The Top Ten Problems Facing Caltrain

Caltrain is searching for a new General Manager.  This person will need a briefing on the key issues now facing Caltrain.  Here is a list of the top ten problems that are clouding the "blended" vision of Caltrain and high-speed rail:

PROBLEM #10: Bloated Staffing.  There are well over 100 Caltrain conductors, among an operating staff of close to 500.  The traditional job description of a conductor (ensuring safe movement of the train, acknowledging signal aspects called out by the engineer, announcing stops, operating doors and lifts, checking fares, giving out information, etc.) is slowly being made obsolete by technology.  The new signal system will ensure safe train movements.  Modern trains will automatically announce the correct station stops, and allow remote door operation from the driving cab.  Smart phones give everyone up-to-the-minute information.  We are quickly reaching a point where union-mandated crew size is no longer justifiable, and an employee-to-locomotive ratio of 20 is an unsustainable excess.  Solutions:

• Do more with less.  Make modernization pay off by taking a hard look at staffing levels

PROBLEM #9: An Overcomplicated Timetable.  Caltrain's timetable is impossible to memorize and confusing to figure out unless you ride the same train every day.  There are large and irregular gaps between trains.  Irregular stopping patterns make it impossible to plan timely and reliable connections to buses and employee shuttles.  Solutions:

• Convert to a simpler clock-face or takt timetable

PROBLEM #8: Too Much Deference to "Tenant" Railroads.  In a "blended" system, Caltrain's interaction with high-speed rail will be far more intense (as measured in train-miles) than with other "tenant" railroads that use Caltrain tracks, such as Amtrak, ACE or Union Pacific.  And yet, Caltrain's efforts on interoperability are focused on a handful of trains that use only a fraction of the corridor, whether in the planning of the new CBOSS signaling system or the discussions about platform height.  There is even serious talk of allowing Amtrak to revive the Coast Daylight service into San Francisco.  While interoperability is a worthy goal, this is the wrong kind of interoperability.  What matters most is interoperability with high-speed rail.  Solutions:

• Make tenants pay their fair share
• Share station infrastructure to achieve a smaller, more efficient footprint for billions less
• Don't design for heavy freight trains

PROBLEM #7: Skipping the Wrong Stops.  When the Baby Bullet was launched in 2004, fast service and shiny red trains stole the headlines.  The under-reported back story is that speed came at the price of cutting service to a number of previously healthy station stops.  Caltrain is primarily a commuter service, and it should stop where people and jobs are located.  Throughout jobs-rich Silicon Valley (Palo Alto southwards), almost every stop has a similar density of nearby jobs.  Stops like California Ave, San Antonio, Lawrence and Santa Clara are severely under-served.  Solutions:

• Adopt census-centric service planning, with all trains making all stops in Silicon Valley

PROBLEM #6: Russian Roulette Station Dwell Times.  Caltrain is inherently unable to stay on time, but not for lack of trying.  Without level boarding, the occasional wheelchair customer can randomly inject an unanticipated delay of three to five minutes.  The unpredictable nature of these delays forces Caltrain to build a very conservative timetable with generous padding to absorb whatever might happen on any particular day.  This conservatism, which translates directly into lower utilization of the tracks, reduces the amount of traffic the rail corridor can reliably carry.  It also prevents Caltrain from operating reliable timed transfers or overtakes.  Solutions:

• Convert Caltrain to level boarding, making dwell times predictable and reducing the amount of padding required to operate a reliable timetable

PROBLEM #5: Slow Average Train Speeds.  Caltrain's electrification project will help in this regard, but it will not sufficiently increase average train speeds to blend successfully with high-speed rail.  While electrification improves end-to-end run times by up to 12 minutes for an all-stops local, the excessively long station dwell times (on average 45 seconds) blunt the benefits of modernization.  The greater the average speed difference between high-speed rail and Caltrain, the fewer trains the line can carry.  To preserve enough slots in the timetable for Caltrain to grow, run times must be reduced beyond the basic step of electrification.  Solutions:

• Convert Caltrain to level boarding, cutting station dwell times from 45 to less than 30 seconds, resulting in an average speed gain 50% that of electrification
• Procure EMUs with a very high power-to-weight ratio, greater than 15 W/kg

