California High Speed Rail Blog

Visit The New CAHSR Blog

2009-11-29T00:09:00.000-08:00

Our move to a new home is complete. Please visit us at the California High Speed Rail Blog - http://www.cahsrblog.com/ is the new URL. If you are reading this on RSS, http://www.cahsrblog.com/feed/ is the new feed. Please also update your bookmarks!

This site will remain as an archive of the site, though no new comments will be allowed, and no new posts will be put up here. Thanks to everyone for making this blog the leading source of information for the California High Speed Rail project since March 2008. On to the new home!

Why An HSR Design Competition Is An Excellent Idea

2009-11-28T08:50:00.000-08:00

One tried and true practice for designing projects with a great deal of public interest - and public controversy - is to hold a design competition. Many important public memorials have been designed this way, including the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and the World Trade Center Memorial in lower Manhattan.

Such competitions serve several purposes. They open the often contentious process of designing important yet potentially divisive projects to public scrutiny, enabling the public to participate in the selection process (therefore making them more invested in the project itself, instead of as bombthrowers from the sidelines). They also help people see what is possible and what is desirable in a particular project by having architects imagine new and interesting ways to design the project. Instead of an abstract concept or a feared design, like the "Berlin Wall" on the Peninsula, people can see something that interests them, inspires them, and gets them to see the project not as a threat but as a possibility for welcome change, an opportunity to do something new, interesting, useful, but that meets their own goals and desires.

It is in that vein that calls for an HSR design contest on the Peninsula are such a welcome development:

Joseph Bellomo has a simple proposal for the California High-Speed Rail Authority: Leave the design of the proposed high-speed rail to the world's brightest designers.

Bellomo, a Palo Alto architect whose projects emphasize modular construction, energy efficiency and sustainable design, laments that the design of the controversial 800-mile rail line has so far been dominated by teams of engineers, each working on a separate segment of the line.

So while other local architects, urban planners and concerned residents are busy lobbying the state for underground tunnels, Bellomo advocates a different approach for selecting the design of the proposed line -- an international design competition.

Last month, Bellomo sent a letter to the rail authority, the state agency charged with building the $45 billion rail line, proposing a two-tiered international competition in which architects and designers from around the world would send in proposed designs for the entire line. The proposals would be narrowed to three finalists whose ideas would be further developed.

"The only way to get good design, holistic design, is through competition," Bellomo said.

I'm not as convinced that we need a design competition for the entire route, but a design competition for some elements of the project, including the Peninsula Corridor, makes quite a lot of sense. It would help make the CHSRA seem like less of an outside invader and more of a facilitator of modern designs for a modern urban landscape, allowing residents and architects and planners to come together to present innovative designs appropriate to the location.

This is especially valuable on the Peninsula because the objections to HSR there are almost entirely aesthetic (though they're rooted in deeper issues of economic opportunity and a desire of some to protect what they have at the expense of others). The desire for a tunnel is driven by the conviction that an elevated structure designed by CHSRA will merely resemble a giant freeway. As we've shown before, above-grade HSR tracks can be built elegantly, blending well with their surrounding urban environment. A design competition can show ways to build HSR that meet both the operational criteria of the CHSRA and the other criteria of local HSR supporters. Such a design competition will never silence the hardcore HSR deniers, but that isn't the purpose here.

Bellomo isn't just calling for a design competition in the abstract. He is also offering his own idea, which you can find at his site (scroll down about halfway to find the HSR section). His proposal is for what he's calling a "solar corridor", an elevated track with a steel enclosure that holds photovoltaic solar panels. His Peninsula design leaves two Caltrain tracks at-grade, allowing for its electrification, and a either a single or double track in the elevated viaduct. In some ways this resembles Rafael's La Vitrine concept from back in March, though with important differences.

I can't say I'm sold on the Bellomo concept. And it's unclear whether the visual impact of the "ribs" would be embraced by the locals. Also left unstated is what happens to the at-grade tracks at existing grade crossings. But I am glad to see him giving some thought to how to implement HSR along the Peninsula.

His idea of an HSR design competition for selected segments of the route is a very wise idea. It won't solve everything, but it is worth embracing.

NOTE: Tonight's the night for the switch to the new blog. Take the chance to update your bookmarks. If you haven't already registered a username, please do so - it'll make your posting life much easier.

This site will remain as an archive, but comments will be closed as of tonight, 10PM Pacific. Unless of course something goes wrong in the transfer.

Thanksgiving Open Thread

2009-11-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

Enjoy your holiday, everyone!

I'm staying here in Monterey for the occasion, as I can't imagine a better place to spend a long weekend. But many Californians have taken to the crowded roads this week, an 8% increase over last Thanksgiving (on the roads, at least). I'm sure a lot of them could have used a high speed train option for their in-state travels.

Unsafe At Any Speed

2009-11-25T22:19:00.000-08:00

There are at least four families in Palo Alto who will be having a less joyous Thanksgiving this year - four families touched by the tragedy of suicide. This year, four teenagers have committed suicide by walking in front of Caltrain locomotives on the at-grade section of the tracks near Gunn High School.

Now, a group of Palo Alto parents are pushing a petition to demand Caltrain slow down to a 5 mph crawl between West Meadow and Charleston Road in Palo Alto:

We ask Caltrain to implement a schedule, effective immediately, of slowing all trains from West Meadow to Charleston to a speed of 5 MPH in order to prevent further suicides on the tracks in this area.

In preparing this request our research has turned up a number of facts that support this measure.

1. They will not go elsewhere. Research has shown that individuals bent on suicide at a hot spot will not simply move further down the tracks. See links.
2. If you restrict access to the ‘means’ you will reduce the number of incidents. It has been proven that even a small impediment at a suicide hot spot reduces the number of incidents at that spot. This is why we are also watching the tracks. We believe that this vigilance, in combination with slower trains will reduce the number of incidents and perhaps stop them.
3. In the case of a suicide hot spot the threshold for the individuals who may be considering suicide is lowered. This is especially true for teens . This means the existence of the hot spot and access to it is increasing the number of incidents.
4. Although teen suicide has many possible causes and there are many preventive measures we may take as a community, slowing the trains is a short term solution.

Although a train at 5mph may be no less deadly, we believe it will be less attractive while giving us the chance to clear the tracks and giving the driver time to stop.

Currently it takes the commuter trains less than a second to clear the crossing at 60mph. At 5mph this would increase to approximately 4 seconds, a negligible delay for drivers when compared with a human life.

Slower trains will reduce the allure of this area, allow time for track watchers to clear the tracks, and give Caltrain engineers the chance to stop the train if necessary. Most importantly, slower trains now will give us time as a community to work together in launching a multi factorial effort to curb teen depression and suicide over the long term.

Caltrain takes these suicides, and any other safety hazard along the tracks, extremely seriously. And it's hard to fault parents who want their kids to experience safe conditions.

That being said, you might as well stop the trains entirely if you're going to insist they crawl through at 5 mph. I don't know if this is a good short-term solution or not, but it is clearly not a long-term solution for either the parents, Gunn students, or Caltrain.

It's difficult for transit infrastructure to be designed in a way that can stop someone truly determined to kill themselves from doing so, as the Golden Gate Bridge and BART have discovered. That being said, this rash of suicides reminds us of the inherently dangerous nature of grade crossings where fast, heavy trains are operating. (Light rails and streetcars have potential issues - but then so does any other vehicle operated on the roads.)

Back in June this blog asked why the death toll of at-grade rail crossings was being excluded from the conversation about high speed rail on the Peninsula. The fact is that Caltrain on the Peninsula as it stands right now - at-grade through a densely populated urban area - is unsafe at any speed. A 5 mph slow order is no lasting solution to the problem of how to operate a modern passenger railroad safely through such a landscape.

Some may accuse me of "politicizing" the issue. But it has already been "politicized," long ago, by those who argue that their own property values and their own personal, idiosyncratic vision of urban aesthetics and what their community should "feel" like trumps the safety needs of the general population, including Gunn students.

"Politics" is the process by which individuals and groups make collective decisions, and how they weigh competing needs and desires. Right now in Palo Alto, there is a politics that prioritizes preserving the status quo over providing for safe, affordable, reliable, clean, and economically stimulating passenger rail. Whether the tracks go over or under the grade crossings, it is clear that the status quo for Caltrain and Palo Alto no longer works.

The community needs to come together to find a long-term solution to make the railroad as safe as possible, balancing that against the need for that railroad to continue operating at improved efficiency. They need to recognize that while there is no way to provide for perfect safety, some ideas, like grade separations, are such obvious parts of the solution that anyone who argues against them out of a desire to preserve their own pocketbook or their own sense of aesthetics should be, at best, questioned relentlessly about their priorities.

Tuesday Open Thread

2009-11-24T21:57:00.000-08:00

Some items as I get things squared away for the holiday weekend:

New York State politicians push for HSR - NY applied for $4.7 billion in stimulus funds to build 110mph rail from Niagara Falls to NYC. More about the plan here.

Florida's HSR stimulus application is somewhat contingent on the state funding commuter rail in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Orlando areas, at the behest of the USDOT. Florida legislators are moving to provide that funding, with a Tri-Rail funding shortfall being addressed and the long-discussed SunRail project might finally get a breakthrough in Tallahassee, but Republican opposition remains strong.

South Bend, Indiana is also angling for high speed rail service to Chicago.

Further evidence that there is a greater demand for HSR than the federal government has been able to satisfy so far. Given the need for further jobs stimulus, it would make sense for the White House and Congress to consider fully funding all $50 billion in HSR stimulus applications as a method of growing jobs in the near-term.

California Leaders Call for HSR Funding to Create Jobs

2009-11-23T13:54:00.001-08:00

This is a welcome letter:

In an effort to deal with California's spiraling unemployment rate, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the state's two senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, sent a letter Monday to President Obama urging funding of the state's high-speed rail project and improvements in its intercity rail service.

They urged Obama to fund the projects through federal stimulus funds, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"With unemployment in California reaching 12.5 percent – the highest unemployment rate in nearly 70 years – the impact of providing 130,000 construction-related jobs statewide cannot be understated," the letter said.

As talk ramps up of a "second stimulus" in the form of a job creation bill, and as the jobs crisis continues to worsen, high speed rail funding becomes all that much more important to California and the nation's economic recovery. California simply cannot have recovery without jobs in sustainable infrastructure, and we aren't going to have a long-lasting recovery if we don't start moving away from oil dependence. And the nation as a whole cannot have meaningful economic recovery if California, a major part of the national economy, is lagging behind and mired in high unemployment.

Given that over $50 billion in HSR funding applications were submitted to the FRA for only $8 billion in available funds - all of it for projects meeting the federal guidelines of being "shovel ready" by September 2012 - the Obama Administration and the Congress ought to strongly consider fully funding every HSR application as part of its job creation efforts. There's no reason states should be fighting against each other for that money, since many of the states applying have significant job creation needs of their own.

UPDATE: The complete letter:

November 23, 2009

The President
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

We write in strong support of California’s applications for high-speed and intercity rail funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). California has led the nation in its commitment to creating a statewide high-speed rail system.

Our state has been a leader and innovator in addressing environmental and transportation challenges on a national level. Last November, California voters approved nearly $9 billion in state bonds for high-speed rail construction, far outpacing other states’ efforts to secure local and state funding for these projects. California has completed design and planning for the nearly 800-mile system and made significant progress on the environmental review, making our state uniquely qualified to employ federal funding quickly.

California’s high-speed rail applications have broad support across the state, with backing from leading business, environmental and labor leaders. The California Chamber of Commerce, the Labor Federation of California and the Sierra Club have all endorsed California’s applications for funding. The success of California’s high-speed rail system is enormously important to our state. High-speed rail will help ease congestion and improve air quality. With unemployment in California reaching 12.5 percent – the highest unemployment rate in nearly 70 years – the impact of providing 130,000 construction-related jobs statewide cannot be understated.

We appreciate your attention to the needs of California and thank you for your commitment to this important issue. We stand ready to work with your administration in the coming years to ensure that high-speed rail has the resources necessary to continue to be a national priority.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
Dianne Feinstein
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Good framing, good letter. Kudos to all three for writing this.

Sunday Open Thread

2009-11-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

Busy Sunday for me, so please use this as an open thread for anything HSR related.

I do also want to give an update on the new site. I'd like to invite you all to come test the new California High Speed Rail Blog. Right now there's a test post, and a copy of yesterday's post on LA-SD scoping comments. Please take a look around and leave a comment about what you think, especially in terms of layout. I will be making the final switchover during the Thanksgiving break.

Some notes:

1. The header needs to be fixed. I have barely any CSS or PHP skills, and I need to find a way to move the search box into the menubar and render the header image in the CSS properly. Help on this would be greatly appreciated.

2. ALL posts and comments from this blog will be imported over to the new one. Until yesterday I had been keeping a running import of all posts and comments, but the most recent update import wound up duplicating all existing posts. So I decided that the easiest thing to do will be to import everything at once, during the upcoming long weekend. Nothing from this blog - not one post, not one comment - will be lost.

3. This site will be kept as an archive, but no new posts or comments will be made.

4. You may wish to register your username. I am not going to require people be registered to post, but I will prevent people from using "Anonymous" as a username. Pick something, even if it's a pseudonym.

5. Any unforeseen problems may result in delay of switchover.

CA4HSR Submits LA-SD Scoping Comments

2009-11-21T09:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the deadline to submit scoping comments to the California High Speed Rail Authority for the Los Angeles to San Diego project segment. Californians For High Speed Rail submitted the following comments to the CHSRA regarding the route and station choices. You can read the whole document here, and below I excerpt the main elements.

CA4HSR - Los Angeles to San Diego Scoping Comments

Note that the first part of the comment letter are planning guidelines that emphasize station locations should be considered with respect to walkability of surrounding area, opportunities for transit-oriented development (TOD), and easy connectivity to existing and planned mass transit. These principles guided the comments on stations and alignments.

Inland Empire

All corridors from LA to Riverside County should be studied, except Metrolink corridor from LAUS to Ontario Airport. City of Industry station should be considered for elimination - not a good site for TOD nor is it easily walkable for residents. Locate Ontario Airport HSR station adjacent to air terminal.

Continue to study stations in downtown San Bernardino (Santa Fe Depot) and downtown Riverside, due to surrounding population, TOD opportunities, transit connectivity.

Do not further study I-15 alignment/Corona Station due to lack of large urban centers, higher population along I-215 alignment. Do not further study March AFB station due to lack of walkable, dense, TOD opportunities.

San Diego

Study both Escondido options (city center and I-15). For I-15 alignment, however, move transit center and Sprinter station to I-15 adjacent location and promote TOD around it.

Do not further study or include station in University City along existing Rose Canyon rails. Consider University Towne Center station, and consider a bored tunnel under it to bypass Rose Canyon. However, also consider eliminating this station due to 24 station limit.

Consider new alignments to bring HSR from I-15 to I-5 corridor, including SR-56, SR-163 to SR-52, and SR-163 to I-8.

Qualcomm Stadium should only be studied if it is part of an alignment to downtown San Diego (Santa Fe Depot), significant TOD at Qualcomm Stadium, and elimination of possibility of sending trains to Tijuana via I-805. This would basically be another route to downtown, and downtown SD is the key in these comments.

Opposes ending HSR at airport terminal. Instead proposes "dual stations" - one at airport and one downtown (Santa Fe Depot); or just downtown SD without an airport stop.

How Will the FRA Decide?

2009-11-20T15:18:00.001-08:00

As we await the Federal Railroad Administration's decision on awarding the $8 billion in HSR stimulus funds, some observers are wondering how exactly the projects will be selected - and what the role of merit and politics will be. Over at Railway Age, editor William Vantuono suggests the FRA will be caught between those two considerations:

Let’s assume two things. First, Administrator Szabo has every intention of sticking to the letter of the law, and to the intent of the program, by awarding project grants based on merit. Second, any program involving government dollars is going to involve politics. That’s just the way it is. Anyone who doesn’t believe this needs a serious reality check.

In the case of HSR—actually, “HrSR” (“higher speed” rail, incremental improvements to existing freight rail corridors to enable 90-125 mph passenger trains)—the political game-playing will mostly come from the states. Case in point: A project in one Midwest state, we’re told, does not meet all the FRA’s criteria, in terms of project management, environmental and ridership studies, financial plan, technical score, etc. The state agency in charge of submitting the grant application asked the FRA for guidance. The FRA basically said, “You don’t meet the criteria; don’t submit the application.” We’re told, however, that this state’s Republican governor ordered the agency to submit the application anyway. Why? Because if it’s rejected, the governor can go to his constituents and claim that the Democrats running Washington won’t give his state the funds for a project that will create jobs.

Partisan politics as usual? Of course. Did you expect anything different?

There's much less doubt about whether California's HSR project meets the criteria - it clearly does, AND it has widespread political support from the Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Vice-President Joe Biden, and the California Congressional delegation which, after all, includes the Speaker of the House. It is certain that California will get a big chunk of the stimulus money.

But how big? That's where these issues of the merit and politics of other HSR proposals will affect us in California. We submitted a $4.5 billion request, but can really only expect to get $3-$4 billion. Where we fall in that range will depend on how the FRA and the White House decide to allocate the rest of the money. If they feel the need to keep Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Florida happy (states that were key to Obama's 2008 victory and will be key to his 2012 reelection bid) then we may have to make do with $3 billion and not $4 billion. It's highly unlikely, of course, that they'll give it all to California.

As sources have described the FRA decision-making process to me, the FRA will determine which CA HSR projects get stimulus funding. It won't be a case of them giving us a set amount of money for us to use as we see fit. They may choose to fund the Central Valley test line (Merced-Fresno and Fresno-Bakersfield) and LA-Anaheim and not fund SF-San Jose. Which is actually what I expect will happen.

What I hope we avoid is a situation where CA gets less than $3 billion because Obama feels the need to shore up his position in some of those states I mentioned. Given the amount of stimulus money applied for - around $50 billion from 24 states - there will be the temptation to squeeze California. Especially since it's easy for those other 23 states to whine about California hogging all the money.

Sustainable Menlo Park Speaker Series

2009-11-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

By Bianca

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

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Obstacle to HSR in California

2009-11-18T20:11:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Reality Check Must Be Grounded In Reality

2009-11-17T17:26:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HSR Should Go Where the People Are

2009-11-16T20:00:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting again from the CHSRA route FAQ:

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

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

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

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

Reminder by Rafael:

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

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

Sunday Open Thread - From San Diego

2009-11-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday - been busy all day with the California Democratic Party's Executive Board Meeting here in sunny, beautiful San Diego. Some news from the southwestern corner of the nation:

I had the chance to interview Janice Hahn, LA City Council member and candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 2010. We'll have the video up on a Calitics soon. One thing I asked her about was high speed rail - she's shown strong support for HSR recently, and I asked her if she'd be willing to be a statewide advocate for HSR should she be elected, since we seem to lack such an advocate right now. "Absolutely," she said, and proceeded to make a strong case for why California needs HSR.

Daniel Krause and I took a quick scoping tour of the proposed HSR route in San Diego, from the Santa Fe Depot north to Rose Canyon and University Towne Center. It seemed clear to us that a downtown station would be the best location for an SD station. Downtown San Diego has become a major regional destination, has a lot of density, and is well-served by the existing mass transit (San Diego Trolley). An airport station, which has a lot of local momentum, would be much less effective from the perspective of potential riders and certainly from the perspective of linking HSR to urban densification (which downtown SD has accomplished quite well). We also took a look at Rose Canyon, where CHSRA proposes an at-grade implementation. BNSF still uses this route for freight service, so track-sharing is an issue. Adding new tracks would mean encroachment on Rose Creek, which is what worries locals. Finally, we drove up to University Towne Center mall, which is an awful TOD location and doesn't seem like a good place for an HSR station. A possible alternative to Rose Canyon is possible though via a tunnel under UTC, along Nobel, and then south along I-5.

Scoping comments for the LA-SD route are due Friday, November 20th. From Dan Krause:

It appears that most folks making comments support a downtown San Diego station. Unfortunately, the political momentum in the San Diego area is to eliminate the downtown station in favor of an airport station. While I think there is merit considering a scenario where there would be both a downtown and airport station, it is absolutely necessary for the downtown station to happen for a successful project segment.

Comments are due for the scoping for the LA-SD section of the project-level eir-eis on Friday November 20th. Please consider sending a note to the following address and let them know a downtown San Diego needs to be preserved.

Mr. Dan Leavitt, Deputy Director
California High Speed Rail Authority
Attn: Los Angeles to San Diego via the Inland Empire Section EIR/EIS
925 L Street, Suite 1425
Sacramento, CA 95814
comments@hsr.ca.gov

Feel free to use this as an open thread for anything HSR-related, whether it involves San Diego or not.

Don't Let Arnold Schwarzenegger Divide and Conquer

2009-11-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

One of the consistent points this blog has made since we launched in March 2008 is that HSR is part of an overall effort to revive passenger rail in California. HSR isn't a substitute for other forms of local rail - in some places, like the Peninsula and Southern California, it enhances local rail by enabling more and faster service on commuter lines such as Caltrain and Metrolink. Prop 1A recognized the need for a linked system by offering about $1 billion for non-HSR passenger rail in the state. And this site cheered on ballot initiatives for other local passenger rail projects, including Measure R in LA County and the authorization of funds for SMART in Sonoma-Marin.

Unfortunately, these are challenging times for sustainable mass transit advocates. The recession has been accompanied by a revival of Hooverism at both the state and federal levels. In 2009 California eliminated state spending on local mass transit, and has put on hold the issuance of bonds from Prop 1B in 2006, which includes money to improve existing passenger rail systems. The federal government has been a bit more friendly to transit, but the authorization of a new transportation bill that would provide stable funding for passenger rail of all kinds has been stalled all year and may not be approved until sometime in 2010 (if we're lucky).

This is an environment where mass transit advocates, especially passenger rail advocates, need to stick together and advocate for more funding for rail as a whole, with specific funding to local, regional, intercity, and HSR projects as appropriate. We need to advocate for a holistic plan, instead of doing what the Hooverites want us to do, which is fight over the scraps.

That coalitional approach is not made any easier by the actions of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The LA Times got around to reporting the controversy over the state's singular focus on HSR funds in its federal stimulus application, to the exclusion of other passenger rail:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger quietly spiked an effort last month to win $1.1 billion in federal high-speed rail stimulus funds for 29 projects to improve the safety, speed and capacity of heavily traveled commuter corridors through Southern California.

Instead, he ordered state officials to seek money for only one project -- the proposed bullet train between San Francisco and San Diego.

The governor's decision was intended to increase the state's chances of receiving high-speed rail money, officials said. California is competing with more than 40 applicants from 23 other states.

Richard Tolmach, one of the state's main HSR deniers, has been peddling this story for weeks and apparently finally got someone to bite. He wants to frame this as further evidence that HSR is bad, should be opposed, and is a threat to other passenger rail in the state. And yet, there is logic in what Arnold did. With over $50 billion in stimulus applications submitted this month, and only $8 billion to go around, California was going to have to pick and choose among a number of worthy proposals. There was no way around it. And even if you disagree with the outcome, it cannot be denied that it does make sense for the state to have focused on the high-profile HSR project, which after all has received glowing praise from the very federal officials who are tasked with distributing these funds.

Even if all $1.1 billion in non-HSR funds were applied for, it is extremely unlikely that much of it would have ever been awarded by the feds. Federal officials have sold this as a high speed rail stimulus, so there would have been risk if they awarded that money to non-HSR projects like those along the Pacific Surfliner corridor.

There is also a legitimate argument to be made that even with the above in mind, since HSR won't be complete for another decade, there was benefit to applying to provide more immediate improvements to existing passenger rail systems. I get that, and appreciate that thinking. There's no doubt that California's existing intercity rail corridors need more investment.

But the decision to not pursue that investment in this particular round of funding is by no means a death knell for those efforts. The article explains some other options for providing funding for Metrolink Positive Train Control, one of the projects Arnold chose not to include in the stimulus application:

However, Richard Katz, a former assemblyman who sits on the Metrolink, high-speed rail and Metropolitan Transportation Authority boards, was more optimistic that conventional rail projects, such as positive train control, would not be jeopardized by the governor's concentration on high-speed rail.

For example, Katz said, Metrolink, which serves six counties, needs roughly $200 million to $210 million to install positive train control by 2012.

About $70 million has been requested from other federal sources, and efforts are underway to try to redirect $97 million from state transportation bonds that are earmarked to rebuild the Colton railroad crossing.

If positive train control cannot get enough federal or state funding, Katz said he believes the MTA would lend Metrolink the money.

As to the more ambitious - and necessary - projects to include more grade separations and new tracks along the Surfliner corridor, their future funding sources are less obvious. But that should not mean backers ought to turn their fire on the CHSRA, which did what any other agency would do and argue they should get funded first.

This is a crucial moment for passenger rail advocates in California. Either we can let Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has never been a friend to rail, divide us and weaken passenger rail - or we can unite and push hard for renewed funding for these other worthy projects. Here are four ways we can get started:

One obvious place to begin is the federal transportation bill. There is no reason it should remain stalled in Congress. If Democrats lose Senate seats in 2010, as is projected right now, then it is not possible to push through a new transportation bill that would properly fund passenger rail. All hands will need to be on deck for that one.

Advocates should also join the push for $4 billion in HSR funding in the FY 2010 budget. This would create a precedent for ongoing HSR funding at that level, creating less pressure on California government to try and get their HSR money from other rail projects.

Passenger rail activists also need to get active in the push for a second federal stimulus. Although Obama Administration officials have dismissed such talk, it is only continuing to grow as unemployment continues to rise. Infrastructure is always a popular target of stimulus spending, and given how many states submitted passenger rail stimulus applications, it's clear there is an appetite out there for more money than what the feds have offered so far.

We also need to fight back against the steady defunding of mass transit, including passenger rail, at the state level. All forms of passenger rail - streetcars, light rail, commuter rail, Amtrak California, and high speed rail - are necessary to meet California's 21st century challenges. Given our state's financial crisis, it may seem like a tall order to find new sources of funding for these projects. But it is imperative that we do so.

