HSR Planning Done Right
Mountain View provides an example of how planning projects near the HSR tracks can be done effectively:
The City Council on Tuesday approved a three-story, 50,000-square-foot office building to be built next to the downtown train station.
The building, slated for 150 W. Evelyn Ave. alongside the tracks just west of the station, is intended to compliment a pair of existing two-story office buildings that will flank it on the east and west sides of the four-acre lot….
The project’s architect said the development team had met with the California High Speed Rail Authority and felt sure that plans for two additional tracks along the Caltrain corridor would not affect the office building project. He added that high speed trains would be quieter than existing trains, and that an access road was included in the design in case trains required more room in the future.
Not every project is this easy – as we saw in Buena Park, the conflict is between projects under construction and HSR – but this shows that it is indeed possible to integrate HSR into downtowns and urban cores quite effectively. Mountain View has been welcoming of HSR, VTA light rail, and other modes of transportation and seems to have done just fine for themselves by doing so. You’d think the cities just to its northwest would be interested in taking notes.
Because railroad rights of way have been either neglected or encroached upon in recent decades by cities that convinced themselves the day of the passenger train was past, situations like we see in Buena Park, or in Menlo Park/Atherton, are all too common. California lost a lot of time and ultimately a lot of money by assuming that no new upgrades or ROW preservation needed to be done on these corridors after about 1965. In many ways, the debates over how to build HSR currently taking place up and down the route are making up for that lost time. Reinvigorating these corridors isn’t easy, but it’s necessary, and done right can leave a positive legacy of an improved urban landscape and greater connectivity for residents and visitors alike.
I’m still a little worried. Lack of coordinated planning tends to lead to conflicts, even when they claim to have enough space. Are the planning documents for this project available anywhere?
Is Mountain View seriously angling for a station, or is it set in stone that the mid-Peninsula stop will be RWC?
Clem Reply:
March 11th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
Since when is Palo Alto officially out of the running?
Alon Levy Reply:
March 11th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Officially, it’s not. But unofficially, all the sample timetables say RWC where they used to say RWC or PA. The message is, sue Diridon and Kopp and they’ll kill your station stop.
political_incorrectness Reply:
March 11th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
For all the trouble with lawsuits they’ve caused, why should they deserve a station? Besides, Mountain View=VTA connection
Joey Reply:
March 11th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
The location of the station will not be based on “political trouble caused,” but rather what location is most likely to attract the most ridership and serve the most people.
Spokker Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 1:06 am
Hahahaha
Worst case scenario——-The NIMBYS win!!!! High speed trains have to run from Palo Alto to San Francisco at greatly reduced speed and much fewer in number. In this worst of all cases a Mountain View station would take some of the pressure off Diridon. Is this even a remote possibility?
Alon Levy Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 1:47 am
Diridon Intergalactic is planned to have 14 tracks where the expected train volume could do with 4. So there’s no pressure at DIG to take off. It’s not like at TBT or LAUS, where track constraints are real and passenger volumes are likely to be high.
Andrew Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 7:08 am
14 tracks? Seriously?
If San Jose is to be an all-stop through station like Shin-Kobe (as I imagine it will be), then HSR doesn’t need more that two. Between Amtrak and Caltrain, four to six is more reasonable. But 14 total is just gratuitous.
synonymouse Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:00 am
all stop? – this hsr is looking more like a big BART every day. So much for all that express bs.
CHSRA – too meandering and too many podunk stops. And what are you going to do if internal conditions deteriorate to third world and airline style security measures have to imposed at railway stations?
Time to reconsider the “racetrack” with an airport style station at Livermore.
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:07 am
“all stop,” as in all trains stop in San Jose, not all trains stop at all stops. Stop making stuff up.
synonymouse Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:11 am
All stop at San Jose is setting a precedent. The podunks will demand stops too.
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Again, stop making stuff up.
synonymouse Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Is it all stop at Palmdale? One you start down the path of perdition, aka gerrymandering, where does it stop? It was political corruption that put Palmdale on line, the same influence peddling that will demand all trains stop there.
Projecting realworld scenarios is not “making stuff up”. Just like recognizing that the CHSRA is likely to have serious labor cost problems, based on BART and Muni experience.
