Sustainable Menlo Park Speaker Series

By Bianca

On November 18, the non-profit group Sustainable Menlo Park hosted a presentation on the latest developments on high speed rail. Sustainable Menlo Park is officially "neutral" on the subject of High Speed Rail, but decided to host the event due to local interest in the subject. On the podium were Bruce Fukuji of Caltrain, John Litzinger of HNTB, and Greg Gleichman of AECOM. Turnout at the event was low; there was not a lot of publicity beforehand, and there were perhaps 30 people in attendance. Much of the information had been presented in prior events, but here are a few notes:

Bruce Fukuji made a presentation on Context Sensitive Solutions for the Peninsula. He began, however, by reminding everyone in the room of the big picture: the looming challenge of sustainability. California has led the nation on climate change targets, but meeting future emissions targets is going to be a challenge. He noted that 42% of carbon emissions in California are transportation-related. Even with improvements in fuel efficiency, an expanding population will result in an increase in vehicle miles traveled. Population growth will more than cancel out improvements in combustion-engine technology. It will be impossible to reach our emissions targets simply by relying on hybrids and increases in fuel efficiency. He used the following graph to illustrate the relationship between urban density and gasoline consumption:





Fukuji then went on to discuss the development of Context Sensitive Solutions as a reaction to the DAD model of planning (Design, Announce, Defend). He also explained the concept of "value engineering" and how there is a need to give the functional needs and the context needs equal weight.

The next speaker was John Litzinger from HNTB. He gave a detailed overview of the EIR process, and noted that the goal is to have a fully approved and final EIR at the end of 2011.
During the Q&A session, Litzinger commented that the engineering studies around crossing San Francisquito Creek may likely determine that a bored tunnel is the preferred alignment for engineering reasons; crossing the creek and the approach to El Palo Alto at grade or in a shallow trench is problematic. This may explain why CHSRA representatives at recent meetings have seemed open to tunneling through much of Menlo Park and Palo Alto; if CHSRA engineers conclude that the best way to cross San Francisquito is in a deep tunnel, it may be that Menlo Park and Palo Alto may get some of their tunnel without having to fight for it. I should clarify that this was not in any way an official announcement, just the musings of an engineer. The vast majority of questions from the audience related to tunnels. In some cases, audience members didn't really have questions, they just wanted to state their preference for a tunnel. None of them had any suggestions for how to pay for it.

The last question of the night had to do with subsidies. The questioner stated his premise that all High Speed Rail systems around the world are dependent on subsidies. Litzinger responded by distinguishing the costs of the building the initial infrastructure from the costs of maintenance and expansion. High Speed Rail, like every other form of transportation infrastructure, depends upon government subsidy for construction. After an adoption period to build ridership, all High Speed Rail systems cover their maintenance and expansion costs. Litzinger then noted that High Speed Rail is the opposite of freeways; both need subsidies for construction, but afterwards, High Speed Rail covers its own maintenance and expansion costs, whereas freeways don't charge anything to users and rely entirely on taxpayers forever.

The Biggest Obstacle to HSR in California

For most people looking at California's high speed rail project, the biggest obstacle to its completion would seem to be financial. Prop 1A has put $9 billion on the table to get the project started. We can expect $3 to $4 billion from the federal HSR stimulus. The cost of the first route, SF to LA and Anaheim, is likely to be around $30 billion, leaving about $17 billion left to secure. Most of that is expected to come from ongoing federal contributions, some from local governments, and some from private investors.

And yet, as Robert Goodspeed points out, that may not actually be the main problem facing HSR in California. Instead, he argues, it is a land use planning process that is unable to deliver these kinds of projects quickly and affordably:

Ironically, the California system is demonstrating the biggest problems for high speed rail in the U.S. may not be our lack of technical knowledge but our troubled infrastructure planning and delivery system. Disputes about alignments in California have already spawned lawsuits. Maybe beyond ogling their trains, we should study how our foreign counterparts resolve conflicts about system design. In one case study I read about planning a TGV line in France, the government convened a "debate" bringing together the stakeholders before choosing an alignment or other technical details. In the U.S. on the other hand, government agencies act both as project designers and boosters, relegating other stakeholders to reactionary roles as outsiders who rely on lawsuits to pursue their interests. In addition, our government agencies are also lacking in competent planners and administrators who specialize in rail. In the end, dysfunctional planning processes and weak planning capacity may result in avoidable cost overruns. Overcoming these obstacles may prove even more challenging than finding the historically elusive political will.

