Now What?

In an historic vote, the legislature today approved a funding package worth about $8 billion to begin construction of the first high-speed rail system in the Americas.  To make the package politically more palatable around the state, it included the immediate release of $706 million of so-called "book end" funding in the form of Proposition 1A bonds specifically allocated to the modernization of Caltrain, per the recent Memorandum of Understanding approved by all involved agencies.  The $706M total includes $600M of high-speed rail funding and $106M of non-HSR connectivity funding, from pots of money that are subject to different constraints.  These sums form the lion's share of a $1.456 billion funding package that covers both electrification and a new signal system for the peninsula rail corridor.

While this is no doubt a landmark occasion to celebrate for supporters of modern rail transportation, today's vote will probably not cause anything dramatic to happen on the peninsula in the short term.  Consider:

Taxpayer Lawsuits.  The opposition remains fervent and relentless, and a lawsuit challenging the release of $600M of HSR bonds to improve the Caltrain commuter rail system, with not a high-speed train in sight for more than a decade, is a near certainty.  Protections are built into the law, and require several conditions to be met for release of the funds.  Approval by the legislature is only one of those conditions, and the interpretation of the remaining ones is likely to become legally contentious.

The Environmental Clearance Process.  In April of 2010, Caltrain's electrification project had already obtained federal environmental clearance under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) as the Caltrain board of directors came within a few dramatic minutes of certifying the Final EIR under California's Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.  The board stopped short, under a surprise threat of a CEQA lawsuit, preferring to resolve any issues outside of the legal system before certifying the FEIR.  While the scope of the electrification project has not changed under the recently approved MOU, the project has now become the first in a series of incremental investments leading up to the "blended system" envisioned in the latest HSR business plan.  That means the electrification EIR may go back to square one for yet another round of public circulation (following prior rounds in 2004 and 2009), a process that is likely to take several years.  It would be surprising to see a new FEIR before 2014.

CEQA Lawsuits.  The sole enforcement mechanism built into CEQA is the lawsuit; it is therefore expected that lawsuits could follow the certification of any EIR.  While clearing electrification as a stand-alone project might be legal under CEQA, the issue is complicated by the project's new association to high-speed rail.  The two-tiered environmental clearance process adopted by the HSR project has already run into serious resistance, with the Bay Area to Central Valley Program EIR about to enter its third round of litigation since 2008.  HSR opponents could easily argue that funding the electrification project under Proposition 1A requires the prior clearance of both this program EIR as well as the project-level EIR for the "blended" San Francisco - San Jose section of the HSR project, including all the project phases expected to be completed after electrification.  Those later phases would include more controversial measures such as the construction of new overtake tracks and new grade separations.  This document is yet to be drafted; while the peninsula project EIR for the full-bore four-track system (still allowed for in the program EIR) was almost ready to circulate as of late 2011, it will require extensive revisions before it conforms to the "blended" configuration.  And that's before it becomes mired in what could become years of CEQA litigation.

The Lead Agency Issue.  The high-speed rail authority has in the past been openly hostile to funding Caltrain improvements.  The new leadership, under board chair Dan Richard, may not be much different.  Richard, like Kopp before him, is a longtime supporter of the expansion of BART, which has always been in invisible tension with Caltrain enhancements.  While he has extolled the merits of the blended book-end approach to gain political support for the entire HSR endeavor, this stance could very well weaken now that the legislative hurdle is passed.  Prior to the vote, he was quoted as saying "The Legislature wanted to emphasize that this money would be there for (the Bay Area and Southern California). And they’re right," highlighting that it is the legislature pushing this funding, not the CHSRA.  Indeed, the Authority, and the transit industrial complex behind it, may be reluctant to push for the peninsula improvements (a) because the opposition there is intense, (b) because of inter-agency rivalry with Caltrain, and (c) because the proposed projects do not involve large-scale civil works of the sort that Parsons Brinckerhoff likes to design, and its acolytes in the construction industry like to build.  Progress on the electrification project could thus depend on which agency leads the EIR process and pushes the project to fruition.  Caltrain is both competent and motivated, but the CHSRA could easily drag its feet--after all, the legislature has only authorized the bond funds to be spent, but the CHSRA retains full authority over when to actually spend them.  All the MOU demands of them is "good faith," which has been in demonstrably short supply.

CBOSS.  While the spotlight is on the electrification project, the MOU and newly passed HSR funding also covers Caltrain's new Advanced Signal System, also known as the Communications Based Overlay Signal System or CBOSS, and often criticized on this blog.  This project is a necessary pre-condition for the operation of light-weight European-style trains, and must be completed by the end of 2015 under a federal mandate that shows signs of being delayed to 2018 or 2020.  Despite Caltrain's repeated insistence to the contrary, CBOSS will not be compatible with HSR other than by fitting two separate, expensive, and functionally redundant signaling systems on high-speed trains, an unavoidable and inconvenient truth that may call into question the wisdom of spending even one cent of HSR money on CBOSS.  A far better outcome would be to make the peninsula rail corridor a testbed for the actual train control system to be deployed on the HSR system, based on the increasingly mature worldwide ERTMS rail signaling standard.

