Posted on 03/11/2025 4:42:15 PM PDT by artichokegrower
A Bay Area city council didn’t downplay its disappointment in Caltrain over cost estimates to realign a busy intersection that’s prone to accidents on the tracks.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
A billion dollars for railroad crossing. Tell you what for half a billion I’ll stand out there all day with a flag and lantern to warn cars about approaching trains
Caltrain? They should rename themselves Cashtrain!
Having enough trouble with regular trains, and they want to build a fantasy high-speed train to nowhere?
Does the RR crossing intersect a rare annex of a subcolony of a subspecies of a subgenus of super-rare, highly threatened yellow-penised field toads?
Ridership is down. It’s the downtown SF. I’d take it to the Giant’s game but that’s it.
Even the Warriors’ move to SF wasn’t enough to get people to ride.
“ Does the RR crossing intersect a rare annex of a subcolony of a subspecies of a subgenus of super-rare, highly threatened yellow-penised field toads?”
If you’re going to be snarky at least get it right. They are green-penised field toads.
But the song goes, “Follow the yellow-dick toad”. ;-P
“ But the song goes, “Follow the yellow-dick toad”. ;-P”
Well played amigo…. Well played.
Thank you! The yellow-penised ones are a dime a dozen.
the intersection is in burlingame a few miles south of sf.
there has been according to news articles about a recent 40% increase in ridership, attributed at least in part to electrification.
In decades past, CalTrain had a good financial reputation, at least relative to BART, which has been notorious for sucking operating funds from other, less glamorous transportation agencies such as bus systems.
The recent CalTrain problems seem to stem from a combination of Covid, inflation, and aggressive infrastructure investment in such upgrades as electrification.
Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to San Jose are the oldest on the west coast. Decades of urban sprawl surround the CalTrain right of way. CalTrain cannot increase its efficiency, speed, and safety without grade separation, which is expensive, especially if parallel roadways exist in urban areas. Nevertheless, CalTrain has been (until now at least) taking care of grade separations over the years, resulting in better service overall.
Perhaps the problem is that CalTrain saved some of the more expensive grade separations for last. This is not an uncommon problem for rail— for example, California HSR is building the rural part of their rail first, and saving the expensive urban parts for last.
Anyway, the main culprit of the current CalTrain problem seems to be a confluence of Covid, inflation, and not losing one’s expensive loser subprojects up front. If there had been less components to that confluence, CalTrain might have been able to skate some of the bad publicity. There aren’t, so CalTrain hasn’t.
One thought is that BART has been a perpetual revenue sink over its lifetime. Looking backwards, San Francisco Bay did not quite have the population density required for a full bore subway system such as exist in east coast, European, and major far eastern cities. During the decades of its operation, BART has drained infrastructure upgrade funds away from other more worthy systems such as CalTrain and AC Transit. One can’t simply do this indefinitely without paying the piper somehow, sometime, somewhere. Now it turns out that the price has thus been paid in the form of deferred infrastructure for CalTrain and other systems, with the result that there is now a chronic lack of funds for every form of Bay area transportation infrastructure.
And that does not even begin to count the projected costs of bringing HSR to downtown San Francisco’s SalesForce Transit Center.
Fine, what is the solution? Imaginably, another bond could be proposed. It would however probably need to span multiple counties (SF, SM, SC) and require a thorough financial audit of CalTrain’s current state of affairs. Meanwhile other “worthy” projects such as HSR to downtown SF are crying for funds for completion since every year delayed accumulates more inflationary construction costs. Canceling such projects would accelerate the current downward financial spiral that SF city/county finds itself in. So funding the grade separation would proceed if only a miracle were to occur. A more realistic assessment would be that the intersection remain as is with stopgap measures, and the community just suck it up and learn to live within their means, with a prudent financial safety margin.
Cheaper to pay for a few funerals.
> Cheaper to pay for a few funerals.
Even if one looks to Europe as the ultimate source of solutions for all of our problems, one thing to note is that even with near-full rail electrification, grade crossings have not yet been completely eliminated.
And what about the girl toads?
Some of the yellow boy toads identify as green. The girl toads are green. However every year at the Calaveras toad jumping championship, in the girls division they are finding that yellow boy toads who identify as green toads are taking all the medals.
To date, the National Collegiate Toad Jumping Association (NCTJA) has continued this practice, saying that toads have 75 different colors they can identify as.
Guess who won the internet today?
I heard a version of that joke from a British guy in a bar in 1994 but was never able to use it till now. ROTFL.
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