There used to be a lot more unincorporated islands but SCC LAFCO made San Jose incorporate the small ones. Some are formerly redlined areas. Full list here : santaclaralafco.org/sites/defaul...

@ndhapple.bsky.social this is not a comparison with single bore, it just lists the cost of twin bore in 2024 dollars with and without contingency. Soft costs and financing are not included. For comparison, here is the latest cost estimates for the single bore (excluding BART maintenance yard)

Details of that 40' single bore
option were given in the May CWG presentation here: vtabart.org/wp-content/u...
It looks like a big improvement on the current design in my opinion.

I was hoping VTA would go with a compromise shallower 40' single-bore tunnel with C+C stations. Much better passenger experience than deep mega bore with less surface disruption than twin bore due to DT crossover in tunnel and no cross passages.

Elevated BART stations are huge and Santa Clara St. is not that wide - it would never fit.

I'd like to see an analysis if what is buildable using only local funds. The VTA project team is hinting that, in the absense of an FFGA with the current admin, they plan to just start digging the mega tunnel anyway, assuming they can find a contractor.

Unfortunately the choice of alignment and station locations was made, largely for local political reasons and that was what was presented to the local voters when approving the sales tax measures that fund this. Cutting costs at this point means cutting stations which is politically very bad.

Yes. I believe both the old breda and new s200 are around 75ft per car. 200ft platforms means max 2 cars.

It’s even worse than that. The central subway only supports 2 car trains due to cost cutting late in the project…

Things have changed around here a lot in a century, especially land use and auto infrastructure. The old streetcar networks were more similar to bus service in terms of frequency and capacity than modern rail.

I don’t agree with this. Stanford and DTSJ are the only locations in SCC dense enough to support rail. The point of BART to SJ is to encourage more jobs to be moved to DTSJ where people might use it.

No problem! Note that the section on page 9 already has 1 electrified track for Caltrain. They only run EMUs up to 79mph for now.

Page 9 shows 14-15’ between Tamien and Diridon stations

The plan is for 110mph max as there are at-grade crossings

Note that ROW for the northern part of this section ( north of CP Lick ) is owned by Caltrain PCJPB not UP so will have to meet their standards. Seems like the freight spacing is even closer there in some places but the speeds are likely lower as the alignment has lots of curves.

Example here:

A far more detailed description of this is alternative 4 in the SJ-Merced Section EIR Book 4-A. They seem to have mostly 18ft min spacing to the freight track. Note that the plan here is to purchase the ROW from UP first.
hsr.ca.gov/programs/env...

He says there is no change in accident rates after installing cameras but only shows monthly data smoothed over 3 months so the numbers are so small there is lots of variation. What do the annual numbers look like? How about the trend compared to similar places without cameras?

Wasn’t the original plan for the transbay tube to connect to both upper and lower levels? Maybe it’s still possible to achieve that. To get enough capacity you would need to make W Oakland a skip-stop station as proposed here: mtc.ca.gov/sites/defaul...