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If you're seriously going for some major change in land use patterns to increase density, surely you can fit in some public transit expansion as well.

• vidarh 5y ago
  If you have the budget for that, sure. But upping density can be done fairly cheaply and piecemeal by allowing denser development stage by stage along existing transit and upgrading as necessary. Support for transit expansion becomes a lot easier once there's higher volume of voters who use public transit because they're close to it. Consider that the number of trains per hour for Caltrain today is a joke, and the length of the trains likewise. From a few quick searches it seems much of that is due to lack of electrification, which is apparently in progress. Complete that and you get 30%+ capacity increase without increasing train lengths, and Caltrain trains are about half the length of e.g. London commuter trains. I suspect you'd need signalling upgrades to increase the frequency much, but you probably could more than quadruple Caltrain capacity from current levels with relatively low impact works to the actual lines (finish electrification; extend platforms to handle at least 12 cars; signalling upgrades to handle a few more trains per hour) - most of the cost would be additional trains. That gives a lot of room for additional density along the existing line before you need to justify expensive expansions. But getting support for expansions would probably also be easier if people come to see it as a way of keeping development pressure away from their neighbourhoods and focused on the transit hubs.