Goodspeed's analysis of how other stakeholders wind up being placed in "reactionary roles as outsiders" is quite insightful. Then again, that is precisely how planning in California is intended to be. CEQA is set up on the theory that government construction projects are bad, are threatening, and that stakeholders are already in a reactionary, even adversarial position. CEQA was written with a 1970s logic, reacting to a 1960s California Department of Highways that really did behave as a giant bulldozer not giving a crap about what anyone else in the state thought of its route choices, neighborhood impacts, or environmental consequences.

CEQA wasn't designed to promote smart, sustainable growth. It was written to enable people like Gary Patton to have legal recourse to stop projects they don't like, no matter the reason. The mentality is one that assumes the status quo is just fine, that the cost of doing nothing is actually zero - if a project isn't built, no problem, we didn't really need it anyway.

California's planning process should not be a tool for NIMBYs to stop projects they dislike. It should be a vehicle for public involvement in a project development, and to ensure that a project does not cause damage to the environment. CEQA currently fails to meet these objectives.

I'm not the only one making this point. SPUR, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, came to the same conclusion. In a 2006 report titled Fixing the California Environmental Quality Act they argued that CEQA has failed to meet its objectives, has actually made environmental problems worse, and that it should be replaced in urban and suburban settings with a statewide planning process along the successful path blazed by states like Oregon and Washington:

In the absence of strong statewide planning and in the presence of weak local planning, stopping projects is what California does best. CEQA has become the tool of choice for stopping bad ones and good ones. SPUR has reviewed CEQA from the standpoint of sound planning and environmental quality. We contend that after the law’s 30-plus years of operation, the type and pattern of developments, viewed at citywide, regional, and state scales, are environmentally worse than before. Not all of this can be blamed on CEQA; it has improved individual project design in some cases. Yet viewed broadly, CEQA has contributed to sprawl and worsened the housing shortage by inhibiting dense infill development far more than local planning and zoning would have done alone. To re-form California, we must first reform CEQA....

Our neighbors to the north provide a dramatic model for change. At almost the same moment that California turned to environmental impact reports to protect its environment, Oregon turned to a strengthened planning program, requiring effective local plans and zoning by all jurisdictions. Oregon has protected and greatly improved its natural environment without review of individual projects, but with sound intergovernmental planning. The recent property-rights crusade that passed compensatory zoning at the Oregon ballot box does not lessen the fact that the Oregon environment remains one of the most pristine in the country.

High speed rail should be assessed and planned in a statewide context. Instead, it is assessed in a town-by-town setting, totally divorced from statewide concerns, and even from local urban plans. As a result, sprawl has accelerated over the 40 years since CEQA's adoption, and it has become progressively more difficult to build sustainable infill projects, whether it is housing or mass transit, as the CEQA process empowers people to stop something they dislike, even when doing so causes significant environmental damage.

The alternative to CEQA reform is that more and more projects will simply be exempted by the state legislature from CEQA review. In fact, back in 1982, once and future governor Jerry Brown signed into a law a high speed train bill exempting the project from CEQA review. (The project eventually fell apart in 1983 for various reasons.) More recently, the landmark state planning law SB 375 signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger last year provides CEQA exemptions for certain kinds of infill urban housing projects that meet the AB 32 global warming guidelines.

Using the legislature to provide the occasional CEQA exemption isn't good planning. But it's what happens when the CEQA process is no longer functional. Rather than exempting HSR from CEQA - which, to be very clear, I am not advocating at this time, we should adopt the successful urban planning models used in states like Washington and Oregon that provide for regional and statewide planning processes that still give the public a chance to weigh in, still protect the environment, but don't come at the cost of prolonging a reckless dependence on sprawl and oil. Already the CHSRA is exploring a statewide planning effort, although it is not intended to supplant CEQA.

