It took me about an hour and a half to get home from Livermore the other day. Not only that, but someone nearly crashed into me when they merged recklessly. I won’t make too many assumptions about you, reader, but personally? I don’t care for traffic, and I’d have a hard time believing that anyone is particularly attached to commuting for hours every day.
What if I and some of the other 105,000 Bay Area workers that drive over the Altamont Pass could simply get on a high-speed transit system and skip the commute? That’s what Valley Link wants to provide to our city.
The rail service would span 42 miles, and connect to seven locations: Pleasanton, Livermore, Downtown Livermore, Mountain House, Tracy, Lathrop, and another location in North Lathrop. It’s also worth noting that the Pleasanton Station is a BART intermodal, meaning that it would be exceedingly easy to commute to San Francisco without using a single car by simply transferring from Valley Link to BART. Moreover, the North Lathrop station is the ACE train intermodal, connecting us to places like San Jose or Stockton.
Not only would the rail system be fast and efficient, it would also create zero emissions by utilizing hydrogen. Here’s a direct quote from page 24 of the Valley Link Environmental Impact Report: “Proposed Project operations would provide a new passenger train service that would utilize hydrogen-powered rail vehicles, thereby resulting on zero direct emissions from train operations along the Project alignment and while idling at stations. Furthermore, the Proposed Project would provide an alternative mode of transportation that would cause some commuters to mode-shift from personal automobile use to rail use, thereby reducing single-occupancy vehicles from the transportation network and associated mobile source emissions.” This rail is not a mandatory option for every commuter, but by giving people a choice between a high-speed rail and a car, there are absolutely going to be people choosing the rail. Even if you, the reader, do not at all desire to ride a train to and from work every day, supporting its construction is still in your best interest to reduce both traffic and emissions.
Now, as I understand it, there is a lot of strange mythology revolving around hydrogen. The general consensus is that it’s far more dangerous than gasoline or lithium batteries, when in reality, it’s actually quite a bit safer. The US Department of Energy states that it can be quite combustible, but it has very different properties that make it simply safer in the event of a tank’s puncture. Not only is it a gas, it’s a gas that is much lighter than air. There’s this fabricated scenario of a large conflagration in the event of a crash, but hydrogen would dissipate before ever igniting–not at all like gasoline. And, of course, Valley Link is going to use this technology to create a safe, speedy, and clean rail system.
Valley Link has every intention of helping the people of San Joaquin commute in a far more sustainable, safer way than mashing all of our cars together on the 580. You can find and support the Valley Link project on valleylinkrail.com or scan the QR code!