How Much Per Driver Did US Freeways Lose?

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.

WaPo Joins The HSR Stupidity

Robert J. Samuelson is one of the more right-wing writers at the Washington Post. His previous columns have proposed privatizing Medicare, for example, just to give you a picture of who we are dealing with. And like Ed Glaeser and Ed Morris before him, he has decided to bring a right-wing frame to his attack on high speed rail in today's Washington Post.

The column turns on two basic arguments. The first is that somehow HSR will not pencil out. The fact that every HSR system in the world covers its operating costs is lost on Samuelson, who passes off as fact Glaeser's bad math that we've already debunked. Perhaps expecting HSR supporters to respond with the fact that European and Asian HSR systems cover their expenses through fares, Samuelson then tries to argue the USA is different:

What works in Europe and Asia won't in the United States. Even abroad, passenger trains are subsidized. But the subsidies are more justifiable because geography and energy policies differ.

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it's 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile. Trains can't pick up most people where they live and work and take them to where they want to go. Cars can.

As Bianca pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, however, California HSR will have a much higher density than the figures Samuelson provided above:

Okay, I pulled the numbers from the US Census site (linked above.) Note these are numbers based on the year 2000, so current numbers are likely higher.

San Francisco County – 9,999
San Mateo County- 1,575
Santa Clara County- 1,303
Merced County- 109.2
Fresno County- 143.1
Tulare County- 76.3
Kern County- 81.3
Los Angeles County 2,344.1
Orange County- 3,607.5

average: 2,138 persons per square mile over nine counties served by HSR.

This is just for the San Francisco to Irvine section, but I think we can safely lay density to rest as an argument.

It is true that the Central Valley cities have smaller densities. But one of the purposes of HSR is to spur that density by providing HSR stations in city centers that can serve as magnets for transit-oriented development. Even with that in mind, the average density of the CAHSR route from SF to Anaheim is significantly higher than the numbers Samuelson provides. It blows his entire argument out of the water.

But as James Carville once said, "when your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil." We can go further and show that the European nation most closely resembling California - Spain - has had dramatic success with HSR. Bruce McF made that point at Daily Kos today, and Matt Melzer made it here in July 2008 using the following charts:







That last chart in particular is of immense value in discussing American HSR plans. Spain was not the stereotypical European nation that already had a large share of its population using trains. Spain, like California, was primarily dependent on cars and planes to get around the nation. And yet it is Spain that has had the most dramatic success with HSR in the last 20 years.

Samuelson also made another point above, that trains don't work as well as cars because they don't give you door to door service. There are two flaws with this. First, a high speed train from SF to LA is still faster than driving, getting you from point A to point B in about half the time. Sure, you have to drive to a train station, but the HSR stations in both the Bay Area and SoCal will be centrally located.

That leads to the next point that Samuelson almost totally ignores. Yes, as he says, beyond 400 or 500 miles high speed trains don't compete well with planes. But most US HSR plans, including California's, fall into the sweet spot. SF to LA via HSR will be a 432-mile journey. Madrid to Barcelona is about 385 miles. And that corridor, once the world's busiest air corridor, high speed trains have had a smashing success, grabbing 40% of the market share in just its first year of operation.

It should be quite clear that Samuelson's attack on HSR is not based on evidence at all. Rather, as Dean Baker points out, it seems based solely on hatred of trains. Weak stuff indeed.

Finally, as Rafael noted in the comments to yesterday's post, it's a shame we're even having these discussions. California voters have made their decision - they want high speed trains. President Obama ran on a winning platform that included frequent and prominent references to high speed trains. Glaeser, Morris, O'Toole and Samuelson seem interested in using their prominent media platforms to try and reverse these outcomes. Yet they cannot do so on the evidence alone. They either have to structure their analysis in such a way that ignores the whole context and leaves a lot out, as Glaeser and Morris have done, or they have to ignore evidence entirely, as O'Toole and Samuelson have done.

One wonders when the NYT and WaPo will be publishing pro-HSR op-eds in their pages and on their blogs.

Glaeser's Final HSR Attack - For Now

Edward Glaeser published the fourth and final entry in his anti-HSR series at the New York Times' Economix Blog. Glaeser suggests he will come back to the topic before long, to address the criticism of his flawed use of a Dallas-Houston HSR line (which, although being planned by Texas is not one of the current federal HSR corridors). In this entry, Glaeser chose to attack the argument that HSR would help spur greater urban density and limit sprawl:

A third possible benefit of rail is environmental. Can high-speed rail bring people closer to city centers and thereby reduce carbon emissions?

My work with Matthew Kahn on the greenness of cities suggests that each household that moves from Houston suburbs to the central city reduces carbon emissions and creates $164 of global-warming-related benefits each year. Each household that switches from suburb to city in Dallas creates $133 of benefits annually. Those benefits represent both reduced electricity usage (associated with smaller urban homes) and reduced driving.

But there is little evidence documenting that rail has strong positive effects on land use.

Glaeser, however, doesn't actually explain this supposed lack of evidence. His examples, MARTA in Atlanta and BART here in California, are limited. Glaeser says BART has had some positive effect on density, but "the effects are still modest." What Glaeser doesn't understand is that the Bay Area has a series of anti-density zoning rules in the most dense and favorable areas near BART stations - as anyone who's witnessed the battles in Berkeley over downtown development can tell you. Without those restrictions we might well have seen much more TOD along the BART corridor.

Of greater absurdity is Glaeser's lame attempt to argue that HSR wouldn't cause urban growth by looking at Eastern cities, making claims that are unsupported by the evidence:

Philadelphia is the more natural beneficiary of high-speed rail access to Manhattan; there are already people who live in Philadelphia and commute to New York. Yet even in this most propitious setting, the coming of Acela seems to have had little impact on the population decline of Philadelphia or growth of Wilmington. Perhaps the absence of any trend break in population growth around 2000 just reflects the incremental nature of the Acela investment, but there is little here to bring confidence that rail lines revitalize cities.

Ryan Avent continues his thorough demolition of Glaeser's arguments, including a refutation of the above nonsense:

Meanwhile, the blithe use of population change in Philadelphia as a proxy for economic benefit is a little silly. For one thing, it would seem to ignore actual trends. Since 2000, the rate of population decline in the city of Philadelphia has sharply diminished.

From 2000 to 2001, the city's population declined by 15,000. From 2003 to 2004, by contrast, population fell by just over 7,000. And from 2007 to 2008, Philadelphia lost a mere 1,200 people.

Just using Glaeser's fly-by-night statistical methods, it seems as though the introduction of the Acela has in fact materially slowed population decline in Philadelphia. And obviously there are other variables which show that Philadelphia has enjoyed a serious economic rebound over the last decade.

The rest of Avent's post is worth reading in its entirety. Avent closes with a point that is worth remembering for the inevitable moments when we see Glaeser's work repeated:

Glaeser seems to believe that in coming decades congestion costs will cease rising; otherwise he'd build future increases into his model. He seems to think that the addition of over 100 million new Americans need not lead to any new infrastructure investment; otherwise he'd compare the economic benefits and life-cycle emissions of rail investments to alternative investment plans.

I think those beliefs are daft and indefensible. And four posts into his high-speed rail series, Glaeser hasn't given any of us reason to think that his analysis is worth taking seriously.

And that is the core problem with Glaeser's approach. He didn't consider the alternative costs, including the cost of doing nothing. He did not assess the benefits of the jobs HSR will create, or the role of the trains in creating new transportation patterns that can enable new kinds of economic growth over many decades. Glaeser's posts consistently and arbitrarily used a set of factors that gave readers a limited and incomplete sense of how HSR will actually play out in context. It would be nice if the NYT would give space to someone like Ryan Avent who can explain the benefits of HSR with respect to the evidence. Apparently that's too much to ask.

FRA Guidelines On Federal Funds For HSR

by Rafael

Earlier today, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) published a press release to notify the general public of guidelines for applicants seeking a slice of the $8 billion allocated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) a.k.a. the stimulus bill passed in the spring.

The same guidelines will be used to evaluate applications for the $1.5 billion reserved for HSR in the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA) that was signed into law last October. The principal difference is that PRIIA funds are limited to 80% of total project cost. The proposed 2010 budget also includes a provision for an additional $1 billion in federal funding to be made available in each of the next 5 years and will presumably be allocated according to the same or similar guidelines as PRIIA.

USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood expects the first HSR grants to be awarded by mid-September. To allow for timely processing, the guidance calls for pre-applications to be filed no later than July 10 (preferably sooner). These are essentially expressions of interest with rough outlines that FRA will use to establish the volume of applications it will need to process and, to aid applicants in drafting their formal documentation. Final applications for Tracks 1, 3 and 4 (Projects, Planning and FY 2009 appropriations, respectively) due no later than August 24. Those for Track 3 (Service Development Programs, e.g. the California HSR network) are due October 2. These dates may be pushed back by at least 30 days if FRA decides to make changes to its guidelines in response to formal comments received no later than July 10.

Each application will be evaluated using 7 criteria in three categories. From 1 to 5 points will be awarded for each to reflect how well it conforms to the objectives of the federal government and Congress. The results are summed up, with different weights used for the various Tracks.

The first category addresses the return on public investment. This includes a rigorous analysis of financial costs and benefits of service operations. Further, it includes quantification of indirect benefits such as population mobility and safety, economic recovery benefits, energy efficiency, CO2 reduction etc.

The second category covers criteria related to project success, specifically project management and the sustainability of claimed benefits.

The third category examines the timeliness of estimated project completion and the risk of delays, which typically entail cost overruns as well.

These evaluation criteria will apparently be used to arrive at shortlists of candidates in each of the Tracks described above. The final selection among those will be based on what the guidelines refer to as "balance and diversity". This refers to the geographic extent of the projects, the level of technical innovation required etc. USDOT will explicitly favor those shortlisted projects that have already attracted non-federal investment. Tracks 3 and 4 explicitly require 50% matching funds.

Even so, these selection criteria remain quite fuzzy, so political clout on Capitol Hill and with the Obama administration will almost certainly play a significant role. Keep in mind that only projects in the eleven official high speed rail corridors are eligible at all. However, the Secretary of Transportation has limited powers to modify their definition. Brand-new corridors could only be created by and act of Congress, which would also have to amend the PRIIA and/or ARRA to make them eligible.

The Associated Press interprets the guidelines as favoring California and the Midwest over other regions. My own take is that Florida's HSR effort is still stalled and lacks funding commitments, though it is otherwise well placed thanks to the advanced state of its environmental impact review. In addition, Rep. Oberstar (D-MN) and Mice (R-FL) intended the NEC to be the primary beneficiary of HSR funds in PRIIA, to cut the Amtrak Acela Express' line haul times for New York to Washington, DC from roughly three to under two hours.

Better Modeling of the Above-Grade Peninsula Caltrain/HSR Project

One of the most unfortunate parts of the debate on the Caltrain/HSR project on the Peninsula is the lack of accurate information. NIMBYs and other project opponents have already convinced many people that an above-grade solution would be a sort of "Berlin Wall" through the city, and Jim McFall's video reinforces that errant conclusion. The problem is that McFall's video has been the only attempt to visualize what the corridor would look like with above-grade tracks.

Until now.

Mike, who brought us the point by point refutation of the notorious Cox-Vranich HSR denier report last year, is back to inject some sense and fact into the debate over HSR. He has put together a YouTube video of simulations of the Churchill Avenue crossing in Palo Alto - including the existing at-grade model, the proposed CHSRA above-grade solution, and the flawed McFall model. Mike added authentic sounds of the crossing - a recording of Caltrain crossing at-grade, and of the Acela. Here's the video:



You can see clearly that McFall's model is misleading on several counts. He has the dimensions all wrong - the structure is higher in McFall's model than is actually proposed, and the catenary poles are too densely packed together. More importantly, McFall's video doesn't include existing landscaping that would mitigate much of the visual impact of an above-grade solution. There are no trees in the McFall video, whereas Mike's video makes clear that trees are indeed part of the solution.

The results of misleading misinformation on the Caltrain/HSR project (such as the McFall video) could be seen in Atherton on Thursday night, where a crowd came to speak in favor of the city's avowed "tunnel or nothing" stance:

Duncan Jones, Atherton's public works director, laid out the town's case for both joining the lawsuit and still participating in the high-speed rail planning process. "We need to hedge our bets," he said.

Mr. Jones, a former rail consultant, said that the town's fallback position -- if the route doesn't change, put the high-speed trains in a tunnel, rather than on a raised berm -- isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

The rail corridor in Atherton is lined by expensive homes, and widening it to accommodate high-speed rail would require purchasing swaths of private property.

"When (the authority) looks at all of the costs and impacts, they may find out that going underground may be cheaper," Mr. Jones said.

Jones's comments are barely credible. I cannot imagine that buying a few strips of backyard will cost a billion dollars - which would be the minimum estimate for tunneling through Atherton, even with a cut and cover model. The San Jose Mercury News article on the meeting noted that Hatch Mott MacDonald executives estimated a tunnel through Atherton would cost:

A tunnel on the Peninsula would likely follow the same model as the San Jose BART extension, Townsend said, because both areas have soft ground. A high-speed rail tunnel would likely cost somewhere between $100 million to $250 million per mile, compared to less than $100 million for an at-grade system, he said.

I have a difficult time imagining that the cost of eminent domain for a few backyards would be $100 million. I am also skeptical of the lowball cost of an HSR tunnel that Townsend offered, but even if these estimates are accurate, it represents a doubling of the cost of building on the Peninsula.

Such is the fact-free nature of the debate on the Peninsula, unfortunately. Let's hope Mike's more accurate animation gets spread far and wide, and that people on the Peninsula can actually make informed choices about the Caltrain/HSR project.

East Bay Blues

No, that's not Bob Dylan on the left, but it might as well be. Of all the major population centers in California, the eastern portion of the San Francisco Bay - Alameda and Contra Costa counties - arguably drew the shortest lot. True, East Bay residents will be closer to HSR stations on the starter line than anyone in San Diego or Sacramento, but there are currently no firm plans for an HSR station in either Oakland or Union City - ever.

Moreover, the new Transbay Terminal in San Francisco will be ~1/3 mile from the nearest BART station, Embarcadero, which gets overcrowded during rush hour. TJPA's plans for a pedestrian passage under Fremont Street are still "optional" at this point and, BART has made no commitment to use any of its $241 million share of the prop 1A bonds for additional side platforms at Embarcadero plus ramps featuring moving walkways connecting to such a passage. Unless that changes, BART passengers would have to hoof it across SF city streets to the HSR station, in any kind of weather, with baggage and perhaps children in tow. AC Transit will operate buses into the building, but its unclear how many HSR passengers will take advantage of that option.

Millbrae will hopefully offer a more convenient transfer, but BART takes it's sweet time getting out to there. Worse, on any given day of the week, only one line runs out to Millbrae, so many HSR passengers will have to transfer twice. Either way, the time lost just getting to and from the nearest HSR station will mean Oakland Airport will continue to offer flights to Southern California for many years to come.

HST/Commuter Overlay

Recently, CHSRA did award a $70 million contract to AECOM, for project-level EIR/EIS work on the awkwardly named "HST/commuter overlay" that is "under consideration" (see the pink bit here). The overlay concept was introduced toward the end of the whole Altamont vs. Pacheco debate as a punt ahead of the November election. The idea is to recycle the work done on the Altamont options studied for HSR into an ill-defined regional adjunct to the core HSR network. The overlay would link Stockton and Modesto to Oakland and San Jose via Tracy, Pleasanton and Union City. There is, however, no money at all for building this overlay in either phase I (starter line) or phase II (spurs to San Diego, Sacramento and Irvine).

Moreover, the originally selected route between Pleasanton and San Jose would have trains emerging from a curved tunnel in Niles and then proceeding south via the UPRR and WPML rights of way, CA-262 and the I-880 median. Now that Santa Clara county voters have voted to add another 1/8th of a percent to their sales tax to actually bring BART to San Jose, the short but vital WPML section is no longer available. Co-operation from UPRR was always an iffy proposition anyhow, especially in Fremont. Note that Parsons Brinkerhoff are the lead consultants on both HSR and the BART extension to SantaClara/SJC. That obvious conflict of interest alone ought to speak volumes about how major transit infrastructure projects are run in Northern California.

