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#Caltrain

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TOMORROW!! Come join us at the SCC Government Center as we really for #SantaClaraCounty to opt-in to #SB63 and help get a massive amount of funding for #VTA, #Caltrain, #BART, and others! #publictransit

actionnetwork.org/events/rally

actionnetwork.orgRally for Transit in Santa Clara County Bay Area transit is struggling, and is at risk of becoming much worse. In order to meet our climate, economic growth, affordability, air quality, public health, and justice goals we need drastically improved transit service for Santa Clara County and the Bay Area at-large. Join community members and advocates for the Rally for Transit in Santa Clara County on Tuesday, July 29th starting at 6pm to pressure local leaders to “opt-in” to the 2026 regional transportation funding measure - preventing dire cuts and improving service for Caltrain, VTA, BART, and other transit agencies. We will be meeting at the Santa Clara County Government Center. If Santa Clara County doesn't “opt-in,” transit agencies serving the County will be forced to slash service: stranding riders, clogging our roads, fouling our air, and stalling our economy. Residents will be left with worse transit service and it will be much harder to implement the rider-focused changes that make transit significantly better. This is an important moment because right now, elected officials are still on the fence about whether the County should join a regional funding measure that the East Bay and San Francisco are already participating in. With San Mateo County also weighing whether to join, Santa Clara’s choice is even more crucial. You're encouraged to wear any Caltrain, VTA, BART, or other public transit attire you may have to show our representatives that riders are watching! Co-hosted by Santa Clara Transit 4 Transit, Transbay Coalition, Friends of Caltrain, and Seamless Bay Area.
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@Essanay If you're not in the South Bay, you might be thinking "I don't want to go all the way to San Jose to get my film done", but if you take #CalTrain and bike over, you'll be surprised how many opportunities for good pictures DTSJ presents. I'm kind of looking forward to fall and winter so I can get some good low-light theater marquee pictures without having to be out too late.
If you're in the East Bay, #SFBart may still be years from getting all the way there, but biking from Berryessa isn't that far. Japantown is on the way so plenty of good food options.

Watching the Caltrain go by with their stupid high-efficiency higher-speed electrification and their stupid fancy new double decker cars without the wasted space of the old galley cars is making me SO MAD. :babyrawr:

STOP BEING SO FANCY. *glares at it but double glares at Illinois for Metra being underfunded outdated trash* :vlpn_angry:

...choo choo 🚂:neomouse_train_wagon:

Been waiting on #caltrain at the Hillsdale stop for about 20 minutes, and I figure it's as good a time as any to say:

If you're struggling, help is available. Tell someone - anyone! You're not alone.

Passing through Santa Clara station on a train yesterday, I noticed that a lot of the decomissioned and colorfully-graffiti'ed #CalTrain rolling stock has been move to a place where it's more visible from the station platform. So one can get good pictures without risking life or arrest.
The suncalc.org app is very handy for figuring out when a location will have good lighting.

America’s most-improved regional rail line

Twenty-five years or so of traveling to the Bay Area for work and for family have not left me in the habit of handing out compliments to rail transit there. Between the limited route maps of Bay Area Rapid Transit and Muni Metro and the horribly expensive construction costs of projects like San Francisco’s 1.7-mile, $1.6 billion Central Subway, public transport around the Bay has too often served first as a lesson to others.

More recently–especially since Google moved its I/O developer conference to Mountain View in 2016–I’ve gotten acquainted with and also unimpressed by Caltrain’s commuter-rail service on the peninsula, run with trains hauled by aging, loud and polluting diesel locomotives. But this week’s I/O trip introduced me to a reinvented rail line that the rest of the U.S. should envy.

Between last May and this May, Caltrain completed a lengthy modernization project to string electric wires over 51 miles of track from San Francisco to San Jose and buy electric-multiple-unit, double-decker trainsets from the Swiss manufacturer Stadler.

So instead of waiting for my ride south from Milbrae to groan its way up to speed on Monday night, this train (packed with Giants fans on their way home from that night’s game) quietly whooshed out of the station. That faster acceleration from every stop helped my entire trip from SFO to Mountain View, starting with BART from the airport, take less time than just last year’s Caltrain ride from Milbrae to Mountain View.

Bunking down in an Airbnb four blocks from that station for the next three nights provided another reminder of how much better electrified trains are: I didn’t hear the roar of diesel engines, leaving just train horns at the nearby grade crossings.

Less obvious but also appreciated: the immense drop in air pollution at and near stations as well as onboard train cars.

My return trip up the peninsula Thursday morning, one of four northbound departures from Mountain View between 8 and 9 a.m., was as great as the ride down. Other passengers seemed to agree about the usefulness of the service, with the train looking as crowded as Monday night’s. Caltrain’s fare date for April showed a more than 50 percent jump in ridership compared to a year ago, outpacing growth at every other transit agency in the region.

(Bonus: the fastest train WiFi I’ve enjoyed to date.)

Outside the U.S., this is not that special–fast, frequent, electric-hauled trains are the default for regional rail service across Europe. But in most of the States, the best you can get outside a subway’s service area is a diesel engine, hopefully built in the last 15 years, hauling passenger cars. This trip to the Bay Area reminded me that we don’t have to accept that level of sluggish, noisy and dirty service as good enough.

We can, however, do better than Caltrain in electrifying regional rail lines, since that organization wound up spending $2.44 billion on this upgrade. Delusional NIMBY lawsuits, Trump adminstration unhelpfulness, and the pandemic aren’t its fault, but Caltrain can’t blame anybody else for an unnecessarily conservative infrastructure design and a botched proprietary train-control effort. And it still needs to raise station platforms to train-door levels to speed boarding and alighting.

A recent report called Momentum, written by veteran NYC transit reporter Nolan Hicks for New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, provides a must-read playbook for other transit organizations about how to avoid design mistakes like Caltrain’s and electrify and accelerate their routes at lower costs.

Commuter-rail managers should read it. And if they find themselves needing to head south of San Francisco on their next trip to the Bay Area, they should take a ride on a line that may make them feel bad about their own service.

@nwchapman The biggest obstacle to proof-of-payment systems is everybody suspects everyone else of being a fare-cheat!
People see other people just walk on without buying a ticket, not thinking that they might have a pass, or have paid for a round trip ticket, or whatever, and instantly think "everybody but me is riding for free!"
We have proof-of-paymont on #CalTrain. Some busybody local city councilman decided to prove that they were losing money, and rode without paying for a week--and got caught. So I think he proved that the system works. Basically, if your luck once, you'll probably get away with it. But make a habit of cheating, and you'll get caught.
Dumbass.

Gotta say, the new Caltrain is pretty great. It really does win out often when thinking about driving somewhere, and considering "or I could take the train". As I understand, running trains every half-hour at a minimum is a low bar by some standards, but it is a game-changer relative to what it was before.