The Burlingame Voice

Broadway Overpass: A Long Way Away

One of the common questions I hear in town is "When are they going to fix the rest of Broadway?" meaning now that the bridge has been replaced, what about the rail crossing?  My standard response is "There isn't nearly enough money socked away to even start".  That is the bottom line of a piece in today's Daily Journal recapping the discussion at Council on Monday.  Here are my favorite tidbits, but do click through here to get all of the bits.

No decision was made at the meeting, as the issue was only discussed following a presentation from the county Transportation Authority, which allocates Measure A sales tax revenue for transit projects. The project is currently largely unfunded, and is expected to be completed by 2026, according to available financing.  Examining the rising cost of construction, Transportation Authority officials anticipate the price will jump by about 35% over the life of the project, amounting to about $40 million more than the proposed current cost by 2026.

Although it is apparently considered the most-needed project in all of Northern California.  Here's another gem

In a separate presentation, a Caltrain official said future service at Broadway will sap stops from the Burlingame station as well, as the proximity of the two stations will result in one train stop at either station every 30 minutes.

You mean like a real train service?  Discussion of Mike Brownrigg's idea of not having a station at all at B'way (ostensibly to shorten the Giant Wall Dividing The City) raised the other council members' hackles.  With massive residential development at the Anson apartments on Carolan and Facebook coming along with whatever goes in on the State Lands Commission property (see the next post below), one would think we would want more train service at B'way.  Anyway you look at it, there's not enough money floating around to do much of anything for years.

 

SB50: The 'Drop Zone' in B'game

Yesterday's SF Chronicle piece "SF supervisors oppose Wiener's new housing-near-transit bill, but there's wiggle room" captures some of the many concerns about SB50.  We started the discussion here noting that another SF politician, David Chiu, decided it was good politics to point fingers at Burlingame.  One SF Supervisor, Vallie Brown, joined the "ruin other people's backyard" movement by saying “We need bold proposals, and not just here. We need to have the rest of the Bay Area and California get into gear around housing".  Talk about exceeding one's authority.  But most of the SF supervisors appear ready to vote for a resolution opposed to SB50.  Now if only our own San Mateo County supervisors had as much backbone.  But so far they haven't demonstrated it.  Today's Comicle editorial tries to paint even the SF supervisors as some sort of "reactionary" body--good luck with that laughable assertion:

In the long fight to keep California’s wealthy, homogeneous, exclusive suburbs just the way they are, Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have an ally they might not have expected: San Francisco.  The city’s Board of Supervisors — thanks to its purportedly progressive faction, no less — is poised to reiterate its reactionary resistance to legislation that would legalize higher-density residential development near mass transit amid a crushing housing shortage.

For many locals the threat is still abstract, so here is a map showing the affected sections of B'game should SB50 become law--I call it the SB50 Drop Zone

Lest you think it is bad enough that some hack politicians from the city who cannot even manage their own streets in a first-world fashion want to co-opt approval of development in more than half of B'game; the last part of SB50 says a city that is "employment rich" can't stop development anywhere in town.  Don't get too comfortable up in the hills.  Our City Council has taken a clear stance against SB50 and should be encouraged as they have been by two letters in today's Daily Journal here and here.  To buttress their good instincts, they should consider starting a legal reserve fund since this is likely to end up in court if it passes in Sacramento.  It might also be time to reconsider whether SamTrans should be allowed to operate on our section of El Camino Real.  That sounds crazy to say about a state highway, but it's not any crazier than Weiner, Chiu and Brown telling us we have to build five-story tall high-density housing everywhere in town.

Mission Creep at Caltrain

Wikipedia defines "Mission creep" as "the gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success. Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous irreversible path, each success breeding evermore ambitious interventions, stopping only when a final, oftentimes catastrophic failure was precipitated."  In other words, stick to the purpose that you were set up to deliver on.  Caltrain is creeping towards mission creep as shown here from the Daily Journal piece

Caltrain officials want to build housing, retail and offices on the agency’s underused property, though plans for transit-oriented development will have to be balanced with the future needs of the railroad.  “I think we’ve got tremendous potential to develop this corridor land for not only housing, but commercial developments along the way,” said Board Member Ron Collins, the San Carlos vice mayor.

