Fixing Santa Clara County

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

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

Frequency is freedom 

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

Re-imagine connecting shuttles 

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

Ditch diesel

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

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

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

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

Acquire UPRR's Coast Subdivision and electrify to Blossom Hill

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

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

 

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

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

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

Failure of Imagination

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