Pandemic Open Thread

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

Southbound BART Purple Line train arrives at Palo Alto

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

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

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

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

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

HSR Peer Review Group on Blending

The California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group was established by AB 3034 (the Proposition 1A bond law) to independently review the HSR Authority's plans, assumptions, analyses and estimates.  The Peer Review Group recently sent the legislature its comments on the Draft 2014 Business Plan, including a number of recommendations concerning the plan to "blend" HSR and Caltrain on the peninsula corridor.  The Peer Review Group comments on blending follow:

Blended System issues. Access to San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal has posed a challenge to the program from the beginning. The ideal engineering outcome – a new, four track system separating HSR from Caltrain and freight service – was problematic because of its high cost and environmental impact. An alternative approach was adopted that blends the services of Caltrain and HSR on the same two track system, mostly within the existing right-of-way but with specific additions of passing tracks where needed and with the possibility of incremental increases in capacity when justified by demand. When combined with electrification of the Caltrain lines, paid half-and-half by Caltrain and HSRA, this approach should work to serve the needs of both systems at least through the first decades of the Phase I Blended system. In a number of our previous letters, the Group has supported the blended system approach; our comments below are aimed at improving its implementation.

The blended approach will require a true joint effort by Caltrain and HSRA with full participation of other parties including the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (that has the responsibility for the connection from the current Caltrain terminus at 4th and King Streets to the Transbay Terminal) and the Union Pacific Railroad (that has freight operating rights on the same lines). There are a number of issues on which the interests of the parties must be explicitly balanced if the blending is to work:

• Currently, Caltrain uses a platform height of 8” above rail. This means that boarding/de-boarding requires stepping up/down from the floor of the train (25” above rail), which can impose delays and risks of tripping and falling, especially when the needs of disabled passengers must be accommodated. The result is longer and less reliable schedules. The low platform height is dictated by the regulations of the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) that require platforms to be no higher than 8” on tracks that may also carry freight trains. Unless a waiver from this regulation is granted, or expensive track work is installed, Caltrain will be limited to low platforms. At its current frequency of services, the lack of level boarding is manageable (if undesirable), but it will become much less tenable when Caltrain frequencies are increased and HSR trains are added.
   
• Under current plans, the floor of HSR trains will be about 50” above the rails, which is typical practice for most of the world’s HSR systems and consistent with Amtrak’s plans in the Northeast Corridor. Caltrain is experiencing rapid demand growth, a process that will accelerate when service to the Transbay Terminal is inaugurated. Caltrain’s plans call for acquiring new bi-level, electric multiple-unit rolling stock. Since the existing Caltrain coaches have a 25” floor level, consistency would suggest a 25” floor level for the new equipment. This would mean that platforms for the two systems would be at different levels, making transfers within station more difficult to arrange. This might be manageable at many common stations where Caltrain and HSR could have separate platforms, but the platform disparity would be more serious at the Transbay Terminal because the number of platforms is limited. As a result, routing of traffic into and out of the station will be more complex, and dispatchers will not have the flexibility to send either system to all platforms when delays or operating problems would otherwise dictate. One approach, turning a number of Caltrain services at 4th and King and limiting the number of Caltrain services to the Transbay Terminal, has been suggested, but would pose restrictions for Caltrain’s access to the Transbay Terminal.
   
• The basic standards of the PUC for electric catenary wire call for a clearance of 22 feet 6 inches above the rail. One the one hand, both Caltrain and HSR may want a lower catenary height in order to reduce construction cost for which the PUC will have to grant permission: on the other hand, the Union Pacific and port interests may want to protect the hypothetical possibility of future freight cars requiring even more clearance. HSR’s current electrification designs are appropriate for HSR-only operations and may not be acceptable for use in the Caltrain area. There are a number of specific locations where Caltrains’s clearance is already below 22 feet 6 inches, but there is no generally agreed height limitation.
   
• Positive Train Control (PTC) is a requirement of Federal law. Facing this mandate, Caltrain developed its own system – CBOSS – that is now being implemented. CBOSS may not be appropriate for use by HSR trains. If so, HSR trains may have to deal with two signal systems. In addition, the Union Pacific Railroad will have to operate in the same territory so will have to have conforming signal systems in its locomotives. 

None of these problems is impossible to resolve, albeit at added investment and operating cost by one or more of the parties. There is nothing unique about having multiple freight and passenger operators on a single line and there is experience in the U.S. and Europe with resolving the normal issues. All parties in the blended area are aware of the issues and there has been full cooperation among them.

We are concerned, however, that near-term decisions could be made by the parties acting separately that would ultimately compromise the performance of the system. For example, a decision by Caltrain not to plan for at least 25” platforms, which would provide an essential approach to level boarding, would lead to increased delays and uncertainty that could become unmanageable when Caltrain frequencies increase to meet the rapidly growing demand, especially that caused by the opening of the Transbay Terminal. This problem would get worse when four HSR trains per hour are added to the blended system in 2026. Caltrain will definitely need an expanded fleet, and bi-level cars are an efficient way to meet the need. That said, a decision to buy 25” floor level, bi-level coaches would mean that Caltrain and HSR would be committed to operating on incompatible platforms, which would add rigidity to a system that will be challenged for capacity. This problem could be alleviated if Caltrain ordered coaches that can serve both platform levels or if it adopted a uniform 50” platform, but either solution would clearly add investment costs above those planned. In all cases, the design of the electrification for Caltrain will need PUC approval and will need to consider the interests of all of the operators on the line.