Folks like Richard Tolmach are happy to exploit the lack of proper funding to attack high speed rail and ensure that passenger rail in California remains a moderately successful but niche element of our state's transportation network. And given that HSR is necessary to Caltrain's survival, Tolmach's approach would jeopardize even the existing services we have.

We should not play his game. Nor should we play Arnold Schwarzenegger's game. Passenger rail advocates need to avoid the temptation to fall out over modal preferences, and instead unite to grow the pie, rather than fight over who gets to eat the ever-smaller slices.

Someone Has To Be First

2009-11-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

This week's issue of the Sacramento News & Review includes an article discussing Sacramento's frustration at not being included in Phase I of the HSR project:

Even though the state’s high-speed rail system is slated to begin construction in about two years, it may not reach Sacramento for another 20 years, and even that isn’t certain. The Capitol Corridor line is one of the most heavily used conventional passenger rail lines in the country, but when it comes to high-speed rail, Sacramento is being treated like a backwater

First off, this is nonsense. Sacramento isn't being treated like a "backwater" - they're part of the planning process and are scheduled to be included in Phase II. There are a LOT of communities in California that aren't slated to get HSR service at all, from my own town of Monterey to Oakland to Redding to Santa Barbara to Palm Springs. The article is unfortunately taking the fact that someone else goes first to make it look like once again, poor old Sacramento is getting slighted. City officials are making similar comments:

That has chafed a few Sacramento leaders. Back in March, Mayor Kevin Johnson told The Sacramento Bee that he was “disappointed” at Sacramento’s second-tier status.

“I’m very interested in how we can expedite Sacramento being a part of the high-speed train,” Johnson said Tuesday. “We want to be a part of that first leg.”

I'm all for expediting the link to Sacramento. But the fact is, someone is going to get the HSR line first, and that means someone else won't. In this case, Sacramento is in the second tier behind the higher priority (more people, more riders, virtually no existing direct train service) route from SF to LA. It would be one thing if Sacramento were being left out entirely from the HSR project. But they're not. If they suddenly witnessed a population boom that gave them more people than the Bay Area or LA, I might say they had a case for moving up in the queue. Right now though, they don't. That's nothing personal. Strictly business.

Moreover, Prop 1A includes hundreds of millions in funds for the existing and popular passenger rail route connecting SF to Sacramento, the Capitol Corridor:

Even if Sacramento ends up being the last community in California to get high-speed rail, it might benefit from Prop. 1A sooner. The initiative included $950 million for upgrading conventional rail projects around the state. The idea is to beef up the local feeder systems for the eventual build-out of high-speed rail. Sacramento’s Capitol Corridor could attract a big chunk of that money in order to add additional track, to completely separate freight and passenger operations along the corridor, and to increase speeds for the commuter trains.

Dickinson noted that a rail trip to the Bay Area now takes about an hour and 40 minutes, a bit longer than driving. “But if we can take off 15 or 20 minutes, the train then becomes an extremely attractive alternative,” said Dickinson.

In fact, the Capitol Corridor is already programmed to receive a significant portion of that money. They were also programmed to get new train cars out of the 2006 transportation bond, Prop 1B, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance delayed that (the delays are over, but the new cars still haven't been ordered, through no fault of the Capitol Corridor). Improving the Capitol Corridor would give Sacramento a significant interim boost while they await the construction of their connection to the HSR "spine" at Merced.

So it's not clear that the situation is as dire as the SN&R would have readers believe. HSR is on its way to Sacramento, as is improved passenger rail service. In January the project-level scoping work will commence and locals will get a chance to weigh in on route and structures. In the meantime, locals are advocating for a Sacramento person to be given a seat on the CHSRA board:

Along with lining up its ducks, Sacramento could use a little political muscle to advance its interests. Cohn noted that the High Speed Rail Authority board, with nine members, is mostly composed of people from Southern California and the Bay Area. The one Central Valley representative, Fran Florez, is from the Bakersfield region—which is due to be connected on the first leg of the system.

“Not one of those board members is from Sacramento,” Cohn said. He suggested that Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg could appoint a Sacramentan when a seat opens up.

For example, board member Lynn Schenk is still serving on the board, even though her term is expired. Board rules allow members to stay until their replacement is chosen. Schenk is the governor’s appointee, but Steinberg could suggest a candidate for the governor’s consideration.

“Between the governor and Sen. Steinberg, who knows?” Cohn said. “But we need to be represented.”

I think finding a Sacramentan for the CHSRA board is a reasonable thing to do. Of course, Schenk is from San Diego, so it doesn't quite make sense to leave the other city to be served in Phase II unrepresented in order to give something to Sacramento. Surely there can be some way to resolve that matter.

San Diego Group Opposes UCSD/Downtown SD HSR Alignment

2009-11-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

While the Peninsula NIMBYs tend to get the most attention from HSR advocates, the fact is that there are NIMBYs across California. It's not a phenomenon unique to the Bay Area. The NIMBYism we're seeing on the Peninsula is generated by a desire among those who benefited from the late 20th century model of land use to preserve that model, to oppose anything that might conceivably threaten or change that model. Despite the fact that such changes are absolutely necessary to produce economic recovery, energy independence, and environmental and climate security, for a certain segment of Californians those imperatives are less important than protecting what they've already got, exactly as it currently is.

High speed trains particularly suffer from this problem. Late 20th century California saw trains as an anachronism, and the worldview of most NIMBYs simply has no place for them. They live in an automobile world, where the idea of using high speed trains to grow city centers as denser and bigger population and job centers is fanciful. Wedded to a 20th century model of land use, they have no investment in 21st century technology. In fact, they see such technologies as an inherent threat to their worldview, and so they instinctively oppose their construction in their neighborhoods, convinced against all evidence that the way we do things right now is not only good, but can be preserved indefinitely.

Since that worldview is shared across California, it makes sense that we're going to encounter NIMBYism along much of the HSR route, no matter where it goes. And that makes it imperative that we not give in to such NIMBYism, rooted as it is in an irrational but deeply held defense of a status quo that has already failed for most Californians. Sending high speed trains to city centers, instead of stopping short of those centers, is an essential part of not just the system's overall viability, but in the project to rebuild the California Dream and provide broader economic prosperity for more people.

That's some necessary background for assessing new developments down in San Diego, where several neighborhood activists and elected officials are proposing a new but inferior alignment for HSR in the city. Instead of the line jogging westward toward UCSD and turning south to serve downtown San Diego and Lindbergh Field, they propose sending it all the way down Interstate 15 to a terminus at a football stadium:

The Interstate 15 corridor between Mira Mesa and Qualcomm Stadium would be the preferred route for the southernmost leg of California's proposed $40 billion high-speed train network, not a path that would take it through University City, a coalition of San Diego-area elected officials said today.

"A straight line is the most efficient way to get between two points," San Diego City Councilwoman Sherri Lightner said. "The meandering path that is suggested at present does not achieve that."

This "straight line" argument is becoming more and more common, even though it is complete nonsense. High speed rail means indirect routes designed to serve more people are not only still much faster than any other form of transportation, save for the airplane (which NEVER flies a straight line from runway to runway), but are more efficient at moving people within and between metropolitan areas. The primary purpose of HSR is to move people, NOT to get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible. Good HSR design will find the right balance between the two, not sacrifice one for the other.

What Lightner calls a "meandering path" is actually a path that follows the population. Hardly anyone actually lives in Mission Valley, certainly not at Qualcomm Stadium. But a LOT of people live in University City, directly across Interstate 5 from UC San Diego. And even more people either live in, or want to visit, downtown San Diego, whether for business or pleasure. (Count me as one of those people - I'll be there this weekend.)

The CHSRA map makes this clear. Qualcomm Stadium is noted by the black Q I added, near the junction of Interstates 8 and 15:

More about their proposal:

Instead of following Interstate 5, the coalition called for more study of keeping the trains on Interstate 15, past Mira Mesa to Qualcomm Stadium. The trains would then follow Interstate 805 to Tijuana's Rodriguez International Airport.

The Interstate 15 to Qualcomm Stadium route was studied by the California High Speed Rail Authority, but was largely dismissed because it doesn't end up in downtown San Diego or link up with Lindbergh Field.

San Diego City Councilwoman Donna Frye said environmental and community concerns over the the proposed route through University City have not been adequately addressed.

"The Rail Authority map showing the Carroll Canyon and Miramar Road routes are imprecise," she said. "They offer little clue to their potential impact to Rose Canyon and other sensitive areas."

This is really unfortunate framing coming from Frye, who should have been elected mayor of San Diego in 2005. Either she's deliberately misleading the public, or simply doesn't understand how planning works. Of course the CHSRA map is imprecise - the entire purpose of the current scoping process is to get public input on what the specific route should be, and examine the impact on the canyon.

What Frye, Lightner and others are really saying is that they think HSR is going to disturb the existing land use patterns and aesthetics of University City, and they would prefer that not even be considered. Instead of finding a way to make HSR work, they basically propose dumping passengers in an empty parking lot. Sure, the Q has a trolley station, but downtown San Diego is the central hub of all of the SD Trolley lines:

What they propose is essentially forcing intercity travelers to transfer to light rail at the Q to make it to their downtown destinations. That's even more inferior and impractical than making people transfer to Caltrain at Diridon Station to continue the journey to downtown San Francisco. If you have luggage, you're screwed, and the extra time on a much slower light rail train would make the overall travel time from downtown LA to downtown SD much less desirable.

Further, you're giving up a huge number of riders who would be using the train to/from downtown SD, including the University City/UCSD stop - a part of the city of San Diego that currently has no passenger rail service.

The CHSRA dutifully said they welcomed the feedback and would look at the proposal. Which is what they ought to do. Hopefully they'll reach the same conclusion they did before, which is that the Qualcomm Stadium terminus is inferior and impractical.

In the meantime, let's hope more San Diegans get engaged in the process, letting their elected officials know they support a train that will serve populations where they already are, instead of empty parking lots.

UPDATE: Matthew Fedder posted in the comments a letter he wrote to Lightner and Frye, and I thought it worth excerpting here, as he makes the environmental case FOR the University City/downtown alignment:

The purpose of having stops in UTC and Downtown is to support transit-oriented development in San Diego. In other words, bring the transit conveyances to where people live. And there are no more dense centers of population in San Diego than UTC and Downtown.

The Qualcomm parking lot is a no-mans land, the poster-child for automobile-based, sprawl-oriented development, with only one trolley line to serve as an oil-free, environmentally friendly alternative to get San Diegans in, and visitors out. It also happens to be a parcel of land that is expected to be completely re-worked in the near future - a project which, ironically, Counceilor Frye has opposed on the basis of the additional car-trips it will add to Mission Valley. You think think that's bad? Imagine 48,000 boardings and de-boardings a day in a location with almost no connection to public transit.

Exactly. Dropping passengers in the Qualcomm parking lot would be a cruel joke, a sign that San Diego isn't willing to truly embrace sustainable transportation or smart growth principles.

Spoiling the Bunch

2009-11-10T09:23:00.000-08:00

One thing that's become clear since the passage of Prop 1A one year ago is that the project's opponents have learned from their defeat. Instead of launching a frontal assault on the concept of high speed rail, which a clear majority of Californians support, they've decided to focus on generating local opposition along the route in an effort to abuse the CEQA process to undermine the project. It's a Gulliver strategy - tie the giant down with dozens of little but potent attacks across the state and maybe, just maybe, you can kill it outright.

Much of this effort has involved a truly stunning amount of disinformation on the part of the HSR opponents. They have learned well how to use what Stephen Colbert aptly described as "truthiness" - where people see something as true because they "feel" it to be true, because a statement comports with their own inherent biases, even though it lacks basis in evidence.

Truthiness has been rampant on the Peninsula. HSR opponents like Martin Engel have been effective purveyors of misinformation, such as the idea that HSR would be some sort of "Berlin Wall" along the Peninsula (it won't), or that it will require mass demolition of housing along the Caltrain corridor (it won't), or that the CHSRA is determined to destroy communities (it isn't). Of course, it doesn't matter that there are no facts behind these claims, because to NIMBYs, these claims "feel" true. Anything that is perceived to alter the aesthetics of their community is seen as a threat. And Engel is very adept at playing on those sentiments.

One major element of their strategy is to paint the HSR project as some sort of Death Star aimed at the Peninsula, and to paint Quentin Kopp and Rod Diridon as the Emperor and Darth Vader. Both men have a long history on the Peninsula, and have been involved in their share of controversial projects, so in them Engel has found an easy target. If he can find ways to paint them as mean, out of touch, and unwilling to listen to public input, then he and other HSR opponents will have delegitimized the CHSRA and the HSR project. And that helps them gain ground in the local battles, where most residents want HSR but also want it to be built the right way. Engel doesn't want it built at all, so anything he can do to discredit the CHSRA helps pull more people away from the "sensible compromise" camp and into the "kill it!" camp.

That's the background to the latest controversy manufactured by Engel. At last week's CHSRA board meeting, Rod Diridon said he hoped Ogilvy, the CHSRA's new communications contractor, would do a better job fighting the widespread misinformation on the Peninsula. Engel decided to turn this valid criticism of both the Peninsula opponents and of the CHSRA's public outreach into something else entirely, as explained in the Palo Alto Daily Post:

[Diridon said:]"Misinformation is causing serious media relations problems in the mid-Peninsula -- Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto area especially. That misinformation coming
sometimes from inadvertently our own staff. But then again, it's being presented by opponents, blatantly providing false information to the media and then having no correction. No information being provided that would counter that misinformation and I think you related to that earlier.

Robert here: There is no doubt this is a true statement. Project opponents have been spreading lies and the media has fallen for it. This is a potent attack on the NIMBYs, which is why Engel wants to undermine it. Back to Diridon:

"So would you relate to those two examples, not those two specific cases but those examples as kind of in-the-weeds detail that you really need to be on immediately, so that it doesn't, the kind of thing are like a sore that festers, or the rotten apple in the barrel, if you would like to use another example. And you got to get that apple out of the barrel immediately and please figure out a way and let us know at some time in the future and call us individually or give us a report on how you would be creating kind of flying squads of emergency response to nip those problems in the bud.

"You want to avoid them if you can but if you can't avoid them you need to have a way of countering them immediately so that, misinformation isn't allowed to float around, it's corrected. So please consider that as early tasks."

Makes sense, right? Diridon here is merely explaining what has already happened on the Peninsula. One could use any number of other metaphors here - "poisoned the well," "spread like a cancer," anything to illustrate the point that the lies and distortions peddled by Martin Engel and others have spread on the Peninsula and threaten the project. It makes sense for Ogilvy to figure out how to respond to that misinformation. Nowhere in Diridon's statement did he say he wants to attack individuals - just the untruths they have spread.

Of course, Engel decided to continue making stuff up, and used this statement as his way to try and defuse the effort to counter the lies. In a move reminiscent of Sarah Palin's claim about "death panels," Engel spun this as Diridon having attacked himself:

When Diridon told an Ogilvy representative "you got to get the apple out of the barrel immediately," Engel interpreted that as an assignment for Ogilvy to silence high-speed rail dissidents.

Engel said, "Here is Diridon basically saying, 'Take car of these people. Their information needs to be corrected with our information. We need to shut them up because they are a pain.'"

There is no way you can draw the conclusion Engel did from Diridon's quote - unless you place truthiness about actual truth. The quote was very clear: Diridon was referring to the lies, not the people who tell them. Diridon explained as much to the Daily Post reporter:

"What I referred to was that one piece of misinformation will be repeated and repeated and therefore cause a lot of confusion," said Diridon, a former Santa Clara County Supervisor who now sits on the rail authority's board of directors.

But that truth doesn't matter to Engel, who went further in his baseless claims:

Engel said, "Everything they put out is misinformation. That is what's so ironic about this."

"Everything" is misinformation? Ridiculous. What you see here is that Engel is engaged in a classic case of projection, where you take a criticism of oneself and deflect it onto the person making the criticism. And Engel does this for the purposes I laid out at the beginning of this post - to convince the "silent majority" on the Peninsula that CHSRA and its board members are somehow engaged in bad faith and are making mean statements about nice people.

If Engel was confident that he had a solid case against HSR based on the facts alone, he would feel no need to resort to these kinds of manufactured controversies, deliberate misinterpretations of statements, and continued spreading of misinformation. We who support HSR do so on its merits, and we have no hesitation making an honest and factual case for its construction. I suppose that's our weakness, since we aren't willing to embrace truthiness the way HSR opponents will.

Western Rail Alliance Proposes HSR Routes, Including LA-Phoenix

2009-11-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

Over the last year or so, since the passage of Prop 1A and the election of a high speed rail-friendly president, there has been a surge of interest in high speed rail across the country, and new organizations and consortiums have come together to propose new projects - as well as to revive ones that had been left for dead (looking at you, Florida).

One of these groups is the "Western Rail Alliance," a semi-official group that includes land-use planners from Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. Late last week this group unveiled their list of proposed routes, one of which includes California:

The idea, in a nutshell, is that planners in each state can best negotiate rail routes within their cities and have the expertise to find funding to develop high-speed rail between those cities. The current participants in the alliance are the local RTC [in Clark County, NV], the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County in Reno, the Maricopa Council of Governments in Phoenix, the Utah Transit Authority in Salt Lake City and the Denver Council of Governments. The organizations also have made overtures to the Mid-Region Council of Governments in Albuquerque, but it has not signed on to the alliance yet.

They also have made contact with planning organizations in Tucson and Boise as potential future members.

Right now, the alliance is working toward turning itself into a legal non-profit organization. It also will move toward expanding membership to include prospective suppliers and service providers that could be a part of the effort to build high-speed rail in the Southwest.

Recently, Skancke made the first public presentation about the alliance, speaking to a lunch meeting of the North Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce.

At that session, Skancke outlined the first five routes the alliance will focus on: between Los Angeles and Phoenix; between Las Vegas and Phoenix; between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City; between Salt Lake City and Denver; and between Salt Lake City and Reno.

Now, before you all run off to the comments to criticize this, let's be clear: these routes aren't going to be built anytime soon. They don't appear on the USDOT HSR map, nor are they likely to anytime soon. This certainly isn't going to get funded in any official way, aside from very preliminary studies, for many years.

And that's as it should be. Of these five routes, only LA-Phoenix made it onto The Transport Politic's Interstate Rail Network proposal (in the last of four phases). There are many higher priority corridors that should come before these five.

Yet that shouldn't cause us to dismiss the concept out of hand. My interest in high speed rail isn't specific to California, although this blog is. I quite strongly believe this country should invest in building a national HSR network, proceeding first along the highest priority corridors and over the next 2-3 decades, filling in the gaps so that by 2040 or so, there would be a much improved passenger rail network that could get one from coast to coast faster than you can today. Doesn't mean you'd have a 220mph bullet train going from SF to NY, but one could stitch together a network of long-distance trains that could have faster and more reliable travel times than Amtrak's current routes.

In any case, it can't hurt to take an evening and consider what the Western Rail Alliance is proposing. LA-Phoenix could be a very valuable route for California, depending on the alignment. Any LA-PHX train would include stops in San Bernardino and Palm Springs, reaching a part of the state with a growing population. The train could follow Interstate 10 east toward Phoenix over a relatively easy alignment, with only the climb out of the Coachella Valley posing engineering challenges. Or it could continue southeast to the Imperial Valley, which sports the highest unemployment rate of any California county at 30%, hit Yuma, and then find a path back into Phoenix. This route would be less direct and therefore more costly and with a higher travel time, but there's pretty much nothing between Indio and Buckeye along the I-10 route, so it's worth at least a study.

Las Vegas-Phoenix is already witnessing a major transportation project, the Hoover Dam Bypass, scheduled for completion next year. Aside from Kingman and Wickenburg, this route would also be running through mostly empty land.

Las Vegas-Salt Lake City has the benefit of serving more actual settlements between its two endpoints, including the rapidly growing Utah city of St. George, along with several towns scattered along Interstate 15 before the Wasatch Range metropolis at Provo (and giving a boost to cities just beyond the urban edge, like Nephi). Salt Lake City-Reno would also connect some smaller towns, such as Wendover, Elko, and Battle Mountain, but would otherwise be passing through completely empty land. Would be interesting to see how fast you could crank up the trainsets over the Bonneville Salt Flats.

The most intriguing, and almost certainly the most difficult, is a proposed Salt Lake City-Denver HSR route. Perhaps this one will appeal to the people who think the Grapevine should have been the alignment for the SF-LA route. If you think the Grapevine is easy for HSR, you're gonna love the Rocky Mountains!

An earlier Las Vegas Sun article examined one subset of the SLC-Denver route, the I-70 Coalition which has been proposing passenger rail as a solution to the traffic problems through the Rockies on Interstate 70, especially from Denver to the ski resorts in winter. There's been some discussion of maglev for this corridor, but no firm plans as of yet.

As a relatively young person, I might actually live to see some of these projects get built. As China pours hundreds of billions of dollars into their HSR system as an economic stimulus measure, it's not silly to start thinking on a nationwide scale for HSR. Perhaps none of these corridors are yet deserving of federal money, which for now needs to go to the higher priority corridors. But if the western states wanted to start planning these routes, and were willing to start funding it themselves, I wouldn't object. Better we start thinking about this now, instead of continuing to delude ourselves into thinking the status quo is tenable.

CHSRA Initiates Statewide Land Use Planning Effort

2009-11-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Chronicle architecture columnist John King writes today of an ambitious state planning project known as Vision California. The project is intended to provide a holistic, statewide model of growth scenarios, with an emphasis on how high speed rail will change the state's growth and land use patterns. It is co-funded by the California High Speed Rail Authority. As King explains:

The official action is modest, a $2.5 million contract to devise a set of detailed growth scenarios for California, from classic suburban sprawl to compact development focused on older cities. The goal is to produce a single "preferred scenario" - one that conceivably could be used to prod local governments to accept or reject new construction.

This sort of top-down planning would alter politics in California, where cities and counties for decades have deflected any initiatives that might crimp their autonomy. The difference now: legislative efforts to reduce the state's carbon emission levels, and voter support of a high-speed rail system that could put now-distant portions of the Central Valley within commuting distance of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Proponents say there's no way to make wise long-term decisions without data to gauge the impact of different patterns of growth when it comes to matters such as energy or water use.

This is a long-overdue and much-needed effort. High speed rail in particular is going to reshape California's urban geography, and will produce significant shifts in population movement and growth sites. It makes perfect sense to evaluate this on a statewide basis - how would high speed trains produce growth in Fresno? What kind of growth might happen? And how would that affect land use in the older coastal metropolitan areas? How would that impact water and energy usage?

It is very good to hear that this effort is being undertake and that the CHSRA is playing a role. Given California's numerous and converging crises, from water to environment to economy to energy usage, we need to start considering statewide planning to solve those crises without one region's solutions undermining those of another region.

As King explains, this isn't the first time such an effort has been tried. Governor Jerry Brown initiated such a study in the late 1970s, around the time he promoted a high speed train for California:

For instance: If townhouses and bungalows are built instead of large single-family homes, how much agricultural land will be saved? If new housing is placed near existing jobs and shopping, rather than in distant subdivisions, what will be the effect on a household's transportation expenses?

"By showing people the results of different futures, you create a different political climate," Peter Calthorpe said. A founder of the influential Congress for the New Urbanism, Calthorpe was working for the Office of Planning and Research in 1978 when then-Gov. Jerry Brown released "Urban Strategies for California," the last serious statewide planning push...

Despite Calthorpe's optimism that things will be different this time, there's another scenario: Things stay pretty much the same.

After all, the sense of looming crisis is nothing new; "Urban Strategies" decried how sprawl chews up "air, water and other natural resources," but the proposals never translated into a formal plan.

It's worth noting that Governor Brown's late '70s efforts didn't just die. They were killed. As I've argued before, the 1978 tax revolt was driven in part by a desire to preserve 20th century suburban sprawl from a perceived attack by Governor Brown. Although Brown recognized the need for a denser California, he ran into a massive amount of opposition from the beneficiaries of the 1950s and 1960s model of land use, opposition that in 1978 wrote itself into the state constitution. Ever since, what I have described as a homeowner aristocracy - a specific group of people who were able to buy homes in the last few decades of the 20th century and who seek to preserve their property values and obsolete concepts of the urban landscape at the expense of everyone else - have fought every effort to produce a smarter, more sustainable strategy for economic growth and land use. Their successful determination to preserve the late 20th century model has left California economically weak, dependent on overuse of water, and vulnerable to soaring oil prices. Their refusal to embrace new solutions, which won't actually cause them much if any personal or economic harm, is a major impediment to proper planning for California's future.

Vision California is not just a useful exercise to help build a more prosperous and sustainable 21st century state. It's a way to ensure that high speed rail does not get used to promote sprawl. Many anti-HSR conspiracy theorists claim, against the evidence, that the CHSRA is nothing more than a vehicle for developers to pave over the Central Valley. They should then be the biggest champions of the Vision California project:

The project has three phases and will continue for about 18 months.

The first phase includes the formation of a working group to set parameters and decide how far into the future the projections should go. Data would be compiled and measurement standards defined.

Phase two would develop a base-case scenario that extends past trends forward - and alternative scenarios that give greater emphasis to mass transit and higher-density development patterns. The scenarios would be tested on "targeted groups of key stakeholders."

The final phase would follow the release of the alternative scenarios with a "preferred vision" - coupled with an outreach campaign to show how the chosen path "can most effectively impact the development of state, regional, and local policies aimed at meeting state climate change and other key goals."

In other words, limiting sprawl and promoting urban density, transit-oriented development, and mass transit connectivity are explicit goals of this planning process, something CHSRA is signaling it is willing to abide by once it is in place.

This is a welcome development, and I wish the Vision California project well. Let's hope it is matched with further statewide legislation in the vein of AB 32 and SB 375 to complement local efforts to change the longstanding local government preference for sprawl. HSR is a major tool in the effort to limit sprawl, but as we've always said, that has to be matched with regulatory changes in land use policy. Vision California is a necessary step in that direction.

