Silicon Valley’s Economic Indicator: Caltrain Ridership | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley’s Economic Indicator: Caltrain Ridership

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68 pointspm24601103 comments

As someone who commuted on Caltrain daily from 2007 to 2011, I got to witness the rise and fall and rise again of the ridership. It is definitely a lagging indicator.

Other good indicators are traffic on 101 and and Dim Sum wait times on weekends.

Bridge traffic is also useful[1]. I wish they would break out the Dumbarton Traffic since that is an amplified value due to the fact that once the Valley is fully occupied, additional employees must come from somewhere else.

[1] http://bata.mtc.ca.gov/tolls/historic.htm

If you want to spend the time to dig into it, Caltrans has a more detailed dataset of historical traffic [1]. I used to research traffic in the Bay Area, and it was fascinating to see the way in which it responded to different events.

[1] http://pems.dot.ca.gov/

I'd argue Hwy 85 is a good indicator, but it's actually been pretty horrible since about 6 months after it opened in the 90s.

> It is definitely a lagging indicator.

Almost as if a competent city planner could see the congestion coming in advance and make changes to prevent it!

So, one of the interesting ways Caltrain can expand is to simply add additional rolling stock (cars) to handle capacity. However, there's a problem with that: each additional car reduces acceleration and directly effects the timetable.

For example, currently caltrain consists are 1 locomotive + 5 cars. Locomotives range from 2,500 usable horsepower (after HEP) to 3,600.

The highest horsepower locomotives, the MP36PH-3C's, are pretty much reserved for the baby bullet service. This means that to add an additional car to a train would increase weight on average by 20% - a big addition to a train that has is running flat out at nearly all times.

The problem that caltrain faces is pretty simple: they can't expand capacity without significant investment of capital into additional locomotives and rolling stock.

... and electrification is coming which means a large part of their rolling stock will be redundant within the next five to six years.

I thought the bottleneck was station size, since they already have enough cars to fill them up? Do they have room to add more cars?

Burlingame and Menlo Park are both restricted by street crossings on both sides of the station, not to mention that many stops are limited by platform length. I'm not sure if it would make sense to make just a subset of the stops.

An unofficial blog about Caltrain and California HSR talks about one solution to the capacity problem and some non-solutions. I personally take it with a grain of salt, but it's still interesting: http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-virtues-of-widt...

How about selective door opening? That's used widely in the UK and Europe.

I figured that would be the next step, but there's still a lot of inertia: some stations are bookended by perpendicular streets and would require the train to the parked on the road while loading, which may raise legal or political issues.

I hear they're trying to move all the stations to grade separated ones though, which should alleviate that.

Also, you'd have to get the public accustomed to "want to get out here, have to be in these cars", which, knowing the public, will take a big information campaign and still end up with people frantically charging through cars and screaming at conductors to open the doors...

Many of the "baby bullet" trains are slowed down by other trains on a daily basis. Some stations only get one stop per hour, even during rush hour, so those trains are overcrowded and can take minutes to make those stops. It's not uncommon to see a bullet have to come to a complete stop behind one of those trains. More cars should allow the passengers to exit the train faster, so that would counteract the impact of slower acceleration.

There are 4 (edit: looks like 5) unused Metrolink cars sitting in the siding at 4th and King. I don't know why they aren't being used on some of the busier routes.

They need refurbishing

Indeed. Lighter, nimbler, quieter, and less-smoggy trains are planned, which will run from electricity instead of diesel. The project is estimated to cost $1.5 Billion and finish in about 5 years.

sounds like a runs_per_hour vs capacity_per_run issue.

there is likely a point where the decrease in runs_per_hour is offset by the increase in capacity_per_run.

This assumes that the users will still use the service as long as the time_per_run (how long it takes to get from point A to point B) doesn't increase to a point where users choose to travel by different means.

If it only affects acceleration, not that big a deal since the Express trains matter most and only have a few stops.

One key insight that they're missing is that the 'trendy' office location has shifted from Silicon Valley to San Francisco over the past few years.

The result is that people who may have settled in the valley now find themselves commuting to the city. It's much more comfortable to spend that commuting time on the train than in rush-hour traffic!

I was also surprised by how many people live in SF and commute by Caltrain to offices in the south bay. Sort of "maximize my housing cost AND my commute time."

