(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 549: Reminiscing About the Future

This week on Talking Headways we’re joined once again by Sam Sargent of VTA for part 2 of a conversation about transit agencies and special projects and programs. Sam chats with us about Austin’s light rail plans, Caltrain electrification and moving diesels to Peru, and gives some thoughts on visionary transit leadership such as Randy Clarke at WMATA.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it deep in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood: I wanna go back in time a little bit, and I wanna hear your perspective about the Austin election and what happened then and what’s happening going forward. But mostly I want to get a takeaway from the election because as somebody who was there in 2004 for the commuter rail election.

Who, you know, moved for street cars and some other things in the early two thousands and wrote some really long blog posts after I left that got a lot of attention and some ire. Uh, I’m curious about that process because looking from afar it looked like a very positive experience and something that I wish would’ve happened maybe 20 years earlier.

Sam Sargent: Yeah, no, it was to date and I’m, I’m looking forward to more grand adventures in my transit career, but to date, it was definitely the most special thing that I’ve gotten to be around professionally and one of the most. Important things that I’ve gotten to do even personally just because of my love for my hometown and my love for [00:03:00] transit.

But you know, in 2000 there was an alignment that really tracked with the highest ridership bus corridor, and it hit all of the. I think most obvious, especially if you’re starting light rail for the first time in a city like Austin, the most obvious trip generation points. But unfortunately in that 2000 election back when there were slightly more folks of a, maybe a more conservative bent, uh, in Travis County, it just barely failed.

And then to your point, there was a successful 2004 election that led to Austin’s current commuter rail redline service 2014. We get to urban rail where there’s a different alignment. Which I think personally was very forward thinking. It connects to the airport, it still connects into downtown. It goes through a number of corridors where you have equity priority populations, where you’ve also got a lot of potential for TOD.

And so even though there might’ve been a blank canvas element of it that caused some people [00:04:00] within the electorate. To wonder, well, what’s in it for me? Or I don’t get it. I still think it was a very forward thinking plan, but unfortunately failed. And so I mentioned when I joined Capital Metro in 2015.

Linda Watson was our CEO. She was a CFO by background, and she had really stabilized the CAP metro ship from the recession. And so I think it put us in a position to start looking at what went wrong, not just once, but twice, and how to move forward with a new version of what we were calling Project Connect and still called Project Connect.

And I think. Once Randy Clark came in and was our CEO in 2018, he is a true visionary. I think the ship stabilization was exactly what was needed to bring somebody like Randy into Austin, Texas. It was incredibly exciting. I was able to serve as his Deputy Chief of Staff and then later director of strategy, and later ran the government affairs group at the very end of my time there.

With a little bit of federal, very small starts funding, but it was not a program, a very complex program that community was familiar with. And so we had to bring ourselves up to speed as an agency with our elected partners, with the community, and then pitch this vision to people on a very accelerated timeline.

I think some of the thinking at the time was, well, we’re probably not gonna go back out to voters for a third time on this light rail project. Until maybe 2022 or 2024. And I think that collectively, our board leadership of the city, Randy, our team, recognized that there was gonna be very high turnout in [00:06:00] 2020, and that we had generally the right pieces to put something together.

I think a couple of things really moved the needle and made for a different Austin and a different electorate in 2020, even though 2014 was only six years prior, and we were eventually doing all of this in the middle of the pandemic. Obviously the planning for all of this happened before that, but Austin’s growth was just so red hot that everyone.

Finally recognize, and I feel like I can say that as someone who grew up there finally recognized that the city was not a small college town, but it was something far bigger than that. And I think people were experiencing that both in terms of congestion, they were experiencing it in terms of cost of living.

I think that policymakers were beginning to piece together. That connection between higher densities and affordability as well as higher densities and the success of transit and our bus network redesign also proved the point of how one invests into [00:07:00] transit and what frequency can do. And so it also made CAP Metro more relevant than it had ever been.

And then the last thing that I felt like I picked up on, and I think it’s been a net positive of all of the growth in Austin. Has been the diversity of people in Austin and the diversity of their backgrounds, and the number of people who had either worked in were from or had traveled to cities in the United States or internationally where they had real investments in transit.

You would often hear from people, and I would see in things like Reddit. Newcomers to Austin saying, well, where’s the train? And you know, yes, we had the red line because of the nature of those vehicles. Some people thought it was light rail already, but people just were surprised. I think, that it did not have the level of transit service that even a Dallas had in this big progressive forward thinking town.

