Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected
caltrain.com
caltrain.com
Between this, the new BART cars (also much quieter!), and Muni hitting a reliability & satisfaction records, there’s really a transit renaissance going on in the Bay Area. I really hope we can keep this going!
I get that there's improvement but like it's still rather pathetic compared to almost everywhere else across the pond.
More to the point, I've been favorably impressed with the transit options since moving here, and in terms of reliability it's been better than NYC, though obviously there are fewer trains/branches.
I'd love to see BART open later, like NYC, but even Tokyo trains stop at midnight.
Not being negative. Being realistic. It's unfortunate that being realistic often is negative. Transit here is garbage. You either luck out and live and work near transit or you're like most people and have to drive.
A couple million in energy savings doesn't mean anything compared to the amount wasted by cars.
At current population density all of our lives would improve if a network as dense as the tokyo metro appeared in the bay area over night.
It's probably not worth arguing about too much, because ultimately I agree with you that there's a lot more to be done to reduce car ridership. But pointing at those places and saying "copy them" misses a lot of structural differences.
[1] https://mta.info/about [2] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/0056b6a98b8b4a48869f822...
(Transit oriented upzoning, no parking minimums, and businesses in the station building.)
The Bay area (people) want top of the line transit, all of California wants it. It's similar to how Ethiopia wants to get out of poverty. Both places can't get what they want for similar reasons: incapability.
Take a look at the high speed rail. Probably won't finish in both of our lifetimes. People want that thing, what's stopping it from happening is incompetence.
Sure, everyone wants an easy commute where the train picks them up in front of their house and drops them off at the office, but they also want their house with yard in Walnut Creek. Or lacking that, their single family house in the Sunset.
Sure some people would be happy in a high density city, but do enough people want it to make it worth building? As dense as downtown San Francisco is, it's still a long commute to the Easy Bay or Peninsula from the Sunset or Richmond. Driving is usually faster and more convenient.
The reason we don't build more density isn't lack of demand (see: the price of rent), it is entirely political.
Much of my midwest family is that way - they couldn't believe how tiny my "city" apartment was that wasn't even in the city, it was a 1600 sq ft townhouse that was a 40 minute commute from city center.
It's going to take decades (or some catastrophic disaster) to get Americans to change that mindset and give up low density living.
>It's going to take decades (or some catastrophic disaster) to get Americans to change that mindset and give up low density living.
Bro, that catastrophic disaster is called global warming. And you can see the effects of global warming in the weather in the US. There have already been entire cultures and peoples uprooted from where they live because of rising sea levels. The luxuries we enjoyed living in cities designed for cars is bought and paid for with our future.
I'm sure San Francisco would love to have more billion dollar high density buildings, but can a developer sell enough million dollar condos to pay for them? Is there any evidence that it's zoning that's keeping more residentials towers from being built in downtown SF?
>Bro, that catastrophic disaster is called global warming
It's not a catastrophic disaster yet -- nearly all Americans sat at home in comfort watching the LA fires. People don't see a disaster if it doesn't affect them, then it's just a tragedy.
It is zoning that is stopping high density from going up. The house owners are stopping it. You. When you remove those restrictions you get tons of projects wanting to execute on that.
Look up builders remedy.
In the Bay Area, examples of "Builder's Remedy" projects include proposed developments in cities like Mountain View, Menlo Park, Saratoga, and Los Gatos, where developers leverage the state law to build high-density housing projects in areas previously resistant to new development, often by proposing large apartment complexes or mixed-use developments on sites zoned for lower density housing, particularly in affluent communities that haven't met state housing mandates; notable examples include a 200-unit project at 1920 Gamel Way in Mountain View and a large development at the Mountain Winery near Saratoga, which could include a hotel alongside residential units, all while utilizing the "Builder's Remedy" to bypass local zoning restrictions due to the inclusion of a significant portion of affordable housing within the project. Key points about Bay Area Builder's
Targeted areas:
Developers often target affluent cities like Menlo Park, Los Gatos, and parts of Santa Clara County, where housing needs are high but local resistance to new development is strong.
