bullets is better than five trains per hour with Baby Bullets? Surely this shocking result must be wrong?!? The short answer is no, the numbers don't lie.

The long answer requires a little bit of background discussion. You see, the Baby Bullet has a dirty little secret. In order to achieve such stellar trip times, other trains must clear the tracks ahead of it, because if the express ever caught up to a local, then it would no longer be an express. In practice, that translates to very long service gaps just before a bullet comes through. Service gaps (i.e. how many minutes pass between two successive departure times for a given origin & destination pair) are an important component of the convenience of taking the train. In these calculations, an effective trip time is computed based on the following sum:

70% of the average trip time
30% of the best trip time (to favor express service)
20% of the mean wait between trains (far less than the random arrival figure of 50%)
15% of the maximum service gap (to penalize very large gaps between trains)

What happened in the new 76-train schedule can be understood by taking a closer look at the numbers. Some best trip times got a bit worse, due to the lack of Baby Bullets; some mean wait times between trains got a bit longer, due to 4 rather than 5 trains per hour; but the maximum service gaps dropped precipitously, enough to outweigh the other effects when considered for all origin and destination pairs, even after weighting the results by ridership.

Various other observations on this new timetable:

Rush hour service is significantly improved for stops such as Burlingame, Lawrence, Sunnyvale, Cal Ave, etc. as can be readily observed in the effective trip time savings. Note these are all the stops where service was degraded when the Baby Bullet service started.
Closing Hayward Park makes sense. Despite all the talk of transit-oriented development at this location, the fact remains that ridership is so low that wasting three minutes of everybody else's time to stop there isn't worth it. Besides, the station will be less than a mile away from Hillsdale when that station is moved to the north, as long planned.
There is a long and awkward service gap departing San Francisco between 6:45 and 7:30 PM.
San Bruno, where Caltrain is investing a nine-figure amount to rebuild the station, is left with dismal rush hour service.
Express service isn't inherently bad. It adds the most value when trains ahead don't have to get out of the way, i.e. there is a way to overtake trains without penalizing local service by imposing large service gaps ahead of the express. There exists a six-train-per-hour timetable that scores 145... but it requires a mid-line overtake. That's why a phased implementation of future peninsula corridor improvements should include a mid-line overtake facility as extensively discussed here and here.

So should the Baby Bullet be scrapped? That depends on one's beliefs... namely:

Do service gaps matter? The opinion presented here is obviously that they do. Caltrain seems to consider trip time only in terms of how long a passenger spends on the train (see page 16 in their presentation), without much regard to how long they might spend on the platform waiting for the next train. The underlying assumption is that every passenger builds a routine around the same train every day, and shows up just in time for that train.
How valuable is the Baby Bullet brand? There is reality, and then there is perception. People buy a product based on their perception, and the Baby Bullet undeniably has a certain cachet. The Baby Bullet has been marketed very effectively, to the point that most people believe that Baby Bullet trains are faster than they actually are. That belief doesn't show up in the raw metrics, but it does enter into people's choice of transportation.

When all is said and done, the choice between the proposed 76-train timetable and preserving today's timetable comes down to $3.3 million. That amounts to a mere 3 percent of Caltrain's annual operating budget, and makes this particular decision pale in comparison to far more pressing issues such as providing Caltrain with a dedicated funding source and advancing the electrification project.

News Roundup

2011-03-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

Rubber Stamp

Mike Rosenberg pens a scathing indictment of the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board that runs Caltrain, calling out the board for rubber-stamping everything that is submitted to it by Caltrain staff (including, presumably, the MOU with high-speed rail). The number of Yes votes since the last dissenting vote: 1,591. With only 9 board members, that's 176 consecutive unanimous Yes votes!

One of the dangers of having staff run the show is that an organization will pursue projects for their own sake, to perpetuate its own bureaucratic existence. Case in point: Caltrain's CBOSS train control project, where a small back-and-forth transit operation runs amok with a $230 million technology research and development project that is almost certainly doomed to development failure. Speaking of train control...

ERTMS on the Peninsula?

The CHSRA staff memo for the recent board meeting happens to tally the money currently allocated for HSR in California. One of the items is $16 million of ARRA stimulus money, previously requested as an ear-mark for CBOSS, but now described as funding the "design/implementation of the first Positive Train Control/ERTMS interface implementation on the Peninsula." Say what?

(to find out what the acronyms CBOSS and ERTMS describe, please read here.)

An optimist would note this is the first time that 'ERTMS' and 'Peninsula' are mentioned in the same sentence in official agency materials, rather than just a blog. That much is encouraging.

A pessimist would note that "interface implementation" means an interface between the existing ERTMS and Caltrain's proposed CBOSS, assuming they would co-exist. This is the worst of both worlds: not only is CBOSS 100% functionally redundant with ERTMS, i.e. it will do the exact same thing that ERTMS already does, but interfaces between multiple complex safety-critical systems are astonishingly expensive to implement successfully. If CBOSS wasn't enough of a promise of years of delay and cost blowouts, then kludging ERTMS on top of CBOSS is an absolute guarantee.

The high-speed rail project has very strongly implied that ERTMS would someday be installed on the peninsula. The recent train control technical memos (see TM-3.3.x) explicitly state that the selected technology must already exist as part of an operating system with proven experience worldwide on at least one high-speed passenger railway. That leaves exactly two solutions: (1) the ERTMS standard supported by the world's biggest names in train control, being deployed in dozens of countries worldwide, and (2) the Japanese Digital-ATC product by Hitachi, deployed in Japan and Taiwan. Wanna place bets?

Show Some Teeth, For Once!

One thing the Caltrain board of directors might consider sinking its teeth into (if it has any?) is the CBOSS fiasco-in-the-making. The correct answer, for a small fiscally-vulnerable operation like Caltrain, is to use tried and true solutions whenever they are available. When the wheel already exists (ERTMS) you don't take the risk of re-inventing the wheel (CBOSS), especially when HSR has already telegraphed its intent to deploy ERTMS and might even pay for it!

At this point, a few wrong moves like CBOSS can quite literally end Caltrain's chances of survival.

Millbrae, Half a Billion Cheaper

2011-03-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

The powers that be have determined that the Millbrae intermodal station does not have sufficient right-of-way width to accommodate four tracks of Caltrain and HSR, in addition to BART. That is why the Supplemental Alternatives Analysis from last August and the Millbrae preliminary station footprint from October consider only one solution: three tracks at grade and the fourth track sent down into a trench and covered tunnel, along the profile shown below:

This 2.5-mile trench and covered tunnel facility would dive up to 60 feet below grade, passing below the Hillcrest Blvd underpass (itself passing under the at-grade tracks) and nearby storm drains, as well as under the Mills Creek to the south. It would also pass directly under the existing Millbrae station, requiring the excavation of an underground cut-and-cover "train box" as shown in the section drawing at right. If the cost estimates are to be believed, this one-track trench and tunnel facility would cost about $500 million more than at-grade tracks.

There may be legitimate reasons why a four-track at-grade arrangement can't fit in the existing Millbrae station. But are they half billion dollar reasons? For that kind of money, you'd imagine there would be some serious pencil-sharpening going on.

Shoehorning It In

One of the very first issues covered in these pages, way back in 2008, was the amazing lack of foresight embodied in the design of the Millbrae station. The structural grid of the station mezzanine was laid out so narrowly, and so far to the west of the sprawling BART facilities, that it now precludes four tracks from being built through the Caltrain side of the station without major impacts to the structure itself and to residential areas adjacent to the west.

If the going-in assumption is that BART facilities cannot be impacted by HSR construction, no matter what the resulting cost, then we do indeed end up with the solution proposed by the CHSRA.

But we live in a world where cost matters.

That's why it's worth exploring a significantly cheaper option: converting one BART platform track (of three) for use by Caltrain and/or high-speed rail. The diagram at right shows what the Millbrae might look like under such a scenario. The structural grid is preserved, and no encroachments occur outside the right of way to the west of the station (to the top in the diagram.)

The diagram below shows the wider context of the track layout, including station approaches and tail tracks. (Warning: 2.1 MB image)

What are the pros and cons?

1 TRACK BELOW GRADE	ALL TRACKS AT GRADE
Impact to existing Millbrae station structure
Extensive, with cut-and-cover excavation below existing tracks and below foundations and support columns of existing mezzanine.	None.
Impact to BART operations
None.	Removes one BART platform track and one tail track, leaving two platform tracks and three tail tracks. This facility should be perfectly adequate, considering its similarity to other BART terminals at Pittsburg, Dublin/Pleasanton and Fremont.
Impact to BART tunnel box
None.	Portal of BART tunnel must be modified and additional reinforcement provided to support loads from adjacent track and freight trains.
Impact to passenger convenience
Forces Caltrain passengers to use additional vertical circulation to reach underground southbound platform track. Preserves northbound cross-platform transfer between Caltrain and BART, but removes at-grade Caltrain access from west side, where TOD is planned.	Removes northbound cross-platform access between Caltrain and BART, but creates two new bi-direction cross-platform transfers between Caltrain and HSR. Preserves Caltrain access from west side, where TOD is planned.
Impact to residential areas
None.	None.
Regulatory challenges
None.	Requires Caltrain and possibly freight trains to occupy a track immediately adjacent to BART trains, with no room for a traditional separation wall. Violates CPUC GO-26D side clearances. This could realistically be mitigated by passive and active safety measures, such as a thin but strong steel crash barrier and a permanent speed restriction on that track. This PTC-enforced speed restriction would be about 20 mph for freight and 40 mph for Caltrain, with no impact to Caltrain trip times since all trains stop at Millbrae. Additionally, sensors could be provided to detect shifted loads on freight trains before they pass through the Millbrae station.
Cost to taxpayers
About $500,000,000 (for example, the entire amount of the funding shortfall for the Caltrain electrification project, if it were spent instead to dig a hole in the ground)	Minimal, although some expense in the tens of millions would be incurred for modifications to BART facilities.
Profit to engineering & construction firms
A cut of $500,000,000.	A cut of nothing.

Yes, there are difficult design constraints. Yes, this proposed design violates a few engineering specifications and even some regulations. Yes, it will be politically challenging to infringe on BART. But when a half billion dollars hangs in the balance, it's time to work smarter and not harder. It would be reckless and irresponsible not to explore a compromise solution, through a carefully considered combination of design exceptions, regulatory waivers, and inter-agency agreements. Taxpayers should demand it.

And if that doesn't work out, stop everything, tear down the whole station and start over from scratch with a proper track layout. The entire Millbrae Intermodal station complex, including 3,000 parking spaces, cost $75 million to build ten years ago. In today's dollars, it would be about $100 million, ONE FIFTH of the cost of the below-grade "solution".

The Prescriptive Framework - Update

2011-03-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

Last January, the grassroots group CARRD succeeded after a series of Public Records Requests in obtaining another release of key HSR technical memos that form the prescriptive framework for all the engineering design, statewide. The CHSRA probably doesn't like these memos being published because it undermines the effectiveness of the "Decide, Announce, Defend" model of mega-project engineering. This probably explains why these materials aren't, and probably won't ever be, published on the official CHSRA website... and that's precisely why they are posted here for all to see.

The new collection of technical memos builds on the previous collection (also obtained by CARRD), fleshing out various new topics as well as filling in some detail that had been redacted from the old collection--such as some very informative surveys of foreign HSR best practices. Some memos known to have been published are still missing from the list, and CARRD continues their attempts to pry these free; they are grayed out in the table below, based on a comprehensive list of memos and drawings that was published in a July 2009 Program Summary Report on pp. 53-61.

Peninsula stakeholders still eagerly await the release of Technical Memo 1.1.7, "Shared Use Corridor HST Criteria - Caltrain Corridor". Considering that the administrative draft of the peninsula EIR is 98% complete, there can be little doubt that this secretive memo already exists.

The same caveats as before are in order:

These documents are guidelines authored by Parsons Brinckerhoff program management staff, ensuring that early designs for each section (performed by HNTB for San Francisco - San Jose) are consistent and compatible. They are not a "design bible" for detailed 100% engineering.
The documents cover the entire state, which consists primarily of 220-mph very high speed, dedicated tracks. The peninsula is a different animal, with 125-mph top speeds in a shared corridor with Caltrain and freight trains, so use proper care when applying to or inferring conclusions about specific peninsula situations.
The documents are a snapshot in time, as of December 2010.

With that out of the way, here is the raw technical data download. For each memo, a brief summary of the content is provided.