This is a complex issue involving technology, investment, system performance and sequencing including the interests of a number of parties. Clearly there is no perfect answer and it is actually a problem resulting from success in attracting more passengers. We recommend that the Legislature request periodic joint reports from Caltrain, HSR and the Union Pacific Railroad that will use the tools available, including line capacity simulators, to assess the impact of alternative approaches to coach floor and platform height on capital and operating cost, capacity and reliability of both systems. This would include the impact on Caltrain if it has to construct 25” or 50” platforms. This study should also include the investment and operating cost impact of the alternative approaches to catenary height and platform clearance and should outline the decisions that the PUC will be asked to make.

Blended operations also pose the issue of accidents at grade crossings. Even at its existing speeds and frequencies, Caltrain experiences about 20 grade crossing and intruder deaths per year and generates delays on the local streets as autos and trucks wait for passing trains. This will get worse as train frequency and road traffic both increase over time. It would be difficult to overstate the risks of more frequent, faster and quieter Caltrain service combined with 110 mph HSR trains interacting with growing road traffic in the middle of California’s increasingly busy cities. We recommend that the Legislature ask Caltrain, HSR and the communities involved to develop a joint report assessing the likely future risks of increasing train traffic and speeds on the grade crossings in the areas impacted and identifying possible approaches to resolving the issue over time.

The Peer Review Group's comments are a wake-up call to start breaking out of the silo mentality that is prevalent in our transportation agencies, where "staying the course" is too often the overriding consideration.  The blend can only succeed if all stakeholders adjust their plans and projects to achieve better coordination and system-level integration.  The Peer Review Group understands that we are at a juncture where this opportunity must not be squandered.

Formulation of a Service Quality Metric

The quantitative formulation of an overall quality metric, which can be extracted from an arbitrary timetable, is necessary to objectively answer the question “is proposed timetable A better than proposed timetable B?”

Such metrics facilitate the trade-study and optimization process of planning a new timetable, and must take into account several factors, including not just the quality of the service provided to passengers but also other factors that passengers don’t think about, such as robustness to disruption, fleet size and crew time considerations.

For today, however, we will focus exclusively on quantifying the quality of the service provided to passengers.  This particular formulation proceeds in eight reasonably simple steps, pulling together earlier information on timetable metrics and demographics.  It is only one example of how one might formulate a service quality metric, something that Caltrain has never explicitly done and could benefit greatly from doing as they share the pros and cons of various blended service plans.  This is one way to do it; what's theirs?

Step 1: Extract trip time and wait time statistics for each origin and destination pair.  By straightforward analysis of the timetable, one can figure all the possible trips between any origin station A and destination station B (including transfers) during a one-hour span during the morning peak.  One can then determine (in units of time):

1. The average trip time between A and B (Tmean_AB)
2. The fastest trip time between A and B (Tmin_AB)
3. The average wait between trips that connect A and B (Wmean_AB)
4. The longest wait between trips that connect A and B (Wmax_AB)

The first two metrics measure trip time on board the train, and the next two can be used as a proxy for measuring typical wait times on the platform.  The trip time and wait time figures are intrinsic to the timetable and can be extracted by a computer program.

Step 2: Compute an “effective” trip time from A to B by computing a weighted sum of the time components extracted above. This is where judgment calls start to be made. Taking into account the waiting times Wmean and Wmax is just as important as the actual trip times Tmin and Tmean, in order to properly account for the frequency of service. For example, the effective trip time could be defined as:

Teff_AB = (30% of Tmin_AB + 70% of Tmean_AB) + (20% of Wmean_AB + 15% of Wmax_AB)

The trip time term (30% of Tmin_AB + 70% of Tmean_AB) accounts for some trips being shortened by express service. The waiting time term (20% of Wmean_AB + 15% of Wmax_AB) properly penalizes long service gaps, but remains shorter than the waiting time incurred when the passenger shows up randomly, which is 50% of Wmean_AB.  This lower weighting reflects the fact that passengers don’t show up randomly, but usually time their arrival at origin A for a particular trip to destination B.  For example, when trips are available every 15 minutes, the waiting term works out to a quite reasonable 5 minutes. The effective trip time is a reasonably good measure of how long it will take you to get from A to B.

Step 3: Determine the “effective” speed between origin A and origin B. This is simply distance divided by time, or: V_AB = d_AB / Teff_AB where d_AB is the distance between A and B. This process is repeated for every origin and destination pair A-B, and describes not the speed of a train, but the average speed of a typical trip from A to B including waiting time, based only on the available service provided by the specific timetable being considered.

