Part of the attraction of rail is the convenience of not driving. That part of the value will drain away over the next few decades as level 5 self driving takes the wheel.
Taking people off rail and onto road leads to more congestion. But maybe we can mitigate that with software linked road trains. The cars could negotiate to join platoons where they are all controlled by the lead pilot car, making them more compact and predictable, increasing road capacity and saving energy with drafting.
Rail could slowly die off while "trains" flourish.
Or capture the energy benefit of rail with self driving cars with hybrid wheels. Public transport could become hailing a rail/road car that drives you end to end, with only the middle part on rail.
It's notable that the annual ridership is up 47% in the FY ending June 2025 vs the FY ending June 2024, when electrification was only complete in September 2024-- in other words, it's not even a full year's worth of ridership increase.
On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
Anecdotally, the increased service is a game-changer. Speed matters, too, a lot, but the frequency is what matters to me. A transit system that only arrives once an hour off-peak is not particularly useful. The increased frequency, to a minimum of once every 30mins means missing a train is merely annoying. It's still infrequent enough that you want to check a schedule to avoid waiting around for too long, but not a deal-breaker, IMO.
> On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
It makes a lot of sense. Many companies went full remote during the pandemic and stayed that way, or if they went in person, it's only 60% of the time or less. And a lot of people left the area during the pandemic, and those that are returning are coming back to SF, not the suburbs.
I used to take the train every day for years, but I've only been on it once or twice since the pandemic.
To put it in startup terms, the TAM for ridership shrank considerably. They may very well be capturing a greater amount of the TAM than before the pandemic.
Commuting and residential patterns changed too. A lot of Googlers purchased houses in the Tri-valley during COVID instead of living in apartments in Mountain View or Sunnyvale or SF. Now they have a Dumbarton or 237 commute instead of something Caltrain-accessible. Tech companies also started laying off in 2022, and stopped hiring in the Bay Area; I'd bet that total employment along the Caltrain corridor is significantly lower than in 2019.
The Bay Area also needs way better last-mile transportation. I looked into taking Caltrain to work; it'd take 22 minutes to Caltrain the ~15 miles to the nearest Caltrain station, and then another 22 minutes to shuttle the 2.5 miles to work.
> On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
My understand is that it's been true of commuter rail everywhere - e.g. a Twin Cities commuter railroad has shut down as well due to declining ridership.
My understanding is that there's a decline in transit use in general, but I would hazard to guess that the emphasis on commuters has hit commuter rail the hardest.
Living in Jersey City, the Path train to Manhattan only leaves every 20 minutes on Sundays, and that's infrequent enough that we were discouraged from making that trip. We still went, but I'm sure not as often.
I can tell you the light rail in Austin is a complete failure. There was some ridership before the pandemic, but after a few years, the numbers are dismal. They've covered the windows with ads, so you can't even tell how empty they are inside. Meanwhile, they crisscross the city, constantly blocking streets with rail guards just to shuffle a handful of people north and south.
I think you’re thinking of streetcars—trains that share right of way with cars. Light rail often has its own right-of-way with priority over cars. (That’s what the crossing guards are for.)
Last time I rode Caltrain (late last year) I had my life threatened by some low life who got mad b/c they had been in the bathroom for 5+ stops and an employee had the audacity to knock on the door and tell them to wrap it up and get out (I just happened to be nearby) so there's that aspect of it.
The Caltrain sucks though because taking a car is so much more fast/practical. I must have taken it once in 5y because it's just so far out in the city and not easy to access (and then super slow).
People in Europe take trains because it's a better alternative than driving!
Make subways land right in the train station in SF, then make the train faster, then you have something useful.
On the other hand I agree with the premise of the article. If you have high mobility in a state, the state will become reacher. Doesn't make sense to wait for national trains to be a thing, make sure people can easily move across your state without having to rely on having a car.
You must be riding a different Caltrain, unless I'm on my motorcycle it's always faster to get anywhere in SF via Caltrain + bike from the peninsula during commute hours, it's not even close.