Program Management
TM-0.0a	Memo	Design Terms and Acronyms - Decoder ring for alphabet soup and project lingo, to promote consistency and coordination among design teams.	2008-09-05
TM-0.1	Memo	15 Percent Design Scope Guidelines - Guidance for the minimum level of engineering (referred to as 15% Design) required to support the project-specific EIR/EIS process.	2008-05-12
TM-0.2	Memo	Tech Memo Review Protocol	2008-Q4
TM-0.3	Memo	Basis of Design - Defines the major components and performance objectives of the high-speed rail system as envisioned by the CHSRA, outlining goals, requirements, and assumptions. Underpins the entire engineering effort.	2007-12-20
TM-0.3	Memo	Basis of Design Policy	2009-Q2
TM-0.4	Memo	Project Development Process	2007-Q4
TM-0.5	Memo	Coordination with Caltrans - Process to be followed when HSR encroaches on Caltrans highways. Discusses the coordination between CHSRA and Caltrans to streamline the approval process.	2009-12-30
TM-0.6	Memo	Risk Register Development Protocol - Common standard for project risk identification, assessment, analysis, management /mitigation, and review.	2010-03-01
TM-0.7	Memo	Design Submittal and Review Protocol - Defines how contractor teams submit their work in progress and conduct reviews with Parsons Brinckerhoff senior engineering management. Includes flow chart of the entire process, based on PB's ProjectSolve web database interface.	2009-07-08
TM-0.8	Memo	Programmatic Cost Update Methodology	2008-Q3
TM-0.9	Memo	Draft RPA Protocol	2010-Q3
General Design - Infrastructure
TM-1.1.0	Memo	Design Criteria - Basic design parameters for preliminary alignment and infrastructure, for the overall corridor. Summarizes a few key design parameters that are extensively described in other memos.	2007-03-19
TM-1.1.1	Memo	Codes, Regulations, Design Standards and Guidelines - System-wide applicable regulations, codes, and design standards. Defines order of precedence, conflict resolution, and protocols for obtaining variances.	2009-07-10
TM-1.1.2	Memo	Design Life - Minimum design life for permanent and temporary infrastructure and systems elements, defining the initial frame of reference for establishing maintenance activities and frequency.	2009-06-04
TM-1.1.4	Memo	Engineering Survey and Mapping - Requirements for horizontal and vertical datum and control, photogrammetric mapping accuracy, depiction of man-made features and existing property information, digital terrain modelling (DTM), and engineering survey procedures aimed to support design development through the 30% Design level.	2010-03-02
TM-1.1.5	Memo	CADD Guidelines - Guidelines for the development of Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) drawings for the preliminary design. Ensures many different contractors work to the same standards.	2010-03-09
TM-1.1.6	Memo	Alignment Standards for Shared Use Corridors (LA - Anaheim) - Defines track alignment standards for the LOSSAN corridor where HSR operates adjacent to or within a shared right-of-way with conventional passenger railroad lines and freight railroad lines. Does not apply to Caltrain corridor, but may be very similar.	2007-12-17
TM-1.1.7	Memo	Shared Use Corridor HST Criteria - Caltrain Corridor	2010-Q2
TM-1.1.8	Memo	Demarcation of Territorial Subdivisions and Milepost Numerics - Rationale for defining discrete sections of the project as “subdivisions” and for further refining into mile posts with designations that will enable the precise location of system resources and assets.	2009-09-16
TM-1.1.8	Map	Subdivision Milepost Map - Shows subdivision names and milepost numbering superimposed on a geographical map.	2008-04-09
TM-1.1.8A	Drawing	Systemwide Track Schematic - Schematic track map of the entire California HSR system, including mileposts, stations, crossovers, subdivision names, etc.	2010-03-08
TM-1.1.9	Memo	Flooding and Drainage	2010-Q2
TM-1.1.10	Memo	High-Speed Equipment Structure Gauges - Design Criteria for determination of required clearances around tracks and vehicles, based on existing high speed rail vehicles from Europe and Asia. Includes equipment outlines, static, dynamic, and structural gauges.	2010-03-19
TM-1.1.10	Drawing	High-Speed Equipment Structure Gauges - Drawings of required clearances around tracks and vehicles, based on a composite vehicle outline that will accommodate any European or Asian high-speed trains.	2010-04-16
TM-1.1.16	Memo	Shared Use Corridor HST Criteria	2008-Q1
TM-1.1.18	Memo	Design Variance Guidelines - Procedure for identifying, preparing, requesting, and documenting a design variance (i.e. exception or deviation) from a minimum design standard, standard drawing, standard specification, adopted standard, or design guideline.	2008-06-02
TM-1.1.19	Memo	Capital Cost Estimating Methodology for 15 Percent Design - Capital Cost Estimating Methodology (CCEM). Provides guidance for preparing and presenting estimated capital costs for the project’s 15% Design level. Describes the roles and responsibilities for preparing capital cost estimates, defines the estimating tasks, and outlines the procedures and standards to be used.	2009-07-20
TM-1.1.21	Memo	Typical Cross Sections for15 Percent Design - Rationale for the configuration of guideway to be constructed along the high-speed train alignment, including required right-of-way for various conditions: Two Track At-Grade, Intermediate Stations, Rail-Shared Corridors, Elevated / Aerial Guideway, Trench / Retained Cut, Single Track Formations, Four Track At-Grade.	2009-04-04
TM-1.1.21	Drawing	Typical Cross Sections for15 Percent Design - Supporting drawings for TM-1.1.21, including trench and tunnel configurations as well as vertical clearances for structures.	2010-08-03
TM-1.1.22	Memo	Capital Cost Estimating Methodology for 30 Percent Design	2010-Q3
Track Alignment
TM-2.1.2	Memo	Alignment Design Standards for High-Speed Train Operation - Basis of design and alignment criteria for dedicated high-speed tracks. Includes review of foreign practice and applicable regulations.	2009-03-26
TM-2.1.3	Memo	Turnouts and Station Tracks - Turnout, crossover, and station connection track geometries, including review of foreign practice.	2009-06-29
TM-2.1.3	Drawing	Turnouts and Station Track Schematics - Turnout, crossover, and station connection track geometry requirements.	2010-04-09
TM-2.1.3	Drawing	Typical Interlocking Schematics - Interlocking (signaling) housing locations at stations and cross-overs. Shows total length of a station with 110 mph turnouts.	2010-03-08
TM-2.1.5	Memo	Track Design	2010-Q1
TM-2.1.6	Memo	Ballast-less Track	2009-Q4
TM-2.1.7	Memo	Intrusion Protection - Basis of design for the safe separation of CHSR lines from adjacent transportation systems, including vehicle intrusion and derailment containment.	2008-10-25
TM-2.1.8	Memo	Turnouts and Yard Tracks - Guidance for the geometric design of turnouts, crossovers, yard lead and yard tracks. Does not cover spacing, length or nature of yard tracks for specific purposes (see TM-5.x).	2009-07-17
Station Design
TM-2.2.2	Memo	Station Program Design Guidelines - Identifies the facilities, designated spaces, design elements, and service amenities to be provided at passenger stations. Does not include platform geometries or station site design.	2009-02-19
TM-2.2.3	Memo	Station Program Site Design Guidelines - Guidelines for site design at high-speed train passenger stations, including layout principles, sizing, access, facility design, and site infrastructure. Does not cover specific sizing or configuration of individual stations.	2009-04-10
TM-2.2.4	Memo	Station Platform Geometric Design - Guidance for high-speed train station platform design, including operations, passenger safety, and regulatory requirements. Establishes station platform design geometry, clearance and functional elements such as drainage provisions. Reviews European and Asian practices.	2010-06-30
TM-2.2.4	Drawing	Station Platform Geometric Design - Cross sections of a generic mid-line station configuration, either at-grade or elevated	2010-06-04
TM-2.2.4	Drawing	Station Platform Geometric Design - Drawings of a generic mid-line station configuration, 6000 feet long with 1300 ft platforms.	2009-07-29
Bridge Design
TM-2.3.1	Memo	Aesthetic Guidelines for High-Speed Aerial Structures	2009-Q2
TM-2.3.2	Memo	Structure Design Loads - Defines the permanent and transient load effects used in the design of bridges, aerial structures, and grade separations that directly support high-speed trains. Does not cover non-aerial structure types such as tunnels etc.	2010-06-17
TM-2.3.3	Memo	Design Guidelines for Aerial Structures - Guidelines for the design of aerial structures, including structural performance, functionality, safety, serviceability, economy and trackside environment. Reviews foreign practice in Europe and Asia. Explains rationale for standard aerial structures shown in drawings.	2009-06-02
TM-2.3.3	Drawing	Design Guidelines for Aerial Structures - Cross-sections of two-track aerial structures, including sizing of support columns.	2009-07-07
Tunnel Design
TM-2.4.2	Memo	Basic High-Speed Train Tunnel Configuration - Establishes approximate finished dimensions for bored and cut-and-cover tunnels in which high-speed passenger trains run exclusively, for use during 15% Design. Accounts for pressure effects from high-speed operation, which results in larger cross sections.	2009-07-30
TM-2.4.2	Drawing	Basic High-Speed Train Tunnel Configuration - Cross section drawings of a typical bored tunnel and cut-and-cover tunnel, based on the assumptions of the largest rolling stock (Shinkansen bilevel) and a configuration of two separate single-track tunnels.	2009-07-30
TM-2.4.5	Memo	High-Speed Train Tunnel Structures - Basic issues related to the structural design of permanent cast-in-place concrete or sprayed concrete liners for mined rock tunnels, including design life, durability, loads and analyses.	2010-07-29
TM-2.4.5A	Drawing	Single Track Mined Tunnel Cross Section - Cross section drawing of a typical mined tunnel. Shows design features, but no dimensions.	2010-06-30
TM-2.4.6	Memo	High-Speed Train Tunnel Portal Facilities - Portal infrastructure to be considered for tunnels used exclusively by high-speed passenger trains, including facilities for ventilation, emergency response, maintenance, noise and pressure wave mitigation, rescue, etc. Not your typical tunnel portal, more like something out of a James Bond movie.	2010-06-21
TM-2.4.8	Memo	Service and Maintenance Considerations for Tunnels - Inspection, service and maintenance activities that may be required to be performed within each high-speed train tunnel.	2010-06-25
Building Structural Design
TM-2.5.1	Memo	Structural Design of Surface Facilities and Buildings - Guidance and requirements for the design of surface facilities and buildings that do not provide the supporting structure for high-speed trains (see TM-2.3.3), such as stations, pedestrian and road bridges, wayside structures, maintenance facilities, etc.	2010-06-10
Drainage and Grading
TM-2.6.3	Memo	Hydrology	2009-Q4
TM-2.6.4	Memo	Floodplain	2009-Q3
TM-2.6.5	Memo	Hydraulics and Hydrology Design Guidelines - Design standards for the hydrologic analysis (floods, surface runoff) and design of hydraulic facilities (culverts, channels, drainage, pumps, debris control) within the high-speed train corridor.	2010-06-08
TM-2.6.7	Memo	Earthwork and Trackbed Design Guidelines - Guidance and requirements for earthworks, grading, earth retaining systems, and trackbed configuration to support 15% design. Reviews US and foreign practice.	2009-07-23
Utilities
TM-2.7.4	Memo	Utility Requirements for 15% Design - Standards and procedures for the location, assessment, protection and placement of underground and overhead utilities located within and in proximity of the HSR right of way. Also defines justification criteria for utility encroachments.	2008-11-20
Safety and Security
TM-2.8.1	Memo	Safety and Security	2009-Q3
Geotechnical Studies
TM-2.9.1	Memo	Geotechnical Investigation Guidelines - Standardized methodology, terminology and procedures for sub-surface geotechnical site characterization, including exploration and field and laboratory testing.	2009-05-22
TM-2.9.2	Memo	Geotechnical Reports Preparation Guidelines - Defines content and format for the geotechnical reports that will present the findings of the geotechnical investigations and analyses that are performed during preliminary and final design.	2009-05-22
TM-2.9.3	Memo	Geologic and Seismic Hazard Analysis Guidelines - Guidance for the identification, evaluation, data analysis, and presentation of geologic and seismic hazards (fault rupture, liquefaction, landslides, karst terrain, volcanic hazards, erosion, subsidence, flooding, etc.), giving reference to existing guidance and literature.	2009-06-15
TM-2.9.4	Memo	Preliminary Active Fault Locations and Design Considerations	2009-Q3
TM-2.9.5	Memo	Preliminary Design Earthquake Guidelines for 30 Percent Design	2010-Q1
TM-2.9.6	Memo	Interim Ground Motion Guidelines - Guidelines for developing interim (i.e. 30% design) ground motion criteria. Defines design earthquake levels, and seismic performance criteria including the No Collapse Level (NCL), the Safe Performance Level (SPL), and the Operating Performance Level (OPL).	2010-03-04
TM-2.9.7	Memo	Acceleration Response Spectra for Final Design	2010-Q4
TM-2.9.9	Memo	Final Earthquake Ground Motions for Final Design	2010-Q4
TM-2.9.10	Memo	Geotechnical Design Guidelines - Guidelines for geotechnical analysis and design criteria for high-speed train infrastructure facilities such as bridge and viaduct foundations, slopes, cuts, fills, embankments, retaining walls, excavation bracing, culverts, drainage, etc.	2010-06-30
Seismic Studies
TM-2.10.1	Memo	Seismic Performance Criteria and Design Basis	2009-Q2
TM-2.10.2	Memo	Technical Advisory Panel Work Plan	2009-Q2
TM-2.10.3	Memo	Technical Advisory Panel Summary	2010-Q2
TM-2.10.4	Memo	Interim Seismic Design Criteria - Guidance for the seismic design for high-speed train bridges and aerial structures, tunnels and underground structures, passenger stations and buildings, in consideration of the fact that the HSR alignment passes through some of the most seismically active regions of California, including crossings of major fault systems.	2009-06-08
TM-2.10.5	Memo	15% Design Seismic Design Benchmarks - Benchmark guidelines for all structures that directly support track and running high-speed trains including bridges, aerial structures, tunnels and underground structures, passenger stations and buildings. These simple guidelines support only the 15% design level for the EIR/EIS process. TM-2.10.4 applies to later design stages.	2010-03-29
TM-2.10.6	Memo	Fault Rupture Analysis and Mitigation - Guidelines for the identification of seismic fault hazard zones near the HSR alignment, methods to determine the rupture displacement characteristics, and a variety of mitigation measures to ensure survivability.	2010-06-11
TM-2.10.7	Memo	Final Seismic Design Criteria (30 Percent and Final Design)	2010-Q3
TM-2.10.8	Memo	Structures Type Selection Development Procedures	2010-Q3
TM-2.10.9	Memo	Final Fault Crossing Design Criteria and Guidance	2010-Q4
TM-2.10.10	Memo	Track-Structure Interaction - Specific requirements for high-speed track and structure interaction for aerial structures and bridges (but not tracks supported on grade), such as dynamic performance, traffic safety, rail-structure interaction, and passenger comfort.	2010-06-30
TM-2.10.11	Memo	Passenger Comfort Design Criteria for Structures	2010-Q4
Traction Power - General
TM-3.1.1.1	Memo	Traction Power 2 x 25kV Autotransformer Electrification System - Technical rationale for selection of 25 kV overhead electrification, traction power system configuration, utility interfaces, and voltage limits.	2010-03-31
TM-3.1.1.3	Memo	Traction Power Facilities - Drawings of standardized power substations, switching, and paralleling stations to be built along the right-of-way to supply and distribute electrical traction power.	2010-06-08
TM-3.1.1.3	Memo	Traction Power Facilities General Standardization Requirements - Standardized sizing, layout and placement of the three kinds of electrical facilities used to supply and distribute traction power: substations, switching stations and paralleling stations.	2010-06-10
TM-3.1.1.5	Memo	Overhead Contact System and Negative Feeder Feeds	2009-Q2
Traction Power - System Analysis
TM-3.1.3.1	Memo	Initial Segment Traction Power System Analysis	2008-Q4
TM-3.1.3.2	Memo	Full System Traction Power System Analysis	2009-Q3
Traction Power - Facilities
TM-3.1.5.3	Memo	Utility Power Supply for Traction Power Supply System - Requirements for commercial electric power utility interface to the HSR system, including voltage ranges, redundancy, and space requirements for utility feeds.	2010-06-15
TM-3.1.5.3	Drawing	Utility Power Supply for Traction Power Supply System - Drawings showing the relationship of utility high voltage power feeds to HSR system traction power substations.	2010-06-11
Overhead Contact System
TM-3.2.1	Memo	Overhead Contact System Requirements - Review of standards and best practices to provide design criteria for the overhead contact system (OCS), the high voltage electrical wires that are strung above the tracks to supply power to trains.	2009-07-14
TM-3.2.1	Drawing	Overhead Contact System - Drawings of standard configurations for the overhead contact system (OCS) including pole, headspan and portal arrangements, key dimensions, nomenclature of component parts, etc.	2009-07-07
TM-3.2.2	Memo	Overhead Contact System Structural Requirements - Defines the structural loads experienced by overhead contact system components and establishes limits on deflections and failure modes, considering all environments and climate, especially wind loading.	2010-06-08
TM-3.2.3	Memo	Pantograph Clearance Envelopes - Review of European and Asian practice, and guidance for mechanical and electrical clearances around pantographs (the train-mounted devices that capture electrical power from the overhead contact system).	2009-07-17
TM-3.2.3	Drawing	Pantograph Clearance Envelopes - Dimensioned drawings of pantograph clearance envelopes at two wire heights, with or without curve superelevation, in either open track or in tunnels.	2009-07-07
TM-3.2.5	Memo	OCS Electrical Requirements	2009-Q2
TM-3.2.6	Memo	Grounding, Bonding and Protection From Electrical Shock - Reviews standards and best practices to provide criteria for the traction electrification system (TES) grounding and bonding requirements and for protection against electric shock. Covers traction power systems, overhead contact system, station platforms, structures, and overhead bridge protection.	2010-06-11
TM-3.2.6	Drawing	Grounding, Bonding and Protection From Electrical Shock - Schematics of grounding and bonding for elevated structures, tunnels, station platforms and overhead bridges.	2010-06-11
TM-3.2.7	Memo	OCS Mechanical Requirements	2009-Q2
Train Control
TM-3.3.1	Memo	Automatic Train Control: Concept of System - Describes the functions of the Automatic Train Control (ATC) system including Automatic Train Protection (ATP), Automatic Train Operation (ATO), Automatic Train Supervision (ATS), and Positive Train Control (PTC). The key requirement is that the technology must already exist as part of an operating system with proven experience worldwide on at least one high speed passenger railway.	2010-06-25
TM-3.3.1	Drawing	Automatic Train Control: Concept of System - Block diagrams of two possible approaches to ATC: one based on the European ERTMS radio-based solution, and another on the Japanese Digital-ATC cab signal solution.	2010-06-25
TM-3.3.2	Memo	Automatic Train Control Site Requirements - Identifies the physical area required for train control system equipment such as enclosures and housings, wayside signals (if used), ATC communications infrastructure such as housings and antenna towers, and associated access requirements.	2010-06-25
TM-3.3.2	Drawing	Automatic Train Control Site Requirements - Drawings showing typical sizes for ATC wayside equipment sites at stations and interlockings, as well as typical wayside signals (dwarf, mast and bridge configurations)	2010-06-25
TM-3.3.3	Memo	Automatic Train Control Wayside Power Supply Options - Considers pros and cons of various available power sources for automatic train control equipment along the right-of-way, such as utility power drop, cabling from nearest HSR facility, drop-feed and step-down from overhead contact system, and solar/wind plus battery systems.	2010-06-25
TM-3.3.4	Drawing	Ground and Bonding for Train Control and Communications - Schematics for grounding and bonding of track circuits in open track, at interlockings, and at wayside signal equipment.	2010-06-08
TM-3.3.4	Memo	Ground and Bonding for Train Control and Communications - Describes the grounding and bonding interfaces and criteria required to ensure the correct operation of train control and communications systems in co-existence with high-voltage overhead traction power systems.	2010-06-10
TM-3.3.11	Memo	Measurement Procedure for EMI Footprint - Standard procedure for measuring the level of EMI (Electro-magnetic interference) in the vicinity of the HSR right-of-way. These measurements are necessary for development of a system-wide EMI footprint and for assessment of electro-magnetic compatibility impacts (arising from HSR as well as impacting on HSR)	2010-03-31
Communications
TM-3.4.1	Memo	Communications System Topology	2009-Q4
TM-3.4.2	Memo	Communications Systems Site Requirements - Lists the expected communications functions and components required at each type of facility (control centers, stations, traction power substations, wayside train control cabinets, tunnels, yards). Includes drawings of communication facility layouts.	2010-07-01
TM-3.4.2	Drawing	Communications Systems Site Requirements - Drawings of communications facility layouts (already included in corresponding tech memo)	2010-07-08
TM-3.4.3	Memo	Network Management System	2010-Q1
TM-3.4.4	Memo	Communications Backbone Technology and Protocols	2010-Q2
TM-3.4.10	Memo	Electromagnetic Compatibility Design Criteria	2009-Q2
TM-3.4.12	Memo	SCADA Requirements for Traction Electrification System	2010-Q1
Operations
TM-4.1	Memo	LA - Anaheim Concept Level Operational Feasibility Study - Concept level analysis undertaken in 2008 to estimate the number of high-speed trains that could be operated on the LOSSAN Corridor between Los Angeles Union Station (LAUS) and Anaheim. This study examined the feasibility of four different track configuration and operational scenarios. Events have since overtaken the conclusions of this analysis, since local agencies favor the shared-track alternative.	2008-07-21
TM-4.1 Appx. A	Appendix	Appendix A Network Schematics - Track network schematics showing how the various LOSSAN alternatives are configured.	2008-07-21
TM-4.1 Appx. B1	Appendix	Appendix B Stringlines - Detailed string line diagrams (showing each train's location versus time) of a typical day's service pattern under the various LOSSAN alternatives.	2008-07-21
TM-4.1 Appx. B2	Appendix	Appendix B Stringlines - Continued from previous file (Appendix B is split into two files)	2008-07-21
TM-4.1.1	Memo	Justification for Two-Track Station Configuration - LA to Anaheim - Extremely short memo mentions the possibility of two-track HSR-only stations in the LOSSAN corridor under the assumption of dedicated HSR tracks, an alternative that was still in favor as of 2009. Mostly overtaken by events since then.	2009-07-10
TM-4.2	Memo	Phase 1 Service Plan - Concept level state-wide HSR service plan and hypothetical timetable that has served as the basis for ridership estimates, stopping patterns, fleet sizing, yard sizing and terminal station sizing. The service plan and ridership studies reinforce each other to justify extremely optimistic assumptions that dictate very generous sizing of HSR infrastucture. This document also includes string line diagrams and a proposed timetable.	2008-11-20
TM-4.3	Memo	Full Build Service Plan - Draft of concept level state-wide HSR service plan including extensions to San Diego and Sacramento, that has served as the basis for ridership estimates, stopping patterns, fleet sizing, yard sizing and terminal station sizing.	2009-01-12
TM-4.3 Appx. A1	Appendix	Appendix A1 Full Build Stopping Patterns - Stopping patterns for the full-build system including San Diego and Sacramento.	2009-01-12
TM-4.3 Appx. A3	Appendix	Appendix A3 Full Build Stringlines - Detailed string line diagrams (showing each train's location versus time) of a typical day's service pattern in the full-build system. Note junctions whimsically named after PB program management staff.	2009-01-12
TM-4.3 Appx. A4	Appendix	Appendix A4 Full Build Equipment Cycles - Spreadsheet dump of daily operation with trainsets allocated to each service for fleet sizing purposes.	2009-01-12
TM-4.4	Memo	Operations & Maintenance Cost Model	2009-Q3
Maintenance
TM-5.1	Memo	Terminal and Heavy Maintenance Facility Guidelines - Preliminary guidelines for identifying locations and designing the maintenance and layup facilities for the HSR system. Includes extensive analysis of maintenance practices in France (TGV) and Japan (Shinkansen). Defines facility types, functions, layouts and sizing of maintenance facilities.	2009-08-25
TM-5.1	Drawing	Terminal and Heavy Maintenance Facility Guidelines - Conceptual plans of the HMF (Heavy Maintenance Facility) as well as storage and maintenance yards in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Anaheim, Sacramento, San Diego, or combined LA/Anaheim. Shows track layout and facility dimensions.	2009-07-22
TM-5.2	Drawing	Maintenance of Way Facilities - Conceptual plans for small maintenance-of-way facilities to be located at various points along the right-of-way.	2009-07-23
TM-5.3	Memo	Maintenance Facilities Requirements Summary - Defines requirements for maintenance facility access, employee parking, and site location. Also gives sizes in acres of each planned facility. Facility functional requirements are covered in TM-5.1.	2009-08-31
Rolling Stock
TM-6.1	Memo	Selected Train Technologies - Identifies the available range of high-speed trainsets that are or may be capable of 220 mph (350 km/h) operation. Briefly describes the characteristics of each technology that need to be taken into account in infrastructure design. Includes tractive effort diagrams to support train performance simulations.	2008-05-30
TM-6.2	Memo	Introduction of Euro/Asian Rolling Stock to California	2009-Q3
TM-6.3	Memo	Trainset Configuration Analysis and Recommendation - Examines pros and cons of various HSR trainset architectures (single vs. bi-level, power units vs. distributed traction, availability from multiple vendors) and concludes that California should use single-level, high-platform, electric multiple units (EMUs).	2009-09-23
Regulatory Approvals
TM-7.2	Memo	FRA Criteria Applicability	2009-Q2
TM-7.3	Memo	International Rail Standards Comparison - Reviews and compares the various international rail standards. Describes international standards bodies, their interrelationships and how they address high-speed rail. Recommends that US regulatory framework be based on European Technical Standards for Interoperability (TSI).	2009-04-27
TM-7.4	Memo	Hazard Identification and Mitigation	2009-Q3
TM-7.5	Memo	FRA System Overview	2009-Q4
TM-7.6	Memo	Product Safety Plan Outline	2009-Q2
TM-7.7	Memo	RSPP Safety Plan Outline	2009-Q2

