Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 35: Caltrain Defunding

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

We're here to talk about our favorite subject: Trains   LIVESTREAM, TINY DELAWARE IN CITIES: SKYLINES, 7/25, JESSICA SCARANE FOR SENATE, JUSTIN IS ON AT 12 NOON EDT, LINK: https://www.twitch.tv/jessica_scarane   DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS AND ETC AND PROVIDE THE RECEIPT TO US VIA TWITTER OR E-MAIL AND WE WILL SEND YOU THE BONUS EPISODES: https://www.phillybailfund.org/ https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 E-MAIL IS IN THE CHANNEL ABOUT PAGE   slides: https://youtu.be/QjEI3Ko-kp8 presidio bay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZWhFAh4JSc interurban_era's twitter: https://twitter.com/InterurbanE interurban_era's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC_qV-wGVow_HapR93TeW4A bigmoodenergy's metros video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACTp-ebzhP4 buster keaton, it's actually called "one week": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHo1cvbDIpA   someone remind me if I need to link anything else   patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

Yes, we get recordings going. Everything's going and we got to move relatively swiftly because Miles has to leave. Yeah, I'm moving swiftly. Nice podcast concise podcast. So I don't believe you have the perils of owning a 55 year old automobile means you have to take it to the mechanic every once in a while. So I have to pick it up around this 430.

Yeah, get a fox body. Oh, yeah. How do you consider getting a fan? Actually, yes, the Corvair Greenbrier. So there's a what's your problem podcast all in itself. All right. All right, Max Schnell. OK, welcome to Well, there's your problem.

Are you doing the screen recording? Yes, I am doing a screen record. OK, good. Everything is good. We should be good. Good. A podcast about engineering disasters, which is good. Or so the viewers tell us. Listeners, excuse me.

I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. All right, go. Alice Koodle, Kelly, my pronouns are she and her. I heard the comments saying stop interrupting Justin so much. And I resolved to interrupt Justin on the first sentence of the podcast. So proud of you.

Yes. So proud of you. That's what we like is be aggressive towards the viewers. Don't let them get a foothold. Exactly. Yeah, no kind of social relationships as you're going to see. My name is Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. I'm working on getting a better bike.

OK, shut the fuck up. I'm working on it. I know we all know I have to move. I have to do a lot of shit. The I promise you I am the least of your worries. Again, I will come to your house. I will get a crossbow and I will let you. Six feet away from six feet away.

And and and we have a guest today, a guest, another guest. Hey, I'm Miles and my pronouns are he, they fancy. I know, Tres, fancy. And and today we're going to talk about you'll see on the on the on the screen in front of you, a train. Not just any train. It's it's a cow. The worst train in the world.

It's a cow train. That can't be true. It's not the worst train in the world. The entire train out of calcium. You got to get a watch out for that Helvetica scenario. The low budget shows. Should we should we enlighten the users or our listeners rather? The colloquial term for the motive power industries, MP 36, that is on the screen here.

I don't I didn't know there was a colloquial term for it. Yes, the the crews and some of the people that manufacture it have given it a very good nickname, the dildo liner. You know, I'm squinting. I'm already posting. Yeah, I'm not seeing it personally. But you have to go right to you. Oh, OK.

But, Miles, you, me and Liam have all gone out to Strasburg to see 611. Oh, yes. That's a dildo liner. Oh, yeah. That's magnificent. You could you could fuck you could you could fuck up for us with that. I mean, like. Shall we introduce a new term? Freudian wheelslip.

Oh, that's extremely good. Yeah, there we are. Do you want a job on a podcast? I hear I can make multiple dollars being a podcast. That's true. Literally, a dozen of dollars. Damn. Yes. Do you see the Patreon? It looks big and then you got to divide it and it's not so big.

All right. So anyway, today we're going to talk about Caltrain that stands for California train. This is a train in California. Anyway, but before we tell you why we're going to talk about it, we had to do the goddamn news. It's another downer, isn't it? It's another downer,

although it's kind of been an upper since then because of the way that the Portlanders have been handling this. But yeah, the the feds are being deployed around the United States to just, you know, put people in vans and take them away. Wearing vans. They're violating federal law, not violating any federal law. There's no reason for them to be there. That's what the National Guard is for.

We have. We have laws about this. Don't matter. Don't matter anymore. You can just have a bunch of US marshals. US marshals wearing multi cam and like subdued patches, just grabbing people up into rental vans is cool. It's Trump just playing Tropico one, not realizing it is actually the country. I love tropical.

Yeah, although it's kind of gone off the rails lately. If you were playing tropical, we'd have better infrastructure. True. Yeah, we don't have DHS agents, but we do have police blimps. Yeah. So, you know, they've been like just hulling people off in vans for no reason. And then they like, I don't know,

intimidate them for a while and release them. We don't know if anyone's been disappeared yet. The Portlanders are very mad. And there's been a crew of good dads with leaf blowers just redirecting all the tear gas back into the courthouse out there, which is hilarious last night. Like an honest to God, like skirmish line. It was extremely good.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it was great. DHS employees are mad that the agency is being used in this way. And I was like, you're literally like the police department created in two thousand and two as part of the surveillance state. What do you think your fucking job is? It's literally the are we the baddies need? Yeah, I believe they're.

Their job was to get Bush reelected. Yeah. Well, the tweet that I saw about this that is profoundly sure is that like when the Department of Homeland Security was formed, I said that in a matter of years, it would be used to have like a warrantless power of militaries, disappearing people into vans. And my roommates told me to stop smoking so much part in the dorm room, and both of us were right.

I mean, a matter of years was pretty generous. I mean, it's more like a matter of months. Oh, God. All right. Shall we? Since we got to go quick. So in other news. Everyone's asking this episode. You can't do this episode. We don't have enough information.

It's a paragraph. We can bullshit pretty well. This is that. Well, I think that. Well, yeah, I was about to say, it's not even three paragraphs. It's like five sentences at most. Yeah. For those of you listening on audio, this is the Erfurt Latrine disaster where a bunch of Holy Roman Empire nerds fell in a latrine when the floor collapsed.

Extremely funny, but very funny. Yes, not enough of like documented engineering. Does we should do a medieval one at some point? But yes, this. Yeah. It if someone sends me drawings of how the floor was collapsed, I will try and do it. I feel like one of the things you could do is spend the Patreon money on hiring that weird news place

that makes the weird animations really cheaply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Taiwanese place. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like hire them to do a recreation meticulous of the Erfurt Latrine disaster, but with like, you know, random contemporary figures. Yeah. Hear me out, though. What have we got to hear in chat to do it? Fuck. Yeah, let's do that.

Yeah. I want to hang out with to hear in chat. That sounds like a good time. Much, much better than hanging out with Elon Musk. See, the thing is, all of these guys would have been safe if they'd had the bed that like encases you when there's an earthquake. I don't know.

Maybe the pool would have seeped in through the bed. I don't know if that is the coffin bed watertight. I don't know. Anyway, moving on. Moving on. All right. That was the goddamn news. We've made it quick today news because Miles has to leave at some point. All right.

So I have to ask the question. All right. So for those of you who don't live in the Bay Area, consider yourselves lucky. What is Caltrain? Yeah, East Coast, Best Coast. That's right. All right. So what is Caltrain?

It's a train in California. The clue is in the Dallas. You did Alice, right? Should I describe it in a overly official tone? Please. If you want to, sure. Caltrain for over 100 years has been a integral commuter service connecting San Francisco with San Jose, eventually extending south to Gilroy.

Oh, that's a fantastic commercial voice. Good voice. Thank you. Yes, it's a commuter train. Sort of, you know, it runs between, as Miles said, San Francisco, San Jose. They run a bunch of trains every day. It goes through, of course, some of the wealthiest parts of the United States. That's this whole area here.

It's like Palo Alto. That's like San Mateo. It's like all these horrible places where all the techie techies lead leads me to a question, which I feel like we're going to spend the next hour or so answering. Why then do we have all of these to me? Very beautiful. They're 40s on the right here.

But why aren't they fucking like some Elon Musk curved hexagonal bullshit? Have I got an answer for you? It's because Caltrain Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, is cheap and also because they're oddly good at maintaining these F40s. So they keep on keeping on. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Really? So now Caltrain, like a lot of other transit authorities, you know,

the ridership's around 10 percent unusual, which in Caltrain, which is a system that depends on fare revenue, is a big problem, right? Caltrain receives over 70 percent of its funding from fare box revenue, right? That's just tickets, right? So it's sort of an existential crisis because we got Daroni going around. And one question is, why do we talk about Caltrain in particular, right? Especially when elsewhere in the Bay Area and San Francisco, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, which is, of course,

the transit authority out there has had to cut 50 percent of bus routes. And, you know, there's there's lots of cuts to transit everywhere in the United States right now. Why should people be able to get to work? Yeah, exactly, right? Well, there's fewer people working, so you need fewer ways of getting to work. It's simple. That's just math. Oh, yes. I love to walk another like three and a half

a mile to and from my bus every day. Yeah. Up hill both way because, remember, San Francisco is not flat. San Francisco is non-Euclidean. Yeah, it definitely is non-Euclidean. So. All right. So so Munis like running half their bus routes right now and they're thinking about doing that permanently, right? Just because they have no way to raise revenue.

Caltrain is in a similar situation, right, where they have almost no revenue. And there they had this idea. They were going to put a one eighth sense sales tax on the ballot in November, right? Because they have to continue to fund their operation and because they can, based on their charter, it seems reasonable to me. I am going to be pissed off about something. Unfortunately, we run into California.

California is insane, like a tax amendment where you have to have ballot initiatives to raise taxes on almost anything. Right? That's true. And occasion bridge tolls as well. Oh, my God. The other thing is that the Bay Area in particular is very trigger happy with raising the cost of those types of things. If you look at the disparity in the percentage of sales tax

between counties alone in the Bay Area itself, it's pretty wild. So one of the one of the members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, I think several of them just decided we're not going to put this measure on the ballot, right? Democracy. We're just not going to do it. Yes. And there's sort of there's this sort of full progressive argument from equality here, right? Obviously, a sales tax is a regressive tax, right?

