GILROY
– Caltrain plans to have its Baby Bullet express trains on line
by spring. While none of the express trains will come to the
southern end of the line here, Gilroy riders will be able to
transfer to them at San Jose’s Diridon Station.
GILROY – Caltrain plans to have its Baby Bullet express trains on line by spring. While none of the express trains will come to the southern end of the line here, Gilroy riders will be able to transfer to them at San Jose’s Diridon Station.
A rider would save 35 minutes from Gilroy to San Francisco and the same on the way back – at no extra cost – according to the newly proposed Caltrain timetable.
Only one person attended a public meeting Caltrain officials held Tuesday evening to solicit input, according to spokesperson Jayme Kunz.
Caltrain has received more than 400 comments on the project from throughout Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties, the three Caltrain serves, Kunz said.
The Baby Bullets will only run on weekdays, as all Caltrain trains now do. Caltrain is bringing back weekend service in spring as well, but not to Gilroy. Caltrain found, from a pilot project of a couple years ago, that rider interest in weekend service to Gilroy is “basically non-existent,” Kunz said.
The Baby Bullet project is costing $157 million – $110 million for construction and $47 million for the trains – which is being split by the three tax-funded county agencies that govern Caltrain: the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, Samtrans (San Mateo County) and San Francisco Municipal Railway. While these agencies pay Caltrain operating costs according to how many passengers board in each county, they split capital costs evenly.
The reason Caltrain can charge the same for a Baby Bullet ticket as it does now is that, even though express service costs more to operate per mile, the same train can make more runs in a day, lessening employee layover time and making operations more efficient overall.
Caltrain’s ridership from Gilroy has dropped 25 percent – from about 2,000 people a day to 1,500 – since before the U.S. 101 became an eight-lane freeway south of San Jose earlier this year. Other factors in this lag, according to Kunz, include job loss in Silicon Valley from the dot-com bust and a recent fare hike for riders from Gilroy.
“The latest fare increase for South County passengers is completely unfair and wrong headed,” George Leavell of Gilroy wrote in a letter to The Dispatch and the San Jose Mercury News. “A commuter rail system should be priced to build ridership – especially riders from the far reaches of the commuter rail system …”
In response, Kunz said, the price of a Caltrain ticket is actually only 50 to 60 percent of the cost of providing that service. Taxes covers the remainder.