Schedule Scare

2011-02-12T12:43:00.001-08:00

It looks like the scheduling department at Caltrain is very quick to publish a proposed reduced 48-train timetable when funding cuts loom... and yet for years has utterly failed to publish or market an improved timetable to promote the electrification project. They do a great job selling the downside of service cuts, but when it's time to sell the upside of electrification, nobody's home. Hello?

UPDATE 2/15:

Caltrain's reduced "Armageddon" timetable has been put through the metricator, using the same methodology as before.

First, the Caltrain 2010 timetable: the basis of comparison is today's 90-train-per-day, 5-train-per-hour timetable, to which we assign a score of 100 as before.

Input timetable file (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (318 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (35 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (539 kB PDF)
Overall rush hour service quality score: 100

Now, the 48-train Armageddon timetable, which features 4 trains per hour serving fewer stops, during rush hours only:

Input timetable file (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (343 kB PDF) -- also compared with Caltrain 2010 (324 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (34 kB PDF) -- also compared with Caltrain 2010 (36 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (213 kB PDF)
Overall rush hour service quality score: 86

Not surprisingly, the rush hour service quality score drops, but not quite as much as you might first expect. That's because service to the highest-ridership stops is mostly retained. A curious feature also emerges: rush hour service to certain stops such as California Ave and Sunnyvale is actually improved thanks to regular half-hourly service.

Do note, however, that these metrics measure only peak-hour service quality… obviously, the score for off-peak service would be zero.

The Future of Caltrain, Without HSR

2011-01-29T18:03:00.000-08:00

Today, I had the opportunity to participate in the Save Our Caltrain summit, organized by the grassroots group Friends of Caltrain. It was a pleasure to meet many blog readers in person. My presentation focused on how capital investment in Caltrain should be carefully targeted to increase service quality, grow ridership, and put Caltrain on a sustainable path that breaks out of the debilitating spiral of cost-cutting. Some participants at the summit asked for my presentation slides, so here they are:

Download Slides (1.1 MB PDF file)

There wasn't enough time in six minutes to drive home some very important points.

In deciding which improvements to make, it is of the utmost importance for all stakeholders to agree on the metrics that will be used to determine the relative merits of various proposals. Until agreement is established on the scoring framework, debating the particular merits of this or that project is an arbitrary, subjective exercise with no reasonable chance of closure. You can read more about what I think are the metrics that matter.
Caltrain has failed miserably in marketing the electrification project to the public. It is often sold on the basis of lower emissions, "lower" operating cost, lower noise, lower fuel costs, greater comfort, etc. The bottom line is that electrification is about trip times. Caltrain's product is its timetable, and improving the timetable should be the organization's singular focus. The potential support that peninsula communities could provide to the project is not being tapped because Caltrain has failed to communicate the tangible benefits of electrification to each individual city. Caltrain must promise and deliver a future timetable, and identify specifically how each city would be better served. (How many more trains stopping per hour, and trip times to key destinations.)
There are several reasons beyond poor marketing that explain why the Caltrain electrification project has been in the works forever, and threatens to continue to languish in that perpetual state of indecision--despite its very high return on investment. None of the reasons are technical. It's all politics.
1. Electrification will not create many local jobs because it is a systems contract that contains primarily highly manufactured goods.
2. Electrification does not involve the pouring of enormous amounts of concrete, so the local transportation-industrial complex (aligned around large civil engineering and construction firms) is not inclined to support it.
3. Electrification would undermine the justification for BART on the peninsula. The federal funding for new transit mega-projects is scored in part on the basis of cost per new rider, and allowing Caltrain to tap those new riders would make BART look far less attractive an investment.
4. Electrification is considered by many anti-HSR activists to be the camel's nose under the tent. It potentially hastens the day when high-speed trains will reach San Francisco. The mere threat of litigation has put the project on the back burner since last April.
All these political obstacles must be overcome.
DMUs (Diesel Multiple Units) were often mentioned at the summit as an alternative to electrification. This solution will not achieve the required time savings! Electric trains have a much higher power-to-weight ratio that gives them the required acceleration. It cannot be emphasized enough that the quality desired of Caltrain's new fleet is acceleration. Top speed matters much less. When picking a new train fleet, the key performance spec is power-to-weight ratio... today's diesels are at about 6 kW/metric ton, and we need to be at least in the 12-15 kW/ton range. A few people mentioned Japanese hybrid DMUs (diesel with battery storage), but those extremely lightweight DMUs would never meet the crash standards that are being required of Caltrain. If these hybrid trains were imported here, their structural mass would have to be increased and their acceleration would be insufficient to provide much of a benefit. If it can't do 12 kW/ton, forget about it.
The mid-line overtake isn't half bad for offering continuing service to San Francisco Transbay, should the high-speed rail project initially terminate in San Jose.
Some people asked about the doctored BART EMU photo. It is based on a Stadler KISS EMU (an off-the-shelf European design) that would be perfect for the peninsula. Here is the big version of the rendering.

There was no time for questions, so please post any queries in the comment section below.

Progress at Transbay?

2010-12-16T21:30:00.000-08:00

The many failures of the Transbay Transit Center design, as a train station, have previously been pointed out (see here and here). A November CAC briefing on the latest design iterations of the platform levels finally shows some incremental progress. After digging that $400 million hole, we may actually find signs of intelligent life down there.

Caltrain tracks are moved to the northwestern edge of the train box, closest to downtown. While this change was advertised to avoid the foundations of the high-rise at 201 Mission St, (TJPA headquarters!) a better reason is that Caltrain ridership at Transbay will likely exceed anything HSR can muster. In this case, two wrongs have inadvertently made a right.
With Caltrain tracks switched around, the future plans for tail tracks are now infeasible, and rightly so because underground tail tracks are the most expensive way you could possibly think of to park trains while they are not producing revenue. Again, two wrongs (the desire for tail tracks, and the competing desire for ramrod-straight platforms) make a right (no more tail tracks!)
A new entrance is provided on Beale Street, with an escalator bank perpendicular to the train box, reaching towards downtown. Caltrain passengers can directly access the Caltrain platform without any scenic detours through the rabbit warren of sequential, airport-like functional spaces intended for HSR, which make absolutely no sense for the daily commuter. This new entrance is a big step forward because it suggests for the first time a concern with minimizing the overall travel time of Caltrain passengers. If it's not too much to ask, two more such perpendicular access points should be added at Fremont and 1st streets (better yet: emerging north of Mission, so pedestrians don't have to wait to cross those busy intersections.)
Additional curved turnouts seem to have sprouted in the station throat, thankfully not labeled "emergency crossover", suggesting the possibility of improvements in operational efficiency and flexibility--although once again, nothing would beat a common platform height.

Happy Holidays to everyone.

