CA4HSR Submits LA-SD Scoping Comments

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.

LA to SD Scoping Meetings

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.

LA - San Diego: Quo Vadis?

Note: commenter calwatch, a member of the Technical Working Group for the LA - San Diego segment of HSR, kindly contributed to the research for this post.

We recently discussed plans to completely remodel the overburdened Lindbergh Field airport and before that, the possibility of extending HSR to Mexico, because the SD Trolley Blue Line to the border is so busy.

Of course, both of these presumed that the planned HSR spur from LA Union Station to San Diego Santa Fe depot - or perhaps, a new multimodal transit hub at Lindbergh Field - will actually be built as intended. This requires that the starter line attract enough ridership to generate an operating profit that will permit the sale of non-state bonds to raise capital for phase II, which also includes extensions to Irvine and Sacramento. It also requires that CHSRA secure a suitable right of way, which will not be easy and needs to be done now, more than a decade before phase II construction will even begin.

Here is a map showing the principal railroad rights of way in Southern California (and their owners) plus several of the currently unused freeway medians. Despite appearances to the contrary, it does not represent a smorgasbord of options for HSR - the majority of them are already reserved for freight (expansion) and local/regional transit. At least the risky maglev project through the Inland Empire appears to have shrunk to just a gleam in a number of politicians' eyes: Sen. Harry Reid, Gov. Schwarzenegger and Gov. Gibbons. Rapid transit service between Anaheim ARTIC and Ontario airport via hwy 57 might be more easily implemented via a sexy bus styled by an F1 aerodynamicist and running at elevated speeds (90-150mph) on dedicated lanes and possibly even batteries. HSR is great, but it's not always the most appropriate option.


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Passenger rail service between LA and San Diego is currently provided by the popular Amtrak Pacific Surfliner that runs through Orange County and down the San Diego county coast. The trip takes about 2 hours.

HSR would cut that to 1h 15m, even though CHSRA has selected a preferred route via Riverside county that adds around 30 miles. There were three reasons for this preference:

1. LAWA desperately wants to relieve California's largest airport LAX, where a project to add a third runway had to be canceled after protests from nearby communities. That is the primary reason why the HSR network includes both Palmdale and Ontario airports.
   
2. San Bernardino, Riverside and other inland towns are currently only connected to LA via Metrolink, if at all. However, none of lines has a stop next to the airport terminals, the nearest large airport in the region.
   
3. An HSR alignment along the coast ROW was ruled out because that is too narrow to support four tracks south of Fullerton in Orange County, because of the visual clutter an overhead catenary system would bring to San Clemente and Del Mar in particular and, because of concerns about weather-related and geological hazards that NCTD has had to deal with in the past. CHSRA recommended an upgrade to 110mph diesel-based service be considered but did not pursue the corridor any further.
   

The preference for a detour past Ontario airport and Riverside introduces several critical ROW issues:

• CHSRA is proposing expensive run-through tracks (zoom in on LA please) for a new upper deck at LA Union Station. We have already discussed several alternatives that would require fewer eminent domain takings on this blog. For a variety of reasons, most commenters insisted that HSR trains should stop at Union Station, not at any separate station connected by a local shuttle service - especially one anywhere near the new State Historical Park. Any run-through tracks for HSR would be separate from the ones already planned for FRA-compliant Amtrak/Metrolink equipment on the lower deck. The objective is to secure alignments that allow trains to run from SF/Sacramento to both Anaheim and San Diego without having to waste time reversing direction in LA. Note that there are no plans for direct HSR service between Anaheim and San Diego because Amtrak Pacific Surfliner already serves that market.
  
  
• Securing a ROW from LA Union Station to Riverside
  
  
• Securing a ROW from Riverside to San Diego
  
  
• Avoiding ROW conflicts with freight capacity expansion in Southern California. Fortunately, analysis to date suggests that a combination of expanding conventional rail freight and adding dedicated truck lanes on selected freeways would be a lot more more effective than an inland port served by a bleeding-edge electricity-guzzling freight maglev system in dealing with congestion and even air quality problems that are constraining growth in shipping volume.
  

