Originally Posted by
mayukawa
Maybe we should just get rid of Caltrains and direct funds to the BART extension to San Jose?
BZZT. Thank you for playing. For the amount of money to build that BART extension, Caltrain could electrify the entire rail, buy several new trainsets, and run trains every 10 minutes at 1.5x the speed, negating the bumping problem to some extent because frequency would be so high that people would be able to overlook the problem to some extent. Not to mention that the BART extension to San Jose would enable people to commute from Hayward and Fremont to San Jose - not exactly a top 10 commute route around here, but Caltrain serves the entire Peninsula a.k.a. where the jobs are. Yes I understand 880 is terminally clogged but those people are veering off onto 237 and 101 to jobs ... on the Peninsula. The BART extension will not solve that.
With the leftover money from not building that BART extension, the East Bay tracks could be double tracked through the Drawbridge marsh and Santa Clara, increasing speed, frequency, and reliability for ACE and Capitol Corridor - which ALREADY service the corridor that the BART extension would serve. Note there is a connection at Oakland Coleseum for points North on the BART line. Then with the leftover money from that, we can run rail over the Dumbarton (already "planned") from Union City, connecting BART to the mid-peninsula.
And we would STILL have money left over to subsidize operating costs.