HSR Lays an Egg in Caltrain's Nest

California's high-speed rail project has finally reached a milestone 14 years after the passage of Proposition A in 2008 with the board's certification of the Final Environmental Impact Report for the San Francisco - San Jose project section.

This voluminous document has come a long way since the early days of a four-track 125 mph rail corridor initially envisioned for our region, having been whittled down to a two-track 110 mph "blended system" project that shares tracks with Caltrain without building any new overtaking tracks. Nevertheless, the cost estimates for the project have ballooned to $5.3 billion.

How do you add four high-speed trains per hour per direction, traveling at peak times between San Francisco and San Jose in just 48 minutes (by the way, 18 minutes slower than promised in the HSR bond measure) while building no new tracks and without disrupting Caltrain service? The answer is, you can't.

Instead, the high-speed rail project plans to take over the peninsula rail corridor and become a parasite to Caltrain. Here's how.

The FEIR's Volume 2 Appendix 2-C Operations and Service Summary contains what is described as an "Illustrative Timetable" of this blended service featuring 6 Caltrain + 4 HSR per hour per direction. The assumptions for this timetable include:

• Caltrain is operated as a skip-stop service with 3 different stopping patterns.
  
• Caltrain EMUs operate at up to 110 mph, their design top speed.
• Caltrain station dwells are 30 seconds, consistent with system-wide level boarding.
• Caltrain operates in salvos of three closely-spaced trains every half hour, leaving large gaps for high-speed trains to travel without being delayed by Caltrain. This bunching is flatly denied on page 3.2-91 of the FEIR, inconsistent with the Illustrative Timetable.
  
• Two out of three Caltrains are held for about 5 minutes at either Bayshore or Lawrence station to allow high-speed trains to overtake them.

Additionally, we can make the reasonable assumption that peninsula commuters will be priced out of high-speed rail service, meaning that HSR will not provide many trips with origin and destination between San Francisco and San Jose. Every local peninsula trip taken on a high-speed train potentially displaces a longer statewide trip with much higher fare revenue for the operator, especially at peak times. In a yield-managed fare structure, local HSR trips will therefore be priced punitively. This isn't just speculation, it's well-established practice: Amtrak's premium Acela Express can technically be used to commute from Stamford, Connecticut into New York City, but it can easily cost you over $100 per trip, compared to the $15 peak fare on Metro North. In much the same way, every local SF-SJ passenger would potentially displace a more lucrative SF-LA passenger. Punitive local ticket prices will mean zero local ridership, so we shouldn't figure any HSR services into the scoring of service quality.

Let's put this in our handy taktulator and figure a score for this timetable. Remember, Caltrain's 2011 timetable is the baseline with a score of 100.

HSR FEIR Caltrain, no DTX: Score = 135 service points -- compare that to 147 service points with regularly-spaced 8 train per hour service, as planned in Caltrain's service vision and enabled by a new overtaking station in Redwood City.

HSR FEIR Caltrain, with DTX: Score = 235 service points -- compare to 250 service points with regularly-spaced 8 train per hour service as planned by Caltrain.

In both cases, the HSR timetable improves over the 2011 timetable (score = 100) by only 75 - 90% as much as the planned Caltrain timetable. Despite the higher train speeds, the bunched-up and irregular skip-stop service pattern with long overtaking dwells makes numerous Caltrain trips less convenient. On the plus side, this blended service can be operated with a fleet of 6 fewer trains than Caltrain's more frequent 8 tph service pattern. On the minus side, those trains will be more crowded. Note our taktulator tool measures service quality only from the standpoint of one typical user (weighted by origin and destination population and jobs density), without quantifying overall ridership demand or the resulting level of crowding.

Confronted by numerous stakeholders with the seeming contradiction between Caltrain's plans and its own blended service planning, the HSR authority offers Standard Response FJ-Response-GEN-4: Consideration of 2040 CaltrainService Vision and Caltrain Business Plan, with key points summarized below:

• Caltrain's Service Vision is aspirational and isn't an approved or funded project.
• The Service Vision is insufficiently defined to be analyzed in the EIR and is not "reasonably foreseeable" under CEQA.
  
• The impact on Caltrain service wouldn't rise up to the level of a "significant impact" anyway.
  
• The illustrative timetable is only used as a reasonable basis for analysis and there may exist better timetables.
• It will be Caltrain's job to environmentally clear (and fund) future improvements associated with the Service Vision, such as additional passing tracks to support HSR service in the corridor.

In the HSR project's view, Caltrain will be fully on the hook for upgrading its own facilities to continue hosting HSR even as it becomes more difficult to do so. This sets up unhealthy incentives where capital projects that actually improve Caltrain service, and might create inconvenient "facts on the ground" for HSR, are quite likely to be delayed and de-funded to ensure the corridor stays clear for the future hatching of the giant egg that HSR just laid with this EIR.

