Someone Has To Be First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Russia With Love

Is California's high speed rail future on display in Russia? According to Siemens and the New York Times the answer just might be "yes":

Siemens’s new train — the Sapsan, Russian for peregrine falcon — is a candidate for the high-speed link planned between San Francisco and Los Angeles that may open in 2020. Alstom, the maker of the French TGV trains, and Bombardier are also contenders. Japanese bullet train designs by Hitachi, which are lighter but less secure in a low-speed crash, the only type of collisions survivable, are another option.

The technological breakthrough of the Sapsan is that the train has no locomotive. Instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains. (Passengers sit in the first car too.) Its top operating speed is 217 miles an hour, though in tests this model has reached 255 miles an hour, or about half the cruising speed of some jet airplanes.

For now, though the Sapsan will only be traveling at about 150mph over Russia's dilapidated rails.

Siemens is aggressively pursuing the US market, particularly us Californians:

The United States “is a developing country in terms of rail,” Ansgar Brockmeyer, head of public transit business for Siemens, said in an interview aboard the Russian test train, as wooden country homes and birch forests flickered by outside the window. “We are seeing it as a huge opportunity.”

To position itself to compete in the United States, Siemens has placed employees from its high-speed train division at its Sacramento factory, which produces city trams.

California desperately needs jobs like those that would be created building high speed trainsets in Sacramento. Opponents of HSR argue that the risk of a "boondoggle" is greater than the value of the jobs that would be created - 160,000 for the construction of the project, and 450,000 ongoing jobs, according to CHSRA estimates. I have a very difficult time believing that to be the case, especially when California faces the highest unemployment since the end of World War II.

But back to Russia (for a moment). Jaunted, a "pop culture travel blog," wondered if this was a case of "the space race race moving to the rails." It would be nice if we could move past Cold War metaphors when comparing the US to Russia, but clearly the space race was an iconic era in the 20th century, where international rivalry produced major human accomplishments that might not otherwise have gotten done. And as much as I support space exploration, it is undeniable that HSR provides more immediate and tangible benefits than putting a man on the moon.

What really matters is that nations like Russia, Poland and others are recognizing that having a high speed rail network is essential to their future economic prosperity. The US is not immune, despite what those who refuse to admit that the transportation models of the 20th century no longer work would have us believe.

I don't have any plans to be in Russia anytime soon, but if I did, I'd take time to ride the Sapsan.

July CHSRA Board Meeting

The July meeting of the California High Speed Rail Authority board is tomorrow morning at 10 AM in Sacramento at the city council chambers. You can find the meeting materials here. The meeting will be streamed live at this link (kudos to the Authority for putting that together!).

The agenda includes a discussion of project phasing, an update on HSR stimulus funding and pending legislation in the state legislature relating to the HSR project, and a proposed disability access committee.

June CHSRA Board Meeting Today 10AM

The monthly California High Speed Rail Authority board meeting will be held today at 10AM at Sacramento City Hall. The agenda can be found here and includes the following items:

1. Swearing in of new board members Richard Katz (Governor’s appointee) and Russell Burns (Assembly Speaker's appointee) and reappointed board member David Crane (Governor's appointee).



2. A staff presentation regarding coordination with Caltrans on the application for a major share of federal stimulus funding.



3. An update on bills being considered by the Legislature for board discussion and possible action.



4. Selection of a Program Management Oversight contractor.



5. A presentation on the alternatives to be analyzed under the Environmental Impact Report and Statement in the Anaheim to Los Angeles Union Station Section, preliminary alternatives extending north from Union Station to State Route 134, and the schedule for completion of the Anaheim to Los Angeles Project EIR/EIS.

Can't make it to Sacramento for the meeting? Neither can I (I'm still in DC). But the CHSRA has promised to webcast the meeting at this link. Enjoy!

Review of Yesterday's FRA Meeting in Sacramento

Thanks to Matt Melzer for attending and compiling these notes (with help from Ryan Stern) from yesterday's FRA meeting in Sacramento on high speed rail. Lots to chew over here! -Robert

Besides presentations from the feds, there was one from Amtrak's VP Policy and Development, Stephen Gardner, who emphasized that Amtrak wants to be THE national HSR operator. He also said that expanding state partnerships is "Amtrak's future."

Will Kempton, Mehdi Morshed, and Bill Bronte acted as the regional presenters, making the public case for California to receive stimulus funds based on the obvious success and maturity of California's passenger rail programs. Their PowerPoint also had nice maps showing CAHSR integrated with each existing Amtrak California corridor, as well as all three. Yet, there was no illustration of long-distance routes, regional rail systems, or Thruway motorcoach connections. So the visualization severely minimized the true reach of the state passenger rail network.