Apparently Collins wants to mess up the rest of the Peninsula the way they have messed up San Carlos.

Collins said he wants affordable housing to be part of the plans and Board Member Charles Stone, a Belmont councilman, agreed emphatically.  “I want this policy to prioritize affordability,” Stone said. “We’re a transit agency, we want to do projects certainly that don’t interfere with ridership and enhance ridership and we want to do projects that don’t hurt us financially and improve our finances if possible, but at the end of the day what I’m most concerned about is we play a part in the affordability crisis where we can.”

Voila, mission creep.  How about you just run the railroad and prep for electrification, increased schedules, improve service including "unmet demand", and work on the last mile problem that inhibits ridership.  Could you just do that?

Caltrain Forecast = Train Noise Forecast

Phil Matier at the SF Comicle has a bead on the Transbay Transit Center problems and just added another item to the list of woes.  It's the capacity of the brand new terminal!  Turns out that if the predictions for Caltrain's growth are accurate, the terminal might be too small--and that may be the case even without high-cost rail making it to EssEff.  But here in B'game most people are more concerned with the train horns, so here is the prediction

Caltrain expects to see its ridership more than quadruple over the next 20 years to 250,000 riders a day, once it converts from diesel to electric trains.  But now there are questions over whether there is enough room in the underground station to handle the 12 to 16 trains per hour Caltrain may need to run into the city to handle all those new passengers.

“Our initial analysis shows that at least 10 trains per hour can be accommodated in the terminal,” (Caltrain spokesman Seamus) Murphy said. Meaning that Caltrain could be two to six trains short on platform space.  And that’s without high-speed rail, if it ever comes.

If this was phrased accurately, 12 to 16 trains per hour inbound to SF means 12 to 16 outbound as well so that could be 32 passes through B'game per hour--one train every two minutes.  And you thought the Broadway intersection was a bit of a mess now.........You might ask, "What about the grade separation?"  Here is the tentative schedule for the planning -- while noting that the actual construction funds are a long way from being in hand.  Having spent 30+ years in the forecasting business, I can tell you not to get too worked up about a train every two minutes just yet, but it bears watching...and listening.

High-Cost Rail - Part 147 Partially Pulling the Plug

Yesterday's big news that Gov. Newsom has a new, much smaller approach to high-speed rail was welcomed in many quarters--including this one.  I toasted him with a lovely California cabernet last night--and that is a rare occasion indeed.  Common sense seems to have prevailed at least partially.  I say "partially" because some confusion still remains regarding what the Gov. really meant and how he will stick to it as the details of The Money become clearer.  The post below has some of the direct quotes in the comment section.  My first-glance quick list of money issues that remain are:

--Is the Caltrain electrification funding still available?  It appears so since Newsom mentioned the "bookend" funding which fits Caltrain.  The Daily Journal editorial shows the size of the need writing "Those who are familiar with the nuts and bolts of Caltrain electrification may be concerned that a refocus of the high-speed rail project on the Central Valley may mean that a $713 million commitment toward the $2 billion local project would evaporate."  Caltrain brass quoted in Railway Age state "The Caltrain Electrification Project is currently under construction and is scheduled to be complete in 2022. Last year, the State increased its commitment to the electrification of Caltrain service when it awarded an additional $165 million to support the purchase of additional electric trains. Caltrain is currently working to complete the Caltrain Business Plan".  Unlike HSR, electrification is popular to the extent the general public understands it, so here's hoping for enough money to finish.

--To keep building the Central Valley sliver that Newsom is still committed to he will have to hold onto the federal money.  His quote about not wanting to send it back to Donald Trump may or may not be wishful thinking.  Expect some legal wrangling over whether a short bit of track constitutes performance.  If the remaining federal funds are clawed-back, then the whole scheme collapses including the bit about continuing to do the environmental review of the longer section.  At least one state legislator noted that continuing the environmental review leaves property owners in limbo potentially for decades.