Realistically, nothing will come of the overlay concept anytime soon. And by soon, I mean before 2030. The only exception would be if CHSRA were unable to obtain a ROW out of San Jose and down to Gilroy, e.g. because of environmental justice issues or opposition from UPRR in principle. Some observers have characterized that railroad's stance as a negotiating ploy and that may yet turn out to be true: as a for-profit enterprise, money talks even for UPRR. On the other hand, it is a long-standing, profitable enterprise that just might walk away even from a juicy deal if it thinks it could be detrimental to its core business. Time will tell.

Existing East Bay Passenger Rail Services

Meanwhile, there are already several passenger rail services in the East Bay, in addition to BART. First, there's Amtrak Capitol Corridor, which is operated by Amtrak but managed by BART (h/t to anon @ 12:50pm). It connects San Jose to Oakland to Sacramento and Auburn. The core segment between Oakland Jack London Square is served by 16 trains each way on weekdays and 11 on weekends/holidays. San Jose is served by 7 trains.

Second, there are the four daily Amtrak San Joaquins (each way) between Oakland Jack London Square (OKJ) and Bakersfield. There are also two daily Amtrak long-distance trains serving the area: the Coast Starlight between Seattle and LA and the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville, with a bus connection to San Francisco.

Third, there is the Altamont Commuter Express between Stockton and San Jose, also offering four trains each way but only on weekdays.

However, this isn't quite the transit smorgasbord it may seem to some: Amtrak Capitol Corridor only connects to BART at the OaklandColiseum/OAK and Richmond stations. San Joaquins connect only at Richmond and the other standard gauge services don't connect at all. With some track work, the San Joaquins could have an intermodal station with BART in North Concord now that the Navy has returned the inland portion of the old Naval Weapons Station to the city. However, planners there appear to see no value in an intermodal station and appear to have settled on a TOD concept served by BART alone. That means the questionable eBART project to extend service to Antioch - using new DMU equipment rather than regular BART rolling stock - remains alive and kicking.

Amtrak via new Nelson Mandela Station

In particular, the OKJ station is served by a grand total of just two AC Transit bus lines, with a few more stopping 1/4 mile further west. For a city of 400,000 that is also at the geographic heart of the BART system, OKJ isn't an effective Central Station for standard gauge rail. Unfortunately, running tracks right into downtown (near 12th/Broadway) would require many miles of expensive tunneling.

Fortunately, there may be a more affordable compromise: a shortcut between Emeryville and Jack London Square via Nelson Mandela Parkway. That is a city street, so the alignment would have to run in a mostly covered trench. It has also been lovingly landscaped, something that might have to be re-done at the end of construction. The prize, however, may well be worth it: an intermodal station with West Oakland BART, just one stop from downtown Oakland and downtown SF. In addition better connections into Oakland, the point of the exercise would be to reduce line haul time between SFO, downtown SF, Sacramento and Truckee (in Winter), thus relieving pressure on I-80.


View Larger Map

While not exactly a Central Station in the traditional sense, the West Oakland location could act as a regional transfer hub. The station is currently served by three AC Transit bus lines, more could conceivably be added. There are also plenty of empty lots in the area that could support parking or taxi service if there is demand.

The biggest obstacle to construction, other than funding, would be the UPRR yard next to I-880 and 3rd Street. Passenger trains are not permitted in freight rail yards, so the alignment would have to skirt the terrain while rising back up to grade level. A couple of industrial businesses, one of which looks like a cardboard recycling center, might be affected by eminent domain as a result. Note the single track connector hugging I-880: it would only be used by southbound trains that need to return to Emeryville. There is not enough room for a dual-track loop, nor is one needed. Note that a new "Nelson Mandela" station might prompt Amtrak to reduce service to Jack London Square.

Amtrak CC: WiFi on Board

Like Caltrain before it, Amtrak Capitol Corridor recently conducted a WiFi on Board trial based on terrestrial WiMAX connections to the fixed infrastructure. The service proved much more popular than Amtrak California had bargained for. Nevertheless, the plan is to upgrade bandwidth capacity and still offer it at no charge - something that would be easy enough to do: just print a one-time password good for 2 hours on the ticket. The rationale is evidently that courtesy internet access will help boost seat capacity utilization. Stay tuned.

ACE via Union City BART

Further south, there is scope for an intermodal station with BART in Union City. There is a little-used single-track freight spur running from Industrial Parkway to Niles via Van Euw Common, right alongside the elevated BART tracks. SMCTA had already identified this possibility in the context of plans for limited commuter service across the 100-year old Dumbarton rail bridge, but this has been postponed by the suspicious 1998 fire that destroyed the western trestle and, by the need to repay a $145 million loan from the BART extension to Fremont Warm Springs that San Mateo county had to take out to pay for cost overruns related to the extension to Millbrae/SFO. Some $54 million is still outstanding, the project time line keeps slipping.

However, one opportunity appears to have been overlooked in this context: with some additional track work and trackage rights, the existing ACE service could in theory make a detour via this anyhow planned intermodal station with BART in Union City, cut over to Union Landing (I-880/Whipple Rd) and back down to Newark, as shown in green on on the map below. In addition to the BART intermodal, there would be two new stations to improve transit options for the army of Silicon Valley worker bees that sleeps in the East Bay. Like the Amtrak Capitol Corridor trains, this modified ACE route would still include a stop at Great America in the heart of the "Golden Triangle" bordered by CA-237, I-880 and US-101. BART does not and will not reach that destination.


View Larger Map

ACE to SF via Niles Canyon north slope

Shown in red on the map is the option of a new ACE service direct to additional Silicon Valley employers, Millbrae/SFO and SF 4th & King. In addition to a little bit of access track work north of Sunol and in San Jose, this would involve trackage rights from UPRR or NCRY (whichever now owns the old SP ROW along the north slope of Niles Canyon) plus trackage rights from UPRR along the Milpitas line. At the wye in San Jose, trains would head north up to San Francisco via the Caltrain ROW, in baby bullet mode. That would require trackage rights from PCJPB plus permission from UPRR, which still owns the rights to intercity passenger service on the SF peninsula. One option would be for ACE to accept Caltrain tickets on the peninsula and deduct their value from the trackage fees.

The Milpitas Line is little-used south of 101 but represents a valuable back-up route in case the Alviso line through the salt marshes ever becomes unavailable, e.g. because of an earthquake. However, any passenger rail service on this line south of 101 should implement FRA quiet zone regulations first. Of course, if and when the Dumbarton rail bridge re-opens, there could be scope for further improvements to ACE.

The bigger issues may be in Pleasanton, Livermore and especially, in Altamont Pass itself. Single tracking and slow freight trains mean ACE is at the mercy of UPRR as it tries to stick to its schedule, though it has earned high marks for punctuality recently. That said, the service does take 2h10m to cover 86 miles - not exactly a high speed train.

The Acelafication of California High Speed Rail

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I'd actually been trying to build out a much bigger pro-HSR site using a dedicated URL, a Joomla! installation, and with neat bells and whistles. But it was taking months, and by March 2008, I gave up and decided to just whip something up on Blogger to fill what I felt was a big gap in the online world, a lack of a site dedicated to both the discussion and support of the California High Speed Rail project.

It's been an eventful year, to say the least. The dramatic gas price spike that showed Californians passenger rail was an essential part of our future infrastructure. The long fight over AB 3034. The constant efforts of HSR deniers such as the Reason Foundation to sow misinformation about HSR to the public. The passage of Prop 1A. And now the fight over whether there will be high speed trains on the Peninsula. We've covered all of it here, sometimes contentiously. I think we've all achieved something fantastic here, and I thank all of my readers and especially the commenters for helping keep this blog going.

Looking back on that year, two things have stood out to me that define this project:

1. The public as a whole supports high speed rail and wants it to happen.

2. However, the political conditions that produced 40 years of passenger rail stagnation, as well as California's broad 21st century crisis (an economic, environmental, and energy crisis), are still there, and the necessary political leadership to overcome those conditions and solve those crises does not yet exist.

President Barack Obama may be the game-changer here, as he is in so many other aspects of American life. His support for high speed rail is genuine, as he played the central role in putting $8 billion in HSR funds into the stimulus. His budget proposal includes $5 billion more for HSR. He could provide the leadership that has been lacking, and could help bring groups to the table to hammer out differences.

