Caltrain is the commuter rail system running between San Jose and San Francisco. In the excerpts it appears both as an object of proposed incremental improvement and as the beneficiary of money diverted from California’s high-speed rail bond issue.
The line and its improvement
Mark Joffe describes Caltrain as diesel-operated, connecting San Jose and the Caltrain station in San Francisco, and notes that the federal government approved several hundred million dollars of subsidies to electrify the line Not Enough Bricks (2019). He identifies two advantages of electrification: once clean sources of electricity are available, the line becomes non-polluting, and electric trains can accelerate and decelerate faster than diesel trains, so they operate faster.
Joffe also points to the line’s grade-level crossings. Caltrain has over three dozen of them, meaning rail crossings where a gate comes down and traffic stops. He identifies two problems: the danger that a car or truck will be hit by a train, and traffic jams on both sides of the crossing caused by gate downtime. Replacing those crossings with grade separations — bridges or tunnels — would increase safety, speed up trains because they would not have to slow down for fear of hitting someone, and increase frequency, since without gate up and gate down the line could be used much more intensively.
Beyond electrification and grade separations, Joffe raises driverless trains. BART, he notes, was designed that way going back to the 1970s, with the operator present for safety reasons rather than essential to the movement of the train. He imagines very small two-car trains running very frequently over BART and over an electrified Caltrain, driverless and therefore much less expensive to operate. The aim is frequency: riders now dissuaded by a twenty-minute BART headway or a one-hour Caltrain headway at certain times might be drawn out of their cars.
Joffe frames his support for Caltrain electrification as a departure from strict libertarian doctrine. He says that if he were being an absolutely doctrinaire pure libertarian about it he would oppose the project, but he has stood down from that position Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Governance and performance
Quentin Kopp describes the Caltrain system as governed by a board composed of three people from Santa Clara County, three from San Mateo County, and three from the City and County of San Francisco — a joint powers authority created by the legislature in the early 1990s What Kamala Harris Hopes We Will Forget (2020). He says the system has succeeded beyond his expectations. Before the pandemic, he states, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission researched and published the fact that Caltrain’s farebox recovery ratio was 73.5 percent, the highest in the Bay Area, and that ridership had increased among people from San Mateo County, San Francisco and Santa Clara County.
Kopp states that Caltrain should be electrified and has obtained money to electrify, with an estimated cost of almost $2.5 billion, covering the route from San Jose to San Francisco.
The bond dispute
Kopp recounts that two years before the interview, a San Mateo County legislator introduced a bill which, contrary to law, used about $775 million from the high-speed rail general obligation bond issue of November 2008 toward the $2.5 billion electrification goal What Kamala Harris Hopes We Will Forget (2020). He says he and about eight or nine other people filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court to abnegate that action on the grounds that it was illegal and violated the provisions of the general obligation bond, which he identifies as Proposition 1A of November 2008. They lost in the Sacramento County Superior Court; the case went on appeal to the California Court of Appeal for the Third District, in Sacramento, with oral argument expected later in 2020. Kopp calls it a sorry state of affairs when the legislature disregards the law and a promise made to voters and taxpayers about how the proceeds of the bond issue would be spent, because Caltrain, while succeeding beyond his expectation, is not high-speed rail.
Caltrain and high-speed rail
Kopp’s account of the high-speed rail project places Caltrain at the center of a right-of-way conflict. He states that after he left the High-Speed Rail Board in 2010, people in Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto and to some extent Burlingame demanded that high-speed rail not acquire any right-of-way for itself and instead use the right-of-way of the Caltrain system What Kamala Harris Hopes We Will Forget (2020). High-speed rail throughout the world in Europe and Asia, he says, operates on its own right-of-way, which meant additional right-of-way would need to be acquired, and people complained about losing properties that might be needed. They induced their representatives in the legislature to pass a bill prohibiting any further right-of-way on the San Francisco Peninsula. After Jerry Brown became governor, Kopp says, the High-Speed Rail Board changed the plan so that the first segment would run from Merced to Bakersfield in the Central Valley rather than from San Francisco to Los Angeles, would not be electrified, and would be conventional diesel-operated rail; the plan was further changed to run from Coachella to Wasco, about thirty miles north of Bakersfield in Kern County. Of the $9 billion 950 million bond issue, he says about $5 billion or so is left unspent, and the project is no longer high-speed rail as it is in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Spain, Germany and other countries. He argues it should be stopped and either reformed or the remaining money used to supplement commuter rail service on the San Francisco Peninsula and in the Los Angeles Basin, divided between the Metrolink system and the Caltrain system.
Joffe’s treatment of the same project is more general: he calls the bullet train not a good idea but says that does not mean California should not have more rail transportation, only that it should be done in a more incremental way Not Enough Bricks (2019). He notes that Amtrak’s website shows passenger rail service around California, including a line from San Diego to Seattle and a Central Valley line from Merced to Bakersfield and beyond, and that the problem is that the trains are slow, infrequent and subject to delays.
Across episodes: the same question in two episodes
Both episodes treat Caltrain as a working commuter line whose improvement is worth pursuing, and both connect it to the high-speed rail bond. The treatment changes between them. In the 2019 episode, Joffe discusses electrification as a project he would oppose on pure libertarian grounds but has stood down from opposing, and discusses grade separations and driverless trains as incremental options; the bond issue is not mentioned. In the 2020 episode, Kopp supplies the funding history Joffe omits: the $775 million drawn from the November 2008 bond issue, the lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court, the loss there, and the appeal to the California Court of Appeal for the Third District. Joffe advances the case for incremental improvement; Kopp advances the case that the money was taken unlawfully. The excerpts show no disagreement between them about whether Caltrain itself performs well.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of the appeal Kopp describes, nor whether the $775 million was repaid or the electrification completed. They do not give Caltrain’s founding date, its ridership figures in absolute numbers, or the name of the San Mateo County legislator or the bill. Joffe’s remarks on driverless trains and grade separations are proposals, not descriptions of adopted policy, and the excerpts do not say what any of them would cost.