And so enough people finally said, it’s time to make that investment. It’s time to admit that [00:08:00] we are a large city. What really won the day is the fact that the Project Connect map was a program of projects. It was 7.1 billion at the time in phase one, I think 10.2 billion total, but it was essentially both the 2000 and the 2014 lines.

It allowed people to look at that map and say, I get what’s in it for me, or I get where the connection points are. I also think including the BRT lines expanded out the benefit to people voting for this and thinking, what is Project Connect gonna mean for me, for my business, for my kids, for my neighborhood?

Then also some really important investments, like $300 million in anti displacement investments is what we called it. And it’s a mixture of things like land banking to remain certain types of small business and rental subsidies, and then affordable housing development, which CAP Metro has a very strong team in.

And we had success with the Plaza [00:09:00] saltier redevelopment on the east side of downtown. I think the fact that it was more than a line on a map, we were able to show a vision and I think we did an incredible job. And maybe that’s just me patting us on the back with storytelling. Uh, and ultimately, you know, 57% in favor in a state where you just need 50 50.

That was really something else. That was not what our polling told us it was gonna be. And I think on election night we were all holding our breath and hoping for 50% plus one. But it was something more than that and it was, it was really special. It was really special. The diversity of the people who wound up supporting that vision.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. I wrote my master’s thesis at UT about the politics of rail in Austin, and it goes back to the seventies and even the sixties, and is interesting to see that vote count because of all of the consternation that came from the 2000 election and the loss by, what was it? 1,800 votes. Mm-hmm. 35 or whatever it was.

Then going to like a 57% win is huge. And especially after that 2000 election, there were [00:10:00] lots of calls to take away cap’s money, there was calls to reduce the sales tax. That’s kind of happening now in Dallas. But it’s really interesting to see that kind of big win happen and I was really, really happy to see that happen after, you know, being so immersed in it mentally anyways.

Uh, obviously I wasn’t there in Austin, but it was such a great feeling, especially that night. And we talked to you that night. That’s right. Uh, which was really great. I’m interested, you know, we’ve heard a lot about Randy Clark and obviously he’s at ADA now. I just wanna get your feeling about what makes him a little bit more visionary or different than maybe other GMs that are out there.

And I don’t wanna play him against any other GMs, but he seems different in a way that I don’t think other folks really understand.

Sam Sargent: He is different and he is different in really great ways. I think, especially in an industry where the day-to-day of an operation requires you to think at a very granular level.

To think at a very tactical level oftentimes, and for so many transit agencies in the United States, they’re underfunded. And so they are perpetually thinking six [00:11:00] months out, maybe a fiscal year out, maybe five years out, and they just don’t know what the future holds. And so I think that that’s a big challenge in our industry.

It’s probably true of other industries and other parts of the public sector. Despite that fact, and maybe we were very fortunate in Austin that the full penny of sales tax that was funding Cap Metro in a region that was growing so rapidly was a very healthy source of funds. So that was not really our primary headache.

And so it was a perfect stage for somebody like Randy who thinks way ahead both on service planning and in technology and just. The role that transit should play in people’s lives, and especially doing that in a Sunbelt city where transit is something that there’s at least a corner of the population.

And I think this is true in many corners of the United States, where there are people who will likely say, well, do we really need transit? And I think. You come from other regions, whether it’s on the east coast, maybe Chicago, maybe here in the Bay Area, [00:12:00] where people think of it more like a utility.

And that was where Randy came from, having been at the MBTA and then at APTA and Washington, but coming into a place where he would still encounter folks who might say, do we really need this or do we really need this investment? And certainly. Do we really need rail? But I think that what he is great at doing is telling a story, telling a narrative, having it really appeal to the things that people care the most about as a human being, whatever it might be.

I’ve seen him do that, and I think the best leaders do that on a one-on-one setting, but also being able to capture a room. I also think he is able to read the tea leaves around growth and politics to a certain extent. Newcomer to Texas. He was a newcomer to Austin, and yet he has a very sharp political mind.

I’ve joked also that he is one of the only people I’ve ever met who can reminisce about the future. He can look pretty far ahead and then think, remember when we thought about that? I think that that just inspired people. And I think [00:13:00] a lot of times in the government sector in particular, we’ve got elected officials who are really strong storytellers.

