Unsafe At Any Speed

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rampant HSR NIMBYism In Palo Alto Council Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll know the answer in November.

New Animations of Peninsula Corridor

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



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

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

San Carlos = high visual, low physical barrier

Palo Alto = low visual, high physical barrier

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

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

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

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

Has Palo Alto Turned The Corner?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LA Times On Metrolink Grade Crossing Safety

by Rafael

The LA Times has published an article on Metrolink's safety record, charting the 244 grade crossings deaths on its far-flung network over the past 15 years. On average, that works out to more than one a month.


Source: LA Times Sep 26 2009

While it is true that Metrolink has suffered safety lapses, most notoriously the case of a train engineer who was texting on a cell phone when he should have been paying attention to trackside signals at Chatsworth, it is also true that the agency has to operate on a shoestring budget. The article complains bitterly about a corporate culture that supposedly prioritizes ridership growth over grade crossing safety, comparing it to MTA. That agency is far better funded precisely because it has higher ridership. Metrolink is caught in a Catch-22.

The article also cites the example of a confused elderly lady driver who made a right turn at the Buena Vista Street intersection in Burbank. When the crossing gate came down on her car, she panicked and stepped on the accelerator. Tragically, she was killed in the ensuing train crash. Metrolink concluded it was a clear case of driver error and have made only minimal changes to the intersection in response to the fatality. Without additional public funding, there's not a whole lot it can do.

Up in the SF peninsula, Caltrain has a program for rail safety enforcement, but this public outreach effort hasn't made a significant dent in the grim statistics. It seems that in addition to suicidal persons, there will always be a small contingent of motorists who either don't know how to behave at railroad grade crossings or flout the rules.

What both commuter rail services have run up against is that the only proven way to eliminate or at least massively reduce grade crossing fatalities is full grade separation plus sturdy fences for the rail corridor.

Caltrans did promise to grade separate the aforementioned Buena Vista Street in Burbank against the single rail track in the context of a project to widen I-5, but that's just one one grade crossing among hundreds. Elsewhere in Southern California, a large number of grade crossings were eliminated or had their rail traffic sharply reduced by the Alameda Corridor project. More are either planned or under construction in the context of the Alameda Corridor East project in the San Gabriel Valley. For its part, OCTA is lobbying Congress to close a funding gap for 19 new grade separations on the BNSF Transcon line in Orange County, a critical artery for getting goods in and out of the LA and Long Beach harbors.

One of the reasons the California HSR project is so expensive is that it will feature all-new fully grade separated tracks. In the SF peninsula, part of the Central Valley and in the Lancaster-Anaheim section of the Metrolink service network, the starter line will run immediately next to existing regional and commuter as well as freight trains. While AB3034, the bill made law by the passage of prop 1A(2008) last November, does not explicitly require CHSRA to grade separate any but the HSR tracks, also including adjacent tracks for legacy services should be a high priority wherever that is technically and economically feasible and, it is not already done or planned in another context.

Voters/taxpayers should demand nothing less, even if it doing so entails exercising strictly limited and generous eminent domain against a relatively small numbers of businesses and home owners. This applies in Fullerton just as much as it does in the SF peninsula, Fresno, Bakersfield and elsewhere in the state. The benefits extend well beyond safety, e.g. to rail corridor capacity, reduced dependence on oil in the transportation sector plus the elimination of train horns and warning bells.

Thoughts on the Palo Alto Teach-In

Yesterday's "teach-in" hosted by the Peninsula Cities Consortium in Palo Alto was a rather interesting - and useful - event. I had to leave right after lunch, so my comments are only going to be focused on the two opening speeches and the first panel. I hope and expect folks will offer their own review of the day, including the afternoon "open space" session, down in the comments.

My comments are divided in two segments: first, some thoughts on the specific presentations and panels I saw, and then an assessment of where things stand on the Peninsula.

Yoriko Kishimoto, Palo Alto city councilmember and one of the lead organizers of the "teach-in," helped put together a very good meeting and should be credited for helping make it happen. In her opening remarks she said that the day's events were to proceed from the assumption that HSR was going to happen on the Peninsula, and the best thing to do was to come together to determine how best it should be implemented.