The Surfliner route north of LA looked like an errant finger, with San Luis Obispo positively orphaned. This, of course, has no relation to reality, with the existing Thruway connections to Hanford and the Bay Area, as well as the Coast Starlight and the future Coast Daylight. It's this lack of emphasis on statewide connections on the part of the HSRA that leads to situations like Pete Rodgers of SLOCOG opposing Prop 1A supposedly because he didn't think there was anything in it for SLO. Even if the $950 million for feeder rail and transit improvements didn't exist, he'd still be wrong.

After their presentation giving an overview of the federal HSR Strategic Plan and Next Steps (to which I'll refer readers to previous posts regarding details), Karen Rae (FRA Deputy Administrator), Paul Nissenbaum (FRA Director, Office of Passenger and Freight Programs) and Gardner engaged in Q&A. Some of the juicier questions:

Representative of LA County MTA: With the billions of dollars LA County voters approved for new transit projects in Measure R, why can't MTA use future HSR connectivity benefits as part of cost-effectiveness calculations for FTA New Starts applications? Why aren't FTA's criteria more holistic?

Rae: "We've talked more with FTA in the past 6 months than [we probably did] in the past 15 years." FRA and FTA are aware of such issues and will discuss them more moving forward.

Jason Lee, San Francisco MTA: With so much focus on cost, won't HSR grant applicants cut corners and shy away from key projects like the $1 billion Transbay extension?

Rae: We're "struggling" with how to handle such megaprojects, of which there are many across all modes, that demand huge resources concentrated in very small project areas. Some of these issues could be addressed in the transportation reauthorization bill. Criteria for numerous federal transportation grant programs could conceivably evolve.

Representative of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers: Union Pacific is grappling with Positive Train Control, which system is best, and how to implement it. Shouldn't the feds lead the charge for one interconnected PTC system?

Rae: FRA and the Rail Safety Advisory Committee are working to support the federally-mandated effort for a national PTC standard. We hope that PTC will be as interoperable as other standard railroad equipment.

Gardner: Interoperability is in the law (S.294, the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act [PRIIA], the Amtrak/passenger rail reauthorization and rail safety bill that passed last year). Train control will be a critical issue as we develop corridors that exceed 79 mph.

IBEW Rep.: UP gave the impression that they didn't know about the interoperability requirement!

Paul Dyson, President, Rail Passenger Association of California and SW Division Leader, National Association of Railroad Passengers [Disclaimer: I, Matt, serve under Paul on the NARP Council]: There's a lot of talk of partnerships today. Look at the three providers of passenger rail in Southern California: Amtrak, Metrolink, and Coaster are crummy partners [along the Surfliner route], with passenger-unfriendly schedule coordination. Who's to say states like Arizona or Nevada would ever be willing to work with California as regional "partners" in HSR development, as FRA is encouraging states within regions to do?

Rae: "It is not an easy conversation." But there's nothing like competitive grants to provide an impetus for partnership. "There's not nearly enough money to go around," but best practices in multi-state compacts will emerge from this process.

Representative of Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen: Amtrak is mandated to be profitable; will HSR operations be?

Nissenbaum: Capital subsidies will be required, but it's the responsibility of applicants to account for operating expenses. Amtrak or other operators will seek assurances so that they're not exposed to any risk of operating losses.

Gardner: The profitability clause is gone from Amtrak's mission due to PRIIA, which did stipulate that Amtrak must still minimize the need for federal coverage of their operating losses. States must also cover the losses of any new services.

Rich Tolmach of California Rail Foundation (and plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to invalidate CHSRA's EIR): Will the same FRA safety standards still apply to new high-speed equipment?

Nissenbaum: Absolutely, yes. We will need to create new standards for equipment that operates about 150 mph, since they don't currently exist.

Rae: FRA Administrator Joe Szabo isn't here today because he's touring European HSR equipment, seeing how they achieve both efficiency and safety.

Ryan Stern, State Representative, National Association of Railroad Passengers: Given the moribund state of the domestic passenger rail supply industry, how do we create an environment that allows for ongoing production of rolling stock, so that cars can be purchased quickly and affordably?

Gardner: This falls under the work of the PRIIA-mandated Next Generation Corridor Equipment Pool Committee [which is developing national standards for various types of passenger rail cars]. But we do have to live in the world we have now.

Rae: The White House is in active talks with our domestic industrial manufacturers to retool underutilized production capacity.

Matthew George, Caltrans: Do Amtrak's agreements with host railroads provide for HSR?

Gardner: They apply at any speed, hypothetically. But we'll work collaboratively with our partners and not just "show up" with high-speed passenger trains intermingling with slow freights.

George: How much can you rely on those agreements?

Nissenbaum: You can't; there must be operational agreements specific to each service. But "master agreements" can be a starting point.

Beverly Mason, AECOM: What is FRA's policy on adapting European and Asian HSR trains to domestic use?

Rae: "We will not compromise our safety record." But new technologies are being explored. Sealed HSR systems especially could support more exotic equipment.