High-density development:
These projects often propose significantly denser housing than what is typically allowed under local zoning, including multi-story apartment buildings. Affordable housing inclusion: To qualify for "Builder's Remedy," developers must include a substantial percentage of affordable housing units within the project.
Local opposition:
While intended to address housing shortages, these projects often face significant local opposition from residents concerned about increased density and potential impacts on their neighborhoods. These are rich house owners who own a home and they are the 15% who oppose the 85 percent who don’t. It’s class warfare.
LA is your front doorstep and I lived in LA about two miles from the border of the fire.
Yeah watch from the comfort of your own home. Give it some more time and one day people will be watching you from the comfort of their own home.
Zoning rules are the evidence. Eliminate the zoning rules and let the market sort it out. No? Why not, are you afraid the "character" will change immediately?
You can have both. Tokyo is twice the size of the bay area. Density isn't the issue. It's incompetence.
Hence the term BOTH <3 things && metro>
My brother in law moved from Tokyo to where he could buy a house and yard in Chiba Japan, it's around 900 sq ft with a "yard" that's smaller than the deck on the back of my house. And it's still a 20 minute bike ride + 90 minute train ride to his job in Tokyo.
I don't know if you've been to many homes in Walnut creek, but a small attached house is not what people are moving out of the city for - if that's what they wanted, they could just move to the avenues and stay in SF
I don't think I'm overstating when I say that American style suburbs with large lots and large homes are not conducive effective public transit.
Public transit in Tokyo is largely underground. Density is irrelevant. If you have high density or low density above ground, this factor is completely orthogonal to whatever you build Underground. Understand?
>I don't think I'm overstating when I say that American style suburbs with large lots and large homes are not conducive effective public transit.
You, in fact, didn't say ANYTHING related to this matter. You simply stated it's not conducive without mentioning why it's not conducive. I disagree. You can still build it because what's above ground has nothing to do with what's below ground.
The fact of the matter is, once you build this, barring zoning restrictions, the density should follow. Right now the bay area is a political battle ground where rich people effectively price out poor people with zoning restrictions. It's a class based war where a luxury you want is impacting the lives of people less fortunate than you.
If you let the bay grow naturally and fairly then people with your "wants" should move to the country side.
Suburbia is also not sustainable for the environment. It's why greenhouse gases per capita in the US is the worst in the world.
My argument is that it's economically infeasible, especially in the USA.
Extending Caltrain to downtown SF is estimated at $3B/mile, BART to San Jose is $780M/mile. You can't spend hundreds of millions of dollars building transit to a neighborhood with 100 homes. It's already hard to serve those neighborhoods with buses, since bus routes are either long and slow that wind through many neighborhoods, or they are vastly underutilized.
It’s economically feasible. We have the most powerful military in the world we have the highest gdp per capita in the world.
It’s economically feasible. When I say we are incapable of building mass transit I’m referring to every single type of incompetency in existence except for economic incompetency.
You change the zoning laws it will be utilized.
I didn't think it was necessary to specify "under normal economic constraints and not a thought experiment where we can spend unlimited money on transit". I forgot where I was. Lesson learned.
I’m baffled at how you think it’s not economically possible when it completely it is. How does Tokyo even exists if it’s not economically possible?? It’s possible it’s just we can’t do it due to incompetence.
Just look at the high speed rail in California. That is a framed picture of American incompetence.
The problem is that Bart network will barely get denser. At the rate they're building it, your great great great great great grandkids will live in a bay area where most people don't need to jump on a car to get to work.
We can do better. It's not magic. But we don't. And that is pathetic.
Doesn't help that we're at the end stages of a debt driven real estate/rent price spiral. That means acquiring land for mass transit is twice as expensive as it should be. Ditto labor costs.
Also, if you check out smaller cities in Japan they don't always have as good public transit.
Heck, even in Tokyo you can find neighborhoods where you still need to walk or maybe take a bus because train lines don't quite reach them.
Fun fact: BART police has a large fleet of SUVs, with the highest vehicle-to-officer ratio in the bay area (if only there were some other way for them to get around!)