The Timeline.  The money is available only until June 30th, 2018.

UPDATE: The Poison Pill.  At any time before then, a single stroke of the pen from the Department of Finance can transfer the money to the Central Valley projects, per the Budget Act of 2012, Section 2.00, Item 2660-104-6043, Section 3, Provision 2.

The legislature's momentous step leaves many questions unanswered.

• Is the funding of Caltrain improvements using high-speed rail bonds legal?
• Will opponents hog-tie the electrification EIR to the high-speed rail EIRs in a bid to delay?
• Can the existing electrification EIR be tweaked, or is it back to square one?
• How eagerly will the CHSRA push electrification forward, if the focus is initially in the Central Valley?
• Is it legal to spend HSR money on CBOSS?
• Will the project be shovel-ready by June 30th, 2018?
• How will questions of leadership be resolved, among Caltrain, the CHSRA, Parsons Brinckerhoff, and the regional design consultants?
• Will the agencies finally treat technical compatibility between Caltrain and HSR, as long advocated in these pages, as the priority that it ought to be, allowing any train to use any track to serve any platform?

Only one thing is sure, there is a lot more sausage-making still ahead of us.

Is Demand-Based Planning a Myth?

Original photo by qviri

With over 80% of riders using Caltrain to commute to their jobs during rush hour, one would think that the service would be planned around where people live and where people work, using cold hard numbers from the census.  That's known as traditional demand-based planning: provide service where the most people will use it.  It's not rocket science, and demand-based planning is used all around the world to plan excellent rail service.

But not here on the peninsula.

In a contrarian argument made circa 2005, Caltrain's operations staff claimed that demand-based planning is a myth. (14 Mb PDF file)   At the time, Caltrain was crowing to its industry peers about the success of the Baby Bullet.  The keys to success included "Questioning Traditional Planning Processes" and "Trusting Your Intuition".  Numbers don't matter, just go with your gut!

In the years since, there has been plenty of hard evidence that the Baby Bullet has severely reduced ridership at many locations, especially in Santa Clara County.  Indeed, data from the 2010 census can be correlated to the latest Caltrain ridership data without ever looking at a timetable to reflect quite accurately which Caltrain stops are under-served and falling short of their ridership potential.

Maybe demand-based planning isn't such a myth after all.  Maybe numbers don't lie.  Here's hoping that objective, quantitative metrics will play a central role in planning future blended operation scenarios with high-speed rail.  This stuff is too important to trust anybody's intuition.

U.S. Supplier Enters ERTMS Market

In a move that amounts to a clear acknowledgement of the increasing worldwide supremacy of the ERTMS ("European" Railway Traffic Management System) technology standard, General Electric Transportation Systems recently became the first U.S. signaling supplier to enter the ERTMS market.

GE Transportation Systems is the same company slated to supply the on-board and wayside components of CBOSS, Caltrain's new-fangled train control system that will be paid for with HSR funding while being technically incompatible with the HSR train control system.

One could briefly entertain the illusion that common sense might prevail, and that with a minimum of contractual upheaval CBOSS could evolve into the first U.S. installation of ERTMS, a solution that could eventually be extended to the entire California HSR system.  Unfortunately, in the blinkered world of parochial agency interests, spending money (over $200 million of it for SF - SJ alone!) is a higher aspiration than providing a good technical solution.  Compatibility is for sissies; why do it right when you can do it twice?

Primarily Two Tracks

Figure 4 from Caltrain's study, showing several possible locations for new overtake tracks.  Not all would be built.

In recent days, the high-speed rail Draft Revised 2012 Business Plan as well as the Caltrain Blended Operations Analysis were released to the public.  Both of these documents refer to the peninsula blended solution as a "primarily two-track" system, in the hope of allaying fears of massive eminent domain takings of homes and business-- fears that are largely unfounded, but fanned relentlessly by the local press and project opponents.

The confusion continues over what "primarily two tracks" precisely means, because neither agency seems ready to come out yet and state it in crystal clear terms.  The process still needs to unfold.  Luckily, enough data has already been published to allow a reasonably good reading of the tea leaves, down to the nearest tenth of a mile.

