California Transit Nerd

Everyone from CTC to metro should get this experience when they rubber stamp highway expansion

Of course it’s about the gondola not about metros continued expansion of highways like it’s 1950.
The state just needs to set hard limits on VMT and tough luck if your project is going to increase VMT go spend that money on transit

Double bench good for 6 people was a funny option on sedans.
Pretty sure they were some wagons you could get with front and middle bench plus pull up in the rear so you could seat 8

CAFE didn’t kill station wagons that’s entirely on marketing departments realizing they can charge significantly more for an SUV that costs just a little more to make than a wagon based on a sedan where pricing will be nearly identical

Here is a fun chart looking at reliability for AC transit buses powered by alternative sources
7000 are 2018 NFI XHE40
7030 are 2022 NFI XHE40
8001 are 2019 NFI XE40
8006 are 2021/22 Gillig Low floor battery

Yes because hydrogen is such a poor intermediate fuel.
Diesel hybrids should be our solution right now if batteries/wires don’t make sense and we can decide in the early 2040s if it make sense to use hydrogen then
I care far more about modal shift driving emissions reductions

This is caltrans justification for hydrogen statewide. DB did a nearly identical study for UTA Frontrunner and came to the conclusion that battery+wire hybrid was the route

Here’s a nice report done by my colleagues calelectricrail.org/caltrans-hyd...

I’m not aware of a single hydrogen rail project going well in the world meanwhile Indian in the span of a decade has put up tens of thousands of miles of wires to move right from diesel to electric traction
I’m done with the state burning 250M+ on 11 hydrogen trains not including fueling equipment

They wanted to do light rail at one point but it was going to be over the threshold for federal small starts funding so a DMU line was chosen

It’s a 9 mile shuttle service how could batteries not work?

From an emissions perspective you’d be surprised how dirty gray hydrogen is

I disagree most of those challenges can be addressed with the other tool wiring up. No matter what we are going to need more power in a lot of places so might as well get started now
We already have examples of mine haul trucks to buses to locomotives using batteries+wires to great effect

If you’ve got really long routes just by hybrids now and make the switch to BEB in 2040 when battery tech has significantly improved
In general though a lot of agencies are overly conservative with their batteries and want buses to run between 40-80% vs 30-90% which is fine and gives 50% more range

Right now what hydrogen buses are running in California are using a ~30/70 blend of green and gray hydrogen which makes them natural gas powered with extra steps
ARCHES the P3 that was supposed to deliver tons of green hydrogen is on ice given this administration funding

Yes there’s only a handful of manufacturers of fuel cells and trains so lots of overlap.
The biggest issue is cost, green hydrogen is ~2.5X more expensive than batteries and ~3X more expensive than wiring up given the efficiency losses.
California just like Germany does not have lots of hydrogen

The whole national lab complex is in such a strange spot right now. The initial budget proposed cutting funding significantly although congress hasn’t agreed with that in the past
But then the complex and several other federal institutions are supposed to deliver Genesis an AI platform for science

That would require someone to claim trucking isn’t currently broken for drivers

'Climate arson': A scientist's case against LAX's Olympic expansion Aviation is a "hard to abate" greenhouse gas emitter. Sizing LAX for mega-events like the Olympics is a huge mistake, says a scientist.

Sizing an airport and roads for mega events when you can't even complete a 1/2 mile bike lane before LA28 is just folly.
www.golden-state.org/climate-arso...

Intermodal. Even if you can’t do boxcar door to door you can still pickup and deliver it to within 50-100 miles and then it’s just a short truck ride. Just got to have frequent fast enough intermodal

It’s significantly lower capacity and at risk of disruption. You might as well go to a tram then the system doesn’t have to steer

Long distance trucking shouldn’t exist to begin with that needs to be via rail

Problem is the picking up and discharging of passengers is not so simple for a bus especially with a powered wheelchair ramp in the mix

Yeah I think they’ve said they prioritized getting all trips back on an existing approved timetable rather than wait for UP to approve a clockfaced one

Yeah I thought they were going to be scraped several years ago. The late 90s electronics are a challenging spot and not surprised they’ve had so many issues even after stripping 2 sets and 8+ HHP-8s

Aluminum carbodies last if you can avoid mixed metal corrosion

“Environmental review is not planning” is one of those statements that is so obviously true but nearly every thing about transportation institutions and environmental review in California/US pushes against it.

Full Steam Ahead: Funding Transformational Transit Transit and passenger rail investment in the United States struggles for adequate investment. Despite some improvements in top line figures for transit and passenger rail, federal and state transporta...

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Generally BART hasn’t run 80mph normally it’s been used as a delay recovery tool in select areas.

definitely not that. All the FLIRTs running around meet T1 alt and so do some GTWs
No idea why they are saying it’s European design

Not sure it unlocked any new service but it does allow for more capacity and for the potential to do some interesting dedicating platforms to specific services in normal operations
Shame when they put the 3rd track in they did not just go for 4