The first speaker was Gary Patton, former Santa Cruz County supervisor and counsel to the Planning and Conservation League. He proceeded to almost completely blow Kishimoto's constructive opening statement out of the water with an exhortation to the audience to ignore the will of the voters in passing Prop 1A. Patton's argument is that any project can be stopped. He isn't wrong about that, but the idea that we should reject the voters' will runs counter to his calls for democracy and engagement with the planning process.

Patton claimed that voters didn't approve "high speed rail" but merely authorized $10 billion in bonds. Which flies in the face of the fact that Californians voted for that money precisely because they liked the idea of a high speed train following the route the CHSRA laid out. Patton's assumption is that if Palo Alto residents don't want the train, they can organize and pressure their legislators to stop it. But that doesn't deal with the fact that anti-HSR folks aren't the only ones engaged in the public, democratic process, or that 6 million Californians voted to support that train and probably aren't going to be moved by the complaints of a few.

After trying to redefine what voters did last November, Patton went on to repeat virtually every single HSR denier claim, including attacks on ridership projections, cost overruns, and even repeating the "Berlin Wall" claim. Patton even went so far as to compare HSR to offshore drilling.

Patton seems to be of the school that contends any new development that might induce growth is bad and therefore must be stopped. He claimed that Santa Cruz County's changing growth patterns were somehow a success to be emulated, and even cited his role in defeating a Rod Diridon-supported train from San Jose to Santa Cruz. But those aren't exactly arguments in his favor. Instead of allowing more density in Santa Cruz, which suffers from a severe housing shortage and sky-high prices, development was channeled to Watsonville instead. As a result, Santa Cruz County is almost impossible to get around as Highway 1 is hopelessly jammed. The county is desperately trying to get passenger rail service up and running to deal with the transportation crisis. Patton's model for Santa Cruz County has been a failure for everyone except those who have owned homes in Santa Cruz and still have enough work or income or wealth to survive the downturn and the traffic-choked, unaffordable mess Santa Cruz County has become.

No coincidence then that Patton was in Palo Alto bringing the same message to locals. Patton seems to believe that an eternal 1970s can and should be maintained. But what of the consequences? What of global warming? Economic growth? Mass transportation? The future of Caltrain? None of these were mentioned by Patton.

He also mentioned the Atherton v. CHSRA lawsuit and decision, but wasn't honest with the audience about it. He didn't mention the fact that the judge upheld every aspect of the Pacheco choice, and the only thing about the EIR not upheld was the Union Pacific ROW issue between San José and Gilroy, an issue that would exist along the Altamont alignment as well.

Patton's presence, along with Richard Tolmach's presentation later in the morning, undermined Kishimoto's goal of working within the framework of assuming HSR on the Peninsula would happen. Both Patton and Tolmach clearly have not accepted the decision of the voters to build this train, both want to undermine the basic elements of the project, and both prefer to fight HSR itself rather than find the right way to build it on the Peninsula.

I understand the desire of the event planners to have all views represented. But if the goal is to figure out how to build HSR on the Peninsula in a way that residents can live with, having people like Patton and Tolmach arguing against HSR itself is not useful to achieving that goal.

After Patton came Bob Doty, who was a breath of fresh air - not just for the room but for the Caltrain/HSR project itself. He fundamentally understands what needs to be done and how to achieve it. He recognizes that the whole country is watching California HSR. If we get it right, and build it right, we're going to make HSR possible around the country. But if we screw it up, and can't get it built, it's hard to see how HSR is going to get very far elsewhere in the country.

Doty once again showed he is the right person to speak to the Peninsula on this project. He gives clear and direct answers to questions, even when the answer is "I don't know." Doty explained that the best way to get this project built on-time and on-budget is to get the early planning done the right way at the outset - to invest time and money into finalizing all the details, and then sticking to that plan once it has been agreed.

