The False Choice of Link21

Link21, the nascent megaproject to beef up the Bay Area's passenger rail network, features at its core a new underground transbay passenger rail crossing between Oakland and San Francisco. One of the major dilemmas facing this program is what kind of rail service to put in that new tunnel. The choice is posed between BART (understood as wide-gauge single-level rolling stock) and regional rail (understood as standard gauge FRA-compatible rolling stock). One or the other, but not both.

This is a false choice!

Yes, we can have both. They can share the same tunnels and tracks, if we can just get past the mental block of rigidly associating BART with broad gauge. It may seem mind-blowing, and require crayon colors that nobody has seen before, but BART can have a new standard gauge line. It's nothing unusual for transit systems to operate rolling stock with incompatible track gauges or structure gauges. Besides, BART already is our regional rail, despite any semantic distinctions we Americans reflexively attach to various sub-types of rail, real or imagined.

Where would this new standard gauge BART line go? From Oakland, it would continue south via existing and under-utilized standard gauge rail corridors to serve the (re-gauged) Dublin / Pleasanton branch, which could be further extended to serve the Altamont Pass (hello, Valley Link) and points beyond. Long-distance trains, provided they have a pantograph, could run through from the Central Valley straight into downtown San Francisco.

Link21 planners should stop promoting this specious choice between BART and regional rail. They don't need separate tunnels, and the dogmatic belief that they do will inevitably result in terrible planning decisions.

Small print regarding the graphic: the single tunnel bore (of two) is drawn rigorously to scale. The BART broad gauge version is 250 inches (almost 21 feet) in external diameter, taken from a VTA drawing. The regional rail version is 8 meters (a bit over 26 feet) to accommodate taller bi-level trains. The overhead conductor rail, of the same design used by Caltrain in its San Francisco tunnels, is 18 feet above the rail. The BART standard gauge train is a Stadler KISS with the same dimensions as Caltrain's, but a different color of paint as previously seen in this post.

Note an alternate configuration is also possible with a 40-foot external diameter single bore tunnel.

Down the Tubes with DTX!

DTX overview

San Francisco's Downtown Rail Extension project (DTX), officially known as the Transbay Transit Center Program Phase 2, is a two-mile tunneling project to extend the peninsula rail corridor from its existing terminus in the Mission Bay neighborhood to the purpose-built basement "train box" of the Salesforce Transit Center (SFC). The project is regionally important, as there are more jobs located within a half-mile radius of the SFC than within a half-mile radius of all Caltrain stops combined, from 4th and King all the way to Gilroy. The DTX is nearly shovel-ready, in the sense that environmental clearance is in hand and engineering is being advanced to award construction contracts the moment a key ingredient becomes available: money. Gobs and gobs of money.

Too Big To Fail

The last time the costs of the Phase 2 project were tallied in 2016, the total came to $3.9 billion in year-of-expenditure dollars assuming a 2025 opening. Due to delays, we can anticipate at least another five years of escalation at 5%, bringing us to $5 billion before any changes to the project scope. One can reasonably expect that Bay Area transit agencies' proven inability to deliver mega-projects on budget or on time is quite likely to blow up costs well beyond these figures. As a recent example, the Phase 1 project, completed in 2019, cost $2.4 billion (year-of-expenditure) or about 50% more than the $1.6 billion YOE budget of May 2010, adopted after the train box scope was added.

The DTX project's regional, state and national significance is certainly not lost on our Transportation Industrial Complex. To improve the chances of getting the Phase 2 project federally funded (after which any cost growth becomes easier to fund, following former SF mayor Willie Brown's "theory of holes"), the TJPA is undertaking a phasing study to make the project appear more thrifty. The various approaches include deferring or deleting components of the project, such as a pedestrian connector to BART, an intercity bus facility, and an extension of the basement train box. This nibbling around the edges amounts to $0.4 billion in 2027 dollars or about 8% of the total Phase 2 project cost, a drop in the bucket.

A $30 million project development study is now in the pipeline to get Phase 2 to the state of readiness required to apply for federal New Starts funding by August 2023.