Lastly, there was one hour of breakout groups to address the following three sets of questions, which we randomly called upon share with the whole audience at the end. At least a good 60 percent of attendees stayed for this, whereas crowds had apparently thinned considerably in other cities' workshops. Rae emphasized that FRA is taking all feedback seriously, since the entire national HSR effort is a nascent work-in-progress. The questions were:

1. What does success from a national perspective look like in 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years? How do we measure success?

2. What factors are critical for implementation of the program? What is the role of the federal government, states, and others?

3. What does your region need to succeed, in the short or long run?

All groups wrote their ideas on worksheets, which were ultimately collected. The FRA is expected to make the presentations given at the meeting available on the web "at some point in the future."

-Matt Melzer

Two Thursday Meetings

Tomorrow, Thursday May 28th, will see two meetings on the high speed rail project. I can't attend either of them, but hopefully you can!

First up is an FRA meeting in Rancho Cordova (Sacramento suburb) from 1PM to 4:30PM:

FRA’s High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Workshops
Start May 20, To Tour Nation

Dear Stakeholders:

As we begin to implement President Obama’s vision for developing a cohesive national intercity and high-speed passenger rail network. This vision was set forth in FRA’s Strategic Plan for High-Speed Rail (HSR) announced by President Obama, Vice President Biden, and U.S. Transportation Secretary LaHood, and sent to Congress that same day on April 16, 2009.

The workshops will be led by FRA Deputy Administrator Karen Rae or myself. Through these workshops, FRA is reaching out to the rail community in seven regions across the country to seek your input on the Interim Guidance we are required to issue on or before June 17, 2009, for the $8 billion in grant funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) for the high-speed rail corridors program, intercity passenger rail grants, and congestion grants. The workshops will enable FRA to discuss the HSR Strategic Plan with key stakeholders such as state departments of transportation, regional planning authorities, metropolitan leaders, associations and labor groups (under the ARRA, these workshops exclude the participation of lobbyists).

We seek your input not only to provide us with your regional vision of high-speed and intercity rail networks, but to enable stakeholders to focus on the critical factors that will make this program a success for generations to come.

The goal of the workshop is to take the first steps toward determining how we can best partner together to make the Strategic Plan a reality. During the workshop, you will have an opportunity to share experiences, raise concerns, provide insights, and make recommendations on several key issues and questions, as well as hear those of your colleagues and representatives from a regional perspective. The workshop schedule will include the following:

Introduction 10 minutes
Overview of FRA strategic plan and next steps 30 minutes
Amtrak presentation 15 minutes
Q & A 35 minutes
Regional presentation 30 minutes
Break 15 minutes
Working group break-out 1 hour
Wrap-up 15 minutes

The workshops will be held 1:00 p.m. 4:30 p.m. on the following dates and locations:

California Corridor: Sacramento May 28; Sacramento Marriott Rancho Cordova, 11211 Point East Drive, Rancho Cordova, CA 95742

In addition to participating in the workshop, I am inviting you and other members of the public to submit written comments to FRA by June 5, 2009, on issues that should be addressed in the Interim Guidance and specific recommendations on the criteria to be used in evaluating grant applications. FRA has created a public docket (Docket No. FRA-2009-0045) for the receipt of written comments. Please visit FRA’s Web site at: www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/2236 for information regarding the various ways in which you may submit comments to the public docket.

Please note, additional sessions to aid states with the mechanics of applying for ARRA funds will be scheduled after these workshops, as will informational sessions for industry, labor, intergovernmental and other interested parties.

I look forward to working with you over the coming months to ensure the grant programs funded by ARRA are implemented successfully.

Sincerely,
Joseph C. Szabo
Administrator
The Federal Railroad Administration

The other meeting is in Atherton at 7PM:

The meeting is open to the public, and will be held at the Jennings Pavilion in Holbrook-Palmer Park, 150 Watkins Ave. in Atherton.
Atherton officials, and many of the town's residents, have grave worries about the local effects of the state plan to run high-speed trains along the Caltrain corridor that bisects the town. If the high-speed rail line can't be rerouted to avoid the town, Atherton officials would rather have the train run through a trench or tunnel, instead of on an elevated berm.
The scheduled speakers at the meeting are: Mike Garvey and John Litvinger, public outreach consultants working for the California High Speed Rail Authority; John Townsend, executive vice president of Hatch Mott Macdonald, a leading tunnel-engineering and construction firm; Duncan Jones, Atherton's public works director; Gary Patton, attorney and former director of the Planning and Conservation League; and Jim McFall, who will present a digital model of elevated high-speed rail tracks going through Palo Alto.

I'm really curious about this "digital model" that will be shown. Is it going to be an accurate representation of what an elevated solution could look like, or is it going to be a biased depiction of some kind of Berlin Wall? I hope that the CHSRA has been able to generate some more accurate and realistic digital images of their own.

