Published Friday, February 9, 2001, in the Palo Alto Daily News
Caltrain money
Dear Editor: The $150 million currently being proposed for Caltrain
development (Daily News Feb. 8) is an example of Caltrain's problem,
not a solution: it is pure pork barrel.
Caltrain is a railroad, and its proper business is to transport its
customers; its problem is that the politicians and bureaucrats
responsible for developing and managing it, having not the slightest
interest in running a dumb old railroad, have turned it instead into
a big beautiful money trough to dump government largess onto the
balance sheets of cronies who build parking lots, station additions,
underpasses, and other things that do little or nothing to improve
the ludicrously incompetent way the railroad transfers warm bodies
from point A to point B.
The first thing Caltrain needs is to run trains from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m.
daily with headways of no more than 30 minutes throughout.
The second thing it needs is rolling stock of post-1950s design with
ground-level access cutting bicycle and handicapped boarding times to
a fraction of what they are now.
The third thing it needs is a downtown San Francisco terminal, and
the fourth thing it needs is to run all trains to Gilroy and
eventually to Salinas.
These improvements would do far more to serve Caltrain's ridership
than pouring cement, but don't hold your breath: actually making the
railroad run better will not, alas, put money into the right pockets.
Jon Corelis,
Williams Street,
Palo Alto
[The Daily's email address is editorial@paloaltodailynews.com.]
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