PAX: The World's Most Expensive Grade Separation

If you thought the cost of grade separations is exploding, you really haven't seen anything yet: meet the Pennsylvania Avenue Extension (PAX) addendum to the DTX, a grade separation project that will approach $2 billion for two crossings, reaching the stratospheric cost of $1 billion per crossing.

Even after spending $5 billion (before inevitable cost overruns), the DTX project will leave two existing street crossings at grade, at Mission Bay Drive and 16th Street. Not to be outdone, the city and county of San Francisco has performed a methodical series of planning studies to conclude that a new grade separation project is needed. Rather than taking on the challenge of bending some design rules to keep it simple and make it fit, the favored paint-by-numbers engineering solution is a bored tunnel, which averts any conflict with a planned 27-foot sewer pipe and the sacrosanct pile foundations of the I-280 viaduct, each of which are under the jurisdiction of other agencies. The combined cost of DTX + PAX is estimated at $6.0 billion. Take away the latest (2016) $3.9 billion cost estimate of DTX and you get about $2 billion added for PAX.

Link21 Crashes the Party

Meanwhile, BART is in the early planning stages for beefing up its throughput capacity between the greater East Bay and San Francisco, with a second Transbay Tube. It's worth pausing for a moment to consider what an astonishing piece of infrastructure the first Transbay Tube already is: it carries almost twice as many people during rush hour as the entire ten-lane freeway that is the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge, and at significantly faster speeds. Looking past the pandemic, long-term growth trends indicate that the region must plan for a second Transbay Tube.

Transbay Tube II is the centerpiece of an enormous regional rail program known as Link21, the scale and ambition of which dwarf the DTX. While there are many decisions yet to be made about the implementation details of Link21, perhaps the most critical decision centers on what technology to put in the tube: wide-gauge BART, standard-gauge regional rail, or both.

This question is already of great concern to TJPA, which writes in its August 20, 2021 Phasing Study:

BART and Capitol Corridor’s Link21 program is currently in the early stages of development and has not yet determined a preferred alignment, technology, or rail gauge options to meet their goals and objectives for a future transbay rail crossing. As expected at this stage of development, all options remain available for consideration. For example, Link21 may determine that a second transbay crossing best meets stakeholder needs if it provides additional capacity for the BART network only and does not provide a standard gauge rail crossing of the Bay. BART’s infrastructure and trainset design, however, are incompatible with Caltrain and CHSRA standards. Most significantly, BART operates on a wider track gauge with vehicles that may not meet collision requirements, and therefore a BART-only connection would not relieve congestion and conflicts on the DTX.

We can already see a problematic mindset emerging here, where "BART" is automatically conflated with "five-foot-six track gauge," setting up a false dichotomy of BART-or-standard-gauge.

Caltrain + BART: a Necessary Merger

The false dichotomy of BART-or-standard-gauge threatens to poison the debate around Link21 alternatives. The Transportation Industrial Complex has a vested interest in this incompatibility, as it ultimately forces multiple mega-projects to be built. Why build it right when you can build it twice and get paid twice? From the standpoint of scope and profit maximization, it would then make sense to keep DTX and Link21 as separate projects, despite their overlapping purpose and need to link the greater Bay Area megaregion together using high-capacity passenger rail infrastructure. Seamless integration is good for riders and taxpayers, but not so great for consultants and civil engineering mega-firms. That's why these firms have an interest in propagating the myth that BART and standard gauge rail will always be mutually exclusive.

Removing this false dichotomy is becoming a primary reason for merging Caltrain with BART to form a single Bay Area Rapid Transit system, although there are many other reasons. BART does not have to be synonymous with wide gauge; indeed, BART already operates a seamless standard-gauge extension between Pittsburg and Antioch, and provides day-to-day management of the standard-gauge Capitol Corridor. A new BART peninsula line, while indistinguishable from Caltrain's service vision, would suck the air out of the emerging pointless debate around the track gauge of the second BART transbay crossing. The Measure RR sales tax can serve as a dowry to integrate San Mateo and Santa Clara counties into a restructured BART district.