This last point is really important, because 1 in 7 jobs in LA county depends on the ports. The majority of all manufactured goods imported from Asia into the US flows through the container terminals there and to point east via the Inland Empire. Already, rail freight up to Redondo Junction near downtown Los Angeles has been consolidated via the fully grade separated Alameda Corridor, freeing up old rights of way for projects such as the Harbor Subdivision Transit Corridor.

The success of freight consolidation has spawned a sequel dubbed Alameda Corridor East, with phase I already in progress. Its scope are improvements to 39 grade crossings the UPRR rights of way in the San Gabriel Valley between Redondo Junction and Pomona. The grade separation projects already completed did not anticipate the construction of HSR tracks, something CHSRA's consultant engineers HNTB (also selected for the SF peninsula) are aware of. Later phases will address the eastern section of the UPRR corridors out to Colton and beyond as well as the "91" corridor owned by BNSF, which CHSRA has identified as the preferred corridor between Redondo Junction to Fullerton. South to Anaheim and Irvine, the ROW is narrow and owned by Metrolink.

San Gabriel Valley
At this point, it looks increasingly unlikely that CHSRA can obtain land on the preferred UPRR Colton/Riverside and Colton ROWs for the purpose of constructing HSR tracks. The ROW choice is very much in flux, but right now leading candidates for alternatives out to Riverside appear to be, in no particular order:

• I-10 median on an elevated alignment. The section between LA Union Station and El Monte is already occupied by a single track used by the Metrolink San Bernardino line. The most likely route would therefore involve air rights over UPRR's Colton/Riverside ROW between Redondo Junction and the I-605/hwy 60 interchange, then cutting up to I-10 alongside I-605. The all-essential connecting transit to cover the ~1/2 mile to the three Ontario airport terminals would likely be implemented either via shuttle buses or an elevated people mover.
  
  One big problem is that there is no easy way to cut across from Colton to the I-215 median, the preferred route down to San Diego. Colton, San Bernardino and Riverside all very much want a station in the area, but residents near March AFB in Moreno Valley are objecting. Note that Metrolink has plans for a new service out to Perris, Hemet and San Jacinto.
  
  An alternative would be to cut across to the I-15 median just east of Ontario instead, perhaps even via the long-term parking lot at Ontario, S Haven Ave and a short section of UPRR's Colton/Riverside ROW (e.g. via air rights). The alignment would then continue south to Murrieta via Corona and Lake Elsinore. An intermodal station with Metrolink might be possible if the existing one for Corona were moved about a mile east.
  
  
• Hwy 60 median east of the 710 interchange. It is still unused all the way out to Riverside UC and connected to the preferred route down to San Diego via the I-215 median. Reaching it from Redondo Junction would be difficult if UPRR refuses to cede at least air rights on its Colton/Riverside ROW . Moreover, there are two competing applications for the hwy 60 median: the Eastside Light Rail project and, dedicated truck lanes to haul freight out of the LA/LB ports (though other freeways are also under consideration).
  
  For HSR, a bigger issue with this option is that hwy 60 runs a couple of miles south of Ontario airport. However, a sufficiently fast high-capacity shuttle bus service or people mover up S New Haven could link the HSR station, the East Ontario Metrolink station, the long-term parking lots and all three terminals. A suboptimal solution, but better than nothing.
  
  Both the I-15 and the I-215 medians are more easily reached via hwy 60 than via I-10.
  

Note that both solutions involve obtaining some co-operation, e.g. air rights, from UPRR to proceed south-east from Redondo Junction. The same safety/liability issues that railroad raised in the context of a serious derailment with debris fouling an adjacent HSR track also applies to air rights. What if a derailment were to damage a support column or portal? How would the accident be communicated fast enough to avoid a potentially catastrophic follow-on accident involving a high speed train with hundreds of people on board?

