News Roundup

Rubber Stamp

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

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

ERTMS on the Peninsula?

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

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

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

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

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

Show Some Teeth, For Once!

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

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

MOU, Part Deux

Back in April, the CHSRA and the Peninsula Corridor JPB (also known as Caltrain) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding that laid out a sparse outline for collaboration between the two agencies on the peninsula HSR project. This MOU is not a binding contract, since it can be canceled by either party upon 30 days notice, but it provides an increasingly detailed framework for agreement--so long as it lasts. A new MOU amendment, approved by the CHSRA on October 1st and likely to come before the PCJPB in November, is just as interesting to read as the newly released preliminary alternatives analysis that has drawn most of the media's attention.

A New Organizational Structure

The joint project, known as the Peninsula Rail Program, is structured as shown in the organizational chart at right.

The PRP director, Caltrain's Bob Doty, reports 50 - 50 to the respective chief executive officers, Mike Scanlon at Caltrain and Mehdi Morshed at CHSRA. A horizontal relationship is envisioned between Doty and Tony Daniels, the CHSRA's statewide program manager. That places Dom Spaethling, the CHSRA's regional manager, one tier below alongside the PRP discipline managers. The HNTB team that is currently doing most of the preliminary engineering and environmental work, under Tim Cobb and John Litzinger, reports to Spaethling and not to the PRP director.

The dual reporting structure, embedded deep into the hierarchy, will be challenging to manage whenever the differing needs of high-speed rail and Caltrain come into opposition, as they surely will. The 15 or so people represented by blue boxes will have their work cut out for them when the two agencies don't see eye to eye. While the MOU does not indicate how labor costs are burdened with overhead, the PRP director is listed on page 13 at $547,413 per year, with an average of $392,331 per year for PRP personnel. When the going gets tough, they will have to prove that their mettle at least matches their financial compensation. [UPDATE 10/5: it turns out that the labor figures are about 3.5x the salary paid to the employees. For example, the director makes about $170k per year.]

Five Focus Areas

Under the PRP director, the program is organized into five major functions, each of which is assigned FTE (full-time equivalent) personnel as listed below. Each functional area is further described in pp. 7-11 of the amended MOU.

• Engineering (infrastructure, rolling stock, systems) - 3 FTE
  
• Operations planning - 2.4 FTE
  
• Project controls & contracts administration - 3 FTE
  
• Program management / administration - 2.3 FTE
  
• Public participation and community involvement - 1 FTE
  

It is refreshing to see operations planning staffed to nearly the same level as engineering. Operations planning can establish early on how best to provide efficient and integrated service on the peninsula, which drives all the ancillary questions of engineering such as the choice of rolling stock or the number of tracks required in each location. Operations should drive engineering, and not the other way around--as is sadly and often the case throughout the history of Bay Area rail transportation projects. Work smarter, not harder.

Clash Of The Standards?

The amended MOU includes the following statement:

Until an operator for CHSRA has been identified, PCJPB will provide engineering standards developed by and for the Peninsula corridor, which must be compatible with Caltrain and HSR.

Caltrain's extensive library of engineering standards will continue to rule on the peninsula, despite a growing collection of closely held technical standards, memoranda and directive drawings produced by Parsons Brinckerhoff to ensure statewide technical compatibility and interoperability among all sections of the high-speed rail system.

Caltrain will need to evolve its standards to attempt a complicated feat, without precedent in the United States: the gradual transition from legacy diesel trains to the modern, lightweight electric trains commonly seen in Europe and Japan. Do they have what it takes?

Memorandum of Understanding

The California High Speed Rail Authority recently added to its website the text of a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will soon be signed with the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board (PCJPB, a.k.a. Caltrain).

This document, hammered out by the two parties, establishes an "initial organizational framework" whereby the PCJPB and CHSRA become partners in the planning, design and construction of improvements to the Caltrain corridor. The CHSRA already approved it at their March 5th board meeting; approval by the Caltrain board of directors is expected at their next meeting on April 2nd.

The MOU lays out some key points of understanding:

• A new Program Director, reporting to both the Caltrain and HSR executive directors (Michael Scanlon and Carrie Pourvahidi, respectively) will coordinate and oversee the work of the staffs and engineering consultants of the two parties.
  
• Caltrain will continue to operate during HSR construction.
• The needs of Caltrain must be considered, including the ability to operate 8 trains per hour in each direction (as already set forth in the Caltrain 2025 plan).
  
• The peninsula corridor and all existing improvements belong solely to the PCJPB.
  

The MOU is also interesting for what it does not spell out:

• How and to what extent will the two organizations (governing boards & staff) be integrated?
• Who will pay for what?
• Who will be liable for what?
• Who will own what, after the project is completed?

The MOU states that all these things will be planned. As the saying goes, "the planning will continue until we find out why no decisions have been made."