Such leadership is desperately needed right now in California and on the Peninsula in particular, where concern over above-ground structures - concerns I believe to be overblown and misplaced - have given rise to a de facto willingness to weaken the HSR project unless it is built underground. Way too much of the NIMBY commentary on the situation implies that HSR isn't necessary, and some of the old HSR denier arguments from the 2008 campaign - that HSR can't turn a profit, that the ridership numbers aren't credible, that the Peninsula doesn't really have any need for this anyway - have unsurprisingly been mobilized to attack the project.

This is but one example of some of the underlying political conditions that have produced passenger rail stagnation and economic crisis. Parochial self-interests have spent the last 30 years constructing any number of methods to veto policies they don't like, whether it's the 2/3rds rule or systematic abuse of the environmental review process to accomplish inappropriate NIMBY objections.

And some of it stems from an ongoing unwillingness to admit the need to change. The NIMBY attack on HSR is grounded in the assumption that the status quo is perfectly acceptable - a state dependent on carbon emitting, pollution spewing, fossil fuel burning methods of travel that are not physically sustainable or economically viable. That the physical landscape of Menlo Park can remain that way for all time.

Nobody here wants to destroy communities. But when some in those communities define the way things look in 2009 as a perfect status quo that must not be changed, then ANY change, no matter how sensible or beneficial, becomes viewed as a threat.

Such attitudes have led to the economic crisis we face, where an unwillingness to confront basic realities, stemming from a desire to cling as tightly as possible to a status quo that is quite clearly failing, has prevented necessary action.

Unfortunately we've been here before. In the early 1990s the Northeast Corridor High Speed Rail project was announced with much fanfare, and was promised to finally bring true high speed rail travel to the United States.

15 years later, we have the Acela. It's a workable system, a train that has over 40% of the market share on the NEC and a generally positive reputation among travelers. But it's also not what was intended. The Acela only achieves its true top speed of 150 mph in a few places; in many others it's held to 79mph.

What happened? To put it simply, stakeholders weren't willing to accept some changes in order to build the Acela properly. Some didn't want to give up land to straighten the tracks. Others were concerned about noise and speed. Some didn't want to spend money upgrading the infrastructure. The FRA wouldn't relax its inane weight rules. And in the 1990s, cheap oil lulled people into complacency, believing that passenger rail was a toy that had little practical use, that filled little practical need.

To me it is self-evident that if we're going to build a project, we should build it the right way. That if we ask voters to approve something - especially if we ask them to help pay for it - then it seems self-evident to me that we should deliver exactly what they approved. The City of Palo Alto and many others on the Peninsula appear happy to gut the HSR project by forcing it to run unacceptably slowly along the SF-SJ route, or to force an unworkable transfer to Caltrain at SJ Diridon that will significantly reduce ridership, or to bypass the state's third largest city (San Jose) just to make a small handful of residents happy.

That's just not right. We must build HSR the right way. We can build it in a way that meets the needs of everyone in California, but when NIMBYs refuse to compromise, they're implicitly saying that a flawed system or no system is preferable to one they don't like. They're happy to Acelafy our project.

We see these problems anytime efforts are made to address our multifaceted crisis. Obama wants to restore higher tax rates on the wealthy to pay for his economic recovery plan? Oh god no, can't have that! Solar energy companies want to build a solar plant in a sunny desert spot, but need to build power transmission lines through open desert to get there? Oh god no, can't have that! We need to build a high speed train along an existing rail corridor? Oh god no, can't have that!

If the underlying political problems did not exist - a state government hamstrung by the 2/3rds rule, a small but vocal group of NIMBYs who are expert at hijacking planning processes, a lack of political leadership on passenger rail - then we wouldn't have these crises at all. HSR would have been built long ago, California's budget would be in the black, and the US would not be staring economic Depression and the massive effects of global warming in the face.

The reason I am such a strong advocate of California high speed rail is because I understand that things must change if our state is to survive this crisis. HSR is just one aspect of the changes that need to be made. And that requires fixing the underlying problems that have produced the crisis and threaten to strangle the HSR project.

The big picture has been lost. If people truly believe that an above-grade trackway is more of a problem than mass unemployment and global warming, then maybe we're in a bigger crisis than even I imagined. If a small group of NIMBYs can block HSR, what's going to happen when we try and build wind turbines or tidal energy projects?

One year later, I am encouraged that Californians as a whole understand the need for passenger rail. But I am concerned that even HSR supporters have lost sight of the big picture, and aren't sufficiently willing to challenge the failed assumptions, rules, procedures, and practices that have brought us to this crisis point. Palo Alto is a warning shot across our bow. Unless we find away to remind Californians of the stakes, of why HSR is such a vital part of the solution to our multifaceted crisis, it will be turned into another Acela, rendered less effective and less viable because we did not have the courage to face down those who created this crisis, and those who believe there's no urgent need to do anything at all to solve it.

John Kerry Introduces HSR Bill

I don't have a whole lot of time to go over this today, as I'm going to be on the Coast Starlight headed back to Monterey from a quick SoCal trip. But it's important to discuss the new High Speed Rail funding proposal that Senator John Kerry and Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter are proposing in the US Senate. It's known as the High Speed Rail for America Act of 2008 and is numbered S.3700 (full text not yet available from THOMAS) (UPDATE: see an extensive summary of the bill's provisions here (h/t to Peter in the comments) and has a number of co-sponsors, including Senate heavyweights Dianne Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and Charles Schumer. According to Kerry's office:

Specifically, the High-Speed Rail for America Act of 2008 provides $8 billion over a six-year period for tax-exempt bonds which finance high-speed rail projects which reach a speed of at least 110 miles per hour It creates a new category of tax-credit bonds – qualified rail bonds. There are two types of qualified rail bonds: super high-speed intercity rail facility bond and rail infrastructure bond. Super high-speed rail intercity facility bonds will encourage the development of true high-speed rail. The legislation provides $10 billion for these bonds over a ten-year period. This would help finance the California proposed corridor and make needed improvements to the Northeast corridor. The legislation provides $5.4 billion over a six-year period for rail infrastructure bonds.

The obvious question this raises is will this be enough? The entire bill looks to be around $23.4 billion, which would be enough to help finish the first phase from SF-LA-Anaheim. Obviously we're not getting all of that, and being a Congressional bill other states and other Senators are going to want a piece of the pie - note that most of the co-sponsors come from the Northeast Corridor. But our project IS the farthest along, and is the best positioned to make use of this funding. Other states have a lot more ground to cover to be able to make use of these bonds.

In fact, my only criticism of this proposal - pending the actual bill details - is that the amount is not ambitious enough. $50 billion seems like a better funding level - instead of setting states and Senators against each other, $50 billion would help substantially seed a number of HSR projects around the country and build a true national system. This recession is deepening and significant stimulus is necessary to pull us out of it. Now's the time to be ambitious, Senator Kerry. Think big, think bold. This bill is an excellent start, but let's use the opportunity to build a truly national high speed rail project.

Zombie Lies

I had hoped we'd dealt with this when it popped up at Daily Kos yesterday - the commenters there gave it a thorough smackdown - but unfortunately it's appeared across the blogosphere today, helped by the credulous and fundamentally uninformed Kevin Drum (I still don't understand why Mother Jones would hire a moderate to blog for them) who reproduced "it" on his site today.

"It" is an email being peddled by the daughter of James Mills offering criticism of Prop 1A. Mills is another one of these "rail supporters" who are offering truthiness and outright lies to try and convince people Prop 1A is a bad idea. To the uninformed masses - which unfortunately include some bloggers - anyone who claims to have rail credentials apparently is given the benefit of the doubt when we who actually understand rail policy know that James Mills, Richard Tolmach, Wendell Cox, and Joseph Vranich are fundamentally anti-rail.

Mills and Tolmach co-authored an HSR denier op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this month. I gave it the usual thorough deconstruction here on the blog when it appeared, although I focused my fire on Tolmach, since I'd never heard of James Mills. Now Mills' daughter is circulating Mills' own arguments to the bloggers, and some of the more gullible bloggers, like Kevin Drum, have taken the bait. As a result Ezra Klein and now Atrios are discussing its contents.

So, time to try and kill the Zombie Lies.

The email starts like this:

I am passing on an analysis of California's Prop 1A ballot initiative from one of the leading experts and advocates of mass transit in the state of California, James Mills.

Mills' daughter writes:

I'd like to suggest you vote "No" on Proposition 1A, the "Safe Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act," on the basis of the following insider, expert information: my dad says it's a bad idea.