Step 4: Compute weighting by population and jobs.  This is where census data enters the calculation, as it must.  For the morning rush hour, since ridership consists primarily of people going from their home near A to their work near B, we calculate a potential ridership weight based on how many people live near A and how many people work near B.  This simply reflects that if a lot of people live near A and work near B, it is more important to provide fast service between A and B than between other station pairs where fewer people and jobs are located.

The “home weight” Whome_A of origin station A is a simple gravity sum (1/r squared law) of the residential population, taken from the 2010 census, as described previously in greater detail.  Each person is divided by the square of how far they live from station A, to reflect that people who live further away from the station are less likely to use it. To prevent over-counting people who live very close to the station (where the 1/r squared term diverges), anyone living closer than ¼ mile from the station is considered to live ¼ mile away.  The resulting weights are shown at left, in orange.

Similarly, the “work weight” Wwork_B of destination station B is a simple gravity sum of the number of jobs over $40k, again taken from census data. Each job is divided by the square of how far it is from station B, to reflect that people who work further away from the station are less likely to use it. Once again, to prevent over-counting jobs located very close to the station, any job closer than ¼ mile from the station is considered ¼ mile away.  The resulting weights are shown at right, in blue.

Step 5: Compute weighting by distance. Regardless of where people live and work, there are upper and lower limits to how far they will typically commute by rail. Extremely short trips are less likely because of the overhead of access and egress to and from the station at each end of the journey. Conversely, extremely long trips are less likely because of their sheer duration.  As it turns out, the typical rush hour trip on Caltrain turns out to be about 25 miles, or 40 km.

For our purposes, the distance weighting is constructed by drawing a curve with a peak at 40 km. This distance weight starts off at zero for a trip distance of less than 7 km (reflecting no demand for such short trips), peaks at a distance of 40 km, and decays slowly thereafter.  Converted to miles, it looks like the figure at left.  The underlying math to draw this curve is a Rayleigh distribution with a peak at (d-7) = 33, where d is the trip distance in km.

Step 6: Combine the population, jobs and distance weights to obtain a ridership potential matrix.  The ridership potential matrix R is a matrix of size N squared, where N is the number of stations.  Each element R_AB of this matrix represents the "potential" ridership (in arbitrary relative units) that can be tapped into during the morning commute from origin A to destination B.  This ridership potential matrix has an important property: it is independent of any timetable, and concisely describes the underlying demand that inherently exists out there--regardless of how or whether that demand is met by rail service.  Each element R_AB is given by the product:

R_AB = Whome_A * Wwork_B * Wdistance_AB

Note that the matrix R is not symmetric, because the number of residents and jobs near each station differs.  For example, far more people will want to commute to SF Transbay in the morning than from it, since the number of jobs within a half mile of that station is greater than all the jobs within a half mile of every other Caltrain station all the way to Gilroy combined.

Step 7: Compute the service quality matrix. The service quality matrix Q is again a matrix of size N squared, where N is the number of stations. Each element Q_AB of this matrix represents the quality of morning rush hour service from station A to station B, and is given by the following formula:

Q_AB = R_AB * V_AB

This combines R_AB, the timetable-independent ridership potential from origin A to destination B, with V_AB, the timetable-dependent effective speed from A to B.  If you have a preferred AM origin and destination (as most commuters do), then you can compare your Q_AB for various timetables to see how any given timetable will meet your own specific needs.

Step 8: Extract overall service quality scores. The service quality metrics must be bench marked against some reference, so they are simply normalized against the most current timetable.  That means today's timetable will score 100, by definition.  By adding the elements of Q over all possible origin and destination pairs, we can quantify the degree of service improvement and compute a score for the entire timetable as well as a score for each individual station. The overall timetable service quality score is S = ΣQ / Sref, i.e. the sum of all the elements of Q divided by the corresponding sum for today's timetable.

An entire timetable can now be distilled to its essence, a single service quality score.

We are now empowered to compare various timetables and understand quantitatively the pros and cons of each.  This method will tell you objectively whether timetable A provides better overall service than timetable B--and if you happened to disagree with the scoring outcome, then your argument would be with the scoring method and not any particular detail of this or that proposed timetable.  Beyond the mathematical minutiae of the rather simple scoring method presented here, the larger point is that there needs to be a defined scoring process and a framework for stakeholders to discuss what makes a good timetable.  This scoring process is absolutely essential for planning future blended service on the peninsula.  Caltrain's approach so far has been to prescribe a certain skip-stop pattern (see Tables 7 and 8) and restrict all analysis to that particular pattern, seemingly without regard to overall service quality!

That Burning Smell

There's a burning smell at Caltrain headquarters, from the smoldering tensions over high-speed rail on the peninsula. Caltrain CEO Mike Scanlon tries to triangulate a dicey situation with a statement to the public and a letter to his counterpart at the CHSRA. Let's review the state of play:

• Facing a catastrophic shortfall in its operating budget for fiscal year 2012, Caltrain needs every ounce of good will it can get from peninsula communities in order to survive as a service and as a bureaucratic entity. All this talk of 80-foot wide viaducts tearing through residential neighborhoods is not helping one bit.
  
