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Posted Mar 30, 2021, 11:52 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2016
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 24,177
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Quote:
THE HOLY RAIL?
How leaders want to transform Bay Area transportation
By Jody Meacham – Contributing Writer
Mar 19, 2021 Updated Mar 20, 2021, 8:14am PDT
. . . a new rail tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland is being proposed by two railroad partners — BART and the state-financed Capitol Corridor service — as the linchpin of a massive 20-year rail improvement program called Link21.
The program, still under development, is intended to make it faster to travel by rail than by car within a 21-county region of almost 13 million people and 6 million jobs stretching from Monterey to the Sierra foothills.
The idea is that by speeding up trains, increasing their frequencies and eliminating connections, some of the region’s most vexing economic and environmental problems could also be addressed . . . .
Job growth from 2012-2018 far outstripped population growth from 2012-2019 by 17% to 7% in San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, the institute said. In the East Bay, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Merced and Stanislaus counties, the situation is reversed: Population growth is up to double the rate of job growth.
Frequent, faster rail would rebalance that housing-jobs situation when office work resumes post-pandemic, as Link21 proponents and a poll showing 79% of Bay Area residents believe it will . . . .
The region’s roads are already jammed. The Bay Bridge, which the tunnel would bypass (and on which passenger trains rolled to the East Bay on its lower deck until 1958), carried a quarter-million vehicles per weekday pre-pandemic.
At the same time, the stretch of combined Interstates 80 and 580 from the bridge’s eastern landing north along Berkeley’s bayfront is ranked the 14th most congested freeway stretch in the United States by Seattle-based transportation data firm INRIX, which estimated the resulting economic loss for just those five miles at $100 million a year.
“A second transbay crossing is not just one singular project, but we think of it as a major investment that will literally transform the entire regional transportation network,” David Kim, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, told a recent Link21 webinar.
Goal No. 1: Transbay crossing
Including the new tunnel, estimated to cost about $30 billion, the railroads involved in Link21 have already identified 13 key improvement projects. Some of them, like BART’s subway in San Jose, are about to begin construction; others are still in the dream stages, such as converting more trains from diesel to emission-free electric power.
But for the projects that already have price tags, the tab is between $103 billion and $113 billion over a couple of decades — as much as the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed rail link hobbled by costs.
Many of the funding sources are yet to be found. Potential sources could include local tax increases, state funding provided by the legislature and federal grants from the Department of Transportation through either its Federal Railroad Administration or Federal Transit Administration. The FTA’s acting administrator is Nuria Fernandez, who just resigned her post as head of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority to accept the job in the Biden administration. Federal funding will depend on how successful Biden is in getting an infrastructure bill through Congress.
Because proponents describe Link21 as a “program” rather than a “plan” — there could be more projects — organized opposition has yet to develop. But the most likely place for opposition to the whole package is around funding. Tax increases would require a public vote and, if they’re tied just to a specific project, require a two-thirds majority. General tax increases require only a simple majority for passage, but are open to attack by opponents because legally the revenue can be spent at a county or transit entity’s discretion.
According to proponents, the return on transit investment would be 500%, though that estimate is based on a national formula developed by the American Public Transit Association, the lobbying group for transit agencies, and not on the specific elements of Link21.
More projects may be identified through public outreach in coming months, but all will undergo a “business case” evaluation framework that includes how well they meet goals for strategic transportation improvements, delivery and operational costs compared to revenue generation, employment and population growth, and what it will take to manage it all.
“Link21, the way we’re describing it, is a program of projects,” said Sadie Graham, acting director for the effort at BART’s end. “We’re very much at the beginning of defining what this program is. … But we do know that the crossing and some of the ancillary supportive projects will be within that first package of whatever the projects are” . . . .
The new bay crossing could expand the one-hour rail commute radius from San Francisco — which now barely less than 50 miles to San Jose — to around 80 miles, according to Link21’s concept, with the potential for direct rail service between the city and Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley.
Part of whatever transportation improvements are achieved would not be solely due to infrastructure improvements, which is Link21’s focus, but also through increased cooperation, integration and perhaps elimination of some of the nine-county Bay Area’s 27 transit operators . . . .