My father, James Mills, spent his entire career in the California state legislature (1961-1983) working to promote public transportation in the state. He was President pro Tem of the Senate for a decade. He was chairman of the Amtrak board under president Carter. Since retiring he has worked as a consultant on transit issues, and in the 1990's he served on the High Speed Rail Commission for the State of California . My dad is hard-core in favor of rail. If he says a proposal to fund a rail project is no good, then that proposal has to be a real turkey.

Notice the sleight of hand here. James Mills is not a well-known figure even in California political circles. His specific policy positions are completely unknown. But just like the notoriously anti-transit Wendell Cox, and the equally anti-rail Joseph Vranich, Mills trades on a 30-year old association with Amtrak to try and gain credibility when he passes on flawed HSR denials. The last sentence is designed to solidify the assumed expertise of Mills, but to me it just sets off alarm bells.

Which are justified when we read the specific objections:

1. Prop 1A raises about ten billion dollars in a bond issue. This is a down-payment on a project which was estimated in 2006 to cost 45 billion dollars but will probably cost more if it is ever built. Remaining funding will be sought from the federal government (10-15 billion) and private investors (15-20 billion).

Notice that, as always, no specific reason is given as to "probably cost more". It is blind speculation. No specific figure of cost overruns is given either. Lacking those details or underlying explanations this claim lacks credibility. Rail projects around the country, including LA's Metro Gold Line extension, have been delivered on time and on budget in recent years.

Further, and this is ironic, that $45 billion is the figure for the ENTIRE system - which in point #5 Mills claims is unplanned.

2. The federal government has never invested any amount even close to $10 billlion in a transit project.

The federal government had never spent $700 billion on a bank bailout either. Before 1971 they'd never operated passenger trains. Before 1956 they'd never spent hundreds of billions on freeways. Shall we go on?

But we have better evidence. John Kerry and Johnny Isakson are working on a bill to provide about $10 billion for HSR projects around the nation. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden are strong supporters of HSR and want to fund it.

3. If private investment were found, the bill says that investors would make money NOT from a the profit of the transit system, but from a percentage of ticket sales. In other words, the profit of investors is guaranteed, regardless of the operating costs of the system. The Legislative Analyst estimates that the OPERATING AND MAINTENANCE COSTS of the system will be one billion per year -- the State of California will cover any deficit not covered by ticket sales. It is rare for a public transit system to run in the black: normally, not all costs of the system will be covered from the fare box.

This is a bit misleading. As I understand it from what Rod Diridon explained today, those same investors also have to satisfy their own bond to the state/CHSRA and a "franchise fee" to the same. That's quite a bit different than saying "their profit is guaranteed" - a misleading statement designed to imply that California is going to be left holding the bag while private investors light cigars with our money.

This claim also misleads Californians on the Legislative Analyst's estimate - she has said the $1 billion figure is a worst-case scenario.

And of course, it is not rare for high speed rail systems to run in the black. In fact, they ALL run in the black. Every last one. In France the TGVs are so profitable they subsidize other slower rail services. SNCF had so much money they actually gave some to the French treasury earlier this year.

4. Premises on projected ridership are false. The only high-speed rail system in the US is Amtrak's "Acela" service between NY-Washington and NY-Boston. This system is well established and serves large population centers with excellent public transportation tie-ins to feed it such as subways, and they carry 3 million riders a year. The French have the best high-speed rail system in the world, and their busiest line is Paris to Lyon, again large cities with major subway systems, and it carries perhaps 15 million riders a year. In contrast, proponents of Prop 1A rely on a projection of 100 million riders per year between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a figure provided by a paid consultant that happened to be Lehman Brothers. This projection of patronage is a fantasy.

This paragraph is full of outright lies. Yes, lies.

First, Acela is not true HSR and is much slower than our system will be. Anyone trying to compare the Acela to CA HSR either does not understand Acela or is deliberately misleading readers. It does not speak very well of James Mills' vaunted "rail knowledge."

Second, these arguments about ridership come directly from the oil company funded Reason Foundation. It is a libertarian lies being passed off as fact. Those ridership claims - specifically about Paris-Lyon - are complete nonsense. We thoroughly debunked the "not enough riders" claim last month. The key portion of our mythbusting:

Cox-Vranich's [the Reason Foundation study] ridership figures are wildly inaccurate. Using C-V's preferred measure, JR Central reported 2007 ridership of 80 million passenger km per Shinkansen route km (44.5 billion passenger km / 552 km route). In the "high" scenario, CA HSRA is forecasting roughly 27 million passenger km per HSR route km (30 billion passenger km / 1,120 km route). So C-V's claim that CA HSRA is using numbers higher than those achieved on any other system in the world is absurdly false - in fact, CA HSRA's numbers are only 1/3rd of what has been previously achieved.

JR Central's Shinkansen is the densest ridership in the world. A more informative comparison would be the TGV or the new Taiwan HSR (THSR). We don't have passenger-km ridership for those lines, but we can compute passengers per route-km. The TGV Paris Southeast (PSE) line gets 45k passengers per route-km (20 million pax / 448 route-km) while the THSR gets 101k passengers per route-km (34 million pax / 335 route-km). CA HSR is forecasting a high of 80k passengers per route-km in 2030, or around 56k passengers per route-km at today's populations. This is slightly above TGV PSE but well below THSR. It does not seem unreasonable since the LA Metro Area is larger than Paris Metro Area or the Taipei Metro Area. And more importantly, the SF Bay Area is twice as large as the Kaoshiung Metro Area and four times as large as the Lyon Metro Area.

On to the fifth and final lie, which is the most ridiculous of them all:

5. Promises of future extension to Sacramento, Orange County and San Diego are empty in that no concrete plan of any kind is offered other than the unrealistic plan for a Los Angeles-San Francisco line.

Mills is just showing off his ignorance here. Prop 1A would fund a line from SF to Anaheim - which, last time I checked, was still in Orange County. SD and Sacramento plans are in existence in full detail and can be found at the California High Speed Rail Authority website.

It's worth closing by reminding people of the big picture here. High speed rail will create badly needed green jobs and economic stimulus while providing Californians with sustainable transportation that reduces dependence on oil and cuts carbon emissions. It is supported by virtually the entire California progressive community.

It is being opposed by the Howard Jarvis Association and the Reason Foundation. The former are the keepers of the right-wing flame here in California. The latter are a group of rabid anti-government nuts who are funded by oil companies and other leading right-wing foundations. They have been using an ignorant and pliant media to push out their "omg boondoggle not enough riders" nonsense over the last six weeks or so.

It would be a shame for folks in the blogosphere - folks who usually know better - than to repeat the high speed rail version of the "Obama is a Muslim" email.

Nearly A Good Laugh

It was only a matter of time, really. Libertarian and far-right anti-tax groups in California have been unhappy about our high speed rail project for a while now, and sooner or later they were going to run into noted passenger rail hater Wendell Cox. Cox believes light rail, heavy rail, high speed rail are all inherently flawed concepts, perhaps because he takes no small amount of money from bus and highway lobbyist groups. Cox has also been associated with the conservative Reason Foundation for many years, a group that is funded by oil companies and their affiliated foundations. When Cox, the Reason Foundation, and the rabidly anti-HSR Howard Jarvis Association got together, the outcome was predictable.

That outcome was a anti-HSR report (full 190-page version here) that the Howard Jarvis Association included in their 2008 "Piglet Book". It's their attempt to put some "evidence" to their usual anti-train claims. In reality it's full of so many contradictions, half-truths, and outright nonsense that it would take more time than I have to fully refute the whole thing.

The Howard Jarvis Association in particular is coordinating a full-fledged media rollout of the study, with an op-ed in the LA Daily News that suddenly introduces a $54 billion price tag for HSR out of nowhere, to an appearance on KQED forum (Rod Diridon was there on behalf of HSR). That, alongside the media's love for stories on "government waste" should ensure this gets some traction in the press, albeit fleeting.

Reaction to the study has been swift from those who know a thing or two about rail. From our friends at The Overhead Wire:

And yes...they play the fear card.

Terrorism against rail targets is a concern considering the extent of attacks that continue to occur on rail systems around the world.

Typical of current culture warrior thinking. When you can't win with the facts, try to scare people.

