CBOSS Dumpster Fire Update

The CBOSS development lifecycle,
as anticipated in 2009 on this blog.
Today we are at "point of no return."

The deadly crash of an Amtrak train near Tacoma, Washington, which would likely have been prevented if a PTC (Positive Train Control) system had been in place, has renewed the discussion of the status of PTC systems in the Bay Area. Caltrain officials say everything will be OK with CBOSS, Caltrain's very own flavor of PTC. Despite those assurances, a potent brew of ingredients is mixing together.

Bonfire of Lawsuits: After a well-chronicled program failure involving delays, cost overruns, and failure to meet milestones, Caltrain terminated the CBOSS prime contractor, Parsons Transportation Group, in February 2017. PTG and Caltrain promptly sued each other, with PTG claiming wrongful termination and Caltrain seeking up to $98 million in damages. A rich trove of documents can be accessed online under San Mateo Superior Court case number 17CIV00786, and chronicles in detail everything that went wrong with the CBOSS program. With Caltrain likely to recover some damages, PTG has now sued Alstom (formerly PTG's subcontractor and the supplier of CBOSS hardware and software) for failure to deliver a working solution. One is left to wonder how this motivates Alstom to finish the CBOSS project, since delivering a working solution to Caltrain would undermine the claim that Alstom was given an impossible task.

Dying Product: The hardware and software underlying CBOSS is known as I-ITCS, a product originally developed by GE Transportation Systems Global Signalling. While a precursor known as ITCS briefly operated on Amtrak corridors in Illinois and Indiana, it is now being displaced by the de-facto standard freight PTC system known as I-ETMS, with ITCS relegated to controlling only the grade crossing functionality in these corridors. Alstom, which acquired GE Transportation Systems in 2015, is not likely to see a future in the I-ITCS product, leaving Caltrain with a globally unique hardware and software solution. This does not bode well for product support over the lifetime of CBOSS.

Looming Deadline: the deadline imposed by Congress and the Federal Railroad Administration to successfully complete a PTC revenue service demonstration is just a year away, at the end of 2018. One year is not enough to finish, and Caltrain will almost certainly blow this deadline. Will FRA grant another extension and allow Caltrain to continue operating without PTC?

Sole Source Savior: in July 2017, avionics firm Rockwell Collins' subsidiary ARINC was awarded a sole source contract to figure out what it will take to pick up the pieces and complete the CBOSS project. ARINC completed this assessment in September, and will soon (by sheer programmatic necessity, since failure is not an option) be awarded a name-their-price sole source contract to finish a minimally working version of CBOSS that passes FRA muster. With the leverage that ARINC enjoys under these circumstances, the "re-procurement" of CBOSS will likely be (1) expensive and (2) structured such that Caltrain bears all of the risk of continued failure, i.e. cost-plus-fixed-fee rather than fixed price. With the clock ticking, the re-procurement effort has already fallen behind the planned fall 2017 schedule.

Budget Crunch: To date, Caltrain has spent over $200 million (yes, one fifth of a billion dollars!) on CBOSS with nothing to show for it. All the money allocated for CBOSS is spoken for, and a lot more (several tens of millions) will be needed to finish the project. Some of that will come from damages, but it is quite likely that 2018 will bring emergency financial maneuvers to throw more good money after bad.

Descoping of Functionality: while the first 'I' in Caltrain's I-ITCS solution stands for "Interoperable," which was one of the original selling points of CBOSS, this feature is now being thrown over the transom. Interoperability requirements contributed to the scope creep that triggered a re-design of the supposedly off-the-shelf ITCS software. It didn't help that Union Pacific was (as per usual) actively non-cooperative in helping to develop an interoperable solution, leading to Caltrain throwing in the towel and spending an additional $21.7 million (from an FRA "interoperability grant," no less!) to dual-equip seven diesel consists with the I-ETMS freight PTC system for operating on the Gilroy branch owned by UPRR. How I-ETMS freight trains will be accommodated on the peninsula corridor in I-ITCS territory is a burning question, for which the range of answers includes ditching I-ITCS and replacing it with the more viable I-ETMS, following the Amtrak example.

System Integration and Testing is Hard: while Caltrain never fails to remind us that all of the components of CBOSS are physically installed on the trains and the tracks, that is the easy part. The hard part is getting everything to operate together reliably every day, and Caltrain and their shifting band of contractors are barely getting started on this most difficult phase of the development of a new and complex safety-critical system. Integration and Testing is where the best design intentions meet cold harsh reality, and all the mistakes and omissions made during the design phase become painfully apparent. While PTG claimed in court filings that they were 90% done with CBOSS when their contract was abruptly terminated, that last 10% of troubleshooting commonly takes far more than 10% of the budget or schedule.

PTC is Hard: the legal declarations from PTG managers who ran the CBOSS program (see 17CIV00786) reveal a long list of underlying factors that caused much acrimony and remain unchanged today: (1) the specifications and standards for PTC continue to evolve, triggering continued changes and penalty testing; (2) Caltrain and its in-house consultants (the so-called "owner's team") are woefully ill-equipped and uncoordinated in their approach to complex safety-critical avionics technology development; (3) the formal contractual interactions between the "owner's team" and the vendor are complicated and delay-prone; (4) working with UPRR is a huge pain in everyone's caboose; (5) the underlying systems over which CBOSS is supposed to "overlay" are kludged-together stove pipes that, incidentally, will require nearly total re-design for the electrification program; (6) testing PTC on an operating railroad requires extensive coordination that has been demonstrated to be lacking; and so on. Strike PTG and substitute ARINC.

These ingredients will produce a situation where CBOSS does less than was promised, later than planned, and for a lot more money. No crystal ball is needed to predict that CBOSS will continue to "fail forward" to a finish line somewhere beyond 2018.

Thoughts on Palo Alto

There is a vigorous discussion of grade separations now underway in Palo Alto. It misses several important points:

1) Grade Separation is not one project. Trying to come up with a single, grand unifying grade separation scheme for the entire rail corridor through Palo Alto is to over-constrain the problem and to limit the range of feasible solutions. The wide geographical spacing of the four remaining grade crossings in Palo Alto leads naturally and logically to three separate and independent projects: Alma, Churchill, and Meadow/Charleston. These three projects can be and should be completely decoupled from an engineering perspective, if not from a political perspective. The underlying geometry of Palo Alto does not lend itself to a single project.