Future EMU

2010-11-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

The newest automobiles are shown in Paris, Tokyo and Detroit. The latest aircraft are shown at Farnborough and Le Bourget. What about the newest passenger trains? That show, in Berlin, is known as Innotrans and provides a window on the latest evolution in the type of EMU (electric multiple unit) trains that Caltrain is pursuing. One of the future train concepts shown at the recently-concluded Innotrans 2010 is Bombardier's Omneo product platform, ordered in large quantities by French regional transportation authorities and due to enter service in mid-2013. That order is in itself noteworthy, because Bombardier beat French firm Alstom, the incumbent provider of the previous generation of double-deck regional trains, on its home turf.

Tailored slightly for U.S. dimensions, a possible Caltrain Omneo concept is shown in the sketch above. The following key features set it apart from the 1990s-vintage EMUs that feature in Caltrain's electrification plans--the very EMUs that the Omneo is set to replace:

Articulated design. The wheels are placed between, rather than under each train car, leading to a smoother ride. Gangways between cars, traditionally cramped, dark, loud, shaky and unwelcoming places, are transformed into full-width, seamless passages that turn the train into one continuous space. Vehicle systems (traction equipment, air conditioning, etc. shown in dark gray in the figure) are moved entirely out of passenger spaces, below the floor and above the ceiling. With inter-car gangways and systems cabinets gone, open sight lines promote a sense of space and safety inside the train.
A usable amount of high-floor space. Bi-level EMU cars are always a configuration challenge, since passenger spaces must fit around numerous vehicle systems while still providing full ADA accessibility. Accessibility means that wheelchair spaces, bike spaces and accessible toilets must all be provided on the door entry level. Traditional bi-level cars do not provide sufficient room for all these amenities in the high-floor vestibule areas over the wheels, and thus typically board on the lower level where more contiguous space is available. Articulation gets rid of this design constraint.
High-level boarding. While the traditional bi-level EMU architecture tends to allow boarding only on the lower floor, this concept features a 1220 mm (48 inch) boarding height that would be compatible with high-speed rail platforms. The Omneo is offered in 550 mm, 760 mm and 920 mm boarding heights, but additional vertical clearance available in the U.S. makes a 1220 mm floor height feasible. A shared platform interface between Caltrain and HSR presents enormous operational advantages by allowing any train to access any platform, especially at San Francisco Transbay.
Dual, High-Low Doors. To allow a gradual transition from today's 8-inch platforms to 48-inch HSR-compatible platforms, each vestibule features two doors, one for each height. While this temporarily restricts door capacity during the transition period, the modular door assemblies provide for easy reconfiguration to 100% high platforms once the transition is complete. Dual height doors are not unprecedented.
Extra wide interiors. The articulated design shortens car bodies from the traditional 26 m (85 feet) to just 10 or 15 meters. Shorter cars, for a given loading gauge, can be made wider than longer cars. A U.S. spec Omneo car body could be 3.1 m (122 inches) wide in the 15-meter double deck section, and 3.15 m (124 inches) wide in the 10-meter single deck section, all within AAR Plate F. That's 4 and 6 inches wider, respectively, than today's Bombardier bi-level cars used in Baby Bullet service. Such wide interiors might enable comfortable 5-abreast seating.

Bombardier vs. Bombardier

It's instructive to compare the Omneo EMU concept to another product in Bombardier's portfolio, the bi-level commuter cars that Caltrain operates for its Baby Bullet service. The diagram at right shows a direct comparison of a Caltrain car to a pair of Omneo cars of roughly equivalent length.

At three seats abreast, an 11-unit Omneo train measuring 145 m (475 ft, a bit shorter than a 493 ft Baby Bullet train) accommodates 695 seats and 48 bikes, compared to 674 seats and 48 bikes for a Baby Bullet. With a two-abreast seating plan making use of the extra width for aisles and standees, the Omneo would still accommodate 590 seats (not counting 48 flip-down seats.) Using a metric that Caltrain is fond of, seats per unit length of train, here's how it stacks up:

Baby Bullet: 1.37 seats/ft or 4.5 seats/m (including locomotive)
Omneo 3+2 seating: 1.46 seats/ft or 4.8 seats/m
Omneo 2+2 seating: 1.24 seats/ft or 4.1 seats/m

These figures show that an Omneo-like EMU would achieve rough parity with the Baby Bullet in terms of seating density. Of course, as we've discussed before, it's not all about seats... standees are passengers too, if you give them somewhere comfortable to stand.

Innovative Design Enables Platform Height Compatibility

This article is not intended as an endorsement of Bombardier's products; their Omneo train merely serves as an illustrative example. Other manufacturers (Alstom, Siemens and Stadler) aren't standing still, and are also increasingly focused on articulated EMU designs with innovative and flexible interior packaging. In light of these new technological developments, Caltrain's relentless pursuit of 20-year-old double-deck EMU designs locked into a low-platform architecture seems downright archaic.

Cutting-edge European vehicle designs will not compromise the basis of Caltrain's FRA waiver, and might help achieve one of the key tenets of compatibility: a common platform interface for HSR and Caltrain, without billions of dollars and years of platform reconstruction up front. The trains can come now, as part of the electrification project, and the rest can follow later as time and money allows. What is required is a little bit of forward thinking to future-proof the system and enable any train to use any track to access any platform.

Still No Compatibility In Sight

2010-11-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

The high-speed rail authority's program management team, of Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, recently published an Operations & Maintenance Concept for peer review by the many foreign HSR operators with which the California High-Speed Rail Authority has signed collaboration agreements.

Besides regurgitating much of the same information already available in the various EIRs and technical memoranda, the peer review document states a number of operational assumptions that have far-reaching implications for the peninsula rail corridor. The first one on the list:

1. The HST system is assumed to operate on dedicated tracks, independent of any other passenger or freight rail services, except in the following locations:

a. Peninsula Corridor – approach tracks leading to the two terminals at Transbay and 4th and King Streets (shared between CHST and Caltrain commuter trains)

Note the added emphasis, that only the approach tracks would be shared, namely north of Brisbane. And then, this:

8. (...) Train operations at the San Francisco end of the network will be complex, linking the two terminal stations, each with mixed HST and commuter traffic, with the San Francisco‐area storage and maintenance yard, as well as the four‐track main line that has high‐speed trains on two dedicated tracks and commuter trains on the other two tracks.

While the document does briefly entertain the alien notion of shared platforms, as well as a "proof-of-payment" fare system where POP must be provided in the paid area of the station (talk about not getting the concept!), what is abundantly clear here is that high-speed rail is being planned on the peninsula without regard to integrating operations with Caltrain--in flagrant disregard of the MOU with Caltrain, and of many successful shared corridors around the world, including even in New Jersey. In this vision, Caltrain is confined to two tracks, and relegated to the role of an operational nuisance on the approach into San Francisco. Any synergy that might arise from Caltrain express trains sharing tracks with high-speed trains is wasted.

Change The Assumptions, Before It's Too Late!

These operating assumptions have dire implications for local commuter rail service on the peninsula.

Caltrain has so far demonstrated a total lack of ambition on the operations front, and has utterly failed, ever since Proposition 1A passed in 2008, to think outside of the two-track box known as Caltrain 2025. There are ways to provide better service with fewer trains, provided that integrated planning is performed up-front by the Peninsula Rail Program, pursuant to the memorandum of understanding (which the above operating assumptions directly contradict).

The high-speed rail program management team is also uninterested, in the first place because their charter is to provide high-speed long-distance service, not commuter service, and secondly, because the same firm built BART. While this can only be alleged, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas likely has zero interest in improving Caltrain, and every financial interest in receiving another several billion dollars of taxpayer's money to complete BART's manifest destiny to ring the Bay.

Foreign peer reviewers will have little interest in questioning the operational assumptions, since doing so might rock the boat and compromise their future ability to obtain contracts to build and operate California's system.

So just who does that leave to do the right thing, hopefully before any concrete is poured?

Residents and city governments should push hard for Caltrain to integrate its operations with the high-speed rail system, going for maximum flexibility, striking the appropriate balance between local and long-distance services, and enabling the optimal allocation of scarce resources, (such as track capacity at rush hour, platform space at terminal stations, station area footprints in developed areas, etc.) in response to actual demand patterns as they develop. For planning purposes, that means any train should be able to use any track, and stop at any platform.

If peninsula communities are going to bear the considerable disruption of HSR construction and operation, they should have every interest in getting at least a little bit of trickle-down service benefits in return. Otherwise, they may become the rail equivalent of fly-over country.

(thanks to CARRD for obtaining the O&M peer review document)

News Roundup, World Series Edition

2010-11-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

Supplemental AA Supplement: The CHSRA posts the latest round of tweaks to the peninsula alternatives analysis. The updated report is due in November. (Note: this briefing was abridged by the CHSRA, shortly after being posted. The link is to the original slides that were removed from the CHSRA website.)

The Money Goes Poof: since the Feds have specifically ear-marked $715 million in HSIPR funding for the Central Valley, the winner-take-all, four-way horse race between Merced - Fresno, Fresno - Bakersfield, Los Angeles - Anaheim, and San Francisco - San Jose is for all intents and purposes decided before the CHSRA board even gets to vote. Bottom line: SF - SJ is out of the running and will not receive any of the $2.25 billion in ARRA stimulus funds. That has huge implications on process: the rush to beat a 2012 shovels-in-the-dirt deadline is gone.

Ray Writes Anna: the Secretary of Transportation writes a letter to assure Congresswoman Eshoo and concerned peninsula residents that "no final decision has been made regarding the design of this segment, and DOT must approve any final alternative in order for it to receive Federal funds. As long as this process is underway, we cannot prejudge the final outcome." In short, he claims there is adult supervision and the mad rush (now moot--see above) for early federal funding will not preempt due environmental process.

Anna Writes Ray: the Congresswoman replies, profusely thanking the Feds for their oversight and the few crumbs thrown our way (a paltry $16 million, nominally ear-marked for re-arranging the platforms at San Francisco's 4th & King station) ...

... and asks for CBOSS Pork: Eshoo asks that the $16 million be re-allocated to the CBOSS project. She pointedly states "We can assure you that the PTC project is not a "throwaway" that would benefit only Caltrain and require replacement or costly upgrade when HSR is built."

If only that were true.

If only the secretary could hear from people who didn't drink the CBOSS Kool-Aid... for example, by reading Caltrain's own crystal-clear statements that the design of CBOSS will not take HSR into account. Or simply typing "CBOSS Caltrain" into Google. Recall that CBOSS is (a) an overlay system (that's what the 'O' stands for) that cannot function on its own as a stand-alone HSR-capable signaling system, (b) is designed primarily for freight trains, not HSR, and (c) is currently vaporware. For the $230 million they are trying to marshall for this science project (a massive sum with an elastic upper bound, to be exercised via contractual engineering change orders) they could simply install ERTMS, the emerging worldwide HSR standard, at very little cost or schedule risk.

Message to LaHood and Eshoo: now that wouldn't be a throwaway.

Station Design 101

2010-10-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

If you're the poor sucker in charge of designing a mid-peninsula high-speed rail station, here's what you must do: start with the ridership estimates for full 2035 system build-out, and apply Technical Memo 2.2.2 (station design policy) as handed down from above by Parsons Brinckerhoff, the firm in charge of the HSR system design. Table 6.1 has all the relevant formulas that you'll need to size the outer concourse, controlled waiting areas, how many restrooms, etc. All that remains is to plug and chug the formulas and presto, you've got yourself a station.

The result of this formulaic approach to station design can be seen in the recent sizing study for a potential mid-peninsula station at Mountain View, which is very similar to the notions also being entertained for Palo Alto or Redwood City. Key statistics: about 8000 daily HSR boardings, 67000 square feet of floor area (not including platforms), and 3000 parking spaces.

Implicit Requirements

While the technical policy and system requirements do contain a variety of clearly stated requirements concerning station design, many of the requirements are not stated, but instead taken for granted. They are implicit requirements. The following is an attempt to make them explicit:

The station shall funnel every passenger through a sequence of functional spaces that broadly mimic an airport.
The station shall be divided into a public concourse and an access-controlled area requiring possession of a valid ticket.

The station shall have a mezzanine, a large access concourse located above or below the platforms that provides the "necessary" floor area to funnel passengers from a grand station entrance (complete with "entry plaza") through "check-in", shops and restaurants, and possibly "security" to a "gate".
The HSR platforms shall be used exclusively by high speed trains, and may not under any circumstance be shared with Caltrain. The same track and platform edge may not be served by both HSR and Caltrain. The same platform at opposite platform edges may not be served by both HSR and Caltrain.
The HSR platforms shall be fully access controlled with high fences, even if such fence is used to segregate the HSR platform from an adjacent Caltrain platform.
Passengers transferring between HSR and Caltrain shall use escalators and transit via the mezzanine. Maximum vertical circulation is encouraged, and convenient cross-platform or same-platform transfers are explicitly disallowed.
The station shall have gargantuan amounts of automobile parking (1000 spaces at the station, and another 2000 spaces within 3 miles).

None of these "requirements" make any sense, except to maximize the size and cost (and profit) of building such grandiose but operationally dismal infrastructure. What is being envisioned here is not an integrated rail network, but well and truly a flight-level zero airline.

Another Way

It doesn't have to be this way. In France or Germany, any bum off the street can drag a large suitcase onto a high-speed train five minutes before departure without ever passing through a security check or a fare gate. Tickets are checked on board, using what's known as proof-of-payment or POP: if you can't produce a valid ticket when asked, you are issued a citation. POP obviates all this sterile-area gated fare-paid-only nonsense, with enormous simplification of the process of getting from point A to point B.

Is POP a gaping security hole? Not if you consider that bombs brought on board high-speed trains are a rather unreliable way to achieve mass carnage. That's why over several decades, such an attack has only been carried out once, and then rather unsuccessfully. The target environment will necessarily be far richer over on the Caltrain platform. Terrorists in Madrid knew this when they attacked at Madrid's main HSR terminal; all their bombs went off on packed commuter trains. So, a rational evaluation of threats (one not based on security theater) leads to the conclusion that HSR need not look like a BART fortress on steroids.

In Europe, land of POP, commuter rail and HSR routinely share platforms, leading to far more efficient use of space inside stations. For example: Paris, Berlin, Karlsruhe, Hamburg (on a sacrilegious curved platform, no less!), Brussels, and dozens more.

The graphic below shows the differences between the gargantuan mid-peninsula dial-a-station proposed by the CHSRA (and rightly rejected by Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City) and a mid-peninsula station of far more modest proportions, that could be achieved without any loss of functionality provided that the following simple requirements are adopted:

HSR shall use barrier-free fare control
Caltrain shall use the same platform height as HSR
Stations shall allow any train to use any track to access any platform
Stations shall minimize vertical and horizontal circulation needed to access any train

Appropriate station design requirements have an enormous effect on the resulting designs, with overall width dropping from an elephantine 265 feet (as depicted in the sizing study) to a more manageable 122 feet.

At a time when the HSR project is increasingly under attack for being insensitive to peninsula communities, perhaps a reevaluation of station requirements would improve the chances of someday achieving a context-sensitive solution. Mountain View, for example, could have the highly-effective, low-impact intermodal station previously described in this space.