As someone who rides from the fourth most popular station (Sunnyvale) I find that even if it takes a bit longer on CalTrain to get to work, the fact that I'm not fearing for my life on 101 makes all the difference in the world.

>I was also surprised by how many people live in SF and commute by Caltrain to offices in the south bay.

man, when i came 15 years ago here (after living for years in a real city - St. Petersburg Russia), i was staggered that people choose to live in the "backwater villages" like PA, MV, SV, etc... instead of living in a nice vibrant city SF. Well, today i own in a "backwater village" and SF is too young and vibrant for me, and the once in a year or two ride in CalTrain reminds me about my youth and all the time spent in the public transport back then :)

It's a real shame about the monthly suicides, otherwise it would almost be a reliable train service.

This is especially true on the Caltrain baby bullets. Outlets and tables galore!

I took an afternoon baby bullet last week and they were running it using the normal gallery car equipment. I was worried I had accidentally gotten on a very late local train instead.

The future is here it's just not evenly distributed, as they say. Besides a bubble either bursting or continuing to inflate it seems likely that mature tech companies like Yelp, Twitter, Salesforce, and others will realize they can't afford to keep paying their average developer $250,000/year and relocate people to cheaper second tier cities. Yes, you need superstars wherever they are but instead of treating everyone like a superstar can you differentiate between mission-critical and non-mission-critical roles and locate them appropriately? I haven't seen this happen yet but it makes sense that at some point it would, due to the diminishing quality of life in the bay area. Or do they wait for the capital markets to turn on them before doing this?

As long as big tech makes big bucks in the Bay Area, the money's gonna want their labor within arm's reach. Remote work has its place but for most companies you can't have your cake and eat it - remote is either all or nothing. That leaves local employment. Paying a quarter million to a developer seems like a lot, until you compare the efficiency gains of keeping everyone in one place.

I think the real issue with Silicon Valley's future isn't financial, it's cultural. I believe it is rapidly becoming a second Wall Street: the place where young professionals tough it out for a few years until their bank accounts and resumes are good enough for a more fulfilling job in a cheaper and more preferable location without the cost and the crazy.

The Bay Area is a great place to make money, but is it truly a great place to live? Strip away the nice weather and trendy restaurants, and it's hard not to notice how much of the communitarian counterculture that peaked in the 60s has been, like so much of the world today, eaten by software.

I think it's a fantastic place to live, albeit expensive. I don't go to trendy restaurants, but there's a lot to do in the area. Lots of hiking/running/mountain biking opportunities. Don't undervalue the nice weather; it's a lot less enjoyable to do most outdoor activities when the weather is crappy or unpredictable. Easy access to the ocean. Relatively easy access to the mountains, assuming they get snow again. I'm a motorsport enthusiast; lots of great racetracks and mountain roads for cars+motorcycles.

While I don't disagree with you, I do want to make clear for the sake of argument that those mountains were there before the microchip, and they'll remain for a very long time. My point is that a big money monoculture is a great way to homogenize and wash out a cosmopolitan culture. The homeless might remain, but the hippies are long gone...

The hippies are starting to die of old age, anyway.

San Francisco is a city defined by successive invasions.

"The Bay Area is a great place to make money, but is it truly a great place to live?"

SF now costs about the same money as living in Manhattan. I suppose you might value the "theoretically outdoorsy tech-bro/bro-burner" lifestyle here enough to pay New York City prices for it, but you're definitely getting ripped off in terms of everything else: from food to culture to social life, New York is a dramatically better scene. Like 10x better. It isn't even close. And if you truly value mountains and great weather and whatnot, there are lots of cheaper places to get that.

Somewhat related: the little statistical summary they slipped into the end of the article noted that 60% of the caltrain riders are men, and 50% are single. Hope you like celibacy, young tech dude! Keep livin' the dream!

It's terrible here, stay away :)

Proximity to the outdoors are just one reason people like living here (even if they aren't bros or bro-burners whatever that is). The food's endlessly great and people generally seem content with the culture/social life. That doesn't mean Manhattan is bad- it has a lot of great things. Different strokes for different folks. If you feel your SF dollar is worth 10 Manhattan dollars, act accordingly. It's worth noting the software jobs pay less well there, and there's a smaller community which has it's plusses and minuses (like being at a large school vs a small school).

