sjsamson's comments

I'm well aware of (and have personally suffered) all of that: BART's Oakland Wye delaying trains, suicide-by-train, the value of grade separations, and of Clem's Caltrain-HSR blog that I've been reading since the beginning and have learned a lot about railway engineering from it and technically informed commenters.

I would love for Caltrain to be fully grade separated (and electrified and modern Signaling and Train Control with Automatic Train Operation), but this costs a lot of money and there's an opportunity cost with that. Even with cost optimizations that Clem's blog discusses we are still talking billions of dollars and many years to grade separate the dozens of remaining crossings in the Caltrain corridor. Not to mention the ~210000 road-rail grade crossings across the USA, ~100000 in Europe, [0][1] and however many else exist in the rest of the world.

That is the scale of the problem. It is not affordable or realistic to eliminate all of them, we have finite resources and have to pick and choose our spots based on an objective analysis. And the benefit of that primarily goes to road users who should be the ones to pay for it or taxpayers at large, rather than rail users and more limited rail funds.

While loss of life is obviously tragic, in almost all case these are the result of illegal actions of people trespassing or committing suicide-by-train. I dislike characterization of "trains hitting people," as if it were the fault or malicious of the train. Trains operate on rail tracks which are fixed to the ground. Trains don't go anywhere all willy nilly like cars can, including right into people's houses (which has happened to a relative and a neighbor). It is not reasonable to compel a rail organization to spend billions to "fix" this problem, if it even can be. I've even endured a more than hour long Caltrain delay, because someone drove a truck into a structural support column of a Caltrain grade separated overpass, and we were not cleared to cross until structural engineer could come out, inspect it, and give the OK. So let's not act like this is some panacea.

HSTs are never going to operating at 200+ mph on the Caltrain corridor. It's going to be limited to "standard speeds," which can still be 100+ mph. Last I checked the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) allows up to 110 mph with grade crossings, and up to 125 mph with specialized upgraded crossings. This is plenty fast, and common in urbanized areas in other developed countries like Germany and Switzerland.

[0] https://railroads.dot.gov/program-areas/highway-rail-grade-c... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_crossing

Fully on agree on trying to get costs down to Spanish-levels and other developed world costs, and building everywhere while saving money.

But the reasons for the dysfunction are pretty straight forward: there is group of engineering consultancies and construction firms (Parsons, Bechtel, HNTB, AECOM, and other non-household names) that have captured the system and profit handsomely from the status quo. All those billions of taxpayer money is going somewhere, and it's their bank accounts.

Caltrain electrification project is independent/notdependent on CAHSR and also not dependent on grade separation projects, which seem to be tackled individually/ad-hoc in partnership with the city it's in. Everything I've seen suggests Caltrain will still have at grade crossings for the foreseeable future due to the high cost of grade separations (hundreds of millions each), while overhead electrification is slowly approaching completion including over existing at-grade crossings. Nothing prevents a high speed train from using an at grade crossing, albeit at appropriate speeds.

While it would be nice for CalTrain (and most rail crossings) to be fully grade separated, it's incredibly expensive, doesn't add much value for rail users as the train already has the right of way, and it primarily benefits auto traffic. It only makes sense if road money pays for it, rather than more limited rail money.

I wish we had rail, including HSR, everywhere but the real world comes with financial constraints. While a Central Coast trunk alignment would be nice, any reasonable analysis indicates it really should be lower priority than the Central Valley trunk. It's something that would only be built in addition to and after the core system is running through the CV; to add additional capacity, redundancy, and to serve the Central Coast communities.

The Central Valley has millions more people and is projected to add millions more in the decades to come, which matters for ridership and the viability of the system. On speed, the Central Coast is only faster as the crow flies. It may not seem like it, but CV is actually is faster and more direct than the Central Coast on the ground. There's a reason people drive I-5 rather US-101 or CA-1/PCH when doing the NorCal-SoCal trip, unless they're intentionally taking the slower scenic coastal route [0]. There are formidable Coastal Ranges on Central Coast (and much California and Pacific coast of North America) [1][2]. This results in an alignment that is slower and more expensive due to more curves, elevated viaducts, and tunneling. It's also much more vulnerable to erosion, landslides, and flooding. [3][4] CalTrans and local DoTs struggle to keep roads open after winter storms.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/San+Francisco,+California/Lo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coast_Ranges

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Coast_Ranges

[3] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-sea-level-rise-califo...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/06/california-h...

