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Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

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Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#171

Post by jlmorton »

saagarjha wrote: post #104
blintz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think BART struggles with who it's meant to serve now, since it was clearly designed for ultra-peak weekday commute traffic. Recovery for weekend ridership is way better than weekday. 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 Ba…

Wait, BART director is an elected position? Why don't I get to vote on it? (Also, while I am biased towards Caltrain, the new trains beat traffic on 101/280 San Francisco↔San Jose during rush hour).

It shouldn't be, though. There is way too much democracy in California localities.

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.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#172

Post by ninetyninenine »

Johnny555 wrote: post #169
ninetyninenine wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. You can have both. Tokyo is twice the size of the bay area. Density isn't the issue. It's incompetence.

I mentioned 3 things -- pick them up and home and office, and have the big suburban house with a yard.

And I'm saying you can HAVE all 3 of those things PLUS a metro.

Hence the term BOTH

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#173

Post by spike021 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #6
blintz wrote: post #3

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!

Haha. Doubtful. In your lifetime you won't see any transit system in the bay area that approaches anything remotely close to what you see in places like Tokyo or NYC. I get that there's improvement but like it's still rather pathetic compared to almost everywhere else across the pond.

Tokyo metropolitan area is nothing like the SF Bay Area. It's extremely different and so is ridership.

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.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#174

Post by renhanxue »

declan_roberts wrote: post #156
Prosammer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caltrain runs reliably and safely for me, can you elaborate?

The $19 million for regenerative breaking can be used to extend lines or add new stations. We can make up for energy efficiency later.

I think you completely misunderstood the article. It says that the electricity used to power these trains was estimated to cost $19m a year, but the trains are a bit more efficient than expected, so the new estimate is only $16.5m/year.

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.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#175

Post by Johnny555 »

hamandcheese wrote: post #128
Johnny555 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. You're not being realistic. Almost everyone would like to have a choice between getting on a subway for super cheap or driving through traffic. You're saying they would rather have no choice between the two options? Come on 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 l…

> but do enough people want it to make it worth building? The reason we don't build more density isn't lack of demand (see: the price of rent), it is entirely political.

I'd like to see some evidence for that -- sure, there are a lot of people in big cities that are happy with high density (but even many of them move out to the suburbs when they decide to settle down and have kids), but there are many people in the USA that won't give up their 2000 sq ft house with 3 car garage that fits their F150 pickup.

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.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#176

Post by diffset »

ssuds wrote: post #45
infotainment wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fun fact: Michael Healy in the second photo lives in Larry Ellison’s old house in Oakland. He also has a book on Amazon.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#177

Post by Gibbon1 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #65
astrange wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because our politicians patrons are rentier capitalists who think the government spending money on things is a waste of their money. So yeah they really hate spending money on transit projects.

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.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#178

Post by renhanxue »

fsckboy wrote: post #131

> regenerative braking on the new trains is generating and sending back to the electric grid approximately 23% of the energy consumed by the system 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…

Try out the video game Derail Valley and you'll get a decently realistic idea of just how much trains tend to just coast along without any power input. On flat ground you just need a little nudge every once in a while to keep going.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#179

Post by Johnny555 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #172
Johnny555 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned 3 things -- pick them up and home and office, and have the big suburban house with a yard.

And I'm saying you can HAVE all 3 of those things PLUS a metro. Hence the term BOTH

Where in Tokyo do you have easy access to transit and a large suburban house?

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.

Re: Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected

#180

Post by huijzer »

sunday_serif wrote: post #80
whyenot wrote: post #34

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.

Completely agree! 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.

I’m getting more and more convinced that this is a main problem all over the West. In Germany, a business owner called Marco Scheel is becoming more and more popular by being very outspoken about how bureaucracy is hindering him. His company is called Nordwolle by the way. They make clothing out of sheep wool. They spend a lot of effort finding the right type of wool so they don’t need chemicals to paint it.

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!”

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