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CalTrain is pretty full during commute hours, actually. But you wouldn't know, because you don't ride transit. I would know. Lots of engineers ride it to Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and San Francisco. I see just as many people on it as I do on BART. I've seen CalTrain "standing room only" during commute hours. Which is a lot of people for CalTrain, since it has a lot more seats in each car than BART.
You need to ride the LIRR or MNR in New York to have some basic understanding of what a packed train is.
I ride, and have ridden, CalTrain many times. The ridership is LOW for a commuter rail. Mostly, because the rail was built to take people FROM the Suburbs into SF City, but as you're aware- the work patterns are now the reverse of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by neutrino78x
Brookings says you're wrong. They said 61+ percent of companies in Silicon Valley are located such that one could reach them on public transit in less than 90 minutes from any residence in the area they considered (San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino). They also say that 90+ percent of employers in Silicon Valley are in neighborhoods with good access to public transit. And my experience confirms what Brookings says.
Quote:
Originally Posted by neutrino78x
One would have to wonder what is considered good. You're looking at 3 neighboring towns- and one considers a 90 minute commute acceptable? All of these work sites have ample parking. Commuting by car within Santa Clara county is a breeze. Measure any distance by driving time and double it- if the public transit can't make it in that time, then it -WASN'T- considered.
Quote:
Originally Posted by neutrino78x
It didn't take that much time. Maybe 15-20 minutes. Why stick it in the mail when PayPal is right there? In any case, as you admitted above, it proves you are wrong; well paid engineers do take public transit. You should too.
It proves nothing. It is a small sample size in which you are also riding the bus, and as you may be aware ... you're not a well paid engineer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by neutrino78x
I guess you don't know much about computers, then. I thought it was your profession? I just do it as a hobby, but I have a terminal emulator on my Android. Check out the links I gave. I hope you don't work in network security, if you think people can't edit code or issue commands via telnet/ssh on a smartphone. I'm not suggesting it is preferred to do it this way, but your claim was that it is impossible.
[/quote]
I never claimed anything was impossible. Nor did I claim 'computers' are my profession.
It's impractical- and in the sense of programming can likely cause more errors than the timing is worth.
See how many professional programmers and software engineers work by standing up and coding on their phone with intermittent network access.
Maybe propose it at a TED talk. See how quick companies are to jump on this productivity bandwagon.
Public transit is not without it's merit- but there are few to no situations where it's going to be faster than one's own vehicle- and for those who it consistently is, I wholeheartedly believe they should consider relocating.
I personally live a 10 minute drive from my office, or a 50 minute series of two bus rides. That hour and twenty minutes absolutely would not assist in my productivity. If I had to pay $50 to park at my job each day, then it would be considered. San Jose just isn't dense enough to yet have any compelling reason to ride public transit.
Public transit is not without it's merit- but there are few to no situations where it's going to be faster than one's own vehicle- and for those who it consistently is, I wholeheartedly believe they should consider relocating.
I personally live a 10 minute drive from my office, or a 50 minute series of two bus rides. That hour and twenty minutes absolutely would not assist in my productivity. If I had to pay $50 to park at my job each day, then it would be considered. San Jose just isn't dense enough to yet have any compelling reason to ride public transit.
Transit is actually faster / cheaper for the vast majority of downtown SF workers, particularly coming from the east bay.
Here is my personal situation, I work in SOMA, live in North Oakland.
Bus ride at 8A: 25-30 minutes. Walk to the office 7 minutes. Total commute time: 32-37 minutes. Cost $4.20
BART Ride: bus or bike ride to BART: 10-12 minutes. BART Ride: 18-20 minutes. Walk to office 7 minutes. Total time 35-40 minutes. Cost: $3.65 - $5.75
Drive at 8A: 45-50 minutes. Bridge toll $6. Parking near my office: $30 a day ($15 if I am willing to walk 10 minutes).
As you can see, driving is more expensive and takes more time. The evening is actually much worse. It would take at least 20 minutes to even get to the on ramp to the freeway. Travel time is about 30-40 minutes in the evening. The bus gets on the bridge via a special ramp skipping most of the traffic. Ride is 20-30 minutes, 3 minute walk home.
I take transit to work every day. You couldn't pay me to drive to SOMA during the work day.
Transit is actually faster / cheaper for the vast majority of downtown SF workers, particularly coming from the east bay.
Here is my personal situation, I work in SOMA, live in North Oakland.
Bus ride at 8A: 25-30 minutes. Walk to the office 7 minutes. Total commute time: 32-37 minutes. Cost $4.20
BART Ride: bus or bike ride to BART: 10-12 minutes. BART Ride: 18-20 minutes. Walk to office 7 minutes. Total time 35-40 minutes. Cost: $3.65 - $5.75
Drive at 8A: 45-50 minutes. Bridge toll $6. Parking near my office: $30 a day ($15 if I am willing to walk 10 minutes).
As you can see, driving is more expensive and takes more time. The evening is actually much worse. It would take at least 20 minutes to even get to the on ramp to the freeway. Travel time is about 30-40 minutes in the evening. The bus gets on the bridge via a special ramp skipping most of the traffic. Ride is 20-30 minutes, 3 minute walk home.