Doty also earned the trust of many in the room, if not all the hardcore anti-HSR folks, when he said that BART to SFO was a "bad project" that "screwed the Peninsula." That was an important point to acknowledge, given the bad taste the project left in many mouths, and given Quentin Kopp's role in the HSR project.

Another key point Doty made, one that keeps getting overlooked on the Peninsula, is that HSR is necessary to Caltrain's survival. Caltrain needs to electrify in order to survive. That's the only way they can accommodate future ridership growth, the only way they can manage operating costs, the only way they can have financial survival with a 75% farebox recovery rate (Doty's prediction).

As the Peninsula continues to discuss the implementation of HSR, Doty is going to play a key and quite valuable role in helping shepherd this to completion in a fair and sensible way.

The morning panel was interesting and quite useful, aside from Tolmach. I wanted to single out Greg Greenway, representing the Peninsula Freight Rail Users Group, who made some important points that need to be kept in mind. Freight rail is just as much a part of our transportation future as is passenger rail. PFRUG supports HSR, but wants to make sure it protects existing freight rail capacity. Greenway mentioned three specific concerns: operating hours, height of overhead wires, and the South San Francisco yard. It is definitely essential to preserve freight rail, and Caltrain/HSR appear determined to do exactly that. Let's hope others on the Peninsula agree and don't support proposals that would limit the effectiveness of freight rail.

Now, on to the broader assessment of where things stand. I believe there are basically two conversations happening on the Peninsula: first, whether or not HSR should even happen on the Peninsula; and second, how it should be implemented.

The first conversation is going to continue no matter what, but it is not useful or productive at this point. The voters have spoken, the route has been selected, and billions of dollars have been or are about to be committed. While Gary Patton is right that none of this is irreversible, there is no reason to turn back now. HSR is good for California and good for the Peninsula. Caltrain cannot survive without it. So I don't see how it does any good for folks on the Peninsula to continue debating whether or not HSR should happen.

The second conversation is very productive, useful, and necessary. I have always supported that conversation, so long as it happens within the framework that Kishimoto laid out at the meeting's outset - an assumption that HSR is going to happen on the Peninsula.

I think for that conversation to be successful, a few things need to be done. First, the public needs to be given a realistic assessment of project scope and limitations. What are some of the financial guidelines? What are some of the legal guidelines? What are some of the practical guidelines? For example, Kishimoto's statement ought to be clarified: HSR is going to happen on the Caltrain ROW. The silly and unworkable notion of building it on I-280 or US-101 needs to be abandoned. But it would also help if there was some sense, for example, of what locals are willing to offer in terms of funding in order to build a tunnel. Residents cannot assume that someone else will pay for a tunnel. Like Berkeley BART, most of that cost will have to be paid for by the locals themselves. If they want a tunnel, it is reasonable to expect them to pay for it, especially if a tunnel is more expensive than above-grade tracks.

Second, future events should probably not include folks who are pushing an anti-HSR agenda. If Palo Alto, for example, truly wants to find a workable solution to the question of how to build the Caltrain/HSR project, then there's really no point to having Gary Patton and Richard Tolmach there.

Third, the rest of the Peninsula needs to be given a greater role. As Bianca noted, Burlingame and Belmont seem to the ugly stepchildren of the Peninsula Cities Consortium - their issues and needs didn't really come up much at the part of the meeting I attended. Sure, the location of the meeting in Palo Alto probably helped explain that bias, but it speaks to a need to think of this project regionally. Residents and elected leaders in other cities are much more supportive of HSR, including Redwood City and Mountain View.

Finally, I think we need to get a better understanding of the different viewpoints out there. A lot of people on the Peninsula want HSR to happen - after all, Prop 1A did get a 67% yes vote in San Mateo County. Their views don't seem to be represented well at these kinds of meetings. There is a small number of NIMBYs who are absolutely opposed to this project, and then there's a grab bag of people in the middle, who aren't opposed to HSR but have concerns about how it will be built. That group is being influenced by the NIMBYs, who have been very effective at getting out their talking points, many of which are misstatements or just flat out lies.

