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.

Diridon Delusions

San Jose is striving to redesign and expand its Cahill Street station, named for the (still living) former Santa Clara County board of supervisors chair Rod Diridon, to meet the needs of future rail service including BART and high-speed rail. The station's context was discussed here in 2017.

The process led by the Joint Policy Advisory Board, made up of representatives from the city and relevant transportation agencies, has now reached the key juncture of presenting a small number of alternatives to the public. Before we dig into this, let's pause to consider an alternate plan.

The HSR Environmentally Cleared Project

This design is already
environmentally cleared.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, as part of its San Jose to Merced project, has already obtained full federal and state environmental clearance to build the simple Diridon station concept shown at right. This plan adds a couple of overpass mezzanines above the existing platforms, and rebuilds two of these platforms for compatibility with high-speed trains, using the newly established standard height of 48 inches above top-of-rail and lateral offset of 73 inches from the track center. The 48" x 73" platform standard was agreed in June 2023 between the Authority, the FRA, and other prospective high-speed rail operators such as Brightline West. Due to budget pressures, the HSR project took a rather minimalist approach to this station, electing to build it at grade within the footprint of the existing facility, but pledged to work harmoniously with other agencies on more ambitious concepts. Think of it as a minimum viable product that has already cleared CEQA and NEPA, before we turn to what is now brewing for San Jose.

The Diridon JPAB Alternatives

In any public alternative evaluation process, it is important to carry a sacrificial alternative. This serves the same role as an unlikable character in a movie, whose demise is heavily foreshadowed and brings relief to the viewer when it occurs. The sacrificial alternative can be eliminated in an overt display of due diligence, reassuring the public that the authorities are being thrifty and mindful of the interests of riders and taxpayers. In this case, the "stacked" alternative seems to serve this purpose, and warrants no further discussion because it will shortly be eliminated.

Note similarity of elevated and at-grade options.

This leaves a choice between two alternatives known as "at grade" and "elevated," actually a distinction without much difference. Both designs are driven by an overarching requirement to create an expansive concourse level below the tracks and platforms, purporting to imitate grand European train stations but far more likely (this is America!) replicating the airport experience for train passengers. Early architectural renderings show this as an open and airy space resembling an Apple Store, paying no heed to the fact that the sky will be completely obstructed by tracks and platforms built on a dense forest of beefy concrete columns. No matter how pretty the architects try to make it, this will be a heavy elevated structure built on alluvial soils near seismically active faults. The light-filled and soaring station canopy will be enjoyed by nobody for any length of time, since all waiting areas will be in the basement.

Things to Watch For

The effectiveness of a station modernization project should be measured by its operational efficiency. The primary focus should be on shaving seconds off travel times, to include:

• Removing slow zones in the station approaches. On the north side, this means removing the CEMOF double reverse curve, a self-inflicted obstacle added in 2005 that limits all trains to 40 mph over a mile before the station. Main tracks MT2 and MT3 should be restored to their former alignment on the west side of the maintenance facility, with a flatter curve allowing trains to pass the facility at higher speeds. On the south side, this means greatly increasing the speed limit between San Jose and Tamien, currently just 35 mph, and providing at least two electrified tracks.
   
  
• Re-configuring the layout of north and south station interlockings (a.k.a. "station throats") to enable swift and parallel train moves into and out of the station, on turnouts rated for much higher speeds than 15 mph of the current layout. Nobody in Europe or Asia would accept a train crawling slowly along a platform while dinging insistently; trains arrive and depart swiftly and quietly.
  
  
• Ensuring that all Caltrain traffic will shoot through on just two platform tracks and one island platform. Despite the "south terminal" school of thought still prevalent at Caltrain headquarters, San Jose Diridon should become just another intermediate stop on the way to further destinations in the greatly under-served but densely populated southern parts of the city, which the BART-fixated county agency seems to have completely forgotten about. A great way to sell this extension would be as a "South San Jose to BART Regional Connector Project." Cutting Caltrain's footprint to just two tracks and one island platform will free up ample space for other operators.
  
  
• Providing excellent vertical circulation, which means short vertical circulation. This is one benefit of putting the concourse under the tracks: people are shorter than trains. Architects should resist the urge to make the ceilings in the passenger concourse vault too high because this needlessly extends the reach of stairs, escalators and elevators. Likewise, structural engineers should resist the urge to put the tracks on top of enormous concrete box girders. The early concept renderings show 15-foot ceilings with 9-foot structure depth, while 12-foot ceilings and 3-foot structure depth (using through-girders) would bring the entire structure 9 feet down. This saves every single passenger ten seconds of vertical transport, worth an hour per year for each commuter! Don't go for drama, go for ruthless efficiency: form must follow function.
   
  
• Providing a straight-shot escalator / elevator ride from the north end of the Caltrain platform to the west end of the underground BART platform. This simple shortest-path connection avoids a long and circuitous walking detour through the main BART entrance, located outside and east of the station footprint. Please don't let agency turf lead to lengthy and confusing transfers.
  

The unifying theme here is to save passengers time, whether on the train or in the station. Every second of the San Jose travel experience matters. A counter-intuitive fact about high-speed rail is that the best way to save time is to relentlessly focus on speeding up the slowest bits, like station approaches and escalator rides. In terms of capital costs, those are by far the cheapest seconds to save. California has already committed to the enormous expense of building a 220 mph system, and San Jose is not the place to wastefully undo those hard-won time savings.

If operational efficiencies are not realized in San Jose, and the opportunity to bring the station into the 21st century is not captured, then we'll end up with a new multi-billion dollar train basement that does little to improve regional transportation.

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.