Of course, even if we did this, not everyone would buy into it. Those who still adhere to the 1970s "government is bad! there's no downside to killing projects!" attitudes will try and undermine a more sensible planning process in service of their own parochial ends. In fact, they're already doing it, as shown by this John Horgan column:

Belatedly, some citizens are raising alarms. It may be too late. The High-Speed Rail Authority has its own agenda, its own priorities, its own budgetary issues — and a great deal of power.

Input from county residents is being collected at countless public gatherings by the vast public relations armada on the authority's payroll. The panel's latest tactic is something called "context sensitive solutions."

Unsurprisingly, this actually reveals the depth of Horgan's ignorance. CSS wasn't something the CHSRA decided all on its own to use. It was pushed onto CHSRA by the very citizens Horgan claims to be speaking for, who demanded CSS be used on the Peninsula.

I'm still not convinced that the broken planning process is the "biggest obstacle" to HSR in California. I still believe the biggest obstacle is actually the unwillingness of the remaining beneficiaries of the 20th century model of economic prosperity and land use to accept any change in that model, regardless of the consequences. The opposition to properly funding HSR, and the breaking of the CEQA process, are both symptoms of that deeper problem.

A Reality Check Must Be Grounded In Reality

It's a bold headline from my alma mater: "A Reality Check on High Speed Rail" is how UC Berkeley bills a recent HSR symposium. Already Morris Brown is peddling this as yet another reason why HSR is terrible and doomed to fail. Morris wants us to not dismiss the symposium lightly. OK, I'll dismiss it heavily:

Even if high-speed rail attracted everyone who drove and flew between the Los Angeles basin and the San Francisco Bay Area during the year 2007, it would amount to only eight million passengers per year, nowhere near the numbers projected by the California High Speed Rail Authority, explained CEE professor Mark Hansen. But even that estimate is optimistic. HSR would be extremely unlikely to capture most current air travelers due to lack of transportation connectivity in most California cities and regions.

“In Europe and Japan, where HSR has been especially successful, it is a very simple thing to take a subway to the HSR station, go upstairs and get on the bullet train,” explained Madanat. For example, access to Eurostar—the HSR system that passes under the English Channel to link Britain with mainland Europe—is easy and car-less; a typical business passenger traveling from London arrives in downtown Paris in two-and-a-half hours and can walk or take the Métro from the same station to his or her meeting. This connectivity, or short access and egress time, is essential to the success of high-speed rail, and California has very little of it.

Oh really? This would be an accurate statement if HSR stations were going to be built on the edges of city centers. But they're not. The two key endpoints will be directly in the center of the existing mass transit networks in the state: SF Transbay Terminal and LA Union Station. Both are already served by an impressive amount of mass transit, and if Antonio Villaraigosa gets his way, LAUS in particular could be reachable from West LA and much of the San Gabriel Valley by passenger rail by the time HSR opens to SF. As anyone who is even remotely familiar with both SF and LA knows, Transbay Terminal and Union Station are both far more accessible, in a shorter period of time, than slogging through traffic on the freeways to LAX or even Burbank.

We can look to the Acela as an example. The Acela is a successful HSR route. It generates operating surpluses and has no trouble attracting riders. Sure, it helps that NYC has an excellent mass transit system. Washington D.C.'s system is pretty good, built in a very similar way to BART. Stations are located in the centers of both cities, even though DC has an easily accessible airport just across the river from downtown. Suburban DC is very car-centric, as is much of NYC outside the five boroughs, and that hasn't hurt the Acela either.

The presenters at the UCB symposium are not being realistic when they dismiss CA has having "very little" connectivity. Even in cities where the network still has some work to do, like San José (a stop they do not mention), the HSR station will be located very near to the airport (and is actually closer to downtown than the airport), putting both on an equal footing. And unlike SJC, Diridon Station has a stop on the VTA light rail line.

Of course, as Joey pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, the UCB symposium seems to have neglected the fact that HSR isn't just serving SF and LA, and includes places like San José, Fresno, and Bakersfield, where HSR would still be a compelling choice even without mass transit connectivity.

In short, their theory that HSR ridership depends on mass transit options CA lacks doesn't seem to hold water.

Travelers heading to Los Angeles from San Francisco, for example, will consider the time it takes to go to and from airports at each end of the trip, versus the time spent getting to a high-speed rail station. Time spent on the line-haul portion of the trip (actual flying or riding time) is more productive than the access and egress portions. But if access and egress times from HSR stations are as long and onerous as those for air, passengers will save time by driving to an airport instead.

