Caltrain's Weekend Baby Bullets

Caltrain has decided, amidst threats to cut weekend service entirely, to try a new approach to weekend service, by running express trains on the weekends. This service has been quite successful, helping considerably with a 21% increase in weekend ridership. The most probable explanation for this is quite simple: the old local service was slow, and the new express train is fast enough to be a plausible competitor to driving.

The two busiest stations outside San Francisco, on both weekdays and weekends, are Mountain View and Palo Alto, which are 36 and 30 miles away from San Francisco respectively. On weekends, it takes 77 minutes to get from Mountain View to San Francisco and 65 minutes to get from Palo Alto to San Francisco, for an average speed of 28 mph, which is no better than driving all the way on local streets. The new express train, on the other hand, does the trip in 49 minutes from Mountain View and 41 minutes from Palo Alto, for a speed of 44 mph, over 50% faster, and much closer to the speed of driving. If you manage to take the express train both ways, you save a whole hour on transportation. Even taking it in one direction and a local in the other potentially saves you half an hour, which turned out to be significant enough to increase ridership on the local trains.

This is a perfect example of the principles of normal speed rail in action. This service improvement required no new infrastructure at all, and not much extra spending on operations either. Yet it led to a significant improvement in the public perception of the service, which is reflected in the increased ridership. More ridership means more fare revenue, and in a virtuous circle, this provides more money for further service improvements. Hopefully Caltrain will learn the right lesson here, and increase the express service rather than cancelling weekend service altogether.

Saving Caltrain

There has been a lot of talk recently of Caltrain being in a financial crisis, which will result in significant service cuts, possibly leading to the system being shut down entirely if nothing is done. The Caltrain management has even asked for suggestions from the public on how the system can be saved. I think that there are steps that Caltrain can take to drastically reduce its operating costs without degrading service, and thus ticket revenue, too much.

Caltrain is a Joint Powers Authority, which is operated and funded jointly by the 3 counties through which the line runs. The root of the crisis is that Caltrain's revenue will be considerably lower than its expenses, because the counties can no longer afford to provide the current level of subsidy. The only way to resolve this problem is by increasing revenue or reducing expenses, and the single biggest expense in running Caltrain is labor. In order to save money, ways must be found to reduce the labor force.

Fortunately, there is one very glaringly obvious target for such cuts: Assistant Conductors. Their job used to be assisting the Conductor with ticket sales, but Caltrain has had Proof of Payment for years now, and it seems that most of the time, the Assistant Conductors spend their time chatting with the Conductor and not doing anything useful. Firing all of them can save several million dollars in annual operating costs, with very little impact to the quality of service. There's precedent for running with a single conductor too: Metrolink in Southern California has been doing so since the beginning. There are other possibilities for operational savings as well, including cutting (or at least re-thinking) Gilroy service, re-designing the schedule and focusing the capital program on maximizing operational cost savings, and I may explore these further in subsequent blog posts. But getting rid of the Assistant Conductors is the elephant in the room in terms of cost savings here, and I'm surprised Caltrain hasn't even mentioned this option yet.

How to plan rail service

Those who have been following the California High Speed Rail process will have noticed that there's been quite a lot of recent controversy about the proposed route between San Francisco and San Jose. Leaving aside the propriety of a government authority board member deciding on train service to a station named after himself, there's plenty of worry that the High Speed Rail will bulldoze through towns, destroying homes and leaving huge ugly structures with noisy trains in its wake. Emotions are high on both sides, there's a lot of uncertainty, and not much fact to go on, so arguments are based on differences of assumption, and tend to devolve to name calling. Unfortunately, the High Speed Rail Authority hasn't done nearly enough in the way of planning, mostly because they haven't had money to until now. In particular, I haven't seen pretty much anything in the way of joint planning with Caltrain regarding track sharing, service levels, station design, and improvements to the line. This strikes me as a crucial omission, and I suggest Caltrain and HSRA work together to remedy this at once.

What would a planning process look like? I suggest the following:

1. Start with ridership forecasts for both Caltrain and HSR. These already exist, the only potential caveat is to not double-count riders when combining them.


2. Determine a service level that will adequately serve this demand, and make a conceptual service pattern for the line. This has been done on some level for HSR and Caltrain individually, but not jointly


3. Find the minimal set of improvements to transform the service plan into an actual timetable. This is basically a matter of straightening curves to get sufficient line speed, and providing enough passing tracks to allow express trains to pass locals.


4. Finally, this process might need to be iterated several times, to account for the fact that ridership is somewhat flexible and it might be much easier to produce a workable timetable if some riders are convinced to move to adjacent stations.

This doesn't seem like it would be that hard. The respective agencies already have ridership forecasts, they just need to combine them and produce a joint service plan, and start devising potential timetables. Caltrain should probably take the lead here, since they own the ROW and will still be the majority operator. And this is something that absolutely needs to get done, to make sure that all the agencies are working with a common set of assumptions. It would be bad if, for example, HSRA was planning for almost exclusive use of two tracks with only occasional incursions by Caltrain Baby Bullets, while Caltrain was planning more significant track sharing, or even a line that wasn't four tracks for the entire length.