They’ve gotta go out and sell themselves and their vision and their idea every two to four to six years. But on the administrative side and on the sort of executive side of either could be a school district or a transit agency or a city manager, that’s not usually a personality type that you see in those roles.

And so it was very refreshing both internally to have somebody say, Hey, let’s all remember why this is special. And I think especially for someone like me who is so curious about this business and passionate about it, it really sparks something to remind ourselves, you know? In the middle of some long procurement process or some day full of budget meetings to go out and see somebody at a bus stop waiting for a bus.

You have no idea who they are. You don’t know where they’re going. You look at them and you think that might be the most important trip that they ever take, might [00:14:00] also be the most mundane, but I’d like to think that it’s gonna be really important and I got to be a part of that, and that type of thing. I think really inspired people.

And then also just sort of the joys of, you know, these are interesting machines and we get to operate them in very interesting ways. I think that that really sparked people’s imagination. For those of you who follow wada DC Metro or Randy on social media, you can see him doing that on an even bigger stage now in Washington where you’ve got a system that has always run like a utility.

And so I bet a lot of people probably take it for granted now. It’s got kind of an excitement factor around it. Alicia Trost at Bart, who’s their Chief Communications officer, she does a wonderful job with that in the BART context, and VTA A does a very strong job at that as well, but. I think Randy’s leadership, again, it’s forward thinking.

It’s getting the most out of people. It’s also a willingness to take risks that you don’t often find in the public sector. And sure, being able to take risk is probably sometimes a [00:15:00] luxury, and it’s probably a result of having a little bit more certainty on the financial side and having a supportive board of directors.

A fail fast or a fail fast light type mentality is really important because there’s also a lot of small wins that we were able to do as we were pursuing this generational vision for at the time, underground light rail and you know, light rail to the airport and BRT all over the place. But we were also making these really small, meaningful improvements to bus shelters, solar lighting, ePaper for real-time arrival.

Just these little things that go a long way, better uniforms for our operators. Just a lot of different things that I think spoke to people on a day-to-day level and made them, and hopefully made policy makers think Gap mentor knows what they’re doing. I’m, I’m gonna follow. I think that’s something he was able to do and I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from it.

Jeff Wood: There’s something to be said about feeling like somebody who’s leading something is in it with you, right? Yes. They’re in it with you and not just leading something [00:16:00] because it’s their job or because they have to. It’s interesting when you see folks be able to ride the bus or to train with you and.

How that gets a reaction from the public because there’s a lot of trans agencies around the country where that doesn’t happen. Or it’s just like, you know, they drive to work. They, you know, you hear this a lot of like APTA conferences and stuff. A lot of the agency folks, they go to the APTA conference and then they’re taking Uber around or they’re taking, they’re driving a car, renting a car to go there.

And so I think if you have somebody who’s in the trenches with you, not just with staff, but with the writer themselves. You see a whole different thing. It was the same kind of thing with just leadership generally. I mean, in Bloomberg riding the subway mm-hmm. I think was a big thing. And so when you have these mayors and stuff, and you know, Gavin Newsom is having like a, a little moment right now, but you know, one of the things that was frustrating about him and the city of San Francisco is that his chief of staff told people, you’ll never catch me riding the bus or the train.

And it’s like, well, but as a part of the city, this is the cable cars, the light rail, the buses. This is San Francisco. Muni is San Francisco. And so if you’re not gonna participate in San Francisco, are you really leading San [00:17:00] Francisco? And so. I’m kidding at Gavin a little bit right now, but it’s just like that I think is important.

I think we’ve seen that from Randy and I think we’ve seen that from other folks. Mm-hmm. That have really been good leaders. And I think when you have these big elections, and I’ve said this before, but the leadership is really what pushes them over the edge, whether that’s a mayor or a general manager or something along those lines.

You saw, and Antonio Illa, OSA pushing, you know, LA Metro over the line back in the 20 teens, 2008 even. And so I think that leadership is really a big part of it.

Sam Sargent: I completely agree, and I think one of the analogies that was made, and it may have been Randy that made it, or just during his time there, but it would be like owning a restaurant and never going back and seeing the kitchen or being a chef, never eating your own food.

Yeah it’s something that is very challenging. I have found and observed exactly what you just said, which. Transit agencies where staff or certainly leadership are not on the system and experiencing the things that both our frontline operators and certainly our customers are experiencing. And having a leader who thinks about that from a [00:18:00] customer experience standpoint ’cause they’re a customer, is really powerful.