2) Creating new cross-corridor access is not grade separation. While it is understandable that the city desires to knit together neighborhoods on opposite sides of the track by creating new places ("trench caps") where people can access the other side of the corridor, this is not grade separation and should not be funded by scarce grade separation or transportation dollars. It can't be said that the city was actively divided by the rail corridor, since the rail corridor was in place decades before Palo Alto grew into a city. While everyone agrees that new cross-corridor access would improve Palo Alto, the distinction of scope between grade separation of existing crossings (today's network topology) and new cross-corridor access (tomorrow's network topology, a nice-to-have) should remain crystal clear. Muddling the project scope will muddle the discussion of funding.

3) Split-grade solutions should be studied with due diligence. When the city commissioned a grade separation study from engineering firm Mott Macdonald, the council deliberately excluded from consideration any designs where rails or roads might rise above existing grade. From the outset, this eliminated the standard solution that every other peninsula city has adopted: San Bruno, Burlingame, San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, Menlo Park and Sunnyvale either already have or are planning split grade separations, where the rails are raised a bit and the streets are lowered a bit. Turning a blind eye to split grade solutions, however controversial they may be, casts doubt on the entire decision making process. Without due diligence in studying a full range of grade separation solutions, the politics of assembling the necessary funding will become unnecessarily complicated.

4) Funding matters. The most expensive options are the most popular because the cost isn't yet borne by anyone. Everything is paid for with OPM or Other People's Money. If you went to a restaurant with OPM, of course you would select the Filet Mignon (or truffles, if you're vegetarian). A selection process that ignores funding is detached from reality. This also means teaching people about orders of magnitude: capturing ill-defined revenue from new uses of 45 acres of highly impaired land that the city doesn't own, even at Palo Alto prices, doesn't begin to pay for the astronomical expense of burying the tracks. Until funding is seriously factored into decision making, it's all just unicorns and rainbows.

5) County grade separation funding is always at risk. While 2016 Measure B set aside $700 million for grade separation projects, a 3/4 majority vote of the VTA board is all that it takes to re-program some or all of that funding "as circumstances warrant" towards BART, in the exceedingly likely event that the San Jose extension goes over budget. Spend it soon, or flush it into a giant sink hole in San Jose.

Failing to properly acknowledge these realities will likely leave Palo Alto's decision making process tied in knots as other cities move forward.

Freeway Lanes of Caltrain

If everyone drove instead of taking Caltrain, how many more lanes would peninsula freeways need to absorb the additional traffic?

The way to answer this question is to count how many train passengers ride past any given location, in each direction, within the span of one hour. Caltrain publishes all the information you need to do this calculation rigorously, without making any assumptions: the timetable tells you when each train passes each location, and the 2016 weekday passenger count by train tells you how many people are on board that train at that time.

Four cases are considered: morning northbound, evening northbound, morning southbound, and evening southbound. Rather than picking a fixed morning and evening hour over which to count passengers, we slide a one-hour window across the peak period until we find the peak hour at each location, during which the most passengers ride past. Caltrain operates five trains per hour per direction repeating on an hourly cadence, so we never count more than five trains in the totals.

It is an easy but tedious calculation, perfectly suited for a computer.  This is what pops out:

This graph reveals many of the features noted in ridership reports: the flow is asymmetrical with more riders traveling northbound AM / southbound PM, the Gilroy branch is dead, Stanford generates enormous ridership, etc.

Translation to Freeway Lanes

To convert the number of Caltrain passengers into freeway lanes, very few assumptions are needed, and those we need can be backed up by references.

1. A congested freeway lane operating at 45 mph can carry 2000 passenger cars per hour, according to the Federal Highway Administration's HPMS Field Manual (Parameter values: FFS = 45 mph, BaseCap = 2150 pcphpl, PHF = 0.95, fHV = 0.98, fp = 1.0).
    
2. The average vehicle occupancy (AVO) is 1.3 people, based on two studies of the 101 corridor in San Mateo County. This figure includes buses, van pools and corporate shuttles.

This means a single freeway lane can theoretically carry 2600 people in one hour. Note this is a very optimistic figure because slight perturbations in the flow of traffic can cause slow-downs that reduce throughput due to lower free flow speed (FFS). But we'll use this very high number to make an extremely conservative estimate of how many lanes of freeway can carry all of Caltrain's ridership.

Freeway lanes typically do not change directions to accommodate peak flows. That means we must consider northbound lanes separately from southbound lanes, with no possibility of re-allocating the lane capacity to accommodate the AM/PM flow asymmetry that is observed on Caltrain. In practice, this means we must add the northbound peak flow (AM or PM, whichever is highest) to the southbound peak flow (again the highest of AM or PM) to size the number of equivalent freeway lanes. Looking at the graph above, which shows the highest flow is northbound AM and southbound PM, we must add AM northbound and PM southbound people per hour, and divide by 2600 people per hour per freeway lane. Here is the result:

So as of 2016, plain old diesel Caltrain equals about 2.5 lanes of freeway, including both directions. If you integrate the area under this curve, you get how many lane-miles of freeway would be needed to replace Caltrain. That number is 119 lane-miles. These are very conservative lower bounds.

When you hear the argument that "millions" of people use highway 101 but only about 30,000 people use Caltrain, shut it down with facts: today Caltrain amounts to 2.5 / 8 or at least 30% of the lane capacity of highway 101 during rush hour. The reply might be that not all those people would end up on 101, but with an average trip length of 23 miles, which driver wouldn't use a freeway?

Future Capacity Implications

Caltrain capacity is set to increase considerably, first by ~30% with the initial electrification and modernization project, and by ~60% once the system is running at 6 trains per hour with 8 cars each. (If you don't count standees, those figures are ~10% and ~25%, but why would you not count standees?) A 60% capacity increase is equivalent to one and a half lanes added to the entire length of highway 101 from San Jose to San Francisco.

It doesn't have to stop there: more trains per hour and longer trains are possible, because EMU trains scale up in a way that diesel can't. A future Caltrain capacity increase to about 10,000 passengers per peak hour per direction (about triple today's throughput) isn't out of the question, does not require adding tracks or expanding the rail corridor, and would equate to adding 5 new freeway lanes.

In certain quarters of Silicon Valley that are enamored of Hyperloops, self-driving Teslas and Boring underground tunnels, electric Caltrain is looked down upon as a last-century technology that is about to be made obsolete. That particular outlook fails to grasp the importance of throughput or to recognize the enormous carrying capacity of modern electric rail. Self-driving Teslas and Hyperloops will achieve dismal throughput capacity as measured in passengers per hour, and no amount of whiz-bang technology will change the underlying geometry of this increasingly urban region.

The way forward is to add more freeway lanes of Caltrain.

The Overtake That Won't Be

In its renewed environmental review process for the San Francisco to San Jose project, the high-speed rail authority is considering the alternatives for the peninsula rail corridor. The outlines of the new draft EIR are emerging, and this is where politics meets engineering.