“High-speed rail trades unproductive access and egress time for productive line-haul time,” explained Madanat. That is advantageous to travelers, and they are willing to spend an extra hour or more in line-haul time if egress and access time are diminished. Air travel between some cities in Japan has become nonexistent, thanks to the ease of traveling by high-speed rail.

I'm sorry, but Madanat is just plain wrong here. The unproductive access and egress time belongs entirely to airplanes, at least in California. He does not appear to have included the ridiculous security theater involved in air travel that adds up to a half hour to travel times. TSA recommends people arrive two hours before a domestic flight. Add in the travel to LA-area airports, none of which have good mass transit connections (whereas LAUS is the hub of the entire Southern California mass transit network), and it is not conceivable to me that HSR is at a disadvantage in terms of travel times. If anything it is likely to have an advantage, or would be comparable, which is all it really needs to be.

Again, we can look at reality to demonstrate the point: if HSR was such a bad deal, why does the Acela have half the market share on the Northeast Corridor? Madanat apparently didn't speak to actual Acela users:

Barry Ginsberg of Deer Park, N.Y., boarded an Acela train after a meeting in Washington.

"It's a lot less hassle and more comfortable," Ginsberg says. "When you figure how much in advance you have to get to the airport, it's a lot more convenient."

So there's another strike against the "reality check."

The other piece of the symposium report deals with emissions, and claims that HSR won't actually be the cleantech wonder we expect:

Proponents of California high-speed rail tout its energy-saving, greenhouse gas–eliminating characteristics. But panelist Arpad Hovath, also a CEE professor, reported on research showing that, unless ridership is very high, rail cannot perform better than air travel. To compare the carbon footprint of rail with air or driving, he explained, far more than just tailpipe emissions must be taken into account.

Horvath’s life-cycle analysis of the three modes suggests that high-speed rail will produce some 10 million metric tons of CO2 per year during construction. Furthermore, electricity to run the trains must be generated from coal-fired plants, leading to additional greenhouse gas emissions once HSR is operational.

Except that Horvath didn't mention the reality that the CHSRA has mandated that its trains will be powered by alternative, renewable sources to the maximum extent possible, with the goal being generation from 100% renewables. CHSRA's very existence helps bring online that capacity, by providing a guaranteed buyer of solar and wind power.

Horvath's assumptions also assume that ridership will be low. It will take about five years to reach the projected ridership levels (which is why many of CHSRA's projections are for 2030, not 2020), but once you're there, HSR will produce the reduced carbon footprint we expect.

He also charges that the construction alone will generate 10 million metric tons of CO2 per year. Maybe it will. But the cost of doing nothing is not zero. Even those tons of CO2 are a worthwhile investment for long-term significant reductions in CO2, since without HSR CO2 emissions are either going to continue rising and drown us in rising seas, or they'll crash totally without any alternative method of transportation when the oil gives out. And no, this symposium report does not mention "peak oil" at all. If it was discussed, UCB didn't see fit to mention it.

Oh, and the symposium report got in one last shot that Morris Brown, Stuart Flashman, and the PCL will just love:

Changes in alignment could help build ridership early, Madanat said. By switching the Northern California route from Pacheco Pass to Altamont, many more potential riders from fast-growing areas of Contra Costa and Alameda counties could be lured away from air travel.

Or Madanat could have mentioned the Altamont HSR corridor that the CHSRA is planning, which will bring the very kind of "connectivity" he claimed those potential riders needed in the form of a much faster ACE train.

Now it's possible that the problem here is with the staff producing the UC College of Engineering newsletter in which this article appeared. They didn't have to frame it as "reality check" and there may have been a more balanced discussion than what the article presented.

Still, it's a pretty lame "reality check," especially since it doesn't actually consider the realities I described above.

UPDATE: In fact, that's what seems to have happened. Alon Levy in the comments points to a post by Andy Nash about the symposium, which was apparently far more balanced, insightful, and useful than the UCB newsletter made it appear:

Professor Carlos Daganzo gave the first presentation. He showed convincingly how high speed rail can bring down the total cost of travel given the expected increase in travel demand combined with the HSR's decreasing cost per passenger model. This means that there is a very strong case for subsidizing high speed rail in the early stages of development, since it will improve the overall transport system....