Juicy CBOSS Tidbits

2010-10-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: the Q&A with prospective bidders continues. The latest round includes these gems:

Q #31: The RFP addresses HSR. What assumptions should the proposer make in order to address HSR requirements?

A: Evaluation of the potential for the proposed solution to meet future HSR needs will not be part of the proposal evaluation.

Q #43: [Caltrain] states that "the system will be required to be interoperable with the train control system selected for HSR operation throughout the California High Speed network." Since this train control system has not been identified, how can the contractor ensure that their system will be interoperable by the 2015 implementation date?

A: The Caltrain PTC system must be interoperable with existing tenant railroads by Dec 2015. HSR is not an existing tenant railroad.

There. Just in case there remained even the shadow of a doubt: Caltrain couldn't care less about interoperability with HSR, but is focused like a laser on interoperability with Union Pacific freight trains, a.k.a. "tenant railroad."

Caltrain is betting all its chips on the AAR's Interoperable Train Control (ITC) project, an industry-wide consortium effort to stonewall and delay the federal PTC mandate. If there is any doubt about what the AAR (representing the big freight railroads) thinks about PTC, read their litany of complaints and ask yourself just how likely it is that ITC will be completed on time--regardless of the law. Expect the AAR to slow-walk PTC just as the Europeans run rings around us worldwide!

ORIGINAL POST: Caltrain's planned Positive Train Control system (known as CBOSS) has been out to bid for a little while now, and the Request For Proposal process is continuing with some back-and-forth Q&A between Caltrain and prospective bidders in advance of the November 3rd deadline.

The latest volley of questions and answers includes question #20 from an astute prospective bidder:

What assumptions should me made in terms of HSR? (Interoperability, Operations, sharing track, etc.)

Caltrain's official response:

Under current RFP Scope of work, HSR Operations is not considered for this phase of PTC implementation. Public information is available via HSR webisite. (sic)

It's October 2010, and Caltrain still considers high-speed rail as an afterthought. Shall we give them another raise?

Also, just where is the funding for CBOSS going to come from, and is the undetermined funding source why Caltrain refuses to change the wording of the contract payment terms from "will endeavor to pay" to "shall pay" (see question #11) ?

Train Noise Calculator

2010-09-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: noise calculator spreadsheet is now available in both .xls (Excel 2003) and .xlsx (Excel 2007) formats.

The generation, propagation and perception of noise is one of those fields where concepts are deceptively simple and yet devilishly complex. Anybody can buy a sound level meter at Radio Shack, but that doesn't make one a noise expert any more than buying a calculator makes one a math whiz. Thankfully, the FRA publishes a well-written guidebook on High-Speed Ground Transportation Noise and Vibration Impact Assessment that describes a standard methodology for determining noise impacts from new high-speed rail projects. While this guidebook was published in 2005, the physical laws of acoustics remain the same as always.

Despite citing the FRA guidebook, there is little evidence in the CHSRA's program-level EIR noise and vibration chapter and its appendices that the source-path-receiver model framework described in the handbook has actually been applied. Impacts are broadly classified as high, medium or low, and crudely bumped down by one level on the peninsula (from "high" to "medium") because horn noise would be eliminated from more than 40 grade crossings.

To make the issue of noise impacts more accessible to the layperson, an implementation of the FRA noise impact assessment model is provided in the form of a train noise calculator spreadsheet (45 kB Excel 2007 .xlsx file or 140 kB Excel 2003 .xls file, no macros, made virus-free on a Mac.) Before playing with this, it's probably best to study up on the basics of noise in the FRA guidebook as well as CARRD's compilation on noise pollution to tell your dBA's from your Ldn's.

By crunching the FRA parameters and equations behind the scenes, the spreadsheet allows a rapid evaluation of noise impacts (None, Low, Moderate, Severe) as shown in the screenshot at right. The blue circle represents the project's impact, and you can see how it moves around the noise impact diagram based on:

Train speeds (anywhere from 20 mph all the way up to 220 mph)
Train length
Train frequency (both peak frequency, and nighttime traffic)
Train type (diesel, electric, maglev)
Track configuration (elevated, at-grade, trench...)
Screening effects from intervening rows of buildings
Distance from the tracks
Property use (residential, institutional, outdoor...)
Existing noise environment (suburban, urban, etc.)

The spreadsheet also implements a twist for the peninsula: the HSR project would not only add high-speed trains but also replace diesel Caltrain with somewhat quieter electric trains. The spreadsheet calculates the effect of the substitution of one type of traffic for another, and accounts for some unusual scenarios where the HSR project may generate less noise than the existing at-grade, diesel Caltrain.

Some interesting findings, which one is free to experiment with in the spreadsheet:

Elevated viaducts, as currently proposed, are twice as loud (+9 dBA) as elevated berms at the train speeds envisioned on the peninsula, everything else being equal. Viaducts amplify rolling noise because they are hollow structures that act as a resonating chamber. Belmont and San Carlos might be well-advised to leave their berms as they are.
At-grade tracks can be made half as loud (-10 dBA) with a noise barrier, when train speeds are in the 100 - 125 mph range proposed for the peninsula. Noise barriers become less effective as train speed increases and noise becomes dominated by aerodynamics, but here on the peninsula, they would probably do just fine.
Trenches are extremely effective at shielding train noise; they are overkill as far as noise mitigation is concerned. With a trench, even very high levels of traffic (several hundred trains a day) would create less noise than Caltrain does today. The trench need not even be covered for this benefit to be realized.
The proximity to an existing grade crossing with horns has a significant effect on the severity of the impact from the HSR project, as pointed out in the EIR noise chapter. A suburban residence within 500 ft of a grade crossing experiences ambient sound levels twice as loud (+10 dBA) than a suburban residence located away from grade crossings with horns. Since the existing noise level is the basis against which the noise added by the project is evaluated, areas near grade crossings can be expected to rate a lower impact. Nevertheless, not all areas along the peninsula corridor are close to a grade crossing.
Not surprisingly, Caltrain's fantasy schedule (10 tph peak, 162 trains/day) combined with HSR's fantasy schedule (10 tph peak, 6 tph off-peak, 228 trains/day) results in ~5 dBA worse noise impacts than a more realistic traffic level of 6 tph Caltrain and 4 tph HSR.
Out in the central valley, urban areas with ~150 trains/day blasting at 220 mph on concrete viaducts would experience severe noise impact within ~500 feet on either side of the tracks. Suburban and rural areas would experience even wider areas of noise blight, especially if the tracks are built on viaducts.

Noise is one issue; its evil twin, ground-borne vibration, is a subject for another day. In the meantime, suggested improvements to the train noise calculator spreadsheet are most welcome.

That Burning Smell

2010-09-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

There's a burning smell at Caltrain headquarters, from the smoldering tensions over high-speed rail on the peninsula. Caltrain CEO Mike Scanlon tries to triangulate a dicey situation with a statement to the public and a letter to his counterpart at the CHSRA. Let's review the state of play:

Facing a catastrophic shortfall in its operating budget for fiscal year 2012, Caltrain needs every ounce of good will it can get from peninsula communities in order to survive as a service and as a bureaucratic entity. All this talk of 80-foot wide viaducts tearing through residential neighborhoods is not helping one bit.
Caltrain's electrification project, cast for years as the key to future improvements in the system's operating bottom line, is being held hostage by (a) uncertainty over the proper phasing of the electrification project with respect to HSR construction, (b) threats of lawsuits over a somewhat stale EIR that tiptoes around the HSR issue, and (c) the funding package unraveling at the seams, on the widely held but mistaken expectation that HSR will pick up the tab.
Caltrain's $230 million reinvent-the-wheel PTC science project, mandated by the FRA as a sine qua non pre-condition to electric operation, has gone out to bid on a wing and a prayer with no clear source of funding identified other than the remote chance that the peninsula HSR project might receive the entire federal grant allocated for the statewide HSR system.
Caltrain's own guy, Bob "Father of the Baby Bullet" Doty, propelled into the driver's seat of the joint Caltrain - CHSRA Peninsula Rail Program, valiantly ran interference with peninsula communities, and must now be wondering if the steering wheel really is connected to the wheels of this particular bus.

The surest sign of a thorny situation is that stakeholders keep calling for the project to be "done right," the touchstone platitude that is always trotted out when people start to get hot under the collar.

Reset Button

Another recurring buzzword is "reset button." Californians for High Speed Rail wants to hit one reset button. Congresswoman Anna Eshoo wants to hit another reset button.

What about hitting a big red reset button at the Caltrain bunker in San Carlos?

Ditch the weak operating plan proposed as part of Caltrain 2025, and plan for smoking-hot corridor operations. A clockface timetable with a mid-line standing overtake, more than any other Caltrain improvement, promises to increase revenue while keeping operating costs under control, because it requires fewer trains and fewer crews to operate a service that will make the Baby Bullet look like a Model T.
Phase the quadruple tracking for HSR and start by building a modest four-track mid-line overtake facility from Redwood Junction to just south of downtown San Mateo. This avoids most of the NIMBY controversy while delivering the highest possible corridor throughput for Caltrain express service as well as the initial HSR services.
Ditch CBOSS and specify an off-the-shelf PTC standard that can be expanded to the statewide HSR system. Such a system already exists, and is mentioned dozens of times throughout the CHSRA's system requirements with the contractually-delicate phrasing "The CHSTP train control system will demonstrate Functional and Technical Requirements similar to ERTMS but the System Requirements are being written without specifying an ERTMS system. It is accepted that an ERTMS system may eventually be proposed and accepted." Bonus: HSR funds might pay for Caltrain's PTC.
Address the issue of level boarding once and for all. To make the most efficient use of San Francisco's new Transbay Transit Center, it is crucial that Caltrain and the HSR system adopt a common platform interface. The mantra ought to be "any train, any track, any platform". So far, there is not a peep from Caltrain.

While it can't be confirmed, the reset button is possibly located right under Mike Scanlon's desk.

Belmont Shoots the Moon

2010-09-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Belmont City Council is crafting a resolution (see original draft, and revised draft to be considered on 9/14) supporting the reinstatement of a cut-and-cover trench option for the high-speed rail authority's San Francisco - San Jose Draft Project EIR.

Underground tracks, favored by the city, were dropped from further consideration when the CHSRA published its Supplemental Alternatives Analysis on August 5th. That action left Belmont (and neighboring San Carlos) with only a single option to be carried forward for further study in the EIR: a tall viaduct. This viaduct is featured in crude renderings and a YouTube video posted by the city.

Belmont is the only member of the Peninsula Cities Consortium that did not have a trench or below-grade option carried forward for detailed study in the EIR, which has city officials fuming.

All Those Grade Crossings In Belmont

The Supplemental AA has caused quite an uproar on the peninsula, especially in the member cities of the PCC, largely because of the vertical alignment options proposed for the four-track corridor. The vertical alignment may need to be changed, requiring either raised or lowered tracks, in order to eliminate about 45 grade crossings along the peninsula corridor that would otherwise have to be closed. These changes are necessary because the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates grade crossings and pursues a stated policy of reducing the number of such crossings, is exceedingly unlikely to allow four-track grade crossings, much less in a dense suburban environment, regardless of train type or train speed.

One might reasonably assume, then, that the range of vertical options feasible for Belmont would depend solely on the locations and constraints imposed by the grade crossings that currently exist in Belmont. The trouble with this assumption is that the number of grade crossings in Belmont is... Zero.

The existing tracks run through Belmont on a retained fill embankment (shown in photo at left, and known in some quarters as a Berlin Wall) over Harbor Blvd and Ralston Ave. These grade separations were built starting in 1996, opened in October 1999, and did not cut off any pre-existing (legal) access across the tracks. The berm is now perceived as a community division, and prompted the official request to study design options that would enable its removal.

Why a Viaduct?

The Belmont viaduct is an example of the Context Sensitive Solutions process producing an unwanted outcome.

From its very first scoping comments, Belmont expressed misgivings about the berm and requested enhanced connectivity and mobility, in the hope of obtaining a tunnel paid for with OPM (Other People's Money). Taking into account the feedback provided by the Policy and Technical Working Groups at a series of meetings attended by Belmont officials, the Supplemental Analysis Report substituted a tall viaduct for the existing berm because "the Berm option does not enhance connectivity and mobility as well as an aerial viaduct option."

If Belmont disagrees with this outcome, if the city believes the viaduct is not better than a berm, and if this business about connectivity and mobility was all just a colossal misunderstanding, then the berm will simply be expanded to four tracks. The berm is a "fact on the ground" and its visual impact, once all is said, done and litigated, will not be counted against the high-speed rail project. That is the likely outcome if Belmont becomes any more strident in its demands for a tunnel.

Peninsula Rail Corridor Road Crossings

2010-09-09T23:31:00.001-07:00

Click to enlarge, or better yet, download the PDF (57 kB)

The Prescriptive Framework: System Requirements

2010-08-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

A System Requirement is a statement that identifies a necessary attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system in order for it to have value and utility to a user. The entire engineering effort for the California high-speed rail system is prescribed by a long list of technical requirements, which taken together form the system specification. The requirements are prepared by the program management team at Parsons Brinckerhoff, and cover every detail down to the allowable shades of red for the train's tail lights.

The Palo Alto grassroots group CARRD recently made a public records request for this important material. Thanks to their persistence, the system requirements have now been made public:

System Requirements Index by Subsystem (161 kB PDF)
System Requirements Index by Package (161 kB PDF)
System Requirements Text (770 kB PDF)

The document that is likely to be of most interest is the 961-page "kitchen sink" which also contains background information on how each requirement was developed:

System Requirements - Full Details and Supporting Information (5.2 MB PDF)

A large portion of the requirements is a hodgepodge of existing FRA regulatory requirements (Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations), AREMA (U.S. industry) recommended practices, and TSI (European Technical Standards for Interoperability) requirements. The European requirements are featured prominently because there is no existing regulatory framework for very high-speed rail in the United States, and California must blaze the regulatory trail.

As the high-speed rail system comes under ever-increasing scrutiny, these requirements will reveal where and why the CHSRA and its prime contractor (Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas) might resist design suggestions made by communities along the rail corridor.

Another Wheel Gets Squeaky

2010-08-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

With the recent release of the Supplemental Alternatives Analysis for the peninsula high-speed rail project, Redwood City has found itself with only one design alternative carried forward: an elevated four-track viaduct through downtown. This does not sit well with the mayor, who fired off a sternly worded letter to the Peninsula Rail Program, as reported in the Daily Post.

The letter points out that trenches are being carried forward only in those cities that have vigorously opposed the high-speed rail project, unlike Redwood City. The squeaky wheel seemingly gets the grease, and Redwood City feels left out.

The letter is noteworthy because Redwood City has not been at the forefront of HSR opposition so far. Councilwoman Rosanne Foust, a former mayor, is a strong supporter of high-speed rail and serves as CEO of SAMCEDA, the San Mateo County Economic Development Association. One of SAMCEDA's initiatives is the Alliance for Sustainable Transit and Jobs, a pro-HSR lobbying group.

