Building an Organic Machine Along the LA River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


View Taylor Yard/HSR in a larger map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Times goes on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Yes, California, We Can Build It By 2018

Steve Hymon, who runs the Bottleneck Blog for the LA Times, expressed some skepticism about whether the SF-LA line will be open by 2018, as a Daily Cal article reported. Hymon writes:

Not to be a grumpy bear on this -- I know there's a lot of people that want to see the trains up and running -- but I think the odds of the system running in a decade are long. First, there's the little issue of coming up with the $33 billion that the California High-Speed Rail Authority says the project will cost (and some people say that's a low-ball estimate). The bond passed by California voters earlier this month was only for $9.95 billion.

"Some people say" is pretty poor journalism, first of all - those "some people" are the thoroughly discredited Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Association.

Second, if you're going to base skepticism over project delivery on funding, shouldn't you mention the John Kerry HSR funding proposal? Or Obama's $500 billion economic stimulus? Funding isn't certain but it sure looks likely. Skepticism is fine, but readers are still owed informed and complete reporting. He continues:

And then there's this: Look at how long it takes just to build a few miles of light rail. Take, for example, the Expo Line, which is planned to run from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, a distance of some 15 miles. Construction began in 2006 and the first 8.6 miles may be done by 2010, with the remainder by 2015. That's nine years to build 15 miles of light rail, versus a decade to build 400-plus miles of 220 mph rail.

This claim doesn't seem to reflect some factors about the high speed rail project that separate it from something like the Expo Line. First, the Expo Line's phased construction is partly due to funding issues faced by the MTA. Measure R, combined with a federal stimulus, could accelerate the delivery of the final phase. Second, the Expo Line involves building entirely new tracks through an urban center. HSR doesn't. It will involve grade separations and new tracks, but those will come next to existing rail corridors. And the bulk of the route will be built outside urban areas.

More importantly, the 2018 date is not some random number. The California High Speed Rail Authority's 2008 Business Plan explains that it will take 8 years to complete final design and construction. The timetable laid out in that document uses 2012-2020 as the timeline, but Quentin Kopp has recently suggested that the Program Level EIR/EIS process and preliminary engineering could be complete by July 2010 - in which case, the 2018 target date is entirely appropriate.

Sure, the CHSRA might not make that target date. But the way Hymon reported this claim made it sound like 2018 was pie-in-the-sky boosterism, when in fact it's sourced and reasonable.

Do you really think high-speed rail can happen that quickly? Making big promises is a good way to get the public excited. It's also a good way to make them cynical when those promises fail to materialize.

The same is true of the media, which frequently makes readers and citizens cynical about government programs or passenger rail projects by casting them in an unfair light. The Metro Gold Line Extension is being delivered on-time and on-budget even though it involves a tunnel under East LA. Seattle's Central Link light rail project is going to be delivered on-time and on-budget even though it too involves a significant tunnel (under Beacon Hill) and creating a light rail ROW in the middle of a busy urban street (Martin Luther King Way).

Even on a blog, I'd prefer that members of the media focus on reporting the facts in a complete and fair manner, instead of trying to push one's own skepticism.

Why Is Adrian Moore Lying in the LA Times?

The LA Times is running a "dust up" in its opinion pages - a weeklong discussion of high speed rail between Adrian Moore of the oil company funded Reason Foundation and Dan Tempelis, project manager for the CHSRA on the Palmdale-LA section of the route. It's something of an unfair fight, as Moore is trained to push misleading framing into the media, and Tempelis is a project engineer trained to build things. Tempelis isn't bad at this, but neither is he equipped to undermine the truthiness Moore spews.

Here's an example of Moore's misleading claims:

There are several reasons why high-speed rail does not stack up as the best infrastructure investment we can make today. Let's start with ridership. When high-speed rail systems were built in Europe and Asia, they served corridors that were already very dense and where a large share of travel was already by train -- and there was still no reduction in overall air travel in those corridors. Most riders of high-speed rail were already train riders. The California High-Speed Rail Authority's estimates for the state show that riders will not come from existing trains (there are very few of those) or much from the airlines. Rather, their plan rests on getting people to ride the train rather than drive. Given the more modest gas prices here, the lower density and car culture, to predict that the California high-speed train will get far more riders than systems in Europe and Japan is ridiculously optimistic.

This is a classic example of what Stephen Colbert called truthiniess - this "feels" true even though Moore hasn't provided any evidence. In fact Moore is passing along a huge pile of outright lies.

For example: "and there was still no reduction in overall air travel in those corridors." Um, WTF?

• Madrid-Barcelona AVE takes 30% of market from airlines in six months



• Eurostar Grabs Even More Passengers From Airlines



• Romance of Rail Jeopardizes Domestic Air Routes (Taiwan)

We could go on, but there's more Moore misinformation to correct, like "Most riders of high-speed rail were already train riders." Wrong again. As NARP's Matt Melzer pointed out in July Spain's experience proves that many HSR riders are in fact new train passengers. The images below compare the before and after the inaugural AVE line opened between Madrid and Sevilla in 1992:





Melzer's post also destroys another of Moore's claims, that California lacks the density for HSR, showing that in fact CA and Spain are very comparable on this basis:



Moore's left with lame defenses of California's "car culture" - never mind the fact that Amtrak California intercity routes are setting monthly ridership records. From here Moore moves on to equally truthy claims:

This despite that fact that every other high-speed rail line in the world, all with many advantages over a California system, are subsidized.