Earthquake safety may be more manageable, though land would be needed to install the support structures. That could prevent UPRR from laying down another track and/or jeopardize the safety of its employees hanging off railroad cars. UPRR may be a crufty old-fashioned railroad compared to BNSF, but they are profitable and they have been in operation for 146 years. They've almost certainly forgotten more about day-to-day railroad operations and off-design conditions than CHSRA's board members will ever know.

HSR isn't being built in a vacuum, it is being introduced into the pre-existing US railroad ecosystem (for lack of a better term). If it has not yet done so, CHSRA would be wise to retain the services of a recently retired senior railroad operations manager, because neither civil engineers like Mehdi Morshed nor foreign HSR vendors nor foreign HSR operators will be able to bring local knowledge of (antiquated) operating practices to bear in CHSRA's negotiations with the freight rail companies and FRA. You can't reach consensus until the other side is persuaded that you fully understand the concerns they are raising. Operations guys tend to trust their own, because nothing focuses the mind on safety like an injury or death on your watch.

I-15 Managed Lanes
Unfortunately, getting past Ontario is only half the battle. SANDAG is already constructing additional managed lanes in the I-15 median that CHSRA was counting on in the 20-mile stretch between Escondido and south of Miramar. This video animation shows how this "freeway within a freeway" will be accessed via high overpasses. To date, no provision has been made to accommodate HSR. One option now under consideration would use even taller overpasses to permit tracks running on an aerial alignment.

A third option would rely on a covered trench below the center lanes, supported by columns in the middle. If this visually and mechanically more appealing variation is chosen, it would be prudent to anticipate those future trenches now rather than destroy nearly 40 lane-miles of perfectly good freeway lanes later on. One option would be to deploy prefabricated concrete slabs that could be removed during and re-installed after HSR construction. Another option would be to bite the bullet now and construct those trenches sans tracks in anticipation of HSR construction a decade hence. Worst case, HSR does not happen and they would be re-purposed for some other transportation application (zero emissions lanes? water pipes?) The question is: who would pay for digging trenches now rather than later? Note that the spaces between the on- and off-ramps would serve as emergency access points every few miles, eliminating the need for a service tunnel. The Escondido station should probably be sited north of where the managed lanes begin.

Note also that might be possible to obtain land just west of I-15 to avoid having to deal with the managed lanes complication, but 20 miles is a long stretch.

Miramar, Lindbergh Field and beyond
Further south, yet more pitfalls await our intrepid HSR planners. There is as yet no easy solution for cutting over from the I-15 median to the existing railroad coast ROW owned by the San Diego Northern Railway. The closest approach is at Miramar, a Marine Air Corps Station. County voters rejected a proposal to ask the Marines to leave so the field could be converted to a new airport far from downtown.

That ROW is wide enough for four tracks near Lindbergh Field, of which two are already in use for FRA-compliant equipment operated by Amtrak, NCTD and BNSF. The other two are used by SD Trolley, i.e. light rail. Unless FRA grants a rapid rail waiver along the same lines as the one that will be needed in Orange County, the HSR tracks will most likely have to run on an aerial, see slide 22 of this presentation. It seems highly unlikely that this would introduce any clearance problems for aircraft if wind conditions force them to take off to the east or, that wake turbulence and jet exhausts would even be noticeable to HSR trains. However, the authors appear to have include HSR at the last minute as an afterthought: there is no 400m (1/4 mile) island platform for the HSR trains nor any pedestrian overpass to reach them - three would be needed. Fixing this at a later date would require a massive change to the transit terminal's signature wave roof, so it should be elevated some 25-30' before the architectural plans are finalized.

Otherwise, CHSRA will have to stick with plan A and somehow site its station at the beautiful historic Santa Fe Depot near downtown or else further south, e.g. near Petco Park.


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Finally, HSR will need a yard for overnight train storage, perhaps even maintenance. If BNSF are amenable to the idea, one possible location would be all the way down in near the salt ponds near Main St/I-5 in Castle Park. That location would double as an HSR station for communities near the border.