Fun exercise: compare the cleanliness of a Muni Bus/LRV to a BART car (even a new one at the start of the day). There is a huge difference.
why does a transit system need its own police force? Aren't municipal and county police enough?
Having people who have jurisdiction in any bart station is useful. And for example, consistent foot patrols are valuable to BART but not necessarily valuable to the city of Hayward, or whatever. As a concrete example, BART has more or less a goal to be able to put an officer on the car within a stop or two if you report on the app. That's logistically challenging for like a half dozen reasons if the bart police wasn't it's own org.
You would think that the counties could get together and work out an MoU.
1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Transit police, campus police, DEA, ATF, etc, etc, etc. Their entire job is to harass people that the equivalent generalist police couldn't justify allocating resources toward.
Irate homeless? SFPD won't show, but BART Police will.
Drunk college kids shenanigans? Normal cops don't care, but campus police does.
Weirdos making machine guns or huge amounts of LSD? FBI don't care as long as you're not trafficking, they got real crime with real victims to chase. ATF and DEA care though.
Wash rinse repeat this pattern for literally every bespoke police agency.
Yeah, jurisdiction can be a theoretical reason for these agencies but once again it's still a priority thing. When agencies care jurisdiction and coordination isn't a problem. Having one agency span multiple only helps if you're chasing stuff so petty it would get dropped.
I hate Reddit but having both in one image is really convenient.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x2d7v7/num...
Two of the biggest are Canadian National Police and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Police -- and those two are deputized, in both Canada and the US, with Federal, State and Provincial police powers. Despite being railway employees they can cite you for, e.g. speeding if they catch you doing so. Either on or off railway property.
An example of how it goes wrong is NYC. NYPD absorbed the transit police years ago and the role basically degraded to an overtime sink.
Also, with normal railways rails generate property taxes and towns often make deals where slivers of tracks get annexed to nearby towns or cities.
The firm that reupholstered damaged BART seats in the ‘80s paid people to slash them so they’d get more business.
It was estimated that "possibly 85 percent of the more than 7,000 BART train cushions damaged since August 1979" was the work of this company, the Examiner reported at the time.
All said and done, BART had paid the company $115,000 for the repairs, a total of about $339,128 in today's money.
Charlie Chaplin did it first https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izqhtBPd4VQ
I also agree that the governance structure for BART is weird and overly complex. Why do I elect a BART director? Why are they in their own special BART districts completely discontinuous from the 10 other ways we have sliced up the Bay Area?
All that being said, BART has done some good stuff too. The new cars really are way better, and they were not easy to procure since BART has its own weird, non-standard rail gauge. They have increased frequency and shortened trains on weekends to respond to the ridership changes.
Most of all, BART remains the only form of Bay Area transit genuinely faster than driving in real-world circumstances: it averages above 60mph in parts of the east bay, and goes from downtown Oakland to downtown SF in 11min, which is often 2-3x faster than driving. It's the primary transit system that can compete head-to-head with driving. For that reason, I do hope they keep increasing frequency (shortening trains if necessary).
(Also, while I am biased towards Caltrain, the new trains beat traffic on 101/280 San Francisco↔San Jose during rush hour).
There should be no elected school board, transit districts, utility boards, assessors, sheriff, and so much more. No one is properly informed about candidates for these positions.
For that matter, the Board of Supervisors should have no power other than oversight and impeachment. The Mayor should basically be a local dictator, with the power to do anything the State authorizes the municipality to do, at their sole discretion, with the oversight of an elected board.
Instead it removes accountability from public servants who can simply hide behind the “elected” excuse.
I don't think the gauge is a major problem. Train orders are always a custom project, few urban networks use exactly the same standards. Railroad manufacturers are used to different gauges.
In that case blocking the road and dropping in a new road bridge was affordable given the economic value but generally you put up with what you've got.
In practice I am not convinced the BART is severely impacted by their "weird" gauge (whatever is meant by that, not sure what their loading gauge is, for passenger trains the distance to and height of the platforms would be most relevant).
Stadler KISS series used by Caltrain is built at least in 3 different widths.
