Adios 2008, Welcome 2009

And so we come to the end of 2008, one of the more eventful and tumultuous years I can recall (although my memory doesn't really go further back than 1985, so perhaps my perspective isn't that long). In the midst of economic crisis and political upheaval, Californians ought to look back on 2008 as the year we made a long overdue commitment to sustainable transportation. It's not going to be easy to implement, but if I may paraphrase JFK, we choose to build high speed rail and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

California voters approved Proposition 1A which, combined with federal funding and private contributions (which will materialize; the credit crunch won't last forever) will build a high speed train connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles via the Central Valley that will transform transportation and land use in California, along with providing short-term economic stimulus and long-term economic growth.

Californians also voted to massively expand passenger rail in Los Angeles County, including the Subway to the Sea; to build a passenger train along the NWP corridor in Sonoma and Marin Counties (although the collapse of Colorado Railcar is an obstacle for SMART to overcome); and to commit more money to the BART to San José project.

Those votes are but the first step in a long process of building the kind of sustainable transportation that California must have to maintain prosperity in the 21st century. The HSR deniers haven't fully gone away, and the New Hoovers are gathering to fight government spending on infrastructure, including rail. Our work is still cut out for us.

But 2008 showed us what we can accomplish when we give Californians a choice - the failed status quo, or a high speed rail future. The end of 2008 gives us one last chance to reflect on those victories and accomplishments - because once 2009 starts, seven hours from now, we're going to have to get to work on the state and federal level to ensure that the HSR project is funded and supported.

Happy new year, everyone.

Why We Need A Greener Stimulus

The Merced Sun-Star editorialized today for a greener, more sustainable economic stimulus, offering some excellent reasons for using this economic crisis as an opportunity to finally move beyond the now-failed policies of automobile dependence:

Environmentalists must understand that roads, bridges and highways are going to be an important part of our transportation infrastructure for a long time to come. We have neglected that infrastructure to the point of real danger, and that must be urgently addressed.

But proponents of the conventional wisdom in transportation must also recognize that we cannot build our way out of congestion and air quality problems by simply adding more freeway lanes.

That contributes to urban sprawl, with its attendant environmental damage, and does nothing to reduce our dependence on imports of foreign oil. Also, transit and rail systems are often less expensive to build than more highways to carry similar capacity.

One thing is clear: The time has passed for the heavy emphasis on roads and highway now enshrined in federal policy.

That dependence on foreign oil, the legacy of the decision to rely on cars alone as the means to provide mobility in America rather than a balanced approach of cars, trains, buses, bikes and feet, is a major reason for our economic crisis. If Barack Obama, Congress, and other policymakers want to get this country back on its feet and to avoid a repeat of the current meltdown, they need to ensure that more of the proposed stimulus goes to mass transit and not to fulfill state DOT highway dreams.

Obama didn't help when he said that the stimulus should fund projects ready to turn dirt within six months - the need for speed is there, but he should have given himself more flexibility to include using the stimulus for transit. Even so, Jim Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation Committee, is working to increase the share of transit funding in the overall stimulus plan.

Some of that stimulus should go to high speed rail, of course, and even if our project gets federal funding in a later appropriation outside the immediate stimulus, even $50 million to pay for planning and engineering work would demonstrate a commitment to a sustainable transportation policy. Plus, planners and engineers need jobs too!

The details of the stimulus are still being worked out, and public pressure can help produce a better, greener, more transit-friendly stimulus. Transportation For America is running a campaign to pressure Congress to do exactly that. Sign the petition and let Congress know that we need to provide a big boost to mass transit - and let them know that HSR should be a part of that stimulus.

Thunder Alley

Analysis by CHSRA has shown that in order to compete effectively against short-haul flights between the Bay Area and Southern California, the express line haul time between San Francisco and Los Angeles will have to be well below three hours. Given that any acceptable route would also have to serve Central Valley towns with non-express trains and, the desire to leverage Palmdale as a relief airport for LAX, this has led to a requirement to achieve maximum sustained speeds of around 220mph (350-360km/h). The consequence is that CHSRA preferred route calls for approx. 50 daily express trains to barrel through downtown areas of Fresno, Bakersfield and other towns and, do so at the limit of what trainset manufacturers will currently support in commercial service.

Should CHSRA expect strong resistance from residents and businesses located close to its chosen route in the network core?

The main problem is that anything moving that fast creates a great deal of aerodynamic noise. Indeed, the rated power required to overcome wind resistance at high speeds is proportional to the cube of velocity. Most of that power goes toward moving air out of the way, resulting in severe turbulence and hence, in noise. As a first approximation, it's reasonable to assume that noise levels will also increase with the third power of train velocity. Ergo, a train running at 220mph will radiate roughly 1.65 times as much sound power as one traveling at 186mph. At a distance of 50m (~150ft), a TGV train will register a peak of around 92dB in open terrain. The new AGV may be expected to come in at around 94-95dB at that distance and its top speed, though improvements in train aerodynamics may have mitigated the increase.



For reference, a major road at 10m (~30ft) comes in at 80-90dB, a pneumatic jackhammer at 1m (~3ft) at 100dB. In other words, high speed trains are really quite loud, especially if you consider that many railroad rights of way are no more than 100ft (~30m) wide. However, assessing the effect of this noise on the human body and psyche is quite involved. First, the raw sound pressures must be modulated to reflect the fact that the human ear is more sensitive to intermediate frequencies than it is to very low and very high ones. The most common modulation is the "A" weighting curve, resulting in dB(A) values. However, it was developed for sounds that are quiet overall and may therefore not be particularly accurate.

Second, the impact on an average person exposed to the noise depends on the length of exposure, the rate of change in sound power, the spectral distribution and the rate of change of spectral distribution (e.g. due to a Doppler effect). Initially, concentration is most easily broken by sudden, loud noises emitted by fast-moving sources - our stone-age physiology is prone to mistake them for approaching predators or other dangers. Depending on the person, frequent repeat exposure can lead either to acclimatization or, to annoyance. The former refers to a neurological response that mutes the initially present fight-or-flight response, the latter to a negative emotional response to frequent distractions from the task at hand. Activities that require high levels of concentration may favor an acclimatization response, whereas the same person lying still in a hospital bed may suffer acute annoyance. Age is also a factor: children are usually less able than adults to disregard noise events, which can impact their academic performance.

Third, noise tolerance is much lower at night, when most people are trying to sleep. This will be especially relevant to high speed cargo operations on the California network, if any. The increased sensitivity is often accounted for by artificially increasing the severity of nighttime noise events by 10dB(A), corresponding to roughly a factor 3. In general, CSHRA planning at the program level has followed established guidelines to account for all of this in their metrics for predicting likely noise impacts on sections of proposed alignments. However, none of them were developed for ground vehicles traveling at speeds of up to 220mph. CHSRA and other state and federal agencies will likely have to create some new guidelines in the context of this project.

Specific local noise impacts can only be assessed at the project level, as the type of alignment (at grade vs. aerial vs. trench etc.), the type of ballast (gravel vs. concrete) and the presence of nearby buildings all greatly affect how sound is absorbed and reflected in the environment. Structure-borne infrasound, i.e. vibrations below the hearing threshold of ~30Hz, can lead to secondary noise if it causes furniture and items to rattle, though this usually does not apply to high speed lines because their rails are continuously welded.

A much less well understood aspect of high speed train acoustics is the response of animals to repeated noise events. As with humans, for each species and individual there appears to be a spectrum of responses ranging from acclimatization to annoyance to panic reactions. Annoyance effects could range from changes in product quality to increased aggressiveness to obsessive compulsive behavior to reduced fertility. The effect of high speed train noise on small populations of endangered species, e.g. in the Pacheco Pass section between Gilroy and Chowchilla, would be especially difficult to quantify.

Fortunately, at least the trains themselves are easier to study. One tool used to identify noise sources at various frequencies is acoustic tomography. Microphone arrays and software are combined to help engineers figure out which parts of their designs they need to refine further. For example, the pictures below were produced by TNO in the Netherlands to analyze a TGV trainset then under development passing from right to left at 330km/h (~205mph) at a distance of 80m (~250ft). The vertical axis indicates distance from grade level and, the number above each picture reflects the frequency band shown. Note that the horizontal and vertical axes are not shown to the same scale.



Evidently, some of the noise at around 2000Hz is created by the rolling contact of wheels and rails, but most of it originates from the tractor cars at either end - presumably the power electronics. Note that the loudest emissions are from the underside of the trailing car, most likely a result of aerodynamic effects.

At 1000Hz and 500Hz, the ghostly images of the pantographs are visible. Note that the noise sources along the length of the train are located above the wheels at these frequencies, indicated structure-borne sound radiating off the lower edges of the carriages.

At even lower frequencies, the picture becomes harder to interpret. Clearly, the power cars still contribute the bulk of total noise emissions, but there is also a complex acoustic signature from the sides of the carriages. Note how it correlates with the location of the wheelsets, which in an Alstom design are found in-between the carriages (Jacobs bogies). This may be a reflection of the greater stiffness of the side surfaces at those points or, of gaps between the cars.

The sound track of the following video should give you a better appreciation of the individual sound sources, especially the recordings made at the overpass. The whistling sound may be that of air being squeezed sideways at the wheel-rail interface.



The Japanese have developed a variety of nose cone shapes to reduce not just regular noise but also tunnel boom and rail pitting effects related to HSR aerodynamics. Unfortunately, the sexy 500 series performs less well in terms of noise than the cheaper 700 series with its bulbous duckbill nose.





Just for kicks, here is a video of a Caltrain "baby bullet" train storming past a local one at ~79mph with various sound effects. IMHO, if a passenger train is going to make that much noise, it should be at least twice as fast!



The bottom line is that exterior noise will likely be a significant factor in engineering the California HSR system, especially in the Central Valley. In particular, FRA rules prohibiting mixed traffic currently prevent the use of legacy tracks to access stations in downtown areas while routing express trains through open countryside. Note that FRA might make an exception if HSR trains only share track with other passenger trains and their locomotives are upgraded to appropriate safety standards. Unfortunately, that would mean constructing bypass tracks for freight traffic, something Fresno in particular has long sought but never been able to afford.

Worst case, sound walls could be deployed next to HSR tracks to at least reduce noise by as much as 8-15dB (varies with wall height and alignment design). Construction would cost $1-1.5 million per mile, depending on visual appeal. In the context of a $40+ billion project, this may be a small amount compared to the cost and impact of creating brand-new rights of way through prime farmland. After all, HSR ought to improve the quality of life in Central Valley towns beyond merely eliminating horns, bells and danger via grade separation.

On the other hand, it's useful to keep in mind that freight rail operators aren't exactly walking on eggshells right now, even at night. Witness this recent example from east Modesto:

Saturday Open Thread

I'll be back on Monday to continue the high speed rail conversation. For now use this as an open thread to discuss whatever's on your mind that's HSR related - even if only tangentially.

Some articles that have appeared over the last few days regarding California HSR:

• CHSRA officials optimistic about federal funding (SF Chronicle)



• Vegas resident argues for conventional HSR to LA - not maglev (Las Vegas Sun)



• Texas officials hopeful for federal HSR money (and showing that CA isn't going to be alone in asking Congress to open its wallet for HSR) (Dallas Morning News)

Thursday Open Thread

I'm in Arizona celebrating Christmas, probably freezing my ass off in the mountains and snow, but likely having a good time anyway. I hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday season, whatever it is that you celebrate (my wife and I are more into the solstice, but we're not going to turn down a nice big Christmas dinner either!).

I think we all got our present several weeks early, when California voters approved Proposition 1A and setting us on the path to finally building high speed rail. Of course we're going to have to defend it in 2009 as the economic crisis and residual HSR deniers and New Hooverites continue to swirl overhead. We built a solid foundation for HSR activism this year and next year it's going to accomplish even bigger things.

Tuesday Open Thread

I'm headed to Arizona for the holidays and will be back on December 29. So in the meantime we'll have a few open threads every other day to tide us over.

I wish I had more time to write about this, but Yonah has an excellent post on HSR privatization over at The Transport Politic. He looks over the two kinds of privatization - of infrastructure and of management - and concludes, rightly, that both are unworkable and unnecessary. With John Mica aggressively pushing privatization it is worth taking a close look at this and pushing back against ideologically-driven efforts to fix something that isn't broken. Public entities have had great success operating HSR around the world and the US should emulate that model.

One of the very first posts on this blog reached similar conclusions about HSR privatization. Worth a look.

Arnold Schwarzenegger + Jim Gibbons = Maglev to Vegas?

So claims the Las Vegas Sun:

For over 20 years, boosters have dreamed of and lobbied for a train that could travel from Southern California to Las Vegas at 300 mph.

The proposed magnetic levitation train line linking Las Vegas and Anaheim, Calif. — attacked by critics as a multi-billion dollar pipe dream — has gained new life.

Near the bottom of a news release detailing Gov. Jim Gibbons’ meeting last month with President-elect Barack Obama was the announcement that Gibbons and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had agreed to move ahead with the high-speed train project.

“Arnold and I agreed to jointly work together on the project,” said Gibbons, who is planning to travel to Sacramento to talk with Schwarzenegger about it.

The train, Gibbons argues, should be a candidate for federal economic stimulus money.

The rest of the article goes on to discuss "pork" in the stimulus bill and how infrastructure stimulus should emphasize projects with lasting value. We agree, of course, and HSR is one of the best possible examples of infrastructure that provides both short-term stimulus and long-term economic value.

The question here is, does Harry Reid's maglev from Anaheim to Vegas count toward that goal? Maglev is a notorious form of vaporware on an intercity scale - the cost is enormous and no project to build intercity maglev has gotten off the drawing board. That hasn't stopped Reid from getting $45 million from Congress to study maglev to Vegas, even though a competing firm has a more realistic plan to build conventional steel-wheel HSR from Victorville to Vegas. Reid dismissed the Desert Xpress plan:

Reid has criticized that project because he doesn’t think people will drive from Los Angeles to Victorville and then board a train to Las Vegas.