Vote Yes on Measure RR

For all the criticism of Caltrain that you might have read on this blog over the last decade, you might think that my support for the upcoming Measure RR 1/8th cent sales tax measure in the three counties served by the peninsula rail corridor would be tepid at best, and that I’m no friend of Caltrain. True friends, however, aren’t measured by giving unconditional praise. True friends question things that are taken for granted and start conversations about uncomfortable subjects. I see enormous potential for the peninsula rail corridor, potential that can’t and won’t be realized without stable and predictable funding. That’s why I urge you to vote Yes on Measure RR.

The peninsula rail corridor is under-developed
If a ride on Caltrain takes you back to 1985, that's no coincidence. Most of the fleet is that old, well past its sell-by date. And yet, with antiquated equipment and obsolete labor practices, this diesel commuter railroad still manages to carry the equivalent of three freeway lanes, and does so while covering a greater share of its operating costs (chart credit: Juan Matute) than any other transit operator in California. This level of financial self-sufficiency is unheard of for any freeway, and yet billions are spent on the futile exercise of adding lanes to the Bay Area freeway network and enabling the rich to buy faster trips on express lanes at the expense of gridlock for everybody else. A dense corridor with large job centers distributed throughout is ideally suited for regional rail, and the latent capacity exists to grow Caltrain into the equivalent of more than an eight-lane freeway, except faster, quieter, less polluting, and conveniently serving city centers. This can't happen without more investment.

Electric regional rail is the right technology choice
Here in Silicon Valley, we hear constantly about the next big technology leap: driverless cars, autonomous electric pods, door-to-door on-demand service hailed by an app, tunneled hyperloops, and endless promises of a clean, efficient and convenient science fiction future of seamless mobility. In that environment, it sounds positively retrograde to support what futurists often deride as 19th century technology, the same steel wheel on steel rail that first turned on the corridor in 1863. That framing misses the point: what we have here isn't a technology problem; it's a geometry problem. It takes space to move people. Short of inventing teleportation, you can't solve a geometry problem with the latest Silicon Valley technology, and none of these newfangled ideas can scale to the raw transportation capacity of regional rail, especially on a linear corridor such as the peninsula. There is no technology on the horizon that can carry this many people, using this little space, this fast, using this little energy. Throughput capacity is measured in units of people per square meter per second per Joule, and none of the exciting new mobility tech can beat regional rail on this metric. Hyperloops and pod cars have laughable throughput, and a driverless electric car sitting in traffic or queuing for a tunnel is still just another car, consuming the same scarce resource of space. All this new mobility tech is best thought of as a capillary network that will connect to the aorta of the rail corridor, each one enhancing the other in unclogging the circulatory system of our peninsula.

Caltrain is heading in the right direction
This isn't the first time that Caltrain finds itself in financial distress, and the big picture remains the same as it was ten years ago. The difference now is that the agency is actively planning for a better future, with its methodical business planning efforts showing a clarity of thought and ambition that is rare for an American transit agency. A logical plan driven by quantitative metrics is exactly the framework needed to convey and to realize the potential of the peninsula rail corridor, with a 2040 growth scenario that gradually builds on the foundation of the electrification project. A sound business plan is the seed; stable and reliable funding is the water to make it grow.

Much more than just a Covid bail-out
The pandemic and the high fixed costs of operating a railroad are putting a huge financial squeeze on Caltrain right now, all the more punishing because Caltrain derives a greater share of its operating expenses from fare revenue than any other agency in California. There is little doubt that the first step if Measure RR passes will be to bond against future tax revenue to survive in the short term. But that's not the point; RR was in the works before this started, and will be needed after it ends. As the economy revitalizes and transportation demand returns, Caltrain will be packed to the rafters again. All this talk of continued work-from-home and depressed transportation demand is myopic, mistaking our current predicament for a future trend. The creativity and vitality of our region is based on co-location and face-to-face contact--if it weren't, Silicon Valley or San Francisco simply wouldn't exist. Stable funding for Caltrain will ensure that modernization and service expansion won't stall after electrification is completed, and that we won't get stuck with mediocre commuter rail, just now with pantographs on top.

The reasons above come in addition to the strong arguments in support from Seamless Bay Area, Friends of Caltrain, and Streetsblog SF.  Please vote Yes on Measure RR.

Now back to our regularly scheduled tough love.

Electric Timetable Contest

The coveted Takt Cup

Timetable planning has long been a staple of this blog, with the support of rapid prototyping tools like Richard Mlynarik's excellent Taktulator, a calculator for "Taktverkehr," the German term for clockface timetabling. While it may take a few minutes to learn how to use the tool, you can easily punch in a stopping pattern into the Taktulator to get an instant score, based on well-researched quality metrics and train performance calculations described here almost a decade ago. The service quality score is normalized so that the 2011 timetable, not much different from today's, earns 100 points.