Auckland, NZ had (not sure whether still in use) rolling stock from the UK, converted from 1435 mm to 1067 mm track gauge, the loading gauge obviously was close enough.
Finland has engines (Sr3, Dr20) and railcars (Dm12) designed for smaller central European loading gauges. They look a bit tiny compared to other stock, but they are fully usable.
BART and Muni were great. My only complaint was that BART from downtown to SFO was almost painfully loud.
There are 30% more violent assaults on BART vs Muni.
> if only there were some other way for them to get around!
Do you want them to respond rapidly or eventually?
If anything that statistic you cited shows that their existing policies are not a deterrent. Perhaps because they are in their vehicles instead of on train cars where the crimes are happening.
So you're sure you can create a deployment plan that will have the correct amount of officers on station at all times? What if they need backup? What if two incidents happen at once?
> their existing policies are not a deterrent.
I'm sure their vehicle strategy has little to do with deterrence. Or are you suggesting this is the _reason_ why there is more crime?
> instead of on train cars where the crimes are happening.
Crimes also happen on the platform, the turnstiles, and the curtilage. I get that people want to be "mad the vehicles exist" but this is not sensible.
That said, there are lots of other stops in the area that are either overrun with parking, like you said, or are one story business districts with no housing. Lots left to do.
I suspect the problem might be mismatched incentives. ISTR reading that some East Asian transit companies own and develop the parcels on and around their stations, which provides funding and drives ridership.
That station (the Google Office MIT/Kendall one I'm assuming) was part of the larger redevelopment that happened in Kendall Square over the last 40 years which displaced a significant portion of Cambridge residents due to eh flawed 1949 Urban Redevelopment Act (the same one James Baldwin historically opposed).
Just go one stop inbound (MGH) or outbound (Central) and that level of synergy goes away.
A lot of this is because the T is just straight up old. Most of the stations are at least a century old if not older and it would take an inordinate amount of money to rebuild stations in a more modern manner.
> I suspect the problem might be mismatched incentives
The Asian as well as the more recent North American metro systems like BART or DC Metro are much newer (built or rebuilt in the last 50-70 years) and were thus able to include that public-private mixture.
I think the Bay Area suburbs are also egregious - e.g. North Berkeley BART station is surrounded by single family homes, even though it's 25min from downtown SF by train.
Not that electric isn't a huge step up for all the usual reasons but most of that is just because it's new and hasn't been worn out yet.
The Stadler KISS units are so much faster because they're EMU's (Electric Multiple Units), that is most of the wheels in a 7-car consist are powered with their own traction motors. An F40PH makes 3000 hp (2200 kW) while a Caltrain 7-car KISS consist can put out 9400 hp (7000 kW) continuous and about 50% more than that in short duration overload mode for starting. That's the reason it accelerates so much faster.
Traditional locomotive trains are completely obsolete in any sort of commuter service with frequent stops, there's just no way for them to keep up with EMU's or even DMU's. You can't solve it by just putting bigger engines on the locomotives, you wouldn't have enough weight on the wheels to make sufficient tractive effort.
If they can electrify the San Jose to Gilroy segment that will be even better.
Even Cupertino doesn't have a station ffs
So California, one of the forerunners in the US, seems to be roughly 90 years behind. Depends on your age whether you'll be able to enjoy a quiet train trip during your lifetime. </sarcasm>
Even today it’s not uncommon to de-electrify lower-volume rights of way.
They need to turn every road or pedestrian crossing into an underpass or overpass, or eliminate it. They've started on this process, but it will take many years.
The lights and barriers are assumed to be sufficient. Within cities, there may well be CCTV cameras (pointing only at the crossing) so the signal controllers can check the crossing is clear.
More video than you could possibly want:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hidjpkqJ0-Y
(I think the honk in the first one is the train driver recognizing the person filming? It's far too late to be for safety.)
The requirements for a no-signal crossing is essentially a pedestrian gate. The quote the city has for each crossing was if I remember right 1.5 million usd. And you’d need to replace many of them. The city doesn’t want to prioritize that much money. (FWIW I agree)
The worst thing is we have under utilized tracks going all over the region and no commuter train service. Even with the rail expansion prior to the Olympics (I’m near Los Angeles), the commuter rail is only being extended to the northern most edge of the city.
