High-Cost Rail- Part 152 San Mateo Wakes Up

You really have to just laugh sometimes when you read supposedly professional and elected officials' statements on long-running issues.  It makes you wonder where they have been for years?  This week's comments on HSR wait times for cars from various leaders in San Mateo are perfect cases in point.  The Daily Journal gets a couple of quotes that start the laughter

Once both efforts are realized, there will be so many trains traveling through the corridor that in downtown San Mateo, cars could be stuck at railroad crossings for as long as 20 minutes per peak hour, said Brad Underwood, San Mateo’s Public Works director.  And that’s based on Caltrain’s “baseline” growth scenario. If Caltrain opts for the “high-growth” scenario then gate downtime goes up to almost 27 minutes per peak hour.

“It’s a huge concern in the city,” Underwood said.  San Mateo councilmembers have echoed the concern.  “We can’t have our intersections closed for 26 minutes during peak hours. It shuts down the city,” Councilwoman Diane Papan said at a meeting in August.

Back in 2015, the frequency of trains was well-documented, for example in Part 108 of this saga 

Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.

It was old news five years ago, but San Mateo is just waking up to the problem.  Years ago San Mateo was a non-player in the Peninsula Cities Consortium that sought to stop high-speed rail's destruction of the Peninsula and our collective budgets.  Now their residents will have to sit in their electric vehicles pondering the waste of time, money and reduced emergency vehicle response time because of that decision.   

Comments

[Bobby]

Will there ever be a moment of clear headed sanity in Sacramento wrt HSR? This ridiculous project was pushed on an unsuspecting electorate back in 2008 (yes 12 years ago!) Since then costs have tripled, initial service is largely targeted between that highly congested Merced-Bakersfield corridor, 2 recessions (one that we’re still in), tax hikes for everything, a global pandemic etc. Yet this stupid thing won’t die, nor is there any political will to make it die, despite all the other priorities (eg, wildfire prevention) we should be working on in the state.

[Gavinius Caesar]

I, Gavinius Caesar, declare the steel aqueduct must be build at any cost. The Little People do not understand the immensity of the effort. They will be educated and will ride the aqueduct as I command.

[Everything's Jake]

This is what happens when one party rules a state. No one will be held accountable for this mess. How many treatment centers for addicts, homeless care, schools could have been built with the money they threw down the rabbit hole?