Because it applies equally to everyone. And a lot of that sales tax sales tax would come from San Francisco. Most San Franciscans do not ride Caltrain. That's people from the suburbs coming in, right? At least one of the Board of Supervisors, Shaman Walton, who is also on the joint powers board that oversees Caltrain, wants more San Francisco representation on the board before he would even let voters vote on the sales tax, right?

It was goddamn business. Also, are there like now four people living in San Francisco, all of whom are billionaires? One of the things that I've had and say sort of like a joke for a long time is because San Francisco is so expensive, it's like that it's like the Truman show where at like six p.m. everybody leaves the entire city and it's completely empty. Two of the Wilmington Delaware.

I mean, the vibe I got like of people who actually live in San Francisco is that it's one gay bookstore that's been open since the mid seventies. That is slowly being forced out like in a vice and then like six guys who got rich, like finding a way to like slightly evade some more capital gains tax or less. And then you throw in a bunch of you throw in a pretty diverse population and you've pretty much got it. It's like Yogi Berra says nobody goes there anymore.

It's too crowded. Exactly. Now, one of the things that inspired me to say we should do an episode about this was a bad tweet, which I'm not going to mention who it was or because I think the person has suffered a month enough by now. But they specifically stated Caltrain's high fares made it a super highway for Silicon Valley, which was specifically designed to keep, you know, poor and black and brown riders off the trains.

Right. Right. Now. So first off, that's that. First off, Route 101 is a super highway for Silicon Valley, right? They have all those buses where they like they pay the people driving them almost nothing and then they have to sleep in the buses in between shifts and they use the like regular San Francisco bus stops, but they don't like pay for them or anything. Yeah, that's correct.

The Google the infamous Google buses as they've come to be known. They have had a positive impact in reducing overall traffic. But, you know, when it comes, which comes to shove, San Francisco's get grumpy about nearly everything. So even something that could be on paper be seen as a good thing from a transit perspective was actually literally pick it lined more than once, which is pretty hilarious. I like it. Yeah. Well, like all the really, really rich techies,

they're not taking Caltrain, you know, they they're putting on autopilot on their Tesla, you know, you know, and just snoozing on the way into work until I crash into a semi truck, you know, which I believe like 50 percent of autopilot trips end in. Second off, just because, you know, that's a middle class and upper middle class people ride the train doesn't mean it's exclusively a train for rich people, right? Exactly. You know, we have Excelop.

Yeah, you don't have to be like a dirt farmer to be, you know, like. A poor right, you know, a lot of people can swing five dollars to ride the train in from zone two each day. But, you know, still struggle, right? The San Francisco poverty line of actual numbers are something insane. It's like it's eighty eight thousand dollars for a single person. Is the poverty line in San Francisco? Jesus, fuck that, man. Right. That's a lot of money.

Just, yeah, move the Delaware. God damn. And that's the thing. So if you think about this, so your average Muni bus driver gets paid about fifty five thousand dollars a year last I checked that. Yeah, so it doesn't matter how, you know, how many years you've served in Muni. Of course, you get paid a little more each year, but at the end, you're probably still beneath the poverty line. Is about to say you got to live out in

Stockton or some bullshit way on the boonies. Sadly, yes, or you have to. Yeah, exactly. It's it's not a good idea. You have all this weird super commuting from far off unknown locations like Tracy. So, I mean, I kind of wanted to do this episode because I've been a commuter rail rider basically my whole life, you know, and especially if you're commuting in the off peak hours, you know, not everyone on the trains like a button down

middle management guy or anything like that, right? Exactly. But there is a sort of kernel to kernel of truth to the idea that like commuter rail is, you know, for the middle class and higher, right? The fares are high compared to other modes of public transportation. In our case, this particular train runs through very privileged towns and cities. More than half the ridership makes over the median area income. And a lot of people who ride the train are white, right? There's a class character to the train, right? Yes.

Also a side note, the medium income of that strip along the peninsula is one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a person. Jesus. Yeah. I hate to criticize trains, but we are doing ruthless critique of all that exists. And so. Yes. Yes. So one of the things is like this sort of thing is reflected in commuter trains all across America, right? How did this come about?

And sort of to explain the current conditions, we're going to have to talk about some of the history of commuter rail in the United States, some of the history of Caltrain, how Caltrain and other commuter railroads operate and why those operations basically require high fares. And we'll talk a little bit about California housing policy. Oh, no. Oh, yes. That's right. If we had the Wilhelm Scream drop, I'd put it in right there.

What the hell was that screaming? Screaming into what, an air conditioner? A toaster. It's not to say. Oh, yeah. Fuck you. Fuck you. No. So fantastic. But I put in the dog's play and poker here. This particular dog's play and poker is for aces and his stop

to represent the previous luxury of commuter trains in the United States. And that's great. I like the big ass watermark from painting here dot com. Yeah. The intellectual property of low respect is. Yes. So now, one of the things we say on this podcast a lot is train good, right? Yes, the rallying cry of Mumtots.

Yes. So now, train usually good, especially in a modern context, but train not always good, right? Very much, no. Train can sometimes be bad. You know, infrastructure is sort of neutral, right? Depending on who's doing the infrastructure, what they're doing it for. Well, thinking about like Cecil Rhodes is like a train from what is it? Cape to Cairo.

Yeah. Yeah. Also, the whole Holocaust thing. That was that was bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So like we use trains for, you know, Western expansion, right? You know, it's good to have better transportation, obviously, right? But it's bad that we're stealing ass loads of land to do it, you know?

And you can see here, these are land grants given to railroads. These are really ass loads of land. Sort. Yes. Yes. So, for instance, the Red Central Arrow is the Central Pacific slash Union Pacific, which is the famous transcontinental. If we look at the tip of the arrow that Justin has drawn, there's the Bay Area, of course, and about halfway through in the middle of Utah is promontory, where the split is.

Now, these wide swaths you see on the map are actually quite accurate. They can be dozens or hundreds of miles wide in some cases. I mean, even though it is a bunch of individual land grants, look at poor Iowa, for instance, which has won every 10 miles. It's absolutely ludicrous. I was under the understanding that this map was a little bit exaggerated in that not all of this land was actually granted to railroads, but this was the potential land grants.

There are some. Yeah. If you look at the South, the Atlantic and Pacific, for instance, which is the second lowest one there and the little X's out of it. Yeah, right here. Yeah, they they tried laying it and they were like, oops. Can't do that. Also, I am personally insulted right over here. Pennsylvania and Jersey and Delaware are all the same state now. I don't like that anymore.

Oh, my God. I'd love to live in the Colorado State Area. This might be the only map that actually has the upper peninsula of Michigan drawn in, but not Maine. Look, we've given it to New Brunswick. It's owned by the Irvings now. All right. So, yeah, we you know, we used we used railroads to, you know, access and then, you know, sort of obtain land owned by

the Native Americans, right? And, you know, we sort of murdered them in order to get their land. And, you know, Canadian National had a whole class of passenger cars, specifically called colonizer cars for bringing people out west as cheap as possible so they could, you know, stake the claim to lands that people already lived on. Oh, we have that too. The Central Pacific had and the Union Pacific had cars that were second class cars that were just for that as well.

Wow. I'll see if I can dig up an image if you want to put it in the thing officially when this is done. And you get a lot of like romantic notions about like taming the west and like manifest destiny and things of that nature because you have this superior technology of railroads. Right. And it did end with the Root and Tootin Cowboy era either, as we see in the images now, a complete legacy of being extremely racist. And in some cases, not even precise, the picture in the back shows

what you'll soon learn to be a Southern Pacific commuter coach loading Japanese folks being interned all along the West Coast to be sent to places like Manzanar. But their first stop being through Tanforan, a racetrack, a horse racetrack or Santa Anita down south in the Pacific Electric picture on the right there, where they were unfortunately and horrifyingly kept in stables until they were, quote unquote, sorted out and then shipped off to Manzanar.

Even our beloved inner urbans were used for bad stuff as it turns out. Yeah. And it wasn't just during World War Two. In 1933 and the deaths of the Depression, there was a decision that came out to deport people believed to be, quote unquote, Mexican, so a large Latinx population all throughout California was forcibly deported. The numbers range, but the average seems to be about 1.3 million. And it wasn't just the, quote unquote, illegals you hear about now.

They were also naturalized, natural born US citizens thrown over the border. Is that the operation I'm digging up with the extremely racist name? No, that's actually a debut word. Yeah, that's a follow up that happened in 1953. This is a lesser known, but oddly larger operation that happened in 33. OK. Well, we always got to conceal the worst things America did. Can't learn about American war crimes. Can't try to make your country better.

Can't learn for the past. Nope. Nope. America number one. I did. Can not learn from mistakes ever. So you can do you can do, you know, trains to do internment, ethnic cleansing. You can, of course, do trains for extermination. Yeah, yep. Yeah, and that's not so good. Yeah, Deutsche Bahn really does not like you mentioning this at all. Well, I once went into a Hugo boss store

and asked where they kept the SS uniforms and I was probably dead. This exhibit is closed. It's actually a big controversy. Beckman, VRE, switched operator, some M-track to Kialis, which is the American division of the French SNCF National Railroad Company, where, you know, that a certain group in the area, a one of the Jewish groups in the area was like demanding Kialis disclose its role in the Holocaust.

Because, of course, SNCF, Vichy SNCF did, in fact, deport Jews to Poland and other bad places. If you want to the closest thing to something that will make you feel better from this, it's the only time that a Holocaust train was actually stopped was an attack by the Belgian resistance, I believe. And literally it was just two guys, one of whom with a lamp and the other one with a gun, but with the sort of like improvised cooperation of the Belgian driver, who was just like, yeah, I'm just going to run this as slow as I can

without the Germans shooting me so that people can jump off it. That's great. So yeah, thank you, Belgium. Thank you, Belgium. Sorry for insulting you in the beer episode, which I'm still working on, I swear. The beer still don't. Yes, the beer is still bad. So, you know, you use trains to do racism, of course.

