SANDAG , the regional planning agency for San Diego County is appealing a ruling by 2 lower courts to the California Supreme Court of a lawsuit brought by a coalition of environmental groups. The lawsuit is over SANDAG’s transportation planning for the County. The basis of this lawsuit is SANDAG’s current planning expects a net…

Summer, particularly in August up to Labor Day is one of the busiest travel periods in this Country. The Pacific Surfliners has its busiest month in August. The reason for this is no secret. Summer is the time for vacations and leisure travel. People like to travel.Thomas Cook understood that as early as 1841 when…

Anyway you measure it, Amtrak just isn’t in the same league as the major league rail passenger railroads of Europe, Japan or China. Be it revenue, on-time performance, running times, average running times,customer satisfaction, passenger miles or whatever:Amtrak just isn’t in the same league for Passenger Railroading of most developed countries. To be fair, the…

There are now 5 rail transit projects in different states of construction in Los Angeles County. Two projects: the Gold Line extension from Pasadena to Azusa and the Expo Line extension from Culver City to Santa Monica are both now almost finished. Both will have passenger service by early 2016. Also well into construction is…

In the United States, we have been running rail passenger service the wrong way for years. What we need is a rail passenger system. What we have instead is a fragmented series of services that that don’t connect with each or serve places when and where people want to travel. Often service providers look at…

If you asked Amtrak passengers if Amtrak management was competent after they spent a day on a train with a car that had a serious problem, what do you think their answer would be? Or passengers stranded for hours on a train first because of mechanical problems, but then because Amtrak didn’t have replacement crews…

There were a few news reports on June 27th of an Amtrak train from Chicago that was stranded overnight in Iowa because of a bridge wash out. This was the westbound California Zephyr leaving Chicago on Friday the 26th of June. What was not reported was that this train arrived at Emeryville 36 hours and…

The interview in the June 30th Los Angeles Times by reporter Dan Weikel with Art Leahy gave some hints of what the future plans for Metrolink are. What was missing in the interview was background information about what was discussed. Leahy in the interview makes it clear that his priorities are dealing with the problems…

The State of California’s official policy is to reduce its emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The Governor recently set a new goal to insure the 2050 goal is met by executive order for the State to cut its GHG emissions to 40 percent below those of 1990 by…

Almost every town that has railroad tracks with passenger rail service on them would love to have a train station. If a town has a train station, it would love to have every passenger train going past to stop at its station.The problem with that is if every train stopped at every station, you would…