CNBC is claiming LA may have to resort to bankruptcy to deal with labor costs – is that “making stuff up”?
wu ming Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 6:55 am
gerrymandering = other people drawing district lines that put one at an electoral disadvantage.
connecting the population centers of a region on a high speed trunk line ≠ gerrymandering, neither literally nor figuratively.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
All Shinkansen trains stop at Nagoya and Kyoto, going back to the first Hikari train. So what? The podunk towns get their Kodama service.
Andrew Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Holy slippery slope, Batman! That’s horse shit and you know it.
San Jose’s a big transit hub, there’s no reason why all trains shouldn’t stop there. Fresno too should arguably be an all-stop station.
wu ming Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:29 am
san jose is the 5th largest urban area in CA, right after #4 riverside-san bernadino (which you’re obsessed with trying to bypass for whatever damnfool reason). if you were going to make a train that avoided “podunk” places like SJ or the inland empire, that’s be pretty much a direct SF-LA express train with nothing in the middle.
idiocy. trains don’t work like planes, it’s a completely different sort of logic.
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Not to mention that San Jose will be the feeder station for the East Bay and the Pleasanton Livermore area until the Altamont Overlay is completed.
Clem Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:55 am
From Oakland and points north / east, it will likely be faster to take BART to San Francisco even after BART to San Jose is completed. That’s because average speed down the peninsula will be about 85 mph, vs. 35 mph on BART.
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Assuming the connection is acceptable between BART and the TBT.
synonymouse Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:52 am
There is some similarity to airline operations, especially if you have to go to airline level security, with individual searches and all. Don’t say never; all it takes is one incident.
lyqwyd Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 11:01 am
never
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
There’s been more than one incident. London, Madrid, Garden City NY, Black Tom NJ, ( Black Tom was sabotage though ) an incident or two on TGV, the specifics that I don’t remember. The Sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway…. Just because you don’t remember them doesn’t mean they never happened.
Spokker Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Do they have airline style security?
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
No, but synonorodent can tell the future.
synonymouse Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
The airlines are mostly private opertions. A private operator is going to be more concerned with security than a government run railroad. Any “incidents” will directly affect patronage and profitability, not to mention insurance.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
On the contrary, private operators are usually less concerned about security – they settle out of court, the insurance is minimal anyway, and the probability of an incident is low. Compare government reactions to Somali piracy to shippers’ reactions, for example.
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Hence why security was so lax prior the the 9/11 attacks.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Even pre-9/11, security was fairly tight. If you want to look at lax security, you need to go to the 1950s and 60s, when airline security as we know it didn’t exist. It took scores of bombings, some for insurance scams and some for terrorism, as well as government regulations, just to get the security theater of the 1990s.
Richard Mlynarik Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 11:57 am
For bizarre values of “urban“.
(That last one? That’s the BART-scamming, 14-track-Diridon-Pangalactic-requiring, mega-urban, super-urbane, suave “downtown” Capital of Silicon Valley.)
The City of Los Banos hereby annexes the entire state of California into its boundaries, thereby making it the very most importantest and top super-urbanist area in the entire universe!
Richard Mlynarik Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
First bizarre link broken — sorry.
That’s TOD, San Jose style.
Seriously!
See the transit? See the development? That light line right there is the second most recent extension of the world class, world beating, super-urban VTA Light Rail Network. As you can imagine, the ridership is simply overwhelming. Just as HSR ridership will be at 3 level 14 track Diridon Pangalactic, the vital, throbbing heart in the core of the urban Capital of Silicon Valley.
Peter Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
San Jose Hater. ;)
Richard Mlynarik Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
San Jose? I’ve work there for years, for people whose taxes are wasted there.
San Jose is perfectly good at being what it is, but that isn’t an urban center and frankly never will be. Get over it! Revel in the urban expressways and the easy parking!
Every dollar spent on rail transportation in San Jose is a dollar completely wasted, sadly, and that’s not going to change now or any decade soon.
No “hate”, just direct experience and consitent history.
jimsf Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
broken record.
Joey Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 8:30 am
14 including BART, VTA, UPRR, etc. HSR+CalTrain only add up to 8.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Amtrak and UP need one track between them, charitably. HSR + Caltrain should be 4, maybe 5; HSR + Caltrain + Amtrak + UP don’t need more than 5.
Now, this doesn’t mean DIG is completely useless. It’s not – if California remains a world leader in technology, it’s a prime location, enabling aliens to land right next to world-class research labs.