The study makes some rather outlandish claims. They charge that because HSR's projected cost has risen to around $40 billion, that by the time it opens we might have to spend as much as $80 billion. It's not enough to simply look at a trend and assume it will continue on forever - you have to explain the underlying logic, as we have with gas prices. They don't. Nowhere is global inflation of construction materials or the declining value of the dollar mentioned. A gallon of gas costs 200% more in 2008 than it did in 2000, but somehow I doubt that Reason and the Howard Jarvis people would suggest we abandon cars and freeways as a result.

Their $80 billion cost estimate is pulled out of thin air - and if we use their same logic, a gallon of gas will cost between $8 and $10 by 2018 ensuring that HSR is a financial bargain.

Numerous other examples abound. They claim California isn't as favorable for HSR as Europe or Japan, even though Spain's conditions are similar to our own. They claim Acela isn't a success, but it has at least 40% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor, a stunning number for a system that isn't true HSR. Their claims about ridership aren't backed up by a close study of the assumptions that went into the CHSRA's studies - instead they say "well this doesn't compare well to Europe so it can't possibly be right?!" They say non-HSR alternatives will be cheap, that freeways can be expanded for $900 million - but it'll cost $6 billion to widen Highway 99 alone!

It goes on and on like that for 190 pages. But the details of the study aren't important to the authors and promoters, who don't expect anyone to actually read it and see the nonsense for themselves. Instead they just want to muddy the waters in the public mind by saying "boondoggle! pork! massive cost overruns!" often enough in hopes that the media will listen and repeat it for them.

We remain confident that Californians will see the value of high speed rail. While Cox and the Howard Jarvis Association quibble over numbers Californians are screaming for solutions to the airline crisis, to high fuel costs, and to the nasty economic downturn that we're sliding into head-first. They know better than to have oil company and highway lobby shills convince them to abandon California's future.

Taking the Coast Route

(This was supposed to auto-post at 3PM yesterday. Bloggered again...)

ABC News has a high speed rail story up on its site this morning, about the proliferation of HSR plans around the country. They quote some skeptics, including William Garrison, a retired civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley:

William Garrison says there is little national demand for high-speed rail. He says the push for high-speed rail is merely a new way of doing something old. "While the high-speed trains look nice, they're just polished-up, old, sterile technology," he says. "They're like I am. I am an old man with a new haircut."

It's conceivable that Garrison has not been to Europe or Japan anytime in the last 30 years to see the cutting-edge, extraordinarily popular high speed trains there. It's possible, I guess, that he hasn't even been to the western edge of his city to see the frequent, high-ridership Capitol Corridor trains. And it's more than possible, but quite likely, that he's just an old-school freeway builder who convinced himself in the 1960s that rail was dead and 40 years later cannot bring himself to admit new evidence and new realities.

Ironically Garrison himself coauthored a book attacking that kind of thinking:

Major themes of the book include the pervasiveness of conventional wisdom, its often unfortunate role in shaping policy, and the need to resist it. Another theme is historic path dependence, in which initial decisions when a technology is young lock systems into development paths out of inertia (as in the case, say, of railway gauges), so that they become historic artifacts rather than dynamic transport systems. The authors also address the maturity of our transportation system (and its possible senescence). That creates the danger that new ideas will be suffocated or starved, especially given the present preoccupation with polishing and fine-tuning obsolete systems, or tinkering around the edges, refining and optimizing in small increments what is already deployed.

Despite this undercurrent of dismay, the authors claim to be writing out of a sense of optimism. "We need to think harder. We need to do better," they write, with the implication that that is possible.

The book includes an attack on high speed rail, which is directly contradictory to its stated themes:

At the same time, the authors suggest that the passenger railroad is a dying technology, suitable for a select few settings, but extremely limited in its practical usefulness overall. They analyze the prospects for high-speed rail in the U.S. market and, contrary to some widely publicized views, conclude that it is not likely to succeed on its own merits. In the two places where high-speed rail has enjoyed some of its greatest success, Europe and Japan, other factors contributed to the outcome. Regulatory schemes artificially inflated airfares, so airlines could not compete for customers on price. And because Europe and Japan are more densely populated and have more severe congestion and capacity problems, high-speed rail has an easier time of matching the convenience of air, creating the high-volume, short-distance market for which high-speed rail is most suited.

So how do they explain the Acela's success?! European air travel has been revolutionized by low-cost carriers such as easyJet and Ryanair, but high speed rail has still beaten them. Matt Melzer destroyed the "more densely populated" argument here on the blog last month, showing that Spain has very similar conditions to us in California, and Spain's successes can be repeated here. Finally, the notion that air travel is "convenient" just doesn't seem true any longer - when American travelers are given a choice between flying and high speed rail, they're choosing the rails.

Garrison and his coauthors go on:

Finally, they argue, high-speed rail is too late: "In mature systems, the benefits of new infrastructure in an already well-served area are elusive." Tinkering with an older system will yield only minimal gains. "Whether high-speed rail is a new story, or simply the final chapter to the history of conventional passenger rail, waits to be seen," they conclude.

Of course, California is not a "well-served area." HSR isn't "tinkering with an older system" and his implicit notion that passenger rail is headed for some dustbin of transportation history is belied by the reality that surrounds us.

Ultimately Garrison's argument is really little more than libertarian anti-transit nonsense dressed up in academic speak. Their book purports to explain why "the math" doesn't work for transit, but this ignores the massive subsidies given to freeways - meaning "the math" doesn't work for them either. And nowhere in their book, published in 2006, do they discuss the impact of higher gas prices or global warming mitigation costs on transportation - both of which suggest that HSR will be effective from both a transportation and an economic point of view.

Garrison's arguments are the last gasp of a dying 20th century model. The 21st century model is one that emphasizes sustainability, in our case through modernized passenger rail. I love riding the Coast Starlight, but give me high speed rail and I'll choose that over Amtrak, driving, or flying any day.

Travelers Seeing Rail As Superior to Planes

It's a frequent canard raised by the HSR deniers - that nobody would choose even a bullet train over a plane to get between the two halves of our state. Soaring passenger rail ridership belies this argument, as travelers see the benefits - in terms of comfort and economy - of rail travel. The Washington Post explored this dynamic in today's paper, interviewing Acela riders to explain the shift:

Jada Golden stood in the waiting lounge at Union Station, explaining why Amtrak is a better way to travel than an airline.

"It's as heavy as we want," Golden said, pointing to an oversize suitcase. "We can put it on a rack in the rail car and get things out of it."

Golden, 36 and a Boston schoolteacher, pointed to another bag -- a large paper grocery bag filled with sandwiches, salads, water and fruit. "You can bring food," she said.

She continued. On the train, she's free to pick her own seat and doesn't have a flight attendant telling her when to use electronics. And then there's the airline stress factor -- the security headaches and the delays.

"You're always delayed in the airport," Golden said. "You always have connecting flights."

Security theater, high fuel prices, an aging infrastructure, and corporate nickel and diming are all driving passengers away from planes and to the trains. On the Acela passengers are free to talk on their cell phones, getting work done that they couldn't get done on a plane. It's a superior method of travel, as more and more Americans are discovering.

Of course it helps that the Northeast Corridor has something like the Acela, a quasi-high speed train that is competitive with flying times between DC and NYC. Here in California we just don't have that option. The Coast Starlight, which I'm riding to LA tomorrow, takes about 12 hours to get from the Bay Area to SoCal. There's just no way that can ever shift travel habits in any lasting or meaningful way. I love riding it, but most Californians can't afford to take two whole days to get between LA and SF. Compared against the Coast Starlight, yeah, flying is generally the better option.

And that's where high speed rail makes such an enormous difference. Two and a half hours on a train is certainly competitive with flying, especially when the security theater, travel time to and from the airport, waiting in the terminal, and frequent flight delays are considered. You can conduct business on the train, with a cell phone and likely by wi-fi once our project is built. It provides a stable cost of transportation, as opposed to flights which are dependent on an ever-rising cost of oil.

Already airlines are cutting flights between LA and SF, which is likely to continue as fuel costs eat into profit margins. To believe we can rely on airlines to handle our intrastate travel needs is to deny reality. Americans are already demonstrating that they WILL take high speed rail if it's an option, just as Californians are riding the Amtrak California lines in massive numbers. Put together it's a solid argument for high speed rail in California.