Warren Buffett's Bet on BNSF

2009-11-07T09:46:00.001-08:00

by Rafael

Recently, Berkshire Hathaway, the company led by renowned investor and industrialist Warren Buffett, announced a takeover bid for the 77% of shares in the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad it does not already own. Remarkably, the offer price of $100-a-share is around 30% above that of the share price before the takeover bid was announced. Even though the $44 billion deal is Berkshire Hathaway's biggest-ever, Buffett will still have $20 billion of cash on hand even after it closes. "It's an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States," said Buffett in a statement. "I love these bets."

A discussion thread in the NY Times' Room for Debate blog looks into the possible motives for the acquisition and Buffett's modus operandi. The panel of contributors perceives his grand bet primarily in the context of freight rail operations, which remain the most eco-friendly way to move bulk goods over land. That said, one of BNSF's core activities in the eastern US is hauling coal to power stations. (via Infrastructurist)

Even competitor Union Pacific has hailed Buffett's decision as a "strong positive statement" for the industry. Berkshire Hathaway has a 1.9% stake in UPRR but is not looking to expand on that.

BNSF owns and operates tracks in California and in Los Angeles in particular, notably between Redondo Junction (downtown Los Angeles) and the Arizona border and, between Bakersfield and Richmond. The company has a track record of solid cooperation with Amtrak California and Metrolink, it gives them scheduling priority and even measures Amtrak on-performance while on BNSF track.

In the context of the California HSR project, BNSF is open to at least discussing the partial sale of rights of way and/or air rights above them. CHSRA is relying on a deal with BNSF for the Redondo Junction to Fullerton and the Calwa (south Fresno) to Bakersfield sections of the planned network. The section between south Stockton and Calwa is suboptimal for HSR, but CHSRA's preferred alignment along the CA-99 corridor will be difficult to implement without a deal with UPRR, as will other sections of the network.

What, if any, impact might the Berkshire Hathaway acquisition of the remainder of BNSF have on California HSR?

Fresno Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is For Maintenance Hub

2009-11-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

We've been following the growing contest among San Joaquin Valley cities for the main maintenance hub for the CHSRA system. Back in March CHSRA said Merced's Castle Airport was their first choice for the hub location, and Merced County officials have been strongly pursuing that. The contest has become more competitive, with Madera County proposing a site near Chowchilla, and Bakersfield proposing a site as well. Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin has been working to bring the hub to Fresno, an effort that may get a big boost from Fresno County:

Fresno County leaders may divert funds from Measure C, the county's half-cent transportation sales tax, to attract a high-speed rail maintenance yard that could employ 1,500 skilled workers....

But Fresno County is assuming it will need to line up a site to get serious consideration.

A task force of county officials and other local leaders has already chosen an undisclosed site along the system's route on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe corridor in rural southern Fresno County. The cost could be as much as $40 million....

But Anderson made clear that she thinks the most likely source is Measure C -- specifically a $37 million fund reserved for "new technologies such as personal rapid transit or similar system."

Although some in Fresno County raised cautions about redirecting Measure C money, I cannot imagine a better or more appropriate use for that $37 million than a maintenance hub. Personal rapid transit is a silly technology that shouldn't take priority over funding an HSR maintenance hub, should CHSRA decide Fresno is the best location for it.

Another possible funding pool is much less desirable for redirecting to the hub:

The council's staff also suggested that part of the measure's $106 million fund for moving the Fresno's BNSF tracks to the Union Pacific corridor could be diverted to the maintenance yard project. That drew fire from rail consolidation advocates.

"Make no mistake, folks: They're not talking about borrowing funds from rail consolidation," said Tom Bailey of Fresno Area Residents for Rail Consolidation. "They're talking about flat taking."

Fresno should move much more cautiously before diverting funds from consolidation to the hub. The Fresno rail consolidation project is a very good project that deserves to be supported, not defunded for a maintenance hub.

CHSRA has also evolved its own stance away from their March comments in favor of Castle Airport:

The authority's Central Valley regional director, Carrie Bowen, said the board is determined "to make this as competitive as possible."

Candidates will have to "identify what they can do" for the project, she said. In most cases, that will mean providing an estimated 154 acres in a shape appropriate for a train yard -- long and narrow.

A competitive process is desirable, but local governments shouldn't toss other worthy projects overboard to win the hub. Of course, PRT does not count as a "worthy project," so moving the $37 million in Measure C money is not only a wise policy move, it would seem to fit the letter and spirit of the voter-approved language, since HSR is after all a "new technology," at least as far as California is concerned.

November CHSRA Board Meeting

2009-11-05T09:34:00.001-08:00

Use this as an open thread for anyone interested in discussing the November CHSRA Board Meeting. Click here for the agenda, which includes a board vote on whether to accept the staff recommendation of Ogilvy for the $9 million communications contract, and a presentation from the authority's "French partners" (I assume this is SNCF? Agenda isn't clear on this). Click here for the live webcast (link updated) of the meeting for those of us who can't make it to Sacramento for the occasion.

Will Dianne Feinstein Vote for High Speed Rail?

2009-11-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

Today's San Jose Mercury News includes a fantastic op-ed by State Senator Dean Florez (Fresno) and Erin Steva of CALPIRG, calling on US Senator Dianne Feinstein to support the $4 billion for high speed rail currently pending in the Senate:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has established herself as a high-speed rail champion. She has another great opportunity to stand up for high-speed rail, since she serves on the House-Senate conference committee that will finalize the bill. Its eventual choice will send an important signal to the country about Congress' commitment to high-speed rail as an innovative solution to our nation's transportation challenges.

Sen. Florez and Steva lay out the case for federal HSR spending:

A $4 billion federal investment would buy new, high-performance locomotives and passenger cars built in the U.S., better signals, track and grade-crossing upgrades and removal of rail bottlenecks — all resulting in faster and more convenient travel. In California, it will create hundreds of thousands of quality jobs in fields that have experienced losses over the last decade, including the technology, construction and engineering sectors....

Americans are turning to passenger rail in record numbers. Rail travel ridership increased each of the last six years, while vehicle miles traveled for cars and trucks has fallen over the last two years for the first time since the oil crisis of the 1970s.

It's a strong argument for HSR spending, especially since putting $4 billion in this year's bill will set a precedent to maintain that level of funding in future budget cycles. Whereas a $1.2 billion amount, as the Senate seems to prefer, would make it more difficult to expand HSR funding, especially in future years when there is likely to be increased pressure to slash federal spending.

It's not the usual way of operating for Democrats, but they would be wise to push as many good things through now, and set a precedent that will be more difficult to undo should they lose control of Congress or the White House in the next decade. Let's hope Senator Feinstein comes through with $4 billion for HSR.

Final Judgement in Atherton v. CHSRA

2009-11-03T17:20:00.000-08:00

It's pretty much a formality at this point, but Judge Michael Kenny has issued his final judgement in the case of Atherton v. CHSRA, ordering the CHSRA to revise the EIR for the Bay Area to Central Valley segment of the project to address the concerns over noise/vibration and ROW sharing with UPRR that the judge cited in his initial decision. See both the Final Judgement document and the Peremptory Writ of Mandate below, and then my comments:

Final Judgment in Atherton v. CHSRA

Peremptory Writ of Mandate

As we explained earlier, the judge rejected plaintiffs' request to stay further HSR work. According the the CHSRA, this outcome does not impede them from continuing to move forward as they currently are with project-level EIR and design work, and should not jeopardize stimulus funding. The judge did not order a complete reopening of the full EIR process, and CHSRA is confident they can submit the revisions on time. The judge gave CHSRA 70 days to show their compliance (by decertifying the EIR - they have more time than that to finalize the revisions; thanks to the comments for pointing this out) ~~although exactly what that means isn't precisely clear in the documents.~~

Although we'll hear the project opponents and those that filed the lawsuit claim victory here, it's difficult to see how those claims can be justified. The Pacheco alignment is upheld, CHSRA can continue to plan and design the system, they'll still be getting federal stimulus funds, and the judge has given them wide latitude in how they comply with the order to revise the EIR. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of the plaintiffs' claims, particularly the main ones about the Pacheco alignment, were thrown out. The plaintiffs basically got lucky in that the judge found some other parts of the EIR that the plaintiffs never really focused on were deficient and necessitated a revision.

What was promised to us in the summer of 2008 as a lawsuit that would stop the project in its tracks and blow up the route decision has essentially fizzled. CHSRA will produce an improved EIR and address the UPRR issue, something they needed to do anyhow. The plaintiffs will get their court costs paid, but otherwise they've failed to accomplish their goals of undermining the HSR project.

Deal for LA Rail Car Factory Falls Through

2009-11-03T04:55:00.000-08:00

by Rafael

AnsaldoBreda is an Italian manufacturer of passenger rolling stock, with a portfolio covering light rail, subways, standard speed and high speed products. SPCR radio reports that the company has walked away from a $300 million order for 100 light rail cars for Los Angeles MTA. In spite of earlier assurances, in the end the Italians were not willing to sign up to stiff penalties in the event of late delivery. It is now likely that the authority will have to execute an open tender process after all, which in the long run may well prove the best possible outcome.

What's Past is Prologue

In 2003, LAMTA awarded AnsaldoBreda a contract to build a new fleet of 50 model P2550 light rail cars with options for 2 x 50 more, in spite of delivery delays on two previous contracts. Evidently, third time is not the charm, as the company is late yet again - by three years, no less. The units already delivered are almost 6,000 lbs overweight, which means they cannot be used on certain lines.

Nevertheless, Mayor Villaraigosa pressed for these options to be exercised in a no-bid follow-on contract, with the understanding that the company set up a factory in LA and also move its corporate headquarters there. An LAEDC report dated March 2009 confidently forecast 535 manufacturing jobs and summarized that "in total, AnsaldoBreda will sustain continuing economic activity worth $368.5 million in economic output and 2,240 FTE jobs in Los Angeles County with estimated annual earnings of $91.1 million." Rumor has it the factory was to be built by an outfit headed up by the former chief deputy mayor.

Critics point out that this level of fresh employment could only be sustained with an annual output of 75 units, which would require additional orders from other US transit agencies. However, in addition its history with LAMTA, the manufacturer is now also several years late on unrelated orders from Denmark and the Benelux. The latter are for V250 "Albatross" high speed trainsets. Nomen est omen, though in all fairness the latter project has been hamstrung by factors beyond the company's control. Given AnsaldoBreda's global track record of missed deadlines, LAEDC's implied forecast that it would become a major player in the US rail car manufacturing industry was perhaps more pious hope than realistic expectation. After all, the company's assembly plant in Pittsburg never grew to the originally intended size, either.

Note that the deal that just fell through would have been ineligible for federal co-funding because the current surface transportation bill contains a five-year deadline for exercising options on existing contracts.

Plan B: Go Fish

With the passage of Measure R last year, LAMTA's needs have anyhow expanded to a total of around 200 cars for both subway and light rail in addition to refurbishment of the existing fleet. The increased size of the deal means the authority now has a much better chance of attracting bids from major players in the rail transit vehicle industry, some of whom also have high speed trains in their portfolio. Names mentioned in the radio interview: Siemens Mobility, Bombardier Transportation and Kinkisharyo, though this list was not meant to be exhaustive.

In principle, a fresh order would be eligible for federal co-funding in the context of even the current surface transportation bill, though that is already being extended for 90 days at a time because the Obama administration has decided to postpone discussion of the next one. Whichever bill would apply, there are long-standing FTA rules against federal co-funding if a tender process is skewed in favor of bidders who offer to set up a local manufacturing facility. Nevertheless, in order to help the Mayor save face, LAMTA intends to write just such a skew into the rules for the upcoming tender. That means sticking with the strictly local funding model in the (forlorn?) hope that USDOT will redirect its generosity to other component projects of Measure R so it ends up a wash.

For reference, Siemens Mobility already has a light rail assembly plant in Sacramento. Bombardier Transportation has rail maintenance facilities in Southern California and is also present other US states. Patentes Talgo S.A. is present in Washington state and is setting up a factory in Wisconsin.

Potential Implications for California HSR

While LAMTA has no formal authority whatsoever over vendor selection for the California HSR project, Los Angeles does wield significant clout in Sacramento. Don't be surprised if Mayor Villaraigosa attempts to sweeten the pot by dropping heavy hints regarding possible follow-on business from CHSRA to encourage bidders to set up shop in his city.

Like it or not, industrial policy - i.e. manufacturing job creation/retention - has been a factor in vendor selection in many HSR projects all over the world, especially for the prestigious initial order. I suspect CHSRA's role in vendor selection may therefore end up limited to the technical and commercial pre-qualification of a shortlist, though neither the Governor nor the legislature have said so publicly.

More Passengers Choose Trains Over Planes In Spain

2009-11-02T14:38:00.000-08:00

For several decades, the world's busiest air route was the "Puente Aereo" (air bridge) between Madrid and Barcelona. At a distance of about 400 miles on the ground, it's also a perfect distance for high speed rail. Ever since the AVE line was completed to Barcelona's Sants station early last year, high speed rail has been winning a greater and greater share of the Spanish travel market - despite Spain being hit extremely hard by the global recession, with unemployment of around 20%.

Now the AVE line has surpassed the Puente Aereo in terms of travelers. More people are taking the train rather than the plane between the two largest cities of Spain:

Spain’s bullet train is beating the plane in the race to win passengers. For the first time, more passengers have chosen to travel on the high-speed AVE rail link between Madrid and Barcelona than have opted to fly — a switch that could influence British ambitions for a high-speed rail network and add impetus to the creation of a second high-speed line in the UK.

Between July and September, 651,498 passengers made the 314-mile journey between Spain’s biggest cities (slightly farther than London to Newcastle), a rise of 21 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In comparison, 643,512 travellers made the journey by aircraft during the same period, a fall of 7.5 per cent compared with the third quarter of last year.

Madrid-Barcelona is the fifth busiest air route in the world, with four airlines offering 116 flights a day, according to the Official Airline Guide in July. Since the rail link opened last year, Renfe, the Spanish state rail operator, and the airlines, led by Iberia, the national flag carrier, have fought a fierce battle to win passengers. The high-speed train, which takes 2hr 40min to travel between Madrid and Barcelona, at 236.3 kilometres per hour (146.8mph), has won over commuters with competitive fares, greater comfort and the absence of elaborate airport security. It also offers promotions to attract tourists, as well as business travellers.

Once again, it is worth reminding readers that Spain offers a very good comparison to California in terms of not just high speed rail - but population density and geography. SF Transbay to LA Union Station is 432 miles, and our trains are projected to have a higher operating speed.

Ultimately, the Spanish experience suggests the SNCF report and the Brookings Institution are both correct in suggesting the LA-SF route, the nation's second busiest, will support a high HSR ridership. As our airports already burst at the seams during flush economic times and with rising oil prices, it's clear that we need the HSR option in California. Spain's success story will soon be replicated here.

Sort of fitting given Spain's role in California history...

New Pro-HSR Group Forms on Peninsula

2009-11-01T16:18:00.000-08:00

As reported in the SF Business Times on Friday (subscription req'd for whole article) a new pro-HSR group has been formed on the Peninsula. The Alliance for Sustainable Transit and Jobs is comprised of some of the Bay Area's heaviest hitters, including representatives of the largest businesses in the region. They don't yet have a website, but that doesn't really matter right now; these groups have already been very active behind the scenes in lobbying for high speed rail, and their coming together as a formal organization portends much greater public visibility. From the article:

Countering critics of high-speed rail along the Peninsula, business and labor groups have banded together to support the approximately $8 billion section between San Francisco and San Jose.

The Alliance for Sustainable Transit and Jobs “was formed in response to recent community outbursts regarding the high-speed rail route through the Peninsula cities and the forthcoming lawsuits, political posturing and other blocking maneuvers,” according to a flyer promoting the group, which will be based in the Belmont offices of the San Mateo County Economic Development Association.

In addition to SAMCEDA, business groups in the alliance include the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Bay Area Council, Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the chambers in San Mateo and Redwood City. Labor groups in San Francisco, Santa Clara County and San Mateo County are members.

“We’re coming from the point of view of what (high-speed rail) might bring to the Peninsula” in terms of jobs and other economic boosts, said Rosanne Foust, a SAMCEDA vice president and Redwood City mayor.

The Bay Area Council is of particular importance here. 60 years ago they came together to promote regional mobility in the wake of the transportation crisis the World War II boom created; out of their early proposals came the system we know as BART. While they didn't design the system itself, they helped get it launched and built, and look to do the same with HSR. Their member list reads like a who's who of Bay Area businesses, including companies like Chevron and Google; their executive committee includes representatives from Wells Fargo, Clorox, Bank of America, even Janet Yellin, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Similarly, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group includes similar (and even some of the same) companies, as does the SF Chamber of Commerce. Clearly, this is a serious effort to promote high speed rail and counter the distortions and NIMBY attacks on HSR on the Peninsula.

Of course, it's not the case that just because a bunch of large corporations say HSR is a good thing, we should just do as they say. In this case, though, the interests of the Bay Area's largest employers match those of working people and families living in the Bay Area and on the Peninsula, clear majorities of whom showed their own support for HSR by voting for Prop 1A last fall.

Having talked with some BAC staff about HSR, they made it clear that for their member companies, sustainable transportation is a very high priority. California is in a severe economic crisis, part of a global recession. When the global economy recovers, multinational corporations will look for places to invest. And it won't necessarily be California, especially if we are burdened with a transportation system that gets gridlocked during times of growth and is dependent on oil, a commodity whose costs are definitely going rise. Those companies want to invest in the Bay Area, but are saying that high speed rail needs to be part of the equation, part of the recovery, if they are going to make long-term plans for the region.

Again, there's nothing to say that the Bay Area should do something just because their largest employers recommend it. But that does place the burden on HSR deniers and NIMBYs to explain to people - especially people on the Peninsula, many of whom depend on the companies represented by the organizations that have formed this new pro-HSR group - where jobs and economic growth are going to come from without high speed trains. The answer is likely to be an assumption that the conditions of the late 20th century will just somehow magically continue indefinitely into the future, and that answer will likely not mention that the current economic crisis was caused by an overreliance on late 20th century sources of growth (sprawl, oil, finance capitalism).

Most Peninsula NIMBYs are those who were the "winners" of the late 20th century economy, those who own property near the tracks and prefer to maintain that asset value at the expense of the economic prosperity of others. Presumably they don't think they have any need of HSR, such is their economic security, but since HSR might possibly in some alternate universe threaten their property values, they're going to fight it tooth and nail. Even if that causes long-term economic distress for the region.

Even those who might not want California's 21st century economy to be dominated by a handful of large corporations can find value in high speed rail. HSR will create a green dividend that makes capital available for new entrepreneurial ventures by reducing spending on oil-based transportation. The hundreds of thousands of jobs HSR will create will produce more buyers of local businesses' products, more tax money for local governments to improve quality of life, and the trains themselves will enable Peninsula residents to have a broader spectrum of job opportunities and mobility that a 21st century economy requires.

In short, HSR offers opportunities for businesses big and small, for workers young and old, for cities along the tracks and those that aren't. The Alliance for Sustainable Transit and Jobs, along with truly grassroots groups like Californians for High Speed Rail, will help give voice to those on the Peninsula who so far have been drowned out or ignored by the loud but few NIMBYs.

Scoping Comments for Merced to Bakersfield Segments

2009-10-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, Californians for High Speed Rail submitted the following comments to the California High Speed Rail Authority for the Merced to Fresno and Fresno to Bakersfield segments.

As you can see, the comments follow the general principles Californians for High Speed Rail have laid out for the HSR project. The comments call for stations to be built in downtown Merced, downtown Fresno, and downtown Bakersfield, accompanied with rules to promote transit-oriented development and to prevent sprawl. For example, in Merced, owing to several factors, the comments included possible alignments around the town of Merced with non-downtown stations. Even in those cases, the stations would involve selection criteria and mitigation measures designed to limit sprawl, such as considering the "Amount of transit-oriented development (TOD) the locality has committed to planning for within a half mile radius of the station site" and "Growth management policies the locality has adopted or is committed to adopting that would direct growth into the half-mile radius of the station site." In Fresno and Bakersfield, the comments recommend against any non-downtown alignment. The comments for both segments include recommending not only those factors be applied to the possible Merced stations, but to all possible stations, as well as using automobile trips generated (ATG), instead of level of service (LOS) to determine impact on automobiles.

Additionally, the comments call for a Merced station to be fully compatible with Amtrak service, so as to enable a quick and easy 5-minute transfer from a high speed train to a waiting Amtrak train to continue to journey north to points along the San Joaquin routes to Oakland and Sacramento. They also support "further examination" of a station in downtown Hanford, but recognize that this station is a low priority and should not be built at the expense of building another station elsewhere in the system. The comments support a strictly defined examination of a Hanford station at the junction of state routes 43 and 198 just east of town, but only with strict TOD and anti-sprawl considerations. The comments do not endorse any station near Visalia. And finally, the comments call for using the BNSF right-of-way between Fresno and Bakersfield, and not following the UPRR ROW, owing to the BNSF alignment's better positioning of the preferred downtown Bakersfield station.

Here are the complete letters:

CA4HSR-Merced to Fresno Scoping Comments

CA4HSR-Fresno to Bakersfield Scoping Comments

Californians for High Speed Rail will be submitting comments for other segments in the coming days, promoting our vision for a high speed train that promotes both intercity passenger service alongside transit-oriented development and mitigates against sprawl in each community it serves. You can submit your comments as well on the following corridors (note the due dates) to comments@hsr.ca.gov.

• Bakersfield to Palmdale: due November 2

• Los Angeles to San Diego: due November 20

• Altamont Corridor: due December 4

We'll try and keep you apprised of other comment deadlines as they approach.

Does Russell Peterson Know What He's Doing?

2009-10-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

In response to a recent Wired Magazine article that declared "NIMBYs won't be able to stop California HSR," one of the more prominent Peninsula NIMBYs, Russell Peterson, decided to not go gently into that dark night. He wrote an email in reply to the article that was itself posted on the Wired site this week. It's a remarkable piece of cognitive dissonance - Peterson is suing to demand that Union Pacific's rights to the Caltrain ROW be recognized as giving UPRR a veto, while at the same time calling for a tunnel to be built on the corridor. The problem with a tunnel, of course, is that it makes it difficult - not impossible, but difficult - for UPRR to continue freight service on the route.

To be clear, the lawsuit (.pdf) is the least intrusive legal action one can take. It is called “declaratory relief” and simply asks for a legal interpretation of the existing contractual rights of Union Pacific. Union Pacific did sell the right of way to the Peninsula joint powers board, but it retained permanent rights. One of those rights, exclusive development of intercity rail, and the exclusion of high-speed rail development on a portion of its right of way makes the situation unclear. And Union Pacific has written letters (.pdf), in May 2008, to the California High-Speed Rail [Authority] stating it will not allow high-speed rail on certain sections of the right of way it owns outright. To imply otherwise is a factual error and a misleading statement in the article.

The problem is that Peterson is overstating his case. Caltrain has argued ~~that the 1991 purchase agreement gives it, and not UPRR, ultimate power,~~ that Peterson is reading the agreement wrong, that there's no conflict and that they have a "cordial relationship" with UPRR. Clem took a look at this over at his blog in August. The key section in the agreement appears to be section 8.3:

8.3.(c) In the event that Owner demonstrates a reasonably certain need to commence construction on all or substantially all the length of the Joint Facilities (including User's Cahill/Lick Line) of a transportation system that is a significant change in the method of delivery of Commuter Service which would be incompatible with Freight Service on the Joint Facilities (other than User's Cahill/Lick Line), Owner may, at its sole cost and expense, file no sooner than nine months prior to the commencement of such construction for permission from the ICC to abandon the Freight Service over the portion of the Join Facilities (excluding User's Cahill/Lick Line) upon which the construction is to occur. User shall not object to or oppose such a filing; however, it shall be allowed to participate in the abandonment proceedings.

Of course, Caltrain and CHSRA have shown no desire to kick UPRR off the corridor. Much to the contrary - they are already in discussions with each other about accommodating existing freight rail service.

And that is going to be difficult to do with a tunnel. The tunnel would have to be high enough to allow overhead wires to give clearance room for double-stacked container cars, and would have to have adequate ventilation for diesel locomotives, since it is extremely unlikely that UPRR will use electric power for this route alone.

That would undermine Peterson's stated support for a tunnel:

Likewise, Caltrain rail experts told a civic audience on Oct. 3 that a tunnel is not even twice as expensive as current plans for elevated rail. Given that environmental and other required mitigation costs add significant expense to the elevated option, the tunneling proposal offers interesting development opportunities along the route. Besides these opportunities it seems odd to promote 21st-century high-speed rail and then proceed to plan a 1950s- and 1960s-style elevated structure. The not-so-subtle inference that opponents are NIMBY is simplistic. Boston’s “Big Dig” buried a major freeway, the Loma Prieta earthquake took out the Cypress Freeway (now a park with renewed neighborhoods, etc.) and the Embarcadero Freeway (which led to renewal of the Ferry Building and surrounding area), and Berkeley buried its rail (and only paid a 10 percent premium vs. above grade). All of these projects brought both transportation and civic value to their respective areas. Why community involvement/engagement is so readily marginalized is puzzling to me with such clear examples of revitalized communities.

This is basically an incoherent grab bag of claims. First, the elevated structure would not be "1950s- and 1960s-style," there are 21st century methods of building elevated structures in ways that fit well with the surrounding community. San Carlos hasn't exactly been destroyed by its elevated segment. The Big Dig isn't exactly an argument in his favor, and neither the Mandela Parkway nor the Embarcadero replacement projects were tunnels. Finally, Berkeley paid the extra costs of what was mostly a cut-and-cover project by taxing itself to do so. Unless Peterson believes that the mid-Peninsula cities plan to tax themselves to pay for a tunnel, then he'll be looking to the sale of air rights - a sale that won't be possible if UPRR preserves its freight service rights on the existing at-grade ROW.