Not all men are into women, and not all single people are celibate. Enjoy the snow :)

I've lived here for nearly a decade. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone at these prices. It's not that one SF dollar is worth ten Manhattan dollars, but rather that people are paying Lamborghini prices for a Mini Cooper and congratulating themselves on the purchase.

The bay area is definitely a world leader in smugness and self-satisfaction. The restaurant selection in SF is perhaps on par with the east village, but more expensive and provincial. It sure is "endlessly great" not to be able to get decent food after 10pm!

Also, you're wrong about salaries.

I've lived here for a decade, and am yet to tire of the food. There are more places to try than time and energy, new ones opening all the time, and plenty of great food from nearly every culinary tradition. Ukranian? Burmese? French? You name it, you can get something pretty decent or better in the Bay. Yes, just like NYC.

Whether or not it's valuable to live here depends on a lot of factors. The general advice tends to be of little value- like telling people where to go to college.

There's a lot of smugness here, sure. And SF has no monopoly. In Manhattan, I've met plenty of people that think they're at the center of the universe and the peak of civilization. Some that grew up there and never left and don't understand why anybody should see what else there is.

If you know where to look, you can find decent food after 10PM. Yes stuff closes early, it's true, and it'd be great if you could buy alcohol until 4am like Manhattan.

"Also, you're wrong about salaries."

Any data? Any explanation?

> There's a lot of smugness here, sure. And SF has no monopoly. In Manhattan, I've met plenty of people that think they're at the center of the universe and the peak of civilization. Some that grew up there and never left and don't understand why anybody should see what else there is.

When I lived in London I feel like a I regularly ran into New Yorkers who would roll their eyes at the mere mention of an American city that wasn't New York. Certainly SF has the lock on tech douchebags but NYC is unrivaled in civic arrogance.

It's justified. People draw comparisons between SF and NYC, but it only serves to underscore the fact that they know absolutely nothing about what they're comparing.

One is a world-class city on par with London, Paris or Tokyo. The other is a mid-sized American city with nice weather and small-town infrastructure, and a notoriety that accidentally exceeded its potential in the 1960s. The main reason it's the epicenter of the tech world today is because it's the closest thing to culture that silicon valley gets. And I say that as someone who loves (or used to love) this city. It's simply not worth paying New York prices to live in Nerdistan sur Mer.

I think what we've learned today is that New Yorkers and San Franciscans are both equally deluded about the quality of life in their matchbox lofts.

> The bay area is definitely a world leader in smugness and self-satisfaction.

If anything is neck and neck with it, I would say it's NYC. To some of the people I knew who came from NYC, that fact almost formed the entirety of their identity.

"Single" probably means "not married," which doesn't mean celibacy (unless that's your thing).

By average developer do you mean in terms of general deveoper skill or in terms of average salary? I'd be surprised that even that the companies you list, the average salary for developers is 250k. And I'd be even more surprised if it's the median salary.

It's close to that when you factor in benefits and perks. That said, proximity has a lot going for it, and software is a high margin business. I don't see companies moving away from the Bay Area any time soon, and I don't see developers salaries falling soon either.

It might be, but it's still hard to believe. Has anyone written a blog post with some reasonable napkin math? Some breakdown of a prominent company of engineers by salary range?

Fully agree, a lot of software will be entrenched in the Bay for decades to come.

Maybe look at glassdoor: http://www.glassdoor.com/ ?

I feel like Oakland is the place to be right now. It's super convenient to the city. BART isn't the worst thing in the world -- it gets you where you need to go. Housing prices aren't too bad (I'm paying $1k for a 1 bedroom). Traffic isn't too bad. Office prices aren't bad either -- the startup I work for got a great deal on real estate.

The parts of Oakland near BART are either not that cheap or Fruitvale levels of get-shot-for-not-being-poor.

You are nuts. Crime in east oakland is almost entirely "poor people vs poor people".

I was exaggerating for effect. Parts of east Oakland are definitely the kind of place where you might get mugged for looking like a techie and carrying a laptop.

Perhaps the low property prices are due to the high crime rates?

I'm down for high crime if it keeps the yuppies at bay.

Really? You don't give a shit about personal safety or your possessions?

I live in a (practically) zero crime area that has no yuppies and is very cheap. It's nowhere near SFO :)

To anyone who doubts this direction, come to Portland, aka Bay Area 2. While you're here, ask local realtors how many homes sold to Californians in the last year.