What Reid apparently doesn't realize is that it's a mere 50 miles from Victorville to the planned HSR station at Palmdale Airport:



So wouldn't it make sense, Senator Reid, Governor Gibbons, and Governor Schwarzenegger, to link a Vegas HSR line to our existing HSR plan - using the Desert Xpress model, merely extended west across the flat Antelope Valley desert from Victorville to the Palmdale Airport station? That would solve the cost issue, provide a direct train connection from LA to Vegas, and even could help logroll both Nevada's and California's HSR needs into a single plan.

I have to confess I've never believed that HSR to Vegas is a particularly high priority for either California or the United States as a whole - there are other corridors that have a greater need for HSR. But if Nevada and their powerful Senator are bent on HSR to Vegas, let's do it the smart way, the right way, instead of wasting millions on a maglev train that will never get built.

The New Hoovers Are Still Trying to Kill HSR

As we repeatedly explained at this blog during the campaign, the New Hoovers have it in for high speed rail. HSR is a necessary part of California's economic recovery, but Republican politicans - from Arnold Schwarzenegger to GOP legislators - are bent on using this economic crisis to achieve the dismantling of government that they could never get during normal times. They have used the 2/3rds rule and the governor's veto power to prevent a balanced budget from being enacted. As a result California has had to borrow money to pay for basic operations, but the strain of that borrowing has nearly exhausted our short-term borrowing capacity.

As a result of Arnold's most recent budget-blocking action the Pooled Money Investment Board had to cut off all funding for infrastructure projects - throwing a whopping 200,000 people out of work. As an AP article explains that action jeopardizes HSR planning efforts:

The state treasurer says the high-speed rail board won't be able to tap any of that money until lawmakers pass a balanced budget.

Without an agreement to close the budget gap, the treasurer won't be able to sell any bonds and won't allow the board to get a loan to tide it over until the bonds are sold. The state's loan fund, the Pooled Money Investment Account, is needed for other state operations, said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Treasurer Bill Lockyer....

Carrie Pourvahidi, one of the rail board's deputy directors, said the board is counting on getting $29.1 million from the Pooled Money Investment Account to pay for its operations in the first half of 2009.

Without that money it would have to shut down in late January or early February, she said.

[Mehdi] Morshed said he doubts any federal money could be allocated quickly enough to fill that void.

"If we can't pay our bills, we would just have to stop spending, which means we would have to tell our contractors to stop work. Then, hopefully, later on, when we have the money, we can pick it up," he said.

As you may remember we just went through this mess - during the summer Republicans blocked passage of a budget for three months, delaying the delivery of the updated Business Plan until just after the November election. When the state is out of money the CHSRA cannot continue its planning operations. This current delay - again caused by Republican intransigence - could cause consultants to leave the HSR project:

But if the state does not resolve its own fiscal problems in time to keep the board operating, even a short-term shutdown could prompt some of the engineers, planners and environmental consultants who have been working on the project to abandon it for more reliable clients, he said. That could cause delays.

"The federal government's going to pump billions into infrastructure nationwide," Morshed said.

"Then everybody's going to scramble for the people who are going to deliver those projects. Whoever has their hands on somebody, they are in better shape than the other person. If we lose some (consultants), we may lose them for good or a very long period of time."

Arnold Schwarzenegger needs to get his head out of his ass and sign the Democrats' budget plan. Otherwise California is going to suffer for quite a long time - the infrastructure projects Arnold championed in his Newsweek op-ed will be severely weakened and compromised by this ongoing crisis. Not to mention the effect of California being thrown into an outright economic depression which HSR is supposed to help alleviate.

Federal aid will still be necessary to complete the project and while that looks more promising, New Hoovers in Congress are beginning to stir in their own opposition to infrastructure stimulus spending:

House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said he has "grave reservations about taking $1 trillion from struggling taxpayers and spending it on government programs." He suggested tax cuts as a better alternative to kick-start the economy.

As far as I can tell Republican politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. are, instead of trying to help resolve one of the worst economic crises we've faced in 75 years and help build for our future, are using the crisis to settle old scores and trying to reverse what remains of the New Deal.

Canadian author Naomi Klein described this phenomenon as the shock doctrine. And it's now threatening to cripple the HSR project California voters approved last month. Things were bad in the 1930s, but at least our government wasn't being held hostage by a clique of ideologues determined to score points even at the expense of the economic security of millions of Californians, of the state's future prosperity.

High Speed Cargo

Over the past several months, this blog has rightly focused on high speed passenger service, because that will be the primary task of the California network. This post will discuss the other potential application, that of high speed cargo. This would be suitable for a range of light high-value time-sensitive goods, e.g.

• mail and packages
  
• pallets of high-tech manufacturing parts
  
• critical spare parts for machinery
  
• meat, poultry and fish (in suitable auto-refrigeration units)
  
• eggs, packaged dairy and farm-fresh produce (well insulated)
  
• fresh cut flowers (idem)
  
• general air cargo in standard unit load devices (ULD)
  

On page 13 of Chapter 1 of its 2008 business plan, CHSRA indicates it is at least aware of the possibilities:

"While the high-speed train system is not compatible with typical U.S. freight equipment and operations, the proposed high-speed train system could be used to carry small packages, letters, or any other freight that would not exceed typical passenger loads. This service could be provided either in specialized freight cars on passenger trains or on dedicated freight trains. Moving medium-weight high-value, time-sensitive goods (such as electronic equipment or perishable items) on the high-speed train tracks would also be a possibility but would need to be operated overnight when it wouldn't interfere with passenger operations and would require additional facilities for loading and unloading."

Note that this is essentially a technical assessment. The business case for running such a service in California would need to be made by a freight operator, which could be either a new company or an autonomous new division of an existing one.

There is already one precedent: in France, state-owned La Poste has long operated a small number of yellow cargo TGV trainsets at speeds up to 250km/h (~150mph) on the core Sud-Est line between Paris and Marseille in lieu of domestic air mail.

Video of La Poste TGV

There are now plans to take this one step further by forming a joint venture between SNCF Fret - the company's rail freight division - and La Poste called Fret GV (fret a grande vitesse = high speed freight). The primary business for this new JV will be mail and parcel service plus possibly light pallets. The rolling stock will be converted first-generation TGVs that SNCF is gradually replacing with newer, faster models.

A competing consortium called Carex (CARgo EXpress) is gearing up to provide connecting ground service for selected ULD sizes between airports on the Thalys network (northern France, Benelux, Cologne) and through the Channel Tunnel to London. Future extensions are planned to Spain and Italy as well as to Berlin, though Deutsche Bahn's HSR network is patchy. The driving forces behind the trans-national Carex effort appear to be the operators of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and, Liege Airport in Belgium. The service, which is not yet in operation, will likely be based on 20 trains featuring custom derivatives of Alstom's TGV Duplex design, as single-level concepts cannot accommodate the height of standard ULDs.

FedEx and UPS are both studying the opportunity, which promises to deliver more reliable delivery times than Europe's congested roads. Moreover, many airports do not permit nighttime operations, but HSR can operate 24/7 - especially at night, albeit with some speed restrictions in built-up areas to keep the noise down. For additional details, please see this PDF.

Meanwhile, DHL may decide to use a new high-speed rail line under construction for a rail freight forwarding service between Frankfurt/Main and its new European hub at Leipzig/Halle airport.

All of these examples are completely different from traditional rail freight, especially the cost-sensitive long-distance heavy container freight so dominant in North America. High speed cargo operators need to position themselves not against ocean or inland shipping but rather, in-between air cargo and medium-distance trucking. This niche requires fast, efficient transshipment from aircraft to trains to trucks/vans (and vice versa). In particular, sidings located directly on the premises of airports that can operate at night confer a real competitive advantage. In the California system, that would mean Ontario, Palmdale and possibly, Castle airport in Merced County.

Dedicated high-speed lines usually impose a load limit of 17 metric tons per axle. Heavier trains would cause excessive wear and tear on the rails and excessive geometry creep on the trackbed, especially in high speed curves. Lowering speeds through those curves reduce the dynamic loading, but below a certain point the flanges of the inside wheels will press too hard against the inside of the rail, again causing excessive wear and a lot of noise besides. This is a function of the amount of unbalanced superelevation permissible for the line - the bank angle can only compensate centrifugal forces exactly at one speed, the design target velocity. Gradients are another important factor for high speed cargo: consists must be able to climb and descend 3.5% inclines at fairly high speeds. In practice, that means short trains and plenty of traction power. However, older tractor-based designs are preferable to modern EMUs in this case - you want to use the permissible axle load on the cars for payload, not electric motors.

During the day, only the lightest of cargo - i.e. mail and packages - can be transported at the very high speeds required to keep pace with passenger traffic. Labor costs can be reduced and line headways maintained by attaching "hitchhiker" cargo trainsets to regularly scheduled passenger trains. Coupling and uncoupling at a passenger station is very quick, but a driver for the cargo trainset would have to be present to support the procedure. Note that European and Japanese coupler designs are incompatible with one another, FRA might have have to choose one or the other for high speed trains in the US.

Video of two ICE3 trains coupling

Alternatively, single high-speed passenger trainsets operating at the "local" or "semi-local" service levels could be scheduled to also stop at dedicated high speed cargo yards with run-through tracks, These could be many miles from the nearest passenger station but would still be integral to the high-speed network and therefore, topologically separate from traditional freight railyards where passenger trains are prohibited. In practice, the passenger train would drop off its current cargo trainset, if any, then (optionally) proceed a short distance down the track so a new one can be coupled and its temporary driver alight. The sidings in the high-speed cargo yard would feature wide platforms so multiple forklift trucks could quickly unload and re-load the trainset that was just dropped off so it can hitch a ride on another passenger train scheduled later in the day. The delivered cargo would immediately be moved to a waiting aircraft, truck or sorting facility, as appropriate. Note that a ULD might be used for a particular shipment even if it never leaves the ground, simply because that's what this logistics system would be designed around.

At night, when there would be at most a few sleeper passenger trains on the network, high speed cargo trains could operate autonomously in single or double trainset consists. Obviously, the operator would have to employ drivers for the graveyard shift. This is non-trivial, even with PTC safeguards, as humans tend to make more mistakes in the small hours of the morning. The biggest technical obstacles to leveraging the expensive high-speed infrastructure 24/7, other than finding suitable locations for the yards, is minimizing rail-wheel noise when passing through built-up areas at moderate speeds. Spanish manufacturer Talgo and Kawasaki/Hitachi in Japan are arguably leaders in this field.

The CHSRA quote also suggests that medium-weight goods could potentially be transported on the high speed network. For reference, there are several traditional systems of intermodal truck-on-rail transport:

• "rolling highways", essentially rail ferries (e.g. Alps, Channel Tunnel)
  
  
  
• trailer on flatcar (TOFC), allows tractor units to remain local
  
  
• TCSC ad-hoc rail cars, an ingenious but complex system used east of the Rockies
  
  

All of these have one big disadvantage: consists must either be assembled using yard shifter locomotives or, trains must be loaded and unloaded at one or both ends. This takes a long time, sharply reducing the advantage of combining local trucking with electric rail over diesel-guzzling long-distance trucking. A modern take on TOFC that greatly improves trailer transshipment is the Modalohr system. In Europe, it operates on regular lines, but that would not be permitted in the US - the special flatbed cars are currently not designed to FRA standards. Note that the mechanisms for turning the trailer trays are embedded in the transshipment terminals. If required, an entire train can be unloaded and re-loaded in less than 30 minutes.

Video of the Modalohr TOFC system

This is an excellent example of what I would call rapid freight, as opposed to both conventional heavy freight and high speed cargo. Thanks to horizontal loading, the system is compatible with regular height overhead catenaries. In California, the challenge would be to keep the axle loads under 17 metric tons to avoid damage to the expensive high-speed line, since FRA won't permit mixed traffic on legacy freight tracks. Perhaps a push-pull combination of locomotives might be possible. If so, a large number of trucks could be taken off highways in the East Bay, the Central Valley and in the LA basin, all areas where air quality and congestion are especially problematic.

Hey Arnold

The governator has a rather hypocritical op-ed in Newsweek on the importance of infrastructure to economic stimulus and recovery. Here are some quick excerpts:

America has failed to invest in its infrastructure for the past 50 years, and the bill is coming due. The situation is reminiscent of the ancient Roman Empire, which grew strong because of its advanced aqueduct system, but which fell into decline when that feat of engineering tumbled into disrepair. We're in danger of repeating that history, but it's not too late to fix the problem if we take decisive action now....

None of this makes sense in America. It doesn't make sense that in the greatest country on Earth we still rely on trains that go the same speed as they did 100 years ago, so our shipping times and commutes are longer than other countries....

In 2008 alone in California, we've committed more than $10 billion dollars in infrastructure investment, which will create at least 200,000 jobs over the life of that investment. And when our state unemployment rate has broken 8 percent, that kind of investment has a profound effect.

That last bit is a reference to Proposition 1A and high speed rail, although it'd have been nice had Arnold actually said that openly. But that's a quibble compared to the hypocrisy of this article.

Why do I say hypocrisy? I fully agree with everything I just quoted. The problem is this is another example of our governor's penchant for greenwashing - go tell the national media how awesome you are but back at home, help destroy the state.

You see, despite Arnold's claims to be an infrastructure builder, he has instead helped create a state budget crisis so severe that earlier this week the Pooled Money Investment Board voted to halt ALL infrastructure projects in California - immediately. 200,000 workers face unemployment as early as January 1.

Arnold could have avoided this had he agreed to a Democratic budget plan sent to him by the Legislature yesterday. Instead he announced his intention to veto the solution and consign the state to another indefinite deficit.

The state's bond ratings are plummeting fast, but worse, without infrastructure projects in the works, it's going to be very difficult to attract federal matching funds in Obama's emerging stimulus package. If this budget mess - for which Arnold bears the primary responsibility right now - continues then it may become difficult for us to get HSR funds from Congress in 2009. It'll become all too easy for HSR deniers to argue we don't deserve or can't even use the matching funds.

