Growing Caltrain into an 8-Lane Freeway (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Growing Caltrain into an 8-Lane Freeway (2018)

caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com

30 pointsjseliger51 comments

For those interested in what Caltrain itself thinks here's their latest presentation on plans and expectations for 2040 (which was put out after the linked blog post): https://www.caltrain2040.org/wp-content/uploads/CBP_November...

Caltrain thinks on the high end they can get ~243k daily riders by 2040 up from the current 62k. That's actually a bigger capacity growth (3.9x versus 2.9x) than the blog is talking about although the blog only goes up to 2035.

I’d love to see the Bay Area agencies take the bitter pill and do a cut-and-cover for BaRT all the way down the El Camino from SF/DC to SJ. Alas, I know it isn’t going to happen, but it could and it’d be great. It’d serve more people and would be more convenient than Caltrain's right-of-way.

More cars? Trying to figure out how to get more cars on the road?

That’s been the plan since the 1970’s.

Maybe they should have built the high-speed rail like they wanted at that time. It becomes more difficult and expensive as the decades progress.

No, they're saying Caltrain would contribute the same as 8 lanes worth of freeway commuter volume. But I think BaRT would be a better solution than Caltrain, if they put BaRT down the El Camino as it would serve a higher pop and would be closer to pop centers.

I responded to cut-and-cover comment. He wants to bury the train and build a road over it?

I understood the article.

El Camino is an existing road. OP is suggesting adding a BART tunnel beneath it to extend BART service from Millbrae through Silicon Valley.

Does the soil support cut-and-cover? Most Bay Area homes I've seen don't have a basement, and I've always assumed that's for a reason.

Basements are expensive to build and the climate in northern california doesn't require you to build below the frost line like it does in the north. So nobody does.

Code doesn’t require it, and basements add building costs.

I would think poor ground strength makes cut-and-cover even more attractive relative to the alternative (drilling). For tunnels drilled under streets, the street is supported by rock/soil. For cut-and-cover, the street is supported by concrete and steel.

Maybe you're thinking that it's just impossible to have shallow tunnels at all with the type of soil? I don't think that's how things work, but I'd love to hear from an expert.

It's not just a bitter pill but a very expensive one. That's, what, 50 miles of tunnel at a cost of $300 to $800 million per mile (based on other US projects). That's $15 to $40 billion total which is a massive investment (BART's budget is only $700 million per year) and I somehow doubt even the high end captures the full cost (once NIMBY get's involved).

Cut & cover is not the same as tunnelling. The name says it all: you dig a deep trench (cut), build structures, then replace the road as the roof (cover).

It's typically cheaper and faster, as it requires very little in the way of special equipment or personnel. The downside is that it requires cutting up the road. The "bitter pill" here is the several years of traffic disruption that would be required.

Cheaper and faster does not mean it's cheap or fast. Traffic needs rerouting, existing underground infrastructure (water, power, etc.) needs to be handled, stations need to be built, ventilation needs to be built, etc.

The BART Berryessa Extension was above ground (even cheaper) and still cost $230 million per mile. So, yeah, I doubt cut and cover would be anywhere close to cheap.

Those are factors of all underground construction. Some of those are even factors of elevated or ground level construction, since utilities are rarely placed with foresight for things like tunnels, and you’re probably impacting road drainage and need to reconstruct wall to wall.

Cut and cover actually doesn’t really use ventilation; with enough openings to the sidewalk, trains will create a natural piston effect cycling air in and out of tunnels. That’s how the NYC subway operates.

>Those are factors of all underground construction.

Yes, my point exactly. Underground construction is not cheap.

If we are talking of things that might not happen, won't it be much cheaper for BaRT and Caltrain to unify, providing seamless transfer between them, and increasing Caltrain frequency? This competition between Caltrain and Bart is doing more harm than good.

Don’t forget amtrak (it’s been running on the 880 corridor parallel to the new bart extension for decades), or ACE.

For a nice visual of the fiefdoms, check out the map here:

https://www.seamlessbayarea.org (From SPUR)

Caltrain and BART don't compete except for the Milbrae->SF segment. I don't think that the Caltrain ridership would be supportive of what would essentially be a BART takeover of the system, because Caltrain is so much more pleasant to ride. There are a lot of reasons for this -- different demographics of the areas served, commuter oriented schedule, and the different configuration of the trains themselves. One of the biggest though is the positioning and attitude of the employees towards troublemaking riders. If you're making a nuisance of yourself on Caltrain, the conductor will come through and throw you off the train. There is no conductor on BART, and the station attendants generally don't leave their booths. It's to the point where you can literally shoot heroin on a BART train and nothing will happen to you. Try that on Caltrain, and you will be thrown off and the police will be called. The net result is that on roughly the same segment, Milbrae->SF, if I can get a seat, I have no concerns pulling out my laptop on Caltrain. I wouldn't even consider this on BART, and I am even cautious pulling out my phone.