Along with just the optics of having. Your operators know that somebody is not just there in the C-suite or in in the ivory tower all the time. And you know, I feel fortunate over the course of my career, both Randy Michelle Bouchard, who’s the general manager at Caltrain, you know, she had started in the operations side planning before that.

Her knowledge of that corridor was second to none. And you know, in her personal relationships with the engineers and with the conductors was the same deal. And I think that made a huge difference. And Carolyn, my boss and our CEOA general manager at VTA, she comes from the project delivery side and has done pretty much every job that exists at VTA over her 20 plus years there, including leading the phase one of Bart Silicon Valley.

And so. For an agency that has a very large sort of construction engineering group because of the things that we do, her ability to [00:19:00] speak to them as engineers, as project managers, I also think makes a huge difference in terms of leadership. It’s not somebody who’s broad but not deep. These are people with real depth and I think that it makes a big difference, and I think you see that in the most successful agencies.

Jeff Wood: I wanna talk about your job titles. What is government affairs specifically? I’m curious what it is you do on a daily basis. What are the things that you’re in charge of? What are you working on?

Sam Sargent: Sure. So I started in what I would think of as sort of pure government affairs and net cap metro. At the time it was both government affairs and community engagement.

So I was out in the system a lot. I was presenting a lot, neighborhood associations, city councils PTA meetings, whatever it might have been. And it was definitely a good sort of trial by fire to learn transit. Quickly. Good thing. I loved it so much. And then eventually when I moved into the Deputy Chief of staff role, when Randy arrived in Austin at Cap Metro, as the name implies, I mean Chief of Staff is somebody who’s really shepherding the members of the [00:20:00] executive team.

It’s somebody who has sort of an enterprise wide view of the place who’s spotting risk for the general manager. Than helping them seize on opportunities. So it was nice. It was sort of like a strategic advisor to the general manager in that time. But as the ramp up to the 2020 election in Austin really started going, I started focusing more on our external affairs strategy, sort of the storytelling element of that program of projects.

And then eventually, something that was very fascinating to me was working on the governance framework for what became the Austin Transit Partnership. And for those who don’t know. Austin Transit Partnership is a really unique entity in that it’s a joint venture of the city of Austin who levied the property tax for the Light rail program in Austin, and Cap Metro, the transit operator, who will be one of the recipients of federal dollars.

Now, Austin Transit Partnership will also be a recipient, but just creating that governance structure from scratch. There were a couple of entities around the country, California in particular that had some [00:21:00] similarities, but this was something very new, certainly for Texas. Then I was the director of strategy within the Austin Transit Partnership.

Kind of borrowed over from Capital Metro. That was really a startup manager. I wore a lot of hats. It was just we were recruiting people from all over the place, making it a cohesive little organization. It’s now much bigger and is doing a great job of delivering that program. And then I went back and ended my time at Cap Metro doing what I think of, again is sort of pure government affairs, which was legislative focusing on our federal grants at the time, playing defense with the Texas legislature.

And then working with our city councils, both Austin and suburban cities. And then when I went to Caltrain, that role, like my current role at VTA, but the role at Caltrain was director of strategy and policy, and it was a role that had never existed before. So very grateful for that opportunity. Caltran was also in a very unique, and I haven’t mentioned this yet in a very unique point in its life.

Not just wrapping up electrification, but [00:22:00] because it had been the transit operator in the United States with the highest or second, highest fair box recovery that I have ever heard of at 74, 70 5% pre pandemic, that all went to almost nothing. When the pandemic set in, in one of the most. Telework enabled corridors in the United States during a pandemic, unlike anything anyone had ever seen that led to measure rr, which was Caltrans first ever sales tax measure.

Its first ever dedicated source of funding that was both good for its bottom line, but it also led to a rethinking of the governance structure of the three counties that are member agencies, including VT A of Caltrain. It allowed Michelle Bouchard, the first ever standalone general manager of Caltrain, to pull together her own executive team for the first time and build out a team in the finance space and in planning and in government affairs, and a.

Operations and, uh, design and construction. And so I was brought on to [00:23:00] work through the next steps on how do we work with SamTrans in San Mateo County, which was the managing agency is the managing agency of Caltrain. Work with our other funding partners at VTA and in San Francisco. And start building an independent Caltrain structure and culture.

