Peninsula for Everyone

Caltrain's new fleet of electric trains finally began carrying passengers up and down the Peninsula in September 2024 — quieter, faster, cleaner, and a genuine win for the region. But they arrived years late and hundreds of millions over budget, and a big share of that delay traces back to a single town of fewer than 7,500 people where the median home price is ~$8 million.

Here is the short version. In 2012, Caltrain budgeted its electrification project — the backbone of the Peninsula's transit future and a prerequisite for high-speed rail to ever reach San Francisco — at roughly $1.5 billion. By 2017 that number had ballooned to $1.9 billion. In between, the Town of Atherton sued.

What Atherton actually did

In February 2015, just as the project cleared its environmental review, Atherton filed a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Its objections were, at bottom, aesthetic: overhead wires would require removing trees, and the poles would be visible from town. Read the lawsuit filing in full. The town argued Caltrain electrification and high-speed rail were really one project that should have been reviewed together — a procedural argument designed to force the whole thing back to square one. (Atherton was the lead and public face of the suit; two advocacy nonprofits joined as co-plaintiffs, all represented by the same attorney.)

Caltrain didn't stop work, but it couldn't move forward either. The Federal Transit Administration would not commit to the ~$647 million federal grant the project needed while the lawsuit hung over it. Construction procurement and federal funding applications were frozen by the legal risk. Crucially, the delay pushed the federal funding decision out of the Obama administration and into the incoming Trump administration — which then sat on the grant for months in 2017 as congressional Republicans lobbied to kill it outright. The project came within days of losing its construction contracts before the grant was finally released that May.

In September 2016, the court threw out Atherton's suit in its entirety. Judge Barry Goode rejected the central claim flatly, writing that the electrification project "can be implemented successfully even if the HSR project never takes another step forward." Caltrain made no concessions to the town as a result of the case.

But by then the damage was done.

Because the project was stalled, Caltrain was forced to pay higher material and labor costs by the time it could actually build, plus roughly $20 million in direct delay payments to contractors. Those escalations then opened new funding gaps, which created their own delays — the vicious cycle that makes every stalled infrastructure project more expensive than the last.