The CHSRA hasn't been able to counter that, primarily due to a lack of funding. This "teach-in" would have been perfect for the summer of 2007 or even 2008. But the CHSRA was fighting for its financial life during those years, as Arnold Schwarzenegger at one point (spring 2007) proposed cutting the CHSRA's budget almost to zero. They'd asked for about $130 million, and ultimately received about $50 million, which itself got delayed by the Legislature's inability to agree to a budget. That didn't help the HSR project get off on the right foot on the Peninsula, and it enabled some mistrust and misstatements to take hold. Much of what is being done now, both on the part of the CHSRA and the locals, is making up for lost time.

And I think that yesterday's teach-in helped push that in the right direction. The NIMBYs and HSR deniers aside, I felt that there is a workable coalition for moving forward on the design process over the next 18-24 months on the Peninsula. Locals need to lay out their preferences and priorities, and project planners need to lay out their own needs, their own priorities, and most importantly, what the limitations are on this project.

If there is a genuine commitment to building HSR the right way - and I felt that many in the room shared that commitment - then this project will bring the benefits to the Peninsula, and improve the quality of life, that it ought to be producing.

I hope others who attended will give their thoughts in the comments. It was good to see you all there yesterday, to those I missed, my apologies. I wished I could have stayed all day.

Finally, thanks to Steve Emslie, Yoriko Kishimoto, Sara Anderson, Nadia Naik, and everyone else who helped make the teach-in happen. It was exactly what the Peninsula needs, and I look forward to participating in future meetings.

Thoughts from the Menlo Park Town Hall

First off, it was a pleasure to meet so many of you in person last night at the Menlo Park town hall event. For those of you who were there and who I didn't get to talk to, my apologies, I'm sure we'll reconnect at the Palo Alto HSR "teach-in" on September 12. I even got to say hello to Morris Brown and Martin Engel, and they were cordial and friendly to me as I was to them. It's not about personal attacks to me - I think they're wrong on pretty much everything to do with HSR, but that doesn't make them bad people.

I also don't know how I would have gotten through the whole meeting without being able to let off steam by making snarky comments about stupid questions to Bianca, especially since my iPhone died with about 20 minutes left in the evening (if you were following the twitter feed and noticed that the tweets didn't go to 9pm, that's why. Don't worry, you didn't miss anything important).

Overall Anna Eshoo deserves credit for hosting this event, and for bringing together folks from Caltrain and the CHSRA to talk about the high speed rail plans. Eshoo ran a good event - folks submitted questions or comments on cards, and Eshoo worked her way through an impressive amount of the hundreds of cards submitted. She promises that either her staff, Caltrain or the CHSRA will respond to each and every card that didn't get answered in person.

Eshoo also did a good job of pushing the panelists to answer the questions that were asked as directly as possible. That was necessary to help build some trust between the audience and the panel, although as I'll explain, that was an uphill battle from the start, as many in the audience had already made up their minds about the CHSRA.

Unfortunately, Eshoo's skills as a moderator did not outweigh her overall lack of familiarity with the project. Eshoo is a Menlo Park homeowner who lives very close to the tracks - "few people live closer to the tracks than I do," she explained several times during the evening. At times her perspective seemed to be that of a typical local - she said "I want less noise, I don't want a 40 foot wall, I don't want to lose my home." Of course, she should have known that there would be less noise, that a 40-foot wall was highly unlikely, and that she wouldn't lose her home. Caltrain and CHSRA officials made those points repeatedly during the night, but I am not quite sure Eshoo understood those points.

I get the sense Eshoo called this meeting in response to numerous constituent complaints about the project, because Eshoo did not show she really understood the HSR project in any detail. One of the evening's most stunning moments came when she realized that the CHSRA already made the decision about the route for the trains before Prop 1A was approved. Eshoo seemed to have it in her head that the whole route itself was still up for grabs, and not just the details of its implementation.

Further, she seemed to be dismayed that Prop 1A included a detailed routing based on the Final statewide EIR. Which is equally stunning to me. Did she expect people to vote for vaporware? To give $9 billion to a project that had no details nailed down?