I take transit to work every day. You couldn't pay me to drive to SOMA during the work day.
SF is a completely different story from San Jose.
You also live across a body of water.
I clearly posted that if I had to pay a considerable sum to park at my job (or any job) there is a reason to discourage driving.
I do have to question however how your bus ride is shorter than your drive as they're going the same distance.
You need to ride the LIRR or MNR in New York to have some basic understanding of what a packed train is.
I ride, and have ridden, CalTrain many times. The ridership is LOW for a commuter rail. Mostly, because the rail was built to take people FROM the Suburbs into SF City, but as you're aware- the work patterns are now the reverse of that.
I don't want to derail the thread too much, but Caltrain is pretty dang packed during commute hours - and it's also near the top in ridership in the country (see below). It's hard to get a seat on express/baby bullet trains. Local trains are a bit less crowded. Mornings can be tricky and evenings are really bad heading north during Giants season. It's been pretty packed on commuter hour trains for a few years now...the introduction of the 6 car trains for some of the express trains has been helpful to alleviate some stress on the system.
I used to take Caltrain to/from Palo Alto (~6 years) from San Mateo (~4 years) and SF (~2 years). I would purposefully take the later trains (late morning, later in the evening) to get on less crowded trains). I now take it north to SSF and it's a bit less crowded since most people are on the express trains.
I haven't notice a considerable difference in ridership in each direction, but I'm sure one direction is a bit more crowded. It's certainly not a clear inbound-morning, outbound-evening thing like you find in NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc.
Caltrain just announced new ridership figures as of June 30, 2016: 60,219 average per day
Looking at typical ridership figures compared to other metros, Caltrain is near the top for ridership per mile. If you use the full 77 miles of track to calculate it (SF to Gilroy), then the system has ~780 riders per mile.
The vast majority of ridership happens in the SJ to SF corridor, though, so I imagine the true ridership per mile is much higher...my basic estimates: 59,000 passengers / 55 miles = ~1072 passengers per mile.
I'm assuming ~55 miles of track between SJ and SF (it might actually be less?), and I'm conservatively saying there are 1,000 passengers from Gilroy...when there might actually be less. Either way, that "real" figure puts it in line with the busiest commuter rail lines in the country.
I don't want to derail the thread too much, but Caltrain is pretty dang packed during commute hours - and it's also near the top in ridership in the country (see below). It's hard to get a seat on express/baby bullet trains. Local trains are a bit less crowded. Mornings can be tricky and evenings are really bad heading north during Giants season. It's been pretty packed on commuter hour trains for a few years now...the introduction of the 6 car trains for some of the express trains has been helpful to alleviate some stress on the system.
I used to take Caltrain to/from Palo Alto (~6 years) from San Mateo (~4 years) and SF (~2 years). I would purposefully take the later trains (late morning, later in the evening) to get on less crowded trains). I now take it north to SSF and it's a bit less crowded since most people are on the express trains.
I haven't notice a considerable difference in ridership in each direction, but I'm sure one direction is a bit more crowded. It's certainly not a clear inbound-morning, outbound-evening thing like you find in NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc.
Caltrain just announced new ridership figures as of June 30, 2016: 60,219 average per day
Looking at typical ridership figures compared to other metros, Caltrain is near the top for ridership per mile. If you use the full 77 miles of track to calculate it (SF to Gilroy), then the system has ~780 riders per mile.
The vast majority of ridership happens in the SJ to SF corridor, though, so I imagine the true ridership per mile is much higher...my basic estimates: 59,000 passengers / 55 miles = ~1072 passengers per mile.
I'm assuming ~55 miles of track between SJ and SF (it might actually be less?), and I'm conservatively saying there are 1,000 passengers from Gilroy...when there might actually be less. Either way, that "real" figure puts it in line with the busiest commuter rail lines in the country.
i'm going to point out the ONLY train lines I mentioned as a reference point were the LIRR and MNR.
You're comparing Caltrain's 60K riders a day to an average of 325K on an MTA day.
Unless you've ridden both (or all three) it's hard to draw a comparison.
CalTrain is a nice system because of the massive worksites the Bay Area offers. Many passengers are going from SF to San Mateo, and plenty are going from San Jose up towards SF.
In NY, 90% of your traffic is going into Manhattan during peak hours, and post peak it's 90% going out.
That means you concentrate all 325K riders rather than spreading them in two directions.
Compare that to a $243 Monthly (Caltrain - SF to SJ 4 Zones) to $446 Monthly (LIRR - Same Distance in Zones) and you know what a true hell commute is.
i'm going to point out the ONLY train lines I mentioned as a reference point were the LIRR and MNR.
You're comparing Caltrain's 60K riders a day to an average of 325K on an MTA day.
Unless you've ridden both (or all three) it's hard to draw a comparison.
CalTrain is a nice system because of the massive worksites the Bay Area offers. Many passengers are going from SF to San Mateo, and plenty are going from San Jose up towards SF.
