Denver City Council Meeting Today

Today at 5:30 pm there is going to be a public meeting on Denver's plans to guarantee a federal loan to the DUSPA. This plan keeps costing more and more, and transit keeps getting less and less. The tracks are not going to be fixed, light rail is going to be farther away, and there is not going to be enough room for all if transit use increases (which it has been.) The people running this project are property developers, not folks with backgrounds in transportation.

I am going to go and state my opposition. Denver should guarantee transit, not private development. ColoRail is bringing several people. Hopefully, we can get to our goal of 30 people.

First local post

Conor O'Neil's Traditional Irish Pub in downtown Boulder give a lunch discount to anyone with an ecopass. I should find out if they give discounts for other bus passes. The food and atmosphere are pretty good. The service is slow, but friendly.

This is local post as I am now in Boulder. No trains, and there are not going to be as Boulder Station is probably going to be in east Boulder. But the pub is near the downtown bus station and all transit is good and social.

(Meet a new person, ride a bus today.)

Emeryville, California

Of Interest: rail gateway to the Bay Area
Hotels: yes, expensive

Tourist Office: no

The Emeryville Amtrak station is the main station serving San Francisco with Amtrak buses to and from that city. There are also local buses to one of the BART stations which is actually a quicker way to get to San Francisco.

I think the station is next to an interstate exit. There are several chain hotels within walking distance, all lined up along a single road. To get to this area, you have to walk across the tracks. Because of the size of the parking lots, the walk from one end of the hotel strip to the other is probably quite a hike. Most of the hotels are fairly expensive.

Emeryville is the terminus for the California Zephyr which heads to Chicago. The train passes through Reno, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Omaha. It is one of the most beautiful routes in the Amtrak system, but also one of the slowest and least reliable.

The Coast Starlight, San Joaquin, and Capitol Corridor all pass through Emeryville. By all these routes, Oakland is ten minutes away. The Capitol Corridor is the most frequent service. San Jose is an hour and fifteen minutes in one direction while Sacramento is an hour away in the other. The San Joaquin also passes through several times a day, although not all San Joaquin trains go through Emeryville. It takes an hour and a half to go to Stockton, four hours to get to Fresno, and six hours to get to the other end at Bakersfield.

The Coast Starlight is a long-distance train that passes through once a day in each direction. It goes south to Los Angeles (eleven hours) and north to Portland (eighteen hours) and Washington (twenty-three hours). Like many long-distance routes, the ride is stunning, often right next to the ocean.

Introduction

This is going to be a blog about traveling by train in the US. I find that there is a lot of information about being on the train, but not a lot of information about what you are likely to find when you get off the train. Therefore this blog is going to focus on practical information such as walkability of the station area, access to local public transportation, access to downtowns, etc.

The first posts are based on trips taken in the western part of the US during 2007 and 2008. Hopefully, I will eventually cover all of the US and even Canada and Mexico. Amtrak stations will form the spine of this blog, but local rail systems will get attention too. I find that local light rail systems can help a newcomer get oriented to local public transport systems, including buses.

(This post is a rewrite of the first post from my Wordpress blog.)