Update: Thanks to Clem in the comments who links to Jim McFall's video - videos that put the worst possible spin on this, making the HSR grade separation look like an Orange County freeway.

Additionally, I'm curious what the tunneling exec will have to say. Will he explain the price tag of a tunnel? Will Atherton residents have their checkbooks and credit cards ready to go to pay the multi-billion cost of such a tunnel? Only one way to find out - go to the meeting!

If anyone does attend, and wants to write up their impressions of the meeting(s), I'll be happy to post it here unedited.

Sacramento Bound

In recent months, whenever we mentioned Sacramento on this blog, it was in the context of state politics - especially the saga of AB3034 (the bill enacted by proposition 1A), the even more tortuous state budget process and its impact on CHSRA. Yet there is also a bona fide HSR spur from Merced to Sacramento that is planned for phase II of the project and that we've not given the attention it deserves. Like the spur to San Diego and the extension to Irvine, this will be funded using non-state bonds backed by net positive operating revenue from the starter line, which may take several years after start of operations (2018-2020 time frame) to materialize.

In other words, actual construction on the spur to Sacramento won't begin until 2023-2025 and the first trains won't run into the state capital until several years after that. That's a very long time to wait, but the city is already busy planning for its bullet trains. Specifically, a huge 240-acre site northwest of downtown is being developed as a mixed-use transit-oriented development that will preserve and partially re-purpose the historic rail yards at its center.


View Larger Map

The part of greatest interest to us on this blog is the Sacramento Intermodal Transportation Facility (SITF), which will be located just south of the historic yards. UPRR and Amtrak will remain at grade but the alignment between the rail bridge across the Sacramento river and 7th/D will be straightened out starting this year.

An overview of the SITF component of the redevelopment project was presented at a recent workshop. Still to be decided is if the historic depot (station) should remain where it is or be moved 500 feet north. The latter would create a more compact facility and free up space for general development on the downtown side of the site.

Either way, the light rail transit (LRT) station for the SITF will be relocated to the east, near 5th Street. Among other lines, Sacramento is planning one out to SMF airport via the Natomas district. It will be a slow ride with a total of 13 stops and, the airport station appears to be far removed from the two terminals. It's unclear how successful the service will be at attracting passengers with baggage - most of those connecting at the SITF will probably prefer a taxi or shuttle bus. The project has progressed to the project EIR/EIS stage for the first mile along 7th Street, but it doesn't appear to integrate into the design options for the SITF depot at all well. Either the documentation is out of date or, the left hand doesn't know or care what the right is doing. It's not intermodal if you have to walk two blocks.

Just north of the new LRT tracks will be the relocated run-through tracks for UPRR and Amtrak. The area reserved for these will accommodate two island platforms for a total of 4 platform and two through tracks on the outside. To avoid the freeway supports, designers moved the islands further from the river than strictly necessary and tacked on severely curved sections at the eastern end. The straight sections are approximately 250m (800ft) long. The HSR station would be a terminus featuring what appear to be 10 full-length tracks on an upper level, with a concourse in-between. It's not immediately clear if the current plans for the SITF already reserve enough space for all ten elevated tracks.



Elevating the HSR tracks implies two things: first, that HSR trains will never cross the Sacramento river. And second, that UPRR agrees to let CHSRA run an aerial structure above its own tracks on the way to that station. Please zoom in on Sacramento for details of the implementation CHSRA used for cost estimation purposes.

As we have recently discussed (How Important Is UPRR To California HSR?, Union Pacific Speaks), it is far from clear that UPRR will in fact agree to this concept. If so, CHSRA could find it very difficult to reach the SITF at all. East of 46th Street, CHSRA intends to run at grade, except for short sections in Elk Grove, the Lodi bypass and downtown Stockton. All of those aerials are overpasses of other rail lines or freeways. South of Stockton, CHSRA is counting on the UPRR ROW that runs east of the Sharpe Army Depot and is currently used by ACE. Between Manteca and south Fresno, CHSRA would prefer to keep running alongside UPRR tracks and I-99.

It very much remains to be seen if UPRR will go along with all that, early indications are that CHSRA might have to partner with BNSF instead for the south Stockton-south Fresno section. That might mean greenfield bypasses for both Fresno and Merced plus relocating several stations. For example, Merced county may well prefer a station at Castle Airport to the Amtrak stop on W 24th, in a residential neighborhood at least eight blocks from downtown. Considering that express trains will run through the Central Valley at 220mph (as opposed to just 125mph in the mid-peninsula), it's not clear that CHSRA has fully communicated the noise impacts to Central Valley towns hungry for the construction work.

None of the videos produced by NC3D features audio, something that may well come back to haunt the planners. Just how much would it cost to send a sound recording specialist to Europe or Asia, anyhow? Example: grade separations in Fresno.



