Last year, Santa Clara VTA made a change to their light rail schedule that had the practical effect of eliminating a bottleneck on the system. Due to timing and single-tracking, there was a situation where if a light rail train was one minute late to my stop, it was a minute late, but if it was two minutes late, it was effectively ten minutes late – because it would have to sit and wait for the train in the other direction to depart on time and pass by the last stop before the single-tracking.
The solution for this was to move the trains in one direction two minutes earlier and the trains in the other direction two minutes later. The net result was that a train could be up to five minutes late without triggering the additional wait time, which is critical in rush hour when people are trying to connect to other train systems. (The practical effect of making the earlier train was to improve the margin for error in reaching the connecting system, which was nice.)
It worked. It worked fine, as far as I could tell. Sure, up a couple minutes earlier, but worthwhile to avoid the holdup. And they made it up to me with Wi-Fi on the light rail backed by 4G cellular, which is handy to have.
And then, two weeks ago, they changed it back. Or at the very least, they changed the two-minutes-later train back to where it was. Which means the blockage is back on – I see it regularly of an afternoon when my train coming the other way goes whizzing by one stopped because it was late and had to hold for us. I didn’t see that once during the period of the double-shift.
The problem is, to make up the difference, the train I catch is now running earlier than scheduled, and leaving earlier than scheduled. If you get to the platform two minutes before the time on the schedule, you’ll be just in time to cuss the driver at the top of your lungs as the train pulls out and takes off, having come to a stop for approximately five seconds before pulling out again.
What this tells me is that Santa Clara VTA doesn’t know how to run a railroad.
The problem with VTA Light Rail is that it’s a bad match for the location. Caltrain had the advantage of a hundred years of trains running from San Francisco to San Jose, so that the line runs perpendicular to the main downtown street of every single town on the Peninsula from China Basin to Palo Alto before picking up Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara en route to the main terminal at San Jose. Only Los Altos and Woodside (where nobody would think of relying on public transit anyway) are left off the Peninsula route.
The VTA light rail, by contrast, starts at Mountain View and runs across the bottom of the San Francisco Bay before taking a turn and heading down First Street in San Jose. Once it gets into San Jose, it goes through populated areas, and at the Mountain View end it picks up the NASA base and the Caltrain station, but for about forty-five minutes, the light rail runs mainly by office parks flush with parking. On the weekend, especially, it’s the height of foolishness to get on the light rail to go to San Jose – easier to go to Caltrain and take a 19-minute ride from Mountain View to Diridon than to do the same run in an hour and a half on light rail. (The other half of the system is a mirror image and similarly situated in the eastern half of the South Bay.)
Silicon Valley is a whole pile of towns in the 50-to-100-thousand population range. The density is simply not there to support micro-scale train transit like one gets from the Metro in DC or the MUNI in San Francisco. By routing the train as what is essentially a South Bay commuter line, they’ve rendered it useless for almost any other time of day or week. Things would be far better off with a macro-scale system – say, looping BART down from Fremont to pick up Milpitas, a couple of San Jose stops, Santa Clara, Cupertino, the Los Altos/Palo Alto border, Redwood City,and two or three more Peninsula stops before tying back on at Millbrae. And then let Caltrain handle going up and down individual towns and lay on enough buses – and Bus Rapid Transit where possible – to take care of micro-level “take me to this bar” sort of stuff.
The alternative, I suppose, is to pull hard for “if you build it they will come” and try to get more destinations on the VTA line. But the time-lag on building the Orange Line under Wilson Boulevard in Arlington and the rise of Clarendon as a destination was about 25 years, and some serious zoning changes would need to take place in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara to make it work. Meanwhile, things like the Rivermark are built impractically far from the tracks so everyone has to drive anyway. Maybe the new 49ers stadium will be in proximity to the light rail, but I wouldn’t count on it, and that’s a destination a whopping 8 times a year plus preseason, maybe playoffs and maybe a draft-day party. (Doubled if the Raiders break down and agree to share the stadium instead of moving back to LA and Farmers Field.)
For public transit to work, it needs to be safe, reliable, and go somewhere you want to go. If nothing else, VTA is certainly safe, but they’re going to need to get cracking on at least one of the other two choices, and soon. A Smart-car-sized electric vehicle with satellite radio would take me right off the train with a quickness…