Eshoo's apparent surprise that a route had been selected before Prop 1A went to voters, and her claims that she didn't know about it, really do not make her look very good. As a sitting Congresswoman she should have known these things. The route debate got widespread media coverage last year, including on the Peninsula. For her to miss that rather key detail suggests she wasn't really paying close attention to what goes on in her district.

And as it turns out, Eshoo did know of these key details - at least she did as of August 2007, when she signed the following letter to the CHSRA, alongside other Bay Area Congressional representatives including Zoe Lofgren, Tom Lantos, Mike Honda and my own rep, Sam Farr:

Title: Letter to Mehdi Morshed, Executive Director, California High Speed Rail Authority
Date: 08/24/2007
Location: Washington, DC
Letter to Mehdi Morshed, Executive Director, California High Speed Rail Authority

Five California Members Sign Letter Calling for Pacheco Pass Route

Washington, D.C. - Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), joined with Representatives Anna Eshoo (D-Palo Alto), Sam Farr (D-Monterey), Mike Honda (D-Campbell), and Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) in signing a letter strongly endorsing the Pacheco Pass route for California's High Speed Rail Project.

The complete text of the letter is below:

Mehdi Morshed
Executive Director
California High Speed Rail Authority
925 L St., Ste. 1425
Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Mr. Morshed,

We are writing to express our strong support of California's High Speed Rail Project. We believe that the project will transform the state's transportation network into a much safer system that will serve our growing population for this century and the next in a way that can boost our economy while protecting our environment.

We recently reviewed the Northern Mountain Crossing Corridor Study you released concerning different possible routes from the Bay Area to the Central Valley. We all agree that the High Speed Train network should serve all three major cities: San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. However, upon reviewing the document it is clear that the Pacheco Pass alternative provides a better level of service with a greater number of trains stopping in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose on a daily basis. The Pacheco Pass route is also the least damaging to our region's natural resources.

In order to connect the Bay Area to the Central Valley using an alternative option, the Altamont Pass, would require building a new high level bridge over the San Francisco Bay. The Altamont Pass option would also require construction through the Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge with additional impacts on the San Francisco Bay and Palo Alto shore of the Bay. This alone is a good enough reason in our opinion to reject the Altamont Pass outright. The impact the Altamont Pass would have on the environment could well make us rethink our support of any federal funding for the project.

We believe there is sufficient and compelling data to determine that the Pacheco Pass is the best option for the High Speed Train to serve the Bay Area. We thank you for your consideration and will continue to follow the issue closely.

Sincerely,

Zoe Lofgren
Michael Honda
Anna Eshoo
Sam Farr
Tom Lantos

So I don't know what Eshoo is talking about when she expressed surprise about the routing choices. True, Eshoo did not come off last night as a pro-Altamont person. Instead she came off as someone who really didn't understand some of the key project details. I hope she had some private meetings with Caltrain and CHSRA staff before the town hall, and that the town hall wasn't her first encounter with some of these issues.

Eshoo did have some other very good points, including the need for the CHSRA to improve its outreach. But if I'm a Peninsula resident, I'd be somewhat annoyed and troubled that my Congressional rep gave off an impression that she hadn't been paying attention to the details 10-year long development of a project that would bring significant change (for the better) to my region.

Two of the panelists were Caltrain staff - executive director Mike Scanlon and project advisor Bob Doty. Both of them were very, very impressive. Scanlon showed he clearly understands the need for the project as well as the locals' concerns. He emphasized that this is about survival for Caltrain, and that without electrification, Caltrain may not be able to continue operations. Caltrain needs partners to do the electrification, which will dramatically cut their costs. The state of California is no longer able to be that partner. So Caltrain needs CHSRA and its federal funding.

I don't quite think the Peninsula NIMBYs understood this point (and they would probably refuse to accept it even if they did). Their vehement opposition to the HSR project could well destroy Caltrain. These towns are already choked with traffic as it is, including Menlo Park. They desperately need Caltrain to not only stay, but to improve.