In NY, 90% of your traffic is going into Manhattan during peak hours, and post peak it's 90% going out.
That means you concentrate all 325K riders rather than spreading them in two directions.
Compare that to a $243 Monthly (Caltrain - SF to SJ 4 Zones) to $446 Monthly (LIRR - Same Distance in Zones) and you know what a true hell commute is.
I compared ridership per mile. How else would you compare the two systems?
Sure, NY's is more crowded in one direction, so it's not a complete apples-to-apples comparison. Although, I didn't directly say it was, and did mention that it's more of the opposite (that Caltrain doesn't work like other cities with massive inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening).
All I'm saying is that Caltrain is a very busy system. And the trains aren't as long as NY's, so they tend to get very crowded. It's pretty difficult to get a seat on any baby bullet. It's very common to be standing, especially if there's an event compounded on top of normal commute traffic.
Last edited by HockeyMac18; 08-15-2016 at 07:56 PM..
SF is a completely different story from San Jose.
You also live across a body of water.
I clearly posted that if I had to pay a considerable sum to park at my job (or any job) there is a reason to discourage driving.
I do have to question however how your bus ride is shorter than your drive as they're going the same distance.
Yup! The bus has access to the carpool lane. And there is a bus only on ramp in SF. Casual carpool is as fast as the bus. But it is farther from my home.
Location: "Silicon Valley" (part of San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA)
4,375 posts, read 4,069,460 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WithDisp
You need to ride the LIRR or MNR in New York to have some basic understanding of what a packed train is.
I ride, and have ridden, CalTrain many times. The ridership is LOW for a commuter rail.
No it isn't. CalTrain does quite well in that regard. I would quote figures but other people already have.
Quote:
It proves nothing. It is a small sample size in which you are also riding the bus, and as you may be aware ... you're not a well paid engineer.
It proves what you admitted: that you're wrong. Your claim was that only poor people ride the bus, and no well compensated engineer would do so. Clearly, you were not correct.
Quote:
I never claimed anything was impossible. Nor did I claim 'computers' are my profession.
It's impractical- and in the sense of programming can likely cause more errors than the timing is worth.
I wouldn't say so. No one is suggesting that you're going to write the Linux kernel with your thumbs. But, just to provide one example, let's say you had a loop that had frustrated you all day, and then you suddenly realize that you would improve it if you increment the variable at the end of the loop instead of the beginning. That has happened to me as a hobbyist. Well, if you have the appropriate software, you can make that change on a BART train using your smartphone. If you have that realization while driving, you can't do anything until you get home.
Anyway, light programming is just one thing you can do on a smartphone on a packed train. You can check email, respond to meeting requests, check your server status (for example "service mysqld status" or "ping example.com" or "cat /var/log/server-log-file-example"), make and receive phone calls, if you're a lawyer you can review that motion one more time, read a transcript of witness testimony, etc.
My point is simply that time on transit -- as opposed to time driving in bumper to bumper traffic -- is not wasted. You can work on the bus/train, if you wish.
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Public transit is not without it's merit- but there are few to no situations where it's going to be faster than one's own vehicle-
Rush hour.
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San Jose just isn't dense enough to yet have any compelling reason to ride public transit.
lol just read that Brookings report. Silicon Valley is actually BETTER in terms of this than San Francisco itself. About 30% of employer sites in SF can be reached in 90 minutes on transit from most locations in San Francisco and Oakland. In Silicon Valley, that figure is over 60%. The density of businesses (as opposed to population density) might be higher down here, I'm not sure. I know that riding the light rail up north first, from 1st and santa clara to the Samsung campus at 1st and Tasman, one passes many tech companies, and that's only, what, ten miles? A10 Networks, Cavium, Sanmina, eBay, PayPal, Cannon, Altera, Maxim Integrated, Cisco, Analog Devices...all can be seen going up north first on the light rail.
Last edited by neutrino78x; 08-15-2016 at 08:20 PM..
BART is better than nothing, but is so far behind compared to similar systems around the world. Almost ancient like.
I recently visited the Bay Area from Sacramento, which I do every once a while since I miss some things about it.. decided this last visit to take the BART into SF since it's been years since I last did that. Wanted to see how things have changed.. Let me tell you, aside from some slight differences in the ticket/change machines and added parking structure and ticketing system at MacArthur station, and some electronic sign changes on the platform, seeing the practically unchanged map using the same original design and color schemes and getting into the train was like stepping back in time! Pretty much the same signs and advertisement styles, except for some signs on the windows saying the car was an experimental new layout. Sure, they removed the carpeting and changed the type of seating fabric, to make things easier to clean (smart move IMO), and some cars may have a newer layout to better accommodate the handicap or what not, but for the most part it was the same old BART of old and I felt like I was back in the 1980's.
They may have also changed out old, scratched/vandalized windows and weather seals around them also, and perhaps added hand straps for passengers standing up.
BTW, I got to think it's pretty cool that you can take the BART all the way to the SFO airport now... but prices have definitely gone up since the 1980's lol, when I think it was like $0.80 for the first 2-3 stops? I started feeling the pinch by the 1990's I think.
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