Working back from its long term service vision, Caltrain has started planning for the near term timetable change that will occur with the start of electric service. Through a process of elimination, Caltrain has settled on two candidate service patterns, each with six trains per peak hour per direction, linked below in the Taktulator. You can verify that the resulting string line diagrams match extremely closely with the last couple of slides in Caltrain's presentation.

Two Zone with Express
Score: 123.3
Fleet: 13 EMU + 7 diesel

Distributed Skip Stop
Score: 124.1
Fleet: 13 EMU + 7 diesel
This timetable has a bit of a "can't get there from here" problem.

Can YOU beat those scores with a better concept?

Of course, scores depend on the assumptions you make. If you assume that the downtown extension is built into San Francisco Transbay, that all the diesels are replaced by EMUs, that dwell times are shortened by system-wide level boarding, that operating practices are reformed to allow better punctuality with less padding of the timetable, that terminal turn times are shortened to match foreign practice, and that a cross-platform transfer station is built in Redwood City with a short four-track section from just north of San Carlos into Redwood City (most of these contemplated in Caltrain's long-term planning), then you can set a sky-high score. In fact, using the Taktulator, you can even quantify the service benefit of each separate improvement. If we're allowed to dream, surely this is one of the most efficient:

Richard's Finest
Score: 230.2
Fleet: 16 EMU

Unfortunately, for the start of electric service in 2023, we'll have to settle for a bit less. There is no service to San Francisco Transbay, there is a fleet of 19 EMUs available of which you probably don't want to operate more than 17 at any given time, dwell times are still long (for simplicity, assume 45 seconds everywhere), timetable padding is ample (assume 10%), terminal turns are slow (assume 15 minutes), and there are no expanded stations or passing tracks. So, with those assumptions input into the Taktulator, can you beat Caltrain's score and win the coveted Takt Cup?

Please post your suggested Taktulator timetables and scores (and your supporting rationale) below in the comments. In your comment, use a clickable hyperlink, in the format <a href="your-taktulator-link">your timetable title<\a>, for brevity and clarity.

Here's my first entry for this contest, to kick things off:

Silicon Valley All Stop
Score: 126.9
Fleet: 17 EMU + 4 diesel

This improves on Caltrain's concept by admitting what census data and Caltrain's presentation tells us: all of Silicon Valley has enormous ridership potential, and running skip-stop express service south of Menlo Park is harmful to overall service quality. In short, the Baby Bullet is bad. This timetable also makes better use of the EMU fleet, as was intended when additional trains were ordered, by running 5 EMU + 1 diesel per hour per direction, instead of 4 EMU + 2 diesel.

Can you beat my score subject to the assumptions above?

Three Next Steps

Caltrain's exhaustive business plan effort has resulted in a long range service vision for how to grow the railroad to the year 2040, recently adopted by the board as official policy. This is the mountain we wish to climb. How do we climb it? One step at a time. In fact, with electrified service now unlikely to begin before 2023, there is extra time to plan and execute three next steps.

Step One: Extend Platforms

The biggest short-term constraint to growing Caltrain capacity is  limited platform length. The new EMUs will be 685 feet long when extended to eight cars, too long for many existing platforms. The existing platform lengths are shown in the graphic at right (source), with the required extensions to 700 feet highlighted in orange. The diagram shows the year of construction of each platform, proving that Caltrain is a champion of platform construction, having poured about five linear miles of new platforms over the last two decades. The amount missing is about 3500 linear feet, or a bit over two years' worth of average platform production. There are a couple of tight spots boxed in by grade crossings, most notably Burlingame (767 feet between pedestrian crossings), but most locations have plenty of space.

Longer platforms enable the operation of 7-car diesel express trains, each with about 950 seats. While diesel trains don't feature prominently in future plans, they can still fill an important interim role once they become freed up by the arrival of the EMU fleet. The diesels can easily handle longer trains. It may not look good to continue belching diesel fumes, but it gets the job done at far lower emissions per passenger-mile than by forcing unmet demand to drive instead.

At the recent going rate of 7 to 10 thousand dollars per linear foot of platform, including all capital project overheads, the entire job should cost in the range of $25 - $35 million. For perspective, that's a percent or two of the modernization budget. This project is within reach of Caltrain's existing resources and is now official policy under section (1).E.ii of the service vision. There is no plausible excuse for not undertaking it immediately, to finish by 2023 concurrently with the start of electrified revenue service.

Step Two: Add 8th Car to EMU Fleet

The EMU order currently stands at 19 seven-car trains. The seventh car was ordered in a recent exercise of an option on the original contract, at an average price of $4.7 million per car. Assuming 10% price escalation, another 19 cars to extend this fleet to 8 cars would cost about $100M. This is a large sum, but one that could be scraped together over the next year or so if some high-speed rail funding gets re-allocated to interconnected "book end" projects.