PROBLEM #4: Limited Corridor Capacity.  Under any "blended" scenario, high-speed rail will consume a large share of the traffic capacity of the peninsula rail corridor, leaving a limited number of rush hour slots for commuter service and severely constraining Caltrain's future growth.  In today's rush hour, 5 trains per hour per direction x 650 seats = 3250 seats/hour/direction are often standing room only.  Ridership is sure to zoom again when service to Transbay is inaugurated.  Unfortunately, the "blended" system will limit Caltrain to no more than six trains per hour per direction unless the corridor is widened to four tracks.  Solutions:

• Pack 'em in with comfort, using five-abreast seating in extra-wide trains 
• Buy the new EMUs at least 8 cars long, not just 6 as currently planned

PROBLEM #3: Traffic Jams into SF Transbay.  Despite marketing as a "Grand Central of the West," just six platform tracks for both HSR and Caltrain will require a tightly choreographed ballet of arriving and departing trains that will degenerate into cascading delays at the slightest disturbance.  As it stands, Caltrain is shut out of 2/3rds of the platforms in a station that could generate nearly 50% of its future ridership.  The solution to this problem is most assuredly not to terminate trains at 4th and King (see Problem #2).  Solutions:

• Adopt a common platform height so any arriving train can be assigned to any platform, giving much-needed flexibility to relieve congestion in the station's approach tracks and to recover from a service disturbance
• Optimize the track layout of the station approach for routing flexibility and higher throughput

PROBLEM #2: Incomplete Service to SF Transbay.  Today, the Transbay location has more jobs within a half-mile radius than exist within a half-mile radius of all the other Caltrain stops from 4th and King to Gilroy combined, and the intense development around the site will push its potential even further into the stratosphere.  Meanwhile, every preliminary or conceptual timetable published by Caltrain planners in the last five years shows the majority of rush hour trains terminating at the existing 4th and King terminal.  When asked about this, Caltrain invokes baseball game service and completely misses the point.  Solutions:

• Adopt a census-centric service planning approach
• Send every single Caltrain into Transbay.  Leave no train stranded at 4th and King.

PROBLEM #1: An Agency Culture That Doesn't Put Service First.  At Caltrain, infrastructure projects are dreamed up over a timeline of many years, planned by layers of consultants until a funding package is cobbled together, and then pursued doggedly and almost for their own sake.  Caltrain is still an agency that thinks of itself as running a railroad, rather than providing a transportation service to its customers.  The capital projects that result aren't the outcome of a focused planning process that puts service first--case in point, the San Bruno grade separation, a $155 million piece of infrastructure that has achieved exactly nothing for the average Caltrain rider.  Solutions:

• Use a capital planning approach driven by service quality metrics
• Make the timetable, and its future possibilities, the focal point of all capital planning
• Consider waiting time and first-mile / last-mile connections in all planning decisions
• Live and breathe the mantra: service drives planning drives infrastructure

The Baseline of Mediocrity

The top ten problems and solutions, by contrast, give us a detailed picture of the most mediocre outcome that Caltrain could achieve by 2030:

• Infrastructure first, planning optional, service an afterthought
• Sub-optimized service where ridership already is, not where jobs and people really are
• Rush hour trains that don't serve San Francisco Transbay
• Caltrain squeezed into 2 Transbay platform tracks due to incompatible HSR platforms
• A slow and inefficient train traffic jam in the tunnel approach to Transbay
• Narrow European-size EMUs that don't take full advantage of the available clearances
• EMUs that are just as short as today's diesel consists, limiting passenger capacity
• Russian-roulette dwell times, with wasteful timetable padding to absorb them
• Unreliable timed transfers and delay-prone overtakes
• No level boarding, resulting in only modest improvements in trip times
• Fast acceleration, but not enough giddy-up to blend efficiently with HSR traffic
• Overstaffed train crews that increase cost and drag down fare box ratio

Caltrain has always had a lot of potential.  With such juicy ridership demand as this corridor enjoys, it will be hard to call Caltrain's "modernization" a failure, but so far it doesn't promise anything more than this baseline of mediocrity.  To be sure, electrification is a huge step forward compared to most other commuter rail systems in the U.S.  But that's the wrong frame of reference.  This is San Francisco, this is Silicon Valley, where we never stop short of making things better, where "good enough" is quickly left behind, where innovation is prized, and where ambition fuels a relentless drive to change people's lives for the better.  There is no other place like it in America.

Will Caltrain's new General Manager have the vision it will take?