> It’d serve more people and would be more convenient than Caltrain's right-of-way.

Does it? They parallel each other with less than a mile between down most of the peninsula.

Bart lacks tracks for passing (though this could be added in new construction), and the Daly City route is a detour for most commuters looking to go to Downtown SF, so it's slower than most Caltrain trains.

Caltrain's also been able to handle capacity issues better because they buy off-the-shelf cars.

It seems more cost-effective to grade-separate and electrify Caltrain and run the extension to the Transbay Terminal. And fix the Transbay Terminal.

You have to drill down into the tiny About link at bottom right to find that this is not an official Caltrain site at all:

"I do not work in the rail transport industry. I have no relationship with the CHSRA or any of its engineering consultants, whether personal, professional or financial."

Caltrain seems to be thinking along similar lines although who knows how much of this will pan out: https://www.caltrain2040.org/wp-content/uploads/CBP_November...

FWIW it's a blogspot post and doesn't look like an official Caltrain post in any way to me.

Yea, it would have been nice to have more author information up top so I knew who I was listening to, but I never was put under the impression it was an official Caltrain blog.

I find public transportation in the bay area to quite literally be an intractable problem. I've lived here for 31 years and there's been zero, and I mean zero real progress. BART received a warm springs extension and a couple (non-connected) airport trams. The highways are largely unchanged (excluding highway 237, maybe)

NIMBYs in Palo Alto, Atherton, Menlo Park, etc will block any true expansion or creation of public transit on the peninsula.

Reminder: we don't have electrified Caltrain because of Atherton.

Hence, I've made a decision - move elsewhere. Literally anywhere else has better public transportation. NYC/Chicago/Los Angeles/Portland/Seattle/Austin/Miami

I wish it would change, but your best bet is to simply move closer to work here, if that means leaving your single family home in Fremont to a townhome in Sunnyvale.

Another example: There's already rail infrastructure in place parallel to the Dumbarton bridge from Fremont to East Palo Alto / Palo Alto.

Plans were in place - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Rail_Corridor

We can't seem to get anything done.

> We can't seem to get anything done.

From a distant outside perspective, my impression is that nothing will ever be done, short of a cataclysmic upheaval (political or geographic).

The major barriers are that there is no single polity for the Bay Area and that there are multiple rail systems. Small polities resist mergers because they (correctly) deduce that their local wishes will be overridden by a wider collective need. Multiple public rail systems won't be merged. Unlike private rail, they don't have economic pressure to merge and have independent sources of existence (state vs federal legislation, for example).

> NYC/Chicago/Los Angeles/Portland/Seattle/Austin/Miami

DC and Chicago are notably absent from your list despite being better than all but one city on your list with public transit.

Pay these both a visit. And don't oversell Austin's public transit system :)

As an aside, it does fascinate me that DC Metro (WMATA) and BART were built from largely the same pattern and yet DC managed to rehab itself quite significantly while BART hasn't come close. We don't have nearly the same amount of NIMBY going on here, so your correlation might hold pretty well when comparing these two markets specifically.

> The highways are largely unchanged (excluding highway 237, maybe)

And excluding ~20 miles of CA-85 built in the late 80s and early 90s.

Which is an objectively terrible freeway.

> Reminder: we don't have electrified Caltrain because of Atherton.

Why?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Anti-high-speed-...

I spend a lot of time in all the major cities and what strikes me about the Bay Area is how geographically constrained the suburbs are. You basically get degrees of freedom to the South and North (and some in the East Bay) but unlike NYC you can’t spread out in all directions.

I’ve never formally studied this in detail but my intuition says geography led to many of the Bay’s housing and transportation problem.

When viewed through that lens this superhighway of Caltrain makes sense.

Not rocket science but thought I’d share.

Constrained geography is an important part of shaping cities, but it's generally considered by geographers and urban planners to be an enormous positive.

I'm curious why that's the case and under what conditions it applies.

Constrained geography means that, physically, you can fit fewer people within the same commuting time which means prices should go up faster given demand than otherwise. Given an external source of demand (ie: hot area for whatever reason) that seems a bad combination for a healthy city.