Link21, to its credit, places equity and inclusion at the forefront of its project development process. The contrast with DTX is jarring, as TJPA's Phase 2 project can easily be viewed as just another gold-plated white-collar rail project enabling nine-to-five technology and finance types to more conveniently access San Francisco's skyscrapers from the affluent suburbs to the south, without ever having to mix with the blue-collar working class. Bringing DTX under the Link21 umbrella, and merging Caltrain into BART, immediately defuses the classism and racism that underlies this anachronistic Mad Men commuter rail vibe.

Transbay Through Running

A stub-end terminal station suffers from fundamental throughput limits related to long turn times and the unavoidable crossing streams of inbound and outbound traffic in the station approach or "throat." For a given number of platform tracks, a through-running station configuration where all trains that come in one end of the station can exit the other end will always provide more throughput capacity, whether measured in trains per hour or passengers per hour. Trains don't have to dwell any longer than necessary at a platform, and don't foul opposing traffic on their way in or out.

With the DTX as it is, past operational analysis indicated that just 12 inbound and outbound trains per hour (8 Caltrain + 4 HSR) would push the limits of the terminus design, with near-saturated platform occupancy. If you uncork the other end of the train box (by having Caltrans clear some right of way i.e. dismantle and redevelop a couple of medium-rise buildings to the East) so that the DTX can connect directly to a new transbay crossing, everything changes. A lot of new capacity is created by virtue of not having to layover or turn trains right smack where your platforms and track real estate is the most expensive.

A recent through running operations analysis commissioned by the TJPA shows that the Salesforce Transit Center could handle up to 20 trains per hour per direction if no more than six of them turn at the station. Any more than six turning movements, and the excessively long platform re-occupancy times (as the study notes, due to the poor layout of the switches leading to tracks 1-4) will reduce throughput capacity to less than 20 trains/hour.

Broken Assumptions at Link21

The TJPA phasing study reports the following direct quote attributed to Link21 project team:

We have received briefings on the operational modeling for DTX and it would seem that even a three-bay DTX tunnel poses operational constraints. A robust service level through the transbay crossing is required to justify investment into Link21. Link21 is envisioning scenarios where not all trains that cross the Bay would continue to San Jose. At this point, there is no other location to turn trains around in the northern peninsula which makes flexibility in DTX important to the Link21 Program.

You read that right: the Link21 team is thinking of turning Capitol Corridor trains at the Salesforce Transit Center, a completely American idea (copied straight from Penn Station New York) that is operationally insane if you think about it for even a minute. In a through-running configuration, all trains that cross the Bay should stop in downtown San Francisco and get out immediately. The California High Speed Rail Authority is planning a huge yard in Brisbane, a perfect place to clean, service and layover Capitol Corridor trains. These deadhead (non-revenue) moves are much less wasteful of infrastructure capacity than treating a through-running station as a terminal.

As was remarked in previous discussions regarding San Jose, the act of 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. Just stop it, don't even think of turning trains here!

The Bottom Line

Here are the pros and cons of merging DTX with Link21:

Pro	Con
Eliminates silly idea of a multi-gauge transbay tube project	Could further delay DTX, since Link21 is at an earlier stage of development
Increases SFC throughput capacity and bang-for-buck, making the enormous cost of DTX worth it	Exposes DTX to political re-prioritization
Provides faster Peninsula - East Bay connections than existing BART, and finally "Rings the Bay with BART"	Greatly reduces scope and profits for Transportation Industrial Complex
Makes more efficient use of taxpayer dollars by building  one project and building it right	Requires inter-agency coordination and mergers, which agencies abhor
Provides seamless regional rail connection from SJ and SF to Sacramento, if Capitol Corridor is electrified

Despite the obvious political and organizational obstacles, from the point of view of a rider and taxpayer, the pros vastly outweigh the cons. The answer is then obvious: the DTX should go down the tubes of a new standard gauge Link21 crossing, with Stadler bi-level EMUs operated by BART seamlessly connecting the peninsula corridor (a.k.a. the new BART Purple Line) directly to Oakland and points beyond. DTX should be built without delay and form the first building block of Link21.