Sticking with BNSF would mean all of the stations in the Central Valley would be intermodal with Amtrak San Joaquin trains, though it's unclear if that service will remain viable once the HSR network is fully built out. One problem for HSR is that the BNSF tracks UPRR's at very nearly a right angle, with insufficient room for a high-speed corner. One possibility would be to cross over between Escalon and Ortega/French Camp, roughly along an existing secondary rail ROW. The ever-useful 2005 Rail Rights of Way and Abandoned Corridors Study commissioned by Caltrans' Division of Rail (aka Amtrak California) shows this section as active. My guess is UPRR owns it now.


View Larger Map

Even if CHSRA were to bypass Stockton to the east on a brand-new ROW - something that it never even considered - it would still have to deal with UPRR north of Lodi and up in Sacramento. For this spur, even more than any other part of the planned network, CHSRA needs to be in UPRR's good graces.

Sacramento Meltdown

Note: Rafael contributed to this post as well.



As the LA Times reports, the state of California still doesn't have a budget after a 30-hour marathon session in the state senate. Lawmakers on both sides were so exhausted many fell asleep at their desks.

That means pretty soon CHSRA officials will no longer get paid, their consultants are already being offered IOUs. If the impasse is not resolved, the HSR project could be seriously delayed unless the Obama administration awards some stimulus funds directly to the authority, bypassing the deadlocked state legislature. It's conceivable that might happen, but politicians from other states will wonder if it's wise to spend anything at all on such an ambitious project in a state whose own funding depends on a budget process that is broken beyond repair. As an indication of things to come, consider that the national media are now lampooning (starting at 2:10) the whole thing as the political equivalent of a horror movie, the production of which the proposed state budget would subsidize. While they mention why lawmakers are asleep, the mere fact that it has come to this means the Bear Republic is now the front line in this era of serious financial crisis.

It should be noted that Prop 1A and the HSR project are not to blame here. Our bonds haven't even been sold yet. Of course, the longer this crisis goes on, the more costly it is going to be to float those bonds, and that means less money for high speed trains and tracks.

But perhaps the worst possible outcome of this mess is a proposal that is likely to be on the May 2009 special election ballot. It's a "hard spending cap" - a far-right effort to ensure that the spending cuts that are being made can never be reversed. It's actually worse than that, as it would prevent the state from ever taking on a major new project, regardless of its level of popular support, regardless of its need, and regardless of its ability to pay for itself.

The way a cap like the one proposed works is this: spending is only allowed to grow by a rate determined by population growth and inflation. If those numbers are 0, then no spending growth is possible. The cap might allow for 5% growth in spending, but only meet the educational and social services need of those new people and the higher cost of doing business thanks to the inflation. ALL state spending is subject to this cap, even something like high speed rail.

In practice what this means, as the state of Colorado discovered when their cap hit hard earlier this decade, is that government programs have to fight each other. If California wanted to spend $2 billion of the Prop 1A bonds in, say, 2012, then $2 billion in corresponding cuts have to made elsewhere in the budget. HSR would be pit against schools and hospitals. I don't know about you, but that's not a good situation for us to be in.

Worse, the spending cap means that California will have to make further cuts in coming years even above and beyond what Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes, and that's itself a set of rather conservative spending plans. The California Budget Project shows what the impact looks like:



In short, a spending cap like the one proposed could be catastrophic for the California High Speed Rail project. The Legislature has already voted to put it on the ballot in May. Defeating it is going to be a high priority for HSR supporters and transit advocates around the state.

High Speed Rail is Good for the Central Valley

Below is a repost of a Yes on Prop 1A article written by a good friend of mine who blogs as "wu ming" (Mandarin for "anonymous") at Surf Putah, a blog based in Davis. It's an excellent overview of not just the case for Prop 1A, but why Central Valley voters, even those who won't see an HSR train for decades, will benefit from its passage:

Yes On Prop 1A

There are a whole lot of reasons why Prop 1a is a great idea - reduced carbon emissions, reduced stress on crowded highways and airports, insulation from high oil prices, increased urban densities near stations, and the prospect of a massive construction project in the perennially-underemployed and housing-bubble-busted Central Valley - but beyond that, it's also very smart local politics.

But how? you might ask. After all, the line doesn't even run through Yolo County, and the Sacramento leg won't be completed until a later stage in the system.

Here's why:

1. The Capitol Corridor. In addition to the money to build the main High Speed Rail line, Prop 1a contains a huge amount of funding for feeder lines into that HSR trunk line, among them the highly successful Capitol Corridor, which runs through Yolo County at Davis. The Capitol Corridor is already running near capacity, and while Caltrans has done a lot of work improving the tracks and crossings, leading to faster trains and a very high on-time rate, the route will need a lot more funding to expand to meet local demand. Prop 1a's funds would help run trains more often and later, which is of direct help to Yolo commuters, shoppers and tourists into both the Bay Area and Sacramento. I'd much rather take the train into Sac than drive on the Causeway, if they ran often enough.

