On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc...

In 2009, Caltrain projected 72 thousand boardings by 2030 , a rate of annual increase of 2.3%. These projections are obviously extremely important, since capacity increases need to be planned well in advance. Indeed, as was predicted by essentially all rational observers at the time, the ridership has exploded far in excess of that "extremely conservative" schedule, Ridership survey reports are available here . Here's the annual ridership: At the rate ridership has been increasing it would hit 72 thousand not in 2030, but rather in 2019: A key thing, though, is that ridership will not increase at this rate. There simply is not the capacity. At some point trains get so full that the experience of riding on the train is worse for a sufficient number of passengers than the experience of driving, or the experience of working from home, or the experience of moving closer to work, or the experience of changing jobs closer to home, or the experience of moving to Portl...

electrified Caltrain rendering With the Caltrain electrification process slowly, oh so slowly, moving forward, the organization is making important decisions about infrastructure investment which will affect capacity for decades. It's much easier and cheaper to do things right the first time rather than try to remedy poor decisions later. For example, when the Gallery sets were purchased in the 1980's, the cars were provided with only a single boarding site per train car, creating a choke point for boardings and deboardings which slows the train at every one of the many stops along the line. And when the Bombardier sets were introduced in the 2000's, on board bike capacity available with that car design was substantially restricted, which given the strong demand for bikes on board has made these newer, nicer cars unsuited for the express trains which handle the peak load during commute hours. Now Caltrain is moving ahead with electrification, and it's important les...

Sign the Baby Bullet petition here . Caltrain always seemed to need to be dragged kicking and screaming to do what's in its own best interest, assuming its best interest is more ridership at lower cost and better service for the majority of people. John Murphy, who previously petitioned Caltrain for weekend baby bullet survice (ie trains with substantially reduced stop schedules between San Francisco and San Jose), is now petititoning for a later baby bullet . Presently the last southbound AM baby bullet is at 8:57 AM from San Francisco, and the last northbound AM baby bullet is from 8:03 AM. From 9 am until around 4:30 pm it's essentially skeleton mid-day service, substantially reduced from its already inadequate peak around 2008, despite a higher budget and ridership growth since then. Electrified Caltrain rendering Caltrain has continuously underestimated latent demand for later baby bullets. When the trains were first introduced, southbound baby bullets left San F...

I take the train around 450 times per year (one-way) and I've been doing that for around 11 years, so that's around 5000 train trips. Caltrain runs around 90 trains per day, or 450 during the week, about the same number I take in a year. Caltrain hits a pedestrian or vehicle around every 3 weeks, so at least one per month on weekday trains. I ride the train around 2/3 the total distance. That means I'd expect to be on a train which hits a pedestrian or car around once every six years. But I've never been on such a train, until now. I'm on the train now, logged in to a wireless network which happened to reach this position. There's two bike cars per train. I usually get on the southernmost. That's what I did this evening. The northernmost is the lead car for the evening commute. The engine is to the south, pushing the train set ("consist" in train-speak). Cyclists in the northernmost car, the other bike car, reported the collision was l...

Until last fall, I would ride my bike to the Caltrain station, take the train to Mountain View, and ride from there to work. Since then, however, I've been leaving the bike at home. This is because in August I started training for early December's California International Marathon, then after that redirected my focus to the Napa Marathon. Napa is looking extremely grim due to extended training lost from post-holiday-travel sickness, but I prefer to not dwell on that. I've continued to go by foot to the train. It's interesting to compare the relative times, using the 314 train which departs San Francisco @ 7:14 am. Another day on the Caltrain bike car ( StreetsBlog ) Train: Leave home at 7:02 with bike. Ride to 4th and King station. 22nd Street station is closer (0.8 miles versus 1.3 miles), but if I go there I risk the bike spaces filling up before I arrive. It takes me around 7 minutes to ride to the 4th and King. However, if I leave any later than 7:02, I...

The results of my ongoing learning experience with Caltrain and Clipper... Checking online, asking conductors, and calling on-line help never provides the whole truth. I'm given fragmented information, partially true, partially wrong. Yet I continue to chip away at that vague thing we call reality. That hyperdimensional fractal volume whose surface can never be perfectly realized, only approximated to ever-increasing resolution... Here's my understanding for how Clipper Direct works with monthly passes on Caltrain: 1. Each month you deposit via Clipper Direct at least sufficient pre-tax dollars into your "account". 2. Using the website , you can then purchase "transit products". These can be one-time or recurring orders. In my case, I have a recurring order for a monthly pass between zones 1 and 3. 3. This monthly pass will get you on the train for the first nine days of the month (at least this worked for me this month). 4. If at some point dur...

"I have a puzzle for you" my fellow passenger asked.... I was riding on the last northbound Caltrain baby bullet train out of Mountain View at 6:38 pm, the one I've been taking pretty much every day since starting my new job last October. If I leave any later, I start paying the price of riding trains which make more stops, get me home even later. This is the latest train I can take and have time to eat dinner, relax a bit, and get a solid night's sleep before catching the 6:11 am southbound the next morning. Long days, sure, but I'm having fun. "A jailer has too many prisoners in his prison and needs to get rid of 100. So he gathers 100 prisoners in a room. In an adjacent room he puts 100 hats, each hat containing one of the names of the prisoners, in random order. One by one, prisoners are brought into the room with the hats where they can pick from up to 50 hats (half) to find their name. If they find their name in those 50 picks, they leave thro...

