Regional Rail

Shifting Funds, Shifty Priorities

Posted by Eric ⋅ 26 March 2009 ⋅ 9 Comments

First, A Few Numbers (and Acronyms) Regular readers may recall our previous discussion of Transportation 2035, the latest update to MTC’s ongoing efforts on the Regional Transportation Plan. Earlier this year, we wrote a special feature that describes the multifaceted plan, fleshing out how MTC has proposed to allocate $226 billion of local, state, and … Continue reading →

Preliminary Injunction Against Warm Springs Denied

Posted by Eric ⋅ 20 March 2009 ⋅ 1 Comment

This morning, Judge Frank Roesch (of Alameda County Superior Court) heard arguments in the Lewis v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission case we discussed two weeks ago. The petitioners (former BART directors Lewis and Nakadegawa, and TRANSDEF) sought a preliminary injunction of MTC’s and ACTIA’s total allocation of about $315 million to the BART extension to Warm … Continue reading →

Lawsuit Challenges the Warm Springs Funding Swap

Posted by Eric ⋅ 4 March 2009 ⋅ 15 Comments

BART announced in February 2009 that it was moving forward on a $225 million contract to construct the subway portion of its planned extension to Warm Springs, which will tunnel under Central Park in Fremont. The 5.4-mile extension south of the existing Fremont terminal station will be the first stage of BART to Silicon Valley. … Continue reading →

November 2008 Election: Yes on Measure Q (Sonoma & Marin Counties)

Posted by Eric ⋅ 3 November 2008 ⋅ 8 Comments

Courtesy of SMARTTrain2008.org. In 2006, voters in Marin and Sonoma Counties very narrowly turned down a 1/4-percent sales tax whose proceeds would fund Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART), the project that would rehabilitate the 70-mile right of way (formerly of Northwestern Pacific) between Cloverdale in northern Sonoma County and Larkspur in Marin County. This year, … Continue reading →

Celebrating a Milestone and Biding Time

Posted by Eric ⋅ 7 August 2008 ⋅ 20 Comments

Hey, Caltrain: nice work. This past fiscal year, the underappreciated regional rail corridor linking Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco Counties has enjoyed the highest annual ridership in its history (now 145 years and counting): close to 12 million riders, or an average of almost 38,000 each weekday. The average weekday ridership in May … Continue reading →

A SMART Pipe Dream

Posted by Eric ⋅ 2 July 2008 ⋅ 4 Comments

Please click here to read the previous post, which adds a bit of context and motivation for this post. Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) will likely be going up for the ballot again this November. Most recently, in the November 2006 election, the Measure R quarter-cent sales tax for SMART failed — falling just … Continue reading →

Missing Geary Misses the Point

Posted by Eric ⋅ 2 July 2008 ⋅ 3 Comments

Over a year ago, before this website was born, the conceptual proposals were released for Bay Area regional rail expansion projected for the next 50 years. Included among the plans is a second tube for the San Francisco-Oakland Transbay corridor, providing additional core capacity for a crucial regional link that is already a bottleneck point … Continue reading →

A Valentine’s Day Ode to Caltrain

Posted by Eric ⋅ 14 February 2008 ⋅ 3 Comments

On this day two years ago, Caltrain held a contest to get people in the right mood for Valentine’s Day. Caltrain accepted submissions of poems and selected a few winners. Since it was for Valentine’s Day, the poems were supposed to be about love — either a poem describing some sort of romance on the … Continue reading →