The big value to me as a BART/Caltrain rider was the ability to avoid traffic and avoid parking hassles within SF. In SOMA, at least, street parking is mostly metered 4 hours max, and private parking is $30-60/day.
The electric trains are a bit faster, but still slower than something like BART.
My main issues with Caltrain are the cost (public transit shouldn’t be more expensive than driving) and the schedule: depending on the station, missing a train can mean waiting 30-60 minutes.
also the Peninsula isn’t really built around trains. I still have to drive 5-10 minutes just to get to the station, then wait, then ride at that point it’s easier to just drive the whole way. If I lived within walking distance, I might use the train way more.
The US needs a model for stronger state and regional authorities that plan and implement mass transit and zoning. In California in particular, cities and counties have consistently bungled planning, locking entire communities into single family housing with low height maximums, ceded walkable downtowns to freeway strip malls dominated by a handful of national retailers, and few updates to mass transit since BART was built in the 1970s. The example of the North Bay NIMBYs blocking BART expansion sticks out to me in particular.
Those rich regions are setting examples of building transit at way too high a cost for poorer regions to afford.
If we could use other parts of the world as an example - my region is richer than them and could afford it. But those places somehow are never used as the example
So RTO started happening around the same time they electrified and ridership is on its way back up to pre pandemic levels. I don't really care if Metra is diesel or electric if I need to get into the office.
The transition enabled faster and more frequent service, which is something you probably do care about if you need to get into the office and are deciding how to get there.
Caltrain is functional, I guess, but it's one linear system. It doesn't even have express tracks. (It has a few four-tracked overtaking areas, but nothing pervasive.) Inside, basic electric power outlets are hard to find. Grade separation? Ridiculous fantasy. The route map hasn't expanded since 1992.
Yeah, they've electrified the system. Congrats, I guess? The system is still a glorified people mover. It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction.
Given Caltrain's route map stagnation and the worse fates of other CA rail projects, it really doesn't seem, well, grounded to reality, to suggest everyone emulate California rail's success. After all, it takes two days to grab a train from Seattle to SF!
If you want a half-decent model, at least look at NYC. The LIRR, Metro North, PATH, and the subway form something resembling a coherent transit grid.
I would expect a regional system to connect an entire regional area.
Caltrain connects two parts of the Bay Area: San Francisco and the South Bay. BART connects the entire East Bay to San Francisco. In a functioning system, they would both just be legs and not two completely separate systems.
The only place they connect appears to be in Millbrae and not near any large hubs.
Is the argument just that the MNR and NYC subway, or Boston's T and commuter rail, are better integrated than BART and the Caltrain? Seems pretty great now but then I remember before the renovations at 4th and King.
Long Island is even more of a long hallway than the peninsula. The LIRR manages to have multiple trunks and something like 10 different branch lines.
One thing that made it possible is LI is much flatter terrain than the peninsula.
The main trunk lines are in Long Island are about 3-4 miles apart. Northwest of around Cupertino or so, the mountains edge too close to the bay shoreline for you to make a second trunk line viable. Your best bet would be plonking a line around about 85, but the right-of-way doesn't exist to actually hook that line up to the existing line in any useful way.
And outside of that, basically everything you'd consider plonking another path already exists with some service: BART runs up the east shore of the bay, as it does west of San Bruno Mountain. You have two mountain crossings covered by BART and one by ACE. The main missing things are curving BART back into San Jose and reactivating the Dumbarton Bridge.
Your last sentence was going to be my reply. The peninsula is really linear along 101 / the historic el Camino. There really isn’t anything to connect to.
LIRR still had to do plenty of tunneling to build the East Side Access station though. Still, it opened in 2023! NYC is also still building the second avenue subway --- slowly, haltingly, and at near-ruinous expense, but it's actually a real expansion to the network is actually happening. By US standards, that's a miracle.
> If you want a half-decent model, at least look at NYC
I don't have the data, honestly, but isn't NYC (and it's surrounding cities/suburbs) more dense than the Bay Area?