Pandemic Open Thread

These are challenging times. We can ponder ideas that are significantly outside the mainstream, taking an existing concept and extrapolating it, Black Mirror style, to its extreme conclusion. Here are some controversial conversation starters:

Southbound BART Purple Line train arrives at Palo Alto

Merge Caltrain Into BART.  The long-standing push to get the operation of Caltrain a dedicated source of funding (via November ballot measure) looks shaky at best, with the economy heading down the toilet. San Mateo and Santa Clara counties see this tax measure as a way to push Caltrain off their books, but for residents it supplements one tax with another. Why not blow it all up, and merge the two counties into the BART district?

• Secures dedicated operating funding, via BART half-cent tax to join district.
• Removes a warring tribe from the balkanized landscape of Bay Area transit.
• Retires the awkward and unwieldy Joint Powers Agreement between the peninsula counties.
• "Rings the Bay" in 2023 with a new BART Purple Line, using state of the art HSR-compatible technology.
• Ends decades of silly talk about closing a perceived "missing link" between Millbrae and Santa Clara by using wide-gauge technology, as most recently encouraged by VTA (!)
• Replaces the passive-aggressive operational antagonism that is routinely on display at Millbrae with coordinated, centrally-planned, seamless connections.
• Puts in charge managers who actually understand from direct experience the value of short dwell times and level boarding.
• Raises the bar for mega-project delivery, which has been set so low by Caltrain's spiraling trouble in managing delays to the electrification project (and the large budget blow-outs that are 100% certain to follow) that we might as well just let BART take over.
• Removes the pretext for VTA's ridiculous plan to duplicate the Purple Line with an expensive BART tunnel from San Jose to Santa Clara, with BART instead establishing coordinated, centrally-planned, seamless connections at a modernized San Jose Diridon station.
• Frees BART and VTA to plan for a far more logical extension along Stevens Creek Boulevard to serve the sprawling automobile-captive transit deserts of Santa Clara County.
• Keeps the really good people at Caltrain employed. They can work for BART.
• Just makes categorical sense. Caltrain's trajectory of modernization, described extensively in its business planning effort, takes it out of the old-fashioned category of "commuter rail" and into the category of "rapid transit," right here in the Bay Area. You could then describe it as Bay Area Rapid Transit, or perhaps just BART for short. If it walks like a BART and quacks like a BART, then it surely must be BART!

Kill the DTX project.  The San Francisco Downtown Extension (DTX) is one of those projects that is so important that everyone got tunnel vision and let costs explode as we forgot why we were doing it in the first place. A quarter century of planning later and at six billion dollars and rising, the benefit is no longer worth the cost. Why not blow it all up, and merge DTX with the Second Transbay Rail Crossing?

• Solves the problem once, not twice, something taxpayers and riders will all appreciate. DTX and Transbay Tube II both connect a mega-region by creating high-speed, high-capacity arteries to supply the economic heart of the Bay Area. Both projects solve a geometry problem that no amount of additional freeway lanes or autonomous vehicle technology can possibly address. They should be one project, and the distinction between them is not only operationally counter-productive but astronomically costly for taxpayers.
• Defuses an emerging and highly toxic competitive dynamic between two competing mega-projects, which threatens to delay both.
• Makes the Salesforce Transit Center a through-station, which is enormously more efficient to operate and enables far higher throughput capacity (trains and passengers) within the existing station footprint. Yes, this requires dismantling a couple of medium-sized high rises whose foundations stand in the way on the northeast end of the train box; this is the cost of progress.
• Enables seamless high-speed electric through service from the East Bay / Sacramento to the Peninsula and Silicon valley, just like the Paris RER or London Crossrail.
• Stores the EMU fleet on the Oakland side of Transbay Tube II, presumably somewhere inside the dystopian freeway mess of the Maze, thus removing the anachronistic need for a train yard in the heart of San Francisco.
• Allows a large-diameter tunnel boring machine (big enough to allow for 2 wide-gauge tracks stacked on top of 2 standard-gauge tracks for the Transbay segment) to start from a more accessible construction site on the Oakland side. The TBM would land in San Francisco near Howard Street, providing the start for a Geary BART subway.