2. SoCal gets a lot closer. Even before the bullet train line gets to Sacramento, it will be pretty easy to catch a San Joaquins train in Sacramento to the HSR line in Fresno, and then jet over to LA down the valley from there. Right now, the Coast Starlight is excruciatingly slow because it goes down the coast, but with that slow train + high speed rail combo down the Central Valley, it'll get you to downtown LA in 4 hours or so, which is about as fast as if you drive from Yolo County to Sac Metro, park, wait around in the airport going through security and dealing with delays, and then pick up your baggage and rent a car on the other end. And unlike airplanes (or god forbid an I-5 or Hwy 99 road trip), high speed rail will have wifi and cell phone reception, so you can actually make some productive use of that time while you sip your coffee and admire the scenery.

Of course, when the Sacramento leg of the HSR is built, that'll go down to 2 hours, which will revolutionize the way we think of SoCal, bringing it practically as close as the Bay Area. If you have friends or relatives in SoCal, if you want to take the kids to Disneyland, get out of winter's tule fog and see the sun again, or just want to hit the beaches for the weekend, it'll be a whole lot closer than it is today, and cheaper to get there due to the economics of long, fast trains making multiple runs a day.

3. Yolo County depends on a healthy state economy, and a state government in the black. While I tend to be wary of bond measures, building world class transportation infrastructure is exactly what bonds are supposed to be for. Especially in an economic climate such as this, big projects that employ a bunch of people, both to build and run it, is smart Keynesian economics. It's what we did in the Great Depression, building Shasta Dam, the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge. When the economic cycle gets back on its feet, having infrastructure like this, which not only moves people more energy-efficiently and cost-effectively, but which also frees up highway, airport and rail space for freight, will contribute to the recovery.

And that infrastructure and job creation, in turn, will lead to a state government and state economy that has more money to invest in other things Yolo County needs. As a county highly dependent on University of California funding, as well as state assistance because of our rather smallish tax base relative to our county government expenses, a thriving state economy, goosed by High Speed Rail, will help to reverse the current death by a thousand cuts that the state legislature is doing to education and social welfare spending.

Replace a vicious cycle with a virtuous one.

4. Finally, because it's incredibly cool. Seriously, as someone who has ridden shinkansen bullet trains in Japan, I am ecstatic at the thought of blazing down the Golden State in a bullet train of our own. One of the things about airplanes is that they are so high up that they remove you from the scenery. High Speed Rail trains, on the other hand, fly along the very surface of the landscape. With a state with scenery as beautiful as ours, be it urban or natural, riding the train will be an amazing experience in and of itself.

As a state as well as a county, passing this bond measure will determine in many ways we have not even considered what sort of future we live in. Right now the market is scrambling to find something to invest in that's not a paper scam or an investor bubble. We should have no problem getting the investors for this train, if we have the will to set it in motion.

Vote Yes on 1a to finally bring California into the 21st century.

The above was written by wu ming and reposted from Surf Putah with his permission.

A Little Less Conversation

Daniel Weintraub at the Sacramento Bee is hosting a "Sunday Conversation" on Prop 1A. The conversation consists of four articles - an HSR-skeptical article from Weintraub himself, an article from HSR denier Joseph Vranich and two from Californians who currently ride the passenger trains and who would welcome high speed rail. It's an interesting discussion, if rather incomplete.

Weintraub's article does not set a good tone, and is rather deeply biased against HSR. For example:

Will they risk $10 billion, which translates into $650 million a year in debt-service payments, on an unproven idea at a time of great personal, societal and governmental financial stress?

Weintraub does his readers a disservice to argue that HSR is an "unproven idea." That is simply untrue. It is a proven idea - he can look at France, Germany, Spain, Japan, China, and Taiwan to find HSR success stories. Many of these systems have been operating for a long time - for 45 years in Japan - so Weintraub is off base to claim it "unproven." Californians have been setting monthly records on intercity passenger trains for nearly two years, so he can't credibly argue intercity rail is an unproven idea either.

And even in good times, $650 million a year is not chump change. To put that number in perspective, consider that it is equivalent to 20 percent of what the taxpayers spend now on the California State University system, which has become a giant assimilator taking working-class kids, many of them from poor immigrant families, and turning them into successful players in an ever more technological economy.

Would a new train, even a futuristic one, really be a better investment than giving 70,000 more young adults a college education every year? That's the kind of choice that is buried in these single-issue ballot measures but rarely debated.

This is a deeply biased and misleading framing. $650 million a year is 6.5% of the annual budget of California prisons, but Weintraub didn't use that as the point of comparison. Instead he argues that California must choose between higher education or high speed trains, a clearly biased choice designed to make HSR look bad.