Arnold's hypocrisy knows no bounds.

The Trouble with LA Union Station (UPDATED)

One aspect of the HSR project that we have so far paid little attention to on this blog is how the new service will be integrated with the existing Los Angeles Union Station. This terminal station with its iconic waiting room was built on a spur off the main line along the Los Angeles river before the war and is today a multimodal hub served by Amtrak, Metrolink, two Metro subway lines, Metro Gold Line light rail and multiple buses, including the FlyAway to LAX.

Union Station waiting room:


View from street level:


Aerial view:


Note the ramp for two light rail run-through tracks under construction for the Metro Gold Line Eastside extension. Separately, FRA published the final EIR/EIS for four heavy rail run-through tracks back in 2005. These would veer east to join up with the BNSF main line along the west bank of the Los Angeles river. These tracks would primarily be used by Amtrak Pacific Surfliner and presuambly, modified Metrolink lines.

Rumor has it CHSRA plans to add a second level of tracks dedicated to HSR, stacked on top of the existing ones. H/t to Michael for this video edit:



This would have the advantage of linking HSR directly to growing network of local and regional transit services in the LA basin, east into the Inland Empire and south into Orange County and to San Diego. Unfortunately, it would also have severe disadvantages:

1. The HSR level would itself be a terminus station without run-through tracks. Trains between San Francisco/Sacramento and Anaheim-Irvine/San Diego would have to reverse direction, as would trains between Anaheim-Irvine and San Diego.
   
2. Diesel trains serving a covered grade level would create an air quality problem for passengers and staff. This will become less severe if and when Amtrak and Metrolink receive funds to switch to Tier 4 locomotives, but dirty legacy locomotives will probably remain in service through a long transition period. Significant forced ventilation may be needed mitigate the issue in the interim.
   
3. Without an additional mezzanine level, pedestrian flow capacity could be severely restricted at the stub end. HSR trains can be 1320's feet (~400m) long and support over 1000 seats with bi-level cars.
   
4. Construction of a second story capable of supporting multiple HSR trains weighing 400-600 metric tons each will cause significant disruption to passengers of the existing heavy rail services. Along with the ramp for the approach tracks, this will also be rather expensive.
   

It may therefore make sense to consider an alternative involving the construction of a new Alameda Station, located about half a mile north of Union Station. A large area there is currently being undeveloped being developed as a State Historical Park as it contains archeological artifacts (h/t to bafg).

In theory, it could support an at-grade station plus rail yard (e.g. for high-speed cargo trains at night) plus a number of transit-oriented commercial buildings. The new station would be linked to Union Station via the existing Metro Gold Line, supplemented by a new courtesy Metro Black Shuttle funded by a small surcharge on HSR tickets to and from Los Angeles. This would leverage the Gold Line tracks and Chinatown station but use new, private single-track stub spurs at either end. These stub tracks would have platforms to either side, one for level boarding and the other for level alighting, to facilitate rapid turnaround. The two drivers sitting in the cabs at either end would alternate to secure high service frequency. At peak times, two Black Shuttle trains would be in service, otherwise just one. Their schedule would have to be integrated with that of the Gold Line.

The following map shows the location of the HSR station with its 10 platforms tracks and access connectors. These would permit run-through service north-to-south, north-to-north and south-to-south. Also note that HSR tracks would have to cross legacy tracks in one location. This can be implemented at grade with appropriate signaling to ensure FRA-mandated time separation in mixed traffic situations.

UPDATE: an alternate location next to the Los Angeles river east of Union Station is now also indicated on the map. This would avoid the loss of the aforementioned State Historical Park. See also UPDATE 2 at the end of this post.


View Larger Map

Legend:

• blue = section of proposed HSR tracks for non-compliant bullet trains
  
• red = section of legacy + run-through tracks for FRA-compliant trains
  
• yellow = section Metro Gold Line + Eastside extension
  
• black = proposed Metro Black Shuttle
  
• pink = alternate station location, connection via unmanned people mover
  

To illustrate the concept, 10 HSR tracks are shown at the station. It would be possible implement fewer HSR tracks and add some run-through tracks and platforms for FRA-compliant trains (e.g. Amtrak Pacific Surfliner) instead. This option is not shown on the map. Neither is the option of transit-oriented office tower development north-east and south of the new station.

Prior to station construction, a section of N Alameda street would need to be moved underground. Along with N Spring, Sotello and N Main Streets, this would afford vehicle access to the main station hall located east of the tracks. This corner of the station footprint could itself be a high-rise with office suites or a business hotel/conference center on the upper floors. There is room for an adjoining bus terminal.

The mezzanine level above the tracks would provide generous pedestrian flow capacity, with multiple descents to each island and side platform plus paths to the Black Shuttle and Gold Line stations. Optionally, the mezzanine could house a shopping mall. If desired, one or more levels of for-fee public parking could be implemented on top of this, accessible from N Broadway via a flyover at the north end of the station.

The loss of the existing public park at what would become Alameda Station could be compensated by adding a green roof park to the structure, supported by recycled water. This could include bleacher structures for open-air concerts and/or al fresco restaurants. For reference, here's a picture of the "living roof" on top of the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco:



UPDATE 2: In response to comments from bafg and others regarding the State Historical Park, I've fleshed out the alternative of a new East Terminal for Union Station featuring ten run-through HSR tracks at grade, i.e. underneath E Ceasar E Chavez Ave next to the river. The HSR terminal would be connected to the main terminal via a short unmanned people mover running above street level. The new terminal has a mezzanine level, but only north of the people mover station. A green roof would still be useful in that it eliminates an air conditioning requirement.

Optionally, the Metro subway lines could be extended one stop to provide direct service to the new terminal.

Note that in this alternative, the diesel tracks have been relocated to near where the road begins to rise to bridge level. It may be necessary to create a slight dip for them to achieve adequate vertical clearance. Doing it this way minimizes the number of grade crossings between legacy and HSR tracks. The large building north-west of Keller Street need not be torn down.


View Larger Map

UPDATE 3: If CHSRA is forced to use the I-10 median for the Inland Empire/San Diego spur in phase II because UPRR refuses to offer its ROW, then the plan to build run-through tracks for HSR at the existing Union Station terminal would run into problems. A modified version of my original proposal that skirts the new State Historical Park would solve that. The northern approach tracks would run on an aerial structure above N Spring St, with a transparent sound wall to avoid impacting visitors to the park. The mezzanine at the station would then be at street level, the platforms above severely curved. I'm not entirely sure of the vertical configuration of the existing tracks in the "throat" into Union Station, but perhaps the ones for HSR could run above them to separate grades and avoid capacity constraints. Note that the Metrolink San Bernardino line already runs along in the I-10 median between the 716 Junction and El Monte. Also note that an HSR station in the I-10 median at Ontario airport would require an additional people mover to be of much use.


View Larger Map

Ray LaHood - HSR Denier?

Some troubling news out of Chicago where a relatively unknown Republican Congressman from Illinois, Ray LaHood, is slated to become Barack Obama's Secretary of Transportation.

LaHood doesn't appear to have much of a record as a transportation expert - at least when Bush crossed the aisle for Norman Y. Mineta he got someone who knew the issues well. But the troubling thing is that what LaHood has said about HSR isn't encouraging. From 2004:

LaHood dismisses Illinois Amtrak high-speed service

U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R) said on July 15 he does not favor high-speed rail for Illinois.

"I think it’s a bad idea, mainly because we don’t have the money to fund the routes that currently serve Illinois," LaHood said at the Statehouse.

Amtrak President David Gunn said earlier this week in Chicago that upgrading the Chicago-St. Louis corridor for faster passenger trains is a top priority for Amtrak. Planners want trains to be able to go 110 mph in the corridor, while the current top speed is 79 mph – but it would take nearly $200 million for the next phase of track and equipment upgrades.

LaHood said he considers Amtrak "the lifeblood transportation for small communities," and he knows many college students from Chicago’s suburbs use trains to travel to school, Copley News Service reported via The Lincoln Courier.

"On the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is fabulous," LaHood added, "and after 9-11, it became the transportation of choice for a lot of people because they felt it was safer than flying.

"I think if we’re going to have a pot of money where we subsidize airlines and we subsidize the funding of highways, that we certainly ought to continue to subsidize Amtrak," LaHood said.

He said, "I don’t think we can afford at this point, with the kind of deficits we’re running," to be talking about high-speed rail.

While funding is his main concern, he said, "People in rural Illinois are not for high-speed rail... They do not want a train traveling 120, 125, 150 miles per hour through the rural areas, and I support them on that."

Obviously 2008 is different from 2004, and the "HSR vs. Amtrak local" dichotomy that LaHood set up in these 2004 comments may no longer apply (if it ever did). But this doesn't exactly inspire confidence in our new Secretary of Transportation, who ought to be someone who understands the ins and outs of transportation policy, particularly high speed rail.

Some may argue that Obama-Biden's strong support for HSR will force LaHood to change his views. But that's quite a risk to be taking with such an important position. Many transit advocates are either wary or skeptical of the choice with one commenter at Streetsblog writing:

Not to sound like a reactionary here, but given the pool of great candidates like Janette Sadik-Khan and Earl Blumenauer, you have got to be freaking kidding me.

Blumenauer had taken his name out of the running and endorsed Mortimer Downey. The Bay Area's own Steve Heminger was high on the list too, with support from Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Other names like Jim Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation Committee, had also been floated.

There are rumors that Rahm Emanuel had a big role to play in suggesting LaHood, who may be a purely political appointment to satisfy Obama's desire to have some Republicans in the Administration. If so this was a particularly bad place to put one, especially if LaHood doesn't have the expertise to fill this vital role effectively.

We need the DOT's help big time to get HSR off the ground - from FRA exemptions to disbursements of money; the Kerry HSR bill sets up an Office of High Speed Rail within the DOT. We need someone heading that department who knows what they're doing and who fully supports high speed rail. I am concerned Ray LaHood is not that person.

Something for the confirmation hearings, I guess...

The Central Valley Test Track, Part 2

In part 1, we discussed why CHSRA needs to construct a high speed test track early on in the project. Here, I'll propose one way how this might be accomplished.

The primary objective for the test track is to achieve speeds of 220mph for extended periods of time. Given that HSR can and will only run that fast in the Central Valley, that's where the track will need to be. In addition, the segment will have to be used in regular commercial service once HSR operation begin, because it would be far too expensive and anyhow not necessary (h/t to commenter thik) to construct and maintain a dedicated facility.

CHSRA appears to have decided that the central maintenance facility will be located in Merced County, quite possibly at Castle airport (formerly Castle AFB of the SAC) in Atwater. The airport is currently only used for general aviation, but its single long runway would be ideal for heavy air lift and air cargo services. Given the low population density of the area, it would be suitable for 24/7 operations. With the addition of a small passenger terminal featuring an HSR station inside the building, it could also support trans- and intercontinental passenger flights using the largest available jets (747, A380). In that sense, Castle airport could serve not just the Central Valley but - eventually (h/t to Robert Cruickshank) - perhaps also San Benito, Monterey plus Santa Cruz counties and, as a relief airport for the San Francisco Bay Area. Capacity at SFO is often constrained by dense fog.

The first part of my proposal is therefore to use Castle airport as the northern end of the test track.


View Larger Map

Legend:

• dark blue = current UPRR ROW
  
• light blue = current BNSF ROW
  
• yellow = proposed HSR test track alignment
  

Given that BNSF already hosts Amtrak San Joaquin trains, it may also offer to share its remaining ROW with HSR. Since UPRR has not, it makes sense to consider an alignment based mostly on BNSF's ROW. CHSRA had anyhow planned to use that south of Fresno, mostly because it affords easier access to the existing Amtrak station at Truxton Ave in Bakersfield. However, CHSRA had wanted to use the UPRR ROW in and north of Fresno because it affords access to the downtown areas of Fresno, Merced and Modesto. In and north of Stockton, UPRR is anyhow the only option. Since BNSF's ROW crosses UPRR's at a right angle in south Stockton, HSR would have to cut over further south, e.g. between Escalon and French Camp.

Merced County would probably be fine with having its station at Castle airport instead of downtown Merced, since it lobbied hard for just that solution. For Modesto, the current Amtrak station at E. Briggsmore lies at the the eastern edge of town. If UPRR is willing, it would be possible to cut over e.g. between the Stanislaus river and Modesto airport. Of course, all of these alignment changes would have to be reflected in the project-level EIR/EIS for the Sacramento spur, but construction on that won't start until the early 2020s.

Other advantages of using the BNSF ROW are that
(a) Amtrak can serve as an HSR feeder without a route change and,
(b) many towns that will not have an HSR or even Amtrak station will not be subjected to a lot of additional traffic through their downtown areas, possibly even high speed cargo operations at night. In Spain, AVE construction was complicated by small towns that desperately wanted to have stations on the high speed line between Madrid and Barcelona. Be careful what you wish for!

As the southern endpoint of the test track, I'd suggest Bakersfield. This will permit limited commercial HSR operations in the Central Valley to begin well before the entire starter line is completed. It also provides enough distance to conduct meaningful testing.

The fly in the ointment is that this means tackling the mess in Fresno early and head-on. Alan Kandel over at the California Progress Report has chronicled this saga in detail (though he has yet to discover Google Maps). The BNSF alignment in Fresno runs right through miles and miles of residential neighborhoods, at grade. Dozens of daily mile-long freight trains cause pollution, noise, vibration and especially, endless delays at the many grade crossings. The city has been trying to kick out BNSF for 90 (!) years, to no avail.

UPRR, for its part, appears quite happy to host the local San Joaquin Valley Railroad (SJVR, now a division of Rail America) and watch its primary competitor BNSF stuck with a PR nightmare. The company has resisted attempts to create a grade-separated joint freight corridor - conceptually similar to the Alameda corridor in LA - along its ROW, which runs next to hwy 99. Besides, Fresno has never had the money to implement all those grade separations and, FRA does not require them for alignment sections rated at less than 125mph - which means everything except the NEC. Its most recent "action plan" on grade crossings dates back to 2004 and suggests the agency spends most of its time writing reports and then mulling it all over some more.