Phase 1 will be electrification, according to the memorandum of understanding currently being put in place by MTC and other parties.  This project already has federal environmental clearance and is very close to state environmental clearance, although a strong push will be made by opponents to subsume Caltrain's electrification EIR into the peninsula HSR project EIR, a document that will not be finalized (let alone litigated!) until 2015.  This phase of the project will not add any tracks, so the total length of quadruple track will stay as it is today (2 miles in Brisbane; 1 mile in Redwood City; 2 miles in Sunnyvale).

• Purpose: improves Caltrain, enables future peninsula HSR
• Time frame: 2013 - 2019
• Total miles of quadruple track: 5
• Grade-separated fraction: 61% (64 of 104 road crossings)
• Trains per peak hour per direction: 6
• Cities impacted by construction: none

Phase 2 will be a concrete viaduct through Santa Clara, completed at the same time as HSR reaches San Jose sometime in the mid-2020's, enabling a one-seat ride to San Francisco under the so-called "Bay-to-Basin" scenario.  If the CHSRA's grandiose plans (described in an October 2011 report to the legislature) are to be believed, this will entail building a massive double-decker station complex at San Jose.  A new four-track HSR station will hulk over the existing Diridon Station, perched on massive concrete straddle bents.  A more than 3-mile-long, 60-foot-tall viaduct will be constructed northwards, joining the existing corridor at approximately milepost 44.5, north of the Santa Clara Caltrain station.  Overpasses at Hedding and De La Cruz will be demolished and rebuilt as underpasses to make room for the new double-deck rail right of way.  Note that Caltrain's study considers this phase as part of the "baseline infrastructure" and therefore does not count it as additional tracks.

• Purpose: enable single-seat HSR ride to San Francisco
• Time frame: mid 2020's
• Total miles of quadruple track: 8
• Grade-separated fraction: 61% (64 of 104 road crossings) 
  
• Trains per peak hour per direction: 8 (6 Caltrain + 2 HSR)
• Cities impacted by construction: Santa Clara

Phase 3 will be the "short" mid-line overtake from 9th Ave in San Mateo (milepost 18.3) to Whipple Ave in Redwood City (milepost 24.8), which enables HSR service to increase from 2 to 4 trains per hour during the peak.  The data tables in Caltrain's study show that this overtake facility provides nearly all the benefits of the "full" mid-line overtake that extends southwards through Redwood City, but presumably at far lower cost.  The transportation-industrial complex's approach to the short mid-line overtake might very well entail demolishing the entire Belmont - San Carlos grade separation and replacing it with a four-track viaduct on concrete stilts.  A more realistic implementation will likely be to tack on another 15 feet of width on each side of the existing grade separations to accommodate new overtake tracks, something that should have been done in 1999 (but why do it right when you can do it twice?).  In San Mateo, new four-track grade separations will be built at 25th, 28th and 31st Avenues.

• Purpose: increases HSR peak capacity from 2 to 4 trains per hour per direction
• Time frame: late 2020's
• Total miles of quadruple track: 14.5
• Grade-separated fraction: 63% (67 of 106 road crossings) 
  
• Trains per peak hour per direction: 10 (6 Caltrain + 4 HSR)
• Cities impacted by construction: San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos

Phase 4 will be the "full" mid-line overtake, also known as the Great Redwood City Grade Separation, creating a new mid-peninsula HSR stop at Redwood City and grade-separating a dense cluster of six grade crossings.  The four-track mid-line overtake will be extended southwards to milepost 26.3, merging with the existing four-track section.

• Purpose: adds mid-peninsula HSR stop
• Time frame: late 2020's
• Total miles of quadruple track: 16
• Grade-separated fraction: 69% (73 of 106 road crossings) 
  
• Trains per peak hour per direction: 10 (6 Caltrain + 4 HSR)
• Cities impacted by construction: Redwood City 

Beyond that, it gets murkier.  Presumably, the 33 remaining grade crossings that are not removed under Phases 1 - 4 will be addressed on a case-by-case basis, with grade separations designed and built in consultation with the respective cities.  San Francisco's downtown extension to the Transbay Transit Center may finally be built.  Additional passing tracks may be constructed where it's relatively easy and cheap, for example the remaining 2.5 miles from Lawrence to Santa Clara and the "north overtake" in Caltrain's study, an additional 8.2 miles of quadruple track from Brisbane south into Burlingame.

Only one thing is quite certain: the peninsula rail corridor will categorically NOT remain a two-track operation, even if it might still use "primarily" two tracks.  At a minimum, approximately 16 miles or over a third of its length will be quadruple-tracked.  As the process unfolds, it will become apparent that the cities of Belmont, Redwood City, San Carlos, San Mateo and Santa Clara will be the first to suffer the construction impacts.