And so that was something that was really fulfilling for me. It was sort of a mix of strategic planning and call it org design. I also, I think just because I had a background in government affairs and policy wound up being our point person on MTC, which is our very large MPO here in the Bay area. As well as California high speed Rail and some of our interactions with Union Pacific.

So wound up being a bit of a utility player in that role, and then eventually was given a couple of more interesting projects, including what might be one of the most unusual projects I’ve ever undertaken. But I was working on our non fair revenue strategy. So Caltrain now had this source of sales tax, but it wasn’t quite enough.

Ridership was recovering, but it still wasn’t recovering fast enough. So [00:24:00] how do we squeeze a bit more revenue out of what we’ve got and then try to grow ridership in the process. But then I also, I think because I raised my hand in a meeting, and I would encourage people if you are in a meeting and you know, if you have an opportunity to take on something that.

Takes you outta your comfort zone and allows you to learn something. I wound up being the project manager for the sale of our diesel fleet, ultimately to Lima, Peru, and that was sort of a closeout project within the larger Caltrain electrification project that was pretty fascinating. So you can see the theme is that if a project doesn’t fit neatly within one department or division.

It oftentimes winds up being mine to own. And then I kind of build out a multidisciplinary team. And then at VTA, I am also the first person to be director of Strategy and Transformation working in the general manager’s office. And there’s a couple of discreet projects that I have that I’m really excited about.

One of them is leading a new office of change management, and [00:25:00] so. What that group will do, we’ll start small but mighty we’ll, oversee an existing culture and climate initiative. So the culture and climate initiative stemmed from the tragic shooting at our Guadalupe Yard a little more than four years ago.

It is in response to that tragedy and to some other tragedies that unfortunately had befallen VTA. But it’s a really interesting attempt and I think it’ll be successful to try to pull together a very large 2000 plus person organization that’s a direct operator, which means that our mechanics and our road supervisors and our dispatchers are my coworkers, just like our engineers and planners and marketing folks are, and trying to pull together and make a more.

Cohesive organization where people feel that pride in VTA that we all know is there. VTA A has a lot of longevity among its employees, which tells me something is right in its foundation, but there’s something more that needs to be done, I think, to make it an employer of choice that we hope that it can [00:26:00] be.

So that’s an internal facing thing that I’m doing. The other part of the Office of Change Management is really gonna be focused on, you could kind of dryly call it process improvement or business process improvements, but I think it’s an attempt to really lean in a bit more with some of my colleagues in both planning and ops and IT and procurement to lean more into innovation, both innovating in process.

Maybe harnessing new technologies that haven’t been harnessed before. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from my friend Joshua Shank, when he was running the Office of Extraordinary Innovation under Phil Washington at LA Metro to find ways to make improvements that people, employees feel like they own.

Seeing how that can help with the culture and climate side, but also hopefully really help with the customer experience side. So it’s an interesting collection of projects and responsibilities, but it’s one I’m really interested in and excited to be moving forward on.

Jeff Wood: I wanna hear more about what happened to the diesel units from Caltrain.

Sam Sargent: Of course.

Jeff Wood: Uh, [00:27:00] why did the, why did the trains go to Peru?

Sam Sargent: So when you’re doing a wholesale swap out, essentially of your fleet on a commuter railroad this would also be true if an agency were to take 400 buses that were running diesel and overnight go to 400 battery electric. You’d have to figure out something to do with those 400 diesel buses.

So that was the conundrum that Caltrain was looking at. Towards the end of the electrification program, we were beginning to receive these beautiful Stadler electric train sets from Salt Lake City. Pretty quickly before revenue service began, we had a space problem on our hands. Caltrain is a corridor that’s 53 miles of electrified corridor between San Jose and downtown San Francisco.

It’s of a finite size. There’s a finite number of sightings. The maintenance shop in San Jose is only so large and so pretty quickly, you know, it was not gonna be a situation where you could just keep the entire diesel fleet sitting there while you had the whole electric fleet. On [00:28:00] site and then operating, because the, the flip of the switch, literally in September of last year was just that it, you know, one evening people were riding a diesel train to San Jose and the next morning they were, uh, riding an electric train up to San Francisco.

And so we knew that we needed to, uh, part with 93, 19 85 built gallery cars. These would be the silver cars that people who’ve been to the Bay Area would’ve seen before, and they look very similar to what you might have seen. At Metro in Chicago and, and a couple of other places. And then 20, 19 85 built diesel locomotives that were, you know, not at the fancier end of the, uh, clean diesel spectrum, uh, but had served the railroad very reliably for a long time.