I agree with your post thread. A lot of people uninitiated in railways think of HSR as an airplanes on rails. HSR =/= Airline.

Trains have a number of advantages, one of which is a small time penalty for stopping at a station relative to aircraft (2-3 minutes vs ~45+ minutes on average), and the aircraft requires a lot personnel/all-hands to turn around quickly (see: Southwest Airlines). A commercial aircraft is simply not designed for lots of really short hops in rapid succession. There needs to be a new preflight check, refueling, unload/load belly cargo, some maintenance items are based on aircraft takeoff/landing cycles (tires, cabin pressurization, etc.) Trains stopping at station and continuing is trivial by comparison.

A rail operator wants to collect fare paying passengers along the route they are planning on operating, it’s an easy way to boost ridership and revenue. It is a balancing act to have station stops, but not increase end-to-end trip time excessively. Basic rule of thumb: Does stopping add more riders than it costs due to the stopping time penalty? If the model/data say yes, make the stop; otherwise do not.

And just because we have a station, doesn’t mean every train has stop there. We can have local, limited, and express trains. We can passing/siding tracks at stations to prevent local stopped trains from blocking the mainline for limited/express trains. We can have cross-platform time transfers between different train types and destinations. We can have multiple mainline tracks. These things do cost a bit more upfront, but it’s more about good planning and what kind of service to the public is the goal.

— The Tokaido corridor (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka) is extremely dense, both the Tokaido Mainline and Shinkansen line are effectively at capacity (which is also part of impetus for the Chuo Shinkansen). Running at very high speeds with fews stops, consumes a lot track capacity. Which is why JRs prefer running more local and limited-stop service trains, and less than “non-stop” express trains. It’s what a capacity constrained operator should do to optimize operations and maximize capacity subject to those constraints.

Likewise a California HSR program, should find a way to cost effectively serve cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, etc. as part of a larger HSR network.

>One of the lines is from downtown to an airport

You don’t provide enough specifics about your local situation, but it’s been long noted that airport rail lines underperform. The author Alon Levy’s blog and others in the transit space have covered this. TLDR: They fail serve the local riders well, in an attempt to serve less frequent airport riders who are more likely to pay for a taxi/rideshare, rent a car, get picked up/dropped off, etc. There are often poor airport connections, like people movers or airport connectors, getting to the right terminals, etc which creates more friction and confusion.

>neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring

Rail and transportation infrastructure generally is an enabler for re/development and land use, but not a guarantee of it. Necessary but not sufficient by itself.

CAHSR’s mainline is intended to be SF-LA via the Central Valley, and connect the major cities along the way. Some of those valley have around a 1m+ people or will grow to that over time, making them viable to connect. Think “pearls on a string.”

>Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.

They do. People naturally travel more to places closer to them than further away. There is a strong correlation here. When you’re hungry and want to go out, do you go to a food place 5-10 minutes away? Or a place hours away? Or 3 Michelin starred place on the other side of the planet.

The regions targeted for HSR often have significant auto traffic on the highways connecting them, and short haul flights between their airports. HSR hits a sweet spot for trips that are long drives and short flights. Cost and time competitive, while also being more comfortable.

I've noticed this too in China and the B&R rail projects, and while it would be nice to have double stack containers, consider Chinese engineers are making a reasonable set of tradeoffs. China is moving more containers than anyone else in the world, and this may actually more efficient in other ways:

1) Loading/unloading. Double stack requires cranes of some sort and is inherently dangerous when lifting large heavy mass into the air. Single stack could be more loaded/unloaded cheaper, faster, safer with less equipment, and keep trains moving and making money rather than sitting around being loaded/unloaded.