In SF (the city) transpiration is quite decent because it's dense; single family houses and public transpiration together is a very very tricky to pull; you have to choose one or the other and most people would rather live in a family house than an apartment/condo with good transpiration
If the ABAG had power, I would have them replace Caltrain with BaRT to make a it a loop around the SF/SP Bay Area and tear out CalTrain. Caltrain remains because the tracks are used by UP --if it were not UP's right-of-way, BaRT could have that corridor. BaRT could still work if they did cut-and-cover to build a parallel line under the Camino Real. Granted that'd be a lot of money today --they should have bought in back in the 60s. I know, hindsight and all.
The main issue then would be what to do about Gilroy --they can keep Caltrain for that like the ACE does for the East SF Bay.
It's insane that it's not connected to Bart. Or that it isn't Bart. Bart goes SF to San Jose in the East Bay but we have a separate system on the West Bay? It's all a sign of how dysfunctional California governments have been at all levels for a long time. A big part of the dysfunction in the Bay Area is because there are 100 separate tiny governments. If it were one big government, like NYC, we could have sensibly coordinated regional projects.
You should check Austin TX where they tried to do the same thing, but only built one rail.... So yea you have to wait like over an hour just for arrival if the train is at the other end. For what should be a 15 min ride because literally only one train can go back and forth. The train drivers sometime stop the train to get food at in-n-out burger too, seriously.
Its one of the dumbest things I've ever seen, a testament to inefficient bureaucracy. I'm not sure anyone uses it.
No, we shouldn't. Caltrain shows that even the best transit systems are not comfortable for daily commutes.
The upper limit for comfortable commutes is 30 minutes one way. Even assuming that you synchronize your schedule with Caltrain departures, the map of locations within this timeframe would look like a string of rather small beads along the Caltrain route.
As a simpler example, try playing with routes from the Salesforce Tower. You start blowing past that 30-minute mark by the time the train is still passing Brisbane.
I'm really surprised that nobody has yet commented on the dismal economic failure that the California High Speed Rail has been. After 11 years and $15B ($3.4B in federal grants), they've made very little progress. They just lost $4B more in federal grants because the project is a classic example of
Fraud, Waste, and Abuse (FWA). California sued over the cancelled grant, but then dropped the suit. My guess is that it was dropped because it would have opened up California to discovery, which would have revealed the details of the FWA.
Estimates to complete the original plan call for another $100B and at least another 12 years. I don't think it's ever going to be completed given the massive state budget deficit (reliable figures are difficult to find). Even if it ever got completed, it would never pay for itself.
Part of the attraction of rail is the convenience of not driving. That part of the value will drain away over the next few decades as level 5 self driving takes the wheel.
Taking people off rail and onto road leads to more congestion. But maybe we can mitigate that with software linked road trains. The cars could negotiate to join platoons where they are all controlled by the lead pilot car, making them more compact and predictable, increasing road capacity and saving energy with drafting.
Rail could slowly die off while "trains" flourish.
Or capture the energy benefit of rail with self driving cars with hybrid wheels. Public transport could become hailing a rail/road car that drives you end to end, with only the middle part on rail.
It's notable that the annual ridership is up 47% in the FY ending June 2025 vs the FY ending June 2024, when electrification was only complete in September 2024-- in other words, it's not even a full year's worth of ridership increase.
On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
Anecdotally, the increased service is a game-changer. Speed matters, too, a lot, but the frequency is what matters to me. A transit system that only arrives once an hour off-peak is not particularly useful. The increased frequency, to a minimum of once every 30mins means missing a train is merely annoying. It's still infrequent enough that you want to check a schedule to avoid waiting around for too long, but not a deal-breaker, IMO.
> On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
It makes a lot of sense. Many companies went full remote during the pandemic and stayed that way, or if they went in person, it's only 60% of the time or less. And a lot of people left the area during the pandemic, and those that are returning are coming back to SF, not the suburbs.
I used to take the train every day for years, but I've only been on it once or twice since the pandemic.
To put it in startup terms, the TAM for ridership shrank considerably. They may very well be capturing a greater amount of the TAM than before the pandemic.
