We've been talking about Muni's glorious new light rail fleet for a while — in fact, it was over two years ago that we ran the numbers on the (at the time) $1.2 billion proposal to order (again, at the time) 260 new cars to replace those on the J, K, L, M, N and T lines. But now, as officials look at the first of the new cars from the 60-acre Sacramento factory at which they will be constructed, we learn that San Francisco still isn't sure how we're going to pay for the full order of the new vehicles.

Since we looked at the costs for the new rail cars in July, 2014, the project was downsized to 151, then back up to 215 following a $45 million boon of cap-and-trade funds from the California State Transportation Agency. But even with that reduced order and financial infusion, Muni still appears to be scrambling in the couch cushions for the money to pay for the cars.

According to the SF Examiner, which (unlike SFist!) was invited to join Mayor Ed Lee, Supervisor London Breed, Assemblymember David Chiu, and assorted San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency officials on a tour of the Siemens Industry Inc. facility at which the new trains will be built, "The City is still trying to expand its funding sources so it can afford 22 of its new trains."

Muni is banking on voter approval of Propositions J ("Funding for Homelessness and Transportation") and K ("General Sales Tax"), items on November's insanely overstuffed ballot that would "create a Transportation Improvement Fund and a 0.75 percent sales tax to partially fund transportation." (You can see all the details on both measures here.) But even those won't be enough, SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin said in the presence of the Ex, as "some trains in SFMTA’s order to expand its replacement fleet are not yet funded."

"Reiskin said other options are available to fund future train procurements," reports the Ex. Those include "future bridge toll increases, state cap and trade funds, and a local vehicle license fee."

Lee, whose been involved in discussions to propose an increase in SF vehicle license costs since 2014, echoed Reiskin's interest in the latter fee, saying “We’re definitely open to it."

It's unclear how short the SFMTA is on the bill for the new trains, the first of which is now expected to appear on SF streets in late 2017. Yes, that's far later than the December 2016 debut the SFMTA initially promised, but on the bright side that's one more year to get that Kickstarter or whatever going to fund the hundreds of trains we've already agreed to buy.

Previously: Muni's New Light Rail Fleet By The Numbers
Check Out The New Muni Trains That Will Begin Showing Up Next Year
San Francisco's Transportation Funding Ballot Measure Plan By The Numbers

The much dreamt-of, argued-over, fretted-over, celebrated and maligned high-speed rail system from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which will not be completed until many of us are middle aged or entering retirement, is finally having an official groundbreaking January 6, and that's tomorrow. The event is happening in Fresno, where the first phase of rail construction will begin connecting two parts of the Central Valley that are 29 miles apart: Madera and Fresno. And as the LA Times reports, the decision to do the ceremonial groundbreaking in Fresno reflects that city's wide support for the project, which has faced a lot of resistance elsewhere in the Central Valley. (Cough. Bakersfield.)

And this groundbreaking comes after a two-year delay, many legal wranglings, and plenty of squabbles in Sacramento that have focused on the economic viability of the construction project. The High-Speed Rail Authority has been careful to lay out the economic details in this fact sheet, which promises that the railway will be self-sustaining from ticket sales alone even with the most modest ridership projections — and their cause is being helped this week by the spate of recent bad press the airlines have been getting for their cramped seats, nickel-and-diming, and general passenger-unfriendliness. By 2029, when the SF-to-LA system is hopefully, maybe going to be complete, air travel may have all gone the way of Greyhound and Southwest and we'll be deeply grateful for this thing.

Another hurdle hampering the project has been the acquisition of private land through which the railway tracks must travel. As the LAT notes, "Even as construction gets underway, the state has only acquired 101 of the needed 526 parcels for the first 29 miles." And that's a pretty dismal record given how much land has to be negotiated over to complete this whole thing.

There's also the problem of the construction delay, which could put federal funds at risk. There's a mandate that some $4 billion in state and federal matching grants must be spent by October 1, 2017, something which some experts say is unlikely without work happening at an "exceptional" pace.

But, it's details like this that prompted Jerry Brown two years ago to declare that "The world is full of NIMBYs and fearful men," urging people to ignore all the negative polls and general pushback and pointing out that his father was governor when BART was originally approved, and "it barely passed." The moral: Big projects take time, and lawsuits, and more vision than most of these jerks have.

Lawsuits are still pending in Kern County and Bakersfield, where significant opposition has been raised. And let's not even get started on the SF Peninsula NIMBYs who've also been fighting this thing tooth and nail.

In the good news column, the one-way fare from SF to LA is projected to be $97, and the trip should take under three hours. A later phase of the project which no one can even think about just yet would add southern and northern legs connecting Sacramento to San Diego.