Neighbors have been fighting against commuter rail every step of the way. I’ll say attending local govt and rail proposal meetings is at once interesting, impressive at what some groups are trying to achieve and disturbing at the lengths people go to prevent change.
We (as Californians) have GOT to do better than this! There are huge infrastructure projects that we need to undertake in the coming years. We have got to cut the red tape and properly fund projects.
The hard parts seems to be figuring out (1) how to cut red tape for only certain projects and (2) figuring out what red tape to keep.
Chesterton's fence and all that.
edit: for instance, if you have e.g. an environmental regulation that is so onerous that exemptions must be doled out for something as sensible as train electrification, then you don't have an environmental review regulation, you have a 'build nothing except what the exemptor decrees' regulation. Which is rather antithetical to the rule of law and good governance.
Bureaucracies everywhere tend to protect itself, but California's is particularly vicious. There is a reason many of us call the place Commiefornia.
One major example which Marco first became popular with was that he owned a barn but wasn’t allowed to use it for the factory since it was a farm on paper. The government told him to move to a designated factory area. He argued that it made no sense since he was living in a very remote area, and the barn was of high quality. What else should he do with the barn? Why would he need to build something new somewhere else? The barn was there already and stood already for hundreds of years.
His most popular quote is something along the lines of “we can’t all sit with a Chai latte and a MacBook in a coworking space in Berlin and make the 5th dating app. We need some people who do that but not everyone. Some people need to make things with their hands! And for that I need space! I don’t need glass fibre. I need space!”
Of course it makes sense. Farmland is dedicated to farming and producing food/related things. It lacks connectivity, has fertile soil, prices are cheaper. If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc). It's the same reason why you can't farm in an industrial zone, nor can you set up a factory in the middle of the city.
Yes, it can be taken too far and abused, but absolutely 100% makes sense and must exist.
> If anyone can just build a factory there, they will have a negative ecological impact (interrupt animal flows, pollute in areas that are supposed to be cleaner, etc).
All true of farming. FWIW as a fellow NIMBY myself, I use the excuse of 'animal flow' (in particular the flow of bats) to prevent anyone from putting anything more than a fence up within 150m of my house. It's great!
How could this possibly be known without a review in your opinion?
> fellow NIMBY myself
Unless you're American, things don't have to be so binary. The choice isn't between nothing gets built or anyone can just do whatever. We need a balance.
> All true of farming
I'm pretty sure birds and bees and what not prefer having plants than factories.
By all means, have planning applications and a system to process them. Things don't have to be so binary.
Funny you say that. Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country, it's actually needed for a variety of reasons. There are subsidies to incentivise the "correct" crops (you don't want all farmers only doing cash crops for export, rendering your country very vulnerable to import markets to sustain itself), there are also rules/policies to rotate crops to avoid top soil erosion which could be devastating, there are rules on what types of pesticides can be used, etc etc etc etc.
"Everyone does it" isn't much of an argument when it comes to economics, the field is littered with a long history of group-think episodes where most people do things in a way that was, in hindsight, a mistake. And being steamrollered by more economically productive societies that don't ban progress. The modern policies developed countries adopted have resulted in vast investments in China (and Asia more broadly) to dodge the regulatory states that were built.
And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers! If we can't trust them to farm then putting regulators in charge isn't going to save us. That attitude of mother knowing best is still going to result in more misses than hits, even if confidently repeated a few times.
Strongly disagree. The incentives are just not the same. If farmers use pesticides which will kill all bugs and pollute nearby rivers to increase their yield a tiny bit, that's not good for everyone else. If they decide they're only going to do tobacco because it's very lucrative to export, that's not good either. If the techniques they're using are obsolete (and thus inefficient and resulting in them barely being able to survive against foreign competition) or very bad for the soil/environment.
Farmers produce food, it's one of the most critical things in a country. If things go wrong, there are famines or economical crisis (cf. Egypt, Sri Lanka in the last few years, Soviet Russia in the past century). Hell, many countries were couped to take over control over their farming sectors for commercial interests (Hawai, Central America and the Caribbean, cf. the Banana Wars).