Peterson's letter continues in this scattershot vein:

The implication of the story is that this project is coming, like it or not. This may be a correct conclusion based on politics and political connections but Zach makes no arguments for it. Eventually he admits opponents rightfully have concerns, then dismisses those concerns. Caltrain recently issued a letter describing the ill effects of raising a source of noise (train horns) 14 feet in the air and how it is working to correct the problem. Well, elevating the whole train to 15 feet and increasing the speed would create more noise — thus Caltrain even agrees. The environmental impact report is deficient — has anyone explored the idea that people expected environmental laws be followed when they voted “for” this project?

Of course, "this project is coming" is based on the fact that the people of California voted for it and expect the HSR project to be built, and not held up or have its costs driven up by NIMBYism. Peterson claims NIMBYs just have "concerns" and want "oversight," but they've never really shown any support for the concept of high speed rail. Instead they prefer to undermine HSR's effectiveness or even its very existence to suit their own needs, believing that their priorities are more important than those of the state as a whole.

As to train noise, this is a complex matter. But one aspect of it is quite simple: on an elevated structure, there will be no more horns, period. Further studies will demonstrate the difference between those horns and the noise made by passing electric trains, which would not be running at full speed along the Peninsula anyway.

If Peterson's goal was to show the world that Peninsula NIMBYs are a principled group of people just trying to help HSR get better, he has completely failed. Instead he has revealed Peninsula NIMBYism for what it truly is: an incoherent collection of arguments held together by a desire to place their own personal vision of urban aesthetics above the vision, the needs, and the stated preferences of millions of their fellow Californians.

Ogilvy Recommended For CHSRA PR Contract

2009-10-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

At next week's CHSRA board meeting the board will vote on a staff recommendation to award the $9 million PR contract to Ogilvy, a leading public relations communications firm. It's not a surprising choice, as Ogilvy has extensive experience in California political communications. From the Capitol Weekly article on the topic:

Ogilvy Managing Driector Christi Black said her frm received a letter from CHSRA staff saying they were recommending Ogilvy's proposal to the board. Black cautioned that "nothing is official yet, but it's always thrilling to get the letter of intent."

Ogilvy is a global PR firm with offices throughout California, including outposts in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. The firm contracts with other state agencies including the state treasurer's office, the state auditor and the California Earthquake Authority, among others.

It's a sensible choice, given that Ogilvy has that experience with other state government agencies and has a worldwide reach - which the California HSR project will need.

No word yet on how Ogilvy would respond to ridculous nonsense like that being peddled in the LA Weekly. But I'm sure they'll come up with something.

The CHSRA isn't the only California HSR organization working on its public outreach. I've recently joined the board of Californians for High Speed Rail, as we are working on a relaunch of the organization in the near future to provide grassroots leadership and citizen oversight of the HSR project. As part of our relaunch, we're looking for someone to help with web design. Interested in volunteering your services for the cause? Send an email to me - robert.cruickshank at ca4hsr dot org.

And yes, the transition of this blog to WordPress is still happening. Once we get some things squared away, I am hoping to launch it this weekend.

The LA Weekly's Ridiculous Fear-Mongering

2009-10-29T14:53:00.001-07:00

The LA Weekly used to be one of the truly great newspapers in California. Founded during the late 1960s, it quickly earned a reputation as both an independent as well as an informative, investigative paper that by the 1970s and 1980s had become a must-read for anyone who wanted to know anything about Southern California politics. They kept up this reputation into the 21st century. But it has been lost, particularly after a merger with the New Times corporation. New Times' approach to "journalism" is to throw bombs and make wild accusations based on scanty evidence. It's a hollow shell of the standards the LA Weekly had been known for. Former editor Marc Cooper charted the paper's sad decline, and Harold Meyerson, a leading progressive writer, has long since left its pages.

That is crucial background for an examination of a sensationalistic and ridiculous article the LA Weekly published regarding high speed rail this week. The criticisms of the paper's appalling decline in journalistic standards aren't my own, and they predate the article. It's unfortunate that HSR is this week's target of shoddy and misleading "journalism," but, here we are.

The article is essentially a grab bag of attacks on high speed rail, none of which are new, few of which make sense. It includes a rehash of the LA River "controversy" that the LA Times already covered (it used to be the case that the Times followed the Weekly, not the other way around). Let's take some of the more egregious parts of the article:

“They need to work in partnership with us rather than shoving stuff down our throats,” says environmentalist Melanie Winter.

Winter is part of a diverse set of environmental advocates, community leaders, elected officials and taxpayer watchdogs who are banding together in the hopes of changing the direction of the rail authority.

The article doesn't say who these people are, exactly, making the group seem larger than it is. And Winter doesn't explain her concerns - instead the quote is designed to make HSR look like the bad guy, instead of the environmentally-friendly form of mass transit, well-integrated with the community and supported by a majority of Californians that it actually is.

The rail authority’s members have little, if any, connection to actual California voters, who polls say are sick of partisan politics. In fact 20 percent of California voters are now registered as “decline to state” political independents. Meanwhile the rail authority board is almost entirely made up of Democratic and Republican operatives and partisans appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger and the Legislature.

OK, this is just absurd. 80% of Californians are registered Republicans or Democrats, and most of those DTS voters consistently cast ballots for Dems. In fact, the members have quite a lot of connection to actual CA voters, if we're going to use this ridiculous metric, since 80 is larger than 20. Moreover, they are all duly appointed and confirmed by the elected representatives of the people of the state - apparently the Weekly has forgotten how representative government works.

Ironically, right after they say the board is illegitimate because it is stacked with Dems and Republicans (as is the state of California!) they write this about the CHSRA's former chairman:

Retired judge Quentin L. Kopp is one of the powerful board’s few politically independent members.

Which of course totally invalidates their earlier point. But there it is, in print, bizarrely enough.

Five years ago, ANG Newspapers published an explosive investigation by Sean Holstege, reporting on a meeting led by Democratic politico Willie Brown and attended by Katz, Diridon and Morshed, at which Brown advised a roomful of engineering and construction firms that to win contracts to build California’s bullet train they first had to pony up $1 million in fees for Katz and other political consultants. According to the story, the consultants would then pull strings in the Legislature, aimed at getting a bullet train plan on the ballot. The controversy died, but several insiders present at that May 11, 2004, meeting with the big firms hold posts on the rail board.

What does this accusation have to do with the present? Did Katz win a contract? Is Willie Brown still involved with HSR? And since HSR didn't go to the ballot until 2008, did this meeting have any relevance whatsoever to the present situation? The only reason this is mentioned is the desire of the authors to throw every possible accusation at HSR to set up their article, regardless of whether the accusation has merit or relevance.

Few California voters knew this back story last November, when they approved a vaguely worded, $10 million bond measure to begin construction of high-speed rail. The details were fuzzy on where, exactly, the tracks would go, what they would look like, and whether property might be seized.

Um, no. The bond measure was not "vaguely worded," it instead specified a very specific corridor as laid out in a very explicitly and not-vague EIR document approved by the board last summer. The details were clear on where exactly the tracks would go, though in some places the tracks could go in a number of places.

One emerging dispute involves a proposal to build the rail line down the middle of I-5. Some activists say the idea makes sense, especially when the alternative would be to run the rail lines through communities and parkland, in some cases cleaving them in half. But state officials seem to have dismissed the I-5 route long before real hearings even took place.

“There hasn’t been a rigorous study of that alternative,” says Damon Nagami, a staff attorney with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an organization of high-powered lawyers working with communities affected by potential routes. “We don’t understand why the rail authority wants to eliminate this option at this very early stage.”

If that's NRDC's position, they are fools. It's unclear where on I-5 they're referring to, but it doesn't much matter. Nobody lives along I-5 in the San Joaquin Valley, so it makes no sense to put the train there. The trains should go where the people are. If you're talking about I-5 in the LA metro area, that's a truly idiotic plan that should never be given the light of day. It would not only produce much less riders, and might not be feasible given the curves of I-5 in the San Fernando Valley, but the cost would be astronomical and it would have a far greater impact on homes and communities than would following the rail corridors as currently planned. The I-5 alternative should be eliminated because it is senseless and stupid.

Another debate is over downtown’s historic Union Station. The rail authority seems bent on making Union Station the hub for multiple lines that would meet there. But residents of mostly Latino, mostly working-class Lincoln Heights, Cypress Park and Glassell Park worry that trains will tear up their communities.

Nagami says he’s pressuring the state to consider building an annex near Union Station to serve as the high-speed hub. “We’re getting the sense the rail authority has its chosen route and is going to push for that,” adds Nagami, whose organization helped to successfully sue the state eight years ago, when it tried to sell empty land near Union Station to an unpopular developer. “The whole point of an environmental-impact review is to carefully examine a range of options.”

First off, Union Station is going to be the hub because it already is the hub of the LA mass transit system. It would be truly insane to not have trains stop there, with easy transfers to Metro Rail, buses, and Amtrak California and Metrolink trains. The trains won't "tear up their communities" since they'll follow existing ROW and corridors. This is NOT the Century Freeway, despite the LA Weekly's sensationalistic desire to paint HSR as such.

The range of options have already been carefully examined in previous EIRs, and the current program EIR will carefully examine the specific details of bringing trains to and from Union Station.

Perhaps the most emotional and complex issue is the fate of the Los Angeles River. The river has long been both a target for jokes (“L.A. has a river? You mean the giant half-pipe where they filmed Terminator?) and the object of a slow but concerted revitalization effort, which some fear will be quashed by a train route touted on some maps.

Since 2001, California has spent roughly $100 million developing parks along the river, and many of those newly green areas could be ruined by the bullet train.

“This project, if it’s done wrong, will undo years and years of work, on top of the millions of dollars that have been invested,” says Sean Woods, in charge of L.A. parks for the California State Parks department. Though employed by the state, Woods is part of the coalition fighting to make sure L.A. isn’t steamrolled.

LA isn't going to be "steamrolled," as Woods should know. The city of LA's River Revitalization Plan makes clear that the river will continue to be a railroad corridor, and specifically mentioned HSR as part of it. Further, CHSRA is well aware of the desire to connect the riverfront park to the neighborhood, which is why it plans to use the HSR project as an opportunity to achieve that, as this video makes extremely clear. Apparently some people haven't gotten the message:

“Rail has been the barrier to access to the river,” says L.A. River activist Joe Linton, who writes the “Creek Freak” blog. “For eight miles in the downtown area there are tracks along the river. The high-speed rail can either make that a worse barrier or it can make that less of a barrier.”

The plan apparently favored by political types who dominate the rail authority would make that barrier worse. Linton says the inviting green areas now envisioned could mutate into an industrialized backyard for a supertrain. “Those were huge struggles that resulted in parkland for communities that absolutely needed it,” Linton says.

First, the tracks along the river - whether north or south of Union Station - aren't going anywhere. Anyone who thinks they are is out of their mind. Those tracks have been there for a century and will be there for at least one more. Further, as the video makes abundantly clear, HSR will make it less of a barrier.

Of course, the LA Weekly doesn't anywhere mention the CHSRA's video, their plans, their scoping process. Nor does it even appear they tried to reach CHSRA for comment, the way a normal journalist would. Instead they plowed right ahead with their hit piece. Shameful.

China HSR Grabs Significant Market Share From Airlines

2009-10-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

China, which is engaged in a massive high speed rail expansion project as part of both its economic stimulus and energy independence efforts, is witnessing a major shift of riders from planes to trains. As a result, airlines like China Southern are planning to focus on the international market, as short-haul trips are increasingly taken on high speed trains and not airplanes:

China Southern’s traffic on flights between Beijing and Taiyuan in Shanxi province fell about 60 percent after a high- speed rail link began operations, Si said. There was a 30 percent decline on Shanghai-Wuhan trips, he said....

China Southern Airlines Co., the nation’s biggest domestic carrier, will expand overseas flights in anticipation of a high-speed rail network causing traffic to decline on about a quarter of its internal routes.

Traffic may fall by more than half on 518 of the carrier’s weekly flights, Chairman Si Xianmin said today at a conference in Beijing. Of the airline’s about 160 domestic routes, 38 will compete directly with high-speed railway lines, he said.

“This will force us to expand overseas routes, on which we still have some competitive edge,” he said. “It will eventually cause an impact on the global aviation industry.”

The new rail network, due to be completed by 2020, will offer a cheaper alternative on routes covering about 80 percent of China’s domestic aviation market, Si said. That will force the carrier to challenge Air China Ltd. and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. on international services to offset dropping domestic demand.

“For short haul, passengers definitely won’t want to use the airlines,” said Jay Ryu Je-Hyun, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities Co. in Hong Kong.

Some of the reasons for the shift:

High-speed train tickets will be about 40 percent cheaper than current air tickets, according to Si’s estimations. A five- hour rail trip from Shanghai to Beijing, for instance, will likely be about 700 yuan ($103), or about 60 percent of the price asked for the two-hour flight.

Train services may also be more convenient as stations are generally located downtown, while airports are on city outskirts. There are also fewer security procedures, which quickens boarding.

“Airlines will lose all their current competitiveness, like saving time,” said Si. “What’s more, the high-speed trains haven’t reported any fatal accident in the past more than four decades. That’s definitely a plus for passengers considering a trip by air or rail.”

Much of this is directly comparable to what will happen here in California. Although one can find some decent fares for a roundtrip flight tomorrow from SFO to LAX (around $100 on Virgin America), it's very unclear whether that will be sustained in a future where oil prices are certain to rise significantly. HSR, powered by renewable electricity, will not have that problem.

And while there will still be those travelers who choose Virgin America or Southwest over the high speed train, the Chinese experience, along with that of Spain and on the USA's own Northeast Corridor shows that many travelers will also pick HSR. HSR's job isn't to kill the airlines, but to enable them and the airports they serve to survive. Without HSR, we're either going to see people priced out of air travel entirely, or if the expected oil price increases fail to materialize, there won't be enough capacity to handle the passenger load. Either way, HSR is a necessary complement to maintain intercity connectivity in 21st century California, and to maintain California's global competitiveness.

How Much Per Driver Did US Freeways Lose?

2009-10-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

A study that is getting a fair amount of coverage online today is that from the Pew Economic Policy Group, which shows Amtrak "lost $32 per passenger in 2008". The full report breaks it down route by route, showing that only a few routes generated surpluses in 2008, including the only high speed rail route in the Amtrak system, the Acela.

One might see that as a positive sign for high speed rail, proving that it won't experience the same kind of operating losses the other Amtrak lines tend to produce. Already some are arguing the report should produce further support for HSR at the expense of other Amtrak routes.

Unfortunately, the report these analyses are based on is deeply misleading and should not be used by anyone to set passenger rail policy or transportation policy.

The number one flaw of the Pew report, by far, is it does not compare 2008 numbers to previous years. The report merely examines Amtrak route performance in 2008 alone. As you all remember, 2008 was a rather interesting year for American transportation. Most passenger trains - from Amtrak to the local subways and streetcars - experienced significant spikes in ridership as a result of the spike in gas prices.

Any study of 2008 passenger rail that does not take into account these effects is not credible. At all. And a study that doesn't even compare to past years is a joke.

Let's look at a California Amtrak route that DOES publish such credible studies - the Capitol Corridor. Below are excerpts from their 2008 Annual Performance Report, available at the link in the previous sentence.

These charts show a steady increase in both ridership and revenue on the Capitol Corridor, even before the 2008 spike. When presented in context, you see a successful service. Compare that to the Pew report, which took a snapshot of a single year, out of context, pointed out "loss per passenger" that makes Amtrak look like a failure.

This chart is even more impressive and significant. It shows that state subsidy levels (Capitol Corridor is funded by the state of California) have remained pretty much static for the last eight years, yet the Capitol Corridor has had dramatic success at growing ridership and bringing its costs under control.

Eugene Skoropowski, managing director of the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority, presented these charts to the NARP/RailPAC meeting in San Carlos last Saturday. He noted that the 2009 numbers to date show about a 10% decline in ridership from the 2008 highs, but that they're still above FY 2006-07 in terms of revenue and riders.

These numbers paint a very different picture than the flawed and ridiculous Pew study. Amtrak routes have experienced steadily growing ridership since about 2002, and have witnessed improving farebox recovery rates. Further, since we know that the price of oil is merely in a temporary respite and will rise again once economic recovery returns, we can expect Amtrak to continue on a positive upward trend of increasing ridership and increasing financial returns on investment.

And yet that doesn't get at the other enormous problem with the Pew study, which is conceptual. Has Pew done a study of the loss per driver of US freeways?

As anyone who has driven in the Bay Area recently will attest, traffic is much lighter on freeways as a result of the recession. This phenomenon can be found nationwide. So how much money have American freeways lost per driver in 2008? In 2009? What is the trendline?

The Pew study is reinforcing a deeply biased and illogical concept, that passenger rail has to be held to standards of "profitability" that we simply do not demand of our freeway network. As Skoropowski noted at the Saturday meeting, federal highway funds were given to states with a requirement that states pay the ongoing maintenance costs. That money is supposedly paid out of gas taxes, but neither the state nor the federal gas tax has been increased in nearly 20 years. As we expand freeways and as Californians in particular conserve fuel through driving less and buying more efficient cars, the gas tax is less effective in paying these costs, requiring, yes, government subsidies. And of course, nobody has ever once proposed paying back the $425 billion (in 2006 dollars) it cost to build the system.

In short, Pew's study is intended to make Amtrak and passenger rail in general look like a bad investment, when in fact it is anything but that. Sure, the numbers from the Acela prove that HSR will generate revenue, but that's not why we support high speed rail. HSR advocates should condemn this flawed study and resist the temptation to use it to bolster our already strong case for HSR.

Altamont Corridor Planning Begins

2009-10-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

As mandated by Proposition 1A, the California High Speed Rail Authority is beginning its process of studying the Altamont Corridor alignment. Have a look at their announcement newsletter for some details.

The project corridor is defined as San José to Stockton, with a possible spur to Modesto:

As you can tell, this is basically an upgrade and electrification of the Altamont Commuter Express - the full newsletter includes drawings of electric ACE trains traveling along a high speed rail corridor with overhead wires. The projection is that Stockton will be anywhere from 55 to 75 minutes from downtown San José once the corridor is completed, with trains operating at 150 mph or greater.

And the explanation given on the newsletter of the project's scope and goals:

The Altamont Corridor Rail Project will provide a vital link in the regional transit network, connecting our communities like never before. The project will create a dedicated passenger train corridor between Stockton and San Jose, with stops in key cities in between. A spur link to Modesto is also a possibility. The project study area is shown to the right, along with opportunities for strategic intercity rail connectivity. Specific route alignments and station locations will be identified through a community-based planning process. Once developed, alternative scenarios will be evaluated through the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report.

The project could allow operation of trains between the Bay Area and points north including Stockton and Sacramento, as well as points south including Modesto and beyond, within the California High-Speed Train system. The project will provide intermodal connections to Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to serve the Oakland Airport, cities of Oakland and San Francisco, as well as other Bay Area communities. Intermodal connections to BART could be located in the Livermore vicinity, should the Dublin/Pleasanton BART line be extended, as well as in the Fremont/Union City area, meeting either the Fremont line or planned Warm Springs/San Jose extension.

The Altamont Corridor Rail Project could also accommodate a future connection to the Dumbarton rail service in the Fremont/Union City area, as well as connect to the Valley Transportation Authority light rail in Santa Clara County. The project will coordinate with local bus services, providing access to proximate market areas and interfacing with regional bus links where appropriate. Whether for intercity trips, daily commutes, or access to the statewide High-Speed Train system, the Altamont Corridor Rail Project will serve our communities like never before!

My own view is that while faster ACE trains would be nice, this really isn't as high a priority for the state as upgrading the Capitol Corridor, restoring the Coast Daylight service along the Central Coast, and upgrading and speeding up the Pacific Surfliners, to name but a few projects more deserving. The inclusion of the Altamont Corridor in Prop 1A was a sop to Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani and interests in San Joaquin and Stanislaus Counties to compensate for the choice of the Pacheco Pass route for the main HSR trains.

I don't have much of a preference about the implementation on the route, though we will predictably hear from residents in Fremont and Pleasanton concerned about the impact on their neighborhoods. And while it'll be nice to throw that in the faces of the people suing because the Altamont alignment was rejected for the main HSR trains, I'm not entirely sure what the Altamont high speed corridor project gets us. It doesn't deserve to be funded ahead of other higher priority corridors. I'm all for improved passenger rail and I wish the CHSRA and its corridor partners well in the development of a sensible plan, but if this never got funded, well, that's an outcome I could live with.

The scoping meeting schedule is below. All meetings are from 3PM to 8PM.

Livermore - Tuesday, Nov. 10
Robert Livermore Community Center
4444 East Avenue

Stockton - Thursday, Nov. 12
San Joaquin Council of Governments
555 E. Weber Avenue

Fremont - Tuesday, Nov. 17
Fremont Teen Center
39770 Paseo Padre Parkway

San José - Wednesday, Nov. 18
Le Petit Trianon Theatre
72 North Fifth Street

The View from the Cab

2009-10-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

by Rafael

one way to discover how HSR operators in other countries have built their infrastructure and run their trains is to tag along in the driver cab, at least vicariously.

Series 500 Bullet Train

The following YouTube video is part 1 of an eight-part series tracking the progress of a sixteen-car series 500 bullet train from Hakata (Fukuoka) to Tokyo on the Sanyo and Tokaido shinkansen lines traveling in "nozomi", i.e. express, mode at a top speed of 300km/h (186mph). The audio is in Japanese, but the author has kindly provided limited translation.

(Playlist for parts 2 to 8)

Total trip distance is 1069km (664mi), part 6 includes the "rollercoaster" section between Toyohashi and Laka Hamana. Operated jointly bby JR West and JR Central with a change of drivers at Shin-Osaka. Dwell times at run-through stations are around 50 seconds, this is normal in Japan. The journey as such is entirely uneventful. Infrastructure is supposed to be this dependable!

For our purposes, it's perhaps the design of the line that is of greatest interest: at-grade vs. elevated vs. trench vs. tunnel structures, selective use of sound walls, speeds through populated areas, fences etc. Also, contrast the graceful design of the train - inspired by the streamlined shape of a kingfisher breaking the water's surface without creating much of a ripple - with the ugly headspans.

Series 700 Bullet Train

Also informative is this in-cab video of a series 700 bullet train, the successor to the sleek but expensive series 500. This design features a duck-billed nose that minimizes tunnel boom and susceptibility to sway in heavy cross-winds and when passing high speed trains approaching from the other direction.

Note that the Japanese obsession with punctuality isn't just a source of personal pride for the impeccably dressed bullet train drivers but rather, an operational necessity: in many sections, the existing lines are at capacity, so drivers are expected to stick as close as possible to timetables that are prescribed down to the second. The Tokaido shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka supports a total of 285 trains on weekdays. It is headway constraints rather than a lack of engineering chops that force most Japanese bullet trains to travel (at slightly) lower speeds than their counterparts in Europe.

To activate close captioning in (somewhat broken) English, please click the up arrow on the lower right. Keeping the mouse button pressed, slide up and toggle the CC icon.

Eurostar

If you prefer a running narration in the Queen's English, below is the first video of a similar series documenting a Eurostar trip from Paris to London (h/t to Trains4America). The video was produced in 2004, three years before the second portion (CTRL2) of the High Speed 1 line in the UK was completed. Parts 11 and 12 of the series are now only of historical interest.

(Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

The UK is not a signatory to the EU's Schengen Agreement. The British government therefore required border controls including dedicated boarding platforms at all Eurostar stations in France even before the Al Qaeda terrorist bombings on the London Underground. Security consists of running your ticket through a bar code reader at a turnstile, your bags through a scanner and walking through a metal detector. With no baggage handling to contend with, passengers can arrive at the station as little as 10 or 15 minutes before their train leaves.

The first thing you'll notice is that the overhead catenaries feature poles not headspans. Also note the lateral distance to the nearest buildings and embankments/retaining walls on the way out of the French capital. The speed limits there may have more to do with signal block length and associated headways (i.e. emergency braking distance) on the regular network than with concern about noise: one section of the line supports a total of over 200 trains on a weekday. Out in the undulating countryside, extensive cut-and-fill earthworks were needed to keep the ruling gradient to 1:40 (i.e. 2.5%).

Lille, a city of a million inhabitants, got SNCF to run the line to the UK through its downtown area. French mayors and local business leaders understand that "beet field" stations like Haute Picardie make it much more difficult to attract the inward investment they need to compete with the Île-de-France region surrounding the capital. The section through Lille features tunnels, trenches and elevated structures with tall sound walls through residential neighborhoods. Some connecting regional trains depart from Lille Europe, many others from the legacy Lille Flandres station about 1/4 mile away, a single stop away on the local metro and tram lines. Passengers can also choose to walk through a shopping-mall-cum-conference-center.

Eurostar trainsets feature two tractor cars plus motors on the first bogie of the passenger cars immediately adjacent to the tractor cars, for a total of 12 powered axles. Total rated power is 12,200kW (16000bhp). In the event of an emergency, a single tractor car is sufficient to pull the trainset out of the Channel Tunnel, where the speed limit is 160km/h (100mph) for passenger and 100km/h (60mph) for freight and car/truck ferry trains. Along the route, the train has to adapt to four different signaling systems, multiple pantograph settings and two electrification systems. The 750VDC third rail pickups are no longer needed now that CTRL2 has been completed and trains terminate at St. Pancras International, shaving more than 20 minutes of the nominal line haul time and substantially improving punctuality.

Since the summer of 2009, Southeastern Highspeed regional trains also use the new High Speed 1 infrastructure. The series 395 "Javelin" trainsets have a top speed of 140mph and will provide frequent shuttle services between downtown and the sports venues in the East End during the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Takeaways

- operators all use automatic train control systems that engage the brakes if drivers ignore speed limits that are signaled in their cabs. In addition, the infrastructure operators have central facilities for managing traffic on the lines.

- high speed trains do run through suburbs and rural towns at 200-300km/h (125-186mph) in both Japan and Europe. Shinkansen lines typically run through Japanese towns on elevated structures, whereas European planners prefer to run trains at grade and construct numerous road overpasses.