You know, trains used to be segregated, you know, in the south. But also you sort of like catch a train in the north that was heading to the south and get a little bit of segregation in the north, if you really wanted. The treats. Because it's a treat. Yeah. And there's always always that one incredibly well restored Jim Crow car in every railroad museum in the south,

you know, sponsored by the daughter to the Confederacy or something like that. There's, thankfully, a nice epilogue to that as well. Yes, there definitely are those, but they decided to put it put one in the beautiful new museum in D.C. as well. I stumbled across it while researching it. And I came across this picture of a huge Pullman heavyweight car flying into the museum on a crane. That's the National African American History Museum, right?

Yes. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's nice to have one of them preserved by folks who aren't white supremacists for once. Clearly the lowest of bars, yeah. Yeah, it's nice to have some control over that narrative now to actually tell the real story as well. Yeah. And the other thing is, of course, you know, even even minus institutionalized racism,

you can have fallout from infrastructure, which is not good. Right. So I would give the example of the Washington, D.C. Green Line, right? Oh, boy. So they started building this through largely black neighborhoods right after some major race riots, right? You know, and they ran through commercial corridors, which, you know, were pretty well wrecked by race riots.

And then the streets on were shut down for like 10 years to build the tunnels underneath. Wow. Right. And then when the Green Line opened, you know, the yuppies started to swarm in, you know, places like Columbia Heights, U Street. Even Shaw at this point, you know, so you had complete turnover of the population and just absurd gentrification from putting in the Green Line. I think the only pre Green Line and pre race riots business still open on U Street is Ben's Chili Bowl, which is going to close anything.

And then, you know, and then, you know, further down south, like when they built the Green Line, a lot of direct buses from Anacostia, which was a poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C., for a long time. A lot of those buses were canceled. The idea being now you transfer from the bus to the Green Line. But the trains were more expensive than the buses. So, you know, I forced the forest people to take the expensive train, as opposed to the cheap bus, to where they were going. Right.

So even if you're like building good infrastructure, like sometimes it can exacerbate inequalities and make life miserable for people. Right. And, you know, part of this is like if you give a poor neighborhood nice things, you know, like public transit, bike lanes, parks, trails, fix up the sidewalks even rich people start to move in and kick out the poor people. Right. And this is like difficult to square the circle under a capitalist economic system. Right. You know, so long as you have

prophecy developers who are willing to like make lofts to take advantage, then it's going to be very easy for that to happen. It's difficult to build cheap housing in a desirable area. Yeah. You know, this is why like urbanists, I always think have like half the picture like, yeah, sure, we need more housing. But like it matters who controls the housing. It matters how much the housing costs. Correct. You can't just build luxury housing in the most desirable locations.

And like you just you just do red lining and white flight. But again, in the opposite direction, you just like change ends like a soccer game. And so you just force people out into suburbs while the the richer, whiter people just move into the cities again. Oh, yeah. That wasn't that the Obama era in a nutshell. Yeah. You can you can buy a house with this like collateralized insecure mortgage out in the suburbs. And it will be the American dream until it's foreclosed out from under you.

Right. And likewise, we can't just bring good infrastructure to poor people and expect the poor people to be able to take advantage of it before, you know, they're kicked out. This is like a problem with with capitalism, right? You know, there's why people don't like getting nice things sometimes. Because it's like, wow, this nice thing might make my neighborhood too nice and I won't be able to live here anymore. Well, that's that's. Plus you have the. Sorry.

Oh, one of you go ahead. I was I mean, I've seen the take that like we need we want things to improve our community, but it'll change. You know, we can't have more dense housing because that'll change the fabric of the neighborhood, which is this sort of, you know, bullshit take. But like at the same time, like I guess I get getting frustrated. But that's again, symptomatic of capitalism, not just putting infrastructure. The other thing I'd point out is that like another reason to be kind of

suspicious of particularly like a mass transit infrastructure is it has a way of like growing cops on it, particularly if you have an infrastructure. Yeah, that like, yeah, railroad bulls that like needs a fair revenue to to operate. Then you you have a lot of cops there to enforce fares. And obviously, that's not great, particularly if you're the kind of person who does not do well in interactions with cops like, for instance, like people. Yeah, it just reminds me of that MTA thing about the they're hiring $250 million worth of cops to stop $250 million worth of fare evasion.

Yeah, efficiency. Oh, my God. Yeah, also, the the the the form of efficiency that takes is that buys like four cops worth of overtime. Yeah, yeah. No, no. On the other hand, of course, I always, you know, just demolish your house and throw you on the street and give you a whole other system of cops.

Yes, the CHP in California, at least. It's impossible to say whether it's good or not. So next set of slides is where we discuss the various types of mass transit. Heavy rail mass transit, I mean, right. So started this with the idea we're going to talk about what is commuter rail, right? Is a commuter train just a train that goes to the suburbs? There's a hot dog sandwich. Yes, exactly.

That's that's the that's the question we're going to answer here. You know, so like is the New York City subway commuter rail is San Francisco Bart commuter rail is a Chicago blue line. Commuter rail is M track commuter rail. So I thought we'd go through the spectrum of trains. OK, yeah. Seems sensible. Hit me with the genders of train.

The various genders of trains, right? There's more than two. There's at least three. If you forget everything you think about about trains in general, the trains of box that moves people along a fixed path, costs money to run. But makes money when it has passengers in it, right? We hope so. So one end of the spectrum, you have the subway, right?

It runs frequently all day. It has dedicated tracks. I've never seen a freight train on the subway, right? Yeah, you have that one maintenance train that goes around that they fill up with the garbage like that bottle on the platform there. Like, yeah. And you get sometimes you get the money train. Yeah, the money train when the police are just courting MP5s at you

as you're nearly blackout drunk. And you're just like, man, I just want to go home. The stations are close together. Most of the subway equipment and by equipment, I mean trains. They're making money most of the day, i.e. they're carrying passengers, right? So the more time your equipment is making money, the lower your fares can be, right? Because they're making money for most of the day.

So and your subway network usually covers a small area, right? So your your subways are like in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, you know, that sort of system, right? Use it like can be underground doesn't always have to be. The London overground is like meaningfully the same as this. Actually, the London overground is the next slide. Oh, shit. OK, never mind. Disregard. Yeah, I fucking I'm yeah, I'm great at this.

OK, so your next step on the spectrum next. Yeah, the next gender is what we might call in the United States. We call it rapid rail in Germany. You have the S bond, right? And I guess in London, you'd call it the overground, right? Yeah, I guess so. So I guess I'm saying like I know. In the time between the last slide and this one, I have acquired a comprehensive knowledge. So this is like usually these systems

are a little lower frequency than the subway, but they still usually run at least every 15 minutes or so, right? The stations are further apart. They cover a much wider area than the subway, except you like the London Piccadilly line that just goes way out in the boondocks to get to Heathrow. Yeah. Yeah. Is the high speed line on here? Do we count the high speed line or some level of freak show?

The high speed line is the the hunted is a freak. So I love that. I love that trade, man. Love to get way out to the suburbs in like 12 fucking minutes. I then take a bus all the way and then listen to the racist white people. Tell me why they can't possibly have better service in their area because the black people who work there, I don't know. Well, after their shift at the gap at the King of Prussia ball

come to your stupid house in Ardmore or whatever and smash all your windows and take your TV, which is totally fucking realistic. And then bring it on the train. Yeah, every year on the train is an MS-13. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Don't tell don't tell the Cheeto in the White House that the M. The M at MS-13 stands for I work at the gap. Yes, yeah.

So your your rapid rail system, like the stations are farther apart, the whole network covers a wider area, still usually uses dedicated tracks. No freight trains, right? Still, most of the trains are carrying passengers for most of the day, right? And your fares are usually low. They're still distance based a lot of the time, like Bart in San Francisco has distance based fares. They're not flat.

Sometimes these are like multipolar systems, so they might serve two or more metropolitan areas. So if you're if you're looking at examples in the United States, definitely Bart, definitely the Washington Metro, any German Espan system, the London Overground. If you want to learn more about the American ones, go to Big Mood Energy's YouTube channel. It's your video on metros.

It's very good. It's very United States centric, of course. As is sort of this podcast. So, you know, a narrow centrism. Yes. So as we continue down the spectrum, we get to where it starts to get funky, right? Which is regional rail. Well, boy. OK.

Which we talked about in episode three of this podcast way back in the day. So sort of covers the same area as an Espan, but less frequent, right? There's trains every hour or less on the off peak, but more trains during rush hour, right? Because there's more trains during rush hour than there are on the off peak. That means you need a lot of trains to run service, but most of them are idle for most of the day, right? And you still need to have a lot of crews to run those trains.

But most of those crews are idle for most of the day. Yes, do nothing union jobs, baby. Yes, a classic. No, it's always it's always good. But, you know, I like to be paid to do nothing, too. That's why I'm a podcaster, but we work hard. God damn you paid nothing to do nothing. That's the dream. That's the dream.

I was a job like that. Best gets goddamn job I ever had, man. I just stapled shit for like seven months and fucking rolled. Well, this means that your fairs have to be hired to cover for all the trains and crews sitting there doing nothing for most of the day, right? So these are, you know, a lot of these regional rail systems, again, they serve multiple metro areas. Sometimes they share tracks with freight railroads,

which limits service flexibility. Some of your examples, Caltrain, which we're talking about today, Sceptre Regional Rail, some of New Jersey Transit. If you go to Europe, anything that's marked an inter-regio service is basically the same thing, except that that covers a whole continent, as opposed to one metro area, which I don't. We're a long way off from that here in the states. We can only hope one day, one day, Bernie can still win.

So now let's talk about the bad stuff. All right. Yes, the classic commuter rail. All right. Here's where it gets bad. You have in commuter rail systems, this is the Virginia Railway Express. I used to take this train in high school. You have very peaky service, right? So you will have no service in the middle of the day. A lot of times, no service on weekends.

