Let Caltrain go bankrupt.

Here's an idea: Let Caltrain go bankrupt. Shut down the service once and for all. Its eighteenth-century technology serves us badly, at a high price, and keeps us from moving into the twenty-first century.

Don't get me wrong - I ride Caltrain daily between Mountain View and San Francisco. But it's a horrifically wasteful and archaic system. It's unreliable and inconvenient. It is shamefully mismanaged, and should be shut down. Now.

Caltrain is unpleasant to ride: With its implementation of "Proof of Purchase," riding Caltrain is a daily confrontation with hostile authority. Once or twice a day you must show your travel documents to someone who is ready to issue you a criminal citation for $300 or more. There are more than fifty different Caltrain tickets; picking the wrong one or validating it improperly can get you a citation - and a petty mistake suffers the same punishment as running a red light in an automobile. Frequent breakdowns and accidents anywhere in the system delay all trains, sometimes by hours.

For riders, Caltrain is already one of the most expensive public transit systems in the country. It costs much more for a single rider to take Caltrain than to drive. A one-way ticket from Menlo Park to Redwood City costs $4.25! But Caltrain says that fares cover only 40% of their operating costs, so taxpayers are directly kicking in another $6.38 for that three mile trip. But the subsidies go way beyond that. Caltrain owns 47 miles of rail right-of-way. With its yards and terminals and sidings, that might be a thousand acres of some of the most valuable real estate in the country, all exempt from property tax. Caltrain doesn't pay personal property tax on its equipment, either. When you see a train pull out of Palo Alto with happy passengers, you are subsidizing each rider, for every single ride, to the tune of $50. And even that's not enough!

Caltrain is bad for the environment: Even when fully loaded, Caltrain burns more fuel per passenger than an automobile -- and most trains run nearly empty. The train line is a barrier through the center of the Peninsula, disrupting pedestrians, bicycles, and motor vehicles. Trains are noisy and noisome. And in recent years Caltrain's impersonal, massive vehicles have become a target of despairing people, with heartbreaking impact on our community.

In a recent plea for additional taxpayer funding, Yoriko Kishimoto made the ridiculous statement that "CalTrain service currently takes 12 million cars off of Peninsula roads each year." That's just stupid and patently contrary to fact. There aren't twelve million cars in the Bay Area! Maybe she was trying to say that Caltrain saves twelve million automobile trips a year - but even that's nonsense. Caltrain riders might conceivably make a tenth that number of automobile trips per year - but if the system shut down, Caltrain riders would be the most likely people to carpool or find other non-automobile means of getting around.

There is a better way than this archaic, dangerous, disruptive system. We should have - we deserve - we need - a modern publicly-available transit system. Such a system would take us from where we are, to where we want to go, when we want to travel. Such a system would be built on modern technology. It could be built today.

Such a public transit system should be built around jitneys and buses, powered by gasoline or diesel fuel now, and better alternatives when they make economic sense. These vehicles should be dynamically routed. Riders would use GPS-equipped cellphones to request a ride and specify their destination. Prices would vary continuously based on supply, demand, and other factors like acceptable number of stops and whether other passengers are on board. Such a system could move people around efficiently, at much lower cost than hopelessly obsolete Caltrain, and deployed without billions of dollars in capital costs and massive commitments to obsolete technology.