- however, where the line runs (relatively) close to existing buildings, speed limits are either much lower or else noise is mitigated with sound walls and/or soundproof windows installed at the railway's expense.

- expensive tunnels into downtown areas of large cities are worthwhile IFF there is excellent connecting transit and/or transit-oriented development in the immediate vicinity of the station. Both can significantly increase ridership.

Saturday Open Thread

2009-10-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

A few updates:

I'll be in San Carlos today for a joint RailPAC-NARP meeting to discuss several passenger rail projects around the state, including high speed rail. I'll also be talking with several folks about ramping up HSR advocacy efforts. This blog was founded to fill a vacuum in early 2008, since there wasn't any place putting out frequent information on the project, and some of the other pro-HSR sites had gone dormant. The blog was never meant to be a stand-in for a full-scale pro-HSR effort, though we have often worked with others backing HSR, from CALPIRG to NARP, in support of HSR. Now it's time to step it up and get this thing built, especially now when the various process issues threaten to undermine the project. So be on the lookout for more robust grassroots HSR advocacy work.

Speaking of the blog, I know we've discussed this for a while now, but we really are going to move this to a unique URL and to a WordPress platform, and soon. Not only will it offer a cleaner look, WordPress offers greater functionality in the comments - from requiring people to pick a username to threaded comments (where you can actually reply to a specific comment, and thereby follow a discussion thread). The new place is already set up, but we need to do some customization work before we throw the doors open. If anyone reading this has experience customizing WordPress themes, or wants to offer any other technical assistance, send an email to my last name at gmail and we can get going.

Wired Magazine thinks NIMBYs won't be a problem in getting HSR built. I certainly hope they are right, and that the political backing behind the project, its self-evident benefits, and broad public support are enough to overcome the very, very small group of people who think their own personal version of urban aesthetics trumps all other social, economic, and environmental needs.

California Members of Congress Lobbying Hard for HSR Money

2009-10-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

As the decision point for awarding $8 billion in federal HSR stimulus nears, and with some $50 billion in applications submitted, California's federal representatives are making a strong push to ensure California gets a significant portion of those funds:

Employing every tool of persuasion from gift books and phone calls to hallway chats and high-level letters, including several to be sent as early as Friday to the White House, the state's lawmakers are making their case for $4.7 billion. But with 23 other states likewise seeking funds, and merit supposedly mattering more than politics, success could be elusive.

"We think because California is further along in this effort, we're well placed to receive federal funding," Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, insisted Thursday....

"We're doing a number of things," Costa said, when asked how California is promoting its high-speed rail bid.

Still, the longtime rail advocate acknowledged that California will "probably" not receive its entire request. Speaking at a U.S. High Speed Rail Association conference Thursday morning, Costa shared the stage with congressional colleagues who have their own plans.

Which isn't unexpected. I would be surprised if we got less than $3 billion, and would be pleasantly surprised if we got $4 billion or higher. There will be pressure on USDOT to distribute the funds widely, but there is also a recognition that if you spread the money too thinly, it won't do much good at all.

Jim Costa has been a longtime champion of HSR, having authored the 1996 legislation that created the CHSRA and got this project off the ground. But our Senators are getting in on the action as well:

"I'm very hopeful we'll get a large portion of what we're asking for," Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer said Thursday. "We're ready for it."

As part of the lobbying effort, Boxer said she, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be sending President Barack Obama another letter as early as Friday. It will likely remind Obama that California is providing $9 billion from a bond measure, and it will be accompanied by letters from the Sierra Club and the Chamber of Commerce to show support spanning the political spectrum.

Trying for the personal touch, Costa sent Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel copies of historian Stephen Ambrose's book about the building of the transcontinental railroad, "Nothing Like it in the World." And this week, California High-Speed Rail Authority leaders roamed Capitol Hill and huddled with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Since January, records also show, lobbyist Mark Kadesh -- formerly Feinstein's chief of staff -- has been paid $120,000 to advocate for California high-speed rail.

I don't know that a Stephen Ambrose book is going to make the difference - perhaps sending Rahm to Spain to ride a special AVE train with the destinations changed from Spanish cities to California cities ("next stop: Los Angeles Union Station" instead of "proxima estacion: Barcelona-Sants") would have more of an impact - but it does show that CA is making an all-out effort.

Of just as much importance is the fact that Obama Administration officials have repeatedly stated that California is likely to get a significant piece of the HSR stimulus. I am confident they'll keep to that pledge.

Rod Diridon colorfully explained to the New York Times:

"We've likened it to California and the high-speed rail program being the ugliest girl in town, or the ugly duckling, and she was growing up and nobody wanted to be associated with her," Diridon said. "Her uncle gives her $9 billion, and everyone wants to take her to the prom. Well, everyone wants to take us to the prom now."

I'm not quite sure that's accurate. It's more like the attractive boy or girl in your class who you had a huge crush on, but you weren't sure if they were available or not; their parents are kind of strict and tightfisted and might not approve of he or she dating. But now you've heard from the parents that they do approve of the date, and what's more, they're willing to give you some money to buy him or her dinner. Now you know what to do - bust a move.

Mercury Drops Bid for CHSRA Communications Contract

2009-10-22T18:58:00.001-07:00

This was unexpected:

Mercury Public Affairs did not rebid on a $9 million, five-year communications contract with the California High-Speed Rail Authority despite being the frontrunner in September before board members raised objections.

After the board objected, Rail Authority officials scrapped their previous recommendation and reopened the bidding process last month. At the time, Mercury said it would do whatever the board asked. But the firm has since decided not to reapply, saying it lacks confidence in the new bidding process.

"Mercury followed the initial (bidding) process to a tee but we were ultimately sidelined because of internal politics," said Mercury spokesman Brian Jones. "We have subsequently decided to not to invest our time, energy or resources into a process we no longer have confidence in, nor believe in."

There are multiple ways to read this: sour grapes that they didn't get the contract the first time, genuine lack of confidence in the process, annoyance that the skids aren't greased this time around as well (note: I don't believe the skids were greased, but that is an interpretation that's been floated).

Ultimately this will wind up increasing confidence and legitimacy in the CHSRA's bidding process, even if there will still be some critics out there arguing that this is "$9 million for PR" and thereby missing the point entirely (this is for all the agency's communications work, including public outreach, scoping sessions, publishing all those business plans that Roy Ashburn demands, etc).

The final decision on who will receive the contract will be made at the November CHSRA board meeting.

DiFi: HSR Should Use Transbay Terminal

2009-10-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

We've been calling for federal representatives to speak up and help resolve some of the key HSR disputes in California, and it looks like that's exactly what they're starting to do. Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote a letter to Ray LaHood calling for the feds to fund the construction of an HSR train box at Transbay Terminal, as is currently called for in the plans:

The California High Speed Rail Authority may be looking at possible alternatives to a new Transbay Terminal to bring bullet trains into San Francisco, but our former mayor and California's senior senator says the choice is clear.

Go with the proposed Transbay Transit Center.

That's the message Sen. Dianne Feinstein sent in a letter Wednesday to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in advance of the Obama administration's decision on federal stimulus funding for high speed rail projects across the country.

A new Transbay Terminal at First and Mission Streets is "an ideal destination for high speed rail" and a project where construction could begin in the first three months of next year, Feinstein wrote.

"The project represents a real downtown station in one of America's great cities, assuring that high speed rail delivers travelers to the city center without the traffic or delays that afflict other modes of travel," the senator wrote. "This project will not only put thousands of Californians back to work, but will also move the state's plans for high speed rail one step closer to reality."

Feinstein joins fellow Sen. Barbara Boxer and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in calling for federal funds to build San Francisco's high-speed rail terminus at the site of the old bus station.

"Transbay will become the 'Grand Central of the West,'" Boxer wrote to LaHood.

Feinstein and Boxer's comments come along reports I have heard that Speaker Nancy Pelosi not only prefers the Transbay Terminal to be the SF terminus, but that she has said the $400 million for the train box is all ready to go, except for CHSRA's objections.

Let's also not forget, of course, that voters approved TBT as the SF terminus when Prop 1A passed last November.

CHSRA continues to argue they are mandated to explore other alternatives, a position the California Attorney General's office supported. However, California's leading federal representatives are clearly uniting behind the Transbay Terminal project.

Two Very Different Op-Eds

2009-10-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

This week the debate over high speed rail - which, bizarrely, we're still having even after California voters approved Prop 1A a year ago - returns to the opinion pages of two of California's most prominent newspapers. Two op-eds examine the project and reach very different conclusions about the project's value to the state. First up is Daniel Curtin, president of the California Conference of Carpenters, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle:

California voters know we must change to meet the environmental challenges we face. They realize that every passenger who travels these sleek trains will reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that auto or air travel would have spewed into the atmosphere. They know that 800 miles of high-speed rail will reduce congestion between urban centers and encourage low-polluting urban in-fill development....

On high-speed rail, California leads the nation and San Francisco leads the state. An intermodal transit station, the Transbay Transit Center, is ready to break ground. Some 8,000 construction jobs will be directly created by the project and tens of thousands of jobs will be generated from the economic activity, according to plan documents. In a state with more than 12 percent unemployment and a city with just more than 10 percent of its workforce out of work, this will provide a desperately needed economic stimulus...

Just as the New Deal-inspired Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge served as an economic bridge from the Great Depression to a prosperous future, so will the Transbay Transit Center and high-speed rail be our generation's transportation corridor from economic adversity to a greener, more prosperous future.

There are two ways one can read this op-ed, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is as a call to support the economic stimulus value of high speed rail. In this deep recession, where California's unemployment rate is higher than it's been for 60 years, we can use any job we can get. Especially 8,000 construction jobs on just the TBT alone.

And that takes us to the second reading of the op-ed, which is as an argument for the Transbay Terminal project as being a fundamental piece of the high speed rail project. Quentin Kopp is still pushing alternatives to the current location of the TBT train box, and we keep hearing rumors that Kopp doesn't want the TBT to happen at all (rumors which he has denied to me). As the decision on HSR stimulus funds nears, it makes sense for TBT supporters to push out op-eds like this extolling the virtues of the project, including the badly needed jobs it would create.

Not everyone things jobs are important in a state experiencing at least a 12.2% unemployment rate. Dan Walters, who writes on state politics at the Sacramento Bee, writes today that we should "take bullet train claims with a grain of salt". As you'll see, it's Walters' column that requires the salt:

Ironically – or perhaps prophetically – the California High Speed Rail Authority's Web site bolsters the economic viability of a proposed statewide bullet train system by quoting an official of Lehman Brothers....

If nothing else, the fact that the rail authority is still quoting defunct and disgraced Lehman Brothers about financing the bullet train should make us skeptical that the system will materialize during the lifetime of any Californian now breathing, or that it would generate all the economic and social wonderfulness its advocates are claiming.

This is a ridiculous and misleading line of attack. If Lehman Brothers had collapsed because of its work supporting high speed rail, then Walters might have a point. But it didn't. As Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times explained yesterday, Lehman's collapse was due to a CEO, Dick Fuld, who wasn't skilled at negotiating these kind of deals, and due to the Bush Administration's willingness to let Lehman fail.

None of that undermines the work Lehman staff did on high speed rail. Specifically, Lehman told the CHSRA that the project could "leverage significant private participation." There is every reason to believe this is still the case. Global money still seeks a safe return on investment, and as the CHSRA found in 2008 when they solicited statements of interest, at least 40 companies showed their desire to participate in the project.

The case for private investment remains solid. Every HSR route around the world has generated an operating profit. As oil prices rise, ridership will as well, as SNCF argued last month. Obviously the exact amount of money CHSRA can expect from the private sector will depend on credit and economic conditions, but it is still reasonable and plausible to expect that some investment will materialize.

Walters doesn't stop there:

Such skepticism is especially warranted now that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other promoters, having persuaded voters to pass a $9.95 billion bond issue that California can ill afford, are asking the Obama administration for half of the federal money set aside for high-speed rail – nearly $5 billion.

Even if the feds come through with that kind of dough, which is highly unlikely, it would be less than half of the federal funds that California needs. It would also fall well short of the $40 billion or more it would take to link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and points in between with 200-mph trains.

This is just plain wrong. The White House has repeatedly said California will receive a large share of the HSR stimulus funds. It is entirely possible we will indeed receive nearly $5 billion from the feds. Even $3 billion would be a substantial sum.

Does it fall well short of the $40 billion total to build both phase 1 and 2 of the project? (Note how Walters throws in the Sacramento and SD extensions, which will not be built until about 2030, to make HSR seem more costly.) Yes. And that's why President Obama and the Congress are looking at long-term funding of HSR. Right now there is the battle over the $4 billion in HSR funding for 2010 going on in the US Senate. The stalled Transportation Bill is likely to include a permanent HSR funding solution once it is finally passed and signed. Walters doesn't give the reader any of this information, which makes it obvious that CA is quite likely to get the federal money it needs to build the project.

Schwarzenegger et al. are asserting that private investors would put up about half of the total cost. They also contend that the system could operate at a profit without subsidies, based on rosy ridership assumptions.

Well, if that's what Arnold is claiming, Arnold is indeed wrong. I've never heard CHSRA suggest private investors would contribute more than 25% of the cost.

As to operating at a profit, here again Walters is simply wrong. The Acela generates operating surpluses, as do all other HSR projects around the world. And of course, neither California's freeways nor its airports operate at a profit without subsidies (and in fact, freeways aren't expected to operate at a profit, period).

Then there are the assumed economic benefits that would accrue. Building the system obviously would create some direct design and construction jobs and at least some ongoing jobs for operation. But the rail authority has bootstrapped that direct benefit into upward of a half-million additional jobs that would be created, it's said, simply by the economic activity generated by having a new transportation system in place.

The "economic activity" claim is a projection subject to quite a lot of change up or down in the future, but it IS based on legitimate studies. Further, it is based on the proven concept that mass transit creates a Green Dividend - economic activity generated through the reallocation of money previously spent on oil. It may not be as high as 450,000. But at this rate, in a state facing high unemployment for many years to come, even something that falls 50% of that goal is still well worth building.

Grandiosely, authority board member Rod Diridon Sr. of San Jose contends that the project "will generate 600,000 construction-related jobs … and another 450,000 transportation-related permanent jobs, providing a long-term stimulus to the California economy."

The claim appears to be way overblown. But even if true, it would represent a tiny portion of California's economy decades hence. There are about 18 million Californians in the work force now. In 2030, when the bullet train is projected to become operational, 450,000 permanent jobs would represent less than 2 percent of needed employment – if, indeed, they ever appear.

Walters doesn't give any evidence or explanation as to why the claim is "way overblown" - meaning Walters' own statement is baseless. But even if he were right, does he really believe California can afford to pass on even 2% of needed employment? Walters is writing as if it were 1998, when the economy was booming and jobs were plentiful. Here in 2009, it's clear that we are not in a position to turn down jobs like this, especially when the estimates run into the hundreds of thousands for both short-term and long-term employment.

Ultimately Dan Walters shows himself to once again be a leading apostle of the notion that the California of the 20th century, dependent on sprawl and oil, is somehow still a viable basis for economic prosperity here in the 21st century. To believe that, you have to believe that the current recession either isn't happening, or is an acceptable cost of doing business. Most Californians don't see it that way. That's why they approved the high speed rail project, and that's why it's going to get built.

California's going to get those jobs, whether Dan Walters wants them or not.

LA to SD Scoping Meetings

2009-10-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

CHSRA is hosting a number of scoping meeting down in Southern California this month - click that link to see the full details (PDF link). In advance of the LA County meetings, which kick off tomorrow night in Monterey Park, Streetsblog LA offers a primer on the LA-SD route:

I'm sure some are curious why the CHSRA choose to connect Los Angeles and San Diego via the Inland Empire instead of the more direct routing along the coast. From my years following this project I'll offer my cliffnotes on why this is so.

There are a number of obstacles to using the coastal corridor. The right of way in some places is narrow and also traverses environmentally sensitive areas. As the faq "How is this project different from other previous attempts to implement high-speed train systems in the U.S.?" on the CHSRA website notes:

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority) considered but rejected a coastal alignment between Los Angeles and San Diego as part of its certified Statewide Program EIR/EIS (November 2005). The Authority concluded that limited existing right-of-way and sensitive coastal resources made high-speed train service on the coastal rail corridor infeasible. You can read more on the routing choices at the CAHSR's Frequently Asked Questions page.

Another factor is opposition from the coastal communities of Southern Orange County and Northern San Diego County. While cities like Anaheim and Irvine are eager to be part of the system, communities along the coast further south are hotbeds of NIMBY pushback (e.g. San Juan Capistrano and Encinitas). That is why the spur line serving Orange County goes no further South than Irvine. Plus the folks in the Inland Empire want the project to serve their region and have been actively lobbying for it to do so during the past decade. Similar lobbying by Palmdale and Lancaster is the reason why the project goes through the Antelope Valley instead of along the grapevine/I-5 corridor to reach L.A. from the Central Valley.

I would add some things to this. The issue isn't so much NIMBY pushback - that isn't stopping CHSRA elsewhere, nor would it be appropriate for it to do so - but the extreme difficulty of engineering tracks in this area. The tracks between LA and SD currently hug the coast through Capistrano Beach and San Clemente, squeezed between the beach and the bluffs. Those bluffs frequently come down onto the tracks in years of heavy rain, the most recent example I know of being in 1998. It's really not a good place for high speed trains.

The only real alternative along the coast is Interstate 5. But this is even less workable than the coast. I-5 is extremely hilly through much of the section from San Clemente southward (Camp Pendleton being less so). It also has some tight curves that make it additionally unsuitable for an HSR route.

Combined with the larger population along the Ontario-Escondido inland alignment, those engineering concerns made the Inland Empire alignment more viable. And yet it's not without questions - such as what will they do now that the I-15 ROW between Escondido and San Diego has been used up by Caltrans? Another is whether the trains will travel along the I-15 or the I-215 alignment in southern Riverside County. At one of these scoping meetings, yesterday in Murrieta, that issue came up, along with some of the now-standard NIMBY concerns:

Murrieta has been targeted for a station stop in an area near the intersection of the two freeways often referred to as the Golden Triangle.

Officials in the southwest Riverside County city see the station as a potential boon -- possibly a catalyst for commercial development and job growth.

As one of the most auto-dependent locations in a deeply auto-dependent region, Murrieta will derive quite a bit of benefit from having an HSR station, making travel to job centers to the north, northwest, and the south more feasible and affordable.

The issue of alignment was discussed:

Determining which freeway the train will parallel will be part of a lengthy environmental study that begins with the public comments fielded at the scoping sessions, said Jose Martinez, project manager for the Southern California line.

Each route has benefits and drawbacks. The terrain along I-215 is flatter and could allow the train to pass through both county seats. But the I-15 route is shorter and has more available land, said Rick Simon, a project engineer.

The I-215 route does include the ability to generate riders from Riverside, Moreno Valley, and San Bernardino/Redlands, whereas the I-15 route would be quicker from LA to SD but would not generate ridership from many of those cities.

And of course, the usual "omg this will cost too much!" folks came out:

Not everyone was supportive. Murrieta mother and son Ken and Louise Appel said they didn't believe that the benefits of the rail line -- shorter commutes and less dependence on foreign oil -- outweigh the costs -- more noise and the estimated $45 billion price tag for the entire system.

Which of course only makes sense if you assume there is no cost whatsoever to continuing the present model of transportation, which involves massive amounts of sprawl subsidized by everyone else in California. In other words, status quo. America has done a very good job of making those costs seem not only normal, but hidden, even nonexistent. So we who support HSR look like the ones wanting to just throw around money, even though opponents are actually the ones proposing a profligate strategy that, as we have learned with this recession, doesn't actually work for most people.

HSR on the Radio in SF Tonight

2009-10-19T15:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 7PM on KALW 91.7 in San Francisco, City Visions will cover the high speed rail debate. As described in the announcement:

The vision of a high-speed rail link between Northern and Southern California is exciting, with fast, modern trains zipping people between San Francisco and Los Angeles in just over two hours. But controversy over route, ridership and cash is following the project. The state, with little money to spend on infrastructure, has just applied for massive federal funding. But some still call the project a fantasy for the well-off that shouldn’t take priority over more basic rail solutions.

Join host Lauren Melzter as she talks with:
-Samer Madanat, Director, Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley
-Brian Stanke, Director of Californians for High-Speed Rail
-Richard Tolmach, President of the California Rail Foundation

Brian Stanke will be carrying the HSR torch for us tonight. As you all probably know, Richard Tolmach is a leading HSR denier and will be using the show to disseminate his misleading statements about the project.

You can see some of his claims in the most recent issue of Cal Rail News, which he edits. Pages 5 and 6 are full of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about HSR "invading neighborhoods" and claiming, against the evidence, that the trains will run at 200mph through "cities."

Perhaps it might be useful in advance of the show to help debunk Tolmach's claims in the comments?

If you want to participate in the show, the call-in number is (415) 841-4134, or you can email the show: feedback@cityvisionsradio.com.

Building an Organic Machine Along the LA River

2009-10-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

It is impossible to address the broad crisis facing California without affecting some preexisting plan in some way. Whether it's the transmission lines needed to carry power to cities from a solar plant in the Mojave Desert or the Carrizo Plain or whether it's building a light rail line next to an LA high school or something else entirely, solutions to the economic, environmental, and energy crisis aren't being built on a blank slate. We have to implement them within the built and the natural environment we have, and that means when we want to build high speed rail, it may mean other plans have to be shifted to accommodate it.

The latest instance of this intersection of plans is along the Los Angeles River. If you've ever seen the movie "Grease" you've seen the LA River. Once a meandering seasonal stream which sometimes took an entirely different course to the Pacific Ocean than it does now (prior to 1835 it joined Ballona Creek and emptied into the Santa Monica Bay), it has become a largely concretized flood channel of the kind you see all over Southern California (including in the backyard of the house I grew up in).

Along with this "modernization" the LA River has also become a major transportation corridor. It was always thus, from Native American times to the late 1700s when Spanish padres marked the El Camino Real along its course. In the 1800s railroads were built along its banks, and in the 1950s several freeways, including the Golden State and the Long Beach freeways, were constructed alongside it.

Since the 1970s there have been a series of efforts to restore the "old" LA River by removing some of the concrete, which would both slow down the river (making it less dangerous during winter flash floods) and make it more hospitable to wildlife. There have also been plans to conduct urban renewal along some of the older industrial sections of the LA River, including those areas currently used by trains.

These plans will be impacted by the high speed rail project, and the intersection of those two projects is the topic of an in-depth article in the LA Times today. The article, by Ari Bloomekatz, is generally a good overview of the concerns some of the river revitalization activists have about high speed rail:

The plan to build a network of high-speed bullet trains across California is facing opposition from the heart of Los Angeles, where community leaders fear the line will hurt efforts for another grand project: revitalizing the L.A. River.

The rail plan, which has picked up considerable steam since voters approved the nearly $10-billion bond measure in 2008, would use Union Station as a major hub, and the line probably would run along the Los Angeles River.

But some elected officials and residents believe the proposed rail alignment would seriously clash with their vision for the area, which involves replacing the dilapidated industrial proprieties along the river with green space, recreation areas and community facilities.

The situation makes for delicate politics. Many L.A. officials strongly support the bullet train concept and believe that the Union Station hub would fit into the county's efforts to expand subway and light rail service. But they also believe that revitalizing the river is an important part of making the city core more livable for residents and attractive to visitors.

Part of the problem here is that some of the revitalization advocates do not appear to have considered trains as part of their vision for "making the city core more livable for residents and attractive to visitors." Others, still operating in a late 20th century mindset, see any major transportation project as producing the kind of "blight" they associate with the current situation along much of the LA River. Instead of railroads and industrial zones being a thriving hub of activity, by the 1980s they had fallen into disuse as state and federal policy and economic shifts rendered those sites undesirable. Unfortunately, many took the lesson that "railroads along the river produces blight," which doesn't predispose those types to support a train.

The specific area under discussion in the article is known as the Taylor Yard area of the "Glendale Narrows" - the area alongside the Golden State Freeway and the Metrolink ROW. This region has been an important transportation corridor going back to the Native American days, and as anyone who's been on Metrolink through here knows, it is already heavily used by trains. It is also one of the few places along the LA River that has not been fully concretized - it has what is officially described as a "soft bottom" and is therefore seen as a prime location for ecosystem restoration. But the closure of Taylor Yard suggested to many in the area that the day of the train was done, and that a post-railroad vision for that section of the Glendale Narrows was desirable:

The proposed rail routes would run near Taylor Yard, a 247-acre freight switching facility in Cypress Park that was closed by 1985. Part of Taylor yard, which is north of Union Station, is still used for rail maintenance and storage, but it also includes Rio de Los Angeles State Park and sites for a planned high school, green space and a mixed-use housing development. The Los Angeles River runs next to it.

"To take a step backward, to put in a train, it's not going to help the quality of life," said Greater Cypress Park Neighborhood Council chairman Gustavo Lizarde.

Lizarde grew up in Lincoln Heights, moved to Cypress Park in the early 1980s and 25 years ago took over his father's auto service shop on North Figueroa Street. He used to live near Taylor Yard.

Last week, Lizarde walked past a new soccer field at the park off San Fernando Road to the concrete bank of the river. A blue heron swooped by a path littered with foam plastic cups.

The soccer field is one part of the city's long-term effort to transform the area along the concrete-sided river that was once synonymous with crime and graffiti into a place residents can enjoy.

Lizarde is articulating exactly the vision I described above - one where railroads are bringers of blight. Because Taylor Yard was undesirable in the 1980s, and because that led to it becoming a haven of crime and decay, Lizarde believes that any railroad use of the site would inherently produce those conditions again. To someone like Lizard, the Taylor Yard region exists in a perpetual 1985, where any expanded use of the area by trains would inherently blow up the plans to revitalize the river and the surrounding neighborhood.

LA City Councilmember Ed Reyes, whose district includes the Taylor Yard area, thinks HSR should simply avoid the area entirely, even if it meant abandoning the Union Station terminus:

But if the high-speed rail goes through Union Station, some officials and environmental advocates say, it would be difficult to find a route that doesn't run near the river.

Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes said he would like to see other alternatives for routes from Anaheim to Los Angeles and from Los Angeles to Palmdale. He said he supports the high-speed rail but doesn't want to sacrifice the river or the progress of the communities the bullet train would pass through.

"The river right now is in a straitjacket. Lined with cement, constrained by railroad lines. . . . But the way they're approaching it, they're going to put the last strap on the straitjacket," Reyes said. "I support it, but let's not be hasty, let's be opportunistic."

So what's really going on here? Is there a huge anti-HSR backlash forming in LA that can give hope to the Peninsula NIMBYs? Will community organizers like Gustavo Lizarde and local electeds like Ed Reyes undermine one of HSR's most important, most vital aspects - using downtown LA's Union Station as a primary hub?

Not so fast. A look at the details suggests that not only was HSR taken into account in the LA River revitalization planning process, but that the plans envision HSR as a possible solution - instead of a barrier - to achieving some of the plans's key goals.

First, let's have a look at the area in question:

View Taylor Yard/HSR in a larger map

With a proposed high school and state park in the way, one might think "omg this is totally unworkable." But in fact the issue seems to be whether the San Fernando Road alignment or the existing Metrolink/UP alignment is used. As you can see, the location is already heavily used by rail, and Metrolink's primary maintenance hub is located just south of the Taylor Yard area.

Much of the non-railroad land is owned by the California State Parks. A lawsuit several years ago stopped the city of LA, UP, and Lennar (a real estate developer) from new industrial development on the site. Described as "the brass ring" for river activists, the Taylor Yard area is seen as a keystone in the "green" vision for the LA River.

But what does "green" mean? Does it include electric, non-polluting, sustainable high speed rail? Or does it mean essentially turning the area into a park?

The City of Los Angeles's River Revitalization Plan makes a clear statement that trains are an essential part of the River, and that HSR can actually serve as a method of reconnecting neighborhoods to the River:

High Speed And Light Rail Lines Could Be Opportunities To Connect To The River: While heavy rail poses the challenges noted previously, existing and proposed future light rail lines could be opportunities to connect a multi-modal system with the River....

The proposed California High-Speed Rail system would travel from San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles and San Diego in the south, and would connect California’s major metropolitan areas. The proposed corridor alignment has been loosely identified in the Los Angeles area, and it traverses a portion of the project area. The preferred alignment is along both sides of the Los Angeles River: one proposed track crosses the River from Mission Yard towards Union Station and continues south while the other passes through Union Station and splits to cross the River south of US-101 and south of 1st Street. Should the rail system be implemented as studied, it offers the potential to bring visitors from outside the region to the City. A revitalized River could provide an important regional recreational destination, as well as an amenity that could draw more visitors to the City. (pages 3-16 and 3-17)

It also presents an opportunity to reconstruct the tracks in the area - consolidating rail lines and putting them in either a viaduct or a trench, creating the possibility of at-grade connections to a riverfront park. And as that segment of the plan notes, both UPRR and BNSF (which operates further down the river, south of Union Station) are not only heavy freight users of rail corridors along the river, but are likely to explore options to expand the rails to accommodate future freight traffic.

Ultimately the plan makes it clear that rails are part of the River's future, instead of an impediment. Neither the freeways nor the rails are going away anytime soon. In fact, electrified passenger rail is a key element of improving the quality of life in Southern California, including for the residents of the Cypress Park and other nearby neighborhoods.

Few of the people quoted in the article are HSR opponents, and the article itself recognizes the environmental benefits of HSR. The ultimate question here is how to reconcile two efforts to produce environmentally friendly uses of urban land.

What this situation primarily demonstrates is that the issue really isn't about the environment. It's instead about perceptions of what urban life should be like. Some of the neighbors near the Taylor Yard have a fundamentally 20th century vision in mind - they're afraid any new rail projects will return the site to 1985, but their own vision is essentially the 1950s - a low-density community with green space and access to a quiet, meandering river.

In this way they're not so different from the Peninsula NIMBYs, who seem to prefer a permanent 1975, even at the expense of Caltrain's survival. They're all motivated by a belief that trains bring blight, that trains are not a part of a desirable community. That is a belief unique to the late 20th century, but that belief runs deep.

Nobody is yet articulating a truly 21st century vision: one where sustainable land use and transportation, including high speed rail, produces cleaner and quieter communities, bringing economic security for the many and protecting everyone from the looming catastrophes our dependence on oil is about to produce.

The LA River presents a particular problem here. But it's not an unfamiliar problem. Stanford history professor Richard White would have well understood it. In 1996 White, then a University of Washington professor, published a remarkable little book titled The Organic Machine. Ostensibly a history of dams and fish management along the Columbia River, it in fact was something more of a meditation on the impact of modern man on the natural environment.

White's argument was simple: in modern societies, there is no easy separation of the "natural" and the "man-made". A single key sentence explains White's thesis: "We might want to look for the natural in the dams and the unnatural in the salmon." The Columbia River dams became part of nature, and created new ecosystems. The dams brought changes, some of which were positive, some of which were negative. White's goal isn't to praise or damn the dams (heh) but to instead show that for humans to think about saving salmon or managing the Columbia River, they have to accept that there can be no such thing as "purely natural" - instead the river is an "organic machine" whose consequences have to be weighed before they are acted upon.

High speed rail will function as an "organic machine" in California. It will change the surrounding environment, whether that environment is a Peninsula city, a Central Valley grassland, or the banks of the Los Angeles River. And it won't have been the first - compared to the urbanization of California, the agriculturalization of the Central Valley, the building of the first railroads and freeways, high speed rail is really just an upgrade of the existing machine to make it more environmentally friendly and more effective.

And it can serve as an "organic machine" along the Los Angeles River. It can reconnect neighborhoods to the river depending on how the tracks are built. It can help produce a cleaner river, a cleaner sky, and a more sustainable use of the river's watershed. Lizare and Reyes want to see HSR as some kind of invader. It's not. It's instead a way to reconnect human uses of land, just as it is in Palo Alto.

Ultimately what all this shows is that in building HSR, we aren't battling "NIMBYs." We're battling an obsolete model of California. The key dividing line is whether people see a train as a valuable part of the future, or an unwanted relic of the past. Palo Alto residents who design tunnels for HSR are embracing the possibilities of HSR, whereas those who sue to kill the project just don't seem to want trains around at all - including Caltrain, which their HSR denial is putting in jeopardy.

There are ways to revitalize the LA River and build HSR at the same time - and in the same place. Let's hope that residents and lawmakers prefer to embrace a 21st century vision of high speed rail as an organic machine, instead of the 20th century vision of trains as an undesirable and somewhat embarrassing reminder of a past they have rejected, for a present that has totally failed the vast majority of Californians.

UPDATE: Thanks to Rafael, have a look at the CHSRA's Taylor Yard simulation video, produced by NC3D. It shows that in both the Metrolink and San Fernando Road alignments the tracks would be trenched, and there would be two "lids" connecting the Cypress Park neighborhood to the Rio de Los Angeles State Park and riverfront. To see a good example of a "lid", look at the Mercer Island Lid, built over Interstate 90 on Mercer Island, Washington in 1993. The park is a very popular location in one of the Seattle metro's wealthiest communities and does an effective job of providing green space connectivity over a major transportation corridor.

Assuming CHSRA is able to construct the trench-and-lid model shown in the video, the complaints offered in the LA Times are much ado about nothing.

Friday Open Thread

2009-10-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Some California high speed rail items to keep you occupied and engaged as we approach the weekend. Apologies for not being able to offer a more in-depth post, but after that wild storm came through this week, the beautiful weather here in Monterey calls me outside.

The Caltrain/California High Speed Rail Authority’s Policymaker Working Group met last night to get their work off the ground in providing advisement to Caltrain and the CHSRA about the rail improvement project. As Gina Papan's comments showed, not only is misinformation widespread, but there's a disturbing willingness of elected officials to believe whatever they hear from constituents.

Merced Mayor Ellie Wooten and Merced County Supervisor John Pedrozo published a pro-HSR op-ed in the Merced Sun-Star today. It offers some very good restatements of the basic case for HSR, from jobs to the environment, but the main reason for their op-ed is to reiterate their case for building the maintenance hub at Castle Airport.

A recent HSR scoping meeting in Escondido showed that NIMBYism can be found virtually anywhere in the state. Although most attendees supported the project, one whiner claimed "I'm going to fight it" because he's convinced the noise will lower his home values. Someone living in Escondido, which currently lacks a direct link to either the LA metro region or to the job centers in San Diego, should think twice about leaving their city's fate in the hands of oil and freeways. (Yes, Escondido has a rail link to downtown SD via the Sprinter and the Coaster, but it is indirect, requiring a transfer at Oceanside.)

Over at the Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark criticizes the FRA's preliminary rail plan that avoids pissing anyone off (a classic trait of the Obama Administration) and therefore doesn't actually offer any specific recommendations about how to develop a national rail program.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

FourBillion.com

2009-10-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

USPIRG, along with several state-based HSR organizations, have launched an online organizing effort to get the US Senate to preserve the $4 billion in HSR spending that the US House approved earlier this year. From the petition language:

Right now, Congress is finalizing next year's transportation appropriations bill, which could include an historic investment in high-speed passenger rail.

Last month, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that included $4 billion for high-speed rail. The Senate cut the allocation down to $1.2 billion in their version, which passed last week. The two bills will now move to a conference committee, where they will decide the final amount of investment.

The conference committee will be meeting soon in hopes of finalizing the bill by the end of the month. We'd like to send them a roster of support by the end of the week, so we need sign-ons quickly.

Please help us achieve our goal! Get started by entering your zip code below.

Thank you for your support.

If you want to contact Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein directly, here you go:

Senator Boxer:

DC: (202) 224-3553
Fresno: (559) 497-5109
LA: (213) 894-5000
SD: (619) 239-3884
SF: (415) 403-0100

Senator Feinstein:

DC: (202) 224-3841
Fresno: (559) 485-7430
LA: (310) 914-7300
SD: (619) 231-9712
SF: (415) 393-0707

To send an email:

Sen. Barbara Boxer

Sen. Dianne Feinstein

Wednesday Open Thread

2009-10-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

by Rafael

a mixed bag of HSR-related news today, some new, some that fell through the cracks over the past week or two.

The Trade Commission of Spain in Chicago is hosting free webinar on HSR on Tuesday November 10 at 2pm Eastern. Note that Patentes Talgo S.A. recently inked a deal to set up a train assembly plant in Wisconsin.

UPDATE: A similar event will be hosted on Monday, Oct 26 from 8:30am to 2pm at the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles. One of the panel sessions will be on high speed rail. (h/t to commenter Susana)
Gov. Quinn of Illinois supports the state's grant application for a Chicago-St.Louis HSR line at 110mph, but the speaker of the state's House has introduced legislation to block the use of state funds for the preferred route past his apartment on 3rd Street in Springfield.
Secr. of Transportation Ray LaHood warns Florida state legislators to commit to funding the Tri-Rail and SunRail regional/commuter services or he'll reject the $2.5 billion grant application for Florida HSR. Note that Yonah Freemark over at the Transport Politic considers its route to be fatally flawed.
Meet the Texas Mini-Triangle, a hybrid of the triangle and T-bone concepts.
Trains4America has video highlights from rail planning consultancy Steer Davies Gleave’s High-Speed Rail Summit 09. It was held in the context of HS2, which will connect London, the north of England and eventually, Scotland with true bullet trains. Variations on this theme are now espoused by all of the major political parties in the UK. Speakers included executives from railways that already operate HSR trains today.
The prime ministers of Russia and China have just signed a $3.5 billion security and trade deal that includes oil and gas exports as well as new high/very high speed rail lines in Russia's Far East based on Chinese technology. Russia is looking to establish a national HSR network with nearly 11,000km of tracks by 2030.
Meanwhile, Thomas Downs (chairman of the North American Board of Veolia Transportation and a former president of Amtrak) argues that various levels of government in the US continue to subsidize car-centric mobility to the tune of $100 billion a year out of their general funds, over-and-above income from fuel taxes. Add to that an eye-popping $200 billion in health care costs related to road traffic accidents.

Rampant HSR NIMBYism In Palo Alto Council Race

2009-10-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Palo Alto was seen as a leader in sustainable planning in California. City leaders expressed and acted upon support for bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly communities, and backed mass transportation solutions from Caltrain to high speed rail (which the current council backed when they endorses Proposition 1A last year).

Unfortunately, the vocal NIMBYs in that community have begun to jeopardize the city's position of leadership in support of sustainable and forward-looking policies. Led by those who continue to sow the misinformation about HSR acting as some kind of "Berlin Wall," Palo Alto is in danger of opposing high speed rail outright, and in the process fatally undermining Caltrain - and therefore, fatally undermining the city's own stated commitments to mass transit.

This November, Palo Alto voters will fill five seats on the city's nine-member council. Unsurprisingly, high speed rail is a major issue in the race, as evidenced by this report of a recent candidates' forum:

"I was opposed to high-speed rail in November, and I voted no on the bond," candidate Leon Leong said, referring to state Proposition 1A, which launched the rail plans with $10 billion in funding. "I believe the city needs to budget funds for litigation, for advocacy in Sacramento, hiring lobbyists, as well as in the federal government, to either get the route changed or get it stopped in San Jose."

The comment drew a burst of cheers from an audience that had been asked to hold its applause. For most of the two-hour forum at the Palo Alto Art Center, sponsored by a group of Palo Alto neighborhood associations, the crowd obeyed. Not when it came to high-speed rail....

Leong and a few others said the city should be pushing back harder against the California High Speed Rail Authority, the board charged with implementing the plans.

Tim Gray, who lives along the tracks, said, "I've got my back against the rail and I'm going to keep on fighting. I'm like a mother bear with her cubs."

What exactly does Leong want the city to do? Find some grounds for another frivolous lawsuit? People like Leong and Gray haven't accepted the fact that high speed rail is going to happen, and think that it is best to waste everyone's time - and the city's money - battling it instead of determining the best way to live with it.

Gray's position is even more amusing. He's not protecting "his cubs" - he thinks he is protecting his property values, as if government existed for that purpose alone and that everyone else in Palo Alto should sacrifice their need for affordable, sustainable transportation in order to pad his assets. Ironically, HSR would boost his property values - unless there's a huge pool of buyers out there eagerly awaiting the chance to live next to a railroad with loud horns and spewing diesel fumes at all hours of the day.

John Hackmann pulled out an oversized white poster board on which he had written in magic marker, "No to rail wall." Like Leong, he said he voted against the bond measure, as did candidate Chris Gaither.

If Palo Alto residents believe that the ability to write on a poster board is qualification to serve on city council, well, OK...

Karen Holman said an underground high-speed rail line might not be much better, even if the city could afford it.

"Opposing the above-ground option is a no-brainer," she said. But an underground rail line comes with its own problems, she said, including possible eminent domain takings due to construction and conflicts with freight trains that now use the Caltrain tracks.

Holman touted her experience on the city's planning and transportation commission, saying it prepared her to pick apart environmental reports. The report approved by the high-speed rail authority last year is "not a serious document," she said.

Holman is actually raising a good point here - a tunnel is no panacea for Palo Alto. It would likely mean greater eminent domain takings (whereas an above-grade solution will produce hardly any at all in Palo Alto), and it would indeed cause conflicts with freight trains that could hinder or block the city's ability to replace the at-grade railroad with development to help pay for the tunnel.

On the other hand, Holman shows her lack of familiarity with environmental and mass transit planning when she calls the statewide program EIR "not a serious document." For someone who touts her experience on the planning and transportation committee, this is a serious charge to make - and it is utterly ridiculous. The judge in Atherton v. CHSRA found that the EIR conformed to CEQA requirements, with the exception of the matter of the UPRR ROW between San José and Gilroy. For a massive statewide project EIR, that's actually a pretty good performance in court.

One candidate took some credit for publicizing the rail plan's potential pitfalls before most others, including the city council, saw any cause for concern. Nancy Shepherd pointed out that she hosted a heavily attended meeting for her house in the Southgate neighborhood, a meeting some say sparked Palo Alto's activist movement on the issue.

"I would like to see the city council play a much larger role, perhaps even hiring our own engineer" to evaluate a key upcoming environmental document, she said. That way, she said, the city would not be "hoodwinked, like we were last November when we were voting on this."

It's a shame Shepherd prefers to repeat the dishonest "hoodwinked" claim. That implies an intent to deceive which wasn't there; she should retract the accusation. Palo Alto voters had plenty of resources at their disposal, including copious amounts of local TV and print news coverage, to explain to them the details of the HSR project when they voted en masse to approve Prop 1A last November.

And that raises the real issue at stake in the Palo Alto election. It isn't a battle over HSR. It's really a battle over who will be allowed to benefit from city policies for the next several decades. It is about who gets to enjoy economic security and prosperity - and who is going to be denied those benefits.

What the anti-HSR candidates are saying to Palo Alto is that the only people who should benefit from city council policy are those who already own homes near the Caltrain corridor. Everyone else, whether homeowner or renter, young or old, student or townie, rich or poor, comes second to those privileged few, who are mobilizing to seize control of the city council.

As Michael Scanlon pointed out at the Menlo Park Town Hall and as Bob Doty reinforced at the Palo Alto teach-in, without high speed rail bringing the money to electrify Caltrain, Caltrain is not likely to survive.

It sure doesn't sound like any of these candidates are even aware of that fact. If they are, it doesn't seem as if they much care. By prioritizing their own property values over the needs of everyone else in Palo Alto, they're happy to consign other city residents to dependence on ever-rising oil prices and automobile congestion, as well as condemning the city to continue to suffer from the deadly toll of at-grade tracks.

Palo Alto, like California, stands at a crossroads. It has two basic choices. The first is what the anti-HSR candidates propose: preservation of the 20th century model of urban living, dependent on the automobile. It is an obsolete model, one directly responsible for the present economic crisis and guaranteed to produce economic stagnation and immiseration as fewer and fewer people can make ends meet in a place dependent on oil and lacking sustainable methods to move people around.

The second choice is what other visionaries, including some of the council candidates, desire for Palo Alto. It is the realization of the city's environmental and smart planning projects begun in recent decades but now in serious jeopardy at this election. It is a choice that would produce a sustainable city, much less dependent on oil, with a vibrant downtown, a community where the railroad is a permeable yet safe feature instead of a deadly and divisive barrier. It is a city where economic opportunity is available to the many and not to the few.

I have no idea how this will turn out. NIMBYs are notoriously successful at drawing attention and making themselves look more numerous than they actually are. Palo Alto DID vote for Prop 1A in large numbers, and the recent efforts to provide sensible HSR planning have been very well-attended by residents eager to find a way to make HSR work for Palo Alto. Perhaps those who want a better future for Palo Alto will outnumber those who want to abandon that future so that a small group of people can enjoy the benefits of the present for a couple more years.

We'll know the answer in November.

San Joaquin Valley Cities Battle Over High Speed Rail Maintenance Hub

2009-10-12T01:02:00.000-07:00

UPDATE by Robert: Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin's office is disputing the Merced County Times report cited below. From an email from the mayor's press secretary, Mike Lukens:

"Just wanted you to know that the comments attributed to her about the maintenance facility are not accurate. She has never made those comments. Had the reporter from the Merced County Times called us about it, I would have said the same thing."

Back to the original post...

Where should the San Joaquin Valley high speed rail maintenance hub be built? As we've discussed on this blog before, particularly in some of Rafael's posts, Merced's Castle Airport seems like a perfect place for the primary maintenance hub. The CHSRA agreed - as of March they claimed Castle Airport was their "first choice" for the hub.

However, the momentum for Merced to be the site of the hub apparently isn't sitting well with other cities in the Valley. According to a report in the Merced County Times, Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin is upset that Merced has been the beneficiary of some major projects in recent years, at Fresno's expense:

Dr. Lee Boese, co-chair of Merced County’s High Speed Rail committee, met Fresno’s Mayor Ashley Swearingen in Sacramento recently and she told him “You got the University, you got the WalMart distribution center, you’re not getting the high speed rail maintenance facility.”

“I was surprised she even knew who I was,” said Boese who said Merced was keeping a very low profile on its efforts to complete the first phase of the track from Fresno to Merced,” he said.

[See above update - the Fresno mayor's office disputes this report.]

This is a side effect of having split the Central Valley segment into two pieces, a decision that many Valley leaders opposed - potentially to head off divisive problems like this.

California is suffering worse than most other states from the economic crisis, and the San Joaquin Valley has been one of the hardest hit regions in the state. As of the most recent numbers, released in mid-September, Merced County's unemployment rate is 16.7% and Fresno's is 14.7%. Both cities would therefore have a strong argument for needing the jobs that the maintenance hub would create.

What Merced County has that Fresno doesn't is a readily available location for the maintenance hub. The county owns Castle Airport, making the construction of the hub that much easier. To my knowledge, Fresno does not possess anything similar.

That shouldn't put Fresno out of the running. But it does suggest that despite the Fresno mayor's annoyance, Merced is again in the lead for this piece of infrastructure. And Fresno isn't exactly going to lose out - it is poised to reap enormous benefits from HSR, from potentially becoming a commuter suburb of SF and/or LA to being able to land its own jobs and businesses using the easy connections to those larger urban centers that HSR will provide.

23 Members of Congress Sign Letter Supporting HSR Stimulus Funds

2009-10-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, 23 of California's Congressional delegation have signed a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo supporting the CHSRA's application for federal HSR stimulus funds. The presence of Pelosi and the two Senators alone is significant, as they are among the three most powerful members of Congress, but the other 20 members of Congress are significant as well in that they show widespread support in California for this application.

As you can see in the letter below, the members of Congress emphasize the potential for significant and badly needed job creation as a primary reason to approve the stimulus application:

CA Congressional Letter to USDOT/FRA re: ARRA HSR stimulus

One name is notably absent from the letter: Anna Eshoo. She represents the 14th Congressional District, which includes the Caltrain corridor from Redwood City to Sunnyvale. In contrast, Jackie Speier, who represents the other half of the Caltrain corridor on the Peninsula, did sign the letter. Speier has been a tenacious advocate of passenger rail, particularly during her time in the state legislature - and her work in support of Caltrain earned her the distinct honor of having a Caltrain locomotive named after her. Other representatives whose district includes or is near the Bay Area portion of the HSR route, including Mike Honda, Zoe Lofgren, and my own representative Sam Farr, all signed the letter.

The letter states that the San Francisco to San José section of the HSR route would "directly create 11,400 jobs and be responsible for a total of 34,200 jobs beginning immediately."

So the question is, what does Anna Eshoo have against job creation in her district?

Addendum by Rafael:

This is an economic stimulus issue, the focus is on jobs, jobs, jobs.

Considering the fiscal hole California has fallen into is even deeper than already feared, getting people back to work is indeed a high priority. Remarkably, California state bonds are now trading at yields slightly below those in April, though 7.23% is still nosebleed territory for the eighth-largest economy in the world. Still, investing in infrastructure now is the right thing to do, even if the cost of borrowing is high. The Bear Republic cannot recover through spending cuts alone, it needs to take on additional debt so it can act as the spender of last resort - in partnership with the federal government.

The letter is signed by both of the state's US Senators and 22 members of the House, all of them Democrats. Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D - 10th) resigned in June to serve as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in the Obama Administration. Her seat is vacant, a special election is pending.

That means 11 Democratic and 19 Republican members of the California delegation failed to sign this letter, whose sole purpose is to bring $4.7 billion federal dollars to the Bear Republic just when they are most needed. Anna Eshoo is among them, but she is not alone.

Democratic Non-Signatories:

Lynn Woolsey - D - 6th
Barbara Lee - D - 9th
Pete Stark - D - 13th
Anna Eshoo - D - 14th
Lois Capps - D - 23rd
Xavier Bacerra - D - 31st
Diane Watson - D - 33rd
Lucille Roybal-Allard - D - 34th
Maxine Waters - D - 35th
Joe Baca - D - 43rd
Susan Davis - D - 53rd

Republican Non-Signatories:

Wally Herger - R - 2nd
Dan Lungren - R - 3rd
Tom McClintock - R - 4th
George Radanovich - R - 19th
Devin Nunes - R - 21st
Kevin McCarthy - R - 22nd
Elton Gallegly - R - 24th
Howard "Buck" McKeon - R - 25th
David Dreier - R - 26th
Edward Royce - R - 40th
Jerry Lewis - R - 41st
Gary Miller - R - 42nd
Ken Calvert - R - 44th
Mary Bono Mack - R - 45th
Dana Rohrbacker - R - 46th
John Campbell - R - 48th
Darrell Issa - R - 49th
Brian Bilbray - R - 50th
Duncan Hunter - R - 52nd

To see if your Representative in the House is among those listed above, please consult the maps of congressional districts. If so, ask him or her to fight the Golden State's corner!

LA-SF Nation's Second Busiest Air Route - Shows Need For HSR

2009-10-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Brookings Institution has released a report today showing that the nation's busiest air routes are growing more congested over time, a condition almost certain to worsen once the economy recovers. And the second busiest corridor in the entire nation is Los Angeles to San Francisco (second only two Miami/Ft. Lauderdale to New York), with one of the main airports in that corridor, SFO, experiencing "worse than average delays."

As even the Wall Street Journal realizes, this is a call for high speed rail:

The Brookings report recommends that these air-travel statistics be used to prioritize investment in high-speed rail. At 400 miles or less, high-speed rail can been air travel in time, typically with less pollution. That makes Los Angeles-San Francisco, Las Vegas-Los Angeles, Los Angeles-Phoenix and Dallas-Houston the most likely candidates for high-speed rail, in that order.

More than 6 million people fly between the Los Angeles basin and San Francisco Bay per year, the study said. In the northeast corridor, Amtrak carried 11.7 million people on Acela and Northeast Regional lines in fiscal 2008, hitting 14 metropolitan areas. The Amtrak ridership suggests high-speed rail would be viable in out busiest air corridors, the study concluded.

