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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

What do you envision such an agency would look like? "Tech buses" is a thing that hauls thousands of people from all over six counties to a small area. The only thing similar in scope is BART, and we already have BART, and it's not that good.

What we need is a S-Bahn-like service running up both sides of the Bay from San Jose to San Francisco and Richmond. The tracks are already there, we just suck at trains. An electrified two-track mainline railroad operating on 5-to-10-minute headways with bi-level cars would completely solve our traffic problems, and bring the Bay Area up to the standards of minor second-tier European cities.

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I think there's also the US rule that passenger trains sharing the track with freight trains need withstand collisions. That's why they are heavy and less efficient than lighter european trains.

Is there any way any private access to said tracks could be had?

What about designing rail cars based on Teslas open patents for small, semi-autonomous electric rail cars that operate on a very tight automated schedule along a public track.

See, that right there is the problem with Americans. There is NO NEED for some new kind of rail car. Ordinary bi-level passenger trains with 6 cars carry ~2500 people and can run on 2.5-minute headways (1000 people per minute).

Well, to be fair the carrying capacity of Caltrain is immense, but they are slow as hell, poor coverage area and if you want to commute from the east bay simply to mountain view via Caltrain its three hours one way!!!

So while technically you may be correct, they way they have been implemented here in the Bay Area, is, in my opinion, an utter failure.

What's worse, is we knew they were a failure from an efficiency standpoint twenty years ago.

So either we join all the agencies together and fire any schedulers they have and start from scratch. Or we find some way to do what these agencies can't.

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