We wanted to do this with minimal consultant help. I wanted to have a project that was I had a pretty lean budget and hopefully brought some revenue in the door, did some market sounding around the country. Had some interest at first from Southern [00:29:00] California because they were gonna need to increase their fleet at least temporarily for the Olympics.

Also had some interest from a couple of other properties around the country that had different reasons, including midlife, overhauls of their diesel equipment, why they might need 1985, very well maintained, but 1985 equipment. But eventually some of those leads started not turning into anything.

Then our maintenance director, Henry Flores, and I got an email seemingly out of the blue from a company in Pittsburgh that was serving as a broker for the government of Lima, Peru, the mayor in particular, who was looking to start Peru’s first commuter rail line, or greater Lima’s, first commuter rail line.

And he wanted to talk and we thought we’re willing to try anything because I would much rather send it to someone and have these vehicles be ridden on than have them crushed into a cube. Or turned into an artificial wre, whatever it would’ve turned into. Yeah. But you know, we started talking and this wound up being about a year and a half long [00:30:00] process, I believe.

And we were talking to their team out of Pennsylvania and then eventually we started having direct conversations with the mayor of Lima, which was fascinating. And they wanted the entire fleet. And you know, as somebody who’s in the transit business, it’s rare that you could part with that much equipment that quickly.

And so. Seemed like a great deal to us. We were able to price them at a level that was good for both the government of Lima, Peru, and would generate some revenue for Caltrain. We had a couple of regulatory hurdles that added to the complexity, including CARB and the Air Quality Management District. ’cause ordinarily these diesels would’ve needed to have had a hole punched in the engine block and they couldn’t have been used again.

We were able to get a waiver. And this was another interesting sort of turn in the story, was that we were able to get a waiver and we had some research help proving out that the emissions reductions of this diesel equipment running down in Lima per. Was still [00:31:00] very high because they were going to be taking heavy polluting vehicles and buses off the roads down there.

And it was a professor at Berkeley and the US State Department helped us a bit with that research. Eventually, we got the waiver. We were able to package up. I wound up being 90, I believe, of the gallery cars. Three of them were not fit to move off property. Then 19 of the locomotives and they were all put into a deal.

There was a signing ceremony with, uh, the Secretary of State and the mayor and Michelle Bouchard, the Caltrain general manager. And, uh, eventually towards the end of my time at Caltrain, much of the work was about, well, how do we move these things down to Lima, Peru? It’s

Jeff Wood: not like there’s a train track that goes down.

Unfortunately there’s not.

Sam Sargent: Um, and so yeah, there’s not a continuous train track, so it was gonna have to go by ship. That wound up being very fascinating ’cause there are a finite number of ships that work, like a roll on, roll off ship for rail equipment. We also looked at a couple of other permutations of how to [00:32:00] move these things, many of them very labor intensive, like removing the trucks or the wheels from underneath the cars.

Separating it all out, loading it onto a bulk carrier. But ultimately, there was a specialized company out of Houston that was able to bring a ship over from the Netherlands, came to the Port of Stockton, and for those listeners who don’t realize that there’s a Port of Stockton, there is a deep water canal, deep enough, at least up to Stockton, where the ship went, everything was loaded onto I think two of their ships, and ultimately had about a two and a half week journey.

Down to Lima, Peru, and there’s some great video on YouTube. I’d be happy to share it. Yeah. With you if you wanted to repost it. A couple of Great. Put it in the show notes. Yeah. A couple of great drone operators got out to Stockton and got some great shots of both the loading process, watching it go through the North Bay, heading towards the Golden Gate, and then eventually a lot of very excited folks down in Lima who got shots of it being unloaded.

And then the first trains moving to the maintenance facility there in Lima. I’ll have to [00:33:00] check in with my friends in the mayor’s office in Lima to see when they think the start of revenue service will be, but I’m just excited that not only was there some revenue generated for Caltrain and credit to the Caltrain team who closed out the project after I had left, but also the fact that these extremely well maintained vehicles considering that they were 40 years old, are gonna be used to move.

Again, and to take people off the road and hopefully to inspire a new generation of transit customers down there.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Let’s get a second life. I’m interested to hear how they do in high altitude. Lima’s pretty high up. That will be interesting. Yeah, Lima is pretty high

Sam Sargent: up and the line also starts closer to sea level and heads up and so yeah, I’ll be, I’ll be interested to talk to their operations folks to see what the performance is like.

