Editor,
The Caltrain board’s musings on a merger with BART, as reported in the DJ (March 19 edition), has to be the worst idea a public Bay Area official floated in recent memory — except perhaps the grotesque Galatolo contract signed by the community college district.
Look, we all know six+ rail organizations, largely disconnected and each with its own management overhead, is a terrible burden to better transport and a serious obstacle to getting people out of cars. But BART has to be one of the worst public agencies in the state. The stations are generally miserable places on large parts of the system; crime is a serious problem on the trains and near them; the trains themselves are filthy. New cars are coming online but how long they’ll stay clean and functional is anybody’s guess. Riding Caltrain, even when it’s standing room only, is a comparative dream.
Nobody I know would want the BART organization to apply its brand of magic to Caltrain. The only such merger to be considered is one that completely merges all the commuter systems areawide, and that completely remakes the BART organization and its service along with it.
Kevin Simpson
San Mateo
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(1) comment
Mr. Simpson, you sound like a half-empty kind of guy. You don’t think the current management of Caltrain would be able to apply some of their magic to BART? Instead assuming the failing BART organization would taint Caltrain? Not that I’m arguing against your point of view, but I would prefer that we merge as many transportation organizations together as possible so that we could pay less in management salaries and benefits to the alphabet soup of transportation organizations already out there.
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