Wow. Just...wow. This is a bald-faced lie. In France the situation is reverse - HSR subsidizes all other trains. France alone disproves Moore's lie.

there is no doubt that the high-speed train will need to be subsidized; the Reason Foundation's middling estimate is that it will require about $3 billion per year.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Office reported that in the worst-case scenario only $1 billion would be required. This isn't the end of Moore's careless numerology:

Taxpayers should expect the final bill for this train system to be closer to $80 billion.

Moore has NO evidence for this claim. He uses a discredited study to claim there are 45% cost overruns on rail - Angelenos can look to the Metro Gold Line extension to see an on-time, on-budget rail project. Further, if Moore is going to give a specific figure, he needs to explain precisely where the cost overruns will come from and why they will amount to $80 billion. Since he can't, he's merely pulling the numbers out of his ass, an effort to mimic Dr. Evil.

Much of the rest of Moore's argument comes from a discredited Reason Foundation study. It would be nice if more members of the media would challenge this study instead of allow Moore to cite it as if it were gospel.

Dan Tempelis does a good job explaining the economic stimulus benefits of high speed rail and the fiscal safeguards in Prop 1A. But it's an unfair fight, since he's up against someone who will lie to readers to make his points. Yes on 1A advocates need to do a better job pushing back against the bullshit coming out of the Reason Foundation - they are lying to the public and will kill HSR if their lies are not countered.

Sadly that is the story of the 2008 election - lies, lies, lies everywhere. We're dealing with the same problems in the presidential campaign and the fight against Proposition 8. This blog has been consistently willing to debate HSR deniers on the issues. But instead all we get are lies.

If Prop 1A is going to pass, we need to fight back hard against these lies. The official campaign would do well to take a more aggressive tone here.

Flawed LA Times Article on Prop 1A

The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote an excellent argument for Prop 1A earlier this month. Unfortunately Eric Bailey's feature article in today's paper misses the mark and fails to provide readers an accurate picture of the HSR project - particularly by presenting some flawed claims from HSR deniers without independent verification or refutation.

First up is Richard Tolmach who engages in some of the worst kind of exploitation - using the horrific Chatsworth disaster to argue that HSR is somehow similarly unsafe:

"After all the crashes -- the train crash and the market crash -- supporters may have a lot more trouble than they anticipated," said Richard Tolmach, president of the nonprofit California Rail Foundation, a Proposition 1A foe.

Eric Bailey does provide refutation of this egregious bit of nonsense:

Metrolink-type collisions wouldn't be an issue, they say, because the train would run on tracks separate from freight lines. Bridges and other grade separations would keep the rails away from cars.

But unfortunately Bailey does not include refutation of the Reason Foundation's nonsense - even though this blog has provided a thorough deconstruction of that deeply flawed study, including the following points:

A report commissioned by the Libertarian think tank Reason Foundation and other foes compared California's plans with what is rolling on the ground right now in Europe and Asia.

Instead of a profit, the California trains could yield financial losses up to $4 billion, the report contends, predicting at least 60% fewer passengers than promoters project.

mike specifically refuted that point:

So [the Reason Foundation study'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.

Unfortunately Bailey just lets them rant on:

The final construction tab, they say, would swell beyond $80 billion, and other studies support that sort of conclusion. A Danish researcher who analyzed more than 250 big infrastructure projects around the world determined that new rail lines typically cost 45% more than originally estimated.

That Danish study has been challenged before. The LA Times can look a few blocks from its downtown headquarters to see the Metro Gold Line extension is on-time and under-budget. It is entirely possible that we will see cost overruns, but you can't pull a number out of thin air like $80 billion. If you're going to talk about overruns you need to explain precisely why and how those costs will rise. If you can't, then you're just making stuff up, and the LA Times shouldn't be allowing its pages to be used for that purpose.

The article also digs up an anti-HSR prof at USC:

Professor James Moore, director of USC's transportation engineering program, calls it "a dumb project" with overblown ridership and construction estimates, inflated profit forecasts, and wildly optimistic speeds and travel times.

"It's technologically impossible to do what the High-Speed Rail Authority claims can be done, for any amount of money," he said. "When it comes to predicting the actual cost of systems like this, I just say a zillion and leave it at that."

But Moore doesn't explain himself. At all. "A zillion?" That's not intellectually defensible.

The deeper issue Moore is likely referring to is whether the 220mph speed can be achieved. It's worth noting that 220mph is not intended to be the average speed, but the top achievable speed. The HSR deniers' strategy is to claim that if we can't meet the exact specifications that the CHSRA is promoting, then the entire concept is bad and should be rejected.

Which doesn't make any sense. HSR is a good idea not because we can achieve 220mph but because we can get quite close, providing very fast service that will still attract riders and meet our fundamental goals of sustainable, non-oil based, profitable transportation.