It rains all year in Portland-- and it's cold. Artisanal is just another word for amateur. Wages are low. This is bad advice -- do not move here.

Wasn't advising, just stating the facts: people are coming here from the Bay Area in droves.

    paying their average developer $250,000/year

Are these really the kinds of salaries you get in SF/SV?

No, but the prevailing myth is part of what a previous commenter referred to as the area becoming the new Wall Street. All the carpetbagging MBA types I'm acquainted with who would've gone to NYC/London in the go-go mortgage bubble days are here now. It's the logical place for a talented young person with hustle to go and try to get some.

Some people do but they are expectational and not average. It'd be interesting to know but I don't think there is good data.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-eng...

I know brilliant people who live 5 to a 2br in SF despite being all on Tech salaries. As long as people think that this is the living arrangement they want, companies will be able to get away with hiring people in a housing shortage here.

I think about this quite often. Perhaps a more effective argument for this effort is social impact (rather than financial savings). The tech industry is reeking havoc upon lower income earners by rapidly increasing the cost of living. Ironically, many of these companies are social minded and have programs to assist those in need from a day-to-day perspective (i.e. free meal, cleanup projects, etc etc). However, the elephant in the room is that they've done far more damage than is possible to rectify via charity.

Which comes back to the social argument: if tech companies proactively migrate these highly paid tech workers to other municipalities, it could significantly reduce the pressure on rent and home prices. The initiative could be sold as a massive goodwill effort to the local community. And, of course, the employees who willingly move away would get rewarded with a much lower cost of living.

Why is it the tech industry's fault? It's a good thing that the industry is prospering. Would you rather have people losing their jobs? However, it is a bad thing that the housing supply is not keeping up, leading to high rents. There needs to be way more housing supply. This is the obvious solution that is somewhat of a third rail issue due to local politics and homeowners. The fact that even Palantir employees have lobbied for more housing in Palo Alto shows it is really affecting everyone who doesn't already own a house or condo, even those well off.

Also, it's not like the area isn't benefitting from prosperity through taxes. Why is it a company's responsibility to donate for cleanup projects when their taxes already pay for such things? If there should be more meal programs in a city, the city can vote for that, and fund it through taxes.

The correct thing to do is build a shit ton of housing. But that will never happen politically. So I was simply offering a solution that might be attainable.

Wrong, building housing as a means to reduce housing prices is a huge misconception. If a low-rise neighborhood sees the construction of a mid-rise condo building, you've suddenly raised the opportunity cost of not having dense housing, and prices go up regardless.

EDIT: Apparently I'm being downvoted without comment. Great way to further the dialogue. Well, I will: I live in a college town and when developers promised a decade ago that replacing houses with high rises would lower housing prices, well, they built the apartment blocks and prices still went up across the board, by a lot. I'm not talking out of my ass, here.

As long as demand outstrips supply, prices will go up. How much depends on how big the gap is. Government action can try to limit this (subsidizing construction in nearby areas, improving public transit to areas with more room to build, slashing police budgets to increase the crime rate....) but it only works if it can shift the demand.

> slashing police budgets to increase the crime rate [to reduce housing prices]

That sounds interesting -- can you point me to any documentation about this practice, or are you just brainstorming?

It's simply a matter of supply-and-demand economics. Supply is going up, but demand is going up even faster, like one or two orders of magnitude faster.

San Francisco's population has been growing at about 900 people per month for the past few years. San Francisco's housing stock has been growing at about 150 units per month. Approving new housing is way too hard, and the economically illiterate voters just throw up even more roadblocks to housing (e.g. Proposition B, passed by 14% of San Francisco's registered voters in a very-low-turnout June 2014 election).

Tall buildings also cost more per unit to build, which needs to come out in the price. But the way I see it, 1 unit of rich person living in a luxury condo is 1 unit of rich person not out-competing a middle-class family for a little house in a boring neighborhood.

Again, the reasonable expectation and misconception. When you have a remarkably elastic demand for housing (tech workers and college students WILL pay), then it signals to property owners that they can raise rates by a few ticks. Like I mentioned above, if you create a ton of prime housing stock and charge a ton to live there, then you've effectively moved the goalposts and set the new normal for rent. So while that rich person may not live in the boring neighborhood, the middle class family will have to pay more to live there because of the presence of proximate wealth.