A lot of times, no service on holidays. And a lot of times, service is almost all in the rush hour direction, you know, inbound to downtown in the morning, outbound in the evening, right? So and it caters to folks working downtown and they're working bankers hours, right, nine to five, right? And they almost always share tracks with freight trains, which results in bizarre operational practices. And I'll explain using what I'm most familiar

with the Virginia Railway Express. All right. Yet really bad equipment utilization. Here's the rail yard at Broad Run, right? Which is at the end of the Manassas line here, which I used to take into high school every day, right? Right next to performance dogs. Yes. For our podcast viewers, we're looking at a satellite image of a small tin shed

with a six track yard out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trees and a scrap yard. Yes. And the performance dogs where bike fake absolutely had a dog. Oh, God. It's temporarily closed, unfortunately. So you see in this yard, one, two, three, four, five, six trains, right? And if we look at the schedule,

Manassas line northbound in the morning, you will see. One, two, three, four, five, six trains. Leave this yard, go to Union Station in Washington, D.C. And then they sit there the whole day in the yard. And then in the evening, take my word for it, they come back. Usually. Yeah, usually. Oh, they've had some problems recently. They can barely even make this schedule now.

So, you know, this is this is a this is a major problem with commuter rail where they don't use equipment very effectively. That's a lot of time because freight railroads limit the amount of moves they can make in this case for the VRE. There's something called the Long Bridge, which goes over the Potomac River, where CSX says you can only have 40 train movements for day or you will die. Just nationalize it.

Just nationalize it. Just start pushing all the CSX shit over into the river. I don't fucking care. Just like the Huey's evacuees from Saigon. You could just say you could just say, hi, we're the government. And we're here to take this bridge. And when CSX protests, you kneel down, their CEO at dawn and shoot him over the bridge. When you say shoot him over the bridge, I picture him like a trebuchet.

Somehow I imagined many of you see furloughed CSX employees would enjoy this plan. They're building a like a two billion dollar bridge over the Potomac, adjacent to the existing bridge in order to run like 10 more trains a day across. Sweet. It's going to take 10 years to do it. It's bizarre. Efficiency. But you can see like commuter rail sometimes highly inefficient equipment wise, right?

You're just storing. You're just like using up six lines of track for all day. So just for a train that goes nowhere. Yeah. Well, it goes somewhere. It just goes somewhere at specific times of day. Exactly. This is like transport fever bad. Oh, no, transport fever has much better equipment utilization.

We we have to stop the podcast because one of my thousands of mods that I've installed just breaks and like crashes to desktop. When when the train gets to the end of the line, it turns around as opposed to here, where when the train gets to the end of the line, it goes in the yard and takes a nap for eight hours. Yeah, the big mood railroad. Yeah. And the other thing is like this isn't even the worst that's going on in the area because up here at Union Station, the VRE trains at least go into a yard.

Mark, which is the Maryland commuter trains, they just go on to platforms at Union Station and they use the platform as a yard. Wow. We just talk my train here. I mean, that's what Cal train does as well. And during the middle of the day, if you look at Forth and Townsend and San Francisco, it's just chock a block with Cal train contests and a few leaving every so often.

Oh, yeah, they there's like 12, 14 tracks there in a train that leaves every 30 minutes in a train that comes in every 30 minutes. Right. You know, a lot of these huge stations, like Grand Central has a hundred and something tracks. It's a glorified train yard at the end of the day. But you can sort of see here, like having six trains to make six runs a day, not very efficient, right? And you got a higher six crews for this.

And that's why this is sort of this is sort of why ferries have to be really high for this form of public transportation. And a lot of times these are like really balkanized systems. You know, D.C. has two commuter railroads. New York City has three commuter railroads. The Bay Area has at least five disaster show. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially when you consider that there's a million transit agencies

just in general, yeah. London's like at least two train operating companies like Southeastern and Southern, and then probably another couple that I can't think of. Bring back network. Southeast. Yes. Yes. The trains look so good. They look so good.

But yeah, and sometimes these systems don't work together very good. Now, we know a little bit about how commuter rail works in America today. We're going to go to the history of Caltrain. We're going to go back in time. To a picture that I myself took my only Wikipedia contribution. All right. So that means we did. All right, we don't have to credit this one. Thank God. Yeah, exactly.

All right. So let's let's talk about Caltrain history. Since the 1860s, more or less, they've been running passenger trains up and down the peninsula. But the show really started going with Southern Pacific President Edward H. Harriman, who designed a four track main line to go between San Francisco and San Jose. He only ended up laying half of that. But all the tunnels and bridges are built for that capacity

to eventually be used or not. There's bridge abutments and in some cases extant bridges which were built and don't have any tracks on them and never had since 1907. So the the whole idea of Caltrain also is a bit of a real estate scheme. You want to drive obvious people paying passengers along your line. So you sell land along your line so you can develop towns and cities along your line to hopefully get passenger and also freight hauled over your railroad. So starting in the turn of the century,

they started running pretty regular trains. And obviously it was all behind steam locomotives like the one you see. This beautiful P8 class Pacific. And they had ordered what are also known as Harriman cars. And the deal with these cars is that they were they were kind of they were unique development of of Pullman cars. They were lighter weight. They could handle quite a few passengers.

They were excellently designed and durable. And by they ordered a ton of them in 1923 to supplant the earlier equipment. And by 1925, they were operating on just 10 minute schedules with 10 minute headways between San Jose and San Francisco, which is excellent. I could only hope to have better than they do now. Yeah, with steam. That's insane. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And most of the commute, the majority of the years that they had dedicated commute engines.

And why do I say commute? Because there's no goddamn R. There's no R commute. Absolutely no commute. Yeah, OK. No R. They are Southern Pacific's commutes. They are not a commuter train. This is worse than the time that I found out that the word restaurant doesn't have an N. Oh, oh. Anyways, so typical locomotive passenger power were 46010

wheelers, very well loved by the crews and the 462 Pacific, you see here. They held down assignments until the early 50s when they started to retire some of the other larger locomotives after World War Two and eventually bumped the smaller 10 wheelers. And in some cases, even the Pacific's odd of commute service. They got supplanted by gargantuan engines like 484 northerns like the GS4, for instance, and M.T. for mountains and other big, powerful steam T.M.

This is also an integral part of how a lot of Southern Pacific steam got saved because the S.P. commute line in particular was the last bastion of Southern Pacific steam and the entire like 4,000 mile network because, you know, the S.P.'s headquarters was down the street and, lo and behold, they were steam fans, even if their accountants weren't. The last steam powered commute ran in January of 1957. That's pretty good.

And I mean, some some romance there for like steam likeers. Where's that fucking train simulator DLC, man? North and Western kept running them until 1960. Oh, and if we go to the next slide and take 4449, it's about to say a sign to the commute. Oh, yeah, buddy. Just I guess you see why I in Rand develops a whole like insane ideology around this.

Yeah, you look at this and you're just like, I mean, talk about the dildo line, right? That is an obscene train. Although 4449 didn't look as beautiful as this when she was in commute service. All the skirting on the side, the orange bit was scrapped. In the mid 40s to support the war effort, because clearly they needed like five pieces of steel to make a few things. Did we win the war? Did we win the war miles?

Did we win the war miles? I don't know. I mean, it's 20 from 19. Scoreboard, scoreboard, baby, scoreboard. I'm sorry. What are you two arguing? I'm still just looking at this train, just like, oh, it's so orange. It's so orange.

They should just paint all locomotives like this at operation lifesaver wouldn't have to do anything. Because at some point you're going to see the big, dumb orange train. And if you get hit by it, that's absolutely your fucking fault. You're going to stop your car so you can watch it go by. Why is it crushing you to death? Well, no, you'd stop it before the intersection, before the railroad crossing. Exactly.

It just crushes your car. Yeah, train good, all bad. So behind these beautiful locomotives were the passenger cars. And they had three distinct eras of passenger cars. So before the. But in the turn of the century, they had Harriman coaches, which are 60 foot long cars that seated about, I believe, about 80 people in relative luxury. They were painted a dark olive green.

They had pretty nice ventilation and operable windows. The crews loved them and they survived until 1967. The one on the screen now is a 72 foot suburban coach, also a Harriman design. Those were built in 1923 by Pullman, and these lasted until 1985. It lasted into the California. There is a photograph of an F, right? There's a photograph of a brand new F40 pulling a 1923 Harriman car. And if that isn't peak transit.

Once again, the MP54 has lasted longer. I just still, once again, I'm just like, like doing a disaster podcast. It's so nice to just like even appreciating the many problems and failures of Caltrain to appreciate some nice trains, you know? Oh, yeah, the pull of their own vomit. Yes, yeah, yeah, I mean, to be fair, normally I do piss and shit and vomit on my commute home, but that

I don't really. So let's go to the next slide and take a look inside these beautiful cars. Now, here's how they looked in the later years before they had a nicer upholstery job than the primary blue that you see here. But you can see that they're beautiful, well-maintained cars. And they were that way until the end. They were they didn't go through a destitute period or anything because high ceilings. Oh, yes, I like the light fixtures.

Those are nice. The light fixtures are absolutely gorgeous. Oh, Flippy chairs, Flippy. Yeah, Flippy seats. Let me some Flippy seats. Fantastic design. And then in the early 1950s, Pullman came to them again and wanted to order something they were developing called gallery cars.

And yes, classic gallery cars. But why is it called a gallery car? It's because it has a big hole in the center of the car. Oh, yes, the prophesized train glory hole. Go on, Miles. Yes, so the the glory hole, if you will, is so the conductor can punch tickets from the ground floor and the second deck without having to go upstairs, which also

avoids a very Scooby-Doo style fare evasion scenario where they're running out and out. I did it just like like rolling under the Flippy seeds, starting to get around and be like, no, I've been here the whole time. I see. Exactly. The Pullman standard cars were also used by the Chicago Northwestern in Chicago and I think a few other operations spread around.