The eighth car represents a significant step up in capacity: since it has no traction equipment cabinets, bike spaces or bathrooms, it has room for a whopping 132 seats, bringing seated capacity per EMU from 667 to 799, a 20% increase. So, for an extra 5% of the modernization budget, you buy an extra 20% capacity. This should be undertaken as soon as possible.

From an emissions point of view, ordering the eighth car is far preferable to ordering additional 7-car EMU formations to displace the diesel fleet sooner. Growing the fleet before fully replacing it provides a short-term peak-hour capacity boost that will remove traffic from roads and alleviate congestion, easily offsetting the emissions of the small remaining diesel-hauled fleet. Going all-electric sooner sounds "green" if you look at Caltrain in isolation, but keeping some diesels in the short term is greener when considering the overall transportation system of which Caltrain is a part, which is what ultimately matters for the air we breathe. Seven-car diesels can be used exclusively in express service, where fewer stops and starts (which are dreadfully slow with diesel) pose less of a time penalty.

There is the small wrinkle of where to park these longer trains when they are not in service. CEMOF, the maintenance facility in San Jose, currently stores two trains end-to-end on four 1200-foot sidings where two longer trains (EMU-8 at 685 ft, or diesel+7 at 664 ft) won't fit. This means at least four trains will need to be stored somewhere else, presumably at San Francisco or San Jose, as was the practice before CEMOF was built. In a real pinch, trains can be stored during the off-peak in the controlled sidings south of Redwood Junction, with certain shoulder-of-peak trains originating and terminating at Redwood City to avoid long deadhead moves.

Step Three: Accelerate Planning for Level Boarding

Level boarding (discussed extensively on this blog) decreases trip times, improves punctuality, increases crew productivity per hour of labor, and increases the frequency of service that can be provided by a train fleet of a given size. While Caltrain's embrace of the concept has been hesitant, it is now policy under the same section (1).E.ii of the service vision adopted by the board. The next step is to get serious about planning how to actually do it, because it is a far more complicated problem than it first appears.

Caltrain staff have decided to forgo boarding using the high-level doors, and recently issued a change order to have the EMU fleet delivered with these doors replaced by plug panels. Level boarding will happen with European-style 550 mm platforms, which can't be a bad thing, although accessibility requirements are more difficult to meet in the United States. The trick is then how to get there, and how to end up with a level boarding solution that doesn't require crew assistance whenever a person of reduced mobility needs to board or alight, in the current inefficient fashion of Northeastern railroads.

The trains will require a boarding step arrangement that deploys to serve either 8-inch legacy platforms (using a drop step mechanism) or to close the gap to newly raised 550 mm platforms, during an extended transition period where some stations may have been modified before others. Due to a lack of foresight on Caltrain's part, this capability is not available on the new EMUs as procured. The EMUs will need to be retrofitted with new three-position step modules (presumably engineered by Stadler's step supplier, Bode / Schaltbau) roughly like this:

The primary engineering challenge is to meet the ADA horizontal gap requirement in Position 2, which is 3 inches maximum (in current law) and is planned to be reduced to 2 inches. The step mechanism must also deploy to the correct height without crew intervention.

The platforms will need to be raised by a bit less than 14 inches, preferably without demolishing and starting over. One intriguing way to do this cheaply and with minimal service disruption would be to re-use the existing platforms as a slab foundation, with drainage, electrical grounding and bonding, and utilities staying as they are. The platforms would first be fitted with prefabricated adjustable edge modules. An adjustable platform edge that can be jacked to the correct height at initial installation and periodically adjusted during maintenance (e.g. after track tamping) is an unavoidable requirement of meeting the demanding ADA gap specifications for unassisted level boarding.

View of a single six-foot-long 550-mm platform edge module installed on a legacy 8” platform

After suitable modifications to platform amenities, the remaining area of the platform would be raised using lightweight expanded polystyrene fill (Geofoam) and modular pavers. The pavers cover the temporary boarding step that is integral to each edge module, which is no longer needed. The resiliency of the resulting platform structure enables periodic adjustment of the platform edge jackscrews to maintain compliance with the ADA gap criteria.

The modular construction technique with edge modules and pavers lends itself to rapid “blitz” construction schedules, since no platform concrete curing is necessary. After each night's construction, the platform can be left in a usable state for the next day's service, avoiding the logistical complications of closing entire platforms during construction.

Regardless of the technical solution ultimately adopted, level boarding starts with a robust planning process to define the problem and consider all the engineering approaches. This planning process is not expensive, and it needs to be funded and staffed now that level boarding is policy.