Economic illiteracy, Exhibit A.

The definition of elastic demand is that there is change in demand given a change in price. College students and tech workers, who will pay anything for their place, are examples of demand inelasticity. The demand keeps going up, despite the price.

Though, I suppose you have a point, considering the global market. There are enough houses in the United States for everybody to live. It’s just that more people want to live in the Bay Area than in Detroit, so we’re double- and quadruple-packed here while entire neighborhoods go empty there. And then, skyrocketing house prices attract speculators, who will bid against people who actually belong here and keep the price rising as long as possible.

The missing bit is that that first dense housing signals unmet demand. The real keys are:

1. is to keep on going with the dense housing to saturate.

2. a city council that insists on below-market-rate housing be included with the development

3. layer cake development: bottom floor is retail, middle is office, top floors are apartments/hotels + below market rate

This prevents developers from cherry-picking the highest demand usage for their building at the expense of the total needs of the community.

I would say the havok is caused by NIMBYs + rapid economic expansion. For example, there are no height minimums for new construction in the bay area, but constant height maximums.

Would this havok occur in a building friendly city, such as Dallas? They have encountered a recent economic boom due to oil, but you don't hear many complaints of rapid price increases.

Yup. The Bay Area needs to start aggressively building up. The people already there have to give it up and realize their little California suburb isn't that anymore.

Those scared that building up will lower their property values need to relax. Population density will bring more value and thus more desire to live in an area raising the property values of locals. A house that sells for 1.5 million right now could be sitting on a piece of land worth 50 million if a high rise wanted to use it.

So, we need to vote. San Francisco’s stupid direct democracy system means 14% of registered voters voting in an off-year primary election (June 2014) are now forcing everybody else to have to come out to vote yes on Proposition D this November in order for the Mission Rock housing project to get off the ground.

We also need to defeat Proposition I. A moratorium on new housing permits along with more “studies” is exactly not what we need in this housing crisis.

I haven’t looked at the other propositions enough to have an opinion to relay about those, yet. However, you can be sure that the anti-growth voters will be out in force, and we need to come out and vote for more housing.

Problem is, something like %40 of the bay area are immigrants, and a good chunk of them cannot vote. I don't even know if it would be legal for them to participate in the political process through promotions and so on.

Maybe a proposition to allow immigrants to vote in city politics might be good too.

height minimums would be great.

It's almost disgusting walking around ~8th st soma and seeing single story car maintenance places or strip malls take up entire blocks. Tear them down and build rows and rows of 5 story to 20 story apartments.

As for Dallas (err... THE METROPLEX), it isn't a peninsula with restricted growth, crappy highways, and old money refusing anything new that doesn't look like a quaint bombed out city from the old country. I still don't understand why south san francisco looks like a 3rd world country. Eminent domain the whole area and build neotokyo on top of the existing shanty town.

Indeed. Unfortunately there is a lot of pushback on anything that increases building height. I've received notices in the mail urging residents to oppose new constructions that could set a "dangerous precedent" in this regard.

Argh.

But it's "the city"!

It's havok upon more than just lower income earners. That is the most ironic part of it to me, the tech industry is doing this to itself, like a dog trying to chew off its own tail. When you're earning a lot and spending a lot you feel like you are doing well, even if your net savings is close to zero. I've found this attitude especially prevalent among younger folks. The real beneficiaries in a gold rush are the landlords, the government (more taxes), and vandwellers who can effectively arbitrage the high wage-high cost of living gap.

> The real beneficiaries in a gold rush are the landlords, the government (more taxes), and vandwellers who can effectively arbitrage the high wage-high cost of living gap.

Another issue is that there is quite a bit of an income gap within the tech industry itself. Yes, a $100k salary out of college is fantastic, but the cost of living is so ridiculously high that it's almost impossible to buy decent housing here unless you already have old money (which I don't). My parents had an easier time in the 1970s buying a house with their lower salary (adjusted for inflation) than I do now in the Bay Area.

Conversely, many of my hip millenial techie peers are willing to blow their entire salary living in San Francisco, going out to eat every night, driving up their credit cards. I don't have enough fingers on my hands to count the number of folks I know who make six figures and spend 70%+ of their income on rent alone just to be around their friends.

You need to work a company that will pay you in liquid equity. I suppose cash bonuses would also work. You only need 5-10% down payment.