Joey Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Amtrak+CalTrain only have one track between them. 4 CalTrain + 4 HSR + 1 UPRR + 1 CalTrain utility (no platform) + 2 VTA + 2 BART = 14
Andrew Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Ah, I wasn’t counting BART and VTA.
Unless there are plans to terminate local HSR trains at San Jose, then I don’t see why it needs more than two. Taking into account the different services of Caltrain, ACE, and Amtrak, six is probably a decent number between them.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Don’t forget that the only reason to have 4 HSR tracks at SJ instead of 2 is if it’s going to be used by express trains overtaking local trains. Most likely it’s not going to be so used, because it’s too close to the terminus. The overtakes are probably going to take place at Gilroy, Fresno, or Bakersfield.
Richard Mlynarik Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 12:44 am
Not the case — at least not normally, but I wouldn’t put anything past our sub-genius brains trusts at Caltrain/CHSRA.
The reason that stations have more platform tracks than open track and that major stations have more platform tracks than minor stations is because of longer dwell times. Once the stop (or, more technically, deceleration plus dwell plus acceleration) time becomes comparable to the headway on open track either the timetable has to be adjusted, the train performance has to be improved, or the infrastructure (tracks and platforms and turnouts) at the station has to be expanded.
If you look at well-designed (ie not Caltrain, not CHSRA, not BART) high-volume through stations you’ll often see a design in which an island platform is flanked by two same-direction tracks serving the same route. This allows the station stops of close-headway trains to overlap: as soon as the first train clears the splitting turnout ahead of the platform, the route is set for the opposite-side platform track, and the following train can arrive before or as the first train departs.
Some people find a fluid-flow analogy helpful: given the same volume flow per unit time (trains per hour), but a slower flow rate (slowed by station), a larger pipe (= more parallel tracks) is required.
Anyway, if a billion jillion squillion through trains per hour were ever to serve Diridon Intergalactic (just look at PBQD’s Quentin Kopp Memorial Millbrae Pancontinental to consider how likely that is), or in practice if more than about 10 per hour do so, or if trains dwell at this super-important stop for more than 3 or 4 minutes, then it would make sense to have extra platforms to buffer up and even out train arrivals and platform dwells, even if trains depart in the same order they arrive.
But as I’ve said before, with a an even vaguely technically competent and/or realistic and/or not solely contractor profit motivated station design in SJ, through HS trains would flexibly share platforms with through Caltrain and reversing Caltrain, and a total of 5 to 6 platform tracks gives an adequately capacious and sufficiently robust station configuration. (There’s absolutely no need for non-platform express through tracks, especially given limited speeds possible through the station, even if any trains didn’t stop, which is highly unlikely.)
Alon Levy Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 3:11 am
I’ll plead ignorance about non-terminal major station design in Europe. But in Japan, the overtake stations have 3 or 4 tracks on 2 island platforms, and the rest have 2 tracks. For California to have more, especially when its HSR is expected to run on the same gauge as everything else…
At any rate, because SJ is located in a slow zone, the stop time isn’t large – the sample schedules estimate 3 minutes. Even at 8-10 tph, the headway’s large enough to allow this. Not only are dwells of 3-4 minutes stupid, but also CHSRA’s pronouncements suggest sub-minute dwells.
Joey Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Oops, *Amtrak+UPRR only have one between them. My bad.
jimsf Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 12:07 pm
How do you figure amtrak and caltrain only need one track? The trains dwell there.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Caltrain, if they rub three brain cells together, won’t have any FRA compliant trains so they don’t need to use the track for FRA compliant trains. Even if they did, they won’t be stopping for long in San Jose.
Amtrak and ACE, when great big stampeding herds of passengers start to arrive they might have 2 trains per hour in each direction. Means if you want to turn the train around you have to do it in 15 minutes.
If they can’t manage to turn the train around in 15 minutes there’s no reason why it can’t go someplace else and get turned around.
Joey Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
UPRR+Amtrak only need one track. CalTrain needs a bit more.
jimsf Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 12:22 am
again, they dwell the train sets at the platform, they usually dwell for an hour or more. They don’t go back out because the sked is based on crew hours etc. Might be 2 per hour in and 2 out, but the trainsets sit there up to 3 hours. Where they dwell is up to the agencies. Perhaps the various agencies have made it clear that they want “x” amount of space.