Bob Doty was another very impressive speaker. He has project management experience on HSR projects around the world, from the Channel Tunnel to Korea. Like Scanlon he was able to give quick and direct answers to questions, connecting with the audience even when the audience didn't want to hear what he had to say. Doty reminded the audience that tunneling is an extremely complex and difficult undertaking, that the decision to do it is not nearly as simply as the NIMBYs have made it out to be.

I would love for Doty to wind up with a major position at the CHSRA. He has the expertise and the credibility to help provide the kind of leadership that the project needs. UPDATE: According to Clem, Doty is already working for the CHSRA:

Bob Doty is already working for the CHSRA. He reports 50% to Mike Scanlon (Caltrain) and 50% to Mehdi Morshed (HSR), in a dual-reporting arrangement initiated by the MOU between the two agencies.

Wonderful news. Back to the original post...

Mehdi Morshed and Dominic Spaethling represented the CHSRA. Spaethling didn't get many occasions to add comments, though he did a good job of explaining the upcoming public interaction process.

Morshed was on the hot seat most of the night. His performance was mixed. It's worth keeping in mind that Morshed is not a public speaker by training - he's a project engineer. Morshed acknowledged that he's been getting some help on public outreach, and he did his best to answer questions directly. Most of the time he did this well, even if his more determined opponents in the audience refused to accept his answers.

One example is a question a self-described Palo Alto NIMBY asked about the business plan. This question was highly misleading and was a clear attempt to sow disinformation. She asked whether the CHSRA was hiring a PR consultant to write the new business plan. Her implication was that the business plan would be a dishonest product full of spin and devoid of fact.

But as Morshed explained, that's not actually the case. The Authority is hiring a PR firm to design the final publication of the business plan - the typesetting, the pictures, the printing. NONE of the content will be produced by the PR team - that comes from the financial and project contractors who rightly have the skills and knowledge to produce that information.

It's not at all unusual for that arrangement to exist, whether it's a private or a public sector business plan in question. You want someone who knows PR to ensure that the plan is readable. The only reason anyone would make an issue out of this is if you wanted to undermine the public's confidence in the CHSRA.

Morshed did less well when asked about the tunnel. He tried to reassure people that it would be given a fair hearing, but he may have gone too far in that by saying that tunnel costs "would be the last thing considered" when looking at a tunnel. Obviously it needs to be as much a factor in the choice as anything else - the CHSRA needs to ensure that it is going to build a cost-effective system. I understand Morshed's dilemma here, but the CHSRA needs to make it clear to Peninsula residents that unless they are planning to pay for the tunnel themselves, it is not appropriate for the CHSRA to be reckless with public funds.

Overall, I don't think the town hall changed any minds. These things rarely do. Especially when there is a loud group of people who have already decided to believe that numerous myths are actually facts - and that if you point out that they aren't facts, the person who believed it will become indignant at the person doing the debunking.

In that way the HSR debate resembles the health care debate in many ways. Just as "death panels" and "socialized medicine" started to dominate the conversation around health care despite there not being any evidence to support those claims, we now have arguments about a "Berlin Wall" and people convinced that numerous houses will be lost even though a cursory glance at the ROW shows that takings will be very, very, very few in number (especially in the Atherton-Menlo Park-Palo Alto area).

What the town hall also showed is how difficult it has become to focus on the big picture. To their credit, Eshoo and Scanlon both pointed to the need for sustainable mass transportation, and Scanlon in particular understood that the 20th century model of transportation, relying on freeways, was no longer viable. The Peninsula was built on the railroad. It's time to give that railroad an upgrade.

The Peninsula needs political leadership that is determined to build HSR, and determined to build it right. My question of the night was oriented toward that very matter. I wanted to hear that those in attendance, Eshoo in particular, would see to it that critics of the HSR project would not be allowed to overturn the will of the voters, that HSR would be built in a way that was cost effective. Eshoo took issue with my claims about "HSR critics" and said that everyone in the room wanted HSR built, the question was instead about whether or not it should happen.