Commuting and residential patterns changed too. A lot of Googlers purchased houses in the Tri-valley during COVID instead of living in apartments in Mountain View or Sunnyvale or SF. Now they have a Dumbarton or 237 commute instead of something Caltrain-accessible. Tech companies also started laying off in 2022, and stopped hiring in the Bay Area; I'd bet that total employment along the Caltrain corridor is significantly lower than in 2019.
The Bay Area also needs way better last-mile transportation. I looked into taking Caltrain to work; it'd take 22 minutes to Caltrain the ~15 miles to the nearest Caltrain station, and then another 22 minutes to shuttle the 2.5 miles to work.
This happened in my country. Basically many people only go the office a few days a week. Friday's are virtual ghost towns.
Unfortunately for railroad companies commuters are the lifeblood.
> On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
My understand is that it's been true of commuter rail everywhere - e.g. a Twin Cities commuter railroad has shut down as well due to declining ridership.
https://www.progressiverailroading.com/passenger_rail/news/M...
Here's a relatively rigorous report from the GAO synthesizing cross-US experiences:
https://www.gao.gov/blog/most-commuter-rail-systems-are-stil...
My understanding is that there's a decline in transit use in general, but I would hazard to guess that the emphasis on commuters has hit commuter rail the hardest.
Also WFH is still around. Sure RTO is being forced but it's not universal. Lots of orgs are still hybrid.
" find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels."
Do we know how much of this 47% is due to electrification vs just post-pandemic trend?
Living in Jersey City, the Path train to Manhattan only leaves every 20 minutes on Sundays, and that's infrequent enough that we were discouraged from making that trip. We still went, but I'm sure not as often.
I can tell you the light rail in Austin is a complete failure. There was some ridership before the pandemic, but after a few years, the numbers are dismal. They've covered the windows with ads, so you can't even tell how empty they are inside. Meanwhile, they crisscross the city, constantly blocking streets with rail guards just to shuffle a handful of people north and south.
> light rail in Austin is a complete failure
Light rail is stupid. It’s a bus that can’t change lanes. A train that gets stuck in traffic.
And, as you said, they visibly disrupt drivers which generates class animosity.
I think you’re thinking of streetcars—trains that share right of way with cars. Light rail often has its own right-of-way with priority over cars. (That’s what the crossing guards are for.)
The Austin train you are talking about is heavy rail. Not to be confused with Austin light rail which is Coming Soon (TM).
It's still more reliable than the busses. I think it's pretty fun.
Last time I rode Caltrain (late last year) I had my life threatened by some low life who got mad b/c they had been in the bathroom for 5+ stops and an employee had the audacity to knock on the door and tell them to wrap it up and get out (I just happened to be nearby) so there's that aspect of it.
The Caltrain sucks though because taking a car is so much more fast/practical. I must have taken it once in 5y because it's just so far out in the city and not easy to access (and then super slow).
People in Europe take trains because it's a better alternative than driving!
Make subways land right in the train station in SF, then make the train faster, then you have something useful.
On the other hand I agree with the premise of the article. If you have high mobility in a state, the state will become reacher. Doesn't make sense to wait for national trains to be a thing, make sure people can easily move across your state without having to rely on having a car.
You must be riding a different Caltrain, unless I'm on my motorcycle it's always faster to get anywhere in SF via Caltrain + bike from the peninsula during commute hours, it's not even close.
reading is tougher though
absolutely, i love caltrain and i ride it all the time precisely because it's time i can actually use to do whatever i want
The big value to me as a BART/Caltrain rider was the ability to avoid traffic and avoid parking hassles within SF. In SOMA, at least, street parking is mostly metered 4 hours max, and private parking is $30-60/day.
The electric trains are a bit faster, but still slower than something like BART.
My main issues with Caltrain are the cost (public transit shouldn’t be more expensive than driving) and the schedule: depending on the station, missing a train can mean waiting 30-60 minutes.
also the Peninsula isn’t really built around trains. I still have to drive 5-10 minutes just to get to the station, then wait, then ride at that point it’s easier to just drive the whole way. If I lived within walking distance, I might use the train way more.
