Caltrain's electrification project is paying off
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
https://communities.springernature.com/posts/train-horns-sav...
https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/2019-11/FR...
(Also, Congress is going to flip in two years. The only constant in US politics is that voters get bored of whoever's in power and vote against them in the midterms.)
I mean, sure. But this very article is about having built (erected?) electricity poles for those trains to run on.
Emeryville has no horn train crossings. It’s doable.
Switzerland took 20 years to update most of its 4440 train crossings to meet federal requirements. 97% meet this standard as of today. The reason for the upgrade was not to reduce the annoyance of horns but to save lives which it does.
There would be a lot more dead.
I've obviously only watched a couple of minutes, but there are no train horns. There's a mixture of urban and rural locations.
On other walks, there was a phone you were supposed to use (I did) to call an operations center to get a go ahead to cross.
Trains in Switzerland also have very loud horns and if they are inside the train station this can be extremely loud. However you will only ever hear them when for example some fool jumps the tracks or something that can be live threatening.
On construction sites generally they use a separate signaling System that isn't as loud but loud enough for the workers to hear. That is also temporary.
In my regular commute, which includes a local train and a regional train, there are two instances (exclusively on the local train's singular track). The regional trains I use have no level crossings on their tracks (all bridges and tunnels).
Suburban trains in my hometown have been electrified since 1920's. It only took about 100 years to start experiencing the future here in the Bay!
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDI19210907.2.17
Stockton Independent, September 1921
> Electrification of Lines to Be Looked Into by S.P.
> SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 6. — William Sproule, president of the Southern Pacific company, has received authorization from the board of directors of the railway to investigate the feasibility of electrifying the Southern Pacific lines between San Francisco and Peninsula points, It was announced here today. Better and more frequent service would result from electrification of the peninsula lines, according to parties who petitioned the Southern Pacific to take this action.
(Unfortunately, it was dismissed a couple weeks later: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDI19210917.2.13)
Life's weird like that sometimes.
Better late than never I guess.
>If you haven’t experienced the future of transportation for yourself yet, find out what everyone has been talking about
Hahaha
Infrastructure was built in 1920 or 1950. People still regularly pay with paper checks. Federal and state governments seem to operate mostly with paper files. And so on.
(If Elon Musk were serious about improving government efficiency, he would marshal his considerable software experience to bring departments like the IRS into the digital age supported by AI tools. That would amply pay for itself in reduced overhead and improved tax collection. But of course that’s not the kind of efficiency he wants — he’s looking to punitively fire bureaucrats perceived as leftists, not improve government revenue.)
If only that is all it was. It's not calculations and linking entries on one form to another that is the problem, it is interpreting the law. Suppose there is an allowed deduction for a certain type of expense. But the law doesn't provide a precise, actionable definition, it relies instead on "facts and circumstances".
Did you know, for example, that in U.S. income tax law there is no universal definition of a "trade or business", yet that distinction has a huge impact on how certain items of income are treated. So what do you do if you think you have a trade/business, but can't be certain given the information at your disposal. IRL, such disputes often must end up in a court of law to be decided.
Audits are currently performed manually, but the patterns of tax evasion are often obvious. Seems like a textbook case for AI automation.
Clothes dryers usually usually take 220V outlets, which an apartment might not have.
They are more expensive to purchase, and take longer to dry the clothes, but use much less electricity.
In practise, the massively power-hungry dryers of decades ago aren't very common, so my dryer is connected to a normal 220V outlet.
(Three-phase power in an apartment is now only used for the oven and hob, but is used in the building for the lift and the EV charging points in the basement.)
I can't rave enough. It's the most 'futuristic' public infrastructure experience I've had in the US. It's not perfect. It took its time getting built, the wifi can be choppy and frequencies should be better. But I prefer optimism. The new trains getting becoming crowded, and I'm smiling ear-to-ear. People are actually buying in !
Here's an Hindi saying : "Der aaye durust aaye" (Translated as : Let it be late, as long as it's well built.)
Most major airports if you arrive groggy at 5am waiting for your flight, you are blasted with a bunch of nonsense announcements that have nothing to do with your flight every 2-5 minutes "Keep your baggage with you at all times" "The USO is located...", etc. and in between the announcements loud music gets played. Trying to find a location away from a speaker is no good because there are speakers in the ceilings about every 10ft in a grid.
It surprised me when i visted SFO terminal 1 how much a quality of life improvement it is to just have silence in a public place.
tl;dr: nothing to see here just yet.
> The trains have also surpassed pre-COVID-19 ridership levels, with weekends becoming increasingly popular. Saturday ridership has increased 169%, and Sunday ridership has increased 142% since last October, the release said.
But weekend service is now twice as frequent (now every 30 minutes) which is a game changer, so it's not a surprise that those numbers in particular have shot up since they were pretty weak to begin with.
Take BART in the early evening, miss the last train out, take the bus back.
I did see electrics racing diesels during testing.
But they lost all restrooms but one, and guess how often that one stays open?
Big downgrade for folks with issues.
The curmudgeon in my questions where it really make sense for the Caltrain to exist at all, given that it:
1. It is extremely far from covering its own costs
2. The subsidy provided by the state is regressive because it principally benefits the wealthy commuters along the line
3. It imposes substantial negative externialities on the South Bay both in terms of noise & traffic delays at grade crossings
4. The line and stations occupy very valuable real estate that could be sold and put to better usesIt's just a stupid way to analyse infrastructure.
2. There have been ongoing efforts to improve equity, including Go passes for students and low-income workers. Clipper START offers 50% off for low-income riders, youths can ride for $2/day now. Side note: subsidies and programs like this decrease farebox recovery ratios, which is why transit covering its own costs is not necessarily the end goal. In fact, the decline of commuting for tech/knowledge workers (many who now work hybrid or fully remote) has meant that less-privileged workers have started making up a larger share of Caltrain ridership.
3. The new electric trains are a lot quieter. There's ongoing, long-term projects to grade separate the remaining at-grade crossings (of the 113 crossings, 41 still need to be separated).
4. Arguably, the stations were directly responsible for the land being so valuable. Many peninsula downtowns and sometimes entire cities were built around the train stations, 100-150 years ago. Pre-pandemic, some of the most expensive apartments were the ones near the train station. Sure most of them also had the benefit of being close to downtown restaurants, but there were also big developments around Lawrence station which has basically zero local services aside from the Costco and the train station.
Of course this was mostly in the past, but downtown areas continue to be congested and the only way we can keep building high-density housing is to have good public transit. In the long run, the train provide immense benefits to the cities that host them and removing it would be shortsighted.
- traffic reduction - emissions reduction - quality of life / time recovery of train vs driving - socialization of society
That’s off the top of my head.
Not saying those justify anything however costs are not the only factor.
And furthermore since Bay Area roads are not toll roads, the equivalent of farebox recovery ratio is zero, since road users don't need to pay to drive on the road.
iirc there are Japanese railroads that recoup their costs by owning real estate that appreciates in value once a train exists. In Los Angeles the great cable car conspiracy was kind of the opposite, real estate developers built a train to make the suburbs appealing, and then once all the property was sold there was no reason to maintain the trains so they were scrapped, bait and switch really