I tried to do something and they stopped me. This is wrong, I should be able to do this and write my own story.
Which is a perfectly normal feeling. But if you end up saying that loudly in public without ever thinking, well what if the rule of "let this person do whatever they want" applied to people other than yourself, then that seems to indicate some lack of a wider view.
I never said anything about Wikipedia. For the record, I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and I'm skeptical about the new US government.
Please don't assume that because someone holds opinion X that they also hold opinion Y. With the current levels of polarization, it's probably a fair assumption to make, but I think we all as individuals have a responsibility to counter that.
And it's an example of somewhere I'd seen this exact argument against rules/regulation regularly made on HN stories and the comments on them in what I thought was a mostly non-political context.
> I brought up Wikipedia because it's something I'm interested in.
It sounds like Mr. Scheel is applying exactly that view. The idea is everyone should be able to use their remote farm shed for industrial purposes. Indeed, most of the intellectual foundation of the pro-freedom view is precisely that when you take a wider view freedom is generally better for everyone than authoritarianism right up until it becomes a threat to personal safety (even then, pushing the dial a little further towards freedom generally gets better results). If people can't do what they want, then how are things supposed to get done? If we're all doing things in ways that are believed to be impractical then it is going to waste an unreasonable amount of resources and be stupid.
How thorough were they being?
> We (as Californians) have GOT to do better than this!
We pay more taxes than anyone else in the country. /We/ are doing our part. The administration needs to be held accountable.
> We have got to cut the red tape and properly fund projects.
We need to light a fire under the administration and someone needs to take a wrecking ball through the state assembly.
... By the electorate, who clearly aren't doing their part if things like this keep happening.
Look at Switzerland - this is the land of trains, all reachable cities and villages have main train station at their heart, use is frequent, and its part of national pride (precision, coverage, cleanliness etc.). Yet prices are brutal, sure if you live here you can often afford it but it still hurts. The price keeps rising.
And I still use our family car for anything else but commuting to work (and even for that sometimes). Morning trains packed like sardines, in reality there are frequent (usually small though) delays which cascade. Car for 4 is significantly cheaper - I'd say 4x for full tickets, less with half/card but then thats 200 bucks a year on its own per head.
Whatever problems you are facing, I doubt that in US rail will solve all of them. Happy to be wrong here of course. I see rather some AI vans/minibuses ondemand hailing and sharing as way more effective and cheap solution. Small bus full of people has minimal env impact and can provide door-to-door transport.
Would it be cheaper with all the usual externalities priced in?
Cleaner forms of transportation should be subsidized. The fact that it costs me $8 to cross the Bay Bridge into SF but costs $10+ round trip on BART is a shame. Especially when you have two or three people in the car.
A similar project [1] is underway in Canada, but I worry sometimes it'll fall prey to the same administrative bog that the CHSR did. It'll be managed by a new Crown corp, VIA HFR, and from my understanding they're still taking engineering bids. I expect it'll be a while before shovels hit the ground.
A cheap, fast, and reliable rail from Toronto to Montreal would be a dream come true for a lot of Canadians. Any ideas on how best to make it a reality?
[1] https://tc.canada.ca/en/rail-transportation/railway-lines/hi...
>Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year
>...President Trump, [] can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.
>When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress...
(wsj thing https://archive.is/nFNp4)
You can just call it what it is and say Nazi salute.
Not "most," but a lot. From the article: > regenerative braking on the new trains is generating and sending back to the electric grid approximately 23% of the energy consumed by the system
Also, acceleration has no effect on the energy if you’re trying to hit the same target speed (unless there is friction, in which case you’d use less energy with higher acceleration)
[1]https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Yes, right this moment. You can see this here: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
> does decently well[1] on renewables
Technically it does decently well on combined "non greenhouse gas + renewables." This is a rather self serving categorization of generation sources and might not be what people buying "100% renewable" energy think they're actually getting.
In any case, subtracting Nuclear and Hydro, if more than half the kWh purchased in the state are purchased as "100% renewable", they cannot all be possibly served by renewables even in the aggregate.