Joey Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 10:39 am
So I guess the question is how much room they need for the Capital Corridor trains.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Just because it’s cheap and convenient for them to leave trains lolling about the station now doesn’t mean that it should be the way they operate in a rebuild station. If they want to store trains in San Jose they don’t have to do that at very expensive platforms.
I want to tell you a story about an old railway called the Pacific Electric and the Metro Gold Line extension that was denied access across this historic corridor. The city of Rancho Cucamonga was chosen as a Metro Gold Line route extension corridor. The citizens along the route complained and showed up in masses while few in support showed up to the council meetings. The R.C. mayor slacked off while neighboring foothill cities were planning TOD and new light rail stations. The L.A. mayor was finally going to help San Bernardino County get some transit and we dropped the ball. The citizens made sure that no matter what, the line would not get built through the city along the historic route which founded the city in the early days. The line would turn south directly to the LA/Ontario Airport instead. This is a disaster for the passenger levels on the line. The train would have traveled past historic Cucamonga into Downtown Rancho Cucamonga’s new shopping district which sees 20 million visitors per year. Then it was to proceed to the Ontario Mills Mall which sees 26 million people walk through it’s doors every year, that’s more tourists/customers than Disneyland and California Adventure combined. 46 million people per year will be skipped for a few saved minutes? The line will be built all the way into the Inland Empire and then turn south right before the two major activity centers in the state. And to top it all off some bicycle group calling themselves the Friends of the Pacific Electric TRAIL have turned this historic corridor into a freaking bike lane and pedestrian trail instead of a major light rail route. The walkway intersects every major street at grade creating major traffic problems. It’s almost as if they have built another major street across the entire city. Every major street has an at grade trail crossing causing gridlock and safety problems. The trail crossings make you wait for one person instead of light rail with 200-300 people per train. You see one woman crossing the street and fifty cars waiting…idling…waiting…idling…now there’s 75 cars and the light finally turns green. This has to be one of the top wasted corridors in the history of California. Rant over.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 7:55 am
Sending light rail deep into exurbia is insane no matter which population centers you’re trying to connect.
As for your 46 million people, at the usual mode shares of light rail for non-work trips in low-density exurbs, if 2.3 million of them took light rail it would be a miracle. The actual number would almost certainly not come close to a million. Seriously, even in places where transit is good, the non-work trip mode share of suburban transit is low.
synonymouse Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 10:53 am
Commingling rail ROW and bike paths is a mistake. It will prove next to impossible to repo the full ROW. SMART is making this error – it will make it very difficult to double track in the future.
Peter Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 11:19 am
(a) The post was about using ROW for bike paths INSTEAD of railway, which is NOT what SMART is doing, (b) on stretches where the ROW is too narrow, they will not be sharing the ROW with bike or hiking paths but reroute the bike lanes instead, and (c) they are not expecting to ever have enough traffic to warrant double-tracking the entire route.
Peter Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 11:32 am
As in, they’re looking at a TOTAL of 24 to 28 trains per day. Why in the world would you need to double-track that?
Samsonian Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 3:11 am
I realize SMART hasn’t even started operations, and won’t for some years, but humor me:
What if SMART expanded across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge (using the emergency/break-down lane) and made it to Richmond Amtrak/BART, or points further south?
What if the North Coast rail line (NCRA/NWP) up to Eureka/Arcata was fully revived, and Amtrak California started running intercity passenger service?
The line would get more ridership and be more than just a basic commuter service, and might need 2 tracks.
This is supposed to be our future rapid transit route. Would you run BART on single track? NCRA-NWP will be on permanent taxpayer lifeline as the freight traffic isn’t there anymore.
SMART’s budget is so screwed that locals are calling for a rethink of loco hauled instead of doodlebugs to save money.
dejv Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
FRA and FTA mission of killing regional rail is then successful, if loco-hauled trains are indeed cheaper in long run than self-propelled railcars.
(wow, my captcha is gov- expanse :))
Joey Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
SMART will likely be condemned to low service volumes for the larger part of its career. It’s more comparable to, say, San Diego County’s SPRINTER than to BART (but with the additional handicap of FRA compliance). It doesn’t serve any city centers or high-density employment areas (where commute trips come from), but rather it serves those who work in suburban downtowns and those transferring to other modes of transportation.