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Comment by ZanyProgrammer | Hacker News Reader

Electrified Caltrain is infinitely preferable to BART.

Only if you get rid of the behemoth slowpoke trains, elevate the rails, add more rail lines, and add a corridor to the East Bay. The Millbrae Caltrain/BART connection is a joke.

Why electrified vs normal caltrain? Will that decrease the variance or door to door time of using caltrain?

There is a lot of info here [1], summarized here [2]. Probably of the most interest to most people is "Improved Train Performance, Increased Ridership Capacity and Increased Service: Electrified trains can accelerate and decelerate more quickly than diesel-powered trains, allowing Caltrain to run more efficiently. In addition, because of their performance advantages, electrified trains will enable more frequent and/or faster train service to more riders".

[1]http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/... [2] http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/Caltrain+Modernization+Progra...

Faster acceleration. Each stop will cost less time, and Caltrain has a surprising amount of stops between SF-SJ (22 weekday) for its length (47 miles). You can see this effect already with the amount of express schedules that Caltrain has and their varying trip times.

Yeah I couldn't find any estimates about how much time though. It seems like the express train would not be affected much at all.

Not if it still runs at-grade and keeps killing someone every few weeks.

A lot of Caltrain suicides are the result of people stepping off platforms when Baby bullets pass through or trespassing on the tracks. Grade sep won't help that.

It's not as if Caltrain is required to run at grade. It's just a historical artifact of how the system evolved. If we had the money and political will to replace Caltrain with BART, we'd have the money and will to create a grade-separated Caltrain.

What would be the advantage of BART over electrified, grade-separated Caltrain? I'm hard-pressed to think of one, and there's definitely one major disadvantage: the nonstandard rail gauge.

It'd remove an onboarding/offboarding/payment stop at the Millbrae station.

You don't need to replace Caltrain to achieve that. A easier solution would be to convert Caltrain to a gated fare system (like BART is now), and then put a combined BART and Caltrain station behind one set of turnstiles at Millbrae.

While we're at it, why the hell isn't there all-day, every-day direct service from Millbrae to SFO? Having a massive multi-transit-agency station right by the airport, only to tell people "nope, can't get there from here, you have to go to San Bruno and change trains" is just dumb.

Every day direct BART service between SFO and Millbrae was the original intent, and they provided that level of service when the station opened. But ridership fell well below expectations, and BART eventually limited that service to nights and weekends only.

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