Bay Area Diaries — Part VIII: Caltrain

Twilight descends on the Bay Area Diaries. The penultimate journey was admittedly brief, and was done primarily to get another stamp on the Bay Area Diaries’s multimodal Sanfran passport. Metaphorically speaking. (A literal passport does exist; it’s sold by Muni in 1- 3- and 7-day increments and gives a discount on Ghirardelli chocolate.)

For the third time, the scene is Fourth and King streets. The arrival to and departure from Sanfran was via Megabus. The second time was returning to the glass sliver station for afternoon voyage on “Old Ironsides”, the 145-years-young and still-useful-to-society rail corridor known today as Caltrain.

What is the dream and ambition of BART planners and foamers — getting the space-age train to circle the Bay — old-fashioned 19th-century technology said, “Thanks, but no thanks. Now let us get back to work.” Caltrain, handling the western flank, makes the San Francisco-to-San Jose leg spoken for.

The future is here and now, and has been under the Bay Area’s nose for seven generations. Between the Bay Area’s two largest cities, Caltrain goes everywhere. And stops everywhere, too. The abundance of stations make Caltrain slow going. The Baby Bullet, which is the focus of this entry, pulls out all the stops — well, most of them — and makes a rush hour commute between the two cities a contender.

On paper, anyway. The January 17 journey on Train 362 was very fast. Then again, this trip didn’t cover anything south of Millbrae. Had there been more time, this 10-part miniseries would have been a Greek epic, with the transit odyssey including entries on the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s bus and barren light rail and the ruins of the once vast samTrans duchy. Any transit agency rebellious enough to begin its name without capitalization is worth a write-up.

All aboard for this quickie commuter expedition.

It all begins here at Fourth and King streets.

Baby Bullet train 362 left Fourth and King promptly at 4:09 p.m. The train attracted a fair amount of ridership. This particular segment of the car was three-fourths full. Getting a good estimate on the productivity of the whole train was difficult.

Caltrain used its bi-level gallery cars built by Nippon Sharyo — a name familiar to Angelenos as the producer of the Metro Blue Line light rail vehicles. The configuration was peculiar. The cars had a central doorway. The vestibule divided the car into two separate chambers. The upper floor seemed as though engineers designed the car on the fly and shoehorned it in there. The upper floor had a gap in the middle, leaving the lower floor in plain view and bisecting the seats at the top. The catwalks created by the gap were very narrow, and the stairs were too short to climb safely. Also, these cars didn’t have bathrooms, or the lavatories do exist but weren’t immediately conspicuous. Caltrain riders may be accustomed to the trains, but Metrolink’s Bombardier cars put the Nippon Sharyo stock to shame. Caltrain must have felt the same way; it purchased Bombardiers in 2002, but they are a small part of their fleet.

On the catwalk, on the catwalk, I snap my little pic on the catwalk. Both floors are visible from the space in the middle. The flat surface above the gap stores commuters’ baggage.

The San Francisco and northern San Mateo portion of the right of way had scenery more for chewing than for printing on a postcard. Much of Caltrain runs through industrial armpits, and a fair section was canopied by I-280. The temporary collection of the San Francisco graffiti museum adorned the walls in this area.

The Baby Bullet zoomed by four stations, making it hard to see what the stations or boarding activity looked like, let alone whether the waiting passengers’ faces had the same look of consternation when Metro ran “express” service on the Gold Line. Hopefully, riders tolerated the Baby Bullets enough to avoid them subject to the same fate as the Gold Line express.

The ride was almost over as soon as it started. The Baby Bullet hit its target, Millbrae Station, 15 minutes later. At least another 40 people boarded here. Why here? This was also a BART terminal station (and San Mateo County’s Megabus stop), allowing for a quick turnback to Sanfran.

BART and Caltrain platforms are inside this building at the Millbrae Intermodal Transit Center.

In hindsight, going Dionne Warwick and knowing the way to San Jose would have been more informative and interesting. Another Baby Bullet north would have left San Jose 15 minutes after it had arrived, and getting off at Millbrae would have allowed for 2 hours on Caltrain and still left time to explore BART. Then again, the temptation to alight at Mountain View and experience what it’s like to have a whole light rail car all to a single person would have been great. It would’ve consumed far too much time, though.

Millbrae, which received some attention in the Megabus review, is a Caltrain station wrapped in a BART terminal wrapped in more parking spaces than the human race could ever possibly put to use. The parking structure is big enough to have its own representative in the House, and it’s supplemented by at least another thousand street-level spaces. Hyperbole? Here is a Google Maps satellite photo:

The station, the bright square with the logos, is about a third the size of the parking structure. The garage holds 3,000 cars. To capture it and the surface parking within the frame, the map was set to the third tick on the zoom bar. To the east of the station is Bayshore Freeway (US-101), and the major arterials to the west and south are El Camino Real and Millbrae Avenue, respectively.

On the afternoon of this ride, most of the spaces were vacant.

If planners overestimated the demand for park & ride commuting, wouldn’t Millbrae realize it has a goldmine on its hands and turn the asphalt and concrete farm into a transit oriented development? Highly unlikely, for a few reasons.

First, the Bay Area is essentially two cities: San Francisco, and everywhere else trying not to become another San Francisco. Just because they have BART and many other transit options, most Bay Area residents are adamant about preserving and protecting a suburban way of life. In the Bay Area, “smart growth” became a euphemism for land use and economic development policies that mandate cities be frozen in time to when most of the residents first moved in and co-opted an otherwise environmentally sensible position. The residents hate sprawl, but they hate San Francisco more. Second, TOD would be isolated and out of place. Both El Camino Real and Millbrae Avenue are wide, high-speed suburban thoroughfares with traffic light cycles geared only to vehicle throughput. Billions more would have to be spent to make over this neighborhood to offer something, anything, to pedestrians. Third, the real estate bubble bursting has forced everyone to clear all options and scenarios off the table. Clearly now and the near future is going to be a terrible time to start any new home construction. Even long after this decade’s housing debacle is left to gather dust in the attic of public consciousness, its effects will be felt for decades. The biggest one may have closed the window on TOD forever. The bubble created such a glut that there are years worth of overbuilt housing inventories, and the political consensus is going to be figuring out how to move this unsold merchandise.

Then what? To quote something Yogi Berra would probably say: if anything will happen, it will happen.

There was a BART train to Richmond waiting at the station. It formed part of the next narrative in the Bay Area Diaries, which is also the closing chapter of the revenue service portion of this voyage.

Previously:

• Prologue
• Part II: Megabus
• Part III: Golden Gate Transit
• Part IV: Sonoma County
• Part V: Golden Gate Ferry
• Part VI: Muni rail
• Part VII: Muni buses

Photo by neutralSurface via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

BART Board for upcoming arrivals: BART to Pittsburg/Bay Point arrives in 1 day Closing thoughts arrive in 3 days