2) Maintenance cost and wear/tear on rail infrastructure. Wear and tear on rails (and roads) is proportional to the axle load to the power of 4 based on AASHTO testing [0]. Double stacking containers will roughly double axle loads, so damage and maintenance cost increases by ~16x. Keeping axle loads down keeps costs down. As an aside for roads, that means a fully loaded semi trailer (80000 lbs) is about 9600 passenger cars (4000 lbs) worth of road wear [1].

Re Longer trains: they are generally better, but there are practical limits. Trains have to be assembled and disassembled in rail yards. If the train is extra long it makes things more complicated and time consuming. If there are grade crossings on the route (there usually are), extra long trains result in long gate down time (5-10 mins) which can constitute a public safety risk (emergency vehicles not being able to cross tracks), and generally frustrates all other road users including pedestrians and cyclists.

Older railway axle counters used for train control and signalling systems in Europe and elsewhere had 8 bit integer logic controllers. That's 256 axles per train, or 64 rail vehicles assuming 4 axles per vehicle. Any longer and it will overflow, and the train might not be detected. So that is a hard limit without upgrading those systems or risking a catastrophic failure on a safety-critical system, that prevents 2 trains from occupying the same section of track at the same time [2].

[0] https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IPWEA/c7e19de0-...

[1] https://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and-road-damage/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axle_counter

There are overhead electric rail lines supporting double stack freight in the NEC USA, China, India, and possibly elsewhere. There are YouTube videos and images on web. AAR Plate H (20’ 2”) is the North American rail loading gauge for double stack containers, so 21’-23’ for the electrical lines is enough clearance. Nothing unusual here, straight forward for new lines, but as you noted potentially a lot work/cost on existing lines to create enough clearance due to raising overpasses/structures and/or undercutting them and tunnels.

Indeed, Chicago and the Mississippi River is the dividing line in the North American rail network. UP and BNSF dominate western US, CSX and NS the eastern US, CN and CP dominate Canada, and large regionals like KCS, the Mexico side is similarly or more abysmal.

Unfortunately they don’t integrate that well together to form a cohesive network. CP is attempting to buy KCS/KCSM to create something of a NAFTA/USMCA railroad, but it’s not clear it would deliver those benefits without harming competition in the existing setup. Ideally the rail infrastructure would be publicly owned and invested in, and any train operator could transport from any location to any location on the North American rail network.

>> Ships < Trains < Trucks < Aircraft

This is true by approximate order of cost, but it does not show how large the differences are. Trucking can be up to 10X, an order of magnitude, more expensive than train by unit of mass. Air freight can be another similar jump in costs. The cost difference between maritime and rail is marginal by comparison, 10s of percent. Maybe.

This also doesn’t take into account that rail can be easily electrified and even fully automated with limited labor needed, which would radically alter the operating cost structure. The technology to do this has existed for a long time (over a century in the case of electrification), it is a solved problem, but it requires prioritizing and making public investments just like the other forms of transportation.

There are also big differences in the average speed of the different modes. Ships are the slowest by far, taking about a month to cross oceans. Aircraft are the fastest on long distances. Trains and trucks are in between, but are inherently land-based so generally aren’t comparable to the others for intercontinental shipping, except for this Eurasian shipping case. Rail can occupy a unique Goldilocks sweet spot in mechanized transport, with costs competitive to maritime, yet offering performance competitive to roads and air.

Re Airships: I agree this is an area where government and industry has sorely neglected. After the crashes of the Hindenburg, USS Macon, and USS Akron in the 1930s, govt/industry just gave up on it despite our understanding of aeronautics and materials science being far more advanced. There is the Airlander airship project in Britain, but I’d like to see a lot more research and investment in this area.

It seems theoretically possible to create a Lighter Than Air (LTA) aircraft with helium (possibly hydrogen), cover it with flexible lightweight solar panels, battery pack, and distributed electric thrusters. It could have all electric power and propulsion systems with extreme endurance and range, theoretically unlimited minus scheduled maintenance, if the performance curves of those core technologies continue to improve. In addition to cargo, it could be a platform for telecom (cell tower in the sky), air cruises, various defense/security use cases, various atmospheric/oceanic and climate/metrological and earth observation/remote sensing use cases, etc.