The Hybrid DMU, Unicorn of the Rails

The hybrid DMU is a diesel multiple-unit train with a twist: it has on-board energy storage to enable energy recovery, similar to an electric train that feeds power back into the grid when slowing down.  Just as in a hybrid automobile, this energy store helps to start the train rolling again, and reduces energy consumption in stop-and-go operations.  Peninsula cities and stakeholders, ever more astute on rail matters, perceive three important benefits in the hybrid DMU:

1. It keeps high-speed rail out.  In discussions of Caltrain electrification and the slow beating-around-the-bush process that is leading up to the certification of the electrification EIR, high-speed rail has become the central issue. Electrification is viewed in some quarters as the camel's nose under the tent, so a renewed push is underway to ensure that all the alternatives other than electrification have been duly considered.
    
2. It keeps unsightly high-voltage poles and wiring at bay, preserving views and presumably residential property values in some of the most affluent areas in the nation.
    
3. It spares Caltrain, the perennially funding-starved agency, the burden of spending $785 million of scarce capital dollars to string wires over its tracks.

The hybrid DMU is viewed as a synergistic technology that solves all three issues in one fell swoop, in a classic Silicon Valley win-win-win.

There's only one little problem: it doesn't really exist.

Okay, almost.  There do exist a handful of hybrid DMUs in Japan.  These advanced technology trains, instantly knowable to any city staffer via a simple Google search (keyword hint: 'hybrid DMU'), operate in Japan.  The fleet numbers three cars on one line, and ten cars spread among four other lines.  Each car seats about 45 and tops out at 60 mph.  Their power output is less than a Chevy Tahoe hybrid's.

The Law of Diesel Trains

To understand why the hybrid DMU will never work for the peninsula corridor, look no further than the laws of physics.  What Caltrain needs is a singular focus on better service: quicker trips, more frequent stops, higher capacity, and less waiting for the next train.  That requires big, fast trains with one key quality: punchy acceleration, precisely the reason why the EMU (electric multiple unit) powered by high-voltage overhead lines was invented and perfected.  To achieve high acceleration, the laws of physics dictate high power and low weight.

A diesel train makes all its power on board and sends it to electric motors that drive the wheels; it is essentially a rolling mini power plant.  The nicest and newest rolling mini power plants used by Caltrain today generate 3,600 horsepower for a million-pound train.  In metric units, that's about 6 kW/ton, and as any Caltrain rider can attest, it doesn't exactly pin you to your seat.  The problem is that rolling mini power plants are heavy, and if you want more power, you'll need to haul around even more weight.  This is the Law of Diesel Trains, directly derived from Newton's Laws of Motion.  More weight does little to help with acceleration, so diesel basically can't scale up.

The EMU, on the other hand, doesn't schlep around a rolling mini power plant.  Its electricity is generated off-board by a real power plant, of the PG&E variety.  The electric grid, hooked up to gigawatts of generating capacity, can provide essentially limitless power to a train.  That endows a typical EMU (of the sort available off-the-shelf from many manufacturers) with a power-to-weight ratio of about 12 kW/ton, or double the giddy-up of a diesel train.  For short bursts of acceleration, high-voltage EMUs can briefly exceed their continuous power rating and draw even more power, hitting up to 18 kW/ton.  For those still keeping track, that's triple the acceleration of Caltrain.  For reference, BART cars achieve a respectable 15 kW/ton.

So what do the Japanese know about hybrid DMUs that we don't?  Most importantly, they do not claim zippy acceleration as a benefit.  The hybrid DMU does three things for them: save about 10% on fuel, cut down nitrous oxide emissions, and cut the noise of an idling train down to an electric whisper. Beyond those benefits, the 'D' in DMU makes it follow the Law of Diesel Trains.  The Japanese hybrid DMUs manage barely 5 kW/ton, probably because they haul around not just a mini power plant, but also big heavy batteries.  Here in the US, more stringent crashworthiness standards would make such trains even heavier and their performance even more anemic.

The inescapable conclusions are thus:

• Hybrid DMUs provide only about one third of the acceleration required to enable meaningful Caltrain service improvements. A simple technical litmus test for future Caltrain rolling stock is the power-to-weight ratio, required to be at least 12 to 15 kW/ton.  Hybrid DMUs don't qualify.
• Hybrid DMU technology has never been scaled up beyond the size of a bus.
• Hybrid DMU technology inherently cannot be scaled up to achieve higher power-to-weight and acceleration in large (600 - 1000 passenger) configurations.

The mystical powers ascribed to hybrid DMUs by peninsula stakeholders rightfully earns them the nickname of 'Unicorn of the Rails.'  It's time for them to realize that by undermining the choice of EMU technology and promoting hybrid DMUs, they are also undermining the future of Caltrain--intentionally or not.  Caltrain can be faulted for many things, but their choice of high-voltage EMU technology as the path to modernization is unequivocally correct and technically justified, regardless of what happens with high-speed rail.