Professor Mark Hansen spoke next. Hansen looked at the relationship of HSR to air travel. He believes that with HSR the air travel market will become less competitive and that the reduction in flights will be most evident in secondary airports (only a small share of SFO, LAX and SAN flights are intra-state ... although they use more than their share of capacity since they are generally smaller planes)....

Professor Robert Cervero proposed four lessons for California: (1) station siting is critical, building stations in freeway medians or surrounded by free parking will lead to more sprawl development and greater driving; (2) feeder systems are important for solving the "last mile" problem, extended TOD corridors are a good solution; (3) TOD as a necklace of pearls (e.g. like Copenhagen's approach) would be excellent, but California's current planning regime does not support this approach; (4) joint development must be high quality and pedestrian-oriented, studies of joint development in Hong Kong show that these types of joint development can be much more effective than the alternative basic systems.

So now the question is, why the biased report by the UCB "Innovations" newsletter?!

HSR Should Go Where the People Are

(Rafael helped with some of the research for this post. The words and interpretations are mine, so don't blame him for any errors or controversial statements.)

In some ways, the California High Speed Rail project has been a bit too successful in selling itself to voters. The project's emphasis - and, at times, my own - has been on getting people from the SF Bay Area to Southern California in just over 2 1/2 hours. Although this blog has frequently discussed the other areas served by the trains, we haven't always given them equal weight in the basic framing of the project. HSR is and has always intended to be more than just connecting two endpoints. It also connects some of California's fastest-growing cities, particularly those in the San Joaquin Valley.

Not surprisingly, when some people want to find a place to criticize the CHSRA and the HSR project, they point to the route choice between San José and Los Angeles. Some argue that HSR should follow I-5 through the Valley and over the Grapevine. And many of those commenters argue that the CHSRA's failure to pick such a route is either a sign of their incompetence or their complicity with big bad sprawl developers.

These comments crop up often enough that it seemed worth devoting a post to debunking such nonsense.

The basic flaw with the "use I-5" claims, whether they refer to the San Joaquin Valley, the Grapevine, or both, is that they argue for bypassing between 2.5 and 3 million people. There is no good reason to do so. Given that the system needs all the riders it can get to pencil out financially, it is absurd to send the route through completely empty land along Interstate 5 and ignore the populations along the CA-99 or CA-14 corridors.

Especially when those corridors desperately need an intercity alternative. The Highway 99 corridor is notoriously congested throughout much of the Valley, as it is the region's primary transportation route. An increasing number of both trucks and cars use the route, and more will do so if and when economic recovery comes to the Valley. A 2005 estimate showed it would cost $25 billion to bring Highway 99 up to Interstate standards and handle the projected traffic loads. HSR can be built through the Valley for a lower cost but can provide for the movement of people (and improve the movement of goods, especially through projects like Fresno rail consolidation) in a way that can make the widening and upgrading of Highway 99 less necessary.

There's also an environmental reason: the San Joaquin Valley has some of the worst air quality in the nation. HSR will play a major role in addressing that.

The Central Valley is going to see increased population growth during this century. The question whether it'll be sprawl or whether it'll be dense urban infill. HSR can help support infill development by providing opportunities for transit-oriented development. City center stations would help pull growth inward instead of push it outward.

The CHSRA's route FAQ has some more good info on the CA-99 route:

The I-5 corridor has very little existing or projected population between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. In contrast, according to the California Department of Finance, well over 3 million residents are projected to live between Fresno and Bakersfield along the SR-99 corridor by 2015, which directly serves all the major Central Valley cities. Residents along the SR-99 corridor lack a competitive transportation alternative to the automobile, and detailed ridership analysis shows that they would be ideal candidates to use a high-speed train system. The I-5 corridor would not be compatible with current land use planning in the Central Valley that accommodates growth in the communities along the SR-99 corridor.