Interested stakeholders keep asking about how the blended system will actually work, with Caltrain and high-speed rail sharing the scarce resource that is track capacity. The issue is being studied in some detail behind closed doors by an entity known as the Joint Scheduling Working Group (JSWG), consisting of experts from HSR and Caltrain aided by their respective consultants. As of the end of 2016, the JSWG had produced a first report on its work, which was shaken loose by a public records request from CARRD. Before digging into this, let's take a look back at how we got here.

2012 Blended Operations Analysis (Caltrain/LTK)

While the original four-tracks-all-the-way HSR plan was collapsing in a firestorm of community opposition, Caltrain commissioned a study of blended system operations (8 MB PDF) from consultant LTK Engineering Services, to see if blending Caltrain and HSR primarily on the two existing tracks was viable. The 2012 study concluded that without any additional tracks, the corridor could support up to 6 Caltrain + 2 HSR trains per hour per direction, increasing to 6 Caltrain + 4 HSR with overtake tracks.  Key results were:

• With speeds limited to 79 mph, the most reasonable option with 6 Caltrain + 4 HSR was a "short middle overtake" between Hayward Park (San Mateo) and Whipple Ave (Redwood City).
• A "long middle overtake" all the way through Redwood City provided only marginal performance improvements.

This study legitimized the blended system, which has ever since been the favored approach to bringing HSR to the peninsula rail corridor. The study contained numerous disclaimers to the effect that no official decisions had been made regarding future service levels, programmed overtakes, stopping patterns or scheduled trip times... all the important considerations that feed into a railroad's product, namely its timetable.

2013 Additional Blended Operations Analysis (Caltrain/LTK)

A short while later, LTK published another report (2MB PDF + 14MB Appendices) that can best be characterized as an expansion and refinement of the 2012 analysis, considering additional options. Key results were:

• Unlike the 2012 study, the "long middle overtake" performed significantly better than the "short middle overtake."
• A new option, the "middle 3-track overtake" (between San Mateo and Palo Alto) performed almost as well in simulation, although it assumed all HSR trains entered the corridor on time, unlikely in practice.
• Other overtake track options did not fare as well.

The disclaimers continued, with the conclusions of the study being described as "educational."

2016 Joint Schedule Working Group Report (HSR/SMA)

The key chart in the SMA study
(PDF page 62 / slide 48)

The JSWG was established in April 2016, a while after HSR had engaged the services of Swiss rail consultancy SMA. To avoid a standoff between dueling agencies and consultants, Caltrain/LTK and HSR/SMA are now comparing notes on their respective plans for the blended system. The JSWG's 2016 draft year end report (10 MB PDF) provides important context to the decisions now being made to select a "preferred alternative" for the HSR blended system EIR. This study is interesting for three reasons: it is the first blended system study led by HSR, it offers insight into the evolving ideas of the JSWG, and it is not sugarcoated because it wasn't intended for wide public distribution. Key results were:

• The "no additional passing tracks" case is shown to support 6 Caltrain + 4 HSR per hour per direction, unlike in the LTK studies, provided that headways are tightened and Caltrain passengers don't mind sitting in a siding for 6 or 7 minutes during these overtakes.
• The "short middle 4-track overtake" degrades Caltrain trip times, since overtakes don't naturally tend to occur there.
• The "middle 3-track overtake" performs better than any other option, thanks to allowing bidirectional operation through almost its entire length, unlike in the LTK study where half the length of the overtake track was dedicated to each direction.

Tea Leaf Reading

The grotesque station-in-the-sky
proposed for San Carlos under
the short middle 4-track option

The constant refrain that nothing has been decided yet continues to this day, but the tea leaves are becoming quite readable. Here is some informed speculation:

1. The HSR team really, really doesn't want to build the "short middle 4-track overtake," generally because they have no money and specifically because the SMA analysis has shown this scenario to be a poor performer operationally.
    
2. However, the HSR team is reluctant to withdraw any alternative this late in the preparation of an EIR, after it was carefully introduced to the public through countless outreach meetings, workshops and open houses. Sudden change scares people.
    
3. In order not to build the "short middle 4-track overtake," the HSR team has engineered it into a straw man alternative, using the prospect of grotesquely massive concrete viaducts towering fifty feet over San Carlos and Belmont to strategically elicit vigorous public opposition. It's working, but unbeknownst to them, San Carlos and Belmont have little to worry about.
    
4. Due to having no money, the HSR team strongly favors the "no additional passing tracks" alternative. The mediocrity of the resulting Caltrain timetable, and the amount of time spent by Caltrain passengers waiting to be overtaken, is of little concern to them. But that's okay, since San Carlos and Belmont made them do it.
    
5. The HSR team probably dreads resistance from Caltrain stakeholders who don't want the peninsula rail corridor being taken over to Caltrain's detriment. Strong resistance could force the HSR team to revive the "middle three-track" alternative that had previously been eliminated from the EIR process (see slide 15 in this outreach presentation), setting back the environmental review schedule.
    
6. If the assumptions in the SMA analysis stand up to closer scrutiny, the "middle three-track" scenario could actually be a viable compromise for the blended system. It would no doubt be expensive due to the number of new grade separations, but the result (if one believes SMA) would be fast and robust service for both HSR and Caltrain, with reasonably-sized grade separations in every town from San Mateo to Palo Alto. In the last year, the winds of public opinion have turned more favorable to grade separations in Menlo Park and Palo Alto.

One thing is sure: the "middle three-track" alternative should be added to the HSR EIR and studied in detail, with an eye towards designing the future blended system timetable. The timetable is the product, and it will soon be time to decide on one.

Frequent Trains Off Peak

After electrification, Caltrain aspires to operate off-peak service at 2 or 3 trains per hour, instead of the current 1 train per hour. All-local service at 3 trains per hour works out to a fleet requirement of 12 trains in service, far less than needed for rush hour, but still racking up almost 300 train-miles per hour, or triple today's rate. That sort of service level will not be cheap to operate, unless two conditions are met to reduce operating and maintenance costs:

1) Operate Short Trains Off Peak

Shorter trains off-peak reduce maintenance costs by putting less wear and tear on the vehicles and track. The same revenue train-miles can be offered with fewer car-miles. The more off-peak service is provided, the greater the savings: at 3 trains per hour, operating 4-car EMUs instead of full-length 8-car EMUs off-peak results in a huge reduction of 25% fewer weekday car-miles.