> Few places need the theoretical density that buses provide and even less need the level that rail provides.

Almost every major urban city and metropolitan area needs buses and rail service to function effectively, the population density requires it, and it is the proven, mature, and scalable solution to providing high capacity transport. Massive roads used by primarily single occupant vehicles, is the non-scalable, inefficient solution.

> Most of the time they're running at 10-20% capacity. Or at least that's what happens in my city.

Just because you see <i>a bus</i>, at <i>some</i> time of the day being underutilized, is not indicative of much. That same bus on the same day/shift could be at or near capacity, earlier or later in day carrying commuters, or students that got out of class, etc. making it worthwhile.

Capacity planning for a transportation network/system means it has to be sized for its maximum or peak demand (typically during commute hours), so it also makes sense to use its excess capacity during off-peak hours given it is largely paid for to meet peak demand (buses and trains sitting around midday depreciating, and operators being paid a full shift to do nothing, is a poor use of high value assets and resources). This is similar to other systems like energy, telecom, etc.

> I'm not talking about taxis. Something shuttle bus or van sized. We don't need to put 200 cars worth of people in trains to solve traffic issues. Putting 200 cars of people into 30 shuttle buses is good enough.

Same point above about sizing for peak. Additionally this does not match modern fleet management best practices, which would strive to minimize the number of vehicle types in the fleet. Typically this is a standard ~40 foot single level bus. Possibly with additional types (longer articulated or double decker) for lines with higher demand/passenger loads, if needed. A common fleet type minimizes driver and mechanic training, makes buses and personnel more interchangeable and operable across the entire route network, creating efficiencies and economies of scale. These are the same reasons why Southwest Airlines and Ryanair exclusively fly B737s.

Upwards of 80% of the cost structure of providing bus or train service (the marginal cost of running an additional bus/train) is dominated by labor costs in the USA and other developed countries, where labor is expensive and capital, broadly defined, is cheap; so capital replaces labor where possible (developing countries tend to be the opposite). Or to put it another way, 20-40% of the cost structure is the cost of the vehicle. Using smaller, cheaper, low capacity vehicles does not significantly reduce the underlying cost structure, and in fact will increase inefficiencies and costs elsewhere in the system.

An excessive number of small vehicles instead of a reasonable number of large vehicles, where each vehicle requires a driver, will maximize inefficiencies and create diseconomies of scale, resulting in higher overall system costs, lower transport capacity, and higher congestion and pollution in space constrained urban areas. Efficient use of space in constrained urban areas is key attribute of transportation systems [0][1][2].

[0]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gl3bVsV3Kcl_RfIFsJ8iZ7dEEEg... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_load_factor#/media/F... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_load_factor#/media/F...

Many U.S. credit unions are members of CO-OP Financial Services [0], a cooperative of cooperatives, which provides shared ATM and branch services. Effectively making it one of the largest networks in the USA. There are other similar organizations that provide various backend and federation services.

[0]: https://www.co-opfs.org/About-Us

Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Resume/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/suri-samson

Email: sjsamson86 at gmail d0t com

Technologies: Computing Infrastructure (Servers, Networking, Storage), GNU/Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, OpenStack, CI/CD, Distributed Systems

About me: I am a Bay Area native and lifelong technologist. Built my first computer when I was 8, got exposed UNIX/Linux systems and installed Red Hat Linux and Slackware in late 1900s, which sparked my interest in technology and set me on the path I am on. Experience and skills in the Systems, Infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE spaces; from the physical layer (data center and computer hardware) up to supporting apps in production and the developers that build them. Recent years focused on the emerging cloud native computing stack, helping software developers and organizations be successful with it. I bring a systems theory approach to thinking about and solving problems. Have many areas of interest, and am also interested in applying my skillset into various other (not traditionally considered tech) industries and verticals like transportation, energy, water, agriculture, etc. that can have a large positive societal impact.