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Mary Bono Mack and Darrell Issa Attack Vegas HSR

Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack, who owes her seat to having been married to Sonny Bono when he died, is launching a new criticism of the Vegas HSR project: that it would come at the expense of the Inland Empire. Obviously Mack, like John Boehner before her, is oblivious to the fact that many of her constituents will benefit from Vegas HSR, particularly the construction jobs. But she's concerned about the Indian casinos, like Casino Morongo, that might lose out to Vegas when Californians find it's easier to get to Vegas than ever before via a high speed train:

But Bono Mack, R-Palm Springs, said Reid -- a longtime proponent of a Southern California-to-Las Vegas rail line -- stands to gain from the provision at her district's expense. With a fast train in place to take people from Los Angeles to the Vegas Strip, the Inland area would likely lose out on tourist revenue, particularly at the region's Indian casinos, she said....

"He's stifling our economy," Bono Mack said. "We're just going to shuttle people away from the Inland Empire."

So wouldn't one solution to this be to build HSR to Palm Springs? Funny how she doesn't propose that.

As the article notes Mack voted with her party against the stimulus and against the $8 billion in HSR money. Which, it must be noted, will benefit the California High Speed Rail project most of all. A project that many of her constituents will directly benefit from. Look at a map of the 45th district - much of it includes the I-215 corridor, the corridor along which HSR is likely to run on the LA-SD portion of the route.

I guess this is a marginally less ridiculous form of HSR denial, but not by much. The solution here isn't to attack the Vegas HSR project, but to expand mass transit options so that Palm Springs and its casinos are included as well.

And to remind Mack, and everyone else in the Inland Empire, that high speed trains run in two directions.

UPDATE: Thanks to my Calitics co-blogger David Dayen for bringing my attention to this priceless smackdown of Darrell Issa, a Congressman from San Diego, who attacked the "earmark" for Vegas HSR which, as David Shuster points out in the clip, doesn't actually exist:



Worth noting that Issa too represents a district that will benefit from HSR. God, these people are idiots.

Who's Afraid of Harry Reid?

At least once a day I do a Google news search for california high speed rail and then just plain old high speed rail (I also get daily Google News alerts, which are also useful). In recent weeks the searches have rarely turned up new material and so sometimes, I admit it, I have to scrape for subjects to cover in a daily post.

Not today.

The Republican freakout over Harry Reid's statement that the $8 billion in HSR stimulus money might could maybe partly be used to help with a high speed train from LA to Las Vegas has caused the media to pay attention to high speed rail again. This is partly due to the media, the DC-based media in particular, still being willing to indulge Republican whining on virtually any subject. You'd think they'd notice how little the public is interested in hearing that whining, and how little credibility the Congressional Republicans have especially after freely spending under Bush and running the nation's economy into the ground.

But until the media catches up with reality, we're going to continue to have stories like this one where all a Republican politician has to do is claim there's a controversy and, suddenly, controversy actually exists:

"Tell me how spending $8 billion in this bill to have a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is going to help the construction worker in my district," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio complained as he and all his fellow Republicans voted against the stimulus. Republicans cited the rail project in accusing Democrats of breaking their word to keep the bill free of pet projects.

Let's be very clear on what is going on here. Boehner is trying to throw things against the wall in hopes something will stick. Unable to derail a stimulus bill that has wide public support, they've spent the last few weeks trying desperately to convince a skeptical public that the stimulus bill is laden with pork that will cause doom, DOOM, for generations to come.

It's also worth noting that Boehner is lying here. The bill does NOT include $8 billion for Vegas HSR, and as the LA Times properly notes, it doesn't earmark funds for ANY HSR project:

A Reid spokesman said the money was not being earmarked for any specific project but would be available on a competitive basis. "This was a major priority for President Obama, and Sen. Reid as a conferee supported it," said Jon Summers.