Operating and vehicle maintenance
costs of US commuter rail, per car mile

Just how big are the savings? Typical commuter rail costs are available from the FTA's National Transit Database. The operating and vehicle maintenance costs for Caltrain and selected commuter rail operators are shown at right for the year 2015, normalized by the total number of car-miles operated. Some on this list (Metro North, LIRR, SEPTA and New Jersey Transit) operate sizable fleets of EMUs, but their maintenance costs are not significantly out-of-family with Caltrain; therefore, it's fair to assume that maintenance costs will not materially change after electrification. Since the FTA maintenance totals are not broken out by fixed and variable costs, we will conservatively assume that the variable cost (which scales directly with the number of car-miles operated) accounts for half of the vehicle maintenance cost. Squinting at the chart, let's estimate this variable cost at $2 per car-mile.

When you operate 12 hours of off-peak service at 300 train-miles per hour, the variable cost of vehicle maintenance racks up at 12 hours/day * 300 train-miles / hour * 8 cars/train * $2/car-mile = $58k/day. By reducing off-peak train length to 4 cars/train, the savings are half of this, or $29k/day. The savings from shorter trains accrue not just on weekdays but on weekends too, yielding annual savings of roughly $10 million.

Then you might want to factor in energy cost savings. Each car weighs about 60 tons loaded, and is accelerated to about 60 mph between two typical stops. The electricity consumed to accelerate is re-generated into the grid while braking for the next stop, with a round-trip efficiency likely in the neighborhood of 80%. That means overcoming the inertia of one car for one stop (neglecting drag) takes 4 MJ of electricity, or 1.2 kWh in more familiar units. At typical electricity rates of 12 cents/kWh, that's just $0.14/car/stop. Multiplying it up, $0.14/car/stop * 20 stops * 3 trains/hour/direction * 2 directions * 12 hours/day * 8 cars/train = $1600/day.  (Note that drag will significantly increase this figure, but can be neglected for this estimate because the drag of a 4-car train is similar to that of an 8-car train.) By reducing off-peak train length to 4 cars/train, the savings are $800/day. At less than $300k per year, this is just a rounding error compared to the vehicle maintenance, and can be ignored.

The Scharfenberg automatic coupler,
nicknamed "Schaku," linking up two
short EMUs (click for movie)

Offsetting these savings are the costs of making and breaking train formations several times per day, since the entire fleet needs to be available for morning and evening peak service with full length 8-car EMUs. Traditionally, this is a cumbersome operation that involves expensive and specialized labor, with ground crews stepping onto the tracks to connect pneumatic hoses and high-voltage cables. Caltrain is breaking with tradition by using a neat technological trick: the couplers on each end of the new EMUs are fully automatic Schakus, making mechanical, pneumatic and electrical connections in a matter of seconds at the touch of a button in the train cab. Barring any union rules relating to craft distinctions, making and breaking trains can be performed by train crews with zero additional labor cost.

2) Operate With One Conductor

Labor accounts for about two thirds of operating costs in typical commuter rail systems. Operating costs are strongly driven by train crew size. Minimum crew size is constrained by union rules that govern how many conductors must work on each train. Currently, the minimum crew size (dictated by Rule 11 of the agreement with the UTU) is 1 engineer, 1 conductor and 1 assistant conductor for trains up to seven cars, with a second assistant conductor required for an 8-car train or longer.

When contemplating a tripling of off-peak service, the cost of this minimum staffing level becomes prohibitive. Conductors are paid about $40/hour, and assistant conductors about $35/hour. Including benefits and other employee costs, the overall cost of these employees is easily double these figures. Additionally, conductors typically spend about half their shift time on board a revenue-producing train, so the necessary staffing levels are roughly double the number of trains in service. We saw earlier that it takes a fleet of 12 trains to operate off-peak service at 3 trains per hour per direction; staffing an assistant conductor on these trains would cost $70/hour/conductor * 1 conductor/train * 2 hours/(revenue hour) * 12 trains * 12 (revenue hours)/day = $20k/day. Again this is big money: the savings from removing the assistant conductor and going to one-conductor operation accrue not just on off-peak weekdays but on weekends too, yielding annual savings of roughly $7 million.

How do you sell this lower staffing level to the union?

1. EMUs can relieve conductors of some of their workload, after automation of many of their traditional roles (such as stop announcements, door and lift operation, or signal aspect acknowledgement). Fare verification (proof of payment) could even become a separate role carried out by roving fare inspectors.
2. Conductor staffing levels or pay rates can be renegotiated on the basis of actual ridership, instead of the number of train cars, since the new EMUs will have automatic passenger counters that collect detailed and accurate passenger ridership statistics.
3. Most importantly, the total amount of work for UTU-represented employees would increase, since one-conductor operation would enable a tripling of off-peak service, resulting in 1.5 times more labor hours even after cutting conductors staffing levels in half.

It isn't a stretch to envision Caltrain and the UTU re-negotiating the labor agreement to allow just one conductor on four-car off-peak trains; there is room for a compromise that can benefit everyone.

Future Fleet Implications

If you zoomed way, way, into Caltrain's
exterior paint scheme concepts,
the Schaku was plain to see

Caltrain's initial fleet of sixteen six-car EMUs (total 96 cars) will not have the ability to split into shorter formations, but once the option for 96 additional cars (total 192 cars) is exercised, and all trains are extended to their intended length of eight cars, the practice becomes not only possible, but necessary for providing frequent off-peak service.

The fleet needs to operate two service patterns:

1. peaks at 6 trains per hour with a fleet of 8-car EMUs
2. off-peak at 3 trains per hour with a fleet of 4-car EMUs

To support both service patterns using the planned fleet size of 192 cars (including a rather large spares ratio, to withstand regular grade crossing collisions), the optimal fleet configuration is probably something close to:

• 16 4-car EMUs for off-peak service, each with one bike car and one bathroom car, that can be coupled in pairs during peak hour service to form eight trains with eight cars each.
• 16 8-car EMUs for peak service, lengthened from the base order

This results in the following order breakdown for the 96 additional option cars:

• 32 passenger cars for CalMod 1.1
• 32 cab cars, for 4-car EMUs
• 16 bathroom cars (powered), for 4-car EMUs
• 16 bike cars (unpowered), for 4-car EMUs

This EMU fleet configuration enables 20-minute off-peak service frequency for at least $17 million/year cheaper operating and maintenance cost than would otherwise be achieved with a uniform fleet of all 8-car trains. That's a large amount, easily over 10% of Caltrain's current annual operating budget. Considering that Caltrain struggles every year to scrape together enough operating funds, a stronger way of stating it is that without 4-car EMUs and one-conductor train crews, Caltrain will simply not have the financial means to provide 20-minute off-peak service frequency.

CalMod 1.1

This being Silicon Valley, future plans for Caltrain modernization are known as CalMod 2.0, the next big thing beyond the CalMod 1.0 improvements that are already under contract.

