(The following column by L.A. Chung appeared on the San Jose Mercury News website on March 30.)
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Stand around the Santa Clara Caltrain station during the morning or afternoon commute and you’ll realize why public transit works. And why it doesn’t.
Commuters are constantly going and coming from the century-old station, alighting from Caltrain or the ACE trains that stop there. It acts as a hub for VTA bus lines that pull in and leave, headed in several directions.
West of the tracks, it works as well as transit can work in the valley. Get off the train and board a bus that pulls up. Or walk or ride your bike to your destination.
But to the east, look lively and pick your way across six sets of tracks to get to FedEx, Costco, United Defense, Mineta San Jose International Airport, and any number of employers on that side.
It works — as long as you don’t mind breaking the law twice a day. Or risking getting hit by a train. Which is what many people do to get to work.
“It’s so simple, it’s so tantalizing,” said Peter Khoury, who is still smarting from a $112 ticket he got in January from an Amtrak officer for crossing the tracks, en route to catch the 5:10 train north. It’s also absurd.
Brokaw Road beckons about 30 yards across the tracks. The legal way to get there is nearly a mile via a pedestrian-hostile, and bicycle-hostile, set of roadways.
No wonder there’s a stream of workers crossing at rush hour.
A morass of agencies
Khoury, a systems research engineer for ArrayCom, started organizing commuters who walk or ride their bikes from the station. They are engineers, like Khoury, lower-wage workers from Costco or drivers at the airport, like Yevgeniy Lysyy, who have written letters. They’re trying to get authorities to come up with a legal way to cross the tracks — pedestrian bridge, tunnel, or track-level crossing.
But they’re coming up against multiple agencies, different jurisdictions, and competing priorities. Caltrain owns two tracks, Union Pacific owns the rest. The Public Utilities Commission has jurisdiction in the area as well.
“If it were a simple fix, we’d really try to work with the group,” said Jamie Maltbie Kunz, the spokeswoman for Caltrain. But obstacles seem to multiply with the number of agencies. And it requires money.
Building a tunnel or an overhead crossing requires rights of way and meeting the needs of all jurisdictions. The simplest and cheapest thing, a ground-level crossing, is frowned upon by the state. The PUC has already refused to approve use of a crossing built in Palo Alto.
The proposed Santa Clara station in the BART-to-San-Jose scheme includes a crossing, like the one you can use at the Millbrae Caltrain-BART stations. But that’s a long way off. Maybe never.
“The Santa Clara station is a dead-zone for commuting,” Athos Kasapi said flatly. The systems engineer tried the legal route with Khoury and tried using connecting buses that all added time and resulted in missed trains.
A solution: change employers
He finally got a new job that allows him to use the Sunnyvale station. One of the criteria he used to decide which company to choose was “if it had a working Caltrain station.”
The only thing left is if the city of Santa Clara wanted to take the lead in building a crossing, Maltbie said.
The city of Palo Alto recently took it upon itself to build a tunnel at Homer Avenue that will allow people to get to the Palo Alto Caltrain station from a burgeoning area near the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
Money? Yeah, it took money. About $5.1 million, from start to finish, commitment from the Palo Alto City Council, and “a whole lot of wrangling” from the planning staff managing an alphabet soup of agency funding programs, like TEA-21, TFCA, TDC, STIP and TLC.
The city of Santa Clara prefers to wait for BART, staff told me.
I think I can see where this is all leading. Back to cars.