Enter high speed rail, which Congressman Jim Costa (D-Fresno) has worked so hard for. All politics is local, after all...

A number of alternative solutions have been proposed, the one Alan Kandel prefers is called the Metro Rural Loop, subject of a recent regional planning workshop. It's still at the conceptual stage, calling for an enormous ring of bypass freeways around Fresno, stretching north to hwy 152 (Los Banos-Chowchilla) and south to hwy 198 (Hanford-Visalia-Exeter), perhaps even hwy 190 (Corcoran-Porterville).

Much of the area in-between would be gradually filled in with residential developments through 2110, by which time these four counties expect to be home to around 6.5-12 million people (baseline 7.7 million). Side note: it's not entirely clear to me where their drinking water would come from, unless agriculture in this parched section of California were to cease almost entirely.

Each of these bypass highways would consist of (see pp84 of this 8.2MB PDF document):

- 4 HOV, 6 mixed traffic and two emergency lanes (total 12 lanes)
- a two-lane frontage road to either side (total 4 lanes)
- two tracks of light rail, with zero room for express bypass tracks
- one multi-use path (i.e. bikes + pedestrians)
- eight rows of trees

Total width 400-450 feet. Some of the light rail lines would be over 50 miles long.

Grade separated major cross roads would feature:

- four mixed traffic lanes
- two BRT lanes
- two rows of trees

While I'm all for trees and transit, it seems to me the planners are steeped in asphalt lore and more than a little optimistic regarding the amount of gasoline and diesel that will still be available in 2110. Page 19 shows HSR scribbled in as a mere afterthought, several miles west of Fresno.

Transit oriented development - you're doing it wrong!

A slightly less grandiose - but still quite ambitious - alternative would be to focus just on the heavy rail alignments as a first step, since history suggests those are by far the hardest to move. CHSRA has decided - rightly, in my view - that high speed rail stations should be located in the downtown areas of major population centers. In the Central Valley, that means towns with 100,000 or more inhabitants that are expected to grow rapidly in the next few decades. Fresno surely qualifies.

The apparently simplest approach would be to leverage only the BNSF ROW and fully grade separate that. There are 26 road crossings, 23 of them currently at grade. The Fresno Amtrak station at Tulare and Q St. is located at the north-east end of the downtown area and would be an acceptable location for an HSR station. However, the alignment features a number of sharpish turns, which could well prevent operation at 220mph. Besides, even with full separation of the existing grade crossings, there would still be dozens of heavy freight trains running through residential neighborhoods every day, in addition to dozens of HSR and a handful of Amtrak passenger trains.

A more comprehensive, but also substantially more expensive concept has been suggested by Larry Miller in his recent op-ed in the Fresno Bee. What that might look like in practice is shown in this map:


View Larger Map

Legend:

• dark blue = current UPRR ROW/rail yard
  
• light blue = current BNSF ROW/rail yard
  
• green = current SJVR lines
  
• purple = proposed Western Freight Corridor (WFC)
  
• yellow = proposed HSR alignment (elevated for grade separation where appropriate)
  
• black = proposed passenger heavy rail (Amtrak/regional), available for freight only if WFC unavailable due to accident etc.
  
• brown = optional light rail alignments
  

The concept calls for the construction of a Western Freight Corridor (WFC) along a brand-new ROW through prime farmland west and south of Fresno, with access connectors for UPRR, BNSF and SJVR. It also calls for two new rail yards to compensate for the loss of access to the existing ones. The exact location of the corridor alignment and its rail yards would of course be subject to negotations, this map is just supposed to illustrate the basic concept.

This means no heavy freight trains would run through the city at all any longer. Optionally, a bypass freeway could be constructed just west of the WFC. That decision would need to be made early, as it would impact rail grade separation projects at the intersections with hwy 99 and rural access roads. A total of around 70 freight trains run through Fresno every day right now and, this number is expected to grow. During harvest time, slow road traffic would significantly impede freight trains, therefore the WFC should be largely grade separated before the tracks are even laid. It's much cheaper to do when there are no trains running yet.

The straight UPRR ROW within the city would be used for the following:

(1) HSR service, possibly including high speed cargo transshipment at the current BNSF yard in Calwa (south of downtown).

(2) Amtrak San Joaquin using FRA-compliant rolling stock. Note the option of additional county-level service between Firebaugh, Ingle, Pratton, Sanger, Reedley and Dinuba if planners decide to create new transit-oriented developments along part or all of this rural corridor. Heavy freight traffic would be permitted in downtown Fresno if and only if the new WFC were to become temporarily unavailable, e.g. as a result of an accident.

(3) optionally, light rail service using the current UPRR yard at N Weber Ave. The starter line would double back to the BNSF alignment via an existing ROW south of downtown and actually serve existing residential communities all the way out the Gregg, where the connection to the heavy rail tracks would be severed. A spur loop out to the airport terminal would be more difficult because the required ROW has been abandoned for so long. Also shown are optional extensions to Riverbend, Clovis (via the hwy 168 median) and Pinedale (via the hwy 41 median). Between them, these would vastly improve transit within the sprawling city and permit future growth via new transit-oriented developments arranged as a string of pearls.

However, the UPRR ROW is only 100 feet wide, enough for four tracks. Therefore, I'd suggest running HSR on an aerial structure directly above the at-grade tracks for the other services. That means there would still be grade crossings for these, but their gates would only be closed briefly, since passenger trains are short. In addition, they would be upgraded to meet FRA quiet zone regulations.

The new Fresno Central Station would be located near Tulare Street and feature the following:

• 3 underground passages:
  
  
  
  • wide stairwells to at-grade platforms from outer passages
    
  • narrow stairwells plus elevator to island platform from middle passage
    
  • high-capacity elevators to side platforms (both levels) from middle passage
    
  
  
• at grade:
  
  
  
  • station building
    
  • bicycle path + storage racks
    
  • 2 heavy rail tracks (west side)
    
  • room for 2 light rail tracks (east side)
    
  • side platforms plus shared central island platform. Level boarding for all trains would be preferable.
    
  
  
• elevated:
  
  
  
  • 2 express HSR tracks through the center
    
  • 2 HSR side tracks with wide level boarding platforms (1320' long),
    
  • each with 2 stairwells to grade level at ends, plus
    
  • 2 stairwells to ends of grade level side platforms and on to the outer underground passages
    
  • optionally, 2 additional side tracks. In that case, the side platforms would become island platforms.
    

All told, the required width at the station only will be around 150-200 feet. Note that HSR trains that need to stop at the station must not impede express trains as they slow down or come up to speed, so it may be necessary to run four tracks of HSR for as much as a couple of miles to either side of the station. The switches will have to be especially long to support safe transfers between adjacent tracks at what will still be high speeds. Failure to pay attention to this could result in increased headways, i.e. reduced capacity, of the line.

In terms of phasing,

• Step 1 would be persuading the city of Fresno, the four county-area and CHSRA that this concept is worth pursuing at all.
  
• Step 2 would be convincing the railroads - especially UPRR - to also agree in principle.
  
• Step 3 would be finding the money to fund construction of the WFC, likely to be a major sticking point. CHSRA certainly cannot afford to fund it by itself, nor should it.
  
• Step 4 would be constructing the WFC including grade separations, new rail yards and access connectors (including the turnoff for heavy passenger rail near Herndon).
  
• Step 5 would be migrating all freight rail operations out of Fresno.
  
• Step 6 would involve construction of
  
  
  
  • any underpasses Fresno wants for the UPRR ROW
    
  • quiet zone grade crossings for the remaining cross roads
    
  • gantries and tracks for HSR
    
  • the new multi-modal station, prepped for light rail service
    
  
  
• Step 7 would involve
  
  
  
  • migrating Amtrak San Joaquin to the new alignment
    
  • commencing HSR test runs (assuming the rest of the test track is completed by this time)
    
  
  
• Step 8 would be the concurrent
  
  
  
  • introduction of county-level heavy passenger rail services, if any
    
  • construction of the light rail starter line
    
  • remodeling of the two legacy rail yards. Air rights to at least the UPRR yard could be sold to developers of high-rise office buildings.
    
  
  
• Step 9 would be optional extensions to the light rail network in Fresno and the county-level heavy rail service.
  

See, I told you it was ambitious! Btw, the length of the test track as proposed here would be around 176 miles.

UPDATE by Robert: There is a meeting happening right now in Fresno about this topic. It's at the Central Valley Business Incubator, 1630 E. Shaw Ave, #163 next to the Old Spaghetti Factory by Fresno State.

They're STILL Trying to Kill HSR

Back during the campaign the Media News Group were among the most die-hard HSR deniers. Their editorials were usually full of misinformation but that didn't stop them from crusading against a badly needed piece of 21st century infrastructure.

So it comes as no surprise that they're still trying to kill high speed rail, Prop 1A's passage be damned, as seen in Monday's editorial. And as usual they're not above lying to make their case.

California's high-speed rail boondoggle is a case in point. True, voters did back a $9.95 billion bond measure to provide seed money for the $44 billion project. But there is no good reason for the federal government to toss in more money for a highly flawed adventure.

There is no real business plan for the rail system. There are no realistic estimates of ridership, operating costs, capital outlays or total financing.

No business plan?! The new business plan has been available for weeks, including the voluminous source documentation. It includes ridership estimates, operating costs, and financing estimates. But hey, what are a few facts when you have some lies to tell your readers?

We suspect that there is no accurate estimate of the total cost of the rail system. If it is like other big state construction projects, the cost could be way higher than the current $44 billion estimate.

What "other big state construction projects" are these? Of course the editorial doesn't name them, because facts just get in the way - inconvenient truths don't make for good attacks on rail, I guess.

The real motivation for the editorial is to try and deny HSR any federal stimulus money, or any federal money at all:

Perhaps the board is beginning to understand that private investment in a project with no business plan or chance of turning a profit is not likely anytime soon. So why not get in line for a chunk of stimulus money?

Let's hope those handing out tens of billions of dollars of federal taxpayer funds have more common sense than supporters of the high-speed rail system.

California could use stimulus funds in the form of public works financing. But there are other far more worthy projects, such as the BART extension to Santa Clara County.

Private investors remain interested but we must be realistic - the financial and credit crisis is crippling ALL investment activity across the economy no matter what the project, so an increased level of federal support is now necessary. That crisis isn't going to last forever and when it eases high speed rail will be one of the most attractive investments in the country, ensuring long-term returns while providing economic growth through sustainable mass transit.

Media News Group would like to pit HSR and BART against each other but they work best in concert - what better way to ensure high ridership on the San José extension than to have BART meet the HSR line at Diridon Station, ensuring that East Bay travelers have the best possible connection to the HSR line and the rest of the state (short of having an actual HSR route themselves, of course)?

This editorial, for all its misinformation, is a good reminder that we will have to work hard in 2009 to ensure that we get our federal funding. HSR deniers may still be casting about for ways to stay relevant but I can assure that before long, they'll have their sights firmly fixed on Congress.

The Central Valley Test Track, Part 1

By now, you may have read that near the top of CHSRA's priority list is the construction of a long section of sufficiently straight, flat track in the Central Valley, e.g. between Merced and Bakersfield. The central maintenance facility for the trainsets will likely be sited at or near Castle Airport in Merced county.

Today's post discusses why this is at least as important as the SF-SJ and LA-Anaheim segments. Part 2 will address the complicated issue of securing a suitable HSR alignment through downtown Fresno, given that the test track will later be used for commercial operations.

There are two reasons why a test track is needed early on in the project:

First, FRA has not yet written any rules regarding the safe operation of trains at 220mph in the context of the US rail environment. In particular, CHSRA will seek a "Rule of Special Applicability", in essence a new set of rules that will initially only apply to CHSRA and its network. FRA had begun similar work for the Florida HSR system but shelved it when that effort was abandoned. Whatever rules it writes now will create a legal precedent for other HSR systems. That is precisely why the new Kerry-Specter bill calls for a new Office of High Speed Rail to be established within FRA, which has traditionally favored the interests of private rail freight operators over those of public passenger rail services.

For the most part, FRA will leverage the deep experience of foreign HSR vendors and operators for rules on track and catenary construction, track geometry tolerances and creep documentation, signaling, infrastructure and trainset maintenance intervals, procedures, documentation standards etc. Special attention will need to be paid to environmental impacts such as noise - especially for nighttime cargo operations - and, to all aspects of safety. This includes signaling to avoid train-on-train collisions and track surveillance to detect people, livestock and/or wildlife that have wandered onto the tracks. It also includes the dynamic stability of trains and overhead catenary systems in normal operation as well as exceptional circumstances such as freak weather conditions, earthquakes etc.

Detecting and responding to changes in track geometry due to minor seismic activity is another important aspect: special trackbed construction may be required where the alignment crosses slip-strike faults. Japan has decades of experience with high speed rail operations in earthquake country, including how to recover from service disruptions as quickly as possible. Only one bullet train has ever derailed during an earthquake, in Niigata prefecture in 2004. There were no casualties, but it took about four weeks to resume basic service.



One politically sensitive issue is that HSR trains will share track with Caltrain in at least the DTX tunnel in downtown San Francisco and possibly, other short sections as well. CHSRA also plans to share track with Metrolink and freight trains from/to San Diego between Fullerton and Anaheim ARTIC and eventually, out to at least Irvine. Since at least some of these trains in both segments will use FRA-compliant rolling stock and, CHSRA wants to use non-compliant but proven European or Asian trainsets, it is vitally important to the success of the entire HSR venture that FRA create rules that permit mixed traffic subject to conditions yet to be defined. The powerful rail freight companies will vigorously lobby Congress to prevent any rule changes that would force them to invest and then maintain expensive upgrades to their infrastructure and/or locomotives.