CalMod 2.0 is a list of future improvements worth about $750M that includes:

• Full fleet conversion to 8-car EMUs ($440M)
• Broadband connectivity ($30M)
• Maintenance facility improvements ($36M)
• Level boarding and platform extensions ($250M)

In the grand scheme of things, these aren't outrageous expenses ("only" another 38% over and above the $2B tab for CalMod 1.0), but they're not cheap, either. To meet capacity challenges in the short term, possibly concurrently with delivery of CalMod 1.0, perhaps some of these expenses can be moved up to realize the maximum bang for the buck as soon as 2021.

CalMod 1.1 would consist of just two line items:

1) Lengthen EMUs to 8 cars, for $145M

The EMU fleet for CalMod 1.0 consists of sixteen 6-car trains, with a reduced seating capacity of 558 that has caused much yammering amid the increasing load factors during peak commute hours. Even without a ridership bump from the "new and modern" effect, it is likely these trains will be packed from day one. Now is the time to start doing something about it.

Seating layout for two extra cars (based on Stadler brochure)
Two unpowered cars would seat up to 264 passengers.

The contract with Stadler includes an option for another 96 cars priced at $390M, a figure larded up to $440M in the CalMod 2.0 total presumably due to the usual procurement overheads. This figure is for 100% fleet replacement, with all the remaining diesel consists being retired. In the short term, only 1/3rd of the option cars would need to be exercised; this involves purchasing 32 cars or 2 extra cars for each of the sixteen EMU consists in the CalMod 1.0 order.

The per-train capacity will increase by well over 200 seats per train, back to a level that will mitigate peak hour crowding. However, 8-car EMUs will exceed the length of many of the existing platforms.

2) Extend platforms to a minimum length of 700 feet, for $25M

Platform extensions are relatively cheap to build, especially when you don't need to rebuild the entire length of station platforms as would be needed for level boarding. You can leave vertical circulation (stairs, ramps) and amenities (vending machines, lighting, benches, PA system, departure boards, etc.) alone and just tack on a short length of concrete, and perhaps move a pedestrian crossing. Caltrain excels at building platforms and has done so extensively, pouring some 5 linear miles of platforms over the last 18 years!

The length of Caltrain's existing platforms is documented in this schematic of California rail systems. To dock an 8-car EMU, platforms need to be extended to at least 700 feet. The necessary extension lengths are graphed at right; labels show the year of completion of each platform's construction.

The total amount of platform extension required to operate 8-car EMUs is approximately 3500 feet. This figure excludes Hillsdale and South San Francisco, both of which are already slated to be rebuilt to 700 feet. Each foot of platform costs about $7000 to build, on the basis of a typical $10M cost for two 700-foot platforms from past platform reconstruction projects. Therefore, the tab for extending all platforms to 700 feet (for the time being, at their current height of 8 inches) lies in the range of $25M.

Start Planning Now

The bottom line: another $175M or an extra 9% investment over CalMod 1.0 yields an extra 23% peak hour seated capacity for CalMod 1.1. It would be best to start planning for CalMod 1.1 now, and to turn CalMod 2.0 into the big level boarding project for the 2020s. In software parlance, the CalMod 1.1 patch should be applied immediately upon release of CalMod 1.0.

Core Capacity Math

With federal funding for Caltrain modernization on indefinite hold, a diverse flock of vultures have started circling the skies over the peninsula corridor--opponents of electrification, boosters of peninsula BART, opponents of high-speed rail, and detractors of rail or transit in general. Some opponents have latched on to a perceived vulnerability of the modernization project, using a legal parsing of federal regulations to allege that Caltrain's application for federal transit funding is fraudulent and illegal. This sensational claim merits closer examination.

FTA "Core Capacity"

The $647M of funding that Caltrain has pursued for several years, and came agonizingly close to obtaining, is allocated by the Federal Transit Administration and disbursed by congress under a competitive grant program known as a Capital Investment Grant or nicknamed "5309," after the section number of the United States Code under which the program is defined. One of the ways to obtain federal funding under this program is to increase the capacity of an existing transit system by at least ten percent. This is known as a "core capacity" grant, the type that Caltrain is pursuing.

The fracas is all about this ten percent, and whether Caltrain is actually meeting the criteria for eligibility.

To prevent gaming of the system, section 5309 policy guidance specifies how that ten percent increase is to be counted for a core capacity project to become eligible for funding. Importantly, the FTA makes an artificial distinction between "light rail / heavy rail" (where passengers traditionally sit and stand) and "commuter rail" (where passengers traditionally only sit) that fundamentally changes the metric used to measure capacity.

• Light rail / heavy rail capacity is measured by "peak hour person capacity in the peak direction," a measurement that includes standees and is based on floor space.
   
• Commuter rail capacity is measured by "peak hour peak direction seated load," a measurement that excludes standees and is based solely on seat count.

Under this uniquely American taxonomy, Caltrain is an odd duck: the modernization project seeks to transform it from a traditional diesel commuter train into a swift and frequent transit system whose attributes will bear a closer resemblance to a heavy rail system like BART than to a stereotypical American commuter train. Indeed, Caltrain's choice of a Swiss train design underscores the cultural disconnect with the rigid system of American train categories.

If you needed any more proof, BART is removing seats to increase capacity!

EMU seating capacity

As ordered, Caltrain's EMUs will have significantly fewer seats per train  than today's six-car diesels. EMUs are not a magical technology: they may lack a locomotive, but all the traction components that would normally be found in the locomotive still need to be accommodated elsewhere in the train. In a preliminary brochure of Caltrain's new EMUs, the traction bits show up as cabinets marked with a spark symbol. These things take up space, so a six-car EMU offers fewer seats than a traditional six-car train hauled by a diesel locomotive.

(In passing, some have blamed the lower seating capacity of the Stadler EMUs on the dual door configuration. A cursory review of proposed seating layouts can retire this fallacy.)

The seating capacity directly counted from the brochure was 573 seats per six-car EMU, although Caltrain's FTA grant application assumes only 558, averaging just 93 seats per car.

A Shifting Baseline

Ten percent, but compared to what? The baseline present-day capacity is also contentious, since Caltrain's record ridership has created the need to provide more seats today.

In Caltrain's September 2016 grant application materials and correspondence with the FTA (helpfully obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by CARRD Morris Brown), the capacity baseline is tabulated as 3403 seats per peak hour per peak direction, with a net increase of 365 seats (barely squeaking by with a 10.7% increase) to a total of 3768 after the modernization project is completed.  Detailed tabulation is provided below, as extracted from the grant application.