We don't have to speculate here. We can look at the evidence. The Madrid-Barcelona AVE line was intended to accomplish 217mph (350kph) with Siemens train technology. But the best they've been able to accomplish is 186mph (300kph). 186mph is still VERY fast, and it hasn't hurt the success of the new AVE line. In six months the AVE trains have taken 30% of the market on the Madrid-Barcelona route. The AVE trains are so successful that Spain's airlines have had to cut flights because their passengers are flocking to HSR.

Madrid-Barcelona is in fact a very good comparison to SF-LA. The Madrid-Barcelona corridor was one of the busiest airline routes in the world, and are Spain's two primary urban centers. SF to LA is one of the USA's busiest airline routes and are California's two primary urban centers. Madrid and Barcelona are 385 miles from each other by rail; SF to LA via the HSR route is 432 miles. Even if we cannot achieve 220mph, which IS technically possible, a top speed of 186mph would put the cities roughly three hours apart. Given the convenience of train travel and the added time costs of flying this still compares favorably to the airlines, especially when you consider the cost of expanding airports to meet demand, and especially the cost of fuel (and therefore airfares) in ten years' time.

The details do matter. And the details are likely to change. That's the nature of large infrastructure projects. You don't always come out with exactly, precisely the same thing you went in with. That's not a bad thing - projects need to be adapted to conditions if and when they change. Those who claim "omg they can't reach 220 so this is DOOMED!" are merely trying to pull a fast one on Californians, hoping that voters' lack of knowledge about HSR and general distrust of government can cover up the basic fact that even at 186 mph HSR is going to be profitable and popular.

Sadly, this is how American journalism works these days. Journalists become stenographers, quoting "both sides" and leaving it at that, even if one side's flawed arguments are left unrefuted. That's a major reason why this blog exists - to push back against this and provide Californians the truth.

Note: I've had to turn on comment moderation for the time being, since one particularly determined spammer chose to repeatedly post the same personal attacks. I will approve submitted comments as quickly as possible. As usual, I will not reject comments merely for criticizing HSR and Prop 1A. The only out-of-bounds comments are those that engage in personal attacks or those that are cut-and-pastes of entire articles. If you have any problems submitting comments, send an email to my last name at gmail dot com.

Update: Air France is getting into the HSR business, and will operate trains between Paris and London that reach a maximum speed of 224mph.

Do the HSR deniers still want to say that 220mph is impossible?

LA Times Endorses Yes on Prop 1A

The largest newspaper in the state has come out in favor of high speed rail:

There's something undeniably alluring about a bullet train -- the technology is so powerful, the speed so breathtaking, it makes quotidian trips seem exotic. Perhaps that's why proponents of Proposition 1a, which would authorize $9.95 billion in bonds for a high-speed rail line connecting Northern and Southern California, think it would be wildly successful. They predict the line could draw 117 million riders a year by 2030, compared with 3 million now taking the high-speed Amtrak train in the densely populated Northeast. And they say it will turn a billion-dollar profit by then even as it keeps ticket prices remarkably low.

The projections by the measure's opponents, led by the libertarian Reason Foundation in Los Angeles, are much less sanguine and more persuasive. If voters approve Proposition 1a, it seems close to a lead-pipe cinch that the California High-Speed Rail Authority will ask for many billions more in the coming decades, and the Legislature will have to scrape up many millions of dollars in operating subsidies.

And yet, we still think voters should give in to the measure's gleaming promise, because it's in their long-term interest. Weaning travelers from gas-powered, road-choking cars is critical to the state's health and competitiveness. A high-speed rail line would not only provide a cleaner and faster alternative to automobiles, it would encourage transit-friendly development.

The measure isn't as big a risk as it would be if the state were footing the entire bill. The "backbone" segment from Los Angeles to San Francisco is projected to cost $33 billion, with about 75% from federal and private sources. Until those funds are secured, the state won't issue most of its bonds. If the line never gets built, the state's losses will be well under $2 billion. That's not too much to wager on a visionary leap that would cement California's place as the nation's most forward-thinking state.

I could do without the citation of the Reason Foundation study that we thoroughly discredited here. It is far from a "lead pipe cinch" that the Authority will ask for "many billions more" - and it is highly unlikely that they'll need ongoing operating subsidies.

But what I find so interesting about this editorial is their argument that even if the discredited Cox-Vranich study were right, HSR is still worth doing. They are absolutely right that "weaning travelers from gas-powered, roads-choking cars is critical to the state's health and competitiveness." I would add airlines to that as well, something we have to develop an alternative to anyway.

The editorial also nails it at the end - if the matching funds don't come through, then we don't issue the bonds, California loses at most $2 billion, and we survive just fine. The LA Times editorialists saw right through all the baseless, factless, nonsensical claims that HSR will cost us upwards of $100 billion and instead focused on this state's dire need for just such a system to revive our economy and improve our environment.

The LA Times should be congratulated for shifting public focus to the "gleaming promise" of high speed rail. It is the most important infrastructure project this state has considered in 50 years. We will be kicking ourselves very soon if we reject Prop 1A. The LA Times gets the big picture. About time someone in the media did.