Couldn't agree more. This is the consumer version of a business that focuses on revenue while ignoring profit margin.

This is an option right now, almost all big tech companies have offices in Seattle Austin or Boulder. People just want to stay in San Francisco.. Its a great city to live in both when you are a fresh collage hire and if you are trying to raise a child.

I assume you meant not a great city if you're trying to raise a child?

Between the insane rent and child care costs... it's just not worth it. ~$4k/mo for a 2 bedroom and then you're looking at $1k+/mo for one kid in daycare. I've been living in SF for the past five years and despite how much I like it, I'll probably move out with a baby on the way.

I have two kids and I live in SF. I'm just a regular old developer too. For day care you should probably be budgeting more like $2k, FYI.

I live in the outer sunset and I own my home.

Companies aren't proactively encouraging employees to migrate though. The employee has to ask for a approval, and if granted it's generally considered a favor.

"The ridership growth follows the trajectory of the Nasdaq."

If you look carefully at the graphs, it's actually a lagging indicator.

Which makes the hook, "Wondering if the Silicon Valley’s tech boom is waning?" meaningless.

Wondering if the Silicon Valley’s tech boom was waning a year ago? Check Caltrain ridership!

I retract my claim of meaninglessness!

> SurveyMonkey is planning to move its headquarters to within blocks of the Hillsdale stop

Right now there's a huge SurveyMonkey building across the street from Palo Alto caltrain, is that the current headquarters?

Palo Alto is a great stop because so many of the bullet and limited trains stop there. Hillsdale in comparison isn't served as well (only half of the bullets have a stop there in the morning).

If they're moving from 50 feet away from a great caltrain stop to "a few blocks from" a good-but-not-great stop, that doesn't support the article's argument very well. I guess as opposed to moving far away from any caltrain stop it's a good point.

They just moved into that office less than a year ago. I can't see why they'd be moving again so soon.

I was shocked to see they were moving out of Palo Alto so soon – but it appears to be true: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/08/17/surveymonkey-p...

Could they not fit all the surveys in there?

The typewriters were the issue

I commute daily into SF.

- The evening train I take (the 5:14 out of SF) is habitually late; we run into (not literally) the train ahead of us between Palo Alto and Mountain View; that train is habitually late too (it's the cause of the 5:14's problems; we usually hit PA on time, but the train in front of us is still in Mountain View when we should be arriving. i.e., the train ahead is arriving at our arrival time)

- it has definitely gotten worse since I started riding. I recently asked a conductor what the load was: that particular train was 100% oversubscribed: for every butt in a seat, there was another standing. Frankly, the car's AC doesn't seem to be able to keep pace with the summer heat, either. If there's a Giants game … well, it's worse. When the Giants parade happened, the line was out the station, snaked through a ton of stanchions, and then stretched more than a block down the road.

- rarely, I've seen passengers denied boarding due to load; but I see this much more regularly with bikers. I don't know if CalTrain takes this into account in its statistics. (I don't think I've ever seen some of those folks counted, especially outside SF.)

- they got some additional cars, but half-ish of them seem to still be sitting in SF. No idea if they're just not ready yet, or what… (also, the cars feel like a blast from the past when you walk into it, compared to the CalTrain ones. They look the same, but yellower… it's surreal.)

I've wondered if they wouldn't fair better if they had an additional (third) track all the way from SF to SJ. Trains could then pass, which I think might let you add more trains to the system. (Given how we're always stuck behind a train, I feel like the two-tracks are at capacity, train-wise, and you can only add so many cars before you exceed the platform length.) Not sure there's enough room all the way for an additional track, though, so this is probably a crazy idea. I wonder if it wouldn't really help with accidents though. (The first quarter of this year, for example, was hell… it was heartbreaking.)

Also,

> The annual Caltrain passes cost companies either $15,120 or $180 per user—whichever is greater.

Is that $180 figure correct? CalTrain charges my route $2,148 annually for a pass, and I'm not even going the full SF to SJ distance. (Granted, that's the low figure, so you need the ridership to get it… but still! It's a 91% quantity discount, if you get enough people.) (SF to SJ is $2,784 annually.)

> Is that $180 figure correct? CalTrain charges my route $2,148 annually for a pass, and I'm not even going the full SF to SJ distance. (Granted, that's the low figure, so you need the ridership to get it… but still! It's a 91% quantity discount, if you get enough people.)