Detail of Existing Operations					Commuter Rail
Train #	Train Line Reference (e.g. Name/Color/Number)	Departure Time	Number of Cars	Seats per Car	Seats Per Train
1	#217	6:57	5	121	605
2	#319	7:03	6	132	792
3	#221	7:18	5	120	600
4	#323	7:45	6	131	786
5	#225	7:50	5	124	620
Total	During the Peak Hour				3,403
Detail of Operations At Project Opening					Commuter Rail
Train #	Line Reference	Departure Time	Number of Cars	Seats per Car	Seats Per Train
1	#305	7:00	6	134	804
2	#113	7:07	6	93	558
3	#115	7:12	6	93	558
4	#307	7:29	6	122	732
5	#117	7:36	6	93	558
6	#119	7:42	6	93	558
Total	During the Peak Hour				3,768

Opponents have pointed out that well before the date of the FTA grant application, train 225 was converted to a six-car Bombardier consist seating about 790 passengers, as was train 217, thus increasing today's peak hour baseline by 170 + 185 = 355 seats, and cutting the future capacity increase fully in half from 10.7% to an ineligible zero percent 5%. Caltrain may have done itself in simply by serving its customers today.

How to solve the FTA seating equation
To meet the FTA requirements without question, and to shoo those vultures away, here are some solutions Caltrain could reasonably pursue:

• Build the train cars 3.2 meters wide with five-abreast seating on the upper deck (the lower deck would remain four-abreast with a wider aisle). A car width of 3.2 meters is within the AAR Plate F loading gauge that is cleared to operate on the peninsula corridor, and is a common width in East Coast commuter railroads (the LIRR M7, the Metro North M8, and the SEPTA Silverliner V are all 3.2 meters wide with sections of five-abreast seating). Why Caltrain hasn't already pursued this is baffling, because it is a low-cost and high-benefit change regardless of FTA rules. The Stadler KISS EMU that Caltrain ordered has previously been delivered in widths up to 3.4 meters. This design change is worth +64 seats per six-car EMU, or +256 seats/peak hour, or +7.5% core capacity.
   
• Increase the size of the initial EMU order.  This is a tough sell, given how hard it has been to fund the modernization project, but the relative cost increment is minor when considered in proportion to the entire budget. The Stadler contract already includes an additional 96 cars under a fixed-price option, 32 of which (one third) could be exercised to make all 16 of the EMUs on order eight cars long.  The incremental cost would be another $130M (one third of $390M, or less than 7% of the entire value of the PCEP project), and the seating capacity would go up by +186 seats per EMU, or +744 seats/peak hour, or +21.9% core capacity.  That's right: for an extra 7% cost you can triple the capacity increase.
   
• Both measures applied together would increase seating capacity by +272 seats per EMU, or +1088 seats/peak hour, or +32% core capacity (over and above the +10.7% capacity increase in Caltrain's FTA application).

The devil is of course in the details: changing the Stadler car shell is not free at this late stage of design, and lengthening trains to eight cars isn't just a financial headache but brings about awkwardness with certain platforms that are shorter than they ought to be.

Nevertheless, if it comes down to an existential issue of project eligibility, seat count nitpickers can undoubtedly be satisfied, and to everyone's benefit, by making a few basic adjustments. When a project's core capacity metric can be tripled for just 7% extra cost, it's a clear indication that it isn't an illegitimate fraud. Core capacity seat math either isn't an issue, or it can easily be resolved.

The Big Picture

With the delay of a federal grant long planned for Caltrain modernization, there is fear and uncertainty on the peninsula rail corridor. Everything about the project is being put back into question by voices on all sides of the issue. In times like these, it helps to step back and look at the big picture. The big picture has not changed since 2008, and there is a logical flow to it that remains true regardless of the funding situation.

A requirement flow diagram shows a hierarchy of requirements, things that are needed or wanted, and how they relate to each other. The way to read it is to follow along the connectors between boxes. When reading downward, the next box down answers HOW the previous box is to be achieved. When reading upward, the next box up answers WHY the next box is necessary. A simple and intuitive example is provided at right.

Next, we move on to a more complicated diagram that represents the blended system in general, including the Caltrain modernization project. The derived attributes at the ends of the requirement tree are highlighted in green.  If you delete any of the green boxes, all of the boxes that depend on it above are negatively affected.

For example, if you delete level boarding, then you can't reduce station dwell times, which means you can't increase Caltrain average speeds enough to allow operating peak hour traffic, which in turn means the blended system won't work well, and HSR may need to build four tracks all the way.

For another example, if you delete train doors that work at the same height as HSR, then Caltrain can't share platforms with HSR, which means bigger stations and limited capacity at SF Transbay, so Caltrain won't be able to run all trains into the downtown core, which in turn will hurt Caltrain ridership and increase congestion on highway 101 and I-280.

(Click to expand to full size)

This is a useful way to think about the problem, and reveals three important ideas: (1) the mere lack of funding won't make the problem change or go away, (2) the technical approach pursued by Caltrain is sound, if only partially effective, and (3) hacking away the entire HSR side of the diagram doesn't fundamentally change the solution ultimately needed for Caltrain modernization.

Worth a Thousand Words

As Trump's FTA ponders whether to award a big chunk of federal money to make Caltrain great again, the agency itself is failing to promote in pictures what its modern fleet will look like. Visit caltrain.com or even the nascent but unadvertised calmodtrains.com, and you won't see any images of the new Stadler EMUs. We know they exist, and now might be a good time to splash them all over social media.

Here are two new renderings that emerged recently:

A new Stadler rendering set in San Mateo, via Swiss Trade Magazine

A new version of the original Palo Alto rendering, via Business Journal
Note the train now sports folding bridge plates on the high doors.

To be fair, Caltrain is really good at snark.

San Jose Done Right

Map of VTA's BART extension

San Jose is the tenth largest city in the U.S. (by population), with more people than San Francisco; the city achieves this statistical feat by encompassing 180 square miles.  Such a large and populous city surely deserves top-notch rail transit.  BART is widely viewed as top-notch rail transit, which is why the city and VTA (Santa Clara County's transportation authority) have made extending BART through San Jose their very top priority.

Actual expenditures from VTA
Measure A (2000) sales tax, 2015

So overwhelming is the priority for BART that VTA re-programmed the revenue from a half-cent transit sales tax (Measure A) passed back in 2000 primarily to the BART extension, breaking a promise made to voters that a significant portion would fund Caltrain electrification.  The actual expenditures through 2015 are shown in the diagram at left; money spent on the BART extension is shown in blue, and money spent on Caltrain in red.