To Republican politicians like John Boehner, of course, passenger rail funding is pork. Inherently so. They oppose it on principle, and tend to repeat the discredited talking points of Wendell Cox and the Reason Foundation that rail is wasteful. Doesn't matter if it's HSR or light rail or streetcars or Amtrak - remember that a few weeks ago, Boehner and his fellow Republicans all voted to eliminate Amtrak funding from the stimulus. They failed, but it's a further sign that at least for the elected officials of the Republican Party, HSR denial is a way of life. As this week's vote showed, alongside California's passage of Prop 1A, the public does not support them on this.

So once we put aside the usual rantings of HSR deniers, what does this all really mean for California High Speed Rail - the SF-LA project we've been focused on here for nearly a year? The answer, as I explained to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, is that it is entirely good news.

Dug Begley's story explains that, in fact, the concept of a high speed train to Vegas is at least 20 years old, and that if this stimulus breathes life into it, that's probably a good thing:

But officials acknowledge after 20 years of talking about a bullet train across the desert, some residents are jaded about the possibilities. Robert Cruickshank, a high-speed rail proponent and creator of the California High Speed Rail Blog, said growing up in Orange County he heard for years how bullet trains were coming, but to no avail.

"The difference then is there was no funding," Cruickshank said.

To expand on this, as I did with the reporter over the phone yesterday (and I fully understand that he could only use snippets, and I am pleased with the snippets he used), the reason we haven't seen plans for HSR to Vegas materialize in those 20 years is that there was little political support for intercity passenger rail. Congress spent the 1990s taking a chainsaw to Amtrak, including canceling the Desert Wind in 1997. Until the United States was willing to embrace HSR spending, plans such as Vegas HSR would remain on the drawing board.

Now that situation has changed, and I believe that to be a good thing:

A line to Vegas could act as a nice complement to a north-south train, Cruickshank said, and has merit even though it's been a topic for 20 years with little to show for it.

"Anybody who's tried to go to Vegas on a weekend in traffic knows it would be welcome," he said.

Keep in mind the above, that the reason there's been "little to show for it" is that there's been no federal support for HSR spending until now. But the real point of this quote is to explain that if you propose it, they will come. Southern Californians would love to have this train. Complaints about the backups on Interstate 15 are commonplace among Californians, and if you could ensure folks had a way to get to Vegas that was fast and reliable, of course they'd take it. In Southern California, population 15 million, Vegas HSR is merely going to increase public support for high speed rail in general.

And the most important takeaway from all of this, by far, is that the events in Congress this week, combined with the results of the November election, indicate that both the American public and the majority in Congress along with the White House are strongly supportive of high speed rail. John Boehner is spitting into the wind here, demonstrating his irrelevance by trying to paint a popular concept as something illegitimate. The combination of voter support in California with political support in Congress means that when it comes to doling out the HSR stimulus money, California - and the SF-LA trunk route in particular - will be first in line:

Although an LA-to-Vegas line is not the priority in California, Cruickshank said it should not detract from efforts to build a high-speed line from San Diego to San Francisco.

In fact, much of the $8 billion could come to the West Coast.

"Only Los Angeles to San Francisco has any funding at all," he said. "This is the only high-speed rail in the nation that has a plan and any money behind it."

All Harry Reid has is a study. Vegas HSR, whatever it's value, is nowhere near the point of readiness that California HSR is, with completion of the environmental review and permitting process two years away at most. We have detailed engineering studies, a business plan, ridership estimates, and are now talking about final design details. No other HSR project in the country is at that point. And no other project in the country has that most precious of resources - a clearly identified and secured source of funding. The federal government loves nothing more than a local match.

Congress has shown that it strongly supports HSR funds. The people do as well. How much more in HSR funding we can get this year is dependent on a huge range of factors, but the $8 billion here is a huge signal that passenger rail's support in Congress is very strong. No amount of whining from the Republican minority will change that.

Two Quick Ones

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

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

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

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