Last mile connectivity is my issue as well! I live near a VTA light rail stop but taking that almost doubles my trip time to SF.
Yeah my plan is to try Waymo as the last mile. Just idea right now but it sounds like a reasonable alternative to driving.
The US needs a model for stronger state and regional authorities that plan and implement mass transit and zoning. In California in particular, cities and counties have consistently bungled planning, locking entire communities into single family housing with low height maximums, ceded walkable downtowns to freeway strip malls dominated by a handful of national retailers, and few updates to mass transit since BART was built in the 1970s. The example of the North Bay NIMBYs blocking BART expansion sticks out to me in particular.
The US generally doesn't build big things like this any more.
big things seem to require a blank check.
Yep.
Totally disingenuous to say, "Hey! Look at the richest region in the US! They have electric trains. Why can't we?"
Well, make my state the fourth largest economy in the world and we'd have electric trains too.
Those rich regions are setting examples of building transit at way too high a cost for poorer regions to afford.
If we could use other parts of the world as an example - my region is richer than them and could afford it. But those places somehow are never used as the example
Not true, we just only do it if it's part of a DoD budget.
So RTO started happening around the same time they electrified and ridership is on its way back up to pre pandemic levels. I don't really care if Metra is diesel or electric if I need to get into the office.
The transition enabled faster and more frequent service, which is something you probably do care about if you need to get into the office and are deciding how to get there.
Caltrain is functional, I guess, but it's one linear system. It doesn't even have express tracks. (It has a few four-tracked overtaking areas, but nothing pervasive.) Inside, basic electric power outlets are hard to find. Grade separation? Ridiculous fantasy. The route map hasn't expanded since 1992.
Yeah, they've electrified the system. Congrats, I guess? The system is still a glorified people mover. It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction.
Given Caltrain's route map stagnation and the worse fates of other CA rail projects, it really doesn't seem, well, grounded to reality, to suggest everyone emulate California rail's success. After all, it takes two days to grab a train from Seattle to SF!
If you want a half-decent model, at least look at NYC. The LIRR, Metro North, PATH, and the subway form something resembling a coherent transit grid.
> It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction.
To be fair, the peninsula is basically a long hallway. I’m not really sure where else it would go?
I would expect a regional system to connect an entire regional area.
Caltrain connects two parts of the Bay Area: San Francisco and the South Bay. BART connects the entire East Bay to San Francisco. In a functioning system, they would both just be legs and not two completely separate systems.
The only place they connect appears to be in Millbrae and not near any large hubs.
They will soon connect in San Jose.
I wouldn't consider "soon" to mean ten years.
Six miles, 12 billion dollars, opening in 2036.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extension
What's the holdup? Do they need to source more 5.25 inch floppy drives?
Don’t forget the SF Downtown Rail Extension, planned since the 1990s supposedly.
https://www.tjpa.org/portaldtx/about-portal
https://www.caltrain.com/media/17998/download
Is the argument just that the MNR and NYC subway, or Boston's T and commuter rail, are better integrated than BART and the Caltrain? Seems pretty great now but then I remember before the renovations at 4th and King.
My argument is that Caltrain mainly connects the two most largest and richest cities in the SF Bay Area, which are both population and job centers.
It would be like calling the Google private shuttles a model for public buses to follow.
Long Island is even more of a long hallway than the peninsula. The LIRR manages to have multiple trunks and something like 10 different branch lines. One thing that made it possible is LI is much flatter terrain than the peninsula.
The main trunk lines are in Long Island are about 3-4 miles apart. Northwest of around Cupertino or so, the mountains edge too close to the bay shoreline for you to make a second trunk line viable. Your best bet would be plonking a line around about 85, but the right-of-way doesn't exist to actually hook that line up to the existing line in any useful way.
And outside of that, basically everything you'd consider plonking another path already exists with some service: BART runs up the east shore of the bay, as it does west of San Bruno Mountain. You have two mountain crossings covered by BART and one by ACE. The main missing things are curving BART back into San Jose and reactivating the Dumbarton Bridge.