As can be readily observed, the Measure A money is nearly gone, and the BART tunnel through San Jose is not even started.  That's why another half-cent transportation sales tax Measure B was passed in Santa Clara County in November 2016 to raise a further $6 billion through the year 2047.  Exactly like 2000 Measure A, 2016 Measure B promises lots of funding for Caltrain, an ample 16% slice that includes grade separations ($700M) and capacity improvements ($314M).  The small print, however, allows the VTA board to re-program the funding as it sees fit, adapting spending to "unforeseen" circumstances such as, perish the thought, an over-budget BART extension.

With San Jose and VTA suffering from a severe case of BART tunnel vision, it's important to take a more holistic view of what it means to provide the residents and workers of San Jose with a top-notch rail transit network.

San Jose Pan-Galactic Inter-Dimensional Station

San Jose planners will insist that creating a network is their highest priority, and to that effect, their Diridon Station Area Plan seeks to establish a new "Grand Central of the West," as described in Section 2.5 of the plan:

San José Diridon Station will be the best connected transportation hub on the West Coast with the convergence of virtually every mode of public transportation. Activity will increase dramatically with the addition of high speed rail and the extension of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to Diridon station, combined with significant growth by current intercity rail, commuter rail, light rail and bus operators. These new services and growth in demand will create the need for a significant expansion of the existing station. 

This ambitious station development plan rests on two fundamental but unstated assumptions:

1. Caltrain, ACE and Amtrak will continue to operate Diridon station as a terminus, where out of service trains are parked for extended layover periods, wasting valuable platform space as train storage.
    
2. As a result, high-speed rail will not fit within the ground-level footprint of the station, and will most likely require an entirely new elevated facility built over the existing station.

Ridership assumptions for Diridon

These two assumptions are firmly rooted in the ambitious plans of numerous rail transit agencies that prefer to avoid stepping on each other's toes.  Each agency specifies its future needs, San Jose consultants unquestioningly tally up the numbers (see figure at right), and end up prescribing a framework that demands a massive station complex to support a nearly ten-fold increase in ridership over the next twenty years.

Caltrain and high-speed rail consultants have conducted a sophisticated simulation study known as an "operational conflict analysis" that predicted an intolerable traffic jam, with peak-hour delays of nearly an hour.

The Diridon Station Area Plan and the Caltrain / HSR operational analyses are flawed for having failed to examine and question the assumptions on which they are built.  Yes, the station has enormous potential to become a thriving transportation hub, but that is precisely what makes it a very bad place to park out of service trains. Parking or laying over trains at a station platform is the railroad equivalent of parking an empty truck in the middle of a bustling loading zone, and then concluding that the loading zone fails to function adequately and must be expanded.

Trains need to hustle in and hustle out without occupying enormously valuable platform tracks. As will become clear, the simple practice of not parking trains in the worst place to park trains enables a far more efficient and affordable at-grade station configuration for San Jose that provides the same great network effect and transportation benefits for the heart of Silicon Valley, saving enormous sums that can be re-invested to achieve a much better outcome for riders and taxpayers.

Here's San Jose done right:

1) Extend Caltrain through San Jose

Falling short: census data for the Caltrain corridor in San Jose,
overlaid with Caltrain service levels for April 2017.

Viewed as a line on a map, Caltrain already runs through San Jose and beyond, with Gilroy service having started back in 1992. San Jose Diridon station (served by 92 trains/weekday) isn't a natural terminus; south of it, there are three additional stops located within San Jose city limits: Tamien (dropping from 40 to 34 trains/weekday in April 2017), Capitol (6 trains/weekday) and Blossom Hill (6 trains/weekday). Service between Diridon and Tamien is timetabled at 7 minutes, which makes for an average speed of 15 mph, and average speeds south of there hover around 30 mph. The abysmal service south of Diridon station lacks two important attributes of top-notch rail transit: speed and frequency. That's why it's fair to say that despite that line on the map, Caltrain has yet to be extended through San Jose. It's time to do it properly.

One challenge is jurisdictional, with Union Pacific owning the tracks south of milepost 52 and VTA currently holding the rights for only ten daily round trips. However, UPRR does not make intensive use of these tracks, and as a profit-making enterprise would likely be receptive to an outright transfer of ownership while retaining trackage rights to continue operating its Coast Subdivision freight service as before. This would simply extend the existing arrangement between CP Coast (milepost 44.7) and CP Lick (milepost 51.6), where the Caltrain owns the right of way and dispatches the track, southwards to CP Coyote (milepost 59.9).

Another challenge is institutional, with VTA having a vested interest in making commuters use the Santa Teresa branch of its light rail network. The Caltrain San Jose extension would parallel this line, possibly cannibalizing some of its ridership.

Built-up areas shown in black on a map
by the DLR Earth Observation Center
(Global Urban Footprint).  Tamien,
Capitol and Blossom Hill are shown
disconnected, as they are today.

Demographically, the southern half of San Jose is a rich but poorly tapped source of commuter ridership, with dense residential neighborhoods surrounding the corridor. More than 100,000 people live within two miles of the Tamien and Capitol stops, and 75,000 people live within two miles of the Blossom Hill stop. Census data argues strongly for locating the Caltrain terminus at Blossom Hill, with an electrified train storage yard / layover facility in this large vacant space [UPDATE: that large vacant space seems to be spoken for, so look for other unbuilt spaces in map at left], a far better place to park out of service trains than in the middle of San Jose Diridon. ACE and Amtrak trains could be turned at the existing Tamien layover facility.

Turning all Caltrain service at Blossom Hill would improve service for hundreds of thousands of San Jose residents and workers, at some increase in capital cost (to electrify) and operating cost (12 minute longer runs). On the other hand, it would greatly reduce Caltrain's requirement for tracks and platforms at Diridon station. Caltrain would operate through the San Jose Diridon station much like it does at the Palo Alto University Avenue station, using just two tracks and two platform faces. If that seems hard to imagine, remember that Palo Alto has almost 60% more ridership than San Jose Diridon; any perceived need for all those tracks and platforms at Diridon, and the profoundly mistaken notion of a "South Terminal", arises from existing jurisdictional boundaries and Caltrain's unhealthy habit of parking trains in the worst possible place to park trains.

2) Build high-speed rail at grade.

Thousands of cubic yards of concrete,
zero marginal transportation benefit

With Caltrain's San Jose footprint shrunk to just two platform faces, and with HSR's recent decision to shrink platform length to just 800 feet, it becomes feasible to operate the San Jose HSR service entirely within the existing at-grade footprint of the station, without the need for expensive new elevated or tunneled infrastructure. Two of the existing platforms are already over 1200 feet long and could be converted for HSR use. Just as in San Francisco Transbay, these platforms could be shared with Caltrain, taking advantage of Caltrain's new dual-boarding-height trains and leading to even more efficient utilization of the existing station footprint.