HSR Grabs 30% of Market in Six Months

Spain's AVE high speed train service was finally completed between Madrid and Barcelona earlier this year, with the first passengers riding in February. Since then the line has taken 30% of the travel market between Madrid and Barcelona, which was one of the world's busiest air corridors. That's a stunning level of ridership that is surely going to grow as more Spaniards become used to the service.

The Madrid-Barcelona line shares many similarities to the California high speed rail project. It connects the two major metro areas of the polity (sorry, Sevilla) in 2 hours 40 minutes - and even though a flight between the two is about an hour, Spanish travelers are flocking to HSR. Like California, the Madrid-Barcelona line serves a few intermediate-size cities - Zaragoza, Lleida, and Tarragona are sort of like San José, Fresno, and Bakersfield (though not necessarily in that order, and surely not culturally). As Matt Melzer explained last month, Spain's population densities are much like those here in California and a third of the ridership on the AVE trains was "induced demand" - new travelers brought out by the promise of fast and comfortable rail travel.

Lest we think that Europeans are somehow different than Americans in their travel habits, the Acela has over 40% of the market on the Northeast Corridor between Washington DC and Boston, despite the fact that the Acela isn't true high speed rail. Here on California's intercity trains ridership is booming, straining the existing capacity of Amtrak California. Standing room only is now common on many Capitol Corridor and Pacific Surfliner trains, and LA Metro Rail continues to set new ridership records.

As gas prices will continue to rise well into the future, causing airlines to cut back on flights and charge higher fares for those that remain, demand for high speed trains will only continue to rise. If ridership is already this high on Spain's and America's high speed trains, imagine how it will look here in California in ten years' time.

If Californians want a fast and affordable way to get around their state in the years to come, they need to vote for Prop 1.

Ill Advised?

I really should be packing for my trip to Seattle, but this could not pass without comment. Tim Hunt has an op-ed in today's Oakland Tribune calling high speed rail "ill advised". Far as I can tell the only thing ill advised is his op-ed:

And, when it comes to transportation, the bullet train is a remarkable boondoggle. Its board approved the environmental impact report last week that identified costs between $42 billion and $45 billion. If costs were half that much, it's way past time for voters to end this fantasy of politicians who love to spend your money.

This is ignorant nonsense. Because a $10 billion bond will not be floated all at once, but dribbled out over time and as needed, it is not likely to necessitate a tax increase. If it did the cost to the average Californian would be $750 total - going off of arch-conservative Tom McClintock's own numbers - or $37.50 a year if paid in annual installments. I just paid that much to fill up my car last night, whereas high speed rail would save me money.

Remarkably Hunt does not mention anywhere in his column the high price of gas. Nowhere does he mention the airline crisis. Nowhere does he mention the energy or climate crisis. And if it's the economy he's so concerned about, what does he have against the 450,000 jobs that this will create, many of them coming within the next few years when they will be desperately needed?

The language of the "boondoggle" is frequently used by transit opponents. Any government project with a big price tag is immediately seen as a recipe for ruin. The involvement of Parsons Brinckerhoff usually amplifies these cries - but as we have explained before this is to miss the key details entirely. The Big Dig, the usual whipping boy of anti-government critics, was a highly unusual and deeply mismanaged project. Rail projects, especially high speed rail projects, have routinely been delivered on-time and either on or very close to the original budget projections - including here in California.

Unfortunately he goes on:

And for those who still dream about BART extending to Livermore, the bullet train is yet another negative. The approved EIR shows the route coming over Pacheco Pass and then up the Santa Clara valley to San Jose and then north along the Peninsula to San Francisco. Livermore advocates hoped for a route that went through the Altamont Pass to a high-rail connection in Livermore between BART, ACE and the high-speed rail. Pleasanton would sue the pants off of any agency wanting to move more trains — let along high-speed trains — through its downtown, but it might live with a few more ACE trains with most of the passenger traffic taking BART.

The high-speed rail board decision ends that possibility and should send a clear message to Valley voters as well as those voting across the state.

That's odd. Here I thought there was a meeting just last week on extending BART to Livermore. And this notion that the HSR authority "ends the possibility" of more ACE trains or undermining BART to Livermore? Did he miss the part of the plan where Altamont is specifically designated as an HSR corridor that will get funds even though it's not on the main track? That such funds would almost certainly lead to an ACE boost? That plan would be immeasurably boosted by passage of AB 3034 but instead of bashing Republicans that have held it up, he goes after the Authority with a charge so baseless that it leads me to wonder whether Hunt has even the slightest clue of the basic details of the project.

This is a silly boondoggle and deserves to be buried now instead of consuming more precious public funds.

Remember, the state is still $15 billion-plus out-of-balance and could not afford this silliness in the best of times, let alone now.

This is sleight-of-hand, as the deficit and HSR are totally separate issues. The state Legislative Analyst, a respected nonpartisan office, concluded the state could afford this bond. More importantly, not building this will worsen the budget gap as Californians lose jobs and reduce spending due to high gas prices they can't avoid. Again Hunt completely ignores the crippling impact of those high prices on our economy, to which HSR is a partial but valuable solution.

High-speed rail may have its place in America — most likely moving freight between the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to processing centers in the Inland Empire around San Bernardino — but it's certainly not trying to ship people north to south to compete with airlines.

Why not? Acela has taken 40% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor from the airlines. HSR in Spain - which is very similar to California in how its cities are distributed - is successfully challenging the airlines, especially on the Madrid-Barcelona route, one of the world's busiest.

Hunt seems to be completely ignorant of both the stunning global success of HSR as well as soaring ridership on California trains. Were he better informed he might not be making these kind of arguments.

Voters likely will face a $10 billion initial investment to be followed by several more bonds. It's well past time to stop throwing good money after bad on this project that is so ill-conceived that it doesn't even have a business plan.

Wrong again. It does have a business plan. 8 years old, yes, but it exists. AB 3034 would mandate that the Authority update the plan, but Republicans opposed it. Not exactly a good way of holding government accountable or providing the public the latest information, is it?

And, what's more, the current legislation in Sacramento calls for the engineering to be done by Caltrans instead of contracted to an outside firm. Caltrans already is a major roadblock to getting projects moving. That provision to require Caltrans engineering is a sop to the engineers' union and other public employee unions, and another strike against doing things efficiently. Caltrans, despite some good efforts by appointed leaders, defines government bureaucracy that consumes vast amounts of taxpayer and private money with little to show in progress or improvements.

Again, this is simply false. The provision in question was struck from the bill when it was amended in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Once again Hunt fails on even the basic facts of high speed rail. If he can't get those facts right, can we trust his arguments? Of course not. The only thing "ill advised" here would be assuming Hunt's op-ed is of any value in assessing Proposition 1.

You're Not Credible If You're Not Talking High Gas Prices

I've been traveling around California a lot in the last few weeks - mostly by train - and everywhere I go the most common topic of conversation is gas prices. The relentless march to $5 continues - we blew right past $4 a few weeks ago - but more important than the volatile day-to-day price is the underlying fact that gas prices have risen by nearly 400% in the last nine years. This is due to the phenomenon of peak oil - the shrinking supply and rising global demand for oil. Since the production of oil is at or near its all-time peak, we will have to either reduce our demand or pay ever-rising prices. Simple supply and demand law.

So you would naturally think that any effort to assess the high speed rail project - whose primary selling point is that it allows people to travel between metro areas within our state without being beholden to the ever-rising price of oil - would consider this point. Of course you would be mistaken - the State Senate didn't mention it at all in their report. Most newspaper editorials on HSR neglect the issue as well.

Not surprisingly the issue is completely ignored by the group that passes for HSR opposition in California. DerailHSR.com is founded by a group of Menlo Park property owners who don't want high speed trains running near their homes, even though the trains were there LONG before they were (the SP Peninsula route opened to passenger train service in 1863). If these folks wanted to have a discussion about the impact of the train on their property, that's a fair discussion to have out in the open. But they realize most Californians won't be moved by their "plight" - the median household income is $84,000 and most homes are valued near or above $1 million. So instead they try to "derail" the HSR project by making spurious claims about its ridership projections, its leaders, even its basic concept.

Recently these opponents published a paper that supposedly debunks the ridership projections on which the HSR project depends. But nowhere in this paper are fuel prices discussed. Nowhere at all. This despite the fact that passenger rail in America is setting ridership records due to high fuel prices.