This study dovetails with numerous other studies, including not just that of the CHSRA's consultants, but that of SNCF as well, which show the LA-SF corridor as an ideal spot to build high speed rail. We've already seen HSR have stunning success on other busy air corridors: from the AVE on the Madrid-Barcelona corridor, long one of the world's busiest air corridors; to the Acela, which had 40% of the market share of the Northeast Corridor in March 2008. There is every reason to believe HSR will have similar success here in California, especially since it will link the city centers - i.e. the job and business centers - of the state, from SF's Financial District to San José's own growing downtown, to downtown LA and the hub of the city's growing mass transit system.

Every time we discuss HSR and air travel, we usually have to explain yet again the reasons why HSR almost always thrives in competition with airlines on busy corridors. Especially here in California, where people usually say "but I can get a ticket on Southwest to LA right now for $49! why would I take your stupid train?"

And as usual we explain patiently that when you combine total travel time - door to door, including getting to the non-centrally located airport, airport security, time on the runway, and getting from the non-centrally located airport to your final destination, you're about on par with the door to door travel time of HSR. We also explain that Southwest won't be able to offer those fares for much longer - they locked in their fuel costs at $55/bbl through the use of complex fuel hedges that will soon expire and leave them vulnerable to rising oil prices.

Which, we should add, must never be forgotten. Earlier this week Deutsche Bank predicted $175/bbl by 2016 (mark my words: it will happen well before that date) and that such a price rise will "put the final nail in oil's coffin." The key is what happens here in the USA:

US demand is the key. It is the last market-priced, oil inefficient, major oil consumer. We believe Obama’s environmental agenda, the bankruptcy of the US auto industry, the war in Iraq, and global oil supply challenges have dovetailed to spell the end of the oil era.

Deutsche Bank's analysis assumes that electric cars will radically change how we use oil in this country. I hope it does. But electric cars are no substitute for oil-fueled jets for getting people from LA to SF and vice versa. We need electric cars AND electric trains, both for local and statewide travel.

California is poised to lead the path forward. We will use high speed rail to unshackle ourselves from a failing and suicidal dependence on oil, and produce a sustainable economic prosperity, shared broadly, for the remainder of this century.

Judge Kenny: Planning Work Can Continue

2009-10-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

Judge Michael Kenny has issued his tentative ruling in the issue of whether work could continue on the Bay Area to the Central Valley segment of the high speed rail line - and it is a victory for CHSRA:

Petitioners have requested that the writ of mandate to be issued in this case include a stay of all of respondent’s activities dependent on or premised upon the approvals being ordered rescinded. Respondent opposes the request. The Court set a briefing and hearing schedule on this issue.

The Court has considered the parties’ arguments and the evidence they have submitted on this issue. The Court concludes that under the circumstances of this case, staying project-level activities is not appropriate pursuant to Public Resources Code section 21168.9(a)(2) and pertinent case law.

The actions for which a stay is being requested are studies with no potential for adverse change or alteration to the physical environment. Additionally, the Court concludes that such studies do not create such momentum that respondent Authority would be unable to comply with its CEQA obligations as previously determined by this Court.

Accordingly, petitioners’ request that the writ to be issued include a stay is denied.

CHSRA offered this statement in response:

“We’re happy to see that the tentative ruling supports our position that granting a stay on the project is unnecessary since the project is in the planning stage and could cost the state funding and jobs,” said Jeff Barker, the Authority’s Deputy Director.

"We don't believe that anyone is interested in jeopardizing billions of dollars in economic stimulus for California, delaying the creation of tens of thousands of jobs, and forcing taxpayers to shoulder higher costs to build the system," said Barker.

Totally agreed. There was no reason to delay planning work while the CHSRA goes back to address the two items that Judge Kenny said were inadequately examined in the program EIR.

Once again the HSR deniers behind this lawsuit have lost. They basically got lucky on the UPRR ROW issue, which was never a core element of their lawsuit, and their other efforts to stop HSR in its tracks have been consistently shot down by this judge. I have every reason to believe that will continue.

A Closer Look at San José to Merced

2009-10-07T10:13:00.001-07:00

Last night the CHSRA held a public meeting in San José to discuss the plans for what may well be the most challenging segment of the entire SF-Anaheim route: the San José to Merced segment. The battles north of here, on the Peninsula, have gotten a lot of attention, but that segment is much more straightforward - the route has already been chosen (Caltrain ROW) and it's now just a matter of how you implement it.

Further south, the situation is much more complex, additionally so because it is this segment for which the judge ruled the EIR was inadequate in Atherton v. CHSRA, specifically the matter of using UPRR ROW between San José Diridon and Gilroy.

As a result, some of the key route decisions are still very much up in the air. And here too you have NIMBYs fighting what seem to be the most commonsense solutions, including the Gardner neighborhood (which, I should correct, did actually exist before the railroad - the neighborhood was subdivided in the 1880s and again in the 1900s, whereas the SP line was built during the Depression in the mid-1930s). Down in south Santa Clara County Gilroy residents have voiced concerns about using the existing rail alignment, especially based on the factually incorrect statement that trains would run at 220mph through central Gilroy. And there is the matter of a protected grassland near Los Banos that the HSR trains are currently planned to use.

The CHSRA produced a useful document showing the alignment options along this segment, focusing on the three toughest parts: how you get from Diridon Station to either the UPRR ROW or Highway 101; how you run trains through Morgan Hill/Gilroy, and the Los Banos section.

One of our commenters, Peter, attended the San José meeting last night and had these comments, shared in the comments to yesterday's post and reproduced here:

The presenters were brutally honest regarding expected noise levels, eminent domain, frequency of trains, etc.

People definitely preferred the relatively straight tunnel at an angle to Diridon as the alignment they thought the Authority should adopt. They weren't very concerned that it meant the station would be over 100 feet underground.

They were very surprised to hear the maximum permissible noise levels for freight trains (the locomotive) at 55 mph and HSR at 150 mph are the same at 90 dba. The freight cars can apparently be even louder.

They were very upset at the planned peak level of operations of 11 tph in each direction. They were upset despite the fact that the presenter made clear that this was for 2035.

In other words, HSR through the Gardner and Willow Glen areas wouldn't be louder than the existing trains, and like their counterparts on the Peninsula, believe they have some right to dictate the operations of the train corridor (which they don't). Peter continued:

And when I say above that the presenters were "brutally honest," I mean that when they didn't have the answer yet and had not yet studied the issue in-depth enough to have an answer, they said so.

I know people are going to claim they were hiding things, but I just didn't get that impression.

The presenters stated that they were shooting to go as fast as they could between Diridon and Gilroy. It sounded like they liked the idea of the curve around Morgan Hill in order to enable them to possibly 220 mph.

There was one crazy still trying to get Altamont, and he even had a handout ("This is a better choice")with an alignment splitting in Pleasanton and one spur going south to San Jose International and another going via a Transbay Tube and ending beneath SFO.

Two San Jose Board of Supervisors members were there and they made their pitch for the "straighter" tunnel alignment that allowed the trains to go faster, and oh, by the way, would mean they would be out of sight, out of mind.

Oh, and supposedly they are now considering a Morgan Hill station instead of Gilroy....they are considering the Morgan Hill station because the City of Morgan Hill asked them to. All of the alignment alternatives raised are being considered because they have to be. I highly doubt they'll put a station in Morgan Hill, same as I think a 100 foot deep underground station at Diridon is ludicrous.

Here again I'll say the same thing I said about the Palo Alto HSR design workshop: if San José and/or Santa Clara County want a tunnel from Diridon Station southward, they need to come up with a way to pay for it. That strikes me as even less likely given that the county is already on the hook for a multibillion dollar tunnel, to bring BART to downtown San José.

As Clem noted, the CHSRA does listen to and incorporate public feedback - in this case, the "Thread the Needle" plan floated by Gardner/Willow Glen residents, which as you can see on the image below, has been incorporated by the CHSRA as an alignment option:

The simplest solution to me looks like the existing Caltrain corridor through the Gardner neighborhood. If residents want another solution, whether a costly tunnel or a costly and tightly-curved aerial structure shown in green, they'll have to find a way to pay for it. It's not government's nor the public's job to subsidize their home values.

For getting the trains out of central San José, there's the issue of what to do if the UPRR ROW along Monterey Highway is unavailable. The solution as proposed below involves using the Highway 87 and Highway 85 corridors.

I wish I had more specifics on this, because those corridors are already being used by VTA light rail. I do not believe it is either wise or desirable to sacrifice VTA light rail for HSR, and the cost of widening the ROW along both routes would be quite high. Still, if there's no federal pressure put on UPRR to come to an agreement about the ROW, this may have to be explored.

Next up is Morgan Hill, where a station is being considered at the request of the city of Morgan Hill:

As Rafael noted, a Morgan Hill station would not be optimal for those of us living in the Monterey Bay Area (and there are almost a million of us, not an inconsequential number). A Gilroy station is both ideal and still the most likely option.

Of course, the other interesting thing about this map is the possibility of following the Highway 101 corridor. I drive that corridor pretty frequently, including last Saturday, when I took a close look at the options for placing HSR tracks alongside the road. This is very doable. The east side of 101 has more space in the Morgan Hill area, and the west side has more space through San Martin. Because the 101 corridor here is straight and not built up, unlike the Peninsula, it strikes me as an appropriate place to put HSR tracks.

I'm skipping over the slide on the Pacheco Pass and moving directly to the Los Banos region, where a wide range of options are on the table:

As you can see, there are three main issues here: Can the CHSRA build through the grassland? What do you do with the wye at Chowchilla? And can you use the UPRR/Highway 99 alignment? I have no strong preferences here, although the Firebaugh alignment would seem to rule out a maintenance hub at Merced.

Obviously there's quite a lot going on here. To me the best solution is to use the existing Caltrain ROW through Gardner, use federal mediation to reach an accommodation with UPRR in the Monterey Highway area and along the Highway 99 corridor, and use the straightest and most direct route through a narrow portion of the grassland.

I would prefer the HSR trains go through central Morgan Hill and particularly central Gilroy. Those cities are under intense pressure to build urban sprawl, and an HSR station in downtown Gilroy, where the existing Caltrain station is located, would instead help channel that growth back into the existing urban center. That being said, I'm open to a 101 alignment, especially east of Morgan Hill, if that can enable trains to go at a faster speed.

New Animations of Peninsula Corridor

2009-10-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

A new video animation of possible HSR implementations through Palo Alto has been circulating, and a link was posted to it in the comments on yesterday's post. I thought it worth posting, as it looks quite a lot better than anything else we've seen:

That being said, I cannot imagine that the depictions of the above-grade solutions, whether the viaduct or the retained fill, will please the Peninsula NIMBYs. As Clem noted in the comments to yesterday's post, we have to unpack the term "barrier":

As a San Carlos resident, I can't agree with this at all--unless you meant a visual barrier. Visual barriers don't prevent you getting from point A to point B, which is what a physical barrier does (like the tracks in Palo Alto).

San Carlos = high visual, low physical barrier

Palo Alto = low visual, high physical barrier

The whole "division," "barrier," and "Berlin Wall" debate needs to be separated into physical and visual components before it starts to make any sense. Conflating the two is confusing and is often used to scaremongering advantage.

All of the solutions depicted in this video would create a low physical barrier. As we saw over the weekend in Palo Alto, residents also want a low visual barrier in the form of a tunnel, but it is very, very uncertain whether this is financially possible.

Further, there is a third kind of barrier that must be considered - a "mental geography" barrier. Californians have been trained to see above-grade structures as creating spatial divisions and separations within communities, between neighborhoods. An above-ground high visual barrier is usually seen as a something that causes separation and division - which is why the totally ridiculous term "Berlin Wall" used by NIMBYs to describe the above-ground solutions is able to gain any currency at all on the Peninsula. Those barriers are often permeable and people learn to adapt to them, just as Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton have apparently maintained a high quality of life with the much more obtrusive physical barrier of at-grade tracks. But these images are likely to reinforce the perception of an above-ground solution as an undesirable barrier, no matter how positive the effects are likely to be.

I don't know who produced this video, and that would be a rather important matter, especially in determining whether the depiction of the above-ground solutions are fair and realistic or not.

Has Palo Alto Turned The Corner?

2009-10-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend Palo Alto hosted an HSR design workshop that included working groups focused on a number of different neighborhoods in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton. I wasn't able to attend owing to last-minute work commitments. But judging by the reports, it was an extremely productive event where residents came up with their preferred plans - and even explored ways to pay for them.

If you were there, by all means, post your thoughts in the comments. For now, I'm going to have to rely on the local press. Sue Dremann at Palo Alto Online had a good overview:

The two-day workshop, sponsored by the Peninsula Cities Consortium, brought together residents, city and Caltrain officials, architects, and experts in transportation, geology, tunneling, historic resources, finance and public art to discuss the visionary futures for the rail corridor.

The consensus was for undergrounded tracks with parks, community gardens, a bicycle boulevard, green spaces, shops and streets to connect neighborhoods now divided by the at-grade and elevated tracks....

Most groups said tunneling the trains seemed the best alternatve -- but they recognized the complexity and cost. The groups considered boring deep beneath creeks and avoiding damage to El Palo Alto, the city's iconic redwood.

Dremann's article goes into some detail on the various neighborhood proposals, but I want to focus on the bigger picture. Assuming this is an accurate reflection of the event, I am extremely pleased to hear this. I've always been open to a tunnel - the question is instead the cost, and according to Dremann, the locals fully understand it:

Some groups suggested the project could be funded by a one-percent sales tax hike, as was done in Berkeley when Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) was built. Others suggested a voter-approved 30-year property-tax fee could cover costs.

Both funding models are sensible, since they rightly recognize that they will have to pay for a tunnel themselves. If these cities can muster the public support to approve such a tax, and if they can show it will pay for the costs of the tunnel, then I'll be one of the biggest supporters of such a plan.

Funding an underground solution is not likely to be a simple matter. Gennady Sheyner's Palo Alto Online article makes that pretty clear:

But speakers at Sunday's workshop also acknowledged a major obstacle standing between them and their idealistic vision: the high cost of creating underground tunnels. While rail officials don't expect to have a cost estimate for the project for another year, they have estimated the cost of boring tunnels to be about 6.5 times as much as building at grade.

The cost of building underground tunnels is also expected to be beyond the rail authority's $4.2 billion budget for the Peninsula segment.

Glenn Isaacson, principal at Conversion Management Association, said cities would have a hard time funding a tunnel, but offered several ways in which it could be done. Aside from passing bond measures or enacting special taxes, cities could sell land currently occupied by the Caltrain right-of-way and use the proceeds to pay for the tunnels, he said.

Workshop participants have also singled out a downtown stretch between El Camino Real and Alma Street as a possible site for dense, revenue-generating developments, including multi-story condominiums. But Isaacson warned that the project would still likely require significant additional funding from the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

"I'd urge you to watch your pennies in the cost of what you select," Isaacson advised the audience. "You'll have a hard time covering 100 percent of the gap."

My guess is they'll have to do all of the above - property assessments, passing a bond, and selling air rights - to fund an underground solution. One possible solution is for the CHSRA to lay out the cost of an above-grade solution (some of these articles mention an "at-grade" implementation as a possibility, which it is not) and then tell the locals that if they want to go above and beyond by building a tunnel, they have to pay for those added costs.

If you want to get public support for paying those costs locally, you have to sell not the process, nor the technical solution, but you have to sell a vision. A vision of a better Peninsula. And that too is something that the locals understand:

California's high-speed-rail project could offer Palo Alto and its neighboring cities a rare opportunity to revitalize their downtown districts, transform old train tracks into leafy gateways and bring neighborhoods closer together, a group of leading urban designers and architects said at a Sunday workshop....

Judith Wasserman, a member of Palo Alto's Architectural Review Board, gave the plan a special name: "Together Again for the First Time." Wasserman said an underground system could offer the city a long-awaited chance to connect its neighborhoods.

"The town has always been divided by the train," Wasserman said. "We've never had good cross-town connection. This is an opportunity we'll never have again."

Of course, Wasserman has it backwards; the train was there before the town. But that shouldn't take away from what is a very reasonable and supportable vision for how HSR can enhance and improve the local community.

That all being said, there are two huge, related caveats that we all need to keep in mind before we pronounce the corner being turned on the Peninsula HSR debate.

The first is the above-grade solution. It makes sense for everyone involved to have the community do work on determining how to implement an above-grade four-track solution in a way neighbors can live with. Neither Caltrain, the CHSRA, nor the Peninsula cities can afford to pin their hopes on getting voter approval for a tax increase to build a tunnel. Such work may have been done this weekend and just didn't make its way into the reports, but it is vital that the design workshops include an emphasis on planning above-grade solutions.

The second is freight rail. As we saw at the Palo Alto teach-in last month, the Peninsula Freight Rail Users Group is adamant that freight rail continue to operate much as it does today, and Union Pacific has its trackage rights that have to be considered as well. It's theoretically possible to design a tunnel that could accommodate freight rail, but the design for that is very, very different from tunnels for passenger trains alone. Since many of the proposals for tunneling in Palo Alto and neighboring cities revolve around using the at-grade land for purposes other than a railroad, that means they're going to have to build a tunnel big enough to possibly accommodate 4 tracks and high enough to accommodate today's containerized double-stacked freight consists.

I don't know if that all was discussed at the workshop. But it should have been, and it needs to be discussed going forward. Otherwise what was a very productive and valuable planning workshop may not actually be as effective as it ought to be.

LA Times: Put CA First In Line for HSR Stimulus Funds

2009-10-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a growing consensus that when it comes to doling out federal HSR stimulus money, California should get the lion's share. Earlier this summer The Business Insider suggested CA get "all" the HSR funds, arguing that if the money was spread too thin, nothing would actually get built and we thus wouldn't have much to show for the stimulus spending, whereas giving it "all" to California would help produce an actual bullet train.

Now the state's largest newspaper has joined in the "give it to California" chorus, with this editorial in today's LA Times:

Last November, voters passed a bond measure(2008) approving $9.95 billion to fund a high-speed train line from San Diego to Sacramento. They couldn't have known it then, but the timing was fortuitous. Months later, as part of the stimulus package, Congress dedicated $8 billion to pay for high-speed rail projects across the country. California is the only state where voters have already approved funding for a bullet train, and it has the most state-of-the-art proposal, with the most planning work completed, in the nation. Because the funding is meant to stimulate the economy as quickly as possible, officials at the Federal Railroad Administration are expected to give priority to applicants that can start hammering rail spikes soon. So when the California High-Speed Rail Authority submitted its application on Friday, it had powerful arguments on its side.

First off, I am really pleased to see the Times connecting the Yes vote on Prop 1A to economic stimulus. This blog repeatedly framed Prop 1A in precisely those terms last fall, and it is one of the chief reasons for building high speed rail. While we can and should debate the best way to build that train, we cannot let ourselves forget the broader context - an economy in tatters, with even former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, chief architect of the wrecked economy, predicting 10% unemployment before much longer. California desperately needs jobs, and HSR is a damn good way to provide it.

The Times goes on:

The authority is applying for $4.7 billion of the $8-billion federal pot, yet there will be heavy political pressure to spread the money across a broad geographical region rather than giving so much to a single state. Even so, there are strong reasons to award California an outsized share.

It is undeniably parochial for The Times to argue that Washington should send tax money to California for a project that would boost the local economy. But nobody has to take our word that the Golden State should be first in line. In addition to the timing considerations, there is the important matter of ridership -- for the rail program to be successful, it should focus on projects that can move the most people. America 2050, a Washington-based public planning think tank, studied regions with the highest potential ridership for high-speed rail, ranking them by city pairs (routes between two cities). A line connecting New York and Washington was ranked the highest, but three of the top 10 city pairs would be connected by California's bullet train, including L.A. to San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose. If federal officials want the most bang for their stimulus buck, they should look west.

Actually, I don't think it is parochial at all. California is 1/10th of the nation's population, and is responsible for 13% of its GDP. We are a major part of the national, even the global economy. If California does not have an economic recovery, neither will the nation as a whole.

And one reason for California's crisis is, as the Observer noted in a long article today, a fatal dependence on sprawl. For California to have a truly lasting economy recovery, we will need to provide transportation solutions that encourage urban density, reduce dependence on oil, and provide a Green Dividend (economic growth through reallocation of money previously spent on oil).

In short, if the US is going to have economic growth in the coming decade, California must have growth and recovery. And if California is going to have growth and recovery, California needs to build high speed rail to reshape the way we move people around, and how we pay for doing so.

So if anything, the LA Times editorial, while generally excellent and welcome, is actually understating the case. California ought to expect to get much of the federal HSR stimulus - not just for our own sake, but for the nation's sake as well.

Video From LA Union Station HSR Rally

2009-10-03T14:23:00.001-07:00

Thanks to @TedNguyen and OCTA for this short video of the HSR stimulus funding rally yesterday at LA Union Station. Included are snippets of remarks by OCTA CEO Will Kempton, CHSRA Board Chairman Curt Pringle, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

What To Do In Willow Glen?

2009-10-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Note that in fact the tracks from Diridon Station to a point called "Lick" 3 miles south, about where the tracks reach Monterey Highway, are owned by the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board (PCJPB), as Rafael pointed out in the comments. I've updated the post to reflect that info.

This weekend Peninsula residents are gathering at the Palo Alto Sheraton to discuss possible designs for the Caltrain/HSR project through Menlo Park, Atherton, and Palo Alto. I'm going to have to miss this event, but it's worth noting their task is significantly easier than the much more complicated and difficult question of HSR implementation just a few miles down the tracks in San José.

The Willow Glen and Gardner neighborhoods, located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, are wrestling with the question of how to implement HSR through their communities. Like their neighbors on the Peninsula, they too have an existing railroad running through their community, which as on the Peninsula predated the homes.

But unlike the Peninsula, Willow Glen and Gardner in particular have other major transportation systems impacting and dividing their neighborhoods. I-280 and the CA-87 freeways have already cut through significant portions of both areas. These neighborhoods also lie in the flight path of Mineta San Jose Airport, whose runways are located about 2 miles or so to the north, meaning there is significant aircraft noise in this neighborhood.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the existing tracks south of ~~Diridon Station~~ a point 3 miles south of Diridon called "Lick" (thanks to Rafael for the clairification), currently used by a few Caltrains to/from Gilroy and the twice-daily Coast Starlight, are owned by the Union Pacific Railroad. The ROW through the Gardner neighborhood appears to be wide enough to accommodate four tracks, including the existing two that comprise the northern end of the UPRR Coast Line. Of course, as we know, UPRR is not in a mood to actually share that ROW. And that causes a significant problem for both HSR planners and the surrounding neighborhood. (Again, noting the correction above, the segment through the Gardner neighborhood is indeed owned by PCJPB.)

View Willow Glen/Gardner in a larger map

That's why the CHSRA is hosting a community meeting at the Gardner Community Center Tuesday, October 6 from 6 to 8pm to discuss the issue. As the Mercury News explains it, the popular proposal in Gardner and Willow Glen is to move the tracks to Highway 87:

Residents of Willow Glen and the Greater Gardner area including David Dearborn, Jean Dresden, Michelle Harris and Harvey Darnell submitted pages of questions for the "scoping" document that will set the parameters of the draft environmental impact report.

Dresden and Dearborn — who has worked in technical fields for 30 years — drafted a plan called "Thread The Needle," which describes in detail how the rail line could trace Highway 87 through the Interstate 280 interchange. It would run underground in the Delmas Park area to the Diridon train station.

Rail leaders say perhaps a compatible option would be to replace the Valley Transportation Authority's light-rail line along Highway 87 with a high-speed line, although it is unclear if the VTA would allow it.

I'd love to see this plan, which I could not find online, because I'm quite curious about how this would work in practice. Moreover, I'm also quite curious about how the hell VTA would continue light rail service on the Santa Teresa and Almaden lines if their median tracks in Highway 87 are taken, even if just for the few miles between Curtner Ave and the 280 interchange. VTA light rail is a "struggling" system, but as Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic noted, better land use policy in the Silicon Valley would help make the system much more effective. The "Thread the Needle" plan seems to suggest abandoning light rail along the Highway 87 corridor almost entirely (which is one reason I want to see the actual plan). You can't actually widen the Highway 87 to accommodate both HSR and light rail tracks, since to do so you'd have to encroach on the same ~~UPRR ROW~~ tracks that is causing issues for HSR planners even if they leave light rail where it is.

Neighborhood residents say they support the HSR project, even though they exhibit the same errant thinking about the place of rails in communities as some folks on the Peninsula:

Michelle Harris, a 48-year-old Cisco engineer who lives on Fuller Avenue, said many people in the Gardner area want the route moved to Highway 87.

"In older neighborhoods, the Caltrain tracks go through quaint parts of town. Putting a 200 mph train through it is kind of like putting a freeway through it," Harris said.

Harris, the secretary of the North Willow Glen Neighborhood Association, also said that many neighbors support the rail project and voted for Proposition 1A in 2008. They want to be close to a train station that would take them to other cities, she said.

As you can tell, the problem here is that Harris has it backwards - the neighborhood "goes through" the rail corridor, which was there before the houses. But what about the "200 mph train" - is that actually what would be implemented in the neighborhood (and even if it were, wouldn't the noise be FAR less than that of the two existing freeways and certainly less than the existing Caltrains)?

Rail leaders have said in public meetings that trains would travel about 60 mph if they negotiated the curves of the Caltrain line through the Gardner area, but they did not deny that noise and vibration would be issues unless soundwalls or tunnels were built.

Notice, of course, that saying noise and vibration would be "issues" isn't the same as saying they'd impact the neighborhood the same way as a freeway would.

In the end, the real issue here is UPRR. Running HSR trains through Gardner at 60 mph on the existing tracks (it's just beyond Diridon Station, so you have to assume trains were never going to be running a whole lot faster than that) would be a perfectly sensible solution that would cause the minimum impact on the community. But since UPRR refuses to allow ~~that~~ their ROW (south of Lick) to be used, something else is going to have to be ~~done~~ explored - hence CHSRA's willingness to explore the "Thread the Needle" idea, as problematic as that is.

