California Transit Nerd

It’s got ferries to SF and we could do a bus lane though the Webster Tube
It’s also likely to get a station as part of link21

Unless E commerce starts doing rail between warehouses it’s still increasing VMT
There’s plans to make CC more frequent combined with east west smart and maybe some region rail to sac but each is likely to be at best every 15 and that’s a decade+ away for billions in investment

There’s so many options from old malls to places like Alameda NAS and Concord CNWS which are significantly closer, adjacent to high capacity transit and have mediocre density planned.

They don’t even have a strong early plan if they can’t get rail or it’s in a later stage like highway BRT to Fairfield and Davis where there’s existing rail service

The plans have flex space with vague statements supporting anything from AV pods to streetcars which doesn’t given me confidence.
The outside is wrapped in a 6 lane stroad that would make any planner in a traditional development happy
They barley added a stub end station area

I’ll happily though blame LA metro, OCTA, RCTC and SBCTA for the failure to hit even moderate goals. VCTC doesn’t even have any funding of its own. Although they are talking about expanding 101 right now which is insane

Given they still have not committed to a strong mainline rail connect and truly transit+ active mobility first it’s just going to end up being a massive VMT bomb.

They have basically 0 options to raise revenue themselves because they don’t own stations or parking lots, the class 1s kept the utility rights and they don’t own the tracks, the counties do
Its board members mostly use it to pad their credentials and not much else.

Blaming Metrolink is hard when it’s just a JPA made up of the counties without a dedicated funding source outside of a tiny amount of state money. Everything from capital upgrades to service is funded by outside orgs and they are too busy expanding highways

It’s been interesting watching all the old college campuses move from steam heat to hot water usually combined with a thermal battery. Stanford has cold and warm water tanks that allow heat recovery chillers to work more efficiently while Princeton is using geothermal bores as a battery

Existing locomotives can be modified fairly easily. It’s been outline for 40+ years how to electric or dual mode conversion

Class 1s do construction projects incredibly cheaply and given the scale could easily justify all the mechanization that lowers cost and increases productivity

Really frustrating how little the governor or the leg cares about transit. Construction costs are slowing transit to a crawl, but the governor watered down the SB 125 task force report and no one in leg wanted to take up project delivery reform. Meanwhile they want to pause the gas tax for one year.

Good blog post.

The cited 2018 ACT Line 51 report is really instructive.

Without quantified service goals, Oakland and Berkeley traffic engineers, business owners and planners effectively vetoed incremental and cumulative service benefits for Line 51 riders and no policymaker was held to account.

It's great that we passed a new regional transit priority policy, but it's unfortunate that it mainly focuses on requiring cities to get transit agency approval for road diets.

There are serious holdups getting all cities along a road to OK transit priority projects, which will need further reform.

US class 1 railroads like BNSF and UP are some of the largest single users as well. They could cut their diesel usage to zero in 15-20 years if they wanted to between wiring up and batteries. But instead they’ve got to hand Wall St billions each year

There’s a chance now for California and Washington to piggyback on the LD order for 10+ sleepers each needed for a sleeper corridor service.

Absolutely you need a mix of 2-3 daytime services and 1 overnight service

At 8 hours for Seattle to Spokane you can even offer a reasonable sleeper service

If only there was a rail corridor. Oh wait there’s 3 although the publicly owned one has been trailed. It’s just a policy failure we don’t run 4RT+ including 1 sleeper between Seattle to eastern Washington.

These are all so bad
This are some hella basic names some of which are historic that would be way better
Colorado Eagle
Colorado Zephyr
Colorado Flyer
Front Range Zephyr
Front Range Flyer

Congrats to America‘s class 1 RRs which will almost certainly blow this generational opportunity to collect market share.

Sounds great 👍

Reminds me I need to finish my blog on DB enhancement most of which should be fairly easy lifts like bus lanes already planned on Decoto, new higher capacity buses and probably hardest of all bus lanes on Willow between 84 and Middlefield
20 min service between 6am-10pm on both with hourly overnight

Given most of the non renewable is natural gas based which is something we have excess domestic production of I’m less worried about electric prices changing substantially.

a black and white British Rail poster titled "The argument for electrifying our railways, will become clearer in time." with four panels showing scenes from 1978, 1987, 1995 and 2005 with oil running out over that period

"The argument for electrifying our railways will become clearer in time."
British Rail, 1979.

At this time better to just go BEB given the infrastructure required

I know there was plans right as the line was first being abandoned because my mom moved out there during that era and my grandpa wanted it.

I still think in the mid 80s it would have been better to use the newly acquired SP ROW from Tracy to Niles for a half hour regional rail service over blue line BART

It could absolutely be done and doesn’t matter if they pick light rail or a small multiple unit.

There’s a couple of timetables up here

www.bartchives.com/bart-express...