State of Good Design

Railroad operating departments work hard to achieve and maintain what is known in industry lingo as a state of good repair (SOGR). If that's all that Caltrain is going to do in the next decade, electrification will fall flat, like a sort of MBTA with pantographs on top. We have a chance to move beyond the narrow commuter-rail SOGR mindset, striving for something far bigger: a state of good design. The three next steps described here are a small way to get started right now on the way to the visionary service improvements described in Caltrain's business plan.

Risk and Opportunity in Redwood City

Lowe, a major real estate development firm, is preparing to redevelop Redwood City's Sequoia Station, an outdated strip mall adjacent to the Caltrain station, into a 12-acre mixed-use project with towers up to 17 stories tall.  If that is eye-opening to residents of Redwood City, consider that few people yet know that a greatly expanded Redwood City station is the keystone transfer node to enable the growth envisioned in Caltrain's business plan service vision. This new station will require slightly more land than the railroad already owns, and can only be located in Redwood City, the sweet spot that lies halfway between San Francisco and San Jose at the connection point to the Dumbarton rail corridor.

This creates a risk: if a commercial development project is allowed to proceed without respect to the future real estate needs of the railroad, then Caltrain will be constricted and unable to build the optimal infrastructure to support future growth.

Additional Land Needed For Caltrain

Caltrain and Samtrans have extensive land holdings at the Redwood City transit center. Still, just a bit more is needed to build a high-functioning piece of infrastructure, and be could traded for other parcels. Click to expand the map:

Land needed for future expanded station in Redwood City (shaded green)

Design Principles

The absolute worst way to build it.
Existence of this city rendering is
reason enough to be concerned.

To ensure that the Sequoia Station project becomes an exemplar transit-oriented development, rather than relegating Caltrain to the role of development-oriented transit, the rail agency and the developer should agree on some broad design principles.

• Think Big. Redwood City is one of the few stops on the peninsula rail corridor not surrounded by a sea of low-density single-family housing. Intensive land use and transportation must fit together to achieve a dynamic yet sustainable low-carbon future.
   
• Form follows function. No amount of architectural flourish or amenity can make up for a poor station design. Optimize for convenient access, easy transfers between trains and buses, short walks, direct and intuitive routes.
   
• Put the station at the center of the action, right over Broadway. Don't shove it to the north, out of the way of the development. The city rendering at right shows precisely what NOT to do.
   
• Configure the station as two island platforms to facilitate cross-platform transfers, without time-consuming vertical circulation or platform changes. The Caltrain business plan's staff-recommended service vision relies entirely on these Redwood City cross-platform transfers; every single train that pulls into Redwood City will make a timed transfer to another same-direction train docked at the opposite edge of the same platform. Denoting express tracks as 'F' for Fast and local tracks as 'S' for Slow, the optimal layout is FSSF with two islands, resulting in F-platform-SS-platform-F. Again, the city rendering shows precisely what NOT to do: passengers would not only have to change platforms, but also cross the tracks at grade.
   
• Elevate the train station to reconnect the street grid and make the railroad permeable to pedestrians, bikes, and other traffic. A busy four-track station is fundamentally incompatible with at-grade railroad crossings, and the only reasonable way to grade separate at this location is by elevating the entire station. Obstacles to pedestrian circulation such as the Jefferson Avenue underpass would be removed. Once again, the at-grade city rendering shows what NOT to do.
   
• Use four-track approaches from the north and the south. Cross-platform transfers are most efficient if trains do not have to arrive and depart sequentially using the same track, which adds about 3 minutes of delay. The best transfer is one where the two same-direction trains can arrive and depart simultaneously on their own separate tracks. Temporal separation is efficiently established by having the local train stop one station away from Redwood City (southbound at San Carlos or northbound at a new Fair Oaks station at Fifth Avenue) at each end of a new four-track segment that will ultimately measure four miles. In this arrangement, the express trains naturally gain on the local trains without a single passenger being delayed at Redwood City.
   
• Include turn-back tracks. Preserve room in the right of way north and south of the station for turn back pocket sidings, between the central slow tracks. Dumbarton rail corridor trains may not necessarily "interline" or continue on the peninsula rail corridor, so it's important to give them a convenient place to transfer and turn around without fouling other train traffic on the express tracks (hence FSSF arrangement). Same thing for a possible San Mateo local, which could serve the more densely spaced stops north of Redwood City.
   
• Don't be constrained by discrete city blocks. It could make sense to build structures or connect them over and across the tracks, more tightly knitting the station complex into surrounding mixed-use neighborhoods. This has some surmountable safety and liability implications, but buildings on top of busy stations are a common feature of successful cities around the world.
   
• Plan for long 400-meter platforms, not Caltrain's standard 700-foot platform length (again as seen in the city rendering of what NOT to do). While statewide high-speed rail plans currently do not include a stop in Redwood City, it is becoming enough of a destination and a regional transportation node that it makes sense to build a station large enough to future-proof it for service by long high-speed trains, regardless of what the California High-Speed Rail Authority might have to say about it.
   