The state Legislative Analyst, a nonpartisan office, noted that California can afford Prop 1A - that the bond debt will not break our existing debt ceiling. Further, as a Sacramento-based political reporter Weintraub certainly knows that the problem with California's budget is a broken process where the 2/3 rule prevents the state from generating as much revenue as it needs to. Simply restoring the pre-1998 income tax brackets for the top earners, or restoring the Vehicle License Fee that averaged $150 per driver per year, would generate more than enough money to close our budget deficit, pay the debt service, and have enough left over to help more kids attend college.

Besides, "futuristic"? Huh? HSR is a standard, off-the-shelf technology that is actually rather prosaic in its day to day operations.

At the end of his column Weintraub mentions the jobs and economic stimulus that will be generated by Prop 1A, but this feels tacked on - especially as it directly challenges many of his earlier claims about the "opportunity cost" of HSR:

But voters seldom consider the trade-offs inherent in each such proposal, the opportunity cost of doing less of something else, such as higher education, that is not on the ballot.

The problem is that voters also don't often consider the tradeoffs of rejecting a badly needed piece of long-term infrastructure, partly because writers like Weintraub do not ever put it in that way. The stats on job creation Weintraub cited should have caused him to reconsider this "opportunity cost" point - how exactly is California going to have money to do anything if people are out of work, dependent on volatile oil prices, and if the state lacks the tax revenues that the jobs would create?

Further, Weintraub is assuming that the state cannot or will not generate new revenues to ensure that we can do all the things we need to do - pay for schools and health care AND generate new economic opportunities through projects like high speed rail. His framing is inherently Hooverite - that we should not turn to deficit spending in a time of economic crisis. One wonders if Weintraub would have supported the Golden Gate Bridge or the Shasta Dam were he writing for the Bee in the 1930s.

Perhaps the most egregious part of his article is his discussion of outside funding, which is just plain wrong:

More than two-thirds of the money to complete the project is supposed to come from sources still not identified. If that money never materializes, or comes up short, the taxpayers would some day be asked to step up with even more billions to finish the line, or risk stopping mid-project with the world's most expensive train to nowhere.

None of this is true. Much of the remainder of funds is to come from Congress. Weintraub's own paper ran an article quoting Rep. Doris Matsui as saying California is well positioned to receive some of the first Congressional HSR money. Senators John Kerry and Johnny Isakson are leading a bipartisan effort for HSR funding. Weintraub would have been on less biased ground had he said that the funding was not secured.

Additionally AB 3034 amended the ballot proposal to NOT leave the taxpayers on the hook. AB 3034 directly addressed and rendered moot Weintraub's worry about a train to nowhere, since the Prop 1A bond money cannot be used to build more than 50% of a track or a station. The Legislature is not stupid and they will simply not authorize money to be spent to build half a station - only when matching funds are secured will construction begin.

Of course the Bee also included an article from Joseph Vranich, the co-author of oil company-funded Reason Foundation's HSR study that was thoroughly debunked here a few weeks ago. His article offers little that is new and relies on the same discredited ideas as that flawed study.

Happily Weintraub did solicit articles from two California women who eagerly await high speed rail. Estelle Shiroma is a frequent rider on the Capitol Corridor and shared her reasons for wanting HSR:

High-speed rail could very easily replace airline trips when I travel within California. The advantages are numerous - no long waiting period to board, more comfortable surroundings, and ample work space not available on planes. Trains are also more accessible for the handicapped. As the baby boomers age, there will be many more seniors who will not be (or should not be) driving, and the train would provide a safer alternative.

Shelly Poticha is the president and CEO of Reconnecting America and offered her own thoughts on HSR's value:

If California's high-speed rail is anything like the Acela in the Northeast Corridor or the trains I've ridden in Italy and France, the cars will be clean, the seats comfortable, and good food will be available. I'll be able to look out the window at the landscape of our beautiful state and see the communities that define much of our history and support our economy. And, unlike air travel, I'll be able to plug in my computer and connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi or take a business call on my cell phone(in the cellphone-approved cars, of course)....

Ironically, I'm heading to Mississippi to speak to a group of 100 mayors who have joined the Southern High-Speed Rail Commission. They want to build high-speed rail from New Orleans to Atlanta and Houston to Mobile. Many see the rail investment as a huge economic boon: thousands of new jobs, revived towns and travel options for residents who have to commute from city to city. It looks like they are going to pull this off. Can California afford to be left behind?

HSR is a better way to travel, and Poticha does a good job of explaining not only that aspect of HSR's value to California, but reminds us of another aspect of the "opportunity cost" that Weintraub ignored - if we don't build it, other parts of the United States will. California will lose out on not only federal funding, but on the economic opportunities that high speed trains generate.

California cannot rest on its laurels and do nothing to secure a prosperous 21st century future, the way Weintraub and Vranich suggest. Instead we should follow the lead of Estelle Shiroma, Shelly Poticha, and the San Jose Mercury News and plan for our future. From the Merc's Yes on 1A editorial:

The proposal, years in the making, has been thoroughly vetted in public debate, particularly over the route. The High Speed Rail Authority made the right choices, coming up with a practical and visionary plan that will place San Jose and Silicon Valley at the heart of the Bay Area's economy. We recommend it.