Jeff Wood: There is a benefit there, but then there’s also a benefit along the Caltrain line because after electrification service started, you saw those emissions reductions, the diesel particulates and stuff like 80, 90% or something like

Sam Sargent: that. It was [00:34:00] huge, and especially in places where you had idling diesels, whether it was at our maintenance shop in San Jose.

Steered on station San Jose, and then certainly fourth and King, which is the terminus in San Francisco. Yeah, huge emissions reductions, including emissions reductions for the engineers. You can just imagine if that’s your workspace and a much cleaner experience for our customers as well. So yeah, it’s pretty incredible.

Jeff Wood: You didn’t, uh, you didn’t get rid of the caboose and the Christmas No, the Christmas train lift.

Sam Sargent: Yeah. There were three pieces of equipment that remained, a couple of them were damaged. I think one of them is part of the Christmas train, the flatbed and the caboose that Santa rides on remains. And so I’m certain, can you pull those

Jeff Wood: with emus?

That’s a good

Sam Sargent: question. I’ll just ask our, our chief operating officer over at Caltrain, but yes, the Christmas train lives and then Caltrain runs diesel service still from San Jose down to Gilroy, which is the 25 miles or so at the southern end of Cal train’s line going down to the Santa Clara County line.

That’s still diesel, that’s still Union Pacific territory, but there [00:35:00] was a state grant that I think is gonna be very exciting towards the end of this decade to put money into a Statler, which is the manufacturer of our electric trains, a Stadler battery electric train to test out that technology on that corridor to kind of shuttle people between Gilroy and Morgan Hill and Dear Don, where they would then transfer and eventually get to a completely zero emission Caltrain operation.

Jeff Wood: Do you think the state sees the benefit of the Caltrain electrification? Because it doesn’t feel like it’s sometimes when we’re talking about like hydrogen trains and all that stuff. Obviously I’d like for the vehicles not to have to carry their own power and you get more efficiency out of it. Right.

But it seems like from the discussions we’re having at the state level in terms of long range rail plans and stuff like that, the electrification doesn’t seem to have hit as hard as maybe it did. For the rest of us who are watching this very closely.

Sam Sargent: Yeah, I think the people like Governor Newsom who were certainly around this project from sort of dream to funding, to finally operations, I believe that he and a lot of [00:36:00] people in Sacramento understand that benefit and understand what that project means.

But at the same time, I think this is natural, whether it’s in the Bay Area or anywhere else there’s gonna be a lot of hesitancy. When you’ve got a project, even with that level of benefit where the capital costs separate from the vehicle are that high, I mean 52 miles worth of overhead, catenary is very expensive.

I mean, that was a huge part of the expense of the entire project was doing that, and I think that people. Are hopeful that maybe there will be a day when you can have zero emissions transit vehicle, especially rail and especially commuter or inner city, where you don’t also have to build all of that infrastructure overhead.

Yeah. So I appreciate that. The state is looking forward in Northern California, it feels like at battery technology and in Southern California with hydrogen. The H two Statler vehicle is down in San Bernardino. Being used, I believe, on the aero service that connects Redlands to San Bernardino and into Metrolinx commuter rail operation.

But you’re right, it would be great if they didn’t [00:37:00] have to, uh, carry their own power like that. But I do hope maybe as a little bit more time passes that people around the country and. Around the world see the Caltrain electrification project as being an inspiration. I mean, the fact that overhead wire and a complete electrification of that mainline was accomplished while still running a diesel hundred four train service underneath is kind of nothing short of a miracle.

I mean, the, the fact that they didn’t have to shut down that entire corridor for the duration or large durations of that project, hopefully will mean that those who currently have diesel operations say, well, it is doable. So long as they can find the funding, it’s definitely doable.

Jeff Wood: I’m curious about the Caltrain electrification benefits, not just from the electrification, but the ridership.

I mean, you mentioned it in passing before, but I don’t think we touched on the numbers, and I think it’s very impressive to see the ridership increases, but also the travel time reductions. I mean, that’s a huge part of it too. And what kind of drives that ridership increase.

Sam Sargent: Yeah, it’s enormous and it’s pretty amazing that the 104 train schedule that was [00:38:00] operating for diesel, there’s 104 train schedule for electrification, but even though it’s running the same number of trains per day, the acceleration deceleration benefits of those vehicles mean that there’s a lot more frequent service to a lot more stations for those who used to ride Caltrain during the diesel era.