Yup, when I still commuted via Caltrain I was pretty jealous of my friends who had this sweet deal: http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/tickettypes/GO_Pass.html

WSJ didn't drill into the financial side of the story. Remember five years ago?

"Caltrain has gone broke and will likely need to wipe out half its service — including weekend, nighttime and midday trains."

http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_14803959

Why is WSJ comparing ridership stats to Nasdaq? Correlation is not causation and this is a stretch.

Is Caltrain still powered by diesel?

I don't get why the trains running on Caltrain are so enormous and industrial. They're like something from a steam-punk comic book. Instead of a two-level leviathan with an entire car devoted to the engine, running once an hour during the day, why not do UK-style small trains with four or so carriages with engines underneath the passengers, running every 15 minutes?

When I first took the Caltrain I was worried I was accidentally boarding a long distance service that would run for hours because it was so huge and heavy, instead of a local stopping service.

How much energy does it take to get those things moving again at each stop?

Part of the blame is outdated train safety requirements from the Federal Railroad Administration. They like big heavy trains even for commuter rail.

https://bikeeastbay.org/rail/fra.html

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/modern-european-train-desig...

Southern Pacific back in the early 1990's was looking to abandon the railroad.

San Mateo County bought the right of way and formed a 3 county partnership.

Unfortunately, there is no dedicated funding source for Caltrain. So it is entirely at the mercy of the fortunes of Santa Clara VTA, San Francisco Muni and Samtrans. Each one of those agencies have as their first priority local service busses, light rail, and BART.

Caltrain gets the scraps (especially from VTA ) which rather spend Billions on BART instead of a penny on Caltrain.

In Seattle, the old rail lines through the city are converted to bike trails, or simply left to the weeds. Light rail is done by blasting a new corridor through the city at incredible expense, often paralleling the weedy old tracks.

Any ideas why they don't replace the existing tracks? The parallel tracks make sense: it seems rational to reuse the existing rights-of-way.

I bring it up now and then, and no explanation is ever forthcoming.

Like most people here, I know nothing about trains. But I do know that Caltrain trains are enormous, monstrous, loud machines that, on every departure and arrival, seem to portend the end of the universe. I grew up in New Jersey, whose train system is a hundred years older than NorCal's, and serves a denser population. And its trains are like the Concorde compared to Caltrain.

For what, exactly, are we giving California 10% of our income?

New Jersey Transit runs Bombardier two-level cars, very similar to the ones used by Caltrain.[1] PATH runs subway-type equipment through the Hudson Tubes.

Admittedly, Caltrain's power is dated. All those EMD F40PH units are a 1975 base design, built around 1985. It's a widely used, boring, reliable locomotive.

There's a plan to electrify Caltrain (25KV, 60Hz AC), but it has to mesh with both the high speed rail scheme and the Transbay Terminal scheme, which complicates it enormously. (There's heavy poltical pressure in SF from real estate interests to have the train station close to "downtown", or rather where "downtown" used to be. The Transbay Terminal is being built with the platform spaces for a rail station underneath, but without the tunnels to connect it to the tracks at 4th St. All that is in fill, below sea level, in an earthquake zone.)

Meanwhile construction has started on California's high speed rail system. Unfortunately, it only runs from Bakersfield to Palmdale, which is useless.

[1] http://www.njtransit.com/sf/sf_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=Tra...

> Meanwhile construction has started on California's high speed rail system. Unfortunately, it only runs from Bakersfield to Palmdale, which is useless.

Correction 1: Bakersfield to Fresno

Correction 2: This is the opposite of useless because:

  1. Bakersfield is ~340,000 people ; Fresno is ~509,924 people + the other cities between call it about a million now have much better rail service.

  2. CAHSR needs a flat straight section to do acceptance testing for train set delivery.

  3. The federal stimulus money required a fast spending this section was furthest along in planning and the least controversial

> For what, exactly, are we giving California 10% of our income?

So you can get better service than what you have today. Caltrain has no dedicated funding source and relies (too much) on handouts from Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco.

As a result, is is always short of money to really ramp up the service.

Hopefully high-speed rail money will change this.

Yes, although there is an electrification effort planned:

http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...

Current completion date is estimated at 2020, but it keeps slipping...

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