Proposition 1A's $9.95 billion bond will cover about a quarter of the cost of the high-speed rail project. The source for the rest is not certain, although similar systems have found private investment, and a federal high-speed rail funding bill just signed by President Bush was drafted in part with this project in mind.

Still, there's no question it's expensive, and, with a recession looming, voters will be wary. But a down economy is exactly the time to invest in transportation and other infrastructure that will form the backbone of our future prosperity.

California cannot rely on the 20th century infrastructure to provide prosperity for much longer. Just as we rejected the advice of Herbert Hoover and his supporters in the 1930s and built the Golden Gate Bridge and Shasta Dam anyway, so too should we reject the claims of the New Hoovers and build high speed rail in California.

How Sacramento (and other CA cities) Will Benefit From Prop 1A

Today's Sacramento Bee examines what Sacramento gets out of Proposition 1A and high speed rail. The article wants to generate some controversy about the fact that Sacramento is going to be included in a later phase of construction, but few of the folks interviewed were willing to play along. Instead the article provides one of the most detailed and strongest arguments for voters not living along the SF-LA "spine" to support Proposition 1A.

Rail Authority executive Mehdi Morshed said his agency's studies indicate the first segment will be a moneymaker – and income would be used to extend the line to Sacramento and San Diego.

That's the rub for Sacramento.

"Unless somebody builds the San Francisco to Los Angeles segment, Sacramento will never be built because it will never pencil out," Morshed said. "You need to have the cash cow (first)."

Morshed isn't just speaking in the abstract. Both the French TGV and Spanish AVE systems have followed a similar trajectory, where an initial line became so popular it created the political will and the financial capacity to expand new lines. The TGV puts SNCF in the black and subsidizes not only new HSR lines but the rest of SNCF's passenger rail operations. The first AVE lines helped pay for expansions of the system, including the route from Madrid to Barcelona.

Representative Doris Matsui, whose district is primarily comprised of Sacramento, agrees, especially on the need to use a starter line to build momentum for more extensions:

"For me it would be easier to look favorably on this if Sacramento were in the loop early on," said Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento. "We are the capital city. Why not?"

But, she said, "We're never going to get there unless we take the first step. If California comes out ahead, we benefit."

Matsui's approach is sound - realizing that Sacramento benefits when the state as a whole benefits - which it will once the SF-LA line is under way.

Sacramento benefits in more tangible and immediate ways and the article's author, Tony Bizjak, should be commended for explaining to readers that Sacramento's existing passenger rail systems are in line for a much-needed financial boost from Prop 1A:

The bond measure sets aside at least $47 million for improvements to Sacramento's popular Capitol Corridor passenger train line.

Sacramento Regional Transit, which runs light rail and buses, also is in line to receive at least $21 million.

Capitol Corridor train chief Gene Skoropowski is a vocal bond measure supporter, and said his trains between Auburn and the Bay Area would work in tandem with bullet trains, at first in San Jose, and eventually in Sacramento.

"Our service would likely become a major feeder-collector," he said. "People would take our train to Sacramento or San Jose to connect up with the high-speed trains."

The Capitol Corridor trains, RT light-rail trains and Amtrak trains would meet up with bullet trains at the downtown Sacramento railyard transit depot.

$47 million can go quite a long way for the Capitol Corridor, as would $21 million for Sacramento's RT. For the Capitol Corridor that money could purchase new train cars, and upgrade existing sections of track to improve the route's already remarkable on-time percentage - 93.8% in September 2008.

Other passenger rail systems around the state will receive immediate benefits from Prop 1A. The Pacific Surfliner that connects SLO, Santa Barbara, Ventura, LA, Orange County, and San Diego is in line for about $45 million, as are the San Joaquins. The San Joaquin money would be significant since upgrades there could help passengers in Sacramento reach the Merced HSR station more quickly. Metrolink is to receive some money, and the long-planned Coast Daylight, a train from SF to LA via the coast route (Salinas, SLO, Santa Barbara) could also get fully funded.

The article closes by showing how Congress is already poised to begin directing federal money to the HSR project:

Congress also recently established a $1.5 billion grant program to promote high-speed rail. Rep. Matsui said California should line up well for a chunk of that money if voters approve the bond.

That money isn't the full federal match that will be needed, of course - but it IS a clear indication of Congressional willingness to provide money, especially when the US Senate is prepared to push a much larger HSR funding plan in 2009.

Of course, Sacramento can expect to someday be included on the HSR route. We here in Monterey will never be included. But both of our cities will benefit, immediately, from Prop 1A when it passes. And we will benefit in the long term from the HSR line that will make passenger rail travel in our state much quicker, efficient, and available to all of us, even we folks on the Central Coast who make regular trips to Southern California.