The first is that at any given point in time, my instantaneous energy use is offset by renewables.
The second is that over some period of time (e.g., one month) my aggregate energy use is offset by renewables.
The second is MUCH easier. When people say things are 100% renewable, I generally think they mean the second thing. This is a bit of a fudge (not wrong but not 100% level).
Not 100% sure this is how Caltrain works but the fact that everyone is physically using the same pool does not imply that you cannot be 100% renewable if you buy from suppliers to the pool with the above properties.
(If there’s not, this is a free win and yay - but it’s the wrong focus)
At best you'll see an electric car renaissance. But the infra for trains and public transit? Doubtful.
Meanwhile, the current administration is trying to send us back to the 19th century in civil rights, healthcare and energy policy.
Many trains in London still don't do regenerative braking despite the technology to generate electricity from motion being around for... checks notes... 194 years!
Regenerative braking in cars also keeps a lot of brake dust out of the air. A pair of brake pads lasts about as long as the life of an EV.
I'm confused. Your phrasing suggests that you're adding in new and potentially conflicting information, but "many don't" and "some do" mean the same thing.
That happens rarely enough that most of the trains, most of the time, do not effectively regen, and instead use mechanical or resistive braking.
NiMH could have been attached directly to the rails.
Today, lithium batteries win for Watts per dollar, and perhaps custom made packs could also be attached directly to the rails.
But a cheaper solution is probably bidirectional inverters, allowing the DC generated by the trains to be fed back into the 3 phase national grid.
Unfortunately, all trains in London today cannot regen into the grid - they can only regen into the rails and hope that some other train on the same rail is accelerating at the same time to use the energy. By my estimates, that only happens less than half the time.
By the way, implementing regen on synchronous motors is relatively easy, IIUC, command a positive torque to the inverter and it draws current and line voltage gets pulled down. Command negative and opposite happens.
It has been working better than expected, possibly because the bad drivers were breaking a lot of other traffic laws and this one's easier to enforce so is actually keeping them away.
You didn't see the online crowds screaming up and down that it wouldn't do anything but pick the pockets of people? Many genuinely did not believe things would change.
When the needle is moving in the right direction, publicize that so everyone knows about it. That public info makes it harder if someone then comes around and suggests undoing/defunding or any other type of thing that stop the needle or make the needle move in the opposite direction. Keeping the info quiet makes yanking the plug very easy
does this make sense? let's round that 23 up to 25%, and say brake energy regeneration is 100% efficient (it's not): one quarter of the energy put into the system comes back out? city driving in a car, you might have your foot on the brake 25% of the time (yes, that's not how it works, just think conceptually) but a train spends a lot of time running, and comparatively a small amount of time braking, and if you were to detach the engine from the train, one doesn't get a sense the train would roll very far unpowered, so while there's momentum to scavenge, it doesn't seem like 25% of the total
I'm just thinking, how do these numbers make sense?
But to address your main point, the rolling resistance of a train in motion is tiny; basically all the energy cost is at acceleration time— it probably cruises at like 5-10% power.
a good comparison would be the invention of the travois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travois which benefitted from the addition of wheels.
If the moving friction is very low, it makes sense that not that much energy is used to move the train once it's at speed. Slowing it down would return some of the energy back (with the rest dissipated as heat).
But a commuter train, by definition, starts and stops a lot so it makes sense that a large fraction of the energy used would be for acceleration.
Even a model/toy train wagon can easily coast the length of a large room when given a push.
See how little metal is in contact, about 1cm²: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/17ysd...
There's very little friction.
Thats the key. Without the subsidy its more expensive and less efficient than carbon based fuel. In the long run we are worse off, because the subsidy can't last forever.
If markets actually worked for long-term decisionmaking and were therefore capable of pricing in negative externalities, then factoring in the cost of causing Earth to asymptotically approach Venus would change this calculus.
With further investment in energy storage it sounds like they could nearly cover a lost subsidy.
Moreover, the improved service from electric (faster acceleration and better air quality) seem very worthwhile.