My friend John Murphy is rather negative on the proposed "scaled back" Caltrain schedule , designed to reduce expenses in a time of reduced support from the counties. Caltrain, surprisingly, has no dedicated funding source, but rather must rely on the good-faith contributions from San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties. This is because the Bay area has such a hopelessly fragmented transit system. Counting Marin, 511.org lists 22 bus agencies, 6 rail agencies (not counting Amtrak), and 7 ferries. Really it makes a lot more sense for there to be a "Bay Area Transit" agency, since with so many interregional routes (San Francisco to Marin, Marin to San Francisco, between San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties) there's extensive duplication of service, and seemingly arbitrary rules to avoid competition (like SamTrans can't pick anyone up on northbound trips which enter San Francisco). It's a mess. With all of the fragmentation...

Another day on the Caltrain bike car ( StreetsBlog ) Back in February I proposed a weekend train schedule for Caltrain, one which would make the train an attractive option for those traveling along the Peninsula on weekends. That schedule wasn't based on any estimation of actual resource constraints. Rather it was what I expected it would take to start to make a dent in the car traffic on 101 every Saturday and Sunday. That proposal was for express trains traveling north and south each hour, with two limited trains taking care of the secondary stations, also each hour north and south. Without service at least comparable to this, service which is typical of rail systems around the world excluding ours where we've sold our souls to the auto industry, those willing and able to drive will find themselves hard pressed to claim the train is the preferred alternative for travel subject to external time constraints. I'm sitting next to Ammon Skidmore at a JPB meeting in ...

I started a new job and any semblance of "training" has gone by the wayside, as I was first focused on learning my way around, and now on solving some of the problems I'm hired to deal with. I'll need to find more balance in coming weeks. But I digress. A consequence of the new job is I can finally get Commuter Checks, which allow me to buy transit tickets with "pre-tax" income. Considering as well I'll be working from home a lot less (I was around 1-2 times per week) and at least initially riding SF2G in less, surely it's time for a Caltrain monthly pass rather than my usual practice of getting 8-ride tickets. It's time to become one of the big-boy train commuters, right? The fare chart shows that a monthly pass for 3-zones is $159, while an 8-ride is $40.75. So the monthly costs as much as 31.25 rides. in other words, if you ride 16 round trips or more, the monthly is the deal. Sure, there's other factors. For example the m...

SportVelo held its winter training camp Thursday through Friday. Each of the first two days, I boarded a Caltrain Limited from Sam Francisco with my bike, stopped off in either Starbucks or Peets, and easily made it well in advance of the 9:15 am start time for the training rides. Caltrain does fairly well for commuters on traditional workdays. Honestly I don't understand why so many persist in driving. Indeed, as I type this, I'm on the train back to San Francisco from my office in Palo Alto. It's the weekends that're the killer. For various reasons I wasn't able to make the weekend rides, but I would have liked to have the option. This is especially true for Sunday's "Queen Stage". Except Caltrain's earliest train on weekends leaves the City at 8:15. And not only does it leave late, it's slower than any weekday train, stopping not only at all the weekday stops, but additionally at Broadway in Burlingame and Atherton, stops which have...

Caltrain is tasked to be public transportation, not commuter rail. However, weekend service, especially "counter-commute" (SF->SJ AM, return PM) is so marginal to be almost useless. This weekend really reinforced that point. My coach was running a weekend training camp: rides daily at 8:30 am. I couldn't make it. Not Sunday, not Saturday, not even Friday which isn't an official holiday. Not even close. I thought things were bad when service was restored in June 2004 following a two-year down-time due to track work to allow for "Baby Bullet" service, which required passing zones. After a period of debate in which four different scheduling options were considered, the worst of the four, full local service on each hourly train, was chosen. Every time it was suggested various stations would be omitted from the service of some or all of the trains, people from those stations would complain. People from places like Atherton, where the local station i...

Caltrain just shifted their southbound weekend schedule by 15 minutes to allow extra time for nocturnal track work . Caltrain weekend service is a long, sorry tale. For two years weekend trains were canceled altogether for track upgrades, replaced by a limited-stop " RRX " bus which kept up with the previous local-stop schedule to the stops it served. This included a brutal round-trip crawl between 101 and Palo Alto transit center. With track work completed, Caltrain patted itself heartily upon its back by returning weekend rail, presenting three schedule options to public comment. There were plans A, B, and C (PDF schedules linked to page no longer available). Under A, the train would stop at approximately 2/3 of the stations, every hour. Under B, they would stop at every 2/3 of the stations, but some of these stations would be served every hour, others every hour. The final plan, C, and the one I vocally opposed, was to stop at every station, every hour. Obviously...

First, an apology. Last blog post, which I subsequently deleted, I commented on a power metric which I didn't fully understand. I like playing with formulas, I don't deny it. It's sort of my job (in semiconductor devices, not in cycling). I love trying to model stuff. But if I'm suggesting limitations in someone else's model, I'd better be really sure I understand what they're modeling! I'll still post my models here at some point, but in a more constructive fashion. Today I attended the CalTrain meeting on increasing bike capacity on trains. It's fantastic Caltrain recognizes that given the profound limitations of public transit on the Peninsula, the bike + train combination is a uniquely attractive option. Indeed, it amazes me that anyone tolerates the solo-driver commute from the City. Living in San Francisco with a job on Palo Alto simply would not be an option for me if I were compelled to drive. Caltrain bike car. You've gotta be ...