But perhaps in seven years (2022) you will be able to get from Bakersfield to this "ghost town" called Borden (just south of Madera) really, really fast.

All previous coverage of the high-speed rail project on SFist.

Photo by Ariel Dovas.

Your Caltrain commute just got a little tougher this morning. A technological error with the system's dispatching system has caused all sorts of delays and headaches today.

"At around 8:30 a.m. today, the computer dispatching system failed, [Caltrain spokeswoman Christine Dunn] said, forcing Caltrain to halt all trains," reports SF Appeal. "'We are not able to operate trains, so there are major system wide delays and we don’t have any idea on how long this will take to repair,' Dunn warned."

VTA, Samtrans, and BART will accept Caltrain tickets for the time being. Godspeed, commuters.

[SF Appeal]

This video, released by Caltrain to promote public safety, reminds us that it's never a good idea to go around train track safety barriers/beat the train.

SFGate reports:

The video, from the morning of Feb. 18, shows a group of pedestrians safely crossing the tracks near the Redwood City Station. Then a man ducks under the flashing pedestrian warning gate and runs directly into the path of the speeding southbound express train, avoiding a collision by mere feet.

Last year, thirteen people were struck and killed by Caltrain. On Monday morning, if you recall, a man was hit and killed by a southbound freight train crossing into Berkeley from Albany.

[ABC 7]
[SFGate]
[CBS SF]

A 17-year-old girl was struck and injured by a Muni light-rail train on Sunday afternoon, as Bay City News reports. The operator of the train apparently did not see that s/he had hit someone, and kept going.

The train only stopped after passengers alerted the driver that the girl had been hit.

According to Officer Albie Esparza, the girl was "walking against a red light" when the train hit her, and it sounds as though she was not directly in the train's path when the collision occurred as her injuries are relatively minor. She complained of pains in her left side and in her head, but it's not clear whether she was knocked down, hit by a mirror, or what. She is expected to recover.

This all happened at 3:15 p.m. Sunday on the T line at Third Street and Hollister Avenue.

Muni has had its share of accidents this year, with a few pedestrians struck, one cyclist killed, that 14-Mission bus that hit a car, that streetcar that collided with a private shuttle bus, the Muni driver that got hit in the Muni yard, and that train that took off without a driver. But all in all perhaps we should be thankful it wasn't worse.

[BCN/Appeal]
[SanMateo.com]

Yesterday in California's flood-prone capital city, a superior court judge twice slammed the brakes on plans for the state's high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. While the two rulings handed down yesterday won't completely halt the project, experts fear it will cut into public support for an already slow-moving project.

In the first of two rulings handed down yesterday, Judge Michael Kenny blocked the sale of the $8 billion in bonds that Californians approved at the ballot box with Prop 1A way back in 2008. In the second ruling, Judge Kenny sided with a farmer, a homeowner and the Board of Supervisors of Kings County, who are all suing the HSR Authority for not completing all the necessary environmental clearances laid out in the same Prop 1A.

According to one transportation expert cited in the Fresno Bee, the project can still move forward with selling the bonds and building 29-mile test track which recently started construction in the central valley between Merced and Fresno. If anything, Judge Kenny's rulings limit available state funds for a project that is already fighting to find cash. It doesn't affect federal stimulus funds, but even those dollars require the state of California match them with funds from Prop 1A.

Yesterday's rulings also slow down construction of the first segment meant to actually carry passengers: a section from LA to Merced, which is just south of Modesto. That section, which would have been useful for aspiring actors looking to escape their central valley roots, was scheduled to be completed in 2022. In total, the project only has about $6 billion of the $30 billion it needs to finally start zipping Californians back and forth for Giants-Dodgers games.

According to former High-Speed Rail Authority chairman Rod Diridon Sr., the real threat to the project is how incredibly long it's taking to get this train moving. As Diridon told the Fresno Bee, "You've got a project that's been going on for a long time, and it's delayed time and time again by very small groups of people who have used tremendous amounts of money to delay it. There's a tendency on this type of project, if it's delayed for a long time, to become a victim of inertia."

Anyhow, the Hyperloop is starting to look better and better every day. In the meantime, there's always a 12-hour Amtrak ride or 9-hour Megabus trip for anyone extremely averse to airport security.

[AP/Sacramento Bee]
[Fresno Bee]

A fire that appeared to have started on the tracks underneath a Pittsburg-bound BART train at Orinda station Wednesday evening caused some delays into the morning commute this a.m. because of a disabled train. No one was injured and everyone was evacuated from the train at Orinda on Wednesday, however the fire did cause enough damage to the train that it was stuck there until early this morning.