Related to that and to HR 2095 is the requirement to establish national standards for interoperable positive train control (PTC) systems. European railroads and their vendors have spent the last decade developing ETCS (Electronic Train Control System) in the context of ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System). A number of other countries including China, India and Mexico have decided to adopt the European system rather than develop their own. Japan had already developed functionally similar but incompatible systems. US efforts related to PTC technology centered on differential GPS, which neither of these foreign concepts rely on. Complicating the issue is that wireless data communications use different protocols in each geography, with multiple incompatible systems and incomplete coverage in the US. Add to that the inevitable homeland security concerns about relying on foreign-built systems in general and phreakers (phone hackers) in particular and, you can see why FRA rulemaking won't be easy.

ERTMS level 1 is an overlay system that relies exclusively on electronic trackside devices called balises that automatically force a train to brake hard if it has not been given authority to pass them. The problem is that this infrastructure is expensive to construct and maintain because it still requires trackside signals and a lot of buried cabling.

ERTMS level 2 relies on GSM-R wireless communications to eliminate much of this cost. There are still balises, but they are "dumbed down" to just broadcasting fixed messages. This level is generally considered essential for safe operations at 350km/h (~220mph) because drivers can no longer reliably read trackside signals at that speed. There have been a lot of teething troubles related to getting the wireless components to work reliably enough, one reason why tracks and trainsets already capable of supporting that speed are not yet operated at it. For good reason, railroad engineers always err on the side of caution.

Second, CHSRA needs to conduct technical pre-qualification of vendor products. In addition to verifying claims that trainsets actually can run safely at 220mph in commercial operation, regardless of weather, the authority will need to look at interoperability with products from other vendors. After all, the objective is to put operations of both the infrastructure and the trains out to tender. Preferably, that means multiple competing train operators - possibly including some airlines - who will either buy their own trainsets and time slots at the central maintenance facility.

Attracting this private investment will be much easier if there are multiple vendors to choose from. Indeed, CHSRA may well require all vendors who want to make it onto the shortlist to invest in kind, e.g. by making their premium offerings available on term leases.

In no particular order, here's a round-up of the trainsets already capable of 350km/h or better in commercial service on suitable tracks with suitable signaling:

• Alstom AGV, the successor to the TGV. Per unit of length, this design is actually lighter than conventional light rail (~1400 lbs/ft). The first customer will be NTV in Italy.
  

• FS ETR500 Frecciarossa. The latest generation of this Italian design is capable of 350km/h (217mph) but operations will be limited to 300km/h (187mph) until the kinks have been ironed out of ERTMS level 2.
  

• Siemens Velaro E, an uprated version of DB's ICE3. In service in Spain and China.
  

• Talgo 350, a lightweight design based on traditional push-pull tractor cars. The ungainly nose supposedly reduces noise and sway in heavy crosswinds.
  

• Kawasaki/Hitachi 700T, in service in Taiwan.
  

• JR East's flagship Fastech 360S was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for the ageing E2 fleet that is limited to 275km/h (~170mph). Electric trains normally rely on electric recuperation to decelerate, but headways (minimum separation of trains) are determined by emergency brake distances when this facility is unavailable. As top speeds increase, manufacturers have to resort to increasingly exotic and highly proprietary technologies to maximize line capacity for their customers. JR East already operates its shinkansen lines near capacity, so headways had to be maintained. This video shows one nose style on the development platform and the emergency air brakes, which instantly earned the design the nickname "nekomimi shinkansen" ("cat-eared bullet train").
  
  In addition, very strict noise level regulations had to be met, in spite of a speed increase to 360km/h (~220mph). Neither goal was quite achieved, so these trains will operate at 320km/h (~200mph) instead. Note that all modern Japanese shinkansen designs feature active tilt mechanisms because the lines were built decades ago for lower speeds. A California version would run on tracks designed for safe operation at 220mph without recourse to tilt technology.
  
  Correction: JR East will actually bring the E5 series into commercial service at 320 km/h. This is based on technology developed with the purely experimental Fastech 360 trains (h/t to anon @ 9:13pm).
  
  
• Kawasaki is working on a new design capable of 350km/h with the code name efSET.
  
  
• KRRI/Rotem HSR-350X, an experimental design developed exclusively in Korea. The KTX series is separate and derived from Alstom TGV platforms.
  
  
  

Finally, here is a peek inside an SNCF maintenance facility. Note that Alstom and Talgo designs feature Jacobs trucks located-in between cars. This is part of an articulated frame concept that permits shorter but wider cars. It also helps keep cars from toppling over or jackknifing in the event of a high-speed derailment, greatly reducing the risk of death or serious injury for anyone on board. The flip side is that the entire trainset must to be lifted if a single wheel or truck must be repaired or replaced.

Global HSR News

Some interesting stories for a lazy Sunday afternoon:

• Basque separatist extremists are targeting high speed rail, including killing a businessman working on the project, as part of a response to aggressive efforts by the Spanish government to break ETA. According to the Guardian article ETA and other Basque separatist groups claim that the "Basque Y" is going to destroy the environment and screws over rural Basques whose land is being taken for the project. What that article doesn't say clearly is that many in ETA and among their supporters are concerned that the Basque Y, once completed and linked to Madrid, will further solidify the region's connection to the rest of Spain and undermine what remains of the Basques' separateness. The determination of the Spanish government to go ahead with the project despite some local opposition then gets used by ETA to rally public support which has been declining significantly in recent years. Hopefully the project will go ahead as planned.



• On a more positive note the "Red Arrow" Milan-Bologna HSR line opened yesterday, and DoDo at the European Tribune has a great overview not just of the service but of the history of Italian high speed rail, which is lesser known than its other European counterparts despite Italy having a longer history and having provided true HSR service ahead of even France's TGV (I'm as guilty here as anyone in not giving Italy its HSR props). DoDo also describes the future development of Italian HSR, its connections to Europe, and Ferrari's entrance into the HSR industry.



• Frequent commenter BruceMcF has the third installment of his electric rapid rail series up at Daily Kos, this one focusing on electrification of STRACNET for freight and passengers.

Obama And Congress To Screw Up The Stimulus?

That's how I read this Washington Post article which suggests the road and highway lobby may win out over the 21st century in the composition of the economic stimulus package to be offered in January:

Most of the infrastructure spending being proposed for the massive stimulus package that Obama and congressional Democrats are readying, however, is not exactly the stuff of history, but destined for routine projects that have been on the to-do lists of state highway departments for years. Oklahoma wants to repave stretches of Interstates 35 and 40 and build "cable barriers" to keep wayward cars from crossing medians. New Jersey wants to repaint 88 bridges and restore Route 35 from Toms River to Mantoloking. Scottsdale, Ariz., wants to widen 1.5 miles of Scottsdale Road.

None of this in itself is bad. Maintaining what we've got is necessary. But what does this mean for the more important projects - those that will not only create jobs but provide lasting economic growth and value?

On the campaign trail, Obama said he would "rebuild America" with an "infrastructure bank" run by a new board that would award $60 billion over a decade to projects such as high-speed rail to take the country in a more energy-efficient direction. But the crumbling economy, while giving impetus to big spending plans, has also put a new emphasis on projects that can be started immediately -- "use it or lose it," Obama said last week -- and created a clear tension between the need to create jobs fast and the desire for a lasting legacy...

The Obama transition team is aware of the tension created by its goal of immediate stimulus but contends it can be resolved. For one thing, one aide said, some of the most legacy-building aspects of the recovery plan will be in areas other than transportation infrastructure -- such as expanding the electric grid, retrofitting schools to make them energy efficient and modernizing medical record-keeping.

Defending the emerging list of projects, the aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said there simply is a vast need for repairs. But the aide said that the Obama team also has its eye out for longer-term projects to invest in, and that for all the emphasis on quick spending, the recovery plan is considered a two-year undertaking. What is still to be determined is how some of those more ambitious projects would be chosen and how that money would be apportioned.

That aide doesn't really understand what he or she is talking about if that's what they believe provides "legacy". It is essential and at least 30 years overdue for America to stop subsidizing sprawl and start investing in mass transit alternatives, especially rail. Expanding the electric grid is valuable, but the other two mentioned - retrofitting schools and modernizing medical records - are just not significant compared to investing in new transit infrastructure. This is a time for thinking big and boldly, not to pull back and think small-time.

Some argue that it's OK if the economic stimulus doesn't focus on change, since later funding could provide the big investments we really need:

The construction industry also sees a two-step process. "Do the rinky-dink projects, the smaller projects," said Frank Rapoport, head of the global infrastructure practice at the McKenna, Long & Aldrich law firm. Then, later in 2009, he said, the government should use any leftover stimulus money to leverage private equity to tackle larger challenges, possibly via Obama's proposed infrastructure bank....

But that plan assumes that there will be enough money, political will and public support left over after an initial burst of spending to fuel broader investments. It is unclear how much money will be devoted to infrastructure in the stimulus package, which could surpass $500 billion. But the highway officials association has identified more than 5,000 road and bridge projects costing $64 billion that are ready to go, and the transit officials' association has identified 736 projects costing $12.2 billion that could start within 90 days.

If the stimulus funds many of those projects in the short term, there could be less appetite for increasing Washington's long-term investment beyond the roughly $50 billion a year it spends annually now. And on Capitol Hill, members of both parties agree that the focus has to be on the short term.

"Filling the potholes or repaving a stretch of road may not be as visual as the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, but that paved road is going to make a lot of difference in people's lives," said Jim Berard, spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "Will there be political will and money" for later spending? "We don't know. We'll build that bridge when we come to it. Trying to do bigger-type infrastructure improvement at this point would be irresponsible. You'd be fiddling while Rome burst into flames."

I don't see anything remotely good or optimistic in that. At all. Given how much money has been committed to various bailouts - the overall stimulus could reach $1 trillion - that's going to make it politically difficult to push the kind of large investments in transportation, like a national high speed rail network, that we need to both recover from this economic crisis and provide long-term growth for the economy the way New Deal projects did in the 1930s. The Congressional spokesman certainly didn't sound that committed - in fact he dismissed "bigger-type infrastructure improvement."

The only thing irresponsible here is NOT making those kinds of improvements. Our economic crisis is largely due to overdependence on oil and sprawl, which has now failed to provide growth and security as it once did. The economic and environmental costs are enormous. If we're going to provide energy independence as Obama has long proposed, we need to start immediately investing in the kind of major projects needed to get us down a more sustainable path.

Other officials understand the need to not throw good money after bad:

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak is proud that his city was able to quickly rebuild the Interstate 35 bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007 while making sure to include capacity for a future transit line on it. But he worries that many of the road and bridge upgrades around the country will not be done in a similarly farsighted way, given the time pressures.

"The quickest things we can do may not be the ones that have the most significant long-term impact on the green economy," he said. "Unless we push a transit investment, this will end up being a stimulus package that rebalances our transportation strategy toward roads and away from [what] we need to get off our addiction to oil."

The details of the stimulus aren't fully public yet, but the above suggests that concerns over Obama's transportation priorities are valid. We need to push back hard against delaying big projects. One way to do this is to go to change.gov and let your voice be heard for high speed rail as part of the stimulus. Sure, it's possible that California will still get funded in a later bill - perhaps John Kerry's - but the more money that goes to road projects in the stimulus, the harder that later battle will be.

FRA Says Pacheco Pass is OK

From the Federal Railroad Administration:

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has issued of a Record of Decision (ROD) on the California High-Speed Train (HST) system environmental impact statement (EIS) for the corridor between the Bay Area and Central Valley. The FRA's decision supports the State's selection of preferred alignment and station locations, and considers the environmental benefits and adverse
impacts associated with the preferred network alternative. It also describes mitigation measures to address adverse environmental impacts.

The FRA has served as the lead Federal agency for the environmental review of the HST program, while the California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority) is responsible for its planning, financing,
construction, and operation. The Authority and FRA completed the EIS in accordance with both the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), including a broad effort to solicit input from the public, affected agencies and interested parties. This step concludes the program level of NEPA review that will be followed by preparation of site-specific environmental documents for sections of the HST system.

The full ROD can be found here.

One hopes this would give pause to the lawsuit-happy activists who continue to argue that the Pacheco route is the seventh sign of the apocalypse. Sure, Pacheco is imperfect, as is Altamont, but hopefully the FRA's decision will help put to bed that particular routing dispute. There are MUCH bigger issues for us to worry about, particularly what happens in Congress in January.

Bay Guardian: Build the Downtown Extension

This week's issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian includes an editorial calling for construction of the Downtown Extension to the Transbay Terminal. It is based on an article by Steven T. Jones in the same issue that notes, among other things, that the "train box" remains unfunded and outside the plans. First, the Jones article:

Transportation planners say the train box, which is essentially the shell structure in which the train station would be built during the project's second phase, is very important both logistically and financially (doing it later could be very expensive and disruptive to the station's operation), particularly since the TJPA has secured little of the $3 billion needed for phase two....that source must be found by spring to be included in construction contracts.

Um...that's not good. The train box is a must.

The Bay Guardian editorial makes, as usual, some excellent points about why the DTX is so important to the success of high speed rail - and what some of the political obstacles are, namely the leadership of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. From the editorial:

Building an adequate terminal for high-speed rail at its present location would cost at least $750 million, money that would be better spent funding the downtown extension....building the Transbay Terminal with no rail connection would be a disastrous waste of money — and waiting and hoping for more money later isn't a very good financing plan.

So if it's obvious that the Transbay Terminal needs the DTX to succeed, and that a Fourth and King terminus station isn't a good use of money, why is this even an issue? As the editorial explains, the leadership at the TJPA, specifically Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan, isn't doing a good job securing funding or even communicating with partners:

Ayerdi-Kaplan promised us, repeatedly, that there's no way the project will end up getting built without the facilities for rail in the basement.

But Quentin Kopp, a retired judge who heads the state's high-speed rail agency, has nothing but harsh words for Ayerdi-Kaplan and her operation. He insists that she hasn't been working with him and that none of the $10 billion in bond money approved in November for the project will go to extend the tracks beyond the existing Caltrain terminal at Fourth and King. In fact, Kopp is making noises about keeping the end of the line exactly where it is today....