It suppresses sprawl. If you allow people to build (an issue on the peninsula) then you can provide services more efficiently with less environmental impact.

> that seems a bad combination for a suburb

FTFY.

Healthy city requires density - enough density means you got most things you need within walking distance.

Sure but then you get past that density into territory where the price per square foot means everyone lives in shoe boxes and/or is priced out. Higher density costs more money per square foot to build.

> I'm curious why that's the case and under what conditions it applies.

Hong Kong is a small, mountainous archipelago. Tokyo-Yokohama surrounds a bay on a mountainous archipelago. Manhattan is an island. Yet these places have the most skyscrapers in the world and are amongst the richest places in history on any measure.

Urban density has nonlinear effects. It relies in part on the pressure to build vertically and the ability to move many people horizontally.

>Manhattan is an island

Surrounded by a giant empty plain which people commute in from (as in it's population doubles during the day). And there's constant issues with wealth inequality, homelessness, living conditions for the poor, etc. Money is not the only measure by which a healthy city is defined.

I don't know if I'd describe NYC as surrounded by plains. It has the Atlantic on one side. Long Island is, you may have guessed, an island. Westchester and Suffolk are also pinched by the same rivers that constrain Manhattan. The densest parts of New Jersey that people commute from are variously constrained by the Atlantic, rivers and ports.

I cannot imagine that Manhattan would be anywhere near as dense without the Hudson and East rivers cutting it off from the New York mainland, Long Island and New Jersey.

> And there's constant issues with wealth inequality, homelessness, living conditions for the poor, etc. Money is not the only measure by which a healthy city is defined.

What's your definition of a healthy city, and why does massive sprawl satisfy it so well?

>What's your definition of a healthy city, and why does massive sprawl satisfy it so well?

Now you're putting words in my mouth, just because I don't agree with your extreme must mean I hold the other end of the extreme?

You need a certain population density to make mass transit really work (think NYC subways). Having a bay in the middle of the Bay Area makes the math not work. That, and cities' unwillingness to grow.

The causality is circular, though.

Without the MTA, NYC wouldn't be nearly as dense. Construction followed the lines, not the other way around.

It does help that NYC is a unified polity. If the 5 boroughs had remained independent it would be as messy as the Bay Area. The exclusion of Westchester, Suffolk, nearer Long Island and the parts of NJ out to say Seacaucus have a noticeable distortionary effect on the architecture of mass transit in the tri-state area.

> The causality is circular, though.

Maybe more reinforcing than circular, but I take your point.

> It does help that NYC is a unified polity.

It's comically bad in the Bay Area with so many local transit agencies jockeying for power. It's a miracle they were able to get a unified payment system built-out.

Something that I hate about NYC is taking a taxi from Newark to NYC. Newark taxis can't pick up in NYC, so they have to drive back to Jersey.

Beyond the morning and evening commutes, when there is standing room for the middle part of the commute, CalTrain is usually about 1/5th full during the day time, even when it only runs one train per hour. Something tells me "freeway lane" capacity is not limiting factor. The train is slow (San Jose - San Francisco takes over 90 minutes, or a little over 30mph). It is also infrequent with trains running 1-2 times an hour on the minor stops, meaning that unless you can schedule your day entirely around the CalTrain schedule, you'll be stuck waiting for it a lot. Fixing this will require more than electrification and CalTrain projects achieving 110mph speeds in 2040 (realistically 2050-2060).

We should shut down the HSR project (train from SF to LA), and redirect the funds ($77 billion) to improve regional transit.

When CHSR (California High Speed Rail) was approved by 52.6% of voters in 2008, the estimated price was around $40 billion.

Now that cost estimates are at $77 billion (and on track for $100 billion), voters should be allowed a "vote of no confidence".

Imagine what we could do with $100 billion.

San Francisco to San Jose is about 50 miles.

I’d say somewhere around 2060 that becomes a 20 minute commute. The future will eventually get here.

Or, once companies embrace remote work like they should, it becomes a 10 step commute from my bedroom to my office.

Has this person every y’know looked out the window while riding on a Caltrain? The cost alone to acquire the properties adjacent to the tracks would be astronomical

You do realize that this is talking about only using the current two-track rail geometry and not about ballooning the size of the track to that of a large highway?

Presumably, this could all be done without extending the footprint of the rails already present just by increasing the number of trains, cars per train, speed of the trains, or improving the design of the cars. Really, the beauty of public transportation is that you can get much higher density (and speed) than individual transportation if done correctly.

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