• Caltrain's electrification project, cast for years as the key to future improvements in the system's operating bottom line, is being held hostage by (a) uncertainty over the proper phasing of the electrification project with respect to HSR construction, (b) threats of lawsuits over a somewhat stale EIR that tiptoes around the HSR issue, and (c) the funding package unraveling at the seams, on the widely held but mistaken expectation that HSR will pick up the tab.
  
• Caltrain's $230 million reinvent-the-wheel PTC science project, mandated by the FRA as a sine qua non pre-condition to electric operation, has gone out to bid on a wing and a prayer with no clear source of funding identified other than the remote chance that the peninsula HSR project might receive the entire federal grant allocated for the statewide HSR system.
  
• Caltrain's own guy, Bob "Father of the Baby Bullet" Doty, propelled into the driver's seat of the joint Caltrain - CHSRA Peninsula Rail Program, valiantly ran interference with peninsula communities, and must now be wondering if the steering wheel really is connected to the wheels of this particular bus.

The surest sign of a thorny situation is that stakeholders keep calling for the project to be "done right," the touchstone platitude that is always trotted out when people start to get hot under the collar.

Reset Button

Another recurring buzzword is "reset button." Californians for High Speed Rail wants to hit one reset button. Congresswoman Anna Eshoo wants to hit another reset button.

What about hitting a big red reset button at the Caltrain bunker in San Carlos?

• Ditch the weak operating plan proposed as part of Caltrain 2025, and plan for smoking-hot corridor operations. A clockface timetable with a mid-line standing overtake, more than any other Caltrain improvement, promises to increase revenue while keeping operating costs under control, because it requires fewer trains and fewer crews to operate a service that will make the Baby Bullet look like a Model T.
  
• Phase the quadruple tracking for HSR and start by building a modest four-track mid-line overtake facility from Redwood Junction to just south of downtown San Mateo. This avoids most of the NIMBY controversy while delivering the highest possible corridor throughput for Caltrain express service as well as the initial HSR services.
  
• Ditch CBOSS and specify an off-the-shelf PTC standard that can be expanded to the statewide HSR system. Such a system already exists, and is mentioned dozens of times throughout the CHSRA's system requirements with the contractually-delicate phrasing "The CHSTP train control system will demonstrate Functional and Technical Requirements similar to ERTMS but the System Requirements are being written without specifying an ERTMS system. It is accepted that an ERTMS system may eventually be proposed and accepted." Bonus: HSR funds might pay for Caltrain's PTC.
  
• Address the issue of level boarding once and for all. To make the most efficient use of San Francisco's new Transbay Transit Center, it is crucial that Caltrain and the HSR system adopt a common platform interface. The mantra ought to be "any train, any track, any platform". So far, there is not a peep from Caltrain.

While it can't be confirmed, the reset button is possibly located right under Mike Scanlon's desk.

CSS Game Plan

The Peninsula Rail Program recently distributed follow-up materials (1.5 MB PDF) to the Context-Sensitive Solutions (CSS) workshop held in November.

The included schedule reveals that the Draft Alternatives Analysis Report is delayed from January to late February / early March, compressing the environmental review schedule against the late 2012 shovel-readiness deadline. As recently as December 10th, this document had been "on schedule" for release this month.

CSS stakeholders have expressed a multitude of concerns and ideas, ranging from quite reasonable to off-the-wall wacky; they must be read to be appreciated. Exactly how this laundry list of CSS concerns relates to the environmental Scoping Report is unclear. Perhaps the AA will be driven by the scoping report and the CSS workshops, which might explain the delay.

Context Sensitive Solutions

The California High Speed Rail Authority and Caltrain pledged in a recent project update to "Incorporate Context Sensitive Design Principles into project planning and outreach," apparently at the urging of the Peninsula Cities Consortium, a group representing several peninsula cities in matters pertaining to high speed rail.

As described in a City of Palo Alto press release, the cities hope that the Authority and Caltrain will apply an approach to decision making and design known as Context Sensitive Solutions.

CSS is a formal process developed over the last decade to involve all stakeholders throughout the planning and design of transportation projects, to ensure that the outcome meets the transportation need while preserving the community context in which the project is built. The CSS website contains a full description of goals, principles, case studies, etc. while Wikipedia provides a short summary. CSS can even be reduced to a pithy definition, presumably arrived at using some of the very same concensus-building tools:

Context sensitive solutions (CSS) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that involves all stakeholders in providing a transportation facility that fits its setting. It is an approach that leads to preserving and enhancing scenic, aesthetic, historic, community, and environmental resources, while improving or maintaining safety, mobility, and infrastructure conditions.

The push for CSS is rooted in a legitimate concern from peninsula communities that the rail corridor will be built up without sufficient regard for its community context.

Kumbaya or the Real Deal?

The CHSRA/Caltrain bulletin uses the words Context Sensitive Design Principles, stopping short of using the Solutions keyword. Semantics? Perhaps, but if the CSS process were being applied to the peninsula HSR project, many community design workshops would already have taken place.

