Blog: Weeds, trash, and open-air latrines at Caltrain’s San Antonio station

Caltrain’s San Antonio station is located in a sort of no-man’s land on the border between Palo Alto and Mountain View. Between the two cities and Caltrain, it’s not clear to me who is responsible for maintaining the different areas around the station — the platform by the tracks, the underpass beneath San Antonio Road, and the sidewalk along Central/Alma.

But what is abundantly clear is that whoever is responsible is not doing an adequate job. The walkways around the station are lined with tall weeds, strewn with trash, and dotted at one end with open-air latrines. It is disgusting.

For a region that aims to be transit-centric, we have got to maintain these stations at some minimal level of sanitization and general acceptability. If this were private property it would have been issued code violations by the handful. Caltrain and our cities should be subject to the same standards.

The sidewalk going past the station is flanked by waist-high weeds.

Garbage is strewn throughout the weeds.

Trash piles up around the station platform, particularly behind the bushes and the enclosed passenger waiting areas.

The underpass, where San Antonio Road crosses over the station, has even more trash.

The walkway to the station from the underpass has several open-air latrines along the side.

Paper from those latrines has blown towards the sidewalk.

We have to do better than this. All of us. Caltrain and the cities should be doing their job cleaning this area. Every one of us should be using the trash cans, of which there are plenty along the platform. And if we are going to allow folks to camp under this underpass, then we have got to provide a porta potty for them.

We all need to value our shared spaces and act accordingly.

Notes

1. I realize this blog post would be better if it also covered the University Avenue and California Avenue Caltrain stations. But I was pretty queasy after taking these pictures, and I am still queasy. So I stuck with just one station.
2. This station may be uniquely bad because of its proximity to an underpass. For those of you hoping to put our tracks on a viaduct, be careful what you wish for.
3. I realize this post isn’t in keeping with many of my other posts. But if we cannot take care of a simple train station, how can we hope to tackle much bigger and tougher problems?
4. I plan to get back to regular programming in my next post…

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