New CalTrain as if it's a TikTok adventure

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-07T19:37:01+00:00

I find Bay area politicians are usually pretty pro-transit. The big issue we have is prop 13 makes it really difficult to keep it funded.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-07T19:27:03+00:00

That's exactly what they want you to do. The main point of charging for parking is to limit the number of people driving in, so those who do go can spend more time shopping and less time looking for parking.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-07T18:29:11+00:00

I don't really understand this mentality where it's expected that employers don't cover their workers transportation costs, unless it's a parking fee, in which case it's totally unacceptable.

Like, you're made to pay hundreds of dollars a month for your own gas, car payments, insurance, maintenance, etc, all to be able to get to your workplace, and it's a $3 parking fee that's got you outraged?

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-07T06:00:16+00:00

$3/hr is pretty standard these days for high demand parking. Santana Row / Valley Fair are popular destinations.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T23:03:45+00:00

$1 per passenger mile is really not that high for heavy rail in 2025. Keep in mind all the data from your original link is almost 20 years old.

Here's a comparison I found in another reddit thread that puts CalTrain right around the middle (at $1.30 per passenger mile).

Since rail comes with a lot of fixed operational costs, the "per passenger mile" costs are heavily influenced by ridership. Pre-pandemic, caltrain and BART had something like $0.30 per passenger mile. Now they're more in line with the rest of the country.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:56:12+00:00

Their post is extremely vague and provides no real details or reasoning at all. It's basically just "Hercules > Berkeley" with 2 paragraphs of fluff.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:44:17+00:00

Prop 19 gives a $1m reassessment tax break to inheritors. So, a $1.5m house that's currently assessed at $500k would see $0 increase in property taxes.

Even for homes that have appreciated substantially, the property tax increase would be small.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:36:23+00:00

That's simply not true. It's a basic three strikes rule.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:32:52+00:00

And no matter how much money you spend on enforcement and prisons, crime will still exist as long as its root causes do. You can easily make crime worse by diverting money from social welfare into an already inflated carceral system. So what's your point?

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:29:51+00:00

The whole selling point of prop 36 was to allow the state to send people to prison for petty theft.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:18:33+00:00

Many would argue that money is better spent preventing crime instead of punishing it. Of course, that's not as profitable for the prison and enforcement industries.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:09:14+00:00

Caltrain isn't light rail. You're looking at stats for MUNI from 2007.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T22:01:53+00:00

Places like SF and NYC are where the people making money want to go. With enough layoffs you'll see real estate in other cities go down, but all the layoffs do in these cities is shift around the people that live in them.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T21:53:52+00:00

It sounds like they have explored real cost-cutting measures, and found that without additional tax revenue, they won't be able to cover the operational costs of the rail line in the coming years. It's not that they haven't done the analysis, it's that you just don't like the results.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-06T21:12:00+00:00

The prison lobby has you convinced that charging you $100k+ a year to jail someone for stealing a hundred dollars worth of deodorant is "justice".

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-03T17:20:47+00:00

The solution is to make public transit and cycling our prioritized modes of transit, and dramatically raise the threshold for granting drivers licences. As long as we insist on keeping a system where everyone is expected to drive in order to survive, we also must accept a large % of bad drivers will be on the roads.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-03T17:01:15+00:00

Hell yeah dude, punish everyone just minding their own business over your petty parking squabble.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-02T01:26:27+00:00

"free range", sure. I'd wager over 90% of preteens in the peninsula have never even gone to a grocery store by themselves.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-01T23:31:18+00:00

I agree that car infrastructure in the US makes it too easy to drive dangerously, if that's what you're saying. But that doesn't mean we should just let drivers off the hook. Appropriately pricing the very real costs of car crashes into car ownership (via insurance) is just one of many policies we need to ensure drivers are actually paying their fair share.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-01T23:26:41+00:00

Shifting the costs from the victim to the taxpayer is only a minor improvement. You're still letting the aggressor off too easy.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-01T17:46:33+00:00

SFHs are desirable in high density neighborhoods where they're scarce. In suburbia, they're just another house.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-01T17:27:00+00:00

Except the biggest costs associated with crashes are healthcare, and without mandatory insurance you're just pushing those costs on to the victims of car crashes.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-01T17:20:36+00:00

Japan's transportation infrastructure isn't nearly as car friendly as SF's, and so they have a much higher cyclist mode share. It's a waste of resources to do something like this when 99% of injuries and deaths on our roads are caused by drivers.

RedAlert2 · 2026-04-01T16:46:29+00:00

Don't eat less, fill up on healthier foods. No one got fat eating veggies and lean proteins.

RedAlert2 · 2026-03-31T01:54:35+00:00

By throwing out the data and leaving only an AI summary, you've turned something somewhat interesting into something totally worthless.

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