Operationally, HSR would have to quit the same nasty habit of parking trains in the worst possible place to park trains.  Trains would have to layover somewhere north of Diridon, or continue onto the peninsula rail corridor.  There is no operational need for longer station dwell times than two or three minutes within the Diridon complex: get in, board and/or alight passengers, and most promptly and importantly, get out. Go layover somewhere else than the bustling city center.

Building everything at-grade would save about a billion dollars (by foregoing about $250M for elevated approach tracks, $500M for the elevated Diridon station complex itself, and $500M for the "iconic" but entirely avoidable viaduct to cross the 87/280 freeway interchange to the south). An added benefit of the at-grade approach to San Jose is higher speeds and lower trip times. The extremely tight 1000-foot curve radius that connects Diridon to an "iconic" viaduct saps the 'H' out of HSR by limiting trains to just 50 mph, while the existing curve through the Gardner neighborhood could be grade separated and operated at 65 mph.

Rather than cower in the shadow of a new "iconic" bridge proclaiming loudly that they are just a flyover neighborhood, residents of San Jose's Gardner district would gain a grade separation at Virginia Street, improving neighborhood access that has been so brutally cut off by the I-280 and SR-87 freeways, and eliminating the sound of railroad horns--even freight train horns.

3) End the BART extension at Diridon/Arena

As planned by VTA, the BART to San Jose Phase II project doesn't just take BART to San Jose, but takes BART beyond the San Jose Diridon/Arena station, veering north to parallel the Caltrain / HSR corridor for a redundant 2.5 miles, ending in Santa Clara.  While this configuration might have made sense long ago when BART harbored ambitions to "ring the Bay" by linking Millbrae and Santa Clara, the present state of affairs argues for a different solution.

From a transportation perspective, it makes no sense to spend ~$1.5 billion of scarce transit dollars (pro-rated from the $6 billion cost of the entire Phase II project) on a 9000-foot tunnel leading to a huge Santa Clara station complex just to provide a third way to ride between San Jose Diridon and Santa Clara, two locations already well-linked by Caltrain and VTA's 522 express bus.

BART maintenance yard at Las Plumas
Avenue in San Jose, an alternative
that was withdrawn in EIR process

The main argument against truncating the BART extension revolves around a new 69-acre maintenance facility planned at Newhall Yard in Santa Clara. BART argues that Santa Clara and downtown San Jose are too far away from the nearest existing maintenance and storage facility, BART's main Hayward Maintenance Complex, to be operated efficiently. The HMC is about 21 miles from Santa Clara, requiring long non-revenue runs to stage trains to/from the end of the San Jose extension.  While this is admittedly an operationally inefficient arrangement, BART appears to have no qualms operating Phase I (to Berryessa) out of the HMC, over a distance of 14 miles. Cutting back the 2.5 miles from Diridon/Arena to Santa Clara would place the end of the line less than 19 miles from HMC, not so much further from the HMC than Berryessa already is. The HMC itself is undergoing a major expansion, with storage space for an additional 250 BART cars environmentally cleared based on a purpose and need statement that invokes servicing the BART to San Jose extension. Even then, if the HMC Phase II expansion were to prove insufficient and if maintenance and storage demands were truly that dire, a small portion of the $1.5 billion cost avoidance of truncating Santa Clara could be reinvested to provide a new BART maintenance shop at Las Plumas Avenue, an alternative that was considered during the environmental process. Trains could also be stored overnight at Diridon/Arena, to avoid long non-revenue runs at the start and end of the day. The bottom line: the argument that a Newhall shop is a non-negotiable, vital component of the BART to Silicon Valley project is technically unfounded and rests on a stay-the-course-at-all-costs logic that fails to appreciate the opportunity costs of blowing $1.5 billion on a train parking lot.

Another argument against truncating the BART extension concerns a planned airport people mover that would link Santa Clara to the SJC terminals, tunneling under the runways. Using a small portion of the $1.5 billion savings of ending BART at Diridon/Arena, the people mover could run straight to Diridon station, without the need for tunneling under the runways, and connect not just with Caltrain and BART but directly with high-speed rail--seamlessly merging the airport and the train station.

4) Use Newhall Yard for HSR

As it turns out, there is a better use for Newhall Yard than BART storage and maintenance, namely, HSR storage and maintenance.

As previously mentioned, long non-revenue runs to stage trains to/from their terminus are operationally inefficient, but BART can get by because nobody else uses their tracks. If the HSR storage and maintenance yard were to be located in Brisbane, these non-revenue runs would consume scarce and valuable operating slots on the extremely constrained peninsula corridor "blended system," further compromising service quality for all rail passengers.

A better plan is to have only a small storage / layover yard in Brisbane, with a larger facility perfectly located just north of San Jose Diridon at Newhall Yard, which would allow a portion of the HSR service to originate / terminate in San Jose without gumming up the peninsula rail corridor. Recall the blended system will be limited to 4 trains per hour per direction unless long stretches of the peninsula corridor are expanded to four tracks, an idea that faces twin obstacles of funding and community opposition.

Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton

In Germanic countries, there is a guiding principle in rail system design known as Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton, or roughly, organization before systems before concrete. It gives the order of priorities for quickly and affordably increasing train traffic: first you re-plan your operations, and if that doesn't cut it you improve your technology, for example by using shorter signal blocks, and only as a last resort do you pour concrete.

What is about to happen in San Jose is the exact opposite: legions of consultants primarily from a civil engineering background are (surprise!) recommending a concrete-intensive solution to a problem that is ill-posed because it hasn't first been attacked from the standpoint of re-planning train operations. The entire edifice is built on the nasty habit of parking trains in the worst possible place you could think of to park trains.

The planners and engineers working on the future of the Diridon Station area need to be sent back to the drawing board with new operating assumptions:

1. Turn all Caltrains at Blossom Hill, operating San Jose Diridon as just another intermediate stop
2. Turn all legacy diesel trains (ACE, Amtrak) at Tamien, away from the bustle
3. Turn all high-speed trains originating or terminating in San Jose at Newhall Yard

Thinking of San Jose as a terminal is misleading. The litmus test is really simple: if your timetable, operating plan or simulation has any train spending more than two minutes dwelling at a platform in the San Jose Diridon station, then it is probably flawed. Don't turn trains at the choke point of your system, so that we don't spend billions on fancy train parking with zero value to the traveling public and negative value to the taxpayer.

The Bay Area can ill afford transit mega-projects of low utility, such as the redundant BART segment beyond Diridon/Arena to Santa Clara, the giant HSR station in the sky, or more downtown train parking. The cost is outrageous, and the opportunity cost is shameful.