Long-Standing Plans For An Elevated Station

The cover page of Redwood City's controversial 2007 Downtown Precise Plan (set aside in 2009 after litigation) prominently featured the architectural rendering of a downtown elevated train station shown at the top, similar to what the HSR project now proposes. The plan stated that "the preference and assumption has been that the tracks will be elevated above grade, and a new train station will be centered on Depot Circle and the pedestrian connection to Sequoia Station and El Camino Real. This elevated railway will be carefully designed to become one of Downtown’s major assets." The draft New Downtown Precise Plan, published in March 2010, also assumes an elevated railway, as revealed in Book 2.3, which features the diagram of a railroad frontage lane shown at left.

Does that make Redwood City's new-found stance a bit disingenuous?

Alternatives Analysis Analysis, Part 3

2010-08-08T16:10:00.000-07:00

The Supplemental Alternatives Analysis for the peninsula corridor reveals some key engineering choices being made. That tunnels would be taken off the table was never in doubt: tunnels are nothing but trouble. The only tunnels now left are those that have a mountain. Well, almost... as we'll see below.

Freight grades: we were told all along that 1% is the limiting gradient for heavy freight. Not so in Palo Alto, where there is a 2% grade shown in the track profiles (page 15). Recall that the steepness of a grade has no impact on passenger comfort, frequent references to roller-coasters notwithstanding. (This question of dynamics seems to confuse civil engineers, who deal mostly with statics.) If a freight train can handle a 2% grade in Palo Alto, it can certainly handle a 2% grade anywhere else; that's the concept of ruling grade. Considering that steeper grades would greatly reduce the footprint of any elevated section, for example, the massive Mary Avenue rail overpass in Sunnyvale shown on page 18, why are 2% grades not the rule?
Rail yard: the rail yard in Brisbane, the closest-available 100-acre parcel near San Francisco, is on a direct collision course with the redevelopment plans for this area. This may end up as the largest land transaction in the peninsula HSR project. Curiously, the yard is planned on the east side of the tracks, opposite the historical site of the Southern Pacific rail yard.
Berms be gone: Belmont and San Carlos get their grade separation berms removed and replaced by a gratuitously tall viaduct, with the tracks 20 feet higher than today's berms. That doesn't go over well with the mayor of Belmont. Prediction: when all's said and done, Belmont and San Carlos will be begging for their berms to stay essentially as they are.
Blank-check engineering: Millbrae gets some ridiculously massive civil works in order to shoe-horn a fourth track under the ill-configured station. The plan features a 2.5-mile long tunnel (see track profiles, page 8), diving 75 feet below grade in order to duck under the Hillcrest Blvd underpass. Cross sections are also provided (see pages 13 and 14). There are two design options that are likely to be far cheaper and less disruptive to construct:
1. Convert the western-most BART track to Caltrain (see Option D in this diagram). While this requires minor surgery on the existing BART station, and may require an exception to side clearances (e.g. a steel crash barrier to separate BART from Caltrain), no digging would be required.
2. Put the Millbrae BART platforms underground. The tunnel already exists, emerging right before the station.
When the alternative is a 2.5-mile tunnel with an underground station mezzanine, which would likely require partial demolition of the existing station structure all in the name of leaving untouched the under-used BART parking tracks, one is left wishing that these issues had been thoroughly examined and addressed in the AA.
Slimmer sections: Many cross-sections have gone on a diet, narrowing down from the previous elephantine proportions to more realistic dimensions. The four-track retained-fill berm is slimmed down to 78 feet (wall to wall), the elevated viaduct is down to 78 feet, the trench is down to 76 feet (fence to fence). The at-grade alignment remains at 93 feet (fence to fence), but only because the fences are set back 11 feet from the (perfectly safe-to-touch) overhead catenary masts. The eminent domain panic set off back in March was premature: the tracks will mostly fit within 80 feet, a width already available along 88% of the corridor.
Fatter bridges: box-beam elevated structures have a depth of nearly 10 feet (measured from the bottom of the bridge deck to the top of the rails), compared to 5 feet as routinely practiced today, for example on the Belmont - San Carlos grade separations. That means future grade separations must lift the rails at least 25 feet above the road surface, compared to about 20 feet today, with attendant increases in the size of the bridge approaches. Five feet taller, especially when a sound wall will rise another 4 to 8 feet above rail level, makes a huge difference to visual impact.
PAMPA sandwich: The finalized application for the next federal funding increment includes a description of the project phasing plan for the peninsula. Phase 1: 4 tracks Redwood City and north + PTC. Phase 2: 4 tracks Mountain View and south + electrification. That leaves Palo Alto - Menlo Park - Atherton (PAMPA) with a two-track at-grade gap, left until such a time as there develops overwhelming pressure to fill it in.
VTA buried: The light rail spur in Mountain View is buried under the Stevens Creek, to make room for the expansion of the corridor. That doesn't strike one as the cheapest way to do things.
Viaduct vengeance: A FIVE MILE, 60-foot tall viaduct is planned in Santa Clara, an area of the corridor that is (a) already fully grade separated and (b) mostly wider than 100 feet. These people don't do subtle: their vocabulary is reinforced concrete, shoring walls and outrigger bents. This area of primarily commercial and industrial properties is less likely to oppose such a gratuitous structure. Operationally, the HSR viaduct needlessly prevents Caltrain overtakes anywhere between the Santa Clara and Lawrence stations. All pain, no gain... or from their point of view, all profit.

Clearly, there is a long way to go before context-sensitivity is achieved.

Elevated Blight in San Mateo

2010-08-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

The elevated structure spans across several blocks of San Mateo, like a gash through the heart of downtown. Its 67-foot width casts vast shadows onto downtown shoppers, like a freeway overpass, although women and children seem to pass underneath without being attacked. The concrete structure, strangely free of graffiti, provides a full 16 feet of free clearance underneath it for trucks. Three stories up above, the side walls of the elevated bridges loom a full 25 feet over the street. To add insult to this injury, metallic poles tower another 18 feet above the structure, bringing its overall height to an incredible 43 feet!

If you know San Mateo, you might have guessed this describes the Central Parking Garage, a structure with presence, visual impact, and context-sensitivity resembling the elevated, four-track high-speed rail corridor that residents fear.

Peninsula (Northeast) Corridor

2010-08-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

It's official: as noted on page 7 of the latest program management team monthly progress report, the selected track arrangement for the peninsula corridor, a key architectural decision with extensive ramifications for Caltrain operations, is slow-fast-fast-slow (SFFS). That means the express tracks will be located in the middle of the right of way, with Caltrain local tracks flanking them on each side. This arrangement is similar to the Northeast Corridor throughout New Jersey (photo at right by theahnman). From the report:

While the June schedule does not show any change in the deliverables dates, in July there will be a change in the delivery of the 15% integration package from September 2010 to October 2010 to change the alignment of the Caltrain tracks to the outside and HST tracks to the inside tracks to reduce the footprint at Caltrain station locations (using side rather than center platforms).

The good news is that the previously-favored, segregated SSFF or FFSS arrangements seem to be off the table. Those arrangements would have prevented the express overtakes that are the key to an effective Caltrain timetable, and would have forced wrong-way movements whenever any one of four tracks went out of service. Wrong-way movements vastly diminish track capacity and exacerbate cascading delays, where one late train makes a mess of the whole timetable--as any regular Caltrain rider knows all too well. So that's the good news.

The bad news is that Caltrain will be stuck with side platforms. When a Caltrain track goes out of service, as it inevitably will, routing trains to the opposite platform will now require cutting across the HSR tracks, as shown in the diagram at left. No more central island platforms, which have undeniable operational advantages as well as simplified passenger access.

Given the choice between giving up island platforms (SFFS) or giving up overtakes (FFSS / SSFF), then SFFS wins by a mile because overtakes are key--but that's really a false choice, constrained by the menu of alternatives. The one alternative that is seemingly not being given due diligence is FSSF.

Their logic might go like this:

Caltrain design criteria (Chapter 3, paragraph 1.1.d) and HSR Technical Memo 2.2.4 (Station Platform Geometric Design, section 6.1.3) dictate that platforms must be perfectly straight.
Straight island platforms require a double-reverse curve "wow" around the platform at every station, conflicting with HSR Technical Memo 2.1.2 (Alignment Design Standards for High-Speed Train Operation, section 6.1) that prohibits more than four so-called direction changes per mile.
The reverse curve "wow" beyond each end of the island platform consumes an inordinate amount of land precisely where it is most valuable, in the denser suburban cores where train stations tend to be located.

That's a perfectly logical chain of reasoning, but it is unfortunately based on a poorly conceived requirement that prohibits curved platforms.

As discussed in Football Island, curved platforms allow the "wow" around the center island platform to be much more compact, using barely any more land than the side platform configuration. The diagram at right (do you see the football?) highlights the difference in green, amounting to about a half acre. With the exceedingly generous clearances likely to be used--the diagram shows a mere 75 feet of right of way width!--the difference would be even less. Now imagine a straight island platform, not shown in the diagram, where the green area would need to bulge out over a far greater length; the extra area would amount to the entire area of the platform, 30 x 750 feet or another half acre. That is indeed a waste of valuable land.

Fast-Slow-Slow-Fast isn't some far-fetched concept. It works in Sweden, and it would work here, far more efficiently and flexibly than a carbon copy of the Northeast Corridor. Why not give a careful second thought to curved platforms, unencumbered by rote compliance with ill-considered specification requirements?

If We Had Four Billion Dollars...

2010-07-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

The recent Executive / Administrative Committee meeting featured an interesting memo regarding the application for another $2.3 billion of HSR federal funding to be distributed nationwide. Last time around, the CHSRA bagged $1.85 billion out of $8 billion of ARRA stimulus funding distributed nationwide. The additional funding, if CHSRA continues to bat .231, is on the order of $530 million.

The memo examines various scenarios where ARRA funding and Prop 1A bonds, of which a total of $3.3 billion is claimed to be available, are combined with new federal funding to reach a threshold of "independent utility" for one of the many segments of the California high-speed rail project.

If the San Francisco to San Jose segment were chosen as the initial recipient of this funding, then nearly $4 billion would become available for construction, still quite short of what will ultimately be necessary. The hypothetical question examined in the memo is how this money would be spent.

Salient points:

the CHSRA is starting to realize that they can't use a "Big Bang" approach where everything is constructed at once. For the first time, there is talk of phasing and a "building block" approach within the peninsula segment.
phasing means construction would start first on the ~26 mile stretch between San Francisco and Redwood City, avoiding the controversy in PAMPA (Palo Alto - Menlo Park - Atherton).
$4 billion would only cover elevated grade separations; trenches through Burlingame and San Mateo would not be included.
ERTMS is mentioned in the same breath as CBOSS, an encouraging first baby step in the right direction.
FRA would likely frown on using high-speed rail funds to provide "independent utility" for what is primarily a commuter rail corridor, not an intercity corridor

Of course, all this is purely hypothetical. Consider that (1) only one single segment could be started as the marquee project for California high-speed rail; (2) the high level of controversy on the peninsula makes it highly unlikely that the environmental clearance will be obtained on schedule; and (3) short-term improvements that benefit primarily Caltrain will be difficult to pass off as "independent utility" for intercity rail service. The likelihood of $4 billion suddenly hitting the peninsula is fairly close to zero.

Odd Stacking

2010-07-27T21:20:00.001-07:00

The odd stacked alternatives shown in the figure at right (ripped out of a recent technical working group presentation) make little sense, for a number of reasons that were previously discussed.

Recall that track stacking, besides entailing very intensive and profitable construction of complicated earthquake-resistant civil structures on the taxpayer's dime, is intended to reduce the right-of-way width required to build a four track corridor, presumably to appease neighbors and minimize residential property takes. A brief glance at the above drawing (which should also reinforce fears of a separate-but-equal approach that is disastrous for Caltrain) necessarily leads to ONE of the following two conclusions:

The planners have lost sight of what they were trying to achieve, in effect destroying our village in order to save it. The stacked solution on the left requires "only" 87 feet of ROW width, while the one on the right requires 119 feet of ROW to make room for a Caltrain platform down in the trench. These elephantine structures, making use of enormous amounts of concrete, seem to miss the whole point of stacking: to save space. If you were to nibble back just 4 feet out of the 13 feet (thirteen!) devoted to drainage and third-party utility easements, you could simply stick all four tracks down in that trench on 15-foot centers. Dear peninsula communities: do you prefer 13 feet for drainage and utilities, and oh, by the way, a viaduct that looms 30 feet above ground level (16 feet of road vehicle clearance, 10 feet of viaduct box + rails, and 4 feet of sound wall) with another 30 feet of overhead wires towering above that? Or would you rather we cut back to 9 feet for drainage and utilities, and the viaduct disappears entirely? Let's think it over, for about a microsecond.
The planners are not so subtly trying to sand-bag the stacked options to gain community buy-in for property takes. Making the stacked alternative look this bad on paper fulfills the dual goal of giving it environmental due diligence under CEQA and ensuring that public opinion will be "stacked" against it, setting it up for being "not carried forward" in a way that is impervious to future litigation. These are the lengths to which we must go to take 5 feet of somebody's back yard.

Since one would prefer to assume that planners are not stupid, and that they don't take peninsula residents for idiots, #2 seems more likely. Stay tuned for the answer: the supplementary alternatives analysis report for the peninsula high-speed rail project is scheduled to be revealed to the public on Thursday, August 5th in San Francisco.

Metrics That Matter

2010-07-23T21:54:00.000-07:00

The future of Caltrain (if it doesn't go bankrupt first) is likely to hinge on the quality of the service provided. Even if they don't ride the train, all peninsula residents can still benefit from quality train service that vacuums traffic off the road. So how exactly does one define and measure Quality?

From the point of view of a Caltrain rider, quality can be defined in terms of just four Metrics That Matter.

What is the average trip time between my origin and my destination?
What is the best trip time between my origin and my destination?
At my origin, how long is the average waiting time between trains that go to my destination?
At my origin, what is the longest waiting time between trains that go to my destination?

The first two metrics measure trip time on board the train, and the next two can be used to measure waiting time on the platform, which is just as important, and often perceived as longer than it really is. Notice that all four metrics are measured in units of time, between a specific origin and destination. These metrics don't measure operating cost. Not ease of maintenance. Not reduced emissions or noise. Not electricity or diesel. Not seats per hour. Not consist utilization. All those other metrics are important to a train operator, but riders don't understand them, and frankly don't care. Riders care primarily about time.

Figuring the Metrics

The four metrics that matter are objective measures that are reasonably straightforward to extract from a timetable. A computer can churn through a timetable to extract the metrics for every possible origin & destination pair, by making a few simple assumptions about rider behaviors as shown in the graphic at left.

For example, we can crunch the current Caltrain timetable (with 90 trains per weekday and 5 trains per peak hour), with the result shown at right. For simplicity, the graphic shows a limited sample of ten stations; simply follow the blue lines to find the intersection of the desired origin and destination, and read off the four metrics. A more complete version of this table is provided below.

Effective Trip Time

The four metrics are useful to consider separately, but ultimately we'd like to compare entire timetables to determine which timetable is better. To do this, we need to consolidate the four metrics that matter into a single "effective trip time" metric for each origin and destination pair. Thus far, the four metrics required very few assumptions and could be quantified quite objectively. As we construct an effective trip time metric, things get a bit more subjective and debatable.

