Marching boldly into the 20th century. Better late than never!

Everyone: "Sheesh, took long enough, why can't we have nicer things sooner?"
Caltrain: "Well if we just increase taxes a little we could-"
Everyone: "HECK NO! DON'T TAKE MY MONEY! I EARNED IT AND OWE YOU NOTHING! WAHHH!"

The state also awarded a grant to Bart to Santa Clara from Berryessa! Also $20 Million. That boondoggle will cost $7 Billion tough. $20 Million doesn't go too far on that.

And today in San Jose, city officials made a big deal of the VTA transportation tax. They said that $6 Billion will go to road maintenance. Hah. They plan to use that to cover $2 Billion of the cost of the BART to Santa Clara squandering of resources. Why must they lie like that?

Why should north county cities pay so much to make new infrastructure for San Jose.

Vote no on Measure B! Please!

How come they never give facts when they state things like "This project means more commute options and faster travel times ...". Exactly how many more options, and how much faster?

I seriously doubt an improvement greater then 10% will be observed in speed. So going from MntView to Foster City will now take 27mins instead of 30mins. What's the big deal about 3mins?

And the number of options is going to be limited by the number of "engine" cars. Exactly how many more "engine" cars will CalTrain have than it has Diesel Cars today? Will it even have more electrified motor cars? Can CalTrain afford to pay that many more operators based solely on passenger revenue, or will subsidies have to be increased?

Usually when such sweeping statements are made without supporting evidence the truth is trying to be concealed.

That's a great little passion play you just imagined. You must have been really affected by it all.
Personally, I never felt any rush to get it done and I'm very glad they waited for the grant. Patience paid off.

What this means, to those who understand how travel will be faster, is that there will be more trains. Get it? It will mean that if you want to travel from Palo Alto to Redwood City, for example, instead of having one train an hour that stops at both stations, there will be more trains to choose between and they will probably be each 30 minutes or even more frequent.

The point of all this is that with all these grade crossings up and down the Peninsula, there will be more times that the gates will be closed stopping vehicles on east/west routes. We have very long tailbacks as a result of gate closures for trains and when we have more trains these tailbacks will be longer. In fact, each time a train goes by, the sequence of traffic lights is interfered with and turning traffic gets hit the worst.

All Peninsula cities with grade crossings will be affected by this. Now is the time to work together to sort out what the solution will be. There must be grants and other methods to get the funding quickly and sort out this mess before the traffic queues start causing more problems than they do already.

Work together Peninsula and get this done, now.

Caltrain is only talking about increasing the max trains per hour from the current 5 to 6. It won't be that many more train crossings.

Where things will be higher capacity is that there will be 8 cars per train instead of the current 5 or 6. That means more riders on a given train. Also, with electric motors driving the train, the stops won't take so long. (Currently the train slows well before a stop and takes off pretty slowly afterwords).

So, they will be able to stop the same number of trains at more stations, serving more people a the peak daylight times. They only run 1 hours between trains night times after 730pm or so. No upgrades are needed to increase that frequency. They could do it now. It's a matter of demand.

In the daytime, busy stations are already served at 30 minute intervals today. This may get down to 20 minutes and even less busy stations will see more service in the day time high passenger hours.

All due to electrification. And NO big increase in crossing arm downtimes. Such a false impression to convey. Furthermore, at stations like Mountain View, the crossing arm downtime will be less because the signaling is being improved with electrification. Currently many trains cause the arms to come down TWICE for ONE STOP at the Downtown Mountain View station. Truly, even with 1 more train per hour some ours, the impact on Castro Street should be less.

Sigh.You are just changing a DIESEL ELECTRIC engine into a sole ELECTRIC ENGINE. Acceleration and deceleration will not change much. The supporting infrastructure will just have more poles for the overhead wiring.

Data

You make some valid points, but that is the flaw in your argument. What they say and what they do in the future is another thing. Caltrain are already increasing the length of the trains by using another car. However, the aim for Bay Area housing and traffic means that commuting by Caltrain will become more and more attractive. All the stack and pack housing along the Caltrain corridor will ultimately mean more and more riders. This will encourage Caltrain to add more and more trains. There is also likely to be more offpeak trains for evening and weekends. It probably won't be an increment of more than one or two trains a day, but over a period of years it will make a difference.

Now as to your point about the gates being down in Castro Street for less time, I think you ought to look at the point that the crossing is probably going to close permanently anyway. So what will that do to the traffic that wants to cross the tracks?

I welcome electrification to reduce local pollution. Some people don't seem to realize the huge amount of pollution that Caltrain diesel-electric locomotives create near its tracks. I didn't realize this until one foggy winter morning, I dropped my car off at my repair shop on Evelyn and walked 3 miles east along Evelyn (and the tracks) to my job in Sunnyvale near the Lawrence Expwy Caltrain station. The fog and lack of wind trapped locomotives' diesel fumes close to the ground, and I had a fierce headache and was physically ill by the time I got to work. A friend had to drive me home. These fumes certainly can't be good for the health of people, particularly old folks and kids, who live and work in buildings within a few blocks of the tracks.

Caltrain will switch to electric cars with a motor on board each one. The start/stop
time will be greatly sped up. This has been planned for a long time. They've always said this will enable them to stop at more stations on each run.

The current increase from 5 to 6 cars is in effect on many but not all runs. Compared to the long-time 5 car trains, the switch to 8 cars means 60% more passengers. That's a heap more passengers. The extra 1 train per hour max adds 20% more overall. Still, many hours have never had the full 5 trains per hour. Perhaps some increases will occur in other hours as well.

It would be a nice problem to have, if Caltrain ridership did increase to more than 200% of recent levels, but it would take quite a while to happen. Of course, the increased frequencies may also add riders not taking the whole run, but just independent segments of the full 40 mile run. You don't need to add trains or cars for that kind of increase. Serving more stations per run is key.

Give the VTA another $6 billion to squander and take lanes for its buses and tolls? NO on B.

Why all the complaints about VTA? VTA doesn't operate Caltrain.

If electrification will really allow more trains with more cars and more passengers, I'm all for it. During peak hours, Caltrain already transports as many people in each direction as two lanes of freeway. (It's easy to estimate. Assume that a traffic lane transports one car every 2--3 seconds. That makes about 25 cars a minute. Catrain carries about 600 people per train [more if it's really full], at a rate of one train every ten minutes. Refer to ridership data here: Web Link [PDF].) Now they want to double that capacity? Yes, please!

I don't believe the claim of 97% emissions reduction, though. Maybe it's true if you define "emissions" to exclude CO2. The electricity has to come from somewhere, and it will take decades for renewables to take a significant share of the "energy mix".