Also, worth noting in the event the conclusions are extrapolated to diesel over the road transportation: train diesel is much less expensive as it's exempt from fuel (state and federal) taxes.
You're making the classic error here of not factoring the externalities involved - the pollution and other issues from fossil fuels. If they were actually being paid for then electricity would be much cheaper. Fossil fuels get a defacto subsidy by being able to pollute the environment without any cost.
That doesn't seem to be the full picture.
1) The most recent FY 2025 budget (https://www.caltrain.com/media/30699/) has fuel and lubricant expenditures expected to be $5 million. With electricity expenditure estimates dropping to $16.5 million, that puts total expenditures at $21.5 million. The diesel expenditures remain because the long San Jose <> Gilroy corridor isn't electrified and requires diesel locomotive service. Contrast this against FY 2023 expenditures of $17.5 million. That's almost a 25% increase in movement power expenditures.
2) There is increased service now. About ~120 trains run on the latest weekday service timetable (https://www.caltrain.com/media/34716), and 8 of them are diesel service between San Jose and Gilroy. Compare this to ~90 trains for weekday service in 2023 (https://www.caltrain.com/media/30027/download?inline), of which 6 are diesel service between San Jose and Gilroy. Conservatively, we have a 25% increase in service.
3) The new trains are faster. Hitting every stop between San Jose and San Francisco is 101 minutes on diesel and 83 minutes on electric.
So we get an increase in movement power costs proportional to the increase in service, all while having faster trains. I think it's a fair trade.
The subsidies are just gravy on top for a job well done.
EDIT: fixed 2023 weekday service link
- The gradients of the track
- How agressively you want to drive at different time of the day
- How many trains
- The timing of the trains. When one train brakes, it can power another one that accelerates at the same moment
- The efficiency of the power chain
- The resistance model of the train
With so many parameters the results can be quite volatile. However, rule of the thumb in the business is that 30% saving can be achieved with good energy management. Hope this clarifies a little.
Update: bullet points
Companies that build train batteries have been trying to sell to us (car OEMs) lately, and we look at the battery specs and battery management system capabilities and go uhhhh…
On the motor and control fronts as well.
On the battery front, using car-style or truck-style EV battery modules would be more robust and would reduce cost by somewhere in the order of 50%.
Instead, most trains still use induction motors (this is the high pitch whine you hear) and many train battery designs use industrial style rack mount batteries, with screw terminals, controlled by a massive PLC cabinet. In eMobility the controls are handled by a small safety-rated microcontroller.
The power system after the battery is similar to older model electric vehicles.
(There will be a battery for lights etc.)
[1] https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/velaro-evolution/
[2] https://www.ew.tu-darmstadt.de/media/ew/rd/ew_vortraege/0305...
a) it works better in a densely populated territory,
b) but the more people around, the more NIMBY cliques to throw sand into the permiting process, usually abusing environmental protections to do so.
If the new Trump administration defangs NEPA reviews just a bit - and I see no evidence that the original intent behind NEPA was to delay everything everywhere by decades - it might help, but a powerful YIMBY movement would be even better.
Once we get the ridership numbers up we can easily make up for the electricity efficiency.
Most if not all electric trains powered by overhead wires have regenerative braking that feeds back to the grid as standard, and Caltrain's new Stadler units definitely do. Nobody paid extra for regenerative braking, it's just the default way to do things on electric trains, to the point that it'd be weird not to have it. Even diesel-electrics often have a kind of regenerative braking, but they don't have anywhere to store the recovered energy so they just convert it to heat via huge resistors.
However, since this has been normal in Europe and Asia for decades, I doubt the additional expense is significant.
The above if done across the whole metro should get 30% mode share across the merto which would be world class. It would also cost about $200 per month per adult - which is a lot cheaper than a car - but still massively more than any city spends on transit.
My understanding is the electricity efficiency is really just a nice bonus (or perhaps justification) for making improvements that would also increase ridership.
I'm only loosely aware of the Electric Fleet, but my understanding is they add capacity that was desperately needed.
Get the rider numbers up and extend the lines. Thats the only thing we need right now.