• The bike/train debate goes on. Are bike riders classist? Racsist? Worse? Read more at The Bus Bench.
• Move a fourth of the freight from trucks to trains, save the world?
• What would you do with $40 billion big ones? Here’s what Metro would do.
• Is McCain’s disdain for mass transit the nail in his presidential coffin?
• CalTrain makes room for bikes on their trains, but even that’s not enough.

Whew! What a trip it has been. A four-day vacation in the Bay Area led to a bumper crop of material for MetroRiderLA, allowing for a 10-part miniseries. It was a joy to write; hopefully MetroReaders enjoyed reading the series.

Exploring San Francisco and Santa Rosa was tremendous fun. Four days was not enough to see and experience all of what just these two cities had to offer. Even an extended vacation would still show a mere fraction of all what the Bay Area has to offer.

With dozens of bus systems, three urban rail services, several commuter and tourist ferries and three busy train services, the Bay Area shows Elhay where Southern California what we are supposed to need. Right?

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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.

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A 10-part miniseries!

Featuring a cast of thousands!

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