The effective trip time is not the trip time experienced by any particular passenger; rather, it is a single figure of merit that reflects a global average of trip times taken by all passengers between a given origin and destination.

If a passenger showed up randomly, the effective trip time would simply be the average trip time plus 50% of the average wait time. However, most passengers don't show up randomly. They tend to show up before their train, and they also tend to prefer faster express trips. Therefore, we can create a reasonable measure of effective trip time as the sum of:

70% of the average trip time
30% of the best trip time (to favor express service)
20% of the mean wait between trains (far less than the random arrival figure of 50%)
15% of the maximum service gap (to penalize very large gaps between trains)

The first two terms of this sum (70% + 30%) bias the on-board portion of the trip toward express service. The last two (adding up to 35% of headway if the timetable is regularly spaced) reflect the time waiting at the station, with most but not all passengers showing up some minutes before their train. The combination of the four metrics that matter into a single effective trip time allows us to represent the current Caltrain timetable as shown in the graphic at right.

Notice that the effective trip time metric is constructed so as to punish very large service gaps. Due to the speed / frequency trade-off that Caltrain currently must contend with, many smaller stops are severely under-served during rush hour, commonly with gaps of 40 minutes or more, to clear the tracks for Baby Bullets. This is reflected in the table: for example, Palo Alto to 4th & King (the highest traffic and best-served O&D pair) is covered in 47 minutes, but the similar distance between California Ave and 22nd Street (an under-served O&D pair) effectively takes 67 minutes.

Whether or not you agree with the exact weighting used to construct the effective trip time metric, the fact remains that with some optimally chosen weights, the metric is a valid one. The numbers can easily be recalculated using different weighting assumptions.

Measuring the Quality of an Entire Timetable

Now that we have a single number that describes the effective trip time between any given O&D pair, it's time to generalize the approach to encompass all O&D pairs and to construct a single figure of merit that captures the service performance of an entire timetable. Obviously, not all O&D pairs can be served optimally: any timetable is inherently a trade-off between minimizing trip times for most riders at the cost of longer trip times for some riders. Figuring out what works best thus requires ridership weighting.

Ridership weights can be derived from actual weekday ridership data, shown as blue bars in the chart at right (these weights have been scaled such that they add up to one). Unfortunately, actual ridership is not always an exact reflection of underlying travel demand. Some stations suffer from a vicious circle; they have poor ridership in large part because they are poorly served. A good example of such a station is California Avenue in Palo Alto, where average weekday ridership was 1225 riders in 2002 before service was cut to make way for the Baby Bullet, dropping to 891 riders in 2010. This 27% drop occurred at the same time as overall ridership increased by 19%, and is unlikely to have been caused by any shifts in employment or residential patterns in the rather thriving vicinity of this station.

The most desirable approach would be to implement a full-featured ridership model, of the sort that has recently generated so much controversy for the state-wide high-speed rail project. That is unfortunately beyond our means, so we will simply use direct ridership weighting, with some filling in where service currently isn't provided (e.g. Transbay or Atherton).

The ridership weight of an O&D pair is the product of origin ridership and destination ridership (a measure of how many people travel on that O&D pair) and is shown by the light blue circles in the figure at left. Big circles mean heavy ridership, small circles mean light ridership. An optimal timetable will seek to provide the best effective trip time for O&D pairs where a big circle represents heavy ridership.

To construct a single figure of merit for an entire timetable, we first need to come up with a new, ridership-weighted service score for each O&D pair. This score, where higher is better, is the product of origin and destination ridership (the size of the blue circle), divided by effective trip time. Dividing by effective trip time means that shorter trip times increase the score for that O&D pair. Now all that's left to do is to sum up all the O&D service scores, and presto, we've got ourselves a single figure of merit. This allows us to compare timetables and, provided that we agree on the method used to construct that figure of merit, to determine objectively which of two timetables is the better one.

Any disagreements about which is the best timetable can then be reduced to disagreements over the scoring method. Planners tend to fall in love with their favorite solution, so taking the discussion away from the solution and focusing instead on the scoring method allows a dispassionate debate that is less colored by subjective preferences. Indeed, without an agreed-upon scoring framework (clearly defined metrics), comparing timetables is a subjective and useless exercise.

The Great Timetable Shoot-Out

Enough with metrics, are we ready for some fun, or rather, as much fun as can be had with timetables? Let's put three different timetables through their paces, and see how they stack up in terms of service quality.

Contestant #1: today's 90-train-per-day, 5-train-per-hour Caltrain timetable, to which we will assign a score of 100 for the purpose of comparison.

Input timetable file (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (318 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (35 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (539 kB PDF)
Overall service quality score: 100

Contestant #2: the official Caltrain 2025 timetable published in Appendix K of the Preliminary Alternatives Analysis. This 162-train-per-day timetable shows 10 trains per hour in each direction at peak times, with every train performing a skip-stop pattern to keep the entire end-to-end run under 65 minutes--about ten minutes slower than today's Baby Bullet.

Input timetable file (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (345 kB PDF) -- also compared with Caltrain 2010 (329 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (35 kB PDF) -- also compared with Caltrain 2010 (38 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (671 kB PDF)
Overall service quality score: 147

Contestant #3: a plain vanilla takt-timetable featuring only 6 trains per hour in each direction at peak times. Four of those trains are all-stops locals (running at regular 15-minute intervals, with a 93-minute run from Transbay to Tamien) and two of them are expresses, which take advantage of the four-track peninsula rail corridor to overtake locals. One of those overtakes occurs at the middle of the line at the Redwood City station, where the local and the express stop simultaneously on opposite sides of the same platform and exchange passengers--at this stop only, we make an exception to the 3-minute transfer rule. This cross-platform transfer extends the benefits of express service to a much wider selection of O&D pairs than today's Baby Bullet.

Input timetable (tab delimited text)
Metrics that matter table (342 kB PDF) -- also compared to Caltrain 2010 (328 kB PDF) and compared to Caltrain 2025 (317 kB PDF)
Effective trip time table (34 kB PDF) -- also compared to Caltrain 2010 (38 kB PDF) and compared to Caltrain 2025 (37 kB PDF)
Origin & Destination service score table (674 kB PDF)
Overall service quality score: 145

While Contestant #2 takes first place, Contestant #3 is competing with a huge handicap of 40% fewer trains per hour, but comes in just 1% behind in service quality. That's right: there exists a SIX train per hour time table that provides nearly the same quality of service as Caltrain's TEN train per hour timetable. How can that possibly be?

The secret weapon: the mid-line overtake.

The Trickle Down Effect

With the peninsula being reconfigured to four tracks for high-speed rail, it would be a terrible shame not to take advantage of some of that new track capacity to run better and more efficient local service, providing measurable benefits to local peninsula communities. Better service just might be the sugar coating to make the bitter pill of high-speed rail go down a little bit easier in places like Palo Alto, Atherton, Belmont, or Burlingame. Otherwise, why even bother?

Tunnel Sizes

2010-06-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Mountain View mayor Ronit Bryant argues that a deep tunnel for Mountain View ought to be considered because "most of the BART in our area is underground. If they managed it then, why can't they do it now?" Here's one big reason why:

The HSR tunnel requires large clearances around the train for aerodynamic reasons. Without those clearances, a high-speed train (going 1.5 to 2 times as fast as BART's maximum speed) will dump megawatts of power into swirling the air inside the tunnel, making it unbearably hot. In the diagram, the BART tunnel bore is 16 feet (5 meters), and the HSR tunnel bore is 26 feet (8 meters).

Strange Bedfellows Indeed

2010-06-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

The June 2nd CHSRA Operations Committee meeting audio recording included some interesting information that was neither in the agenda nor in the PowerPoint slides, regarding the relationship between Caltrain and the CHSRA.

The True Meaning of Track Sharing

The following exchange took place between Rod Diridon, board member of the CHSRA, and Tony Daniels, the program manager for the entire technical effort--a sort of godfather figure of the HSR project. They had been discussing and praising Caltrain's recently obtained FRA waiver, which allows Caltrain to operate European-style electric trains provided that certain conditions are met. Here's where the discussion went next:

Diridon: The joint track waiver that FRA is going to be giving now to Caltrain, is for them to use diesel and electric, their electric, not our vehicles, on their track.

Daniels: Right. Compliant and non-compliant is the best way to look at it.

Diridon: I understand. But to be more graphic here, it's the difference between using diesel locomotives and the lighter European or Asian type electric powered vehicles.

Daniels: Only for passengers. No freight.

Diridon: For passenger service, on the same track.

Daniels: Not freight.

Diridon: Right, and of course that assumes positive train control.

Daniels: Yeah.

Diridon: Have we thought about using their tracks for our … locomotives, or…

Daniels: We are. We are doing it…

Diridon: I meant their double-track system for our system.

Daniels: We are doing it.

Pourvahidi: Instead of our tracks, instead of having our tracks?

Diridon: No, I don't see in our alternatives any place…

Daniels: No no just, sorry, (…) it's not that we can't run on it, we can, if it was necessary, in the same way as the Caltrain trains can run on ours, our so-called tracks. It's just that there's not the capacity.

Diridon: Well I understand capacity.

Daniels: Right. But you can't work on either. We're planning to keep them separated except when you come in from Bayshore into 4th & King and ultimately Transbay, we have to mix ourselves on the track. As we go into Transbay, for example, we'll use the same track going in.

Diridon: Though we certainly wouldn't prefer it. But if we were stuck along the peninsula someplace with no more than a two-track system, … have you thought about that?

Daniels: Uhhh, it would change completely the whole plan. Right now, we're kind of…

Diridon: I'm not proposing it. Don't misunderstand me.

Daniels: We looked at it operationally, at 60,000 feet, and just… we're talking 22 trains an hour. That's not on, you can't turn around.

Diridon: You mean at maximum, there's 22 trains an hour. Not to begin with.

Daneils: No, but ultimately, when you're starting, you're going to be on the order of something like 18 trains an hour. Then you've got to turn them around at the other end. That's where the difficulty is, not running them on the tracks.

Diridon: You're talking about Caltrain now?

Daniels: Yeah. You can't turn that number of trains around at the terminal end.

The key nugget is highlighted in red. Despite Caltrain's dogged insistence to the contrary, the CHSRA does not, repeat, DOES NOT, plan to share tracks with Caltrain on the peninsula. Their plan is to have their own pair of exclusive-use tracks all the way up to Bayshore. Those HSR tracks could only be "shared" by Caltrain under rare circumstances when another track is out of service--a sort of breakdown lane, and certainly not a mixed-use corridor that would allow Caltrain to provide both frequent AND fast service.

This can and should be construed as a downright rape of Caltrain. HSR is going to be brutishly rammed up the peninsula corridor without due regard to the enormous benefits that a truly shared corridor could provide for peninsula commuters--whether they ride the train or drive.

Keep Your Hands Off My Stimulus

Another interesting exchange occurred regarding the $2.3 billion of federal stimulus funding that the FRA has awarded to California. As noted repeatedly at the operations committee meeting, the late 2011 deadline for stimulus funding is extremely tight, with environmental clearance (a.k.a "shovel readiness") of the peninsula high-speed rail project unlikely to be obtained, let alone litigated. Sensing the possibility that this time-critical federal funding could slip away to other parts of the state, the Bay Area congressional delegation is supporting Caltrain's effort to jockey for some of the HSR bacon.

Diridon: Also, when would be an appropriate time to talk about the impact of the attempt by the Caltrain system to acquire ARRA funds directly.

(…)

Daniels: I think that's a separate matter for the authority, I think, to try and resolve what… is Steve Schnaidt [legislative affairs consultant] here? Because he brought this up as an item that we need to try and resolve, because there is some conflict between what the peninsula wishes to do and what we're doing on the high-speed rail, and that has not been cleaned up yet, I don't think.

Diridon: Can I ask a further question there, sorry to take so much time. [Friendly banter about Diridon taking so much time.] It seems to me that the environmental clearances that the Caltrain system has, that they want to fund, are based on a Caltrain type of service.

Daniels: That's right.

Diridon: Not on a four-track system.

Daniels: Correct.

Diridon: As a consequence, if you're talking about attempting to use ARRA funds to do their electrification on a two-track system, or to do grade separations on a two-track system, it's counter-productive to our objectives. Is that not a factual statement?

Daniels: It is and it isn't. It's not a black-and-white answer. I mean you could structure it, if you could do it under the environmental, our high-speed rail environmental process, it would help ultimately the building of our piece of it. You could state it that way, but …

Diridon: I absolutely understand that we could meld their clearance into ours and modify their clearance to include a four-track system instead of a two-track system or elevated or whatever ours is going to be. But the clearance that they have now, that they're trying to rely upon in order to qualify for ARRA funds directly, is based on a two-track system--on-grade, two-track system--which may not be what comes out of our study.

Daniels: It's very unlikely it will. We will be, we know already from everything we're doing that it's a four-track system to make it work for both sets of operations, commuter and high-speed rail.

Diridon: So, at some point Mr. Chairman we need to have a conversation on this subject. Because if ARRA funds go in to build for example an undercrossing for a two-track system, we then come along at a point in the future with a four-track system, that has to be accommodated by the undercrossing, we have to rebuild the undercrossing. That's the worst kind of government. We don't want to be tearing up brand new projects in order to change something.

Daniels: Well here's the answer to that movie, Rod. The question that we raised right at the beginning of them having some guidance from the FRA about how we're going to put these ARRA funds together will include whether we can or cannot do what you've said. On first glance, I don't think you can, because the ARRA funds are supposed to be for high-speed trains, and a two-track commuter line is not a high-speed train.

Let the games begin. As a clarification, Caltrain board has not actually certified the electrification EIR just yet. That action, unexpectedly held up last April, is reportedly slated for early July.

A Compromise Solution?

One of the many strings attached by FRA to their Caltrain waiver is that positive train control must be installed, tested, and FRA-certified before Caltrain can carry even a single passenger on an electric train. That puts PTC in the critical path. Unfortunately, Caltrain's PTC plans do not jive with high-speed rail's PTC plans. That lack of jive makes it exceedingly unlikely that ARRA high-speed rail money will be allowed to fund Caltrain's PTC project. In these lean times, just where is Caltrain going to find $230 million (opening bid!) to build something that's incompatible with high-speed rail?

A far better approach would be to grant Caltrain some ARRA money to become the first installation of ERTMS in the United States, blazing the path for high-speed rail. Everybody wins: Caltrain gets a lower-risk, timely PTC solution with funding to back it up--and HSR gets the bureaucracy of importing and tailoring ERTMS taken care of early, a state-wide benefit that is far from a parochial peninsula interest. With a viable PTC program in place, it might even make sense to start thinking of funding some Caltrain electrification infrastructure--infrastructure that would be quite useless without PTC. See the Catch-22?

When you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Bi-Level or Bust

2010-06-08T23:13:00.000-07:00

A while back, Bob Doty (Director of the Peninsula Rail Program) was asked about the incompatibility of platform heights between HSR and Caltrain. His response:

The primary issue of non-compatible equipment between Caltrain and high-speed trains is that they will not be able to share the same platform edge if level-boarding access is to be provided.