Your last sentence was going to be my reply. The peninsula is really linear along 101 / the historic el Camino. There really isn’t anything to connect to.
LIRR still had to do plenty of tunneling to build the East Side Access station though. Still, it opened in 2023! NYC is also still building the second avenue subway --- slowly, haltingly, and at near-ruinous expense, but it's actually a real expansion to the network is actually happening. By US standards, that's a miracle.
There used to be a rail line that went closer to the base of the mountains but they tore that down to build Foothill Expressway and other roads.
> If you want a half-decent model, at least look at NYC
I don't have the data, honestly, but isn't NYC (and it's surrounding cities/suburbs) more dense than the Bay Area?
In SF (the city) transpiration is quite decent because it's dense; single family houses and public transpiration together is a very very tricky to pull; you have to choose one or the other and most people would rather live in a family house than an apartment/condo with good transpiration
If the ABAG had power, I would have them replace Caltrain with BaRT to make a it a loop around the SF/SP Bay Area and tear out CalTrain. Caltrain remains because the tracks are used by UP --if it were not UP's right-of-way, BaRT could have that corridor. BaRT could still work if they did cut-and-cover to build a parallel line under the Camino Real. Granted that'd be a lot of money today --they should have bought in back in the 60s. I know, hindsight and all.
The main issue then would be what to do about Gilroy --they can keep Caltrain for that like the ACE does for the East SF Bay.
Curious why lowercase a
LIRR is embarrassing as a transit system, but sure.
But less so.
The history of US rail is that of tragic but distinguishable post-70s states.
It's insane that it's not connected to Bart. Or that it isn't Bart. Bart goes SF to San Jose in the East Bay but we have a separate system on the West Bay? It's all a sign of how dysfunctional California governments have been at all levels for a long time. A big part of the dysfunction in the Bay Area is because there are 100 separate tiny governments. If it were one big government, like NYC, we could have sensibly coordinated regional projects.
NYC here, our three disconnected commuter rail systems would all like a word :)
> Inside, basic electric power outlets are hard to find.
what are you talking about, literally every single seat has outlets except the 9 in the bottom of the bike car
You should check Austin TX where they tried to do the same thing, but only built one rail.... So yea you have to wait like over an hour just for arrival if the train is at the other end. For what should be a 15 min ride because literally only one train can go back and forth. The train drivers sometime stop the train to get food at in-n-out burger too, seriously.
Its one of the dumbest things I've ever seen, a testament to inefficient bureaucracy. I'm not sure anyone uses it.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. A quick look at the schedule shows they do have multiple trains running in each direction during peak hours:
https://www.capmetro.org/plan/schedmap?route=550
But much of the length is, in fact, single-track, making scheduling hard and meaning if a train is late or breaks down it disrupts the whole system.
And it's honestly pretty silly to see a train with the form factor of light rail but diesel-powered.
Voters did approve a proper light rail system in 2020 but it's gonna take a while to build and has already been scaled back twice, sigh...
No, we shouldn't. Caltrain shows that even the best transit systems are not comfortable for daily commutes.
The upper limit for comfortable commutes is 30 minutes one way. Even assuming that you synchronize your schedule with Caltrain departures, the map of locations within this timeframe would look like a string of rather small beads along the Caltrain route.
As a simpler example, try playing with routes from the Salesforce Tower. You start blowing past that 30-minute mark by the time the train is still passing Brisbane.
I'm really surprised that nobody has yet commented on the dismal economic failure that the California High Speed Rail has been. After 11 years and $15B ($3.4B in federal grants), they've made very little progress. They just lost $4B more in federal grants because the project is a classic example of Fraud, Waste, and Abuse (FWA). California sued over the cancelled grant, but then dropped the suit. My guess is that it was dropped because it would have opened up California to discovery, which would have revealed the details of the FWA.
Estimates to complete the original plan call for another $100B and at least another 12 years. I don't think it's ever going to be completed given the massive state budget deficit (reliable figures are difficult to find). Even if it ever got completed, it would never pay for itself.
https://www.hsrail.org/california-is-building-high-speed-rai...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-drops-lawsuit-ch...