71–80 of 305 posts
19 million annually. I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze here. They should focus on making Caltrain run reliably timely, and safely for the passengers. Once we get the ridership numbers up we can easily make up for the electricity efficiency.
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Agreed largely, though IMO BART is holding the bay area back. Unlike Caltrain and Muni, BART management is completely incompetent and more focused on spending their money on random things than actually running their transit system. 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…
Speaking of BART, this story is priceless: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bart-seat-slasher-hur... The firm that reupholstered damaged BART seats in the ‘80s paid people to slash them so they’d get more business.
19 million annually. I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze here. They should focus on making Caltrain run reliably timely, and safely for the passengers. Once we get the ridership numbers up we can easily make up for the electricity efficiency.
The electric Caltrain is so wonderful. It’s way quieter, the cars have nicer interiors, and it is running faster and more frequently than before. 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!
To unlock the true value of these systems the BA needs to be forced to increase density of their cities though. We need SF proper to look more like Manhattan.
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.
They claim that "Caltrain is running its service on 100% renewable energy", but they are connected to the same grid as everyone else. It doesn't really make sense to say, half of our electricity is green, so customer X is renewable, but customer Y is not renewable.
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If you copy Japan policies you can get something much closer to Japan, it's not magic. (Transit oriented upzoning, no parking minimums, and businesses in the station building.)
If it's not magic why isn't it being done? That's the point. This news is rather pathetic strictly because a better scenario is NOT magic.
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I dunno... 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!
Do trains need batteries for regenerative braking, or is it sent right back on the same power lines?
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> BART police why does a transit system need its own police force? Aren't municipal and county police enough?
Actually, train systems having its own assigned branches of police is common enough that there's a Wikipedia article[1]. Unique part is that the US doesn't have an umbrella national or state agency that such branches would be part of. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police
19 million annually. I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze here. They should focus on making Caltrain run reliably timely, and safely for the passengers. Once we get the ridership numbers up we can easily make up for the electricity efficiency.
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.
It's great, but it took more than 20 years to get here due to environmental reviews and shaky funding. ...and this was just re-fitting an existing, relatively short stretch of track! 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.