From: fuzzface@cats.ucsc.edu (Aaron Priven)
Newsgroups: ba.transportation
Subject: Re: "The only sensible way to proceed"
Date: 21 Jul 92 16:10:50 GMT
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz (College Eight)
NNTP-Posting-Host: am.ucsc.edu

In article <1992Jul20.184401.15553@ads.com> 
    henry@ADS.COM (Henry Mensch) writes:
 
>it doesn't matter one whit how much this costs; getting money to do
>anything is going to be a task resembling the extraction of hen's
>teeth until the ridership numbers go up significantly, and this won't
>happen as long as the caltrain fails to make reasonable connections
>with other local mass transit systems.
 
That "ridership numbers will not go up significantly until CalTrain 
makes reasonable connections with other local mass transit systems" is 
a debatable notion. 
 
For one thing, although I am the first to agree that the connection in 
San Francisco is quite poor, it is not entirely impossible to manage. 
Many people make that connection each day, either through jitneys or 
through MUNI or what have you.  Moreover, although San Francisco is 
the destination of the largest proportion of CalTrain riders, there 
are many other places along the CalTrain route where people work.  The 
downtowns of many older suburbs are along the CalTrain route. 
 
There must be a number of people who are not taking CalTrain because
of reasons *other* than the poor connections between it and other
transit systems.
 
Now how big this number is is another matter of debate, but I suggest 
that it is large enough to be "significant".
 
I can easily imagine that there are people who do not take CalTrain, 
despite that it goes where they want it to go, because: 
 
   1) They don't like waiting at CalTrain's poor stations, particularly 
at off-times when it is dark, or when there are very few people 
around.  Not all of CalTrain's stations are terrible, but quite a few 
are.  (For years my father ended up getting off at Hayward Park 
station because that was where the skip-stopping trains let him off in 
San Mateo.  There wasn't even a phone booth.  This was 1979-1980 and I 
haven't been outside at Hayward Park since, but many stations are 
still rather bad.)  I disagree strongly that "a shelter and a slab" is 
all one needs for a station that's going to *attract* passengers.  
Compare this to (dare I say it) BART's stations and one can see where 
the reputations of the two services come from.  And yes, it is 
expensive. 
 
   Do not underestimate this.  Usenet is a medium that is still very 
male, and women especially are concerned about safety issues. 
 
   2) They cannot come home or do not come home at the time that 
CalTrain can take them home.  This is true for anyone who works 
irregular schedules, a larger and larger proportion of people 
nowadays, and also anyone who works a regular schedule that doesn't 
come exactly at peak times or at one of CalTrain's trips.  I mean, 
what if you get to the CalTrain station every day five minutes after 
the train leaves?  During peak times, of course, there will be another 
train soon, but other times one has to wait *fifty-five* minutes for a 
train.  Anybody who will do that regularly when s/he could take a car 
is more of a transit-maniac than I am.  This is the old "frequency" 
drum that I am beating again.
 
   3) Insufficient parking.  Nobody's going to take a train if when 
they get there by car there isn't any parking.  I see park-and-ride 
lots as a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of progress, and I 
would dearly love it if park-and-riding were concentrated so that most 
stations would be surrounded with dense development, but as long as we 
have the automobile suburbs that we've got, we have to provide an 
interface between the car-world and the transit-world. 
 
   (I don't know if I've mentioned this before.  I live near the El 
Cerrito del Norte BART station.  Just now they are opening up a new 
Target store on the block across the street from the station.  It 
bothers me *no end* that the Target people oriented the store so that 
the store building was away from the BART station and putting the 
parking lot in between the store and the station.  I mean, the parking 
lot would have been *even closer* to the freeway offramp [Potrero St.] 
if they had done that, although people would have had to turn right 
instead of going straight [it's a triangle].  Idiots.) 
 
    4) Another reason people don't take CalTrain is because they are 
confused about the system.  CalTrain's fares are simple enough, and of 
course there's only one line, but many riders get confused about skip 
stopping. 
 
    Personally I'd be just as happy if trains didn't skip-stop, no 
matter how much Vaughn says that it's a virtue.  For one thing, it's 
very confusing to riders, who don't expect trains to simply skip by 
their stop.  This *could* be improved.  Rider education on this point, 
the last time I looked, was abysmal.  I think it would help a lot if 
if the JPB decided upon a fixed scheme for skip-stopping -- divide up 
the stops into sets that will always be used, and then educate the 
riders about which trains stop at which sets.  I have in mind big 
signs on the trains -- "This is a RED train, it stops at all RED 
stops," and then all the signs at the stations (and the listings in 
the schedules) would be colored that color.  Even so it would still be 
confusing for many people. 
 
   More importantly, it assumes that riders are always going to the 
end point of the line.  That was fine in the old days, but it's 
important to serve not just workers in San Francisco but workers all 
along the line.  When a good proportion of your riders are going from 
Menlo Park to San Mateo and all sorts of other similar pairs of 
points, skip-stopping loses much of its appeal.  If you have enough 
trains, of course, it doesn't hurt this kind of travel to have more, 
but skip-stopping isn't terribly effective if you're sandwiched 
between twenty-minute frequency trains (because the most time you can 
save is 19 minutes, right?).  
 
Much of the CalTrain right of way has a third track along it.  I 
wonder what it would take to put it into use for true express service?  
I imagine most of the existing rail is too rusty to be of use (that's 
what it looks like to me), but I know little about rail wear. 
 
                               *   *   *
 
I strongly agree that the most effective way in the long term to 
increase CalTrain's ridership is to connect "reasonably" with other 
transit systems, and that it is desirable for this to be done soon, 
but to suggest that other ways of increasing ridership will garner 
only paltry results is I believe to make a serious mistake.  I agree 
strongly with Adrian:
 
In article <1992Jul20.212804.23688@ntmtv> 
   adrian@ntmtv.UUCP (Adrian Brandt) writes: 
>"Reasonable connections" will generally cost money.  So will almost 
>anything else that will boost ridership.
   
>If ridership have to "go up significantly" before we get "money to do 
>anything", then CalTrain is doomed (or at least stuck) by your 
>analysis. 
 
There are other, cheaper things that can be done to increase 
ridership in the short term, so that one can have the political 
leverage to increase it in the long term.
 
And I have one other question to ask: is there a total worldwide 
shortage of passenger rail cars, or else why does the JPB have to 
order brand new cars every time?  Surely somebody must be rich enough 
to want new cars occasionally?  Can't rail cars be refurbished?  Maybe 
they could order new cars and use used cars to make up the time 
difference?  I mean isn't this the whole point of using standard rail 
equipment?
 
   =Aaron=
-- 
Aaron Priven, aaronrp@ucscb.ucsc.edu or fuzzface@cats.ucsc.edu
        "Men make history, but they do not do so under 
         conditions of their own choosing." -- Karl Marx
Newsgroups: ba.transportation