It's getting a little late for that, with the CHSRA preparing to reveal the results of months of design work performed entirely out of the public eye by Parsons Brinckerhoff and HNTB--and then only because NEPA and CEQA laws require all the design alternatives to be fully and publicly documented. While the Authority has collected a large amount of community input through its environmental scoping process, all the exchange has so far gone only one way: into the black box. "Thank you for your comment card."

Key design decisions tend to made early, based on top-level requirements specifications and drawings. A list of these appeared in the CHSRA's July 2009 Program Summary Report, starting on page 54. These documents are very important because they establish the framework under which all design work is proceeding. When that work is made public, questioning a design will be ineffective unless we know what the requirements are that produced it.

CSS principles call for design collaboration and concensus building, early and often. Under CSS, the public would have open access to all the requirement specifications and directive drawings that drive the design. At numerous public meetings, however, the CHSRA and its engineering consultants have deferred, side-stepped or dismissed any specific design questions with a cursory "we don't know that yet." They may be concerned about showing bias, compromising the environmental review process, or inflaming community passions, but such coyness is definitely not among the qualities of Context Sensitive Design.

The Eye of the Beholder

CSS is most commonly applied to highway projects, where context-sensitivity can mean more than a few ornamental embellishments: sometimes, it's about slowing down traffic to make a road mesh consistently with the neighborhood. Applying that model to HSR, CSS can become a blank slate onto which community stakeholders may project their desire for fewer trains, tunnels, or slower speeds.

The CHSRA, meanwhile, intends to implement a service plan based on ridership studies and assumptions about service speed and frequency, painstakingly developed over the last several years. The plan calls for traffic of over 200 weekday trains running between San Jose and San Francisco in as little as 30 minutes, by the year 2030. The need for grade separations, the number of tracks, and the speed of the trains are all direct consequences of this plan, and the Authority's battle lines will be drawn around it. From their point of view, "Context Sensitive Design" might mean ornamental retaining walls (as shown above with a spoof on a famous visualization circulated by HSR opponents), fancy overhead electrification supports, or anything else that doesn't compromise the plan.

Without compromising the plan, the traffic-calming angle is an interesting one. Slowing down the trains through residential neighborhoods is an idea worth studying; the time penalty from slowing to 100 mph from 125 mph for a stretch of about 5 miles (40 seconds) is roughly equivalent to the time gained from straightening out a single curve in San Bruno. Of course, this raises some questions of environmental justice: why should some folks in San Bruno lose their homes so other folks in Atherton or Palo Alto can enjoy lessened noise and vibration?

When it comes to CSS, actions will speak louder than words.

Palo Alto Innovates

While the city of Palo Alto has of late developed a certain ambivalence towards high speed rail, some residents are taking the planning into their own hands. Taking for granted that high speed rail will come through Palo Alto, a group of civic leaders and architects is elaborating some design proposals that may shape the California High Speed Rail Authority's ongoing analysis of alternatives.

The group proposes tunneling the train tracks through the entire 4 mile (6 km) length of Palo Alto, as first described in a Palo Alto Weekly cover story published before the 2008 election. This idea, which would liberate more than 40 acres of land currently owned and occupied by the railroad, has since been fleshed out into an urban design concept entitled Innovation Place. A presentation of Innovation Place earned the group a 2009 urban design award from the American Institute of Architecture California Council. As its creators note, Innovation Place is a collection of ideas rather than a specific project proposal.

The crown jewel of Innovation Place is a complete transformation of the University Avenue station area, as envisioned in the team's graphic above. High speed rail or not, this area of Palo Alto is in dire need of a redesign; today, access between three important zones of activity (the University Avenue shopping district, Stanford University, and the Stanford Shopping Center) is a circuitous and dysfunctional jumble that is both unpleasant and time consuming to navigate, whether by foot, bike, car or bus. Neighboring areas just a few hundred feet apart feel miles away from each other.

The remainder of the Innovation Place proposal consists of a 31-acre linear park adjoining Alma Street, featuring a bike and pedestrian path and uniting the two halves of Palo Alto formerly separated by the train tracks. The additional cost of putting the tracks underground would be financed by selling $700 million worth of air rights for development.

Tunnel Financing

The feasibility of the Innovation Place concept hinges on the financing for tunnel construction. Will air rights for residential and commercial development really be worth $700 million? Will Palo Alto's famously difficult development approvals process allow the construction of 660 homes and 814,000 sq ft of retail and the elimination of El Camino Park, Palo Alto's oldest public park? Will the incremental cost of tunnels (as compared to simpler track alignments) cost as little as $700 million?

These questions remain unanswered, and the technical challenges of building a cavernous four-track high-speed tunnel might not bode well for the cost. On simple grounds of environmental justice, the CHSRA has refused to contribute its own funding for any tunnels that benefit a local community rather than provide added transportation functionality. Instead, it encourages cities to pay for such tunneling costs, as Berkeley did with BART in the 1960s. That scenario might require Palo Alto to pay for the project by taxing itself through an initiative passed at the polls. For such an initiative to have even the slightest chance of passing, the benefits need to be distributed throughout Palo Alto, and not just be focused on the University Avenue area. That is why, out of political necessity, the linear park along the entire length of Palo Alto is a non-negotiable component of the concept. A partial tunnel just won't do.

