Caltrain Bicycle Master Plan, bumped bikes.

The Joint Powers Board for Caltrain heard the Bicycle Master Plan report. In it Caltrain reported that bikes were 8% of ridership. Drive and parked car was 27%, Drop off pick up was 9%, Walking was 29%, transit was 19%, and the free shuttle was 8%. There was no sense of 21st century issues like the cost, co2, pollution especially PM10, and congestion burden for each of these modes.

For example Caltrain maintains 300 spots at its Belmont and San Carlos Stations at a cost of $15.7M dollars that cannot be developed for other uses like mixed use housing and retail which could bring revenue into the agency. This is relevant because the agency receives public dollars to offsets a huge loss in fare box recovery.

The public benefits for the subsidy are that
- transit users reduce congestion (Someone on the JPB once said that 10% ridership on all the transit properties was what was necessary to relive congestion on the roads.)
- transit users reduce pollution to help CCAG meet its air quality requirements and qualify for federal funding through.

Both MTC and ABAG have said we cannot meet out PM10 goals by 2035 even after the most stringent alternatives for vehicles and fuels have been adopted. And clearly with 55% of CO2 coming from transportation primarily single occupant vehicles something needs to happen.

So setting aside the $15.7M cost fixed internal cost for a parking lot, which is clearly not recouped at the $1/- per day rate in the poorly occupied parking lots (with the free shuttle about 75 cars use the lot in Belmont), and the $5k cost of 25 bike lockers and racks, one has to look at the other benefits in the shares of the modal groups getting to Caltrain.

At 8% of trips the bicycle groups far outpaces the other modal shares except for walking. This means that only 37% of trips come from low cost, low CO2, zero congestion, and zero PM10/pollutants modal shares. That means for the transit authority two out three trips have a huge public non-benefit only one of these trips meets the purpose of Caltrain funding.