• Think ahead about construction sequencing. Redwood City should be grade separated in one project from Whipple to Route 84, including the elevated station, taking advantage of Caltrain's land holdings to minimize the use of temporary tracks. A shoo-fly track would have to be built on Pennsylvania Avenue (within the railroad right of way) to make room for construction of the western two-track viaduct. Trains would begin using the elevated station while a second eastern two-track viaduct is constructed. Pennsylvania Avenue could re-open later, under the new four-track viaduct. Construction sequencing may drive how much extra land is needed for the railroad, so it's important to think it through up front.

If these design principles are respected, the re-development of Sequoia Station will present not a risk but an amazing opportunity to enhance Redwood City by realizing its full potential as the fulcrum of the Caltrain corridor and of a new regional express network reaching across the Dumbarton bridge and beyond.

Thoughts on Grade Separations

The emerging Caltrain business plan is broaching the issue of grade separations, a decadal process that has been underway, well, for decades. We're already 63% of the way there today, with another dozen new grade separation projects in various stages of planning or construction. Achieving a reasonable level of grade separation for the peninsula corridor is estimated to cost $8.5 - 11.1 billion, a shockingly large sum that we'll just round to $10 billion. As we try to grasp the enormity of that figure, here are some contrarian thoughts:

1) Don't spend train money on car projects. The benefit of grade separations accrues primarily to automobile travel, with the elimination of gate down time. An intensive grade separation program can eventually unlock additional operating slots for more trains and eliminate the occasional incident, yielding benefits to train riders. Some grade separations are necessary, such as when expanding to four tracks. In the short term, however, the greatest benefit is the removal of an inconvenience to drivers, which in our car-centric society is held as a worthy goal seemingly regardless of cost. Rail dollars are a lot scarcer than road dollars, especially in this era of federal disengagement, so the last project we should spend them on is a project that facilitates car travel with little improvement for train riders. Rail funding should be used to make real and measurable improvements to train service, a standard by which most grade separations rate poorly. So you still want a grade separation? Build it with road funding.

Anticipated gate down times,
under various scenarios in the
Caltrain business plan

2) Quit whining about gate down time. Caltrain put together a nice summary of gate down time, the number of minutes per hour that grade crossing gates block traffic during rush hours. Today the average is 11 minutes, and under future growth scenarios it could increase to 17 - 25 minutes, with a few crossings faring worse than average. If that sounds intolerable, think about a typical roadway intersection with a traffic light. If both roads are equally important, the "gate down time" of a traffic light is 30 minutes. If one road is more important, the lesser road (for example, Ravenswood Ave where it meets El Camino Real in Menlo Park) sees "gate down time" well in excess of 30 minutes, let's say 40 minutes per hour. Nobody is clamoring to grade separate the Ravenswood / El Camino road intersection. There's an obvious double standard here, and the guidelines for what qualifies as unacceptable delay should be set the same way as they are for the grade separation of a road intersection. Gate down time should only rarely, if ever, be the reason to build a new grade separation.

3) There are few economies of scale in grade separation. Doing them all as a package does not save money. The process we have, where local jurisdictions often exert tight control over every aspect of design and construction, does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all approach. Each grade separation is different. Grade separation designs do not depend on each other in the majority of cases where they are widely spaced. While a corridor-wide strategy is important to have, the execution of that strategy and the securing of funding is inherently a city and county issue. If we are going to have a corridor-wide funding approach, it must go hand-in-hand with taking away local control. Jurisdictions that insist on local control should be left to figure out the funding on their own. Palo Alto, where interminable and futile discussions of tunnels continue to this day, should not be allowed to control the design process if their project is paid for through a corridor-wide funding measure.

4) If $10 billion is an okay expense, then there are far better ways to spend it. Especially with rail money at stake, there are much better ways to spend $10 billion than by building a lot of grade separations for cars that produce zero improvement to train service. There are a lot of good investments that should be made to improve the amount and speed of train service:

• Extend all platforms to 8-car length. If you put all the platforms that Caltrain ever built in the last 20 years end to end, they would stretch about 5 miles long. This is not an expensive project; it can be done for about $0.05 billion. It should already be underway, but inexplicably isn't.
• Convert the entire train fleet to 8-car EMUs, starting by exercising the rest of the existing Stadler contract option of another 59 cars, increasing the fleet to 24 trains. The diesels are retired from the peninsula, which is a condition for starting any level boarding projects. This costs about $0.4 billion.
• Convert the entire system to level boarding to speed trips and improve punctuality. Depending on how this is done (high platforms or low platforms, or some combination thereof) and over how long a period of construction, this would cost about $0.5 - 1 billion.
• Build a new EMU maintenance and storage facility near Blossom Hill (San Jose) and extend frequent electrified service through all of San Jose. Including any extortion by UPRR, the owner of the tracks, this ought to be feasible for less than $1 billion.
• Build a new transit center in Redwood City to enable cross-platform transfers between locals and expresses. Call it $0.5 billion, and throw in the downtown grade separations for another $0.5 billion to allow four tracks.
• Expand the EMU fleet to enable 8 train per hour peak service. Expanding the fleet to 32 trains would require another 64 EMU cars, for about $0.5 billion.
• Extend the platforms at highly patronized express stops to 12 cars in length, and extend expresses to 12 cars. This would require extending about half the fleet by 4 cars, or another 64 EMU cars. Including platforms this might cost about $0.8 billion.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but unlike grade separations, all of these projects have immediate and measurable positive effects on the quantity and quality of service provided to riders. This list achieves most of Caltrain's "moderate growth" scenario but without HSR. The tally for all of these projects is still less than $5 billion, so if $10 billion for grade separations sounds at all palatable, this list ought to be a no-brainer.

Grade separations are nice, but their cost and benefit should be weighed very carefully on a case-by-case basis. The cost should be borne by who benefits. The business plan process will hopefully create the framework to have the difficult conversations about what not to pay for with rail funding. Grade separations should be built with highway funding unless there is a clear and measurable benefit to rail service.

Growing Caltrain into an 8-Lane Freeway

Caltrain can and should become an eight-lane freeway. Not like an ugly concrete scar tearing loudly through the landscape, but in terms of throughput capacity in people per hour. Today, Caltrain already carries the equivalent of nearly 3 freeway lanes, and more than doubling the system's capacity is hardly a moonshot. For perspective, BART's Transbay Tube carries up to 27000 people per hour, almost double the entire capacity of the Bay Bridge with its ten freeway lanes.

More than doubling Caltrain's capacity has been proposed before and is now being studied by the agency itself, after a decade of not thinking much past electrification.

Capacity calculations can be controversial and rely on many details and assumptions, so the suggested path to expand Caltrain ridership from 3 to 8 lanes of freeway-equivalent is provided in the form of a spreadsheet, embedded below. You can dig into all the numbers and assumptions for each capacity increase and see the underlying formulas for yourself, down to the detailed number of seats in each train car, to understand how it all adds up.

This is a living document, and feedback is appreciated!

Frequent Trains Off Peak

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

1) Operate Short Trains Off Peak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) Operate With One Conductor

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

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

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

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

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

Future Fleet Implications

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

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

The fleet needs to operate two service patterns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

News Roundup, July 2015

Cost of Dual Height Boarding: with its industry review of the EMU draft RFP, Caltrain sought feedback from vehicle manufacturers regarding the cost and feasibility of delivering vehicles with dual boarding height capability.  According to the latest EMU procurement update, the feedback received indicates that vehicle cost would increase by just 3 to 5 percent.  This small premium (roughly $20 million) all but ensures that the HSR project will be able to pay for this important compatibility feature.

New Rules for Electrification: the California Public Utilities Commission has released General Order 176, the Rules for Overhead 25 kV Railroad Electrification Systems for a High-Speed Rail System.  The new GO, effective as of 26 March 2015, will also serve as the regulatory framework for Caltrain's electrification project, despite the peninsula corridor not qualifying as "high-speed rail" as narrowly defined in the document.  Three major issues remain to be hammered out with regulators and freight railroads: (1) grade crossing warning systems, (2) vertical clearances, and (3) freight personnel safety and training for operating freight trains in electrified territory.  These three issues are minor and unlikely to require a new rule-making process.  The release of GO 176 is timely for Caltrain's electrification project.

Cap and Trade Maneuvering: at least two lines of attack are being pursued by opponents of Caltrain electrification and the high-speed rail project.  First, there is or will be legal action that seeks to deny the use of Proposition 1A HSR bond funding to pay for Caltrain electrification, based on the (quite defensible) argument that electrification isn't high-speed rail and won't meet the legal restrictions of the bond measure. Prop 1A high-speed rail funding accounts for the lion's share of the funding package for electrification, a contribution of $600 million.  The underlying calculus is that denying this funding would kill the electrification project. Second, there is or will be legal action that seeks to deny the use of Cap and Trade funding to pay for high-speed rail, based on the (quite defensible) argument that the greenhouse gas reductions from HSR will only occur far in the future, well beyond the time frame required by CnT legislation.  Both of these legal challenges can be neutralized in one fell swoop, by substituting HSR CnT funds for the HSR Prop 1A funds. According to Caltrain's EIR, electrification will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80,000 metric tons per year initially, increasing to 190,000 metric tons by 2040, largely by cutting automobile traffic.  It doesn't get much more short-term than that, and CnT funds come with far fewer strings attached than Prop 1A funds.  Look for the funding swap to occur this fall, when the nine-party MOU is revised to reflect the growing electrification budget.