The city of Palo Alto recently set aside $70,000, in large part for hiring an engineering consultant to provide independent review of tunneling plans. The consultant is Hatch Mott MacDonald, a mega-firm with extensive tunneling experience (and one of the key players in San Francisco's Downtown Extension project) that has previously provided advice to the backers of the Innovation Place concept. While such a consulting arrangement may be independent of the CHSRA, the firm does have an incentive to show financial feasibility of a tunnel because it may well end up bidding on its construction--a conflict of interest that should be mitigated to obtain the most objective evaluation of tunneling options.

Does It All Hang Together?

If Innovation Place has a weakness, it is that the concept really consists of two separable elements: the University Avenue redevelopment, and the tunnel / linear park. If Palo Alto were to become a high speed rail stop, the rare opportunity to reconfigure and redevelop the station area would present itself regardless of whether or not the tracks ran in tunnels. Most of the Innovation Place presentation is devoted to this intelligent urban re-design of the University Avenue area, which has great merit on its own.

On the other hand, the tunnel and linear park need the University Avenue development in order to make even the slightest bit of sense; otherwise, what's left is a billion-dollar public park, an idea that obviously won't get very far.

Beyond Innovation Place

One of the key features of Innovation Place is an underground station at University Avenue. However, it's worth considering an even wider range of options: this area could just as well be redeveloped without any tunnels at all. Streets on either side of the tracks could be reconnected using regular grade separations. Lytton Street could be connected to the bus depot, El Camino and Quarry Road, improving bus, shuttle and taxicab connections at the train station.

The station platforms could even be elevated with a large pedestrian and transit plaza underneath, in the manner of Amsterdam's spectacular Bijlmer Arena station, a project that has won several architectural awards. Bijlmer was designed by Grimshaw Architects and completed in 2007 for 130 million euros. (Photo by tataAnne; view more photos.) While it is about double the size that Palo Alto would ever need, its design philosophy is light years beyond the unpleasant and unsafe walk through the 1940s University Avenue underpass:

Every aspect of the design process was informed by the need to civilise the viaducts and to create a pleasant and safe ground level public space. To avoid a dark 100 m long tunnel, the concrete structures were spaced apart. Each 20 m span was supported at each end on just one column via an integrated cantilevered saddle. Arrays of columns were then aligned on axis with the boulevard to maximize visual connectivity from east to west. However, the most important decision concerned the roof design in general and its soffit treatment in particular. It is the modulation of this surface, its ribbons of roof glazing and its acoustically absorbent Oregon pine surfaces that convey civility from the perspective of the boulevard below. [From the Grimshaw website]

If one thing is sure, there is no shortage of architectural possibilities--with or without tunnels.

Looking Ahead, Not Back

Palo Alto is unleashing its creative talents on how best to weave high speed rail into the fabric of the city. The city will be hosting design "teach-in" on September 12th, sponsored by the Peninsula Cities Consortium. On October 3rd and 4th, the creators of Innovation Place will host a high speed rail workshop geared towards developing solutions and tangible design products for use in the CHSRA's analysis of alternatives, a key document that will be published by the Authority by the end of this year. Legislators, civic leaders, Caltrain and the CHSRA will participate in both events.

Whatever quibbles one may have with Innovation Place, it represents a forward-looking vision for Palo Alto and an embrace of high speed rail, rather than a desperate clinging to the past, and for that alone, it is refreshing.

Full disclosure: this blogger may participate in these events.

Draft Scoping Report

The CHSRA just released its Draft Scoping Report on the San Jose to San Francisco segment of the route. This report summarizes and categorizes the numerous comments received from federal, state and local agencies and governments as well as members of the public. Numerous appendices include all the raw input for this process, the so-called "scoping comments" that were submitted a few months ago in response to public scoping meetings held on the peninsula. The CHSRA is taking no chances with the environmental clearance process, leaving an extensive trail of documentation that proves the process was scrupulously followed.

Process Context

The environmental clearance process can be a bit obscure to a newcomer. The CHSRA provides an overview that includes the figure at right.

The process is governed by federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) law. Due to the large scope of this project, the law allows for tiering of the environmental review, with a statewide program-level environmental review (completed and approved in 2008) followed by a more detailed project-level review of the peninsula, which is now getting underway and is due for completion in late 2011.

The final result of the environmental review process is an environmental impact document known as an EIR (Environmental Impact Report) under CEQA, and an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) under NEPA. A single document satisfies both regulations, thus resulting in an alphabet soup known as an EIR/EIS. When the project EIR/EIS is approved by the board of the CHSRA, any litigation has run its course, and design has proceeded sufficiently far, the project is "shovel ready". That is planned to happen on the peninsula as early as 2012.

What just happened over the last few months is scoping, and you had to live under a rock not to know about it since it was covered extensively in the local press (see archive). As its name implies, scoping determines what will and won't be included in the environmental review. After scoping is complete, it's too late to raise new issues to stop the project under CEQA or NEPA.