Kopp has some legitimate gripes. Ayerdi-Kaplan, who is supposed to be building the station that will serve as the northern anchor for high-speed rail, has met with Kopp only once. She's going ahead with the project before she has any guarantees that even the framework for the underground station will be funded. And frankly, it's not going to work for the head of the Transbay Terminal project to remain at odds with the head of the high-speed rail authority.

It certainly sounds as if the TJPA needs to get its act together, and one hopes that Kopp and other members of the California High Speed Rail Authority have been trying to proactively work with Ayerdi-Kaplan and her staff to resolve these issues. Apparently she has been hiding behind PR person, Adam Alberti. I can see why Kopp has been making noise about using Fourth and King instead, as a way to force the TJPA back to the table.

Still, this seems to be a leadership issue most of all. San Francisco has a lot of political leaders who could help bring the parties together - Mayor Gavin Newsom, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. Perhaps our federal officials can help provide funding for an infrastructure project ready to break ground. It's time for someone to step up and solve this issue before it gets worse with time and built-up enmity. As we've said before the DTX and the Transbay Terminal are essential to the HSR project's success.

Two Quick Ones

Busy day, busy week. Winter break cannot come quickly enough. Two stories for your perusal:

1. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has approved the scoping plan for the implementation of the AB 32 carbon reduction goals. As we explained in June CARB sees high speed rail as an important part of their overall goal of reducing carbon emissions 30% by 2020. With the Obama Administration showing its commitment to global warming action this move is all the more important, reminding the state and the country of HSR's role in promoting renewable, carbon-neutral energy.

2. The Press-Enterprise looks at the debate over HSR routing in the Riverside-Perris area - should the I-215 corridor be used, or does the proposed Metrolink Perris Valley Line make this problematic or unnecessary? One problem is that the article is really unclear - it suggests that the discussion over the I-215 corridor is over a connection TO the HSR route and thus the $950 million in Prop 1A funds is at stake. But as the board-approved route map shows the plan is to run HSR itself along the Perris Valley/I-215 corridor. So either I'm missing something or the article is missing something.

Still, it is an opportunity to discuss the Inland Empire, which we've almost never discussed here - but should.

Will Obama Repeat Clinton's Failure?

A Democratic president elected after a President Bush led America into a war with Iraq and national recession, a young candidate offering change, promising in particular to change our transportation policy to something more transit friendly, including an explicit promise to build a high speed rail network.

As Yonah at The Transport Politic points out in a must-read post, that wasn't just Barack Obama in 2008 - it was also Bill Clinton in 1992. Unfortunately for America, Clinton's promises never quite came to fruition, pushing back real action on HSR for nearly 20 years:

Before he was elected, Mr. Clinton had laid out a major economic plan, one of whose major elements was the high-speed rail system. Unlike Mr. Obama in his recent statement, Mr. Clinton was willing to put “rail systems” (presumably transit) and “high-speed rail” in the same sentence as “roads and bridges.” Mr. Clinton clearly didn’t find the issue to be so controversial that he wasn’t willing to talk about it. And Mr. Clinton was running on the right of the Democratic Party.

Yonah quotes from Bill Clinton's statement in the second debate from October 1992:

“My plan would dedicate $20 billion a year in each of the next four years for investment and new transportation, communications, environmental clean-up, and new technologies for the 21st century and we would target it especially in areas that have been either depressed or which have lost a lot of defense-related jobs. There are 200,000 people in California, for example, who’ve lost their defense-related jobs. They ought to be engaged in making high-speed rail; they ought to be engaged in breaking ground in other technologies, doing waste recycling, clean water technology, and things of that kind.“

For those of us who may have forgotten (or for those of you who weren't alive then), California was facing a severe economic recession with the end of the Cold War and the scaling back of the defense industry that, in Southern California especially, fueled the 1980s boom. Clinton explicitly said that a California HSR project would be a good way to provide jobs for a state that desperately needed them.

So what happened to Clinton the HSR builder? According to Yonah, despite enthusiasm from environmentalists and rail advocates - including then-Amtrak president W. Graham Claytor - Clinton's initial post-election plans did not come through on HSR and a 1993 HSR bill died in the House:

And yet we all know what comes next. Mr. Clinton entered office and the 1993 High-Speed Rail Development Act, considered in the House, did not move. Though the Federal Railroad Administration has designated corridors for high-speed rail, little has come of the effort. Though Mr. Clinton’s campaign persona seemed like it would produce a very pro-rail president, the result was far less than that. Mr. Clinton did little to promote the issue. He never designated more than a few million dollars to any corridor. The Northeast Corridor’s improvement was half-hearted and resulted in not-so-fast “high-speed” rail.

We can provide more detail. Early 1993 saw a pitched battle between the new administration and moderate and conservative Democrats in the Congress who did not agree with Clinton's new priorities, such as Clinton's plans for a BTU tax - an early '90s version of a carbon tax - and for an increased gas tax to pay for these projects. Conservative Dems in particular objected to new federal spending, forcing the Clinton Administration to climb down from its more ambitious goals in order to save the stimulus - which was already facing a filibuster from Senate Republicans.

Clinton never did get another opportunity to follow up on his HSR promises. After Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 election, Clinton had to acquiesce to many Republican budget cutting demands, especially on Amtrak. Clinton was able to get the Acela built, but because of Republican penny pinching they had to use the existing tracks and corridor, leaving the Acela short of being a true high speed rail system (in spite of that it is still a very successful service). The FRA did produce the HSR corridor plan but again with Republicans controlling the Congressional purse strings this never got beyond the conceptual stage. Meanwhile George W. Bush was killing the Texas HSR project and his brother was planning to do the same in Florida.

The lesson here is that political opportunities for high speed rail do not come along very often. 2008 was a wonderful year for us both in California and in Washington DC. Obama and Biden are both talking a good game but we have yet to see a detailed plan. Kerry's HSR bill is also a good start, but it must not die as did its 1993 predecessor.

It is entirely possible given the ugly economic situation and the precariousness of the Democratic majority in Congress that 2010 could see Republican victories as in 1994. Clinton rode a booming economy to victory in 1996; Obama will not likely have such beneficial circumstances in 2012. That means 2009 is the time to get some real federal support for HSR. As Yonah concludes:

The lesson we should take from the Clinton campaign is to take our own interpretations of Mr. Obama’s statements with a grain of salt. Though it’s nice to imagine the candidate is going to go all-out for high-speed rail, his positions so far have been less forthright than those of Mr. Clinton. Clearly, the President-elect is going to have to do a lot to convince us of his true positions - and that means prioritizing, in the budget.

We shall see in the next few months whether Mr. Obama truly cares about high-speed rail. But let’s not forget to keep up our own activism, rather than let our assumptions about his get in the way.

Absolutely right. We must hold Obama's feet to the fire, and be prepared to do battle with his administration and the Congress if necessary to ensure that HSR funding becomes reality in 2009. We wasted a perfect opportunity in 1993 - we cannot do that in 2009.

To help ensure that Washington DC produces real action and real funding for passenger rail, including HSR, Transportation For America is conducting a write-your-Congressman campaign. Click the link, fill it out, it only takes a few minutes.

We will be launching an HSR-specific version in January here at the blog. The first weeks and months of 2009 will be crucial to the success of California High Speed Rail - and HSR around the country.

HSR across the Bay Bridge?

In my recent post introducing rapid rail as a concept, I included a map showing the potential of running HSR trains across the Bay Bridge. This was very tentative, mostly because I did not know if the bridge could support the weight of modern, lightweight UIC-compliant passenger trains.

Early on in its service life, the Bay Bridge used to carry electric trains, e.g. this trolley car from 1938:



In 1959, the rail tracks on the lower deck were converted to road lanes. In 1998, at the urging of their mayors, voters in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville passed a non-binding declaration of policy that rail service should be restored. Quentin Kopp, then in charge of the project to build a new east span, rejected the idea out of hand. Bitterly ironic, isn't it? See also the response by Emeryville's then-mayor Bukowski.

Nevertheless, MTC did commission a rail feasibility study that was published two years later. It concluded that sacrificing road lanes would not be acceptable due to an expected 22% increase in persons crossing the bridge by 2020. This was a complete non-sequitur, since a rail track can support a lot more person crossings than a road lane. Rather, the statement should be seen as evidence of the clout of the road lobby.

The study did conclude that rail tracks could be added to the west span, either slung underneath (subject to Coast Guard approval) or, on ugly cantilevers on either side. However, the cost for getting the western span "rail ready" in this way was estimated at almost $1.33-1.45 billion, excl. the actual tracks and western approach from the new TTC. With an underground train box there, only the (cheaper) alternative of tracks slung underneath the bridge was considered possible.

The new east span was designed to support five lanes of road traffic in each direction, plus emergency and wide bike lanes. Back in 2000, the design consisted only of the two skyways. The feasibility study concluded that the design of those structures would could support light rail, but only if the inside lanes were sacrificed. The outside lanes would have been preferable in terms of tunnel construction at Yerba Buena. Modifications to add light rail tracks were estimated at $546 million, provided the design changes were made before breaking ground.

All told, MTC study estimated a cost north of $3 billion just to get entire bridge and its approaches ready for two tracks of light rail plus five active road lanes in each direction. This was considered far too expensive at the time, so all rail services were dropped from consideration. The self-supporting suspension span that was added to the new east span at a later date for aesthetic reasons was probably not designed to support light rail.

For reference, the axle load of the latest generation of European bullet trains is below 17 metric tons. That's not much higher than the maximum permitted load on the rear axles of an eighteen-wheel heavy duty truck, 34,000 lbs (15.4 metric tons). In terms of weight per linear foot of track, a measure relevant for bridge loads, the FRA-compliant Acela Express comes in at a hefty 1800 lbs/ft. However, a fully decked out Alstom AGV comes in at 1370 lbs/ft, a shade below light rail at 1390 lbs/ft!

Competitive HSR products are at similar or slightly higher values, BART at lower ones. That suggests running either BART or HSR trains across the Bay Bridge just might well have been possible at reasonable cost, provided that road lanes had been sacrificed for the purpose. Otherwise, it would make more sense to build a second transbay tube one day, e.g. under Oakland harbor via Point Alameda.

Unfortunately, with the construction of the east span and the seismic retrofit of the western approach already underway and, the Transbay Terminal project set to break ground, it seems highly unlikely that bullet trains will ever cross the Bay Bridge.

Detailing the Kerry HSR Bill

Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic offered an in-depth look at John Kerry's HSR bill yesterday and it's a must-read. (Especially since I haven't had the time to go through it myself).

Some of the key parts of the bill:

If passed, the bill would create an “Office of High-Speed Passenger Rail” (we’ll call it OHSR here) which would operate within the Federal Railroad Administration. This would dramatically alter the priorities of the FRA, whose principal focus in recent years has been on improving the freight rail system in the United States. One wonders if FRA’s “safety” precautions, which require passenger rail trains in the United States to be far heavier than similar vehicles in the rest of the world, will be slowly phased out as the FRA’s mission is repositioned towards high-speed rail. Such a change, which would mean great monetary savings for rail operators around the nation in equipment purchases, might be necessary if a true HSR program is to be implemented.

That seems like a good move, giving HSR its own institutional position within the FRA (and the DOT itself) and as Yonah notes, this could also help finally change the FRA's outdated train weight rules.

This is the fundamental point: OHSR would not be the implementing agency, buiding the high-speed rail system. Rather, OHSR would simply distribute funds to other unnamed organizations (presumably mostly state governments, though Amtrak, which owns most of the Northeast Corridor, could also apply for funding). This means that Kerry’s bill, unlike the interstate highway system, does not establish a set group of priority corridors to finance. Rather, the bill necessitates that state and private actors work together to make HSR projects happen.

What this means is that under Kerry's vision there isn't going to be a national HSR plan, but that it will be left largely to the states to produce an HSR network with some federal support. That's a recognition of the status quo and likely of political reality - this approach lets more members of Congress believe that their states could get some of this money, whereas a top-down priority list might exclude more states at the outset.

In terms of money:

In a five-year period, the bill would authorize the following:

* $8 billion in tax-exempt bonds to qualified high-speed rail programs
* $10 billion in tax-credit bonds to “super high-speed” rail programs (we’ll get to this in a minute)
* $5.4 billion in tax-credit bonds to other high-speed rail prgrams

This would mean that the bill would produce a total of around $5 billion a year to be spent on high-speed rail infrastructure improvement. Most of that money would go to California in the initial years, which will need a lot of federal help to make its HSR program a reality.

As Yonah notes this would provide enough funding for our own project - IF the bill is renewed in 2014. That's a big if, given that we don't know what the political landscape will look like five or six years from now. Of course we'll likely be well into the construction phase by that point, and it's harder to kill a spending program once it's in place than to kill it at the proposal stage. States that have used the OHSR funds to start HSR projects will not look kindly on Congress or the White House refusing to renew their funding.

Still, I do wish that Kerry had been more ambitious with his numbers. Better to provide more money at the outset and then if you have to scale back the numbers in 2014 to please Republicans then you could still wind up authorizing exactly the same amount of money over 10 years that you've planned all along by having front-loaded it.

Overall this looks like it would meet our needs in California, though infrastructure stimulus would also be helpful. Kerry's bill would for the first time create funds for high speed rail and provide the kickstart that this country needs. We are going to need to ensure that we get a significant chunk of this money, especially since most of Kerry's cosponsors are from Northeast Corridor states.

Yonah offers some more commentary on the details of the bill, including how it defines "high speed" and "super high speed" rail, but I wanted to cut to the chase and discuss his conclusions about the bill:

The most important question, however, doesn’t relate to the amount of funding. Rather, we question whether the decentralized mode of planning represented by this bill makes sense. HSR is by definition an intercity service, and that would usually mean crossing state lines in the United States. If the planning is done on the state level, however, how can we ensure a cohesiveness to the system? How can we ensure similar levels of quality and network coverage? Unless the OHSR plays a significant role in planning, and in pushing state authorities in the national, united direction it wants, this will become an increasingly large problem as the rail system develops.