Yes, crayon plans like this do not factor in important things like Environmental Impact Reports and shovel-readiness, or the entrenched politics of established bureaucracies, or the deeply carved flows of monies from various federal, state, regional and local sources into the pockets of the private Transit Industrial Complex. But sometimes, difficult times call for big changes. Changes that put riders and taxpayers, who are all suffering to various degrees through this pandemic, in a stronger position at a table of stakeholders that rarely has much room for them.

Fleet of the Future

Not bad in blue, huh? This parody of the fragmented state of Bay Area transit is based on an image by Stadler Rail. There should be plenty in this image to offend almost everyone!

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.

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.

Will BART Bust a Move?

The unfortunate reality of Bay Area transit politics is that twenty-eight agencies compete for funding and ridership with very limited coordination.   At the top of this pile is BART, the biggest of them all.  Not so much BART the transit operator, but BART the expansion-thirsty transit-industrial complex (functioning somewhat like the military-industrial complex), as facilitated by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC).  (photo at right by cplbasilisk, modified with permission)

With recent developments in the peninsula high-speed rail story, it's worth taking a step back and imagining BART / MTC's next moves in this slow-motion game of political chess, assuming for a moment the following motivations:

• Expand as much as possible, constructing the most new infrastructure in the most corridors using the most consultant engineering and "craft hours" of construction labor
• Soak up as much federal, state and local funding as possible
• Take over high-ridership corridors, even at the expense of other agencies
• Ring the San Francisco Bay with BART, as initially planned in the 1950s

The resulting exercise can either be viewed as a crackpot conspiracy theory, or as a simple thought experiment rooted in recent history.  Where MTC and BART have successfully assembled billions of dollars for the Millbrae/SFO and San Jose/Santa Clara extensions, Caltrain has repeatedly floundered: no downtown extension, no electrification, no Dumbarton rail, and the list goes on and on...  Supposing this historical pattern were to be sustained, what specifically would be BART's logical next moves?

Move #1: Drop Support For Pacheco HSR.

The long-running Pacheco-Altamont controversy over the Bay Area HSR alignment, still simmering in the courts, is driven on one hand by not-in-my-backyard sentiment in communities impacted by the Pacheco alignment (notably Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Atherton) and on the other hand by transit activists who argue that the Altamont alignment makes far more technical sense to serve the immediate transportation needs of the Bay Area in a coordinated and sustainable way.

BART and MTC were firmly in the Pacheco camp because of the need to preserve for BART a key piece of rail right of way between Fremont and San Jose (the former Western Pacific line, purchased by VTA in 2002).  This right of way would almost certainly have been claimed by HSR under any reasonable Altamont scenario.  Worse, a blended HSR/commuter rail project could have undermined the very purpose and need for BART in that corridor.

Today, this concern has been overcome by events, and the BART extension to San Jose is a done deal.  Pacheco HSR no longer plays a role in defending this important BART turf, and thus may no longer garner the same level of support from BART and MTC as it once did.



Move #2: Promote Altamont HSR with a BART Connection at Livermore.

The BART board recently approved a more detailed study of a future extension to Livermore, along I-580.  While this extension is a waste of money on its own merits (as are most BART extensions), and is still far from becoming reality, it could be sold as a key enabler for a phased implementation of HSR, especially under a budget-constrained environment.

Livermore as a BART-HSR transfer point has been considered before, if only discreetly, as part of the half-hearted "Altamont overlay" that the CHSRA has been studying in addition to the baseline Pacheco Pass alignment--always with the insistent disclaimer that the Altamont corridor serves a completely different "purpose and need" than the high-speed rail project.  Meanwhile, MTC suggested as recently as 2007 that HSR terminate at Livermore BART, absorbing all HSR ridership into BART (see comment L017-8).

