Recently, the idea of consolidating Caltrain and BART has been floated as an easy way to fix Bay Area transit. In short, it’s a bad idea: the benefits, if any, are small and can be achieved in other ways while the problems are large and very real. I’ve spent a long career analyzing rail agencies and opportunities for improvement all over the world, including California. What we’ve seen over the last few weeks is a lack of understanding of the operational, financial, legal and regulatory differences between the two agencies and what consolidation would entail. Since only about 5% of...