bay area cycling news

San Jose Mercury News reports that Caltrain has almost literally gone broke and could cut service in many areas, including removing weeknight and weekend trains. Caltrain is broke and will almost certainly need to wipe out half its service, leaving no trains on weekends, weeknights or midday and leaving the agency's future in doubt, officials said Thursday. This follows on the heels of another special report by the Merc about Bay Area transit in general being in worlds of financial trouble.

Caltrain just posted that they're looking for public advisors to be on a new bicycle advisory committee. The committee will be a partnership composed of nine volunteer members who serve in an advisory capacity. There will be three representatives from each of the three counties served by Caltrain: San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara. One member from each county will be a public agency staff member responsible for bike planning and/or policy development; one will be a representative of the county’s bicycle coalition and one will be a Caltrain bike passenger from the general public. Head to their page to download an application for this post.

If your bike was stolen from Palo Alto Caltrain recently, file a police report and follow up with it. Palo Alto Online reports that bike thieves were caught with a couple of stolen bikes from the caltrain station.

Another great post over on SF Streetsblog shows that Caltrain is dropping the surcharge idea from it's budget proposal .

Caltrain might need to declare a fiscal emergency for the last half of this year, which will include proposals such as implementing a $1 surcharge on bicycle passengers. A $1 surcharge could generate $700k to $800k annually, and "each bicyclist occupies the amount of train space that two regular riders take up." A good article is over at SF Streetsblog .