Almost everything mechanical and electrical about BART is unique — the 5-foot, 6-inch distance, or gauge, between its rails being the best known example. Standard gauge for most of the world’s railroads, including those in the United States, is 4 feet, 8½ inches, which means no other Bay Area trains can use BART tracks, or vice versa.
BART and the Capitol Corridor — the diesel-powered standard gauge rail service stretching from San Jose to Sacramento and Auburn along the East Bay — already share a headquarters building and some management staff in Oakland.
BART is primarily supported by its three member counties — San Francisco, Contra Costa and Alameda. But the Capitol Corridor, governed by a joint powers authority representing the eight counties it serves, operates trains owned by the state on behalf of Amtrak over rails belonging to the private Union Pacific Railroad, where they intermingle with freight trains.
The Capitol Corridor is the second busiest state-operated Amtrak service in the nation. In 2019, 79% of Capitol Corridor’s 1.7 million riders were commuting or on other business travel between the Sacramento area and the Bay Area, said Rob Padgette, its managing director.
But passengers with San Francisco at one end of their Capitol Corridor trip have to connect with BART in Richmond. Eastbound, that can mean a long platform wait for Sacramento trains that run on frequencies between an hour and5½ hours apart.
Meanwhile, BART’s original transbay tube is at capacity and vulnerable to shutdowns ranging from an electrical failure to a passenger medical emergency, which can cripple the entire network for hours or longer, A second tunnel would provide important, but enormously expensive, redundancy.
Sharing a tunnel containing tracks for both BART and standard gauge railroads, however, could spread the cost burden. That provides a powerful incentive for BART to work with other railroads. It also incentivizes railroads — including the Capitol Corridor, Caltrain, ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) between San Jose and Stockton and San Joaquin trains between Oakland and the northern San Joaquin Valley — to work with BART because they serve markets needing faster and more frequent access to San Francisco and the Peninsula . . . .
A multirailroad crossing could allow Caltrain, which is scheduled to begin electric service to San Jose next year, to run to Oakland. ACE could offer electric service into the city. The Capitol Corridor could add direct San Francisco-Sacramento trains. Or there could be consolidation of those services.
The vision would be to carry Caltrain and high-speed rail from Caltrain’s existing station near Oracle Park to the new Salesforce Transit Center, which was designed and constructed to accommodate a future rail station.
“If you live or work on the Peninsula and you’re trying to get to Davis or you’re trying to get to Sacramento, that’s a pretty difficult trip,” Padgette said. “In our vision, rail becomes a really easy decision to make where you get on at a station and you get off at a station and you’re not worried about who operates that service along the way.”
It’s electric
Two factors drive the move toward replacing diesel trains with electric service. The first is that exhaust gases in long rail tunnels are poisonous to passengers, so electricity or some other emission-free propulsion is the ticket for tunnel entry.
And the second is a state mandate, adopted by the legislature in 2017, requiring greenhouse gas emissions in California to be reduced 40% from 1990 levels by 2030. Sixty percent of those emissions come from the transportation sector, according to the California Air Resources Board. But between 2005 and 2017, according to the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental nonprofit, California’s transportation emissions fell only 5%.
The infrastructure necessary for electric trains is expensive but part of what Link21 envisions as necessary to meet environmental and service goals.
Caltrain’s electrification project will cost $1.9 billion, including the cost of train sets that will replace 75% of its diesel-powered fleet. But its electric trains will accelerate faster, stop more quickly and be capable of speeds up to 125 miles per hour, though initially service will be at the same 79 mph top speed of its current trains.
The Business Times has learned of a breakthrough on the Caltrain project that may allow railroads like the Capitol Corridor and ACE to pursue similar electrification projects for their service.
The latter railroads operate on Union Pacific-owned tracks, and UP has had a blanket policy forbidding its freight trains from operating on electrified lines, according to officials of other railroads who’ve discussed the issue.
Caltrain bought its San Francisco-San Jose line from UP predecessor Southern Pacific in 1991 and had planned to contract out the nighttime Peninsula freight trains UP now operates once Caltrain began electric service.
However, sources with knowledge of the negotiations said UP has now agreed to a deal to operate the service itself even though the line will be electrified.
“An important partner in all of this will be Union Pacific,” the Capitol Corridor’s Padgette said. “I know we don’t know all the answers at this point, but we’re out to accomplish a lot. We’ll have to figure out how to create a system that can accommodate everything.”
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