It is simply not credible to discuss ridership and not include fuel prices in that analysis. On that basis alone the HSR deniers' paper is worthless.

But the paper is so full of half-truths and misstatements that I would be remiss if I didn't call those out. After all, if this is what passes for HSR opposition in California, it's best we nip these ridiculous claims in the bud, before they spread any further. The article states:

Construction costs could be 2 to 3 times projections or $80 to $120 billion instead of $40 billion. Ridership and revenue will probably be one-half to one-third of forecasts.

Nowhere is any basis for these figures given. The author, Arthur J. Ringham, appears to have made up these figures entirely. He goes on to cite a Danish study that purports to examine an "inherent forecast bias" in transit ridership projections - in other words that transit systems overestimate their projected riderships. But we can look to California to see this is not so. The Metro Orange Line saw 20,000 daily boardings in 2007 - a level they were not expected to reach until 2020! The pro-transit group Light Rail Now! offers a list of light rail lines that exceed their projected riderships - and that study was done in 2001. New lines in Minneapolis and Charlotte, opened in the last few years, have also met projections.

Demand on intercity rail lines in California is also soaring, stretching available capacity to the breaking point as ridership skyrockets. Finally, the airline crisis suggests that high fuel prices will mean fewer flights and higher fares on the LA-SF route, yet another indication that HSR ridership will have little trouble meeting expectations. Taiwan's new HSR system exceeded ridership projections and turned a profit earlier than was anticipated, and there is every reason to believe the same will occur here in California.

The DerailHSR folks admit that "most claimed benefits depend on ridership" - and so if their criticism of the ridership numbers has little merit, does any of the rest of their argument have merit? Of course not:

California and Japan are quite different. Japan has far higher population density and shorter distances between major cities, conducive to train travel. Their Bullet train system was well established before freeways, and gasoline has been about twice as expensive in Japan as here. Air fares between major cities within Japan are much higher than rail and a lot more than California air fares for the same distance. Californians have been wedded to cars and freeways for over two generations. It is absurd that California high speed rail travel can even approach its popularity in Japan.

What isn't said here is that in Spain - where population densities and distances between major cities are very much like California's - HSR is a stunning success, having little trouble attracting riders.

The only basis for their ridership claims is a belief that "Californians are wedded to cars and freeways." As a cursory glance at reality shows, this just isn't so. Californians were wedded to cheap oil, which made commuting and driving between cities a reasonable proposition. But with the end of cheap oil, Californians are showing themselves to be quite flexible and adaptable. The demand for passenger rail alone, whether in cities or between them, should remove all doubt.

The rest of the HSR deniers' essay mentions rising costs (yes, the costs will rise, but that is due to global inflation in construction materials - an argument for beginning construction ASAP), and even the threat of derailments along - you guessed it - the Peninsula corridor (no HSR trains have ever caused damage to surrounding homes via derailment). But since their claims on ridership were shown to have no merit, even those easily debunked points don't matter. If you don't assess the impact of high gas prices on transit, you are just not credible.

Veto-Proof Majorities Support Amtrak/HSR Bill in Congress

Congress threw down on rail today in a big way:

A nearly $15 billion Amtrak bill passed the House Wednesday as lawmakers rallied around an alternative for travelers saddled with soaring gas prices.

The bipartisan bill, which passed by a veto-proof margin of 311-104, would authorize funding for the national passenger railroad over the next five years. Some of the money would go to a program of matching grants to help states set up or expand rail service.

Besides the $14.9 billion provided for Amtrak and intercity rail, an amendment to the bill would authorize $1.5 billion for Washington's Metro transit system over the next 10 years.

The US Senate also passed an Amtrak reauthorization by a veto-proof majority. But there are some big differences between the House and Senate versions, and as Congressional Quarterly reports it might not find an easy resolution:

The $14.4 billion reauthorization measure passed 311-104, but future prospects for the legislation are less certain. An expected conference committee with the Senate could be tough...

Republicans acquiesced in the price tag exchange for language prompting privatization of a high-speed rail line in the Northeast Corridor.

The line between Washington and New York would move passengers between the metropolitan cities in less than two hours. Private companies would bid on the construction of the line, which lead proponent John L. Mica , R-Fla., says is a gold mine....

The Senate version does not have privatization language and Amtrak supporters in that chamber, such as Frank R. Lautenberg , D-N.J., are unlikely to accept it easily.

Let's be clear: the Acela, and any HSR line between DC and NY, should not be privatized. Amtrak runs that line quite efficiently. It has grabbed 40% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor and its ridership is rising dramatically. Acela could be improved, but not by privatization - instead by upgrading the overhead catenaries and the tracks so that the system can provide even faster service.

Still, the votes are a significant vote of confidence in passenger rail. It should suggest to Californians that Congress is very interested in supporting our own high speed rail project - and that as Democrats will gain much larger majorities in Congress this November, and with a President Obama (we hope), passenger and high speed rail will get enormous federal subsidies.

It would be nice if California's Senators - Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein - would step up and direct some of this money to our own HSR project, even if it's just a few million dollars, as a sign of support and to help shore up political support ahead of the November vote. But let there be no mistake - the feds are ready to invest in high speed rail. It's now California's turn to step up and do the same.

Spain's High Speed Rail Pressures Airlines

(Flickr image of Madrid Atocha station by luisffranco)

Earlier this year RENFE, the government-owned Spanish national railway operator, opened the final leg of the Madrid-Barcelona AVE high speed rail route, on the heels of the Málaga extension. And Spain is on track to have several new lines, including a link to Santander and Bilbao, open by 2010 - the "world's largest" high speed rail network, or so the Spanish government boasts.

Already the new lines are having an impact: Spanish airlines are reducing capacity on the routes HSR serves as the AVE system grabs a great share of the market share on those corridors. And major airlines, such as Iberia, are planning to refocus their service away from domestic corridors and toward their long-haul routes, especially to Latin America. Iberia's CEO explains the situation:

Iberia chairman Fernando Conte, who has called the competition posed by bullet trains "tremendous," said the carrier would push ahead with plans to reduce its capacity on domestic flights by 15 percent during the rest of 2008....

Other carriers are also struggling to compete with the fast-speed trains.

Spanair, the second-biggest Spanish airline, has reduced the number of its flights between Madrid and Malaga while loss-making low-cost airline Vueling canceled its summer connection between the two cities.

The situation in Spain is analogous to California. The Madrid-Barcelona route was one of the world's busiest air shuttle routes, as is LA-SF. Spain has a high level of automobile ownership that are frequently used by commuters. Until the AVE was begun in 1992, few expected that Spain, which was reliant on cars and airplanes for travel, would ever take to high speed rail - but it has clearly done so.

Spain's success with high speed rail can be matched here in the US. Already the Acela has 40% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor despite not actually being a true HSR system. And like Spain, America's airlines are beginning to shift their focus away from domestic routes, as United Airlines recently demonstrated. Some point to Southwest as proof that air travel will remain cheap and viable - but the architect of their success, Herb Kelleher, isn't so sure:

Herb Kelleher, the iconic co-founder of Southwest Airlines who stepped down as chairman Wednesday, said flying could become something that only business travelers or the affluent can afford, much as it was in the 1950s and '60s.

"You may see a lot less air service across the United States, and that's really a shame," Kelleher said. "We are heading back in that direction."

Fuel prices aren't coming back down anytime soon, and without cheap oil, air travel will not be a viable method for folks to get around our state.

Whereas HSR not only provides stable, affordable fares - since it's not as dependent on oil - but it's also simply a better way to travel. From Spain again:

The high-speed AVE trains, which are fitted with video and music players and chairs that can swivel in the direction of travel, can make the 660-kilometre trip between Madrid and Barcelona in about two and a half hours.

Passengers say bullet trains have more roomier and comfortable seats than planes, faster check-in times and have the advantage of arriving and departing from downtown cores.

Business travellers also like the availability of mobile services and electrical outlets in their seats that allow them to work along the way.

"There is no question that high-speed rail attracts passengers who would otherwise fly," said Henry Harteveldt, travel industry analyst at Forrester Research, a San Francisco-based consultancy. "Taking the train is easier."

The fact is that transportation is changing. The markets are changing, the underlying energy and environmental factors are changing, and public preferences are changing. Combine that with the high cost of NOT building HSR and the case for California high speed rail seems clear.

Update: Atrios agrees.