And then the ones that you see on like the VRE, for instance, are second and third hand from these orders. Yes, I took a 60 year old gallery car into high school each day. It was pretty hilarious. Yeah, they're neat cars. A few of them were were stripped and gutted and then built into basically party cars for the ill fated Transisco tours, arguably one of the ugliest paint schemes

to ever grace a locomotive and train set for an ill fated nineteen eighty four Renault fun train. Oh, boy, I got to stop at Bob at all. Transisco tools, you say. Yeah, there's definitely a well, there's your problem podcast about it. It takes some apart from the Marlboro train, too. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, bud. Oh, I don't like that at all.

Train no longer good. In the meantime, let's take a look on the interior of a gallery car so you can see what's going on here. This is in the later Japanese built gallery cars that superseded the Pullman standard. But you can see that you can you can punch tickets from the first floor. It's roomy. What I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a cross section so everyone knows what's going on here.

All right. Oh, yeah, there you have on the top level. There is a seat here on this side. You're just drawing on my mouth here, right? And then there's a railing. There's a railing. And then down here, there are two seats and there are two seats, right? Now, in the middle of the car right past this doorway, this is the middle of the car, right?

And there's two little spiral staircases here so you can get up to the second row of seats up here. And then on the other side of this part over here, it's the same thing, but backwards, right? That's a gallery car. Now, one of the funny things is when I rode the VRE, after they switched from M-Track crews to Kialis French crews, they decided that rather than do the one pass through and check tickets

from people above and below, they would instead go up every aisle in the car individually. So you could do this, we would do that. It was a concession to American slapstick. It just now took four times as long to check tickets on every car for no reason. That's the VRE, baby. That's the VRE, baby. Yeah. That's your key.

Before you move on, I have posted the the Transisco Tours livery in the Discord chat for you, Justin. It's real. Oh, it's gruesome. This is that Montreal Expo cheek. Oh, boy, Ghost Bones, baby. This is horrible. I don't like that. He doesn't get any worse than this, guys.

Like this is his own. The big doors. I love it. I love it. I love it. I always wanted to ride around in the flag of Norway. It's like, no, it's the palace of the flag of Norway applied to the flag of South Africa. It is. Oh, God, I love it so much.

I wish I didn't, but I love it so much. All right. So our steam was vanquished in 1957. There was a there was what was known as a transition period because he wasn't going to last forever. And Fairbanks Morris was about to kick off the horse power wars. Oh, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. And just think a decade before American muscle cars started doing the same thing. So most EMDs and Alcos of the post or immediate post war period

were like bragging with their belt buckles about having fifteen hundred or seventeen hundred horsepower. And then Fairbanks Morris enters the scene and body slams them with a twenty four hundred horsepower monster known as the train master. That rules train master in the. In the most appropriate use of this meme, this absolute unit. I couldn't resist when I was like, this, wait a minute, here we go.

This absolute unit was powered by an opposed piston World War Two submarine engine. Oh, like a Delta awesome. Yes. Yeah. Very much so. I love putting marine engines in trains. It's the best. Marine engines and everything. Marine engines and everything. Absolutely. I want one in my fucking cell phone. I want to be able to pick up my phone.

I just hit. You start, you start, you start using a higher power app and you hear the revs start to increase. Oh, this is. This is. Oh, my God. So a side note on that. Yeah, there is a long storied history of tugboat and marine applications using locomotive

prime movers. In this case, it's the reverse, which is kind of cool because like EMD often and Alco often used their prime movers and tugboats and other marine craft, which were specifically designed for locomotives. Anyways, so they came on the scene with this 2400 horsepower train master. The SP tried it out, immediately love it, bought one of the largest fleets of any of them and promptly realized that, well, with all this horsepower despair, it gives you kick ass acceleration. So you're able to keep what used to be the steam schedule between all these stations.

They tried out other locomotives. They tried EMD SD 7s and 9s when they realized their gearing was too sluggish that just couldn't get off the line well. And eventually, they supplanted the rest of the fleet with GP 9s, known as torpedo boats, because they have the large air tanks on the roof that kind of make them look like, you know, PT 109 insert JFK reference here. Well, it's hard to do it. No, it's a different kind of moving on. I was going to do it.

Like, you got to, you know, it's hard to toss a girl overboard. You know, when you can only go straight in a sort of deal. There hasn't been a Kennedy train disaster. Every other form of transit car. Yes, there has. Yes, there has. There has. Yeah. And all right. So the Bobby Kennedy funeral. Yeah. Yeah.

That is a Kennedy disaster. The funeral train and Elizabeth, New Jersey, right? A lot of people came came to watch the Kennedy, the Bobby Kennedy funeral train go past, right? And, you know, a lot of people are trying to get good pictures of it. So when when Bobby Kennedy's funeral train went through Elizabeth, New Jersey, it was coming in on track two. So a lot of people got the bright idea we can go out on track one.

And so taking pictures of the train. It's going to act exactly like you think they did. And they did, in fact, do that. And the thing is, another train came through on track one, almost immediately after Bobby Kennedy's funeral train. Yeah, that's not a. Yeah, that's that's hardly, you know, giving you the whole. No, that's more of another.

That's yeah, that's another. That's another Kennedy causing a disaster for another people, but another person posthumously. It was a good idea at all stand by. But anyways, so let's continue on with our Caltrain adventures here. Yeah, I say one note about one note about the train masters is one of the problems with using submarine engines is that the US Navy basically bought every train master as it was retired

to repower their submarines. So I think there's there's only one of these left. It's in Canada. It's an expo rail, if I recall correctly. Even though that's Canada cannot be trusted with submarines. Well, also, in fact, that exact museum, what is it has the minion of Canada? They refuse to give back.

They refuse to even let it go to Britain for fear that someone will steal it. Yeah, that's probably why we totally would do that. They'll Elgin marble that shit. So here's a here's actually one of the S.D. Nines known colloquially. There are only two S.D. Nines that had steam generators known as Huff and Puff, respectively. They were used for officers, specials and other things that didn't require

a quick acceleration. But here is an example of one being tested out on commute service. Anyhow, the one on one, which is the highway, the spine of the peninsula was completed in the mid fifties as sort of a hodge podge reengineering of El Camino Real and has some really bad nineteen forties fifties highway engineering because of it. But it got people into their cars and ridership started to unsurprisingly decline. By nineteen seventy seven, Southern Pacific reported a ten million

dollar annual loss for commute operations and was definitely trying to petition for its cessation or abandonment. Inflation had also driven up operation costs. You know, the 70s stagflation thing. Fifty eight percent. Jeez. And combine that with the Arab oil crisis in 1973, obviously affecting diesel fuel. It was a it was a real bad situation.

And combined fairly the only answer, nuclear powered trains. Yes. Yes. Yes. So should have electrified. Yeah. Well, that's another little side note we'll get into later. But yeah, anyhow, by August 1973, only seven thousand three hundred people were riding the cow of the commute service. A day. Wow. And they petitioned the Public Utilities Commission to abandon ops.

But the PUC was like, no, guys, just. The seven thousand five hundred people need their train service. So here's here's here's where it gets interesting. So the the SP, known as the octopus around the period of the century, the all powerful economic powerhouse that owned a lot of politicians throughout California history, you know, they decided to nonchalantly pick up the rotary dialed telephone and start calling around and pulling on some leashes and pulling on some loose threads.

And eventually the state and the counties agreed that they would they would underwrite two two hundred and fifty million dollar bond to underwrite the debt and to improve the service. That brings us to our next slide. Before we leave the SP, just to say how much influence they had. Didn't even heard of the cell phone carrier Sprint. Oh, God. No. Did you know what is Sprint? Sprint.

Sprint is an acronym. Yep. It stands for Railroad Something Something Telecom. Something Southern Pacific Railroad internal network telecommunications. Yes. Oh, Sam, side note with Sprint. They were the first network in the entire world to lay fiber optic cable extensively around the state. And they had specific trains that they had built with the express purpose to bury fiber optic cable

at a nice walking pace using these giant reels. There's a really cool thing about it. Anyhow, so the transit was going to be the 4G standard. So yeah. So this it turns into an interesting second transition era here. So Caltrans, which we've mentioned before, which is the State Department of Transportation, decided to work with the Southern Pacific on a 10-year lease structure,

handling Caltrans specifically handled setting policies for passenger service, maintenance, performance standards, scheduling trains and fares. But Caltrans doesn't know how to run railroads. So they kept SP on hand for doing management and actually operating the trains with SP employees, trains, conductors, the whole deal. But here was the string that Caltrans said, knowing the SP was falling apart at the seams in the 1970s. They gave them a 90 percent on time train performance mandate.

Yes. Yes. So. Fuck. Yeah. So that was, you know, it seems unbelievable today, especially with Amtrak on performance time being somewhere in the 40 percent tile. You know, Jesus. They wanted something truly exceptional. So the Northeast corridor is fine. I just want to say that.

The Northeast corridor is fine. It's much better than 40 percent. Or else is probably like long distance service in the West, though. It's good luck, you fuckers. Oh, yeah, it can get pretty egregious. I remember waiting for a California's effort on a platform last last summer. And the keep in mind that the Emoryville station is the first station out of the

coach yard. I got there at about 10 30 and waited until to the train event. I eventually left the train pulled into Emoryville, which is like 500 feet from the coach yard at 9 p.m. What the fuck? Oh, my God. God, why? Yeah, it was bad. I've changed my mind. Very bad.

It does look like a podcast. But. So I get on a pilot right into a truck. Yeah. So let's go back to for a second here. So in 1973, you had 7500 people riding the train a day, right? That was spread over 44 trains. Think about that. So I got a lot of people.

Yeah. Well, you're 165 166 people per train, which is that's a real deal. What you could fit in a single gallery car. Yeah. Anyhow, 44 trains a day turned into 52 by day one of Caltrain operation. And by 1982, they started experimenting with push pull service using the by level cars and cab cars and such. And then that's that's when the train stays the same direction, but there's an extra cab in the last passenger

car so that they can control the locomotive remotely. They can go either direction without turning the train around. Right. Yes. And also get tragically crushed in any head on collision with other railway equipment. Don't crash the train. That's easy. Don't do it. So 1985 is when Caltrain starts looking like Caltrain.

You had this weird, like kind of SPD, kind of not transition period. Look at with this bizarre, bloody nose, but with the stripes. Yeah. No, it wasn't great. I love it. I love this library. Oh, yeah. I will. I will defend this to the death. This looks great. I'm sorry.

Hey, I'm a train. I go from Britain. Yes. At any rate, it looks like a toy train. Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah. Not the best graphic design I've ever seen for anything Southern Pacific related, sadly. All right, so let's move on to the next slide, where we have oddly the reverse. You have a car in these.

Yeah. So you've got the Pullman standard cars in the scheme that the GP nine was in. But now you have the fancy silver twin stripe Caltrain of the future. Hmm. So on 1985, the F 40s roll on the situation on the scene. And then it started perking out, ridership increased. People started flocking back to it. And it was right around that time that

techno, you know, obviously Silicon Valley was about to bloom the 90s. So slowly, you're saying is massive government investment and nationalization is very good. Yes. Yeah, I'm not going to dispute that. Why would I? We're on this podcast, aren't we? Yes. But yeah, it actually is a success in that respect. Ridership increased year over year for almost every year. More people started moving to the Bay Area because of tech jobs

and military industrial complex related aerospace jobs. And the 90s, the late 80s, 90s and early odds until the pets.com era. Ah, yes, the first bubble showed steady ridership increases, increases in service, everything was peachy. You know, then there was a little bit of a dent with the pets.com bubble. But everybody got on their feet just to be knocked down again in 2008. Of course, ridership followed the the economic crashes of waves until. This year.

The longest year in human existence. Well, I mean, we had the plague at some point in the past. But yeah, but I mean, that's that's the funny thing is is listening to people being like, well, you have like a cell phone and then access to it. And I'm like, yeah, guess what? It's a very human thing to still be so goddamn bored, man. OK, well, yes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, like you can't stand in the face of progress, but face.

But like, I sure can. And I'm annoyed by it. Come on, you're not baking banana bread and learning Spanish and Portuguese at the same time. One more goddamn sourdough recipe. I am going to personally fly to Facebook headquarters and like bring Mark Zuckerberg in front of the global cabal of Jews. I'd be like, all right, listen, Mr. Soros, something must be done. Look, the shit that you're supposed to do when you get bored in quarantine is start a podcast. We already did that.

So we're out of ideas. Exactly. We're going to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. What else? We're going to learn all at the same time. It's called it's from exposure to the sentence. Yeah, Bolsonaro has tested positive for coronavirus again. The only positive is literally, actually. Exactly. So in about the mid 2000s,

Caltrain started experimenting with what was called the baby bullets. And the other specific can use the fucking name. Spoiler alert. You want to guess which locomotive they used for the baby bullet. The train masters train masters. No. Oh, no, they're the dildos. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, I don't I don't like that combination.

Yeah. Oh, no, it's it's every scene is a major investor in Caltrain, apparently. So they they started experimenting with baby bullets. We're just express limited. It's nothing fancy, but people lost their shit about it. It's like, oh, my God, Caltrain, so amazing. Yay, I can't imagine anything better than these baby bullets. And like, literally, he skipped the stop.

Holy shit. Yeah. Oh, my God. Considering that Southern Pacific had done this consistently in commute service until the late 60s, I'm not sure why they're so excited, but whatever. So that brings us to electrification, which is a cool thing and dates back to 1907. Edward Harriman wanted a fully electrified main line over the Sierras, kind of like what the Milwaukee Road did up north in Montana.

That never came to pass, no pun intended. And they did a whole rundown of like how it would work. And they did a whole cost benefit analysis. It turns out that in 1917 to electrify the entire peninsula commute corridor, you want to guess how much it would cost? More money than existed in the world. Nope. Seventy five dollars. You're actually close. You're actually close.

Fifty billion. It was a paltry one point five million dollars in 1970. Stuff was cheaper back then. And that includes new locomotives and overhead wire. Yep. So and of course, you have to adjust it for inflation. It's not as small as, you know, it is today, but you get the idea. If the bulk of the cost was like haberdashery or something. You have to provide like shiny silver buttons

for all of the railroad cops uniforms. So yes. So it got very interesting. They did the full study they're looking and they were just filling in what turned it would end up being Bayshore yard at the time. They were in the middle of completing that. And they were like, you know, we even though we board these tunnels and laid these bridge about men's like filling in even more of the

the bay is going to be super expensive and I don't want to do it. So they're like, oh, can they never? They got excited. Oh, yeah, it was like it was like a spin off of Clueless. It wasn't. Anyways. So they were they never decided to four track the main line despite building the infrastructure for it.

They never electrified despite building infrastructure for it. And then they kind of tabled it. It came up again in the forties. No, no dice. It came up again in the seventies. Briefly, no dice. And then CalTrain got the brainy idea relatively recently to do CalMod, which is this fantastic and honestly, probably the best thing they'll ever do.

Complete catenary EMU set up for CalTrain to completely electrify the entire main line. Oh, but we don't need that now because we can just have a tunnel full of Teslas. Yeah. Yes, obviously for you trains. Miss. OK, you had your chance. You had your chance.

So we can actually take a fun look at history as an example of how this will probably go post Corona. In the North Bay, the Northwestern Pacific Third Rail electrified lines ran these hilariously rickety 1870s coaches. They literally stuffed trolley traction motors in. They were known as the the peanuts of the whistle they had sounded like a peanut. It's very funny. They were something sound like a peanut.

It's I could show you via the the chat later. It's a very entertainingly small whistle. But anyways, so when the Great Depression happened in twenty nine, they had bought all these. If you're a Pacific Electric fan, you'll know what blimps are. The large seventy two foot riveted steel interurban coaches with the big round windows on the front. They just ran them in the streets.

Yeah. Yeah, fucking cool, folks. You got you could move. You can move. So before the Depression, they were running both the blimps and the old rickety peanuts together. And once the Depression happened, they just retired all the peanuts. They scrapped them.

And what that's both that's probably what will happen here. We'll see a little. We'll see a much shorter transition period from diesel to EMU since we have the downtime to finish the electrification, at least to a fourth in Townsend. And then basically, diesels will disappear and then they'll appear at Ozark Mountain Rail Car for surprisingly cheap. And then Metro will buy all of them.

I will buy them. Yeah, we will get one train. Yes. But like. But here's here's the thing, like what is the advantage of electrification? Right. It's cool. So yes, it's cool. It's number one, it's environmentally friendly, number two.

But we're talking about something much more important than that, which is it gets you to your job faster. So. Their current Caltrain modernization, the way they're going to do it is and they're this is underway right now. It was underway before the Rowney hit is they are buying these. This is a train set manufactured by a company called Stattler in Switzerland, right? Where's one?

And just use it on the interregios in Europe, too. Yes, it's already a product in the home. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's called the Stattler kiss. Oh, no. Yeah, it's a it's a sequel to the Stattler. This is genuinely no joke. This is a sequel to the Stattler flirt. Yes. Yes. God damn.

Why do you do this? Why do we buy a train from the European Institute of Sexual Harassments? It's like when you read about like JDM market cars that are called like the Honda like big jump hug. And you just like, well, you know, you're like, I'm sorry. Like, don't name a train the flirt. Like, please. I love to write. I love to write the express hair sniff.

They have a third they have a third sexually suggestive train model. I forget what it's called, though. Ugly is called the Stattler. I think I think the one before the flirt was called the Vert, which is not like not sexually suggestive to my knowledge at all. Well, it was avert. There you go.

So the idea is this is a lightweight electrical multiple unit, right? So this is different from other electrical multiple units which have existed in the United States before because they all complied with the FRA buff strength test, which is basically like, you know, a sort of raw strength, you know, you need to be able to withstand an 800 pounds, 800,000 pounds impact on each end, right? It's a wink is the is the other one, which by the way,

it's a fucking acronym because the Swiss have deranged. Wandelbarre innovative. That could stop it and give us back our gold, too. It's a convertible, innovative short train for local transit. It's extremely erratic. They also have they also have they also have a tango, something called a spots. And Jesus Christ, and a smile. We're going to tap dance. Yeah.

I don't I don't like any of that, man, I don't like any of that. No, yeah. So because because we have a highly lightweight train, which is illegal in most of the United States, but legal here, you can have schedules which are faster because they accelerate more quickly. They stop more quickly. They can run more quickly on the same tracks. They make runs end to end more quickly.

They have more doors than the gallery cars, which means you're not stopped at the station for the same amount of time. And this saves time on the commute. But it also means you need fewer trains that are on the same schedule. Or you can use the same number of crews to run more trains at no extra cost to you, right? Because you're paying the guys anyway, the trains are already there. Camera crews paid for it.

Yeah, exactly. So the idea is once they electrify the system and run these trains, you're reducing headways from every 30 minutes to every 10 minutes, right? Yeah, it's all sounding quite European, even down to the road. Oh, no, this sounds this sounds classic to me. What are the marks of the proletariat from what I understand? Yes. Yeah, you should only be able to have this service like a train every 10 minutes, but the train is a Soviet diesel.

It arrives belching black smoke over everything. Ah, the movements of the the movements of the pros. Yeah, I don't really get on. I don't really understand with good train service is bourgeois. Yeah, carry on. I'm just baffled. We'll talk about the Soviet high speed train one of these days. The Moscow St. Petersburg run was gone as fast as the modern northeast corridor back in the 80s.

Hmm. It's beats, beats fucking error flood at that time. Jesus. Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, you don't have to worry about falling out of the sky if you're on a cloud. Yeah, just throw your ass out. You do have to worry about air flow landing on top of you. But like, oh, it does. Probably fine.

So, yeah, this is move this moves the system up the spectrum. We discussed earlier from like a regional rail to something that's a lot more like an S bond or like the part, which is just over the river. And we'll soon make it all the way into San Jose. So you'll have like really good commuter, really good, like rapid rail transit on both sides of the bay, right? We can only hope the end. Yeah, the end result of this is that since you're increasing train service,

increasing train performance and you're using the trains and crews more efficiently, you're lowering the cost of running the trains per passenger, which means you could reduce fares. You can make this a more equitable train just by running more trains, right? You know, if you're running this sort of horrible, like economically exclusive commuter service, the solution is to just run more trains. Train good after all. Yes, I'm the argument you've you've I mean, you've made to me a couple of times

with regards to SEPTA, too, because, you know, people do like myself. But you know, about how much like a zone where a zone one fair costs to get somewhere like Maniunk, and it's just we could be running these every 10 minutes if we were serious and we should be. Yes, one of the benefits of it as well is if anybody's been to Vancouver, B.C., like their their little underground service runs every three minutes. So you never have to worry about, oh, no, am I going to miss a train?

It doesn't matter. It's just there. So exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the satisfying low stress transit experiences I've ever had. It's like all you have to do is go downstairs in operating hours and you're going to get a train. Yeah, that was my experience along with Ross with Toronto as well. Toronto, excuse me. I was like, oh, you missed a train next one will be here in five minutes

or less than that, whatever it was. I was just the Toronto subway is ridiculous. It's just how frequently it runs. That's an anti byford does good work when he's allowed to. And you buy for the podcast, Andrew Cuomo. Yeah, Andy Byford, come on the podcast. Talk about the New York City subway. Just curse out, Andy Byford, we're here for.

Excuse me, Andrew Cuomo. Excuse me. Oh, my God. Anyway. But yes, so, you know, it'd be a more equitable service if it ran more frequently as opposed to defunding it, which seems to be the way we're heading right now. Now, there are still problems, of course, you know, which might be outside the purview of Caltrain

that might result in their passengers being wealthier than average, chief among them being. California housing policy. Which painting is this, by the way, I was very curious. Liam, you put this in the chat. It's a harrowing of hell by Van Swannenberg, who I believe was a kid taught young Rembrandt. Really? Yes, I see.

Very good. Yes. All right. So the thing about California housing policy, I'll try and get this done as quickly as possible. Right. Everyone with an opinion on California housing policy is wrong. Don't don't don't come for us. No, I don't want to fucking hear it. The NBs are wrong. The NBs are wrong.

The DSA is wrong. The Democrats are wrong. The Republicans are wrong. The local advocacy groups are wrong. The state advocacy groups are wrong. The developers are wrong. The landlords are wrong. Everyone on Twitter is wrong.

I am wrong and you are wrong. I agree. The subject about which it is impossible to be correct. Yes. Yes. Now, if you want my opinion, is that there's a dialectic at work here, which is that. There are two ways for landlords to make money, right? Let's start out with this as an axon. The first way is to build and rent or sell more housing.

And the second way is to not build or rent or sell more housing and also make sure no one else does. Then raise the rent on what you already got. Right. Yes. Both of these are very viable ways to make money, but the second one has a higher return on investment. Right. So, you know, if you're in most cities have a few high profile

developers are like, yeah, we're going to build really big apartment buildings, blah, blah, blah. And then there's an army of small landlords and homeowners who are entirely opposed to new housing. You know, at least the ones are like, yeah, I need to make sure my investment goes up in value. Right. And these tensions have resolved themselves in different ways and different locations.

But in California, the army of small landlords and homeowners has won out almost everywhere. So, you know, it's all incredibly restrictive zoning everywhere. Everyone has to live in single family house, which is one story. There's almost no, like, apartment buildings or anything like that. Your property taxes are locked in at 1976 levels. Thank you, Proposition.

Yeah, because of Proposition system. It's like it's been fucked. It's been fucked into the days of well before Southern Pacific. But even when it was like orange groves getting turned into tract housing, it's still fucked now. I don't know if it can ever get better aside from fully parody and Minecraft. There have been movements to repeal Prop 13.

And well, you can see where that went. Oh, yeah. That's a bad to say. But the result of this is that every every California homeowner is now a Kulak. Hey, Dad, how's it going? I don't know. You're all the podcast. So like, I know like I'm usually kind of sympathetic to home ownership

because renting sucks. But if you own a home in California as in a desirable area, you like own like, I don't know, a 1945 craftsman on a small lot. And it's like three and a half million dollars. Are you interested in maintaining that wild overvalued? So obviously, you're going to keep your property taxes low. You don't want any new development because that'll dilute your your exactly.

So the and it gets even worse when you have speculation from out of state, out of country, buying up these cute little bungalows for, you know, quite unseen. Like I have there's a real estate office down the street that proudly has these little printouts in the window that says 57 percent over asking, 47 percent over asking. And you're like, the asking price was already one point two million dollars for a house because of artificial scarcity.

You've got exactly. But it's on a 50 by 100 lot. You're up each other's asses and you're paying almost two million dollars for this little house. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's like it's it's telling you like I just build some like row houses or some shit like, come on, come on, you're like 1945. Bungalow is not that special. It's fine. It's fine.

You can sell it and you know, you could like you could like build some denser housing here like, come on, this is like. But yeah, so because of Proposition 13, property taxes basically do not go up. So there's no reason for you to ever sell your house. It's really easy to pass down your house to your kids without any sort of tax penalty at all. Your home's value will go up forever and you will never be taxed proportionately

for that, right? I did a caveat here. I used to think this is the most absurd taxation policy in the world. And then I heard Alice on the last way to die bonus episode and with Alice and Milo talking about the council tax. And I was like, well, yeah, that's worse. Actually, that's where I just somehow still was. We literally fought you over the war with you over this.

Yeah. Yeah. So we've done slightly better than that. Slow down. Slow down. It's slightly better. So places like Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Redwood City, they're very desirable, wealthy communities with no constituency to advocate for denser housing or zoning or public housing.

And, you know, this dialectic of, you know, a good way to raise housing prices is to either build housing or not build housing. I think the way to do it would be to build public housing to achieve a sort of positive synthesis, right? That's crazy. You can't do that. The Bay Area is such an absurd edge case that, you know, maybe you could just loosen zoning. Maybe you should just do that.

Maybe you should let some people build some apartment blocks on these dumb parking lots next to the train stations, you know. Thankfully, there has been some really good progress in that. Part specifically has made this amazing program to develop all of its parking lots and their big parking lots spread all around each station into affordable housing. And they've been doing a bang up job. Like all of the new development in and around

MacArthur Bart Station in downtown Oakland. But we went from a disused parking lot that often had more broken glass on it than anything else to, I think, something like a 40 story tower and a couple of other auxiliary, maybe 27 story. I don't know how. Yeah. 27 stories. And a bunch of other lower rise, affordable housing buildings. And they did this amazing permitting thing

where there is like literally a deadline before like past this deadline, we can't ever do it again. And Bart was like, OK, let me fill out all of these forms to get all of these approved. And so love it. And so they're building on top of all of their stations that are underground that they can. They're building in all the parking lots along all of the major stations

with few exceptions, of course. And it's all coming together. All the buildings are getting built nicely. They look good, you know, for as good as contemporary architecture can be. You know, they're tasteful. And yeah, it's working well. There's more of that happening along Caltrain, too. They're doing they're flipping some of the parking lots,

some of which were privately owned, some of which were state or county owned. And they're building a condos and apartments on top of them with a slant towards affordable housing. But, you know, affordable housing in the Bay Area, let's be real here, is like three thousand dollars a month for an apartment. So yeah, yeah. And of course, there are ones tied to income and other things for like truly low income people.

But yeah, when, quote unquote, low income housing is in, you know, two to three thousand dollar a month range, like, oh, my God. Didn't they make a big stink in Berkeley about like a parking lot being redeveloped? Oh, yeah, there's North Berkeley. They lost their shit about because it's a tiny it's a 1940s era suburb and with a giant parking lot, the size of a city block with the station like tiny in the center of it. And no, we're like 700 story building on there.

Just like a hundred stories of public housing right there. I personally need the neighbors in Presidio Bay. I'm going to build that parking lot. And then I'm going to put the launch our ecology from SimCity 2000 on top of it. Yes. So yeah, they they've raised a stink. They were I think they were getting grumpy about even like a four story

building or something that was going to be mixed used with communities. God. And the whole like Berkeley checklist of things that you would love, you know, like granola dispensers and the hemp bathroom towels and the whole deal. But yeah, they kept shooting it down because, of course, you know, they want to preserve the fabric of their 1940s neighborhood and, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, the classic. I live I listen, I live in the 1890s neighborhood and I would be fine with that shit. Yeah.

I'll take the damn hemp toweled granola dispenser. And here's the funny thing on the other side of Berkeley near Ashby Bart. They got all approved. No questions asked. Beautiful development that they're going to start building in a year or two. You know, a very much needed place for density. Yeah. So like the difference between North Berkeley and South Berkeley seems to be pretty market in that even.

More of a story. Just build the damn housing. We're canceled by all the San Francisco Bay Area DSAs now. Anyway, so your craftsman bungalow neighborhood is not special. It all came out of the damn stairs catalog. Yes, it became that out of an orange grove due to a series of like corrupt land and water deals. Yeah, it's a private investigator's buried under all of the foundations. Definitely. Side note, there is a fantastic silent film

by Buster Keaton called Two Weeks, when which he attempts to build one of the serious catalog homes, please, I implore you to go watch it. It's on YouTube. Oh, that sounds good. I'll put a link to that in the description. So anyway, I guess to sort of conclude this, the end result of this discussion we have is, you know, it's kind of goofy to defund Caltrain when, you know, they have the problems of commuter rail, regional rail,

but they're the agency which is working the most and has the best idea to address so many of these economic inequality issues. You know, it's weird to defund them right now in the name of more equity and transit funding or whatever. Yeah, it builds very much on most place priorities. Yeah. And anyone who's riding Caltrain right now in the middle of a pandemic is someone who doesn't have any other option. Let's get real.

It's a true worker. And I think if you're looking at like, you know, certainly Bay Area projects that ought to be defunded, you know, maybe we shouldn't be spending money on this. Maybe you ought to look at some of the capital projects which you've gone on recently. So what we're looking at here is a cross section of the Transbay Transit Center, right? So this was this, this replaced the Transbay Terminal, a beautiful 1940 year terminal for the key system and inter-urban electric trains

that used to go across the Bay Bridge on the lower deck. Yeah, I remember from the best trains in Malaysia route, the Sacramento and Olsen. Oh, I still need to download that. Yes, it replaced this. As a person who lived through this entire transition period, we all honestly thought they were just going to tear down the Transbay Transit Center and never replace it with anything.

I mean, it was a good looking building. And what they replace it with is not a good looking building. It's a block. It had a beautiful roof, though. I must admit, like not a huge fan of the major structure, but the roof, the roof park is fantastic. Well, I've never been there, so I will reserve full judgment until one day I am able to leave my house and go to San Francisco.

But yeah, so this is a cross section of the Transbay Transit Center. The old, the old key system terminal was like, you know, this area up here, which is now a bus terminal, right? Yep, which was perfectly serviceable before they built this. The idea was they were going to build a new terminal which would service the buses more efficiently because they converted the interurban into a bus system, right? And then they would also build a big hole in the ground

where they would have high speed trains and also Caltrain, right? So one of the things they did when they built this station is they forgot to build the tunnel that would bring the trains into the box underground. Yep. Well, yeah, you don't have your trains hookup. Yeah, and one of the most biggest snafus of any of the projects in the Bay Area in time immemorial.

Yeah, there's a long S curve that's supposed to connect the 4th and Townsend Caltrain terminal and duck underneath South of Market to connect with the train box, which is downtown. You know, many blocks away. And they started, they demolished the original Transbay Terminal, dug the hole, put the train box in, built the station and have not started at all on the tunnel that would connect any of the rail service with the rest of the network.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, this this whole station, right? Today serves the same purpose as the bus station that was there before. It took eight years to build. It cost two billion dollars, right? And it now serves the same function as it did before. Well, looking different and. You know, and constantly having issues

with its structural stability and roadway having issues in closing constantly and reopening constantly. It's been a bad teething process, sadly. And this whole box for trains has never been used. There was no reason to build this thing, right? I mean, but the other thing is like the whole Caltrain electrification modernization project for 60 miles a track or so. Costs less than this one station.

Correct, first. And like their quadrupling service with that amount of money. You know, these these huge, these huge vanity projects dominate transit funding in America today. Like there's no emphasis on like, well, if we spent this money to increase service, it's like, no, we're going to build like a really fancy station. And then I'm going to be able to stand in front of it and cut the ribbon. And all my contractor friends are going to be able to, you know, profit off the grift.

There's no money into like just, I don't know, running more trains. Once again, like as with as with nuclear reactors, we're back to the best thing is very boring and unsexy. Yes, no matter how much you try to call the train, the like the sex like it or whatever. God damn. It's not sexy. Yeah, no, it's it's exactly right. We talk about, you know, and that's one of the things

that they can, especially for those of us, I know all four of us here and obviously most people listening who are into transit and sort of infrastructure that's so goddamn frustrating, especially the media coverage, these sort of high in the sky nonsense projects that will never fucking work. The media attention they receive when it's like, well, you know, why do we still have to use the fucking Hellgate Bridge or Hellgate Port? Like shit like that. Why is the, you know, why is the link into New York still not done?

It's just basic shit like that. And then you have people who are like, ah, gadget bonds and Elon Musk. And it's like, no, still no. You have to like be very basic about how people get places and you don't need to make it more complicated. You have a shitload of infrastructure. You're going to run a shitload more trains on without doing very much. Exactly. You know, instead of instead of like, I don't know,

I'm going to rebuild a million miles of well, I'm I'm going to rebuild a station. That's the real issue is like, I'm going to build a bigger station, right? And it's going to be a better passenger experience because the station, I don't know, has more natural light. This does not apply to New York Penn, which should absolutely be rebuilt. This does apply. This does apply to New York Penn.

New York Penn could be greatly improved by operational changes without moving like without putting a single shovel in the ground. I mean, my glass pane statue by statue. Exactly. There is one advantage of the new Transpay Terminal. It has more shopping to him. Everything doesn't have to be a fucking mall.

The thing. See the thing above the train box there? That's supposed to be a shopping mall. I kid you not. That is it. No, just like the actual terminal that preceded it. They fucking ruined Washington Union Station like that, too.

Or watch whatever. Washington Union Station at least has a mall that exists. There's a Pizzeria Uno there. Wow, I don't know about those in the long run. I really like Pizzeria Uno. That's like one flaw as a person. I'm a huge fan of Chicago Pizza, too. That's another story.

Pass. There there is an interesting story about the original Transpay Terminal and shopping oddly. They had they also had a shopping console, of course, in the original Transpay Terminal, which closed with the end of Interurban Electric Service in 1958. But instead of gutting it, they literally just put a padlock on it and closed it off and then hid it behind a wall.

And before and the week before the demolition, they opened that door and for one single night, they had people run around taking pictures and salvaging everything that had basically been left in place since 1958. It was like it was like a fallout expansion pack. It was incredible. There's photographs of it online. The Last American Orange Julius.

Yes, exactly. Well, now there's a ton of them. The Last Orange Julius is no longer the Last Orange Julius. And I honestly kind of frustrated by that because I went all the way to God damn Toronto for it. And now they're just all over the place. I blame stranger things. Yes, we will all we will all wind up

in the Eaton Center one day in our lives. That's a hell of a place. But. Everyone winds up in the Eaton Center anyway. So yeah, a lot of a lot of public transit funding winds up in these vanity projects, as opposed to actually improving operations that help people as opposed to, you know, having the same operations that happen in a flashier station, right?

Which is just dumb, extremely dumb. Love to be in the trains box. Yes, yes. Right in the train box. Said Miles put a whole bunch of notes here, which I don't know what they are, but the joint powers boards and stuff like that because it's confusing to me. It's confusing to everybody. I feel like it's the the bureaucratic version of the California housing problem.

Everybody is wrong. And they basically what it what it boils down to in the most succinct way is that there's a lot of different organizations that operate the trains and the infrastructure and the bridges and the all of the buses and every transit piece of the pie in the Bay Area, right? But annoyingly, they're all a different joint powers board. So they're all this weird melange of different people and interests and they constantly rub knuckles with each other.

And, you know, they create these unbelievably crazy budgets of which, you know, some of it obviously ends up in the pockets of various individuals, I'm sure, you know, I can either confirm nor deny that for legal reasons, but you get the idea. And it's just this mess. A lot of people have been calling for the BART board to buy Caltrain. And it is a fascinating idea. And frankly, it should be explored.

I'm not poor or against it at the moment because clearly we need to do a little bit more research to figure out if that would actually be an effective solution. But suffice to say, it is a very infuriating process to do anything transit related in the Bay because you have to deal with overlapping joint powers boards, rubbing knuckles with each other. Well, I think if we learned anything from here, it's that, you know, these issues are more complex than like, I don't know, we got a deep fun Caltrain because rich people use it.

You know, it's it's it's it's very, very disingenuous. Like it's it is true that rich people use it. But also like this is a complex issue. And like this is the only commuter rail regional rail agency, which is taking concrete steps to address those problems. So I like the RTS buses here in the in the render here. Yeah, very nice. Like those that anyway.

So I guess that is the episode. Next episode is about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. I don't see myself on this slide, which is good. Like we're doing that joke for one episode only. That was my fan. All right. It was my fan. I'll I'll I'll put it in like seven episodes from now. This is great. Thanks for having me on. I'll bless you. No problem.

Miles, you want to talk about Presidio Bay? Sure. So go. Thank you. Yeah. Presidio Bay has been a project that I've been working on for about two and a half to three years with my buddy Jay. And it is a city Skylines building series, unlike any other. It goes through time, not unlike Franklin, but also incorporates drastic changes that undergo

the entire history of the region of the Bay Area. So it's not just San Francisco. It's Oakland, Sol Solito, Gilroy, San Jose. And you see how over a century or more how the entire Bay Area gets knitted together. And it's exhaustively researched. And the premiere of the first episode was today as of the day we're recording. So go. It's on Jay's channel,

the squiggle housing and put that down in the description because no one knows how to spell that right. I don't know how to spell it. I don't know for ages. I don't know how to spell it. And depending on how late this podcast comes out, the next episode will be on my channel in Urban Era in the next couple of weeks.

All right. Sounds good. I also have a commercial. So this this episode should be coming out as quickly as possible. So I am going to be doing a live stream with organizers for Jess Scurrain for Senate. Right. Jess Scurrain is doing a primary challenge against Chris Coons, Senator from Delaware, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate.

Um, you know, to let let's get some more left wing people in. Right. So on. On July 25th, that Saturday, my portion of the live stream will start as a 24 hour live stream. I'm only on for two hours. And we are going to do a build of miniature Delaware. And there will be many interesting Delaware effects. Are you going to include the one building that has all the companies?

Orange Alice, pay it some respect. Thank you. Yes. So I'll put the details in the description. This should be out probably the day before it happens. So, you know, also the bonus episodes coming out soon. I'm just having difficulty editing towards the end of the episode because the episode is about beer and we all drank a lot of beer. That's right. Yeah. The next bonus episode.

I'm responsible for it. It'll it'll get there. We have some movies. I have to do all sorts of shit, man. All right. Are you my dad? Are you my fucking dad? No, you're not. Get out of the tank. Yeah, just like streaming me to pour about me, seemingly for no reason. Oh, my God. All right.

Miles, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me for a long time. All right. All right. I think we're done with the podcast. All right. Bye, everybody. Have fun, guys. All right. Bye, everyone. Bye.