>I don't really think that was in the cards. The car was already prevalent before the interstate system was built, and the military was much more about a road solution than rail.

These are policy decisions. Other countries chose to invest in rail. The US chose to invest in other forms of transportation and created adverse policy conditions in which rail largely withered and nearly died. I made another comment [1] where I talk about the political milieu that likely contributed to this.

I would also call out the fact since WW2, the US has lost more than half its railroad route-miles (300,000+ to ~147,000 today). Other countries had to rebuild their infrastructure after the destruction of the war. No bombs were dropped on American railroads. Aside from figurative bombs of bad policy by political leaders, competitors in automotive/airlines, and the deeply ignorant idea that railroads and trains are an obsolete 19th century technology.

>As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.

I am well aware of the California HSR project and its many failings. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to rail technology. I view it as symptomatic of and the inevitable result of a broken political system, poor project management, a Transportation/Construction-Industrial Complex (similar to the Military-Industrial Complex), monied special interests like construction and engineering contractors run wild with no oversight, capturing the agencies they work for and transferring as many public dollars into their bank account.

Alon Levy’s blog Pedestrian Observations [2] covers transportation construction costs extensively, and generally calls out Anglo countries (UK, USA, CAN, AUS) as the most troubled. There’s also the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog [3], Systemic Failure [4], and others in the technical transportation commentary space.

>Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else. >Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere.

There is an access problem or first/last mile problem, but rail does not exist in a vacuum. It can work in concert with buses, taxi/rideshare, friend/family pickup/dropoff, biking, walking, etc. as part of a larger comprehensive transportation network. Rail can act as the high capacity core of the network. A pair of optimized, electric, modern signaled rail tracks with has the transportation capacity equivalent of a 8-10 lane highway. This should be taken advantage of, then use lower capacity/higher flexibility transport for the first and last mile problem. Otherwise we continue have a congestion problem with transportation network centered around single occupant vehicles (SOVs), or even zero occupants with autonomy. Autonomous vehicles do not fix that, if anything it makes it worse.

Without getting into third rail politics unique to post-WW2 American suburbs/rural life and notions of “freedom,” historically trains were one of the primary form of mechanized land transport for about century, from the mid 1800s to well into 1900s. Suburbs were originally enabled by rail during this period (e.g. NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA metro areas), many of suburbs grew up around a local railroad or streetcar system, and their historic downtowns are often next to a rail station [5][6]. It was only later, we got auto oriented suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere. These were decisions, we could choose to create transit oriented communities, including suburbs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651127 [2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/ [3] http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/ [4] https://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_town

Great points about public vs private owned networks, private competition at “higher layers in the stack” of a publicly owned network, and building a durable political coalition around that. I’ve been on this train as it were for many years, but building that durable political coalition is a really difficult thing.

In the US, rail is the only form of transportation that mostly privately owned. Whereas the other forms of transportation infrastructure are publicly owned and maintained as a common good: roads, airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC), and maritime infrastructure (seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS)). Ideally the US should do the same for its rail infrastructure. This is what Europe is pursuing, publicly owning and investing the infrastructure, and allowing multiple competitors to operate on top.

Much the American political hostility to rail stems the monopolistic practices of privately owned railroads. Central Pacific, which built the Western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, was founded by the Big 4, which included Leland Stanford, Governor and US Senator in the early days of California statehood, and of course founder of the University. They merged with another railroad they owned in Southern Pacific, later referred to as The Octopus, with tentacles that reached to every corner of the state and dominated California transportation and politics.

The solution to this problem is to bring the railroads under public ownership, not destroy the railroad with subsidized competition from public roads. The consequences of this have been enormous. The US once had over 300,000 route miles of railroad at its peak. Today it has ~147,000 route miles, less than half of its peak. The US National Highway System is ~160,000 route miles by comparison. Many communities lost rail service entirely. Even a rural agricultural state like Iowa, almost 90% farmland, was completely criss-crossed by railroads to an extent that no location in the state was more than 12 miles from a rail line. Today only a fraction of that rail network survives.