These are very good questions. Does it suit our national needs to have basically multiple HSR systems around the nation, with different standards and different technologies? Kerry seems to acknowledge that it's going to be some time before we have a truly national HSR system, and for our purposes in California perhaps that's OK, given our geographic isolation from the rest of the country. But it does suggest that Kerry is thinking modestly here, and not looking to offer the kind of broader rail revolution many have rightly called for in this country. Given the total lack of federal support for HSR in the past, even Kerry's proposal is welcome. Still, we shouldn't stop here and should continue to advocate for a much bigger and broader commitment on the federal level to passenger rail.

HSR To Mexico?

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports this morning that San Diego officials want the HSR project to extend its route to the US/Mexico border instead of terminating as currently planned at the Santa Fe depot downtown:

Cindy Gompper-Graves, chief executive officer of the South County Economic Development Council, thinks running the rail to the border would have a positive ripple effect on the region and beyond.

“It's imperative to us that the train continue to South County and not just stop in San Diego,” Gompper-Graves said. “We see it as an engine for economic growth.”

Backers of a South Bay station, perhaps in the San Ysidro or Otay Mesa areas, say it would ease traffic and trade along one of the nation's busiest border crossings.

“Economically, it makes a lot of sense,” said Jim Janney, mayor of Imperial Beach.

Gompper-Graves favors connecting the system to a possible cross-border airport terminal and perhaps running it parallel to state routes 905 and 125.

Quentin Kopp is quoted in the article as being open to the concept, but doesn't want to add too many new stations - the current cap is 24. Obviously a border extension would require new planning efforts and identification of financial resources, and since the San Diego extension itself is still in drawing board stage, not scheduled to open until after 2020, there is time to work out the details.

At first glance this seems like an idea worth studying. The San Diego Trolley does currently serve South County and the border crossing - which is the busiest land crossing in the entire world - but can't bring the capacity that HSR trains could. The extension could boost HSR ridership not just on this segment but on the whole route. Several bus companies make a nice profit providing service from California cities to Tijuana, thousands of potential HSR riders. Cross-border commuters could also be a significant revenue base for the system.

That being said, does this segment have to be served by HSR? Or could it be served by a version of what Rafael has been calling "rapid rail" which might provide faster trains at a reduced cost?

And what would the route look like? One suggestion quoted above was to run the tracks parallel to the 905 and 125 out to the Otay Mesa crossing, which could help relieve San Ysidro and potentially help serve a cross-border airport to relieve Lindbergh Field.

There's a lot to consider here, especially as the San Diego route still has some overall uncertainties - especially since Caltrans has taken up a lot of the ROW along the I-15 corridor that the CHSRA was hoping to use for high speed trains.

Still, the concept is worth a further look, and probably worth an actual study. We shouldn't build a Tijuana extension just because we can, but if the routing is feasible, if the riders will be there, if we can find financing, and if it's made clear that only HSR can best serve this corridor, then we can revisit the concept in a few years' time.

Finally, it's great to see regions of the state looking at HSR and thinking about how it might help them grow and prosper.

Will It Be A Sustainable Stimulus?

Barack Obama released another entry in his 21st century version of the fireside chat yesterday, a YouTube video on economic stimulus. The key section:

"Second, we will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money."

The "roads and bridges" comment has generated criticism from across the transit blogs, including this excellent article from Trains for America. The Transport Politic believes that the signs remain good that "much of this money will in fact go to non-automobile-based transportation," citing Joe Biden's comments on Tuesday.

I'm not sure I agree, actually. What seems to be unfolding is a dual-track approach to infrastructure spending in DC: an economic stimulus that emphasizes immediate projects, many of which will be obsolete 20th century transportation like roads; and a long-term infrastructure investment package that will give a bigger boost to sustainable transportation like HSR. Biden said some good things at the National Governors Association meeting but that is being overshadowed by persistent reports that Obama wants to use the stimulus to fund projects that are ready to go within 180 days. His YouTube speech gives a lot of credence to that view.

A dual-track infrastructure approach strikes me as a fundamentally flawed way to handle the current crisis, especially if the first and more immediate track directs billions towards roads. That's exactly what we should NOT be doing with our stimulus money. Roads don't build long-term economic growth, unless we're planning to follow Robert Toll's insane advice and reinflate the housing bubble. The nation's bridges do need repair and that's fine, but we need new road capacity like we need a hole in the head.

Economic stimulus should meet two needs at once: produce immediate jobs and spending, and fuel long-term growth. FDR's New Deal projects did exactly that - the nation's nascent highway network needed a LOT of investment and improvement in 1933, from roads to bridges. The New Deal helped seed the economic boom of the 1950s in that way. They didn't sit around building canal towpaths.

Obama's stimulus must provide the basis for 21st century prosperity - and that means sustainable infrastructure projects need to be accelerated and funded so that they can get built. Electric rail meets the twin needs of any economic stimulus very well. It should be included, or even made the centerpiece, of an early 2009 stimulus plan.

I'm not concerned that Obama is backtracking on support for HSR. He is likely to embrace the Kerry HSR plan. But that plan isn't large enough to meet the nation's HSR needs.

More importantly, economic stimulus is a sure political winner. If HSR funds are enfolded within a stimulus package it becomes very difficult for Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats (Southern conservatives who generally do not support sustainable transportation) to block it.

For a candidate who campaigned on a theme of change, Obama is showing himself to be a maddeningly cautious politician who prefers to fall back on the old ways rather than embrace something new but sensible. Perhaps the criticisms of his perceived inexperience stung more than we thought. Even from a political perspective it makes sense to include HSR in an immediate stimulus bill - it not only demonstrates support for sustainable infrastructure, but it will provide greater political returns as the economic benefits roll in. Obama needs to not be thinking about his political position in summer 2009 but in summer 2012. The medium-term view would suggest that a nation at work on sustainable infrastructure is a political winner for Obama, and when the projects are completed and provide the foundation for 21st century prosperity the way the New Deal infrastructure projects did in the 20th century, Obama's party would reap the lasting benefits.

There is very little to be gained, and a great deal to be lost, by returning to a failed 20th century model. As Logan Nash at Trains For America wrote:

But in talking to people in both Tennessee and Minnesota, I’ve come to believe that people are fundamentally interested in passenger rail. They’d like to be able to get out of their cars every once in a while, but they just don’t think it’s convenient as it stands now. They’re also concerned about the massive monetary investment rail requires. But of course, we’re already spending $700 billion, why not put some of that towards a system that can improve quality of life, spur commercial development, and help our environment?

Barack Obama and Joe Biden are exactly the people who could raise these points, who can make a case for investing in HSR, Amtrak, and transit. And they seem to want to. You can feel it bubbling under their well-practiced political veneer. Maybe that’s enough. A more well-rounded Secretary of Transportation and even a neutral administration would be a vast improvement. And if some of that “infrastructure” money is tagged for rail improvements, that’s good news even if it’s kept quiet. But much more progress could be made if our newly elected leaders would be bold enough to bring this topic to the foreground.

That progress will only be made if we organize to make it happen. It's time for transit activists online and offline to start getting involved and helping Americans demand that our political leaders provide sustainable, sensible stimulus.

CHSRA Board Meeting December 2008

Peter Nelson attended the California High Speed Rail Authority Board Meeting in San José on Wednesday and filed this report. The agenda is here and Peter has organized his report according to each item. Scroll down for some media files - an MP3 of the CHSRA lobbyist's report on federal funding prospects, and a PPT of the Work Program. My comments are in italics. Lots to chew over here!

Peter's report:

1-2, closed doors.

3. Approve Oct. Meeting Minutes - I noticed that at the meeting "Frank Guzzo from Siemens presented an overview of Siemens' progress in high-speed train technology." This sounds like it would have been an interesting presentation, but unfortunately the Authority does not seem to video tape their own meetings. It would be nice if they had something like SFGTV, where every single SF meeting is recorded and placed online. [Robert: Yes, this would be a very good way to encourage citizen engagement and continue to promote a culture of openness at the Authority.]

4. Something about compensation for meetings, I didn't listen.

5. Member's Reports - this was most of the patting themselves on the back. Really nothing of substance. There were also a bunch of people like the San Jose mayor and a Silicon Valley Leadership Group representative that gave generic reports / congratulations.

6. Executive Director's Report. This was the start of any actual substance.

• They decided they will produce an annual report to the legislature with the past year's progress. Very good idea, and kinda cool that they brought it up on their own without being told to do so. I assume like the other major filings this will appear online (after a few weeks delay).
  
  
• BNSF has indicated that they are open to negotiation and sharing of their Right of Way, unlike most other companies that own track.
  
  
• The executive director is in the process of negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding with Caltrain defining both sides rights/responsibilities. This is so that the shared Caltrain corridor is developed in a coherent fashion by a single joint entity. Along with Caltrain, it was explicitly mentioned that this would involve also talking with the Transbay Joint Powers Association to get to the Transbay Terminal. So despite the media reports, the Transbay Terminal is still their plan. [Robert: Yes, this was indeed always the plan. As we reported last month there are some turf wars going on between CHSRA and the TJPA, some of it over legitimate issues. But conversations continue to happen, which is very good.]
  
  
• The FRA has given a Record of Decision signing off on the SF/Bay Area EIR.
  
  
• All future meetings will be on the 1st Thursday of the month in Sacramento, so this looks to be the only meeting I'll be attending. [Robert: That's probably a sensible cost-savings move, although it would be good to have a few meetings in other locales around the state each year. I'm going to try and make as many of these meetings as possible. Yay for the Capitol Corridor!]

7. Cooperative Agreement with Caltrans. There was some argument about this agreement. The idea was basically to utilize some of their expertise in RoW acquisition and construction inspection, by contracting the work to them. One board member was quite against giving anything to Caltrans that could be done by a private firm, basically anything related to construction. The main concern though was if Caltrans could actually meet reasonable schedules to expedite the work. It was decided that the executive director would negotiate a contract with Caltrans and then bring it back to the board for approval.

8. Federal funding. Most of the meat managed to be within a single 5 minute presentation by one Mark Kadish, the CHSRA's lobbyist in Washington DC (used to be Dianne Feinstein's Chief of Staff). Click here for an MP3 of his presentation. He mentions a number of different funding sources that are being looked into:

• The Amtrak re-authorization bill with $1.5 billion in it.
  
  
• The new HSR bill Kerry introduced with billions in it.
  
  
• The economic stimulus package everyone is expecting to come into Washington with Obama that will be mostly transit related. Initial wording of the stimulus though is for things that can turn dirt within 180 days, which we are nowhere close to. He mentioned this horizon might be expanded, and they're looking to see if there's anything useful that could be done so quickly (I can't think of anything). [Robert: We'll see about this. There is a lot of momentum and support for a broader stimulus, especially given the likelihood that this recession is going to last a while. Still, this Congress is not known for its grasp of policy or forward thinking, so we will have to work hard to ensure HSR gets stimulus money.]
  
  
• Doing this as an annual appropriation is not realistic, we need to build it into the baseline.
  
  
• Build a coalition for a national program, not a 1-state HSR program. Need to get other states closer to the the CA level in both planning and funding. This will help us get the funding we want, by helping others.

[Robert: As you can hear in the clip, Kadish believes that striking while the iron is hot and ensuring that HSR is part of a stimulus package is key to getting this funded. This site will be part of a grassroots effort come January to ensure that happens.]

There also was a lot of talk about getting more early private investment and reviewing the state of the private investment workings, especially since Lehman Brothers is no more due to going bankrupt. Conclusion was to have a report at the next meeting.

9. Work Program update. Unfortunately this was the point that they broke for lunch and I left. Before leaving I managed to snag the PPT that was going to be presented, and it looks like it would have been an interesting update. Without any notes the PPT by itself is somewhat limited in usefulness, but I've attached it anyway. [Thanks for getting it Peter!]

So ends Peter's report.

Who Supported Prop 1A?

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) released a poll today that, among other subjects, asked voters why they voted as they did on Proposition 1A. The results are an interesting gauge of the reasons for public support for HSR, even if the questions are a bit general and lack the level of depth I'd prefer to see.

In an open-ended question, the top reason voters give for voting yes on the measure is their perception that high-speed rail is important to the future of California (37%). Those who voted yes also think high-speed rail will help fill California’s unmet transportation needs (16%), reduce traffic congestion (10%), and make travel more convenient (10%). Those who voted no are most likely to cite as reasons the state budget deficit or that the state cannot afford it (44%), or that the bond amount is too much (24%).

I'd like to see more detail on what they mean by "important to the future of California" - providing sustainable transit? Green jobs? Reduce carbon emissions? Save at the pump? Spur smart growth? Still, this result does indicate that our activism should continue to emphasize that HSR is important to our future - no matter which specific reason we give at any particular moment. I think we did a pretty good job of doing that during the campaign.

The poll did provide some information on other reasons for support, many of which revolve around improving the quality, speed, and convenience of transportation. It comes as no surprise that fiscal reasons played a big role in motivating the No voters. That should give us renewed purpose in ensuring that HSR is built as close to the budget estimates as possible, and that we are successful in getting federal funding.

The poll also showed some of the party splits:

Dems: 65% yes, 35% no
Reps: 34 y, 66 n
Independent: 52 y, 48 n

No surprise there. PPIC also attempted a generational breakdown, but given that 18-54 is so broad as to be meaningless, I'm not sure how much it tells us:

Age 18-54: 55 y, 45 n
55 and up: 49y, 51 n

The final margin of victory was 52.6% yes, 47.4% no, with almost exactly 625,000 votes separating the two. It's a significant margin of victory, but not a landslide either.

Going forward we need to continue to emphasize how important HSR is to our state's future - and why that is the case. We also need to drill down to the local level - show why HSR is important to specific cities and regions. The coming campaign for federal funding will provide an opportunity to do exactly that, sustaining the public support demonstrated last month and ensuring that Californians continue to embrace their high speed future.

Electric Stimuli

MSNBC has a syndicated article by the New York Times that President-elect Obama is crafting a $400-500 billion deficit spending plan. Of that, $150 billion - perhaps more - focused on creating green jobs over the next decade. BART is mentioned as one of many projects that may receive some federal funding.