Full service was restored as of 6:20 a.m. this morning, however starting at 6 p.m. Wednesday the system from Orinda eastward had to operate with a single track.

What seemed to be a simple track fire caused some damage to a 1,600-pound metal motor reactor which had to be removed before the disabled train could be moved out of the station.

The ordeal caused some headaches for those traveling east last night, and those eastbound commuters early this morning.

Firefighters still don't know what caused the blaze.

[ABC 7]
[CBS 5]

A man who climbed the roof of a BART train has caused a huge mess this morning for traffic in the East Bay. At around 5:30 a.m., the unidentified man was seen climbing onto the roof at the MacArthur Station in Oakland. For the next couple of hours, it seems, the man got off the train, ran around, and then hopped back on.

SF Chronicle reports: "Over the course of the next two hours police chased the man as he ran across the BART tracks onto the nearby Interstate 580 freeway before returning to the BART station and climbing on top of a waiting train."

At around 7:15, the man was finally detained. KTVU's Sal Castaneda snapped the above shot of the man atop the train.

Expect residual delays throughout the AM anywhere up to 40 minutes.

[Chron]
[CBS SF]
[@sal_castaneda]

A Sacramento teacher was tragically struck and killed by a Union Pacific train on Saturday afternoon. Kathy Carlisle, 52, a wife and mother of three, was a popular teacher at St. Francis High School, where she had taught art, painting, sculpting, and photography for the past six years. She was apparently attempting to take photographs of one oncoming train from the tracks when another came up from behind and struck her. Police are investigating whether the conductor attempted to warn Carlisle with his whistle. Carlisle was an avid photographer who frequently carried her camera; it's unclear whether her photography session was personal or intended as part of a class assignment.

"Kathy was a passionate artist, and dedicated teacher to her students," St. Francis president Margo Reid Brown said in a statement. "She possessed the ability to teach students to connect to their audience through art and showed them the incredible power of photography to tell a story or convey a message."

St. Francis, an all-girls' school, held a prayer vigil for Carlisle on Monday morning before releasing students for the day. The school also set up a memorial for Carlisle on campus, where students have left remembrances.

Carlisle is survived by her husband, Steve Jarvis, and her children, Will, Bianca, and Violet, the latter of whom is a St. Francis freshman.

CBS13 Sacramento carries the story.

[Daily News, St. Francis High School]

After signing an $8 billion funding measure on Wednesday that will start construction on "the country's fastest rail system," Governor Jerry Brown climbed atop platform at the burgeoning Transbay Terminal in downtown San Francisco to blast those who fear change, growth, and lickity-split transportation from LA to the Bay Area. "When BART was approved, my father was governor, it barely passed," Brown said, adding, "The world is full of NIMBYs and fearful men...This is a bold move...don't worry about the polls."

As reported in SF Appeal, Mayor Ed Lee, who colloquially christened the Transbay Terminal "the future Grand Central Station of the West" (fingers crossed), also spoke, saying, "We're not waiting...[the] high-speed rail is the connector for our future investment across the state."

Money-wise, the SF MTA will score around $61 million, Caltrain will receive more than $700 million in state funding with $750 million from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, BART will land around $145 million (for new rails and tracks for the Millbrae Station, which will connect to the hish speed rail). Groundbreaking for the first section of the rail could happen as early as the beginning of 2013.

[SFA/BCN]

During a harrowing incident in San Leandro on Tuesday night, a woman driving with her mother became stuck on the train tracks after mistakenly assuming the tracks were a street. With an oncoming train heading their way, the daughter quickly jumped out of the vehicle. Attempts to pull her mother out of the car, however, proved futile. The train collided with the car and killed 56-year-old Pei Chuan Haung.

"The daughter was driving east on Williams Street when she made a right turn onto the tracks that parallel San Leandro Boulevard" reports The Chronicle. "It was raining at the time, and the woman apparently thought she was turning onto a street."

The train rammed the car, pushing it about a quarter-mile until it came to a stop south of Castro Street, near San Leandro Boulevard. The Daily Review notes, "Alameda County firefighters and officers from San Leandro and Union Pacific police discovered the woman had been ejected from her vehicle."

No one else was injured during the incident.

A little before 7 p.m. on Monday, a man died after walking on the BART tracks at the MacArthur station. A Richmond-bound train plowed into the unidentified man, killing him instantly. According to Oakland Tribune, "He fell at the far end of the platform, and officials found no witnesses other than the train operator during the early hours of the investigation."

Police, however, do not suspect foul play.

BART service was affected systemwide until around 9 p.m.