Scoping is pretty bland at this point: a giant pile of inputs is collated into broad categories and decomposed into an all-encompassing listing of the issues raised by all the stakeholders. Everything is still on the table at this point. It's mildly interesting to dig through it to see what everyone has to say, although reading the phone book might be more entertaining.

Where Next?

The next step in the environmental review process is alternatives analysis. The CHSRA will describe a broad set of alternatives (based on scoping inputs) and then select those that will be carried forward for detailed analysis. This involves discarding any alternatives that are not considered feasible or practicable, using structured evaluation criteria. This is where design options will start getting taken off the table, and sparks will really start to fly.

You can read an example of an Alternatives Analysis report for another segment of the HSR project, from Los Angeles to Anaheim, to get a flavor of what's coming to us. This project is slightly further along the process than San Jose to San Francisco. The alternatives analysis for the Caltrain corridor is currently expected around January 2010, just six months from now.

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."

Some Light Reading

UPDATE 2: San Carlos has also posted their draft scoping comments for their city council meeting of Monday 2/23. The letter includes a concern about vertical clearances at the Holly St. underpass, which the Daily News (Redwood City edition) quickly blew out of proportion by proclaiming: Major High Speed Rail Dilemma Discovered in San Carlos. If that is the biggest problem we have on the peninsula, the high speed rail project really must be in great shape! This area is smack in the middle of the future site of the SamTrans Transit Village, a Transit-Oriented Development that threatens to intrude upon the right of way and constrain the configuration options for high speed rail. Transit agencies at their best!

UPDATE: Menlo Park has posted their draft scoping comments for consideration at the city council meeting on Tuesday 2/24.

If the rain is keeping you indoors, why not curl up by the fireplace with some light reading:

The city of Mountain View posted their draft scoping comments on the peninsula high speed rail EIR/EIS, to be reviewed / approved at the next city council meeting on Tuesday.

The Mountain View packet also includes a draft of the "We The Mayors" letter presenting peninsula communities under a united front. As further described in a Daily News article on Saturday, an alliance of peninsula communities is being formed outside of the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board (Caltrain), which has heavy representation from the cities of San Francisco and San Jose, cities whose interests will not necessarily align with those of the peninsula communities in between.

The town of Atherton also posted their draft scoping comments (see Item 19, pp. 13-42) on the peninsula EIR/EIS for consideration at their 18 February council meeting. Atherton had originally submitted comments on the Bay Area regional EIR/EIS, to which the CHSRA responded (refer to Chapter 22, page 101, comment letter L025). Atherton's scoping letter includes point by point rebuttals to the CHSRA's comments and a forceful argument for tunneling.

Atherton is of course one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit to overturn the regional EIR/EIS's CEQA certification, which could re-open last summer's decision to route HSR through Pacheco Pass (and Atherton) instead of Altamont Pass. The court documents pertaining to this lawsuit are available on the Sacramento County Superior Court's document server; search under case number 34-2008-80000022.

Finally, Palo Alto has established on their city website a new section on high speed rail. There's not much there yet, but a good place to keep an eye on.

Who is HNTB ?

HNTB Corporation is a large civil engineering firm that has a key role in the overhaul of the peninsula corridor. HNTB designs bridges, highways, airports, railways, stadiums, and basically any complex infrastructure that eventually involves pouring fair amounts of concrete. They have about 2700 employees in 60 offices nationwide, including a key office in Oakland and a satellite office in San Jose.

HNTB was the principal designer of the BART extension to SFO and Millbrae; they were the brains behind all the track, tunnels, aerial structures, and the South San Francisco and San Bruno stations. The actual construction was done by other firms teamed with HNTB. The BART project was politically spearheaded by Quentin Kopp, who is today the chairman of the California High Speed Rail Authority. On election night 2008, just as Measure 1A returns were being tallied, Kopp was sipping martinis with HNTB management and other firms involved in the high speed rail project. Peter Gertler, HNTB's national transit director (in charge of all things rail) and his staff are even reported to have canvassed for passage of the bond measure.

HNTB is no stranger to Caltrain: they designed the CEMOF maintenance facility in San Jose, which features an elegant reverse curve that is sure to cause yet another interesting engineering headache for high speed rail.

HNTB is now engineering the peninsula section of the HSR project, under a contract awarded by the California High Speed Rail Authority in November 2008. They will design all aspects of HSR on the peninsula, starting with basic track alignments. Their latest status report can be found here. Once the preliminary design is completed to the "30 percent" level in mid-2012, the CHSRA will put the detailed design and construction of the peninsula corridor out for bid. HNTB is certain to team with construction firms to bid on the next phase, but it is not guaranteed to win.

Here are some key names that you may see popping up, and who were in attendance at the scoping meetings. An organization chart is also shown at right, from the January status update.

• Dominic Spaethling - SF-SJ Regional Manager - CHSRA and Parsons Brinckerhoff - Sacramento

• Tim Cobb - Project Manager - HNTB West region public transit director - Oakland

• John Litzinger - Engineering & Alternatives Analysis - HNTB - San Jose

HNTB is teaming with other firms for this design work, including DMJM, Transmetrics, Prointec (a Spanish firm with 20 years of HSR experience), among others. It's nice to see some European involvement to make sure the peninsula is done right.