You might be lucky enough to be at a baby bullet station, which had the most limited stops and the fastest travel time, or one of the limited stop stations, which was good service and certainly faster than local. But now there’s a much more simplified schedule that allows more cities to have more frequent service than they did before.

And then the end to end time from San Jose into San Francisco has been cut down enormously, getting under an hour, which was a big goal. And anyone who’s tried to drive. The 1 0 1 for that distance. Certainly during peak periods, that’s a huge time savings. And I think for somebody who’s moved from a gasoline car to an electric car, I mean the acceleration deceleration is pretty obvious.

The same thing works on a train. And so yeah, the time savings have been huge. The one place where there was an [00:39:00] increase in actual trains per service day is on the weekends, and so weekend service on Caltrain used to be hourly, so it was 32 trains, Saturdays and Sundays, it’s now 64, so they’ve doubled service.

So there’s 30 minute headways. I believe, at least in the spring, they were at something like 120 or 130% of pre pandemic on the weekends. Still at about 50 or 55% on weekdays, but that’s still an enormous improvement over when I first joined in the summer of 2022, where Ridership recovery was still sitting in the 20% range.

And so they are certainly heading in the right direction on ridership. I think that they’re now at about. 40,000 average weekday, which is solid, considering that it was in the teens as recently as three years ago. It’s a better service. It’s a much better customer experience onboard, and a lot of people, because of the nature.

Of the new schedule. It also is a flatter schedule, and what I mean by that is that it’s not quite as geared towards the AM and PMPs. It’s a commuter railroad, so it’s always gonna be heavy [00:40:00] on commuters, but there is now far, far better service in the early, early morning, hopefully, to help with people who work at, say, Stanford Medical Center or people in the service industry or students, but also midday and late night, and then on the weekend.

So it’s just a more versatile service than it was in the diesel era. Yeah, ridership is trending in a great direction. Like I mentioned before, VTA a’s ridership is solid in terms of recovery, but in large part because like AC Transit or a lot of bus heavy agencies, many of the people that we move every single day never started working remotely.

They couldn’t or they weren’t. And so to see that kind of recovery on a commuter operation is really impressive, especially in the Western United States.

Jeff Wood: Are we gonna see frequencies good to five, 10 minutes anytime soon or we have to wait for a bit? I know that my,

Sam Sargent: my friends at Caltrain are working on an update to the service vision, which is sort of a north star for future investment and future planning.

And yeah, there’s certainly a goal to get to much lower frequencies, funding permitting, both on the capital side. ’cause at certain points you’ll need more passing points. [00:41:00] You’ll probably need more grade separations. But also additional vehicles and, and additional operating dollars. Running electrified service compared to diesel is quite expensive, even though the benefits are well worth it.

Jeff Wood: Are you a Californian now? I heard you say the 1 0 1. I’m

Sam Sargent: in Californian now. That is right. I have the driver’s license with a bear and a little gold miner to prove it.

Jeff Wood: I love it. Where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

Sam Sargent: I’m active on LinkedIn. I’m active on Instagram. I. Office out of San Jose, but I tend to bounce around quite a bit.

One of the nice things about my job, both at Caltrain and, and still at VTA, which I’m very grateful for, is that I do get to interact a lot with our other transit operators in the region, but also nationally. I do stay very active in American Planning Association and in APTA happenings and impact up in Portland.

I’ll be up there, I’m gonna be moderating a panel actually that I’m very excited about. See you there. Yeah. Yeah. Check me out there or connect with me on LinkedIn, Sam Sergeant. Director strategy at vta.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. And where can folks [00:42:00] find out more about VTA?

Sam Sargent: Just go to vta.org or check out any one of our social media accounts, whether it be Instagram, where I think we’ve got a fantastic team putting that content together or on X or on Facebook.

But vta.org, definitely check it out because I think whether it’s in California or nationally, VTA is kind of a quiet power in a lot of ways, and I think that it does really special things and it does a lot of different things. That may not be as flashy, but are still very important. And when you click on our projects tab on that website, look at the scale and the renderings and everything around the BART Silicon Valley project.

Also our visionary network, and just a whole host of other initiatives, including vied that I think is really exciting.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, Sam, thanks for joining us.

Sam Sargent: Thanks for having me back. This was wonderful