Level-boarding access refers to the platform and train floor both being the same height--similar to boarding an elevator--and is mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act. For an introduction to the subject, covering the various regulatory and engineering constraints, refer to an earlier discussion of platform height. In short, accessible boarding will have to be provided at every train door.

Doty's comment is predicated on two important but unstated assumptions: (1) Caltrain must operate bi-level train cars, and (2) HSR high platforms are not compatible with bi-level train cars. Let's examine those two assumptions.

Must Caltrain operate bi-level train cars?

Since the late 1950s, the peninsula commute has traditionally used railroad cars that have two levels, upstairs and downstairs. Bi-level cars are such a familiar fixture on the peninsula that one might forget to even question how or why they came to be that way. Even future Caltrain vehicles are systematically depicted as bi-levels. The reasons to use bi-level cars include:

Bi-levels maximize passenger count per train, to provide a given transportation capacity using the fewest trains and crews.
Bi-levels maximize linear density, or how many passengers can sit within a given train length. This can be useful when platform length can't be extended, such as in Menlo Park or Burlingame, where the platforms are boxed in by grade crossings.
Bi-levels provide a seat for every passenger, with no standees. The average Caltrain trip length is 23 miles or roughly half an hour, longer than most people would be willing to stand. Because of this, by the way, Caltrain's capacity is defined not in terms of passengers per hour, but seats per hour.
Bi-levels minimize the mass per seat of the train to reduce energy consumption under intensive start-and-stop usage. (Note, mass per seat can be a misleading metric if a train is designed to provide significant amounts of standing room.)
Bi-levels take advantage of the generous vertical clearances available on the peninsula corridor.
Bi-levels have been used on the peninsula as far back as most people can remember.
Bi-levels differentiate Caltrain's brand image from BART.

Now consider these counterpoints:

Providing a seat for every passenger results in Caltrain operating at an average capacity of just 39 percent. The numbers don't lie, Caltrain actually hauls around significantly more empty seats than passengers! A few peak-hour express trains do operate near 100% of seating capacity, but conversely, many off-peak trains operate nearly empty. Specifying a new vehicle fleet in terms of peak seating capacity (as opposed to passenger capacity) will perpetuate this extremely low and wasteful average load factor.
Shorter trip times, thanks to fast-accelerating, short-dwell EMUs, may reduce the need for seating if there's a comfortable place to stand. Most of Caltrain's current fleet doesn't have anywhere to stand at all; if you do, you will quickly be shooed to a seat by a conductor. The need for a seat for every passenger is a self-fulfilling truth: everyone needs a seat because there's nowhere to stand!
Speeding up service, and especially the turnaround times at each end of the line, allows more trains to be operated using the same number of vehicles and crews. More frequent trains can meet a given level of passenger demand using fewer seats per train.
100% grade separation for HSR means that stations will no longer be boxed in by grade crossings and the length of platforms can be increased (within reason, of course.) Extending platforms across grade-separated streets has the additional benefit of providing direct platform access from both sidewalks of those streets, making stations more accessible to pedestrians.
Caltrain plans to increase peak rush-hour track capacity from today's 5 trains per hour per direction; a conceptual schedule shows as many as 10 trains per hour per direction. Once again, moving more trains per hour can meet a given level of passenger demand with smaller-capacity trains.

Perhaps the need for double-deckers isn't as pressing as it once was.

One could argue that growing ridership would eventually require bi-level cars anyway--similar to this gargantuan commuter train in New Jersey--an argument that isn't entirely without merit, since rail vehicles typically last for one-third of a century. But this argument would need to be based on a serious, quantitative ridership study.

So, must Caltrain use bi-levels? The answer is not as obvious as one might first expect.

It's even less obvious that Caltrain should provide an actual seat for every customer. Providing convenient and comfortable places to stand, and a more flexible floor plan for standees and bicycles, would increase the average load factor and make more efficient and profitable use of the new vehicle fleet. Rush-hour crush loads could still be met by increasing train length (something that is inherently easy to do with EMUs) and by increasing train frequencies.

Are high platforms compatible with bi-level train cars?

The most important implication of this question is how to pull off the transition from the existing low platforms to the high platforms typically used for high-speed rail, without interrupting Caltrain service during construction. One possible solution to this transition conundrum has already been described.

Assuming such a transition were feasible, would it preclude the use of bi-level train cars?

The quick answer is no. You don't have to go further than Chicago or the Northeast Corridor to see plenty of bi-level trains that board using high platforms--to say nothing about numerous examples abroad. The slightly longer answer is that high platforms don't jive with Caltrain's plans to acquire European bi-level EMUs. The European products that Caltrain is evaluating (bi-level EMUs from Bombardier, Siemens or Alstom... and by now, hopefully also Stadler, which just recently entered this market) all feature doors on the lower level. Low-floor boarding has undeniable advantages:

It's what the builders already provide off-the-shelf.
It allows doors to be optimally spaced out along the length of the train, providing good passenger circulation and reducing station dwell times.
It makes for a much easier transition from today's 8-inch platforms to the ADA-mandated level-boarding without interruption in Caltrain service.
It allows Caltrain to retain its relatively young Bombardier sub-fleet, if the platform height is established at 25 inches (the floor height of a Bombardier car). One can of course question the wisdom of making a fundamental corridor architecture decision, such as platform height, on the basis of a sub-fleet of 25 standard-issue commuter cars that would fetch excellent prices on the second-hand market.

All that being said, European bi-level 25 kV EMUs with high-level boarding do actually exist, although not in a form that would be directly applicable here on the peninsula. Without belittling the intrinsic packaging complexity of such vehicles, it is conceivable that one could be procured from within the broad product families of the major manufacturers, which typically feature a modular approach that provides some flexibility in car shell design.

High-level boarding would definitely introduce a big wrinkle in Caltrain's existing plans, but those plans ought to be carefully re-examined in the context of a shared corridor with HSR.

Incompatible Caltrain and HSR platforms would have several crippling drawbacks for the peninsula corridor. The operational benefits of "any train, any track, any platform" are too great to ignore--perhaps even great enough to smash the bi-level paradigm and the low-boarding paradigm. Beware of unvalidated assumptions!

News Roundup

2010-06-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

Another all-stops local round up of relevant peninsula rail news.

SJ - Merced Alternatives Analysis

The California High Speed Rail Authority releases its preliminary alternatives analysis for the San Jose to Merced segment (see board presentation and full report), including the section through San Jose. The result is a balanced trade-off between maximizing construction pork and placating residential neighbors, with transportation utility clearly taking a back seat. The resulting twisty aerial viaduct is already being hailed as a potential "iconic" structure for San Jose, never mind that it will permanently restrict train speeds to a disfunctional 50 mph. That's right, the curve radius will be even tighter than the existing railroad alignment, in another fine example of high-speed rail à la Californienne.

The key take-away phrase, for our dear communities on the peninsula:

After considerable study (...), it is concluded that all underground options are not practicable due to unsafe mining conditions (poor soils combined with high groundwater), construction schedule, potential for settlement, extensive surface disruption and very high construction cost and should be eliminated from further evaluation.

Ka-Pow!!

Caltrain Fiscal Emergency

Caltrain declares another fiscal emergency, despite being the second-most "profitable" transit operator in the Bay Area, with a fare box recovery ratio of 43%, not far behind BART. Board member Omar Ahmad makes the shocking but astute suggestion that a wind-down plan may be needed to pull the plug on Caltrain in 2012. Maybe the specter of fighting traffic with another 18,000 cars on the road will jolt the system into providing Caltrain with a much-needed dedicated source of funding.

Bets are open for how long it will take the California High Speed Rail Authority to shed another crocodile tear about the impending bankruptcy of the owner of a 700-acre piece of prime railroad real estate.

Bring Home That Bacon

The Bay Area congressional delegation, likely realizing that the CHSRA will never meet the federal stimulus deadlines and lose the entire $2.3 billion California HSR allocation to other parts of the state, fires off a letter to transportation secretary Ray LaHood asking for some of that largesse to be showered upon shovel-ready Caltrain capital projects.

Now if only Caltrain could get some operating funding... This is like adding a new bedroom when you can't even pay the heating bill. Operating funds create jobs too!

Californians for HSR Letter

The grassroots group Californians for High Speed Rail writes an excellent letter to Caltrain, laying out many of the same compatibility concerns that have long been the central topic of this blog. Hats off to them, and here's hoping that the letter will have more impact than one guy on his internet soapbox (right here.)

Staking Out CBOSS Territory

2010-06-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

All railroads that will be deploying Positive Train Control (PTC, read all about it here) before the mandated deadline of 2015 were required by federal law (49 CFR Part 236 Subpart I) to submit a PTC Implementation Plan by April 16th, 2010. This plan, subject to FRA approval, is where each railroad explains how it plans to deploy PTC.

Caltrain's PTC Implementation Plan (4.5 MB PDF) was submitted in late March, and is available to the public under docket FRA-2010-0051.

Not surprisingly, the centerpiece of Caltrain's PTCIP is the Communications-Based Overlay Signal System (CBOSS), a new PTC system that Caltrain is developing. CBOSS, described in a Caltrain fact sheet, is about to go out for bid. The importance of this system cannot be overstated, since the additional safety it confers on Caltrain's operations are a prerequisite for the transition to a new fleet of electric trains as well as the extensive reconstruction of the peninsula corridor to accommodate high-speed rail. PTC is a necessary step on the path to reinventing the peninsula corridor, and lies squarely in the schedule's critical path--never mind any federal deadlines. There remains a significant amount of doubt about whether Caltrain can actually pull it off.

Planning For Interoperability

By law, a PTCIP is supposed to describe in some detail how the proposed PTC system will provide interoperability between the "host railroad" and all "tenant railroads" that use the host railroad's tracks. Accordingly, Caltrain lists the following tenant railroads: Union Pacific Railroad, which operates a few freight trains on the peninsula; Amtrak, which operates the Coast Starlight along 6.7 miles of Caltrain's tracks through San Jose and Santa Clara; the Capitol Corridor JPA, which operates Amtrak California trains along 2.6 miles of Caltrain's tracks; and the San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission, which operates the Altamont Commuter Express trains along 2.6 miles of Caltrain's tracks. According to the PTCIP, the entire volume of traffic from all tenant railroads is currently 24 trains per day.

The stunning omission from Caltrain's PTCIP is any mention of high-speed rail. HSR is not mentioned even a single time anywhere in this 123-page document.

While HSR will not be anywhere near entering service by the PTC deadline of December 31st, 2015, the technical interoperability issues with high-speed rail are of paramount importance. HSR is the ultimate "tenant railroad" since it plans to operate on the order of 200 trains per day along the entire length of the peninsula, as opposed to 24 trains per day, most for only 2.6 miles between San Jose and Santa Clara, for all other tenant railroads combined. The ratio of train-miles operated on Caltrain territory for HSR vs. all other tenant railroads will be nearly two orders of magnitude as shown in the chart at left!

Looking at the chart might elicit an important question: with which "tenant railroad" will it be most important to interoperate? The Caltrain PTCIP provides the answer, point blank: the Union Pacific Railroad (see section 5.2), shown in yellow on the chart. That's right, because of an assumption that UPRR cannot be bothered to fit additional PTC equipment on the handful of its locomotives that operate on the peninsula, or an assumption that HSR may never come to fruition, CBOSS must be designed to be 100% compatible with whatever technology UPRR comes up with by 2015. There are two possible outcomes to this approach:

The entire statewide fleet of high-speed trains will need to be fitted and certified with a separate set of CBOSS train-borne equipment for operation on Caltrain's tracks because the HSR PTC system will be inoperable in "CBOSS Territory", or
The peninsula corridor will be segregated into technically incompatible HSR tracks and Caltrain + freight tracks, each with its own PTC system.

Neither of these outcomes is good for state or federal taxpayers, and the latter is a disaster for the train riding public. Both outcomes are quite profitable for the companies that will design, build, deploy, test, certify and operate the respective PTC systems on the taxpayer's dime.

One would think that enough time has passed since November 2008, when the high-speed rail bond was approved by California voters, to develop at least an inkling of a plan for how HSR will mesh with Caltrain in the area of PTC. One would further expect that Caltrain's insistence that the peninsula corridor will be a fully-shared four-track system would cause it to pay special attention to questions of future interoperability with HSR. One would even further expect that the California High-Speed Rail Authority's apparent plan to use ERTMS (an existing European PTC standard that has similar functionality, but is different from CBOSS) would at least be acknowledged in Caltrain's PTCIP.

Is this a lack of attention to detail? Evidently not: Caltrain's PTCIP goes into considerable detail on how individual PTC hardware components will be mounted on its locomotive fleet, as evidenced by the photo at right. The photo, included in an Appendix of the PTCIP, shows an early prototype of a CBOSS Central Display Unit (at the same stage of development as the CBOSS software) being fitted to the cab of a Caltrain locomotive. What is most visible in this photo is attention to the wrong details, details that are trivial, while other enormously important issues are seemingly entirely overlooked.

If one requirement of a PTCIP is to describe how a PTC system will provide interoperability of the system between the "host railroad" (Caltrain) and the ultimate "tenant railroad" in the form of high-speed rail, Caltrain's PTCIP has fallen woefully short.

What is the plan?

The Great Platform Height Transition

2010-05-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

The editorial position of this blog has always been that Caltrain and high-speed rail ought to be 100% interoperable, to derive the maximum transportation benefit from the considerable investment about to be made in the peninsula corridor. This creed can be summed up in a simple slogan: Any train, any track, any platform.

As was previously pointed out in the discussion of platform heights, it is most likely that high-speed rail will make use of high platforms. "Any train, any track, any platform" would require Caltrain to convert its own platforms to the same height as HSR. It's one thing to gripe about platform heights, but quite another to pull off the transition without interrupting commuter service. How can it possibly be done?

Here's an idea: (click to enlarge)

The end result would be a desirable center island platform for Caltrain. One could even build it such that the edge could be cut back to a gentle curvature after construction, resulting in the compact "football island" configuration when HSR is added.

Another useful feature of this concept is that it lends itself to phased construction of the four-track stretches where they are most needed. Commuter trains could use the extra track capacity years before HSR enters service, achieving a level of "independent utility" that the framers of AB 3034 might be proud of.

General Order 26-D

ADA regulations mandate level boarding for Caltrain's new electric trains. Since it is impractical to build a rail car with a floor just 8 inches above the rails, at the same height as the existing platforms, this mandate will require all platforms to be raised from their current height of 8 inches regardless of their final height, whether it be the same as HSR or something in between.

Platform edges higher than 8 inches are prohibited under the California Public Utilities Commission's General Order 26-D, which requires an ample clearance envelope to allow the outdated practice of "train men" riding on the side of freight trains.

There are only two ways around 26-D: compliance by way of a complex, failure-prone and maintenance-intensive technical solution that will saddle Caltrain with endless operating and maintenance costs in order to accommodate two freight trains per day, or... a waiver. Caltrain has now demonstrated its ability to navigate bureaucracies and obtain regulatory waivers; why not obtain permission to move one sign (pictured at right) south from San Francisco to Santa Clara?