Lemonade from a Lemon: Millbrae Take 2

The comments in response to Focus on: Millbrae were quite thoughtful and identified another couple of reasonable options for reconfiguring the station for the arrival of HSR. They are labeled Option C and Option D in the expanded diagram below.

(click to enlarge-- and yes, this figure is getting too big...)

After some consideration, Option D stood out to me as the least-terrible way of making lemonade out of the existing Millbrae lemon.

Option D pro:

• 4 platform tracks for HSR / Caltrain
  
• Cross-platform transfers between Caltrain Express / HSR and Caltrain local, in both directions
  
• No demolition and reconstruction of the existing station mezzanine
• Platforms stay pretty much where they are
• "Site One" transit-oriented development to the west is minimally impacted
• Keeps It Simple, Stupid (compared to nearly every other solution)
  

Option D con:

• Loss of northbound cross-platform transfer between BART and Caltrain
• Non-stop HSR passes platforms at ~125 mph
• Need to establish physical separation of BART and Caltrain on adjacent tracks

While this is probably the best technical solution, it remains to be seen whether it is politically workable, especially because it destroys the BART cross-platform transfer, which was a huge selling point for the existing station. Then again, follow the money... the smaller station footprint and lesser impact to the neighboring development may favor Option D.

Quickie Stakeholder Analysis

Each stakeholder in California's HSR project has different interests in the project. Keeping those interests in mind is very important to interpret their actions. On the back of an envelope, the stakeholders are:

The Public

The public has a strong interest in the HSR project, rooted in two different roles: the role of a user who desires HSR to be convenient and fast, and the role of a taxpayer who desires HSR to be built efficiently and for the least amount of money. The public pays up front (see Proposition 1A) and is usually not very well organized to defend its collective interests, compared to the other stakeholders. This blog will scream loudly, if anybody listens, to defend those interests.

While other stakeholders may say that they want HSR to be fast and cheap, the bottom line is that they have little stake in that outcome. Read on to see why!

The Agencies and Governments

On the peninsula, the various agencies are going to defend their parochial interests. Caltrain, the Transbay Authority, SamTrans, VTA, the three counties, the High Speed Rail Authority, and the local communities are going to defend their piece of the pie, be it money or influence. One catfight to watch for in the coming years will pit Caltrain against the CHSRA. Caltrain owns the peninsula rails, but HSR will so profoundly alter every project recently undertaken or planned by Caltrain that even shared goals (fast, efficient and modern transportation) won't be enough to prevent some friction. Up in San Francisco, sparks are already starting to fly between the CHSRA and the Transbay Authority.

The agencies will be in cahoots with the construction companies. You've got to worry when on the night of the election, Quentin Kopp, the head of the CHSRA, is having martinis with the construction big wigs (HNTB, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Webcor) who will get a piece of the action.

The Construction Companies

Construction companies that will build the HSR project stand to profit handsomely. They are where the money ultimately flows. Design engineering, construction, program management, most of the slices of the HSR budget will be sent to them at some point. Their interest is to make money. They make a lot of money by engineering complex infrastructure that involves lots of earth moving and concrete pouring. The more earth moving and concrete pouring, the greater the profit. There's nothing wrong with that so far.

Unfortunately, those same companies are also in charge of designing all this infrastructure. The fox is guarding the hen house, but in proper industry lingo this is passed off as cost-saving "design-build-operate-maintain" and "turn-key solutions". The construction companies know that once HSR is far enough along, nothing will stop its completion, least of all running out of money. They have little interest in making HSR any faster or better or cheaper than absolutely necessary to maintain continued public funding of the project. The wisdom goes that among the three qualities, faster, better and cheaper, you can have any two. Locally, if the HSR design is left without strong oversight, the peninsula may get none of the three.

Look out for gold-plated solutions to simple problems, sold by throwing up a fog of expert-knows-best complexity.

The Neighbors

Many communities, groups and individuals on the peninsula will suffer negative impacts from the HSR project, either inherent in its design or arising from its construction. These groups have some of the most obvious and clear-cut interests: Not In My Back Yard! They will work hard to influence HSR plans to their own benefit, with less regard for the wider public interest. One example: the resolutions opposing Proposition 1A passed by the city councils of Menlo Park and Atherton. Yet another example is Millbrae's push to develop land needed for HSR. And that's only the beginning...

Opposite the NIMBY's, there are what you might call YIMBY's (Yes, In My Back Yard!) who would like to use HSR as an opportunity to obtain local benefits, again without regard to the wider public interest. One example is the screwball plan to tunnel the tracks underground, floated by a Palo Alto group. There will be other communities keenly interested in swinging some HSR bacon their way to achieve urban design aspirations entirely unrelated to HSR.

Let's finish on a positive note: to avoid becoming the boondoggle that proposition 1A opponents fear, the HSR project needs to be designed under the watchful eye of an independent panel of experts with local knowledge, and especially some TEETH to bite back at the agencies and contractors as required to keep them attuned to the public interest. Whether the provisions attached to Proposition 1A will provide for this remains to be seen.