As an interim phasing opportunity, Livermore BART would actually work quite well:

• Earlier and quicker HSR service to downtown San Francisco and the greater Bay Area
• Earlier and quicker HSR service to Sacramento (quicker than the Amtrak Capitols)
• Cheaper construction with less tunneling to achieve "Bay-to-Basin" connectivity

The Livermore BART extension would be routed south along Vasco Rd. or Greenville Rd., past the Laboratory, to terminate just south of Livermore at a new BART/HSR interchange station on the outskirts of town.  This station would be located on an Altamont HSR alignment proposed by outside groups but studiously ignored by the CHSRA.  This Altamont HSR route is known as the SETEC alignment, after the French HSR consulting firm that performed the preliminary engineering.  The SETEC alignment is noteworthy in that it avoids major residential property impacts to Livermore and Pleasanton, one of the main arguments used by the CHSRA to select Pacheco in the environmental study process.

Here is a rough point-by-point comparison of Altamont/Livermore and Pacheco/Gilroy interim scenarios:

	Altamont HSR to Livermore	Pacheco HSR to Gilroy
HSR Trip Time, from Fresno	0:48 Fresno - Livermore	0:39 Fresno - Gilroy
Continuing Trip to San Francisco	0:57 on BART Livermore to Embarcadero	1:45 on Caltrain Gilroy to SF (electrified)
Fresno - San Francisco CBD	~ 2:00 (40 minutes quicker) including transfers	~ 2:40 including transfers
Fresno - Oakland	~ 1:50 (50 minutes quicker)	~ 2:40
Fresno - San Jose	~ 1:50 (10 minutes slower) assumes BART to SJ	~ 1:40
HSR Track Length	140 miles (25 miles more)	115 miles
Phase 2 HSR to Reach Sacramento	60 miles (50 miles less)	110 miles
HSR Tunnel Length (interim)	about 4 miles (6 miles less)	about 10 miles

Using the money saved by tunneling only 4 miles to Livermore instead of 10 miles to Gilroy, the additional 25 miles of track to reach Livermore are easily paid for-- and then some, since 50 miles of track will already have been built to reach Sacramento, as opposed to zero for Pacheco.

Move #3: Dangle the Carrot of a PAMPA Subway.

The Palo Alto Weekly recently published an article headlined "Four-track design back on the table for high-speed rail," apparently implying that it was once off the table.  That seems to be the crux of a major disconnect between the city and the high-speed rail Authority.  The blended Caltrain / HSR plan, as proposed in recent months by Simitian-Eshoo-Gordon and currently being analyzed by Caltrain, was always viewed by the CHSRA as an intermediate phase, a stepping stone to the immutable objective of a four-track high-speed railroad through PAMPA (Palo Alto - Menlo Park - Atherton).  This viewpoint is borne out in the 2012 draft business plan.  Palo Alto, on the other hand, views the blended plan as a final state of the peninsula rail corridor for the foreseeable future, and believes that the four-track plan should no longer even appear in the program EIR.

BART's best move here is again to promote Altamont HSR.  For PAMPA, the advantages are thus:

• No four-track HSR grade separations, ever
• No additional right of way (a.k.a. eminent domain) needed, ever
• No HSR traffic on top of commuter rail traffic (only 6 trains per hour per direction)
• Future opportunity for a two-track BART subway, considerably cheaper to construct than a four-track high-speed corridor.  A two-track BART tunnel box is four to five times smaller, in cross-sectional area, than a four-track HSR tunnel box.  This makes it remotely feasible to have the cities participate in the financing of a subway, much as was done in Berkeley in the 1960s, to further enhance property values.

For BART itself, the main advantage of Altamont is of course to preserve the future possibility of ringing the bay by connecting Santa Clara BART to Millbrae BART.  The argument that BART can make in pleading this case is that all existing infrastructure north of Millbrae (i.e. fresh grade separations in San Bruno, and existing tunnels to San Francisco) would be dedicated exclusively to HSR, thus mitigating the astronomical cost of accommodating Caltrain detailed in the 2012 business plan.

As billions of dollars slowly coalesce for a possible blended HSR / Caltrain plan on the peninsula, time will become pressing for BART to bust a move.  If the motives that underlie the above narrative are remotely true, then any attempt to electrify the peninsula corridor shall be thwarted, just the same as it has been in past decades.