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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Caltrain is functional, I guess, but it's one linear system. It doesn't even have express tracks. (It has a few four-tracked overtaking areas, but nothing pervasive.) Inside, basic electric power outlets are hard to find. Grade separation? Ridiculous fantasy. The route map hasn't expanded since 1992.

Yeah, they've electrified the system. Congrats, I guess? The system is still a glorified people mover. It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction.

Given Caltrain's route map stagnation and the worse fates of other CA rail projects, it really doesn't seem, well, grounded to reality, to suggest everyone emulate California rail's success. After all, it takes two days to grab a train from Seattle to SF!

If you want a half-decent model, at least look at NYC. The LIRR, Metro North, PATH, and the subway form something resembling a coherent transit grid.

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> It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction.

To be fair, the peninsula is basically a long hallway. I’m not really sure where else it would go?

I would expect a regional system to connect an entire regional area.

Caltrain connects two parts of the Bay Area: San Francisco and the South Bay. BART connects the entire East Bay to San Francisco. In a functioning system, they would both just be legs and not two completely separate systems.

The only place they connect appears to be in Millbrae and not near any large hubs.

They will soon connect in San Jose.

I wouldn't consider "soon" to mean ten years.

Six miles, 12 billion dollars, opening in 2036.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extension

What's the holdup? Do they need to source more 5.25 inch floppy drives?

Don’t forget the SF Downtown Rail Extension, planned since the 1990s supposedly.

https://www.tjpa.org/portaldtx/about-portal

https://www.caltrain.com/media/17998/download

Is the argument just that the MNR and NYC subway, or Boston's T and commuter rail, are better integrated than BART and the Caltrain? Seems pretty great now but then I remember before the renovations at 4th and King.

My argument is that Caltrain mainly connects the two most largest and richest cities in the SF Bay Area, which are both population and job centers.

It would be like calling the Google private shuttles a model for public buses to follow.

Long Island is even more of a long hallway than the peninsula. The LIRR manages to have multiple trunks and something like 10 different branch lines. One thing that made it possible is LI is much flatter terrain than the peninsula.

Your last sentence was going to be my reply. The peninsula is really linear along 101 / the historic el Camino. There really isn’t anything to connect to.

LIRR still had to do plenty of tunneling to build the East Side Access station though. Still, it opened in 2023! NYC is also still building the second avenue subway --- slowly, haltingly, and at near-ruinous expense, but it's actually a real expansion to the network is actually happening. By US standards, that's a miracle.

The main trunk lines are in Long Island are about 3-4 miles apart. Northwest of around Cupertino or so, the mountains edge too close to the bay shoreline for you to make a second trunk line viable. Your best bet would be plonking a line around about 85, but the right-of-way doesn't exist to actually hook that line up to the existing line in any useful way.

And outside of that, basically everything you'd consider plonking another path already exists with some service: BART runs up the east shore of the bay, as it does west of San Bruno Mountain. You have two mountain crossings covered by BART and one by ACE. The main missing things are curving BART back into San Jose and reactivating the Dumbarton Bridge.

I've wondered about running BART from Fremont to East Palo Alto and Redwood City via Dumbarton. Not sure what the ridership would be though. I looked at the Dumbarton bridge traffic and it's the least of the three bridges and pales in comparison to the bay bridge.

Still if you built that the gap between Millbrae and Redwood city is 12 miles.

There used to be a rail line that went closer to the base of the mountains but they tore that down to build Foothill Expressway and other roads.

If the ABAG had power, I would have them replace Caltrain with BaRT to make a it a loop around the SF/SP Bay Area and tear out CalTrain. Caltrain remains because the tracks are used by UP --if it were not UP's right-of-way, BaRT could have that corridor. BaRT could still work if they did cut-and-cover to build a parallel line under the Camino Real. Granted that'd be a lot of money today --they should have bought in back in the 60s. I know, hindsight and all.

The main issue then would be what to do about Gilroy --they can keep Caltrain for that like the ACE does for the East SF Bay.

Curious why lowercase a

Having BART more frequent running with more stops running next to Caltrain faster with less stops would be interesting.

> If you want a half-decent model, at least look at NYC

I don't have the data, honestly, but isn't NYC (and it's surrounding cities/suburbs) more dense than the Bay Area?

In SF (the city) transpiration is quite decent because it's dense; single family houses and public transpiration together is a very very tricky to pull; you have to choose one or the other and most people would rather live in a family house than an apartment/condo with good transpiration

It's insane that it's not connected to Bart. Or that it isn't Bart. Bart goes SF to San Jose in the East Bay but we have a separate system on the West Bay? It's all a sign of how dysfunctional California governments have been at all levels for a long time. A big part of the dysfunction in the Bay Area is because there are 100 separate tiny governments. If it were one big government, like NYC, we could have sensibly coordinated regional projects.

NYC here, our three disconnected commuter rail systems would all like a word :)

You should check Austin TX where they tried to do the same thing, but only built one rail.... So yea you have to wait like over an hour just for arrival if the train is at the other end. For what should be a 15 min ride because literally only one train can go back and forth. The train drivers sometime stop the train to get food at in-n-out burger too, seriously.

Its one of the dumbest things I've ever seen, a testament to inefficient bureaucracy. I'm not sure anyone uses it.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. A quick look at the schedule shows they do have multiple trains running in each direction during peak hours:

https://www.capmetro.org/plan/schedmap?route=550

But much of the length is, in fact, single-track, making scheduling hard and meaning if a train is late or breaks down it disrupts the whole system.

And it's honestly pretty silly to see a train with the form factor of light rail but diesel-powered.

Voters did approve a proper light rail system in 2020 but it's gonna take a while to build and has already been scaled back twice, sigh...

What I wrote is accurate. You are referring to a line that goes out of the city to elgin, a tiny town, that is the only part with two tracks. The part that serves the Austin area has only one line and is as I described. Hey what do I know I just lived next to it for 4 years, and drove to work even though I could walk to the train because of how terrible it is and would add 1-2hrs to my commmute.

Err... well... I live in Austin currently.

I'm describing the red line which goes from downtown to Leander. (The one I linked to.) If you're describing some other line then sorry for the confusion, I didn't actually know there was another rail line. There are plans to build a green line to Elgin but AFAIK that's still under construction.

The red line is mostly single-track, but there are several specific segments of dual-track allowing trains to pass each other, which is why they're able to support multiple trains in both directions.

It's still a crappy schedule -- even during rush hour it's still no more than two trains an hour. Supposedly they intend to start running it every 15 minutes once they add some more dual-track segments.

Maybe it was worse when you lived here?

Remember that Texas cities are having to actively fight with their own state and national level representatives, not to mention economic interests. It's not a "bureaucratic inefficiency" as much as it is active sabotage. That cities in Texas manage to get any public transit built is a miracle.

LIRR is embarrassing as a transit system, but sure.

But less so.

The history of US rail is that of tragic but distinguishable post-70s states.

> Inside, basic electric power outlets are hard to find.

what are you talking about, literally every single seat has outlets except the 9 in the bottom of the bike car

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