All aboard — Caltrain coalition seeks support
In Silicon Valley, the ever-present question is: What’s next? It is an urgent question for Caltrain, which delivers millions of employees to their jobs every year. The 151-year-old railroad faces short-term overcrowding problems, a mid-term task to design and build a modernized and electrified system, and the long-term challenge to ensure the financial stability necessary to maintain and expand a railroad so that it can continue to be a vital part of the Highway 101 employment corridor and the regional transportation system.
To make sure Caltrain survives and thrives, we’re going to have to work together — as employees and employers and as train riders and car drivers — to make sure the railroad has the support it needs and will require.
That’s why we formed the Caltrain Commuter Coalition, a gathering of major employers in the 101 corridor, to advocate on behalf of the rail system that has blossomed from a nice little, local train to an essential element in the quality of our life and the future of our economy. We need your help to make it work. Anyone who rides Caltrain knows it is rapidly becoming a victim of its own success.
Ridership has grown, month over month, for 52 straight months in a row — and the trains are jammed to capacity and beyond, especially the Baby Bullet trains, which have driven a doubling of ridership and a tripling of revenue.
Customers are standing, sometimes as long as 30 or 40 minutes. People are sitting on the train stairs and in the vestibules, if they can find room to sit at all.
To address overcrowding in the short term, the Caltrain board recently approved the purchase of used rail cars from Southern California. In the next several weeks, some of those cars will go into service, making five-car trains into six-car trains and providing some immediate relief.
The mid-term solution to the overwhelming demand is the Caltrain Modernization Program, which includes a new signal system that will allow the railroad to run more efficiently. The signal system project is already under construction.
The other part of the CalMod Program is electrification, which would electrify Caltrain and bring in new, high-performing locomotives and rail cars. The result will be more service, more frequent service, dramatic reductions in noise and pollution, and jobs and economic growth — 10,000 construction-related jobs and $2.5 billion in economic activity, according to a Bay Area Council Economic Institute study.
In January, the Caltrain board took the historic step of certifying the electrification environmental impact report. The next step is to hire a contractor to design and build the electric system. The revised schedule calls for electrified service to begin in late 2020 or early 2021. The revised budget for the project is $1.5 billion, but it has a funding gap of $250 million to $300 million. Long term, there is much to be done. Caltrain’s budget has a structural deficit — it is one of the few transit systems nationally without its own dedicated source of funding. That’s why, particularly when the economy is in trouble, Caltrain can face severe service cuts that would undermine all the progress of the last four years.
Beyond the money required to run the railroad, Caltrain has to maintain its system in a state of good repair so that it can continue to provide good
daily service.
And there is a laundry list of other things Caltrain must do to meet a demand that will keep on growing. The railroad’s average weekday ridership is in excess of 61,000, up from a little over 52,600 a year ago. In 10 years, Caltrain better be ready to carry twice that many people, or the result is going to be traffic congestion that would threaten Silicon Valley’s future as a place employers will want to locate and employees will want to work.
CalMod 2.0 includes more rail cars, upgrading station platforms to allow level boarding and longer trains, building strategically placed tracks so that faster trains can pass slower trains, and building grade separations at crossings where road and rail intersect. That last item is an expensive one, but it allows the railroad to operate at a high level and it is the single most effective safety measure that can be taken to reduce fatalities on the rail right-of-way.
It’s a long list of big-ticket items to make Caltrain everything it needs to be.
That’s why we formed the Caltrain Commuter Coalition, and why we are reaching out to you.
If you commute on Caltrain, or you want to in the future, and your company has not joined the coalition (which we call, for short, C3), ask that it do so.
If you believe Caltrain is critical for the future of the Silicon Valley economy, join with us in telling regional, state and federal leaders how vital the railroad has become and must continue to be.
In the coming weeks and months, C3 will offer a host of priorities and action items that will benefit from your support. Together, we can help ensure that Caltrain receives federal, state and local funds to help close the money gap in the electrification program, advance the next phases of the CalMod program and assure the railroad’s financial stability and position it to grow.
For most of its 151-year history, Caltrain was much like the community it served — low-key, low-profile, even quaint. Just as Silicon Valley replaced orchards and farms, the Caltrain of all-local stops and leisurely scheduling has become a railroad of Baby Bullets and, soon, high-performing electric trains.
But, as is the case in Silicon Valley, we are focused on what’s next. The Caltrain Commuter Coalition is something we can all do together to make sure Caltrain is all it can be, and all we need it to be.