Here again I renew my call for California's federal representatives to get involved. As the only body with the ability to actually push UPRR to be more willing to share its ROW. As a creation of the US government, with much of its land and ROW given to it freely by the government, UPRR should be more willing to find a reasonable accommodation with the HSR project.

CA Submits Second Federal HSR Stimulus Application - Up to $10 Billion Could Be Headed Our Way

2009-10-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

Across California the California High Speed Rail Authority is hosting rallies in support of the state's application for federal rail stimulus funds. You can follow along at the Authority's official Twitter feed, @cahsra.

The official application was unveiled today in a press conference with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Speaker Karen Bass, and a whole host of other dignitaries, including most of the CHSRA board. The total amount of the application is $4.7 billion, which closely tracks the $4.5 billion the board approved on September 23. When combined with state and local matching funds, including funds from Prop 1A that would be eligible to be spent with the 50% match required under AB 3034, the total funding this could generate for the HSR project is $10 billion, more than enough to get actual construction work underway.

Some of the statements from the LA event:

At a news conference at Union Station, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he is a high-speed rail "fanatic" and asserted the project would provide a $10 billion economic boost to the state.

"I think it is disgraceful for America to be so far behind when it comes to infrastructure," Schwarzenegger said. "In Europe and Asian countries, they're traveling now up to 300 miles (per hour on bullet trains) while we're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago. That is inexcusable. America must catch up."

Schwarzenegger said California deserved to get more than half of the $8 billion in federal stimulus money set aside for high-speed rail development because it is further along in planning than other states and is ready to break ground in 2011, a year before the federal deadline for getting the money.

Also, Schwarzenegger said "those stimulus dollars will go further in California than in any other state because California has pledged to match -- dollar for dollar -- all money received" from the federal government....

In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa touted the project's environmental benefits.

"A high-speed rail system that runs faster on one-third the energy of air travel, and one-fifth the energy of car travel, will dramatically reduce CO2 emissions and the time people spend stuck in traffic on our state's freeways," he said.

Among the backers of the application is Senator Barbara Boxer, who put out this statement:

Senator Boxer said, “I am pleased to support the request that the California High-Speed Rail Authority is making today. California voters have already committed nearly $10 billion in state bonds for this effort. This investment of federal high-speed rail funds could help us create more than 130,000 jobs in California, reduce air pollution and congestion on our roads, and accelerate our push for a cleaner and more efficient transportation system.”

Of course, CHSRA's approved application wasn't the final version. The applications for federal stimulus come from the governor's office. And that is where things are starting to get interesting. No small amount of money was shifted around between the September 23 proposal and today's proposal. From the September 23 application:

$1.28 billion for San Jose to San Francisco, including station improvements, grade-separations, electrification and safety state-of-the-art "positive train control" in an upgraded, shared alignment with Caltrain.

$466 million for Fresno to Merced, including right-of-way acquisition, grade-separations, utility relocation, environmental mitigation, earthwork, guideway structures and track.

$819.5 million for Bakersfield to Fresno, including right-of-way acquisition, grade-separations,
utility relocation, environmental mitigation, earthwork, guideway structures, track relocation and new track.

$2 billion for Los Angeles to Anaheim, including high-speed train facilities at Los Angeles Union Station (LAUS), Norwalk Station, and the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC); right-of-way acquisition, grade-separations, utility relocation, environmental mitigation, earthwork, guideway structures, tunneling, and track work.

And from the October 2 application:

$2.18 billion for Los Angeles to Anaheim, including high-speed train facilities at Los Angeles Union Station, Norwalk Station and the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center; right-of-way acquisition, grade-separations, utility relocation, environmental mitigation, earthwork, guideway structures, tunneling, and track work. Total jobs created: 53,700.

$980 million for San Francisco to San Jose, including station improvements, grade separations, electrification and safety state-of-the-art "positive train control" in an upgraded, shared alignment with Caltrain. Total jobs created: 34,200.

$466 million for Merced to Fresno, including right-of-way acquisition, grade-separations, utility relocation, environmental mitigation, earthwork, guideway structures and track. Total jobs created: 10,500.

$819.5 million for Fresno to Bakersfield, including right-of-way acquisition, grade-separations, utility relocation, environmental mitigation, earthwork, guideway structures, track relocation and new track. Total jobs created: 16,500.

$276.5 million for preliminary engineering and environmental work in all system segments including Los Angeles to San Diego via the Inland Empire, Los Angeles to Palmdale and Bakersfield, Sacramento to Merced and the Altamont Rail Corridor. Total jobs created: 12,000.

The differences appear to be:

-$300 million on the Peninsula

+$180 million for LA-Anaheim

We still don't know yet what the details of the shift have been, as the detailed application information has yet to be provided to the public.

Apparently the funding request for the Transbay Terminal train box is still in the plan, but due to a lack of political lobbying leadership on the Peninsula, other voices on behalf of other parts of the state were more successful in retaining funding.

There are also rumors flying around about money for Caltrans' Division of Rail, which operates the popular and important Amtrak California routes. Some reports I've heard claim that $300 million was moved out of HSR and into Caltrans rail projects. Richard Tolmach, a die-hard HSR denier, put out a press release quoted in the comments to yesterday's post, where he claims that CHSRA staff "successfully convinced the Governor's office on the afternoon of Thursday October 1 to block about $3 billion of conventional rail proposals under development by Caltrans."

The problem here is that under Track 2 of ARRA, most of the money is intended to serve high speed rail projects. It is likely that Amtrak California has gotten some funding, as they should. But the notion that $3 billion would ever have been dedicated by the state to funding non-HSR intercity rail is ridiculous, and it is simply not credible to believe that the USDOT would have ever been willing to fund $3 billion in non-HSR intercity rail even if the state of California asked it to do so. Tolmach is spinning - and that's being generous - when he says, without producing any evidence, that the CHSRA tried to undermine other passenger rail. We have no reason to believe any such thing occurred, in no small part because we have no reason to believe any other passenger rail was likely to get a whole lot of money.

And despite Tolmach's claims, the most persistent stories I've heard on this all day is that Caltrans rail programs actually got MORE money than they were expecting.

While we try to sort out what, if anything, was left on the cutting room floor, we should not forget the movie itself. California High Speed Rail is poised to get around $4 billion in federal funding, which will enable the project to spend potentially $9 or $10 billion by 2012 to get underway.

That is a tremendous accomplishment. Now it's up to the US Department of Transportation to deliver the goods. And based on what the White House has said, California can expect to receive most or even all of the money requested in this application.

Despite what the deniers, NIMBYs, and naysayers may argue, this train is leaving the station. California high speed rail is going to happen.

Friday Rally for HSR Stimulus Funds in LA

2009-10-01T09:47:00.001-07:00

Friday morning at 9 AM supporters of high speed rail, including CHSRA board chair Curt Pringle, members Lynn Schenk and Richard Katz, and various unspecified "members of Congress, legislators, city and county officials, and representatives from labor, business and environmental groups" will gather at Union Station in LA to hold a rally in support of the state's application for $4.5 billion in federal HSR stimulus money.

Major newspapers in the state are getting into the act, including the San Jose Mercury News:

Friday's a big day for California's high-speed rail plan: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will formally request $4.5 billion in federal stimulus dollars to advance the project that will create about 133,000 jobs, 15,000 of them in the San Jose to San Francisco area.

The U.S. Department of Transportation should find this compelling. California's plan is further along than any other high-speed rail project in the country, and the state will match every federal dollar. As to the stimulus intent, California's unemployment rate of over 12 percent is a powerful argument. Major questions remain about how the line from Los Angeles will traverse San Jose and Peninsula cities. But voters have approved nearly $10 billion in bonds for the project, a solid vote of support.

The best use of stimulus dollars is to not only create jobs but also to strengthen the economy for the future, just as the United States did during the Great Depression by constructing dams, bridges and the like. High-speed rail someday will seem as indispensable as the Depression-born Golden Gate Bridge, and stimulus dollars can make it happen.

Good to see the Merc picking up the right framing on this. Government spending on infrastructure is one of the best ways to pull California out of the worst recession since World War II. It worked for us during the Depression, and it can work for us now.

PS: Almost forgot that today is also a CHSRA board meeting. Watch it live here, and view the agenda here. Finalization of the updated Caltrain/CHSRA MOU is on the agenda, as is staff authorization to issue a Request for Expressions of Interest to potential private funders.

SF Peninsula Alternatives Analysis Open House TONIGHT

2009-09-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

by Rafael

as we let you know on Sep 20, CHSRA will hold the first of three Alignment Analysis Open House sessions in the SF peninsula this evening.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009
SamTrans Auditorium
1250 San Carlos Avenue – San Carlos
6:00 – 8:00 pm

The other two will be held on Oct 9 in Sunnyvale and on Oct 13 in San Francisco, respectively.

The general process of how Alignment Analysis works is explained in this primer. CHSRA has also published exhibits, a set of slides detailing the alternatives under consideration in the SF-San Jose segment. These will be explained in more detail during the Open House sessions.

Some observations:

Slide 1 shows an overview of the segment. In sections with more than one colored line, multiple options are still being considered at this stage. Obviously, only one will be implemented.

The slide does not show which - if any - rectifications of tight curves in the corridor are planned, nor the track order, nor the location of UPRR freight spurs. The freight rail operator has - unreasonably, IMHO - asked for full grade separation of the associated turnoffs against the HSR tracks.
Slides 2, 3 and 4 describe variations of how Transbay Terminal Center and 4th & King facilities in SF could be utilized for HSR (focus on bottom 1/4 of each slide). For example, slide 4 shows the option of an HSR station either at or below grade at 4th & King only.
Slide 5 shows the option of a Beale Street terminal instead of the TTC train box, with a tunnel not under but north of Embarcadero (i.e. under lots of buildings), apparently to avoid an 18 foot box sewer (PDF p42) identified by TJPA (h/t Andy Duncan).

The map below shows a staggered variation of my own that would cross under it twice but avoid tunneling under any buildings. Two full-length platform tracks would be intermodal with Embarcadero BART/SF Muni, another three would terminate within 300 feet of it. The thick red line indicates a two-track tunnel under Main Street, the TTC building would reduce to just a regular bus terminal, connected by pedestrian passages either above or below ground. This is just intended to illustrate one of many possible refinements of the Beale Street terminal idea - assuming it will be refined at all.

View SF Main St station in a larger map

Note that under CEQA, CHSRA is required to study a reasonable range of options, though it could be argued it already did so at the program level. The Beale Street terminal option was included in response to a comment received during the public comments period for the program level EIS/EIR, but the Transbay Terminal was eventually retained as the preferred option. CHSRA evidently considers it close enough to the TTC building to satisfy the AB3034 mandate that the SF station must be at the "Transbay Terminal".

It's not immediately clear if a station anywhere other than in the TTC train box would invalidate the Record of Decision that TJPA has already secured or its $400m application for HSR stimulus funds. Perhaps CHSRA ought to seek a compromise rather than invite the wrath of an entire city.
Slide 6 shows the option of dedicated HSR tunnels all the way from 4th & King to Bayshore. Since HSR trains will be traveling at modest speeds in this section of the PCJPB corridor, it's worth asking if they shouldn't share tracks with Caltrain in tunnels #1 and #2 in the interest of saving money - even if that means modifying or closing Caltrain's 22nd Street station. UPRR's northernmost turnoff toward the mighty port of SF is at Oakdale Ave, just north of tunnel #3. An agreement to limit freight traffic north of Bayshore to nighttime operations would mean HSR and Caltrain could share all four of the old but serviceable existing tunnels, resulting in additional savings.

Sharing just two tracks north of Bayshore would be contingent on regulatory relief and high throughput signaling/timetable integration. It would not be possible further south, where the speed differential between Caltrain locals and HSR express trains is high.
Slide 7 does not show UPRR's South San Francisco yard, where consists are assembled/disassembled during the day for transport down to San Jose and Fremont in the evening/at night.

Note that FRA-compliant heavy freight trains are limited to gradients of 1% whereas non-compliant HSR trains and Caltrain EMUs can tackle up to 3.5%. That makes a huge difference in the run length required for vertical transitions.
Slide 8 appears to imply four tracks side-by-side through downtown San Mateo, either above or below grade. The PCJPB is currently just 51.5 feet wide between 2nd and 3rd Streets. Widening would require acquisition of adjacent land via voluntary transactions or eminent domain.

It's not clear to me if the expensive(!) potential alternative of two elevated plus two tunnel tracks is being considered as well. Including legacy tracks in elevated grade separation works that are will be used for HSR makes a lot of sense, but CHSRA arguably has no mandate to construct completely separate works for Caltrain alone.
Slides 9 through 12 show that tunnel options are being considered for Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View and even Sunnyvale. Several underground Caltrain stations are shown, implying tunnel sections with not just two but 3-4 tracks. Christmas must be coming early and very often this year.

Note that Mountain View is in the running for the mid-peninsula HSR station. The VTA light rail tracks already there are not shown as a potential conflict.
Slides 13 and 15 illustrate the options of extra-high aerials and extra-deep tunnels in Santa Clara and north San Jose, to clear existing road overpasses and the future BART alignment, respectively. Because absolutely everything has to make way for BART, of course.

The massively cheaper at-grade option would probably require elevating the Santa Clara and College Park stations, though that option is not articulated. There are already ~~six~~ five tracks under I-880 right now, it's not clear the support columns there would permit a sixth even if the others were moved. Caltrain's CEMOF facility would need to be scaled back to make room for HSR tracks at grade.

Fwiw, the right of way maps for mile posts 44 through 47 indicate that 95-100 feet of width are already available in most places.

Confusingly, the option for an at-grade HSR station is shown but tracks leading to it are not. Slide 15 indicates the option of a deep underground HSR station at San Jose Diridon is also now under consideration.

How Others Did It: Rail Is Back in Perth

2009-09-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

by Rafael

I stumbled across the videos below on YouTube and thought I'd share them with you. In them, Prof. Peter Newman, a leading rail advocate in Perth (Australia), articulates why and how that city (pop 1.65m, annual growth ~2.5%) has managed to revive its regional rail services in the face of strong opposition from the asphalt lobby and conservative media outlets. The keys to success were strong public demand for speed and capacity, episodes of high gas prices and a few good few men and women in city/regional politics. A boom in the prices of commodities mined in Western Australia has been instrumental in getting the projects funded.

Perth is yet more evidence that passenger rail isn't just about transportation. Stations can and do act as anchors for re-inventing entire neighborhoods and city centers to shift the focus back from cars to pedestrians.

Part 1:

Part 2:

HSR in California will run at much higher speed, so results will be different. However, I expect some parallels at a larger length scale that includes short-hop flights. In particular, there should be similar synergistic ridership effects with connecting transit and pressure to expand freeway capacity should ease.

Will urban planners in car-crazy California be as inspired as their Australian counterparts to invest in local transit and to make room for transit-oriented development near HSR and especially, HSR feeder stations?

UPDATE by Robert: It's worth noting, in advance of the likely "omg Californians will NEVER leave their cars for trains" comments, that such planning and TOD work is already taking place here in the state. The notion of California as a place without alternatives to the car is at least 30 years out of date. Potential HSR stations in downtown San Francisco (whether Transbay or 4th and King), San José, and Los Angeles already are served by significant amounts of local transit (LA Union Station is the hub of the heavily used Metro Rail system as well as the nation's busiest bus system). TOD is also commonplace near those stations.

As Rafael quite rightly points out, of course, there's more that can and should be done. SB 375, the 2008 law which provides clear mandates to planners to include carbon emissions in their studies and gives CEQA exemptions to many TOD projects, will play a significant role in promoting TOD alongside AB 32. Of course, local activism will be necessary to see this through.

From Russia With Love

2009-09-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

Is California's high speed rail future on display in Russia? According to Siemens and the New York Times the answer just might be "yes":

Siemens’s new train — the Sapsan, Russian for peregrine falcon — is a candidate for the high-speed link planned between San Francisco and Los Angeles that may open in 2020. Alstom, the maker of the French TGV trains, and Bombardier are also contenders. Japanese bullet train designs by Hitachi, which are lighter but less secure in a low-speed crash, the only type of collisions survivable, are another option.

The technological breakthrough of the Sapsan is that the train has no locomotive. Instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains. (Passengers sit in the first car too.) Its top operating speed is 217 miles an hour, though in tests this model has reached 255 miles an hour, or about half the cruising speed of some jet airplanes.

For now, though the Sapsan will only be traveling at about 150mph over Russia's dilapidated rails.

Siemens is aggressively pursuing the US market, particularly us Californians:

The United States “is a developing country in terms of rail,” Ansgar Brockmeyer, head of public transit business for Siemens, said in an interview aboard the Russian test train, as wooden country homes and birch forests flickered by outside the window. “We are seeing it as a huge opportunity.”

To position itself to compete in the United States, Siemens has placed employees from its high-speed train division at its Sacramento factory, which produces city trams.

California desperately needs jobs like those that would be created building high speed trainsets in Sacramento. Opponents of HSR argue that the risk of a "boondoggle" is greater than the value of the jobs that would be created - 160,000 for the construction of the project, and 450,000 ongoing jobs, according to CHSRA estimates. I have a very difficult time believing that to be the case, especially when California faces the highest unemployment since the end of World War II.

But back to Russia (for a moment). Jaunted, a "pop culture travel blog," wondered if this was a case of "the space race race moving to the rails." It would be nice if we could move past Cold War metaphors when comparing the US to Russia, but clearly the space race was an iconic era in the 20th century, where international rivalry produced major human accomplishments that might not otherwise have gotten done. And as much as I support space exploration, it is undeniable that HSR provides more immediate and tangible benefits than putting a man on the moon.

What really matters is that nations like Russia, Poland and others are recognizing that having a high speed rail network is essential to their future economic prosperity. The US is not immune, despite what those who refuse to admit that the transportation models of the 20th century no longer work would have us believe.

I don't have any plans to be in Russia anytime soon, but if I did, I'd take time to ride the Sapsan.

Spain's Transport Minister Makes Progressive Case for HSR

2009-09-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

Although most Americans who know anything about high speed rail associate the trains primarily with France and Japan, it is Spain that has had some of the most dramatic success with high speed rail this decade. The AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) trains have attracted significant numbers of riders in a nation whose geography and population densities are quite similar to California, and operating profits from the existing lines have been plowed back into expansions of the system.

But there are bigger picture reasons to embrace HSR, as Spain's Minister of Transportation José Blanco López explains:

Someone could think that we, the political representatives in charge of looking after the public interests by assessing the opportunity costs of each choice, would be tempted to follow the easy path on those crucial crossroads. But this is not the case.

Maybe Spain, with the socialist party at the head of successive governments, is the best example of how a mindful combination of courageous decisions on difficult times, the power of a cabinet lead by egalitarian principles and the supportive effort of the taxpayers, can lead a country to new heights of economical and social progress.

Our high speed rail network reaches now several edges of the Iberian Peninsula, and connects some of the most important cities of Spain with the most sustainable transport mode and in a fast, safe and clean way: Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Seville and Valencia at the end of 2010. Its next objectives will be Galicia, the north coast, Portugal and France.

The effort under way is so big that, by 2012, Spain’s HS network will be the longest one in service in Europe. And only eight years later, by 2020, another historic landmark will be achieved when more than 90% of the country’s total population will have a HS train station at less than 31 miles away.

Sure, López is selling the PSOE as a good steward of a tough economy, but he raises the key points in how we consider high speed rail. HSR opponents have not offered any explanation of how they will grow the economy and provide economic recovery to the people of California. Whereas we who support HSR have history on our side. We built the Golden Gate and SF-Oakland Bay bridges during the Depression. We built Boulder and Shasta Dams. We built the Central Valley Project and countless other key pieces of infrastructure during the worst economic downturn in history. That spending, far from hurting the economy or making the Depression worse, provided job growth in the short-term and provides jobs and savings to this very day.

López explains that in Spain they too have had to battle conservative Hooverites who opposed AVE expansion:

Spanish conservatives even raised doubts and sowed distrust about a high speed system which finally yielded priceless benefits to the whole society.

’Boondoggle‘, ’Loss-making whim‘, ‘Monument to bad territorial planning’… Shielded behind overly simple, short sighted cost-benefit analysis, critics complained with those arguments against high speed projects over years, until the success of each one of the new corridors proved them wrong and showed that in troubled economic times, the best investments for a society are the ones which improve equality. Today, like we did over the last 20 years, we have to express our conviction in a brilliant future for high speed rail in Spain, with the extension of the network to each edge of the country, building a multi-node web in which each city is a centre. A network which draws territories together and grants equal opportunities to each citizen, no matter where he lives. A network which ties us strongly to Europe.

Now more than ever, we have to look towards the future and we shouldn’t slow down our pace, because each new high speed line carried out will be at the same time a retaining wall against the economic crisis and a lever to get the society ready for the incoming recovery.

López's article is produced in conjunction with this week's Labour Party conference in Britain, where the current British governing party is hoping to use high speed rail as part of its strategy to stave off electoral catastrophe in the spring 2010 election. Julian Glover, writing in the Guardian, makes the case:

High-speed rail can be justified as green if we sort out non-fossil fuel electric power, but the case is really as much social and economic. The unspoken aim of British politics is to make all of Britain middle class, and the middle classes travel – and will do so more and more. It's best if they go by train. Faster journeys are a bonus; the gains are as much about reliability and capacity – good links between Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, as well as to London.

Transport routes north from the capital are full, or soon will be. England's great cities cannot enrich themselves in isolation and the harder it is to get between them, the poorer they will be. Rail investment is a progressive cause, if we don't want to see London as a sort of Singapore, a first world island isolated from – and perhaps one day refusing to fund – an impoverished hinterland.

We can say the same for California. High speed rail is essential to providing economic growth and prosperity to California in the 21st century. Driving and flying aren't going to be affordable for much longer, as the great gas price spike of 2008 showed. Since most jobs are going to be created in the urban centers, those who don't have the ability to live there, and other regions of the state, will be locked out of prosperity.

Those who oppose HSR are those who believe that the economic system of the latter half of the 20th century will persist forever, with a transportation system that hasn't evolved past 1985. They offer no arguments for how we will solve the gridlock on the freeways and the airports that would come with population growth, except presumably to spend twice as much money expanding those instead of building HSR. They offer no arguments for how we will wean California off of carbon emissions, to which transportation is a key contributor. They offer no real arguments at all about how California will generate jobs and economic opportunity - they just assume it will materialize out of thin air.

For the rest of us who have to live in the real world, we cannot put blind faith into a magical economic recovery based on a 20th century model whose failure has produced the present crisis. There is no reason for us to sit on our hands and refuse to follow the proven, successful model laid out by nations such as France and Spain, which have used high speed trains to provide sustainable economic growth and to try and battle a global recession.

And of course, Californians have already decided to reject the "lower your horizons and suffer" model being offered by HSR deniers. Californians knew what they were doing when they voted to build a high speed rail system in their state, and knew what they were doing when they voted to put Barack Obama in the White House, a president who understands the value of HSR and plans to fund it.

Still, we need to constantly remind ourselves and our fellow Californians of why we did that in November 2008, especially as the HSR deniers and those who would put small, parochial concerns over the needs of the state as a whole try and block HSR from getting built.

LA Times On Metrolink Grade Crossing Safety

2009-09-26T14:51:00.002-07:00

by Rafael

The LA Times has published an article on Metrolink's safety record, charting the 244 grade crossings deaths on its far-flung network over the past 15 years. On average, that works out to more than one a month.

Source: LA Times Sep 26 2009

While it is true that Metrolink has suffered safety lapses, most notoriously the case of a train engineer who was texting on a cell phone when he should have been paying attention to trackside signals at Chatsworth, it is also true that the agency has to operate on a shoestring budget. The article complains bitterly about a corporate culture that supposedly prioritizes ridership growth over grade crossing safety, comparing it to MTA. That agency is far better funded precisely because it has higher ridership. Metrolink is caught in a Catch-22.

The article also cites the example of a confused elderly lady driver who made a right turn at the Buena Vista Street intersection in Burbank. When the crossing gate came down on her car, she panicked and stepped on the accelerator. Tragically, she was killed in the ensuing train crash. Metrolink concluded it was a clear case of driver error and have made only minimal changes to the intersection in response to the fatality. Without additional public funding, there's not a whole lot it can do.

Up in the SF peninsula, Caltrain has a program for rail safety enforcement, but this public outreach effort hasn't made a significant dent in the grim statistics. It seems that in addition to suicidal persons, there will always be a small contingent of motorists who either don't know how to behave at railroad grade crossings or flout the rules.

What both commuter rail services have run up against is that the only proven way to eliminate or at least massively reduce grade crossing fatalities is full grade separation plus sturdy fences for the rail corridor.

Caltrans did promise to grade separate the aforementioned Buena Vista Street in Burbank against the single rail track in the context of a project to widen I-5, but that's just one one grade crossing among hundreds. Elsewhere in Southern California, a large number of grade crossings were eliminated or had their rail traffic sharply reduced by the Alameda Corridor project. More are either planned or under construction in the context of the Alameda Corridor East project in the San Gabriel Valley. For its part, OCTA is lobbying Congress to close a funding gap for 19 new grade separations on the BNSF Transcon line in Orange County, a critical artery for getting goods in and out of the LA and Long Beach harbors.

One of the reasons the California HSR project is so expensive is that it will feature all-new fully grade separated tracks. In the SF peninsula, part of the Central Valley and in the Lancaster-Anaheim section of the Metrolink service network, the starter line will run immediately next to existing regional and commuter as well as freight trains. While AB3034, the bill made law by the passage of prop 1A(2008) last November, does not explicitly require CHSRA to grade separate any but the HSR tracks, also including adjacent tracks for legacy services should be a high priority wherever that is technically and economically feasible and, it is not already done or planned in another context.

Voters/taxpayers should demand nothing less, even if it doing so entails exercising strictly limited and generous eminent domain against a relatively small numbers of businesses and home owners. This applies in Fullerton just as much as it does in the SF peninsula, Fresno, Bakersfield and elsewhere in the state. The benefits extend well beyond safety, e.g. to rail corridor capacity, reduced dependence on oil in the transportation sector plus the elimination of train horns and warning bells.