I don't think that is accurate. Judging from the questions Eshoo herself read, there were a lot of people who still questioned the basic premise of HSR. A clear statement that "this WILL be built and it will be built the right way" would have gone a long way toward pushing everyone toward constructive solutions. Instead I'll have to be content with Eshoo's claim that there are no HSR opponents. I'm going to hold her and the Peninsula to that claim. You too, Morris!

CHSRA Project Workshop Presentation Now Available Online

At last week's California High Speed Rail Authority board meeting a project workshop was held to lay out the CHSRA's current approach to project planning, and to lay out what some of the next key steps are. The powerpoint presentation used at the workshop is now available online (PPT file, 91 slides, 6.1MB). The primary purpose is to demonstrate the status of the project planning at the section level, and there is a TON of information on that that I've only now begun to look over.

There is a lot of other interesting stuff, including a mockup of what a morning southbound timetable might look like (slide 14; don't get too attached to it as it's clearly to demonstrate the concept, but may be interesting fodder for discussion in the comments of what an ideal schedule might be); a discussion of the various options for public-private partnerships (slides 69-71); and an in-depth discussion of the construction needs on the LAUS-ARTIC segment as an example of the overall design and planning work that will have to be done on other system segments (slides 76-89), including discussion of the need to move 18 high-tension powerlines, build 49 grade separations, including constructing a 5.1 mile long viaduct over the BNSF Hobart Yard and a big rebuild of the Slauson Ave/I-605 interchange, and discussion of contract requirements.

Should be plenty of conversation starters here. Have fun!

---

Note from Rafael: documents from the August 2009 CHSRA board meeting are now available here, including clean PDF versions of the slides from the phasing workshop. These download a little faster and are not subject to the vagaries of whatever application you use to read PPT files, what fonts you have installed etc. Enjoy!

At Least the Above-Grade Tracks Are Quiet

So the Peninsula is having a hard time making up its mind - do they dislike above-grade tracks more than they dislike the loud horns that are an inherent part of at-grade passenger rail?

It’s not just you — Caltrain’s horns are indeed louder and the transit agency is working hard to tweak its “toots” and “tweets” to bring the noise level down and keep in line with federal law at the same time.

Federal regulations require the horns to produce distinct, separate and sequential blasts and a recent safety inspection revealed the horns were not making the unique “toot” and “tweet.”...

Caltrain moved the horns to the underside of locomotives and cab cars in response to previous complaints from the community.

But since the powerful air horns weren’t making the distinctive “toots” and “tweets” the horns have returned to their original location on top of the trains.

I can see why this would rile up the neighbors. The train horns are already pretty loud, as we demonstrated back in May:



And here's one of many videos of above-grade HSR, in this case an AVE trainset in Catalonia:



Which one would you rather live next to? I found it instructive that in this video, the barking dog was louder and more persistent than the passing train. Sure, sure, the dog was probably closer to the videocamera than the train, but that would be the experience of most residents along the corridor, who will live closer to passing cars, barking dogs, teenagers blasting loud music, etc, than they'd live to a far quieter train structure that is grade separated using electric trainsets.

The horns are clearly getting noticed:

Burlingame resident Lynn Hawthorne said her entire neighborhood has noticed the louder horns.

“It’s just terrible. The horns got much louder. I live two blocks from the track but it feels like I’m living on the tracks when the train passes,” Hawthorne said. “I’ve got double-pane windows but I might as well not have windows at all.”

You just don't hear this from people living next to above-grade high speed tracks. HSR trains aren't silent, and we're not claiming they are. But neither are they anything close to this loud. It's instead an occasional "woosh" that won't sound appreciably louder than the truck that just rumbled down my street here in Monterey.

Which brings me to the real issue here. Living in a city means dealing with noise. It is right to want to minimize the most offending and loud noises. But you can't eliminate it entirely, especially when your community is built around a major passenger rail corridor.