HSR Business Plan Machinations: due to the lack of funding to build the extremely expensive mountain crossings, there are indications that the 2016 business plan for HSR will call for service to begin in the SF and LA areas several years before the Central Valley is linked to anything.  This should be of some concern to Caltrain because it would put HSR in direct competition with Caltrain for affluent tech commuters, no matter what they say.  If Caltrain is elbowed out of the lucrative express market, the loss of revenue will be entirely HSR's gain.  While this Bay Area mini-HSR might show an operating profit (as required by law), it could only do so with a hidden subsidy, provided in the form of extremely scarce and valuable rush-hour track capacity.  Competition is great, but the market mechanisms for sharing the peninsula rail corridor "fairly" (whatever "fair" means to each stakeholder) would need to be carefully developed.  Then again, this silly idea might just wither on the vine, since the letters 'H' and 'S' would be absent from HSR.

Draft Business Plan Impressions

The high-speed rail draft 2014 Business Plan is out, with some interesting implications for the peninsula corridor.

Example service plan, from the 2014
draft business plan supporting documents

New Emphasis on Regional Markets

The ridership model has been (somewhat) updated, although much more is supposed to come, and it's clear that there is now more emphasis on serving local markets.  This theoretically places the high-speed rail system in direct competition with Caltrain.


An example service plan, buried in the supporting documents, is shown at right.  The majority of early-morning trains are local commuter milk runs, including 4 trains per hour serving peninsula stops as well as 4 trains per hour from Palmdale to Los Angeles.

That's all well and good for starting up service in the morning, but one wonders how these customers are catered to during the evening rush (especially to Palmdale) when these commuter milk runs will have to co-mingle with long-distance express trains long before the midnight shut-down, unlike in the early morning when the milk runs coincide with the 6 AM startup.  Here on the peninsula, the speed differential between HSR and Caltrain will be far less, so this problem isn't as acute.

Realistic Peninsula Corridor Trip Times

The trip times embedded in the business plan and the underlying ridership calculations now appear consistent with what can be achieved in a Caltrain - HSR blended service pattern on the peninsula corridor.  These trip times are significantly longer than the 30-minute theoretical SF to SJ minimum that could be achieved under ideal conditions as demanded by the HSR bond measure.  While this shortfall is sure to be the subject of further litigation, it should not detract from the far more egregious loss of trip time due to poor routing choices in the southern part of the state.

The trip between San Francisco Transbay and San Jose is conservatively timetabled at 47 to 49 minutes including a two-minute stop in Millbrae, which is consistent with Caltrain's analysis of blended Caltrain / HSR operations assuming a maximum speed limit of 79 mph for all trains (the same as today).  This isn't too far off from today's Baby Bullet timetable, which includes three more stops than assumed for HSR and therefore takes an additional 9 minutes.

Unrealistically Low Peninsula Fares

The fare model used to estimate ridership and revenue within the SF Bay region is based on an extremely simplistic MTC model that sets the fare to $14.97 plus $0.1283 per mile (in 2013 dollars).  This results in one-way fares of $22 from SF to SJ or $22 from Gilroy to Redwood City.  Such intra-regional trips displace higher yielding long-distance trips, since each seat sold for SF-SJ is a seat that cannot be sold for SF-Los Angeles.  Under any realistic scenario, the HSR operator will manage yields and set a fare structure that discourages low-yield, short-distance trips.  Look no further than the Northeast Corridor for an illustrative example: for a trip from Stamford, CT to New York City (roughly similar in time and distance as SF to SJ), a seat on Amtrak's high-speed Acela Express typically costs well over $100 one way vs. $14.50 on Metro North commuter rail.

Using these ridiculously low fares, the ridership and revenue model for the year 2040 predicts 2.5 million annual HSR riders within the SF to Gilroy corridor, worth $51 million / year in revenue.  That's approximately one-sixth of Caltrain's ridership today, but about two-thirds of the fare revenue.  The model essentially predicts that HSR will poach a large portion of Caltrain's highest-yielding passengers.  Caltrain need not fear for their revenue, however, since the simplistic MTC fare model that underlies this result is not likely to be used by a real-world, for-profit HSR operator.

To Redwood City or Not to Redwood City

Most of the business plan assumes only three peninsula corridor stops for HSR: San Jose, Millbrae and San Francisco Transbay.  The ridership and revenue memorandum, however, includes Redwood City in a fare table.  Furthermore, some of the peninsula trip times in the service planning memorandum are timetabled at 49 minutes (see example service plan, page 8, making sure to account for arrival vs. departure times), which is consistent with an additional stop at Redwood City.  The 33-minute trip time indicated between SJ and Millbrae is very conservative and could easily be timetabled at 29 minutes (departure to arrival) with a 79 mph speed limit and including two minutes of timetable padding.  The extra stop in Redwood City would bring it up to 33 minutes.  Coincidence?