--If you want to get really train-geeky, here is a detailed piece titled California HSR: Seven Deadly Mistakes that goes into all sorts of the funding and approval mistakes that have doomed this boondoggle from the beginning.  #3 is my favorite and we knew this from the get go:  CHSRA then made a broader leap for the remainder of the funding, saying that its finance team “anticipates that the commitment of state and federal dollars will attract private sector funding.”  The other six are equally damning.

California taxpayers can mark Feb. 12, 2019 as a day that may have saved their bacon for another campfire like pensions, "affordable housing" subsidies, "free health care" or any number of other Newsom priorities.  But for now, B'game can rejoice that a vision of trains blasting through town at grade at 110 mph, interspersed with more Caltrain and freight trains, purporting to be faster, safer and cheaper than flying has passed with Jerry Brown's tenure. 

A BART Non-answer

I'm catching up with the January issue of the free San Francisco magazine that magically shows up in the mail every month.  It's often worth a quick read and can venture south of EssEff once in awhile like four years ago when we were deemed Utopia-qualified.  This month has a piece profiling the newly-elected BART board member, Janice Li.  Her claim to fame is as a bicycle advocate.  She also "still thinks it is scary, weird and absurd to be an elected official".   But somehow she has the elected official's non-answer answer down pat as seen here:

Q:  Riders south of San Francisco don't get to vote for BART elected officials, even though there are BART stations there.  Is that a good idea?

A:  There are two sides to the San Mateo problem.  Some people say that the people who live there aren't paying their fair share.  Others say that they are losing out because they have no representation.  I'm not totally sold that BART should even have a voter-elected board.  It's extraordinarily rare.

If you are waiting for the rest of the response, join the club.  I'm not feeling super confident about the future direction of the Caltrain and high-speed rail connections at the intermodal station in Millbrae.  You?

Caltrain: The Good, The Bad and The Idiotic

The Daily Journal piece on the expansion of Caltrain has something for everyone.  It paints a picture of a much larger Caltrain system

Caltrain has unveiled an exceedingly ambitious vision for the future and electrification is only the beginning.  That vision entails an up to 300 percent increase in ridership by 2040, expanded all-day service, trains arriving every 10 minutes and service extending to Monterey, to name just a few proposals.

The good news is that electrification is humming along even if the money to do it is the "fruit of a poisonous tree" like high-speed rail.

The expansion being contemplated applies to both the system and service, and it’s all predicated on electrification, the $2 billion project that will replace 80 percent of Caltrain’s current diesel fleet with electric trains traveling between San Jose and San Francisco by 2022.

I'm not sure why only 80% of the fleet will be replaced, but perhaps that will become clear over time.  The bad part of the story is that the Broadway station is still a whisper of its previous self.  It's been that way for 13 years.  I found this quote interesting in that regard

“Right now we take the philosophical viewpoint that ridership drives where we employ service, we don’t forget stations for the most part even if they don’t have vigorous ridership,” Board Member Charles Stone said. “My point is as we go forward let’s keep in mind that the demand we see may not be all the demand, that there’s pent-up demand that’s been created by the system we use right now.”

Let's hope Charles Stone is correct and perhaps one good thing to come out of the huge Anson Apartments on Carolan will be more frequent B'way service.  Now for the idiotic.  Redwood City council member Jeff Gee was not on my radar screen until this article appeared.  Here's Gee's thoughts on Caltrain expansion

“Why are we limiting our physical constraints? In other words, if we are only, in many places, limited to two tracks, what would it take to get to four tracks on the corridor?” he asked.  Gee went on to suggest the “constant tension” between the interests of 20 cities along the corridor and service will be the major sticking point moving forward. 

“What’s right for a quaint little city on the Peninsula may not be the right answer for the region and so at what point does the agency say ‘thank you very much quaint little city but this has got greater benefits to the corridor’ and how do we bridge that and how do we deal with that as an organization?” he asked.