It is hard imagine something like this happening to other forms of publicly owned transportation infrastructure, because of that durable political coalition. People would not accept half of all roads or airports being abandoned because they are not nominally profitable. It is considered a common good provided for by the state.

>By cost per ton mile, in which US freight rail is cheaper than almost any other country in the world, including China.

That likely won’t last assuming it is still true. China’s rail network is largely electrified, providing inherently lower operating costs over diesel-electric [1]. They also have more widely deploy advanced train control systems, safely enabling more capacity and future driverless operation.

>China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.

That’s a very flawed interpretation. Excluding Covid-19, China freight volumes have been growing dramatically for many years and is expected to continue; while US growth is smaller, and generally mature/steady-state. China’s growth in land-based freight volumes has been largely captured trucks on roads, hence the falling relative mode share of rail freight, even though absolute ton-miles/TEUs/railcars/etc. by freight rail have grown significantly year-over-year. This trend will continue and relative mode shares will likely turnaround eventually.

China is investing hundreds of billions of dollar equivalent in their railway systems, both high speed passenger (300-400+ km/h) and “standard speed” passenger (up to 200-250 km/h) and freight (up to 100-130 km/h). There is also large investments in “dry ports” inland intermodal rail facilities. While high speed passenger lines capture a lot of attention and dollars/yuan, there are still large direct investments in the “regular” rail network improving freight capacity. And where high speed lines parallel standard mainlines, standard speed passenger services are reduced or eliminated, freeing up capacity for more freight in an indirect manner by separating them.

China has made a strategic decision, at the highest levels of government, to invest in railways and to mode shift as much possible to rail, passenger and freight. Tens of thousands of miles of railway have been built in just the last decade. It is likely the largest rail expansion in a century. More trackage of high speed lines than the rest of the world combined twice over, and it only started in 2008 (0 to 22,000+ miles; 0% to ~67%). They continue to plan and build major expansions in the decades to come, there does not appear to be a slow down. [2][3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China

>The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel.

The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS).

>When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.

We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

Remote: Preferred, but on-site is fine

Willing to relocate: No

Resume/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/suri-samson

Email: sjsamson86 at gmail d0t com

Technologies: Computing Infrastructure (Servers, Networking, Storage), GNU/Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, OpenStack, CI/CD, Distributed Systems

About me: I am a Bay Area native and lifelong technologist. Built my first computer when I was 8, got exposed UNIX/Linux systems and installed Red Hat Linux and Slackware in late 1900s, which sparked my interest in technology and set me on the path I am on. Experience and skills in the Systems, Infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE spaces; from the physical layer (data center and computer hardware) up to supporting apps in production and the developers that build them. Recent years focused on the emerging cloud native computing stack, helping software developers and organizations be successful with it. I bring a systems theory approach to thinking about and solving problems. Have many areas of interest, and am also interested in applying my skillset into various other (not traditionally considered tech) industries and verticals like transportation, energy, water, agriculture, etc. that can have a large positive societal impact.

Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

Remote: Preferred, but on-site is fine

Willing to relocate: No

Resume/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/suri-samson

Email: sjsamson86 at gmail d0t com

Technologies: Computing Infrastructure (Servers, Networking, Storage), GNU/Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, OpenStack, CI/CD, Distributed Systems

About me: I am a Bay Area native and lifelong technologist. Built my first computer when I was 8, got exposed UNIX/Linux systems and installed Red Hat Linux and Slackware in late 1900s, which sparked my interest in technology and set me on the path I am on. Experience and skills in the Systems, Infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE spaces; from the physical layer (data center and computer hardware) up to supporting apps in production and the developers that build them. Recent years focused on the emerging cloud native computing stack, helping software developers and organizations be successful with it. I bring a systems theory approach to thinking about and solving problems. Have many areas of interest, and am also interested in applying my skillset into various other (not traditionally considered tech) industries and verticals like transportation, energy, water, agriculture, etc. that can have a large positive societal impact.