The $600 million Dumbarton Rail effort (Almanac, June 20) doesn’t pencil out as designed, but this shouldn’t be a “take it or leave it” plan. The renewed debate is in fact a huge opportunity to “do transit right,” and with active citizen input it can happen.
There is understandable and formidable resistance from the old line heavy rail advocates. It is true that diesel Caltrain is the greenest transit on the peninsula, and we owe Caltrain our support, but even there we can and should do better.
Heavy rail has a heavy downside: It is partnered by federal law with freight — the reason the trains are more than twice as heavy as needed is the requirement to survive freight collisions — and this weight has to be accelerated from rest, stopped, and accelerated again at every stop from San Jose to San Francisco. The massive wasted energy is simple physics.
A modern rapid transit Dumbarton is a challenge to Caltrain, and rumor is some staff members are enthusiastic. But when voices like Steve Schmidt and Sue Lempert try to paint those calling for lower energy use and quieter operations (and the lower “footprint” of the entire system) as “opponents to transit,” they miss the very real opportunity to leverage public sentiment to finally get us up to date. In ecology, the difference between 40 tons and 100 tons is not “splitting hairs.”
For the hundreds of affected neighbors, neither is the (federally mandated) opportunity for Union Pacific to run freight midnight to 5 a.m. past Menlo Park, Redwood City and East Palo Alto homes, versus lower-impact trains and no freight.
Caltrain staff have made clear that Dumbarton cannot be electrified in their proposal, freight wouldn’t be anyway, and there is no money even for a low berm along the tracks to deflect sound, let alone window replacements to address the diesel proposal. And the EIR process does not create new funds; it merely evaluates the proposed project. These are facts, and we have to work with them, not editorialize in wishful thinking.
Do we need to support a Dumbarton right of way project? Yes. Give us a clean, green, modern system and the neighbors themselves will back it — and use it! But it cannot be “Caltrain or no train.”
There already exist both light rail and rapid transit systems that provide the speed we need: Europe, Asia and even Canada are already there. It’s time to get with a modern, green system, and we can start with the clean slate before us and do it right. Please, let us on board.
Henry Riggs is a Menlo Park planning commissioner and a resident of Lorelei Manor.