Gee sounds like the kind of myopic "leader" who has presided over the ruination of downtown Redwood City with block after block of Soviet-style overstuffed buildings creating a soulless wasteland.  Thankfully this guy's term is up next month and he does not appear to be running for re-election.  Hopefully that means he will be leaving the Joint Powers Board as well.  If not, we may have to look to facilitate that before he does more damage to the "quaint little cities" he seems to dislike so much.  Kudos to Zachary Clark of the DJ for getting this kind of destructive thinking by a public official on the record.

 

Train Horn Non-update

Like many B'gamers, I wish this article in today's Daily Journal was about the B'game city council working on a quiet zone, but it's about San Mateo trying to get started.  I'll just pluck a couple of the technical and money points to highlight the challenges both cities face

To mitigate the uptick in risk associated with not sounding the train horns at crossings, the Federal Railroad Administration, or FRA, requires cities requesting quiet zones to implement safety improvements at the crossings, said San Mateo city engineer Jeffrey Tom. Among the measures Tom said could be taken to reduce the risk of crossings are:

• four-quadrant gate systems, which block both directions of traffic on both sides of the track
• installing medians to prevent drivers from crossing the tracks when the gates are down
• converting two-way streets into one-way streets and
• separating the tracks from the street level by building an underpass, or a grade separation project.

But those measures will be costly, Tom explained, with the least expensive option — to install four-quadrant gates at Second, East Fourth and East Bellevue avenues — to cost at least $9 million.

That would be $3 million per quadrant gate by my math.  I'll just play my broken record for a moment-  we have $100 billion dollars for an unneeded high-speed rail system that will probably never be finished, but $3M per gate is likely to take years.  Typical.

No Train Horns... in Fulton

I had a chance to get away to Sonoma County this past weekend and among the many joys of the wine country and coast was this railway crossing in Fulton.  Fulton is just north of Santa Rosa and this is the SMART line crossing.  Caltrain and Union Pacific horns are a perpetual issue in B'game as noted here and earlier.  Among the many things to enjoy in Sonoma was the quiet train since they have a No Horns section of track.  Note also the absence of the "Quad gates" that Caltrain has used as an excuse in the past for not being able to accomodate the Peninsula.  Society seems to be able to survive quiet electric vehicles everywhere on the streets so isn't it time for a quieter train?

Bridge Toll Increase Passes

I was originally of two minds on the Regional Measure 3 bridge toll hike that passed on Tuesday.  On the one hand increasing the tolls might drive down the traffic from the East Bay that makes 92 and 101 a mess during the daily commute, but the ballot opposition by local transit expert Pat Giorni (and others) convinced me to vote against it--to no avail as it passed.  So now that we are stuck with it, let's post for the record what we are supposed to get from the MTC with all of this new money (~$4.5 billion).  The DJ notes:

In San Mateo County, the measure was approved by about 54 percent, slightly under regional totals. The measure was most popular in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, where it was approved by 65 and 61 percent of voters, respectively, while Contra Costa and Solano were the two counties to reject the measure with 45 and 31 percent of voter approval, respectively, according to early results.

Linda Koelling, a former Foster City mayor leading the San Mateo effort against RM3, said the measure won’t even come close to curing congestion. “It doesn’t provide a timeline or framework for any performance measures,” she said. “Most of these projects aren’t even shovel-ready and who decides whose project comes first or second? I have no confidence in whoever put this together in their ability to plan and prioritize projects.”

The projects are:

• Expansion of BART’s fleet for $500 million and extension of BART service to San Jose for $375 million
• $300 million would fund the express lanes project, which would add two additional lanes with tolls to Highway 101 from Whipple Road to Interstate 380 in San Mateo County
• Another $300 million would be dedicated to enhanced ferry service
• $325 million would extend Caltrain to downtown San Francisco
• $50 million would be allocated to work on the Highway 101/State Route 92 interchange.
• Twenty-five percent of revenue will be allocated for transit operations annually.

Based on history, Ms. Koelling would appear to have a realistic view of the MTC's project management and governance weaknesses.  But we all pay up anyway.  Let's check back in 3-5 years and see if any of this really happened or the billions just vanished into the bureaucratic maw.