The strategic focus appears to be more on reducing US exposure to crude oil than on increasing transportation capacity. We should therefore stress the following:

Electric trains can run on any source of primary energy. Their range is limited only by the size of the electrified rail network.

The California HSR system will rely exclusively on wind, hydro, geothermal and/or solar power. Electricity from biogas would be a fifth option. California is a major agricultural producer. For example, 20% of the nation's milk comes from this one state. Each cow produces ~100 lbs of manure per day. Left untreated, this decomposes, releasing methane - a powerful greenhouse gas - and an excess of nitrates that leach into runoff and can cause problems for fisheries downstream. Harnessing organic waste streams as energy resources is anything but sexy, but doing so solves multiple environmental problems at a stroke. Plus: where there's muck, there's brass.



(full screen version)

Biogas production is already common practice in a number of EU countries, especially in Germany, because the EU has mandated that small-scale producers like energy farmers must be permitted to feed their electricity into the national grids. Once you scale aggregate biogas production up far enough, it can become an integral component of an all-renewable virtual power plant:



Another point we should make is that electrified rail right of ways lend themselves to selling air rights to utility companies. The Japanese railways appear to be doing this already, though at least the line on the side appears to be a telephone wire rather than a power distribution conduit. The one high above the others does look like it might be for power distribution and appears to have been tacked on as an afterthought. I'd be surprised if it's a high voltage trunk line, perhaps an electrical engineer could chime in with a comment to help us interpret what the picture shows (click on image to see all of it):



In Taiwan, too, there are lines above the catenaries that may or may not be power distribution lines:



President-elect Obama wants to implement a modern, robust and intelligent national electricity grid for the US. The backbone could be high voltage DC lines for long-distance transmission between unsynchronized regional AC grids. Sharing pylons and generating cashflow from air rights could help freight railroads offset the high cost of electrification. A change in the property tax code for railroads could also promote combo solutions involving rail electrification and power distribution. Problems related to overhead catenaries on lines used by trains of double-stacked flatbed cars have reportedly been solved in India.

Note that HVDC is also preferred for underground and underwater power distribution lines because of low capacitive losses. This could be relevant for railway tunnels, especially those in wilderness areas. Environmentalists would almost complain loudly about utility pylons not integrated with rail electrification or at least, located immediately adjacent to the rail ROW.

As recently as this September, BNSF was revisiting electrification as a way to save cost because diesel prices had hit $5 a gallon. Prices have since come down sharply, but everyone expects them to go back up once the US - indeed, world - economy recovers from the present recession. California HSR should consider selling air rights as a way to bring renewable power from remote areas like the Mojave to population centers like LA and Orange county, later on to San Diego as well. SANDAG has been trying for years to obtain a permit to construct a new trunk line from Arizona through the Anza-Borrego desert. Combo solutions would therefore be especially interesting for any plans to link Phoenix or Las Vegas to the California HSR grid.

In short, all thing electric related to trains and rail infrastructure projects are likely to find favor in Congress for a while. Just don't touch the wires, please!

Going In Depth on the Peninsula

You may have noticed a new addition to the blogroll at right - the Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog. It's a fantastic site run by Clem, who lives on the Peninsula and is an expert on the Caltrain (and now HSR corridor). His blog provides some very detailed discussions of the HSR route between SF and San José and focuses on what needs to be done to build HSR the right way.

His posts offer some of the most informative commentary on the Peninsula segment that I've seen. For example, his San Bruno post pointed out a significant issue that will have to be addressed to make HSR trains run effectively:

One important consequence of this history is that San Bruno is left with one of the sharpest curves on the peninsula, where the cutoff formerly diverged from the old main line. The radius of the curve is 1800 feet (550 meters), giving it a maximum safe speed of about 70 mph (115 km/h). Caltrain has a speed limit of 60 mph at this location. Slowing down a high speed train from a peninsula cruise speed of 125 mph (200 km/h) to take the existing San Bruno curve would cost more than a minute, or over half a percent of the entire SF to LA running time. Considering how much investment is being made to shave seconds off run times for the entire system, a 1-minute penalty in San Bruno for a single curve should raise some red flags at the CHSRA.

Consider the "San Bruno Curve" a significant obstacle to HSR on the peninsula.

His Millbrae post from yesterday offers some excellent thoughts on how the flaws of the BART project mean that the Millbrae station is going to have to be significantly reengineered for HSR and Caltrain to be effective:

Plans for the Millbrae HSR station, described in the CHSRA's environmental impact documents, call for four tracks to pass through, with two outside platforms.

Unfortunately, the incompetent design of the existing Millbrae station (opened in 2003 and billed as the largest multi-model station west of the Mississippi) has squandered much of the space available within the Caltrain right of way. Massive support columns for the expansive station mezzanine have been placed right where you'd want to run extra tracks, and a third platform track at the south end of the station (presumptuously built to terminate some Caltrain services, assuming everyone would want to ride BART into San Francisco) sits unused, with no possibility of continuing north through the station. The photo at right, taken in 2000 during construction, illustrates how a forest of concrete pillars now constrains the right of way.

The total lack of foresight in this design is breathtaking.

To make room for four tracks, the existing southbound platform and part of the mezzanine that it supports (including the ill-placed pillars) will have to be demolished and rebuilt a few dozen feet further to the west.

Clem is determined to make sure that HSR is built the right way along the Peninsula:

Let's finish on a positive note: to avoid becoming the boondoggle that proposition 1A opponents fear, the HSR project needs to be designed under the watchful eye of an independent panel of experts with local knowledge, and especially some TEETH to bite back at the agencies and contractors as required to keep them attuned to the public interest. Whether the provisions attached to Proposition 1A will provide for this remains to be seen.

I fully agree, and that's where these HSR blogs become so valuable. We have a lot of people here who are supportive of the concept and who understand the technical issues involved. WE can provide the oversight and public pressure to ensure that HSR becomes the success we all know it can and must be for our state.

When I started this blog back in March it was primarily to fill a void - there were a few sites that had HSR content but they weren't being updated often, and weren't providing the ongoing information and insight that was needed to ensure that Prop 1A would pass. I like to think this blog filled that need and will continue to do so over the next months and years. But if we're going to build this the right way, we need local writers and activists to get involved. Kudos to Clem for stepping up on the Peninsula.

Densha de Go!

A little light fare from me for a change.

The video below is the intro from a popular shinkansen simulator for various game platforms. Afaik, the series is only available in Japan, but perhaps one of you hardcore fans has had a chance to play with this. 2020 seems like an awfully long time to wait for HSR in California, doesn't it? This gives Wiiiiii a whole new meaning!



Disclaimer: I don't have any ties to Taito, I just stumbled upon this and thought I'd share it with you.

Biden Calls for Rail Investment

At today's National Governor's Association meeting Joe Biden took the chance to call for investment in high speed rail as both economic stimulus and environmental action. Video thanks to Matt Yglesias and Think Progress:

There’s a reason when you turned on the olympics to watch them this past summer, you saw mag-lev trains going over 200 miles an hour in supposedly a third world country [i.e., China] in terms of its economy, blowing into town, dealing with environmental problems they have as well as transporting people in a way that we don’t even come close to being able to do. And as Barack has pointed out, and Jon Corzine knows, I may have a bit of a pro-rail bias. I think think of the jobs we can create in both construction and innovation if we make similarly bold investments here in the United States as well as the environmental payoff that flows from that kind of investment.

We should fast-track funding for the thousands of ready-to-go projects across the country that can quickly put people back to work and lay the foundation for long-term growth.

In the longer term, we are calling for the creation of a new National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will help us make the investments we need to build a 21st century transportation system – while creating jobs and taking the politics out of infrastructure spending. And it has the added benefit of making American business more competitive in the world.

Biden - or Vice President for SUPERTRAIN as Atrios calls him - is playing exactly the role we expected he would, an influential voice for high speed rail projects. Even though he does not have a formal policy role he has an important role in shaping the debate over the place of rail in our country's economic and transportation policy. Biden's remarks were carried live by CNN and are getting a lot of interest on the blogs, which can drive more coverage.

It would be wonderful if Biden had some influence over Obama's transportation appointments. But what's even more likely is Biden playing a major role in shepherding Obama's stimulus package through the Senate, which will hopefully include "fast track funding" for rail projects of the kind Biden described.

In any case, the Obama/Biden administration is already looking great for high speed rail. It's going to be up to us to make sure Congress comes through in 2009.

PS: BruceMcF has a great post at Daily Kos about coast to coast electric rail, riffing off of Rafael's Rapid Rail post from the weekend and Biden's comments today. Bruce's post is not about HSR per se - that's coming in a future article - but it is a good overview of how a tiered and electrified rail system could be rolled out on a nationwide basis. Worth the read.

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor has some more details on the NGA meeting and high speed rail:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) noted that his state already pledged $42 billion of state money in 2006 to rebuild roads, bridges, and highways, as well as to build a high-speed rail system.

"We hope that is an inspiration to the federal government and the Obama administration to do the same thing nationwide," he said. The California Legislature "also [just] approved an additional $10 million in high-speed rail, which I think is another important thing, because I think there's no reason we in America should be traveling at the same speed as we did 100 years ago."

Obviously the "$10 million" figure is either a misquote or a flub from the Governator. Of far more significance was Chief of Staff-to-be Rahm Emanuel's comments on HSR and infrastructure spending:

In talking with reporters after the meeting, Obama's pick for chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that some of the infrastructure projects under discuss involve advances in technology. "Some [governors] talked about what I would call the infrastructure for a 21st-century economy: medical [information technology], broadband. A lot of the infrastructure was around green technology, some on ... high-speed rail [and] mass transit," Mr. Emanuel said, according to a pool report.

Of course, Emanuel did not explicitly commit to helping fund HSR. But he clearly understands that it's high on the agenda and its inclusion in his list along with other goals Obama has already committed to is a very positive sign.

"All Of A Sudden We're Popular"

Last week the Fresno Bee had a good overview of the funding issues our high speed rail project still faces. The article includes some good details that we haven't discussed before:

Three days after the election, the authority published an update of its 8-year-old business plan. It estimated construction costs at $23.5 billion in 2008 dollars, plus $3.2 billion to $4 billion for trains and about $6.1 billion for design work, rights of way and other expenses.

Besides the $9 billion authorized by Proposition 1A and the hoped-for $12 billion to $16 billion in federal funds, the authority also is counting on $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion from pension funds and other investors, plus $2 billion to $3 billion from local governments along the route.

If it all comes together, the plan says, the authority will be ready for final design and construction in 2012, a little more than three years from now. But that's a big if.

This is the first mention of pension funds, but they are an intriguing and I would argue sensible source of money for the project. The stock market crash has hurt some of the larger public funds, like Cal-PERS, and it makes sense that they'd want a more stable long-term investment. It's worth keeping in mind that it's not anticipated that pension funds would make up even half of the $7 billion or so from private investors, and that the California High Speed Rail Authority has letters of interest from over 40 large investors.

As the US looks to recover from what is already the longest recession in over 25 years sustainable infrastructure projects will be a major part of future growth. It makes sense to use HSR as a 21st century version of the Depression-era projects that did so much to put California back to work. Private investors will find security in our project that has been lacking elsewhere in the economic landscape.

And of course economic stimulus is a major reason why we can expect to see some considerable coin coming out of Congress for HSR in the next year. As the Fresno Bee points out, though, we're not the only ones in line:

An Amtrak reauthorization bill that President George W. Bush signed in October puts the state in competition with 10 other potential high-speed rail corridors for a pool of money currently limited to a modest $1.5 billion. The Washington-to-Boston corridor -- home to Amtrak's Acela, a sort-of-high-speed train that tops out at 150 mph -- is at the front of the line.

California is fighting for second place with nine others, including virtually all of the nation's population centers from Florida to the Pacific Northwest.

That $1.5 billion is the first drips from the faucet - John Kerry is proposing a much larger package for the 2009 session. Still, the Northeast Corridor has powerful allies. There are at least sixteen Senators representing the eight NEC states from Massachusetts to Maryland (damn seventeenth century borders!) as compared to just two from California.

However, California is in a VERY strong political position with San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer wielding significant power in the US Senate. Jim Costa, a member of the House of Representatives from Fresno and the author of the 1998 bill creating the High Speed Rail Authority while a state legislator, is confident that we'll get federal money:

Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, a current San Joaquin Valley congressman and longtime high-speed rail advocate, predicts that any federal help will come in several chunks.

Besides the Amtrak bill, Costa said, funds could come from other legislation on surface transportation and climate change as well as an economic stimulus bill intended to relieve the recent credit crunch and recession.

Lynn Schenk, a CHSRA board member, was also quoted as saying that our possession of state matching funds will put us in a very good position when lobbying Congress - outside the NEC no other state has matching funds for an HSR project (though some states, like Washington, have funds to upgrade existing tracks to reach higher speeds).

The upshot is that California has an opportunity to get HSR funded in 2009. I would prefer that the federal funds come all at once, but Costa is probably right that chunks are more likely. I just hope that doesn't mean we get hung out to dry if control of the federal government shifts in 2012 or later. My own view is that a maximalist strategy is best - we should lobby Congress to contribute the entire federal match at once, and be willing to accept a smaller amount if necessary.

The article also discussed where the first section of HSR track will go:

At some future date, [the Authority] will begin construction on the first section of track, extending about 160 miles from Merced to Bakersfield.

The longest, flattest stretch of the proposed route, that segment is intended for use in testing trains at their maximum speed so that their use can be approved by federal regulators.

Along with expected upgrades to the urban Bay Area and SoCal portions of the route, this suggests that the final pieces are also going to be the most difficult - Pacheco Pass and the Tehachapis. The tunneling work alone will take years, but once completed it should mean that the entire first phase will be open. 2018 is still the ballpark date for SF-LA-Anaheim, and as Kopp pointed out in the article, the sooner we get moving the better.

We won the battle in California for high speed rail this year. Now we must prepare to do battle in the Congress. Our high speed rail project is exactly what this country needs in a recession like this. Let's make sure California gets the federal support we deserve.