Despite the fact that the Caltrain corridor has been handling passenger trains for much longer than any resident along the route has been alive, there are still people living there who seem to think they can make the train corridor silent and invisible. That's just not possible, unless these cities have billions of dollars lying around to spend on a tunnel. So instead you should find ways to ensure that the trains are well-integrated into the community, including finding ways to minimize the noise.

Above-grade tracks are the most cost-effective way to do this - and they come with the added benefit of making what is already an extremely dangerous corridor much safer by separating the trains and the cars and people passing by the tracks.

In short, if folks in Burlingame are upset at the horns, they should be asking their city councilmembers and city staff why they've joined with Menlo Park and Atherton to fight the above-grade solution that can affordably solve this rather loud problem.

HSR Meeting In Menlo Park, Saturday 7/25

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo is hosting a high speed rail "town meeting" this Saturday in Menlo Park. State Senator Joe Simitian will be there, and has the details on his site:

You are invited to join Joe at a town hall meeting on high-speed rail hosted by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. The event will give participants an opportunity to receive the latest information on California’s high-speed rail project and to get questions answered. A live webcast will also allow you to watch the town hall from home.

WHAT: Town Hall Meeting on High-Speed Rail hosted by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo

WHEN: Saturday, July 25 at 2:00 PM

WHERE: Menlo Park City Council Chambers
701 Laurel Street, Menlo Park, CA

Live webcast at http://eshoo.house.gov/

This town hall is open to the public, and no RSVP is necessary. For more information, call Joe’s district office at (650) 688-6384 or (408) 277-9460.

I will be there. Will you? We need to ensure that there are HSR supporters at this meeting, people who want the HSR/Caltrain project to be built the right way, a way that maximizes the operational capability of the line, a way that is financially responsible, and a way that is properly integrated with the surrounding urban landscape.

NIMBYism and the Environment Don't Mix

by Robert Cruickshank

The East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper serving the Berkeley-Oakland market, had a great feature article last week titled "You're Not An Environmentalist If You're Also A NIMBY". Its focus is the debate over urban density in Berkeley and Oakland, where folks who claim to be environmentalists are also opposing greater urban density, despite the fact that such opposition fuels sprawl, which contributes significantly more pollution and carbon emissions to the atmosphere than urban density:

Global warming is changing far more than just the climate. It's altering the way environmentalists view development. For years, city dwellers who consider themselves to be eco-conscious have used environmental laws and arcane zoning rules to block new home construction, especially apartments and condominiums. In the inner East Bay, liberals have justified their actions by railing against gentrification and portraying developers as profiteers. But the lack of urban growth in Berkeley and in parts of Oakland during the past few decades also has contributed to suburban sprawl and long commutes. And all those freeways choked with cars are now the single biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the region.

The debate on the Peninsula regarding high speed rail has a different focus, and yet the basic details remain similar as this AP article on Peninsula "concern" over HSR explains - one of a number of similar articles that have been written about Peninsula NIMBYism in the wake of the release of the draft scoping report on the SF-SJ segment of the HSR route. As in Berkeley, folks in Palo Alto and Menlo Park are primarily driven by a desire to maintain their communities exactly as they look right now, with little regard for the environmental consequences of maintaining an urban landscape suited to the auto-oriented 1950s.

There is a crucial difference between the urban density debate in the East Bay and the HSR debate on the Peninsula. NIMBYs on the Peninsula have been able to have it both ways, claiming that they aren't opposed to HSR, that they either want it built underground (without explaining how to pay for it, meaning they're not offering a credible proposal) or built somewhere else (without explaining why, if HSR is so awful for communities, it's OK for Pleasanton and Hayward to be stuck with it).

In all this time I've never been unsympathetic to legitimate concerns from community members about making sure that HSR can work in their town. Nobody, myself included, wants to just drop the train in the middle of town. Of course, neither does the CHSRA, despite the frequent hyperbole you hear from some on the Peninsula.

But what you never seem to hear is an honest assessment of the HSR project's place in our broader agenda of environmental and global warming action. Too often HSR is cast as some random project being foisted upon the Peninsula, when in fact it's designed to help them get around their county, their region, and their state more easily and sustainably.

Corridor of Death