Express trains in the SR-99 corridor would connect San Francisco to Fresno in just 1 hr and 20 min, and Fresno to Los Angeles in 1 hr and 24 min. This corridor would link San Francisco to Bakersfield in about 1 hr and 50 min, and Bakersfield to Los Angeles in 54 min. The SR-99 corridor was estimated to have 3.3 million more intermediate-market ridership (passengers to or from the Central Valley) per year than the highest I-5 corridor projections (CRA 1999). Therefore, while SR-99 corridor travel times would be 11 to 16 min longer than the I-5 alternatives between Los Angeles and San Francisco, overall ridership and revenue for the SR-99 corridor would be higher.

Similarly, the case for Palmdale and against the I-5/Grapevine alignment is compelling. In addition to the fact that Palmdale/Lancaster has just under 500,000 people right now, whereas hardly any live along I-5 north of Castaic, there is the inescapable geological fact that the Tehachapi Pass is flatter, less seismically risky, and cheaper to construct than the extremely hilly I-5 corridor. The I-5/Grapevine route would require individual tunnels of 6 miles in length, more overall miles of tunneling, and would come closer to the seismically unstable junction of the Garlock and San Andreas Faults, one of the more dangerous of California's numerous faults. Typically, you want to cross faults at-grade and not in a tunnel, which is very difficult on the Grapevine route. See more in the CHSRA Tunneling Report.

The time difference is estimated at 12 minutes between Grapevine and Tehachapi, which isn't nothing, but neither is it a huge sacrifice, given the fact that Tehachapi is cheaper, more seismically stable, and serves more people.

Combine all this with the fact that there are forecast to be 1 million people in the Antelope Valley by 2020 (even if that isn't reached, there will be more growth here, as in the San Joaquin Valley), and it makes it clear that here as well, HSR should go where the people are. Even if the Tejon Ranch housing development is actually built, there still won't be as many people as in the Palmdale/Lancaster area.

Quoting again from the CHSRA route FAQ:

The most significant difference in regards to potential environmental impacts between the Antelope Valley option and I-5 alignments is in regards to major parklands. The Antelope Valley alignment would not go through major parks. In contrast, the I-5 options would potentially impact Fort Tejon Historic Park, Angeles and Los Padres National Forests, Hungry Valley State Vehicular Recreation Area, Pyramid Lake and other local parks. The Antelope Valley alignment would also have a lower overall potential for water-related impacts, less potential impacts to wetlands and non-wetland waters, and was forecast to have less impacts on urbanized land and farmland conversion than the I-5 options (because the I-5 options would result in more growth in the Central Valley).

The Antelope Valley alignment traverses less challenging terrain than the I-5 options, which would result considerably less tunneling overall (13 miles 21 km of tunneling for the Antelope Valley option versus 23 37 km miles for I-5 options), and considerably shorter tunnels (maximum length of 3.4 miles 5.5 km for the Antelope Valley option versus two tunnels greater than 5 miles 8 km for the I-5 options) which would result in fewer constructability issues. Although the Antelope Valley option is about 35 miles longer than the I-5 alignment options, it is estimated to be slightly less expensive to construct as a result of less tunneling through the Tehachapi Mountains. In addition, due to its more gentle gradient, geology, topology and other features, the SR-58/Soledad Canyon Corridor offers greater opportunities for using potential high-speed train alignment variations, particularly through the mountainous areas of the corridor, to avoid impacts to environmental resources. In contrast, the more challenging terrain of the I-5 Corridor greatly limits the ability to avoid sensitive resources and seismic constraints. The alignment optimization system (Quantm) that was utilized to identify and evaluate approximately 12 million alignment options for each mountain crossing could only find one practicable alignment option through the Tehachapi Mountains for the I-5 Corridor.

For practical, financial, ridership, planning, and any number of other reasons, HSR should be built along the proposed route.

As we noted in the San Diego post last week, the purpose of HSR isn't to connect two points with a straight line. It's to move people. HSR serves people, not geometry. We need to find the balance between serving the most people possible and a sensible, non-circuitous route. I strongly believe the current CHSRA plan strikes that balance.

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Reminder by Rafael:

Altamont Corridor Rail Project - Public Scoping Meeting
Today, Tuesday, Nov 17 3:00p to 8:00p
at Fremont Central Park Teen Center, Fremont, CA
39770 Paseo Padre Parkway, Fremont, CA, 94539
(510) 790-5541‎

If you attend and learn something new you feel would be worth sharing with readers of this blog, please email a summary to cruickshank at gmail dot com.