3

Dumbarton

from page 1

interest and efforts in establishing and main-

taining an Amtrak/ACE station at Centerville

in Fremont. (Visit the Centerville Depot website,

http://centervilledepot.railfan.net, for more info.)

Fremont is even planning a new ACE com-

muter rail station near Auto Mall Parkway to

serve the Pacific Commons Technology Business

Park which eventually is expected to create 25,000

jobs. The City of Fremont owns, operates, and

maintains the Fremont-Centerville station and

depot, and has committed substantial local funds

to the station. (Visit http://centervilledepot.railfan.net/

fundingsources.html to find out how the Fremont-

Centerville station was funded.)

Fremont residents would be prime benefi-

ciaries of Dumbarton rail service. Presently,

58% of the westbound AM peak hour traffic on

the Dumbarton highway bridge comes from

north Fremont, Newark, and Union City. If Hay-

ward is added, the total rises to 71%. About 81%

of the westbound traffic is destined for Redwood

City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Los Altos. Faced

with such facts, both the cities of Union City and

Newark, and the business associations in

Centerville and Niles have embraced the

Dumbarton rail proposal. They see that the com-

muter trains would reduce congestion in the

Dumbarton corridor and permit the future ex-

pansion of ACE trains across the Dumbarton rail

bridge to the Peninsula.

Alameda County’s $24 Million Bargain

Right now, Alameda County is being asked to

provide $24 million, an extremely modest cost, to

fund rail capital improvements in the East Bay to

enable Dumbarton service to operate. Efforts are

underway to encourage the Fremont City Council,

which has viewed the proposal with skepticism, to

revise its transportation priorities to include

Dumbarton rail and more ACE service.

See Dumbarton, p. 6

map courtesy of Michael Kiesling

JPB, continued

from page 5

from 6am to 10pm each day. If this happens it

will be a huge improvement. But true to form,

the train I took back to work from the JPB meet-

ing (#42) was an unannounced 12 minutes late

at San Carlos and became far later (due to wheel-

chair loadings, which in turn are solely due to

JPB staff’s purchase of disabled rider-hostile

equipment) by the time it got to California Av-

enue, where nobody boarding had heard a peep.

But at least they’re paying lip service to cus-

tomer information, which is worlds ahead of past

outright evasion.

Scanlon said that negotiations are underway

to add MORE TRAIN SERVICE soon, and made

this observation that doing so “is not rocket sci-

ence.” Unfortunately, the emphasis appears to

be on plugging “mid-day gaps”, which is com-

mendable, but ignores the really crying-out

needs: firstly for vastly better early-evening ser-

vice (in both directions, useful service basically

stops after 6pm — banker’s hours), secondly

beefed-up reverse-commute service (how about

a real express, SF 08:55, 22nd, Bayshore, ex-

press to San Mateo, express to RWC, express to

PA, then all stops?), and lastly the atrocious,

terminally embarrassing weekend service. Still,

it’s a start.

Later Michael Burns commended Scanlon on

(finally!) approaching additional service provi-

sion on an incremental cost basis. In the past

SamTrans staff have, as one of their many tactics

to avoid running any actual trains over the last

eight years, insisted on completely renegotiat-

ing the entire Amtrak contract and throwing in

millions of dollars worth of extraneous stuff to

attempt to inflate the apparent cost of just mov-

ing an extra train back and forth.

With respect to a report from MTC represen-

tative Sue Lempert that the California High

Speed Rail Authority is in 16-20 year deep freeze

(thanks, Gray Davis), Scanlon said that staff were

pursuing plans “with the Legislature” to bring

the “northern end” of the proposed system up to

“high speed standards” independently. If so,

this will be a great development, but they’ll

have to undo, at the cost of many tens or hun-

dreds of millions of dollars, years of systematic

right-of-way destruction which SamTrans staff

have inflicted upon the Caltrain right-of-way in

the last five years. (San Bruno Avenue BART

grade separation, Millbrae BART station, San

Mateo parking lot, Belmont-San Carlos grade

separation disaster, Mountain View station rede-

sign disaster, etc.) The idea that somebody who

works for SamTrans would even mention real

upgrades to the Caltrain line is a welcome

development.