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With revenues slumping, ridership sluggish and a fiscal cliff on the horizon, this may seem like an odd time for Caltrain to throw a celebratory bash.
But on Sept. 21, the agency whose train service functions as the transportation backbone for Silicon Valley’s workforce will have a reason to cheer. After more than a decade of planning and seven years of construction, its $2.4 billion electrification of the rail corridor will go fully live, triggering celebratory dancing, food trucks and speeches from politicians, transit advocates and other dignitaries all along the Peninsula corridor.
“We are at a transformational moment,” said Brent Tietjen, Caltrain’s external affairs manager for electrification, at an update on the project this week.
When the project kicked off with a groundbreaking ceremony in Millbrae in 2017, the goal was to improve operations, meet growing demand, reduce congestion and help the environment by replacing diesel trains with electric ones. But after four turbulent years, Caltrain leaders increasingly see the project as key to accomplishing another major goal: simply surviving.
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, with much of the area’s workforce switching to Zoom, Caltrain ridership plummeted to about 3% of its pre-pandemic level, according to Michelle Bouchard, the agency’s executive director, at a Palo Alto City Council hearing on Sept. 16. The recovery since then has been steady but frustratingly slow. In July 2021, when the pandemic was in full effect, Caltrain had an average of 8,721 weekday rides, according to agency data. Two years later, it saw 20,525. This last July, it was 23,286.
“We’ve been increasingly getting back our ridership. We’re nearing close to 40% of pre-pandemic,” Bouchard told the council. “We just know with electrification this will be one of the ways in which we will continue to bring riders back to the system and continue to serve the communities that we serve.”
Even with the recent recovery, Caltrain’s fare revenues remain in the dumps by historical standards. In 2019, Caltrain received $103 million in fare revenues, according to Casey Fromson, the agency’s chief of staff. In 2023, the figure was $43 million, she said at the Sept. 5 meeting of the Caltrain board.
For an agency that relies heavily on fares, the blow has been devastating. Before the pandemic, fare revenues covered about 73% of the costs of operating the system; today, it’s 23%. As a result, the agency is staring at an $77 million annual deficit.
“We really do have a looming fiscal cliff which does constitute an existential crisis for the railroad,” Bouchard told the Caltrain board of directors earlier this month.
FIRST, WE FEAST
But when Caltrain officials and elected leaders gather this Saturday at the downtown Palo Alto train station for celebratory speeches and free train rides, the mood promises to be jubilant rather than downcast. The launch of electrification signals the second big switch in Caltrain’s 160-year history and the first since the 1950s, when diesel trains replaced steam engines.
In a Sept. 15 presentation to the City Council, Caltrain officials touted the many benefits that electrification will bring to local commuters. Each new train is outfitted with accessible bathrooms, a bike room, electric outlets and free Wi-Fi. Tietjen said electrification will mean less waiting and faster trips. Riders will now be able to travel between San Francisco and San Jose in less than an hour on an Express train and in 77 minutes on a local train, down from 100 minutes today.
A trip from downtown Palo Alto to San Francisco, for example, would now take about 38 minutes on an Express train, six minutes less than today. From the California Avenue stop, it would take 43 minutes.
Electrification also means that riders can now expect service at least every half hour on the weekends and in the off-peak hours on weekdays. Meanwhile, 16 stations will see trains every 15 to 20 minutes during peak hours on the weekdays.
Overall, there would be 20% more train service. Areas that are designated as “equity priority stations” because they serve more minority or low-income riders will see a 26% increase in service, according to Caltrain.
Caltrain soft-launched the electrification project on August 10, when it hosted several celebrations with proclamations by notable politicians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. Since then, it has been adding two electric trains a week, giving the public a taste of the near future.
The project included installation of more than 2,500 poles, 2.5 million square feet of overhead wire and upgrades to signal systems at 31 at-grade crossings between San Francisco and San Jose. But for local officials, one of the most striking features of the electrification project is one that’s not visible at all. Palo Alto Mayor Greer Stone and City Council member Pat Burt, who serves on the Caltrain board of directors, both noted during the Sept. 15 discussion that the new trains are much quieter than the diesel ones they are used to.
“I was on Alma the other day and I saw the train about to pass and I started to roll up the window because I was on my phone and expecting the normal noise and I could barely hear it,” Stone said. “It was such a change. That was great.”
CAUTION AHEAD
Caltrain officials are banking on riders embracing the new and improved trains. Its current revenue plan assumes a 20% ridership increase in the first year of electrification, following 10% increases thereafter.
“We’re all bullish on electrification and hope that we are going to see a big increase in ridership, especially as we have more frequent service,” Fromson told the Caltrain board.
Sluggish farebox receipts aren’t the only problem that Caltrain is trying to navigate. The agency is also dealing with growing costs of construction and labor, a trend that is complicating efforts by cities along the rail corridor to separate the tracks from roads and rail crossings. Burt said that the city of Burlingame seemed all set to advance its $315 million grade separation project at the Broadway crossing before costs suddenly shot up to about $600 million. While Caltrain has been assisting Palo Alto and other cities with their grade separation efforts, the climbing costs are complicating these efforts.
“Caltrain was looking up and down the corridor going, ‘What we thought was a $10 billion project is looking like a $20 billion project, and we didn’t have the $10 billion,” Burt said during the Sept. 17 meeting of the council’s Rail Committee.
Uncertainty over future ridership is another complication. For more than a decade, Palo Alto officials have been debating ways to separate roads from tracks at three crossings — Churchill Avenue, Meadow Drive and Charleston Road. More recently, the conversation at Rail Committee meetings has shifted to consideration of whether Churchill grade separation is even necessary. Burt noted at the Sept. 17 meeting that in addition to improved safety and better cross-town connectivity, a major driver of the city’s grade separation effort was the expectation that there will be more trains and significantly more cars.
That assumption now seems shaky, with both Caltrain and BART showing slow recovery, he noted.
Tietjen noted at the Sept. 16 update that Caltrain will achieve its service increases while maintaining 104 trains. The service upgrades will be achieved because of operational efficiencies, with the trains now being able to stop and start at more stations. Before the pandemic, Caltrain was talking about running six trains per peak hour in each direction to meet the demand. For now, it is sticking to four trains per hour.
“As soon as we see ridership increase to a level that demand it, we will increase our service to the six trains an hour that was mentioned,” Tietjen said.
The lower ridership means the type of congestion that Palo Alto and other cities were planning for at their crossings is not as urgent as it seemed it would be before the pandemic. Yet there are other reasons for municipalities to pursue grade separation, chief among them safety.
“They say the safest crossing is no crossing at all,” Mike Meader, the agency’s chief safety officer, said during the Rail Committee meeting.
Grade separations, however, take a long time to plan and the costs are high and getting higher, he said. As a result, Caltrain is now exploring a suite of faster and cheaper solutions. Meader said these include installing CCTV throughout the corridor at stations and high-risk sections of the corridor; adding motion detection technology and clearly marking the area around the tracks through use of bollards, red paint and/or shielded lighting fixtures.
“If we see somebody in the space, the system will alert us immediately,” Meader told the Rail Committee. “It alerts our dispatch, so we know someone is perhaps walking down the alignment and we can let the train know so the train can stop in those areas and we can dispatch folks out there to address whatever the situation is.”
The agency is also looking at new ways to keep drivers who rely on GPS apps from making erroneous turns into the tracks. The problem is particularly acute on Churchill, which, according to Caltrain, had 30 such incursions between 2020 and 2024, more than any other crossing on the corridor. Meader said the agency has been working with Google, which owns Waze, to address this phenomenon. Google and Waze, he said, have been “fantastic partners” in this endeavor, he said. Apple has been less responsive, he added.
“Eventually here in the very near future you will hear language in the navigation — verbal instructions that basically say, ‘Cross the railroad tracks and then make your first left turn into Alma,’ or whatever it is,” Meader said. “And we really believe that’s going to eliminate some of that.”
PARTY TIME
The conversation over Caltrain’s financial future will unfold over the next two months as agency staff present options in November and December for cutting costs and getting more revenues, according to Fromson. This weekend, however, the focus will be on introducing the new and improved Caltrain to the community and celebrating the completion of the modernization project.
According to Caltrain, the celebration will unfold in cities all along the corridor on Sept. 21 and Sept. 22, with the main events scheduled for 2 to 6 p.m. on Sept. 21 in Palo Alto (with an afterparty from 6 to 9 p.m. at MacArthur Park) and from 2 to 6 p.m. on Sept. 22 in San Mateo. Train rides will be free all weekend and festivities will include DJs, dance troupes, Caltrain swag and a flash mob doing the electric slide.
Redwood City will celebrate electrification at 1 p.m. on Sept. 21 with ice cream, a program by the Kennedy Middle School band and remarks from council member and Caltrain Board Member Jeff Gee. Mountain View is planning a train naming event with U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, Mayor Pat Showalter and Council member Margaret Abe-Koga on Sept. 21, between 1 and 1:45 p.m. Another event at the Mountain View station will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sept. 22, with an electric slide flash dance set for 11:30 a.m.
Menlo Park will party from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sept. 22, with the celebration featuring a Waffle Roost food truck and Free Bliss popsicles.
“The new Caltrain is cleaner, greener, faster, and all-around better than it ever has been before,” Bouchard said in an announcement for the events. “I would like to invite everyone to celebrate this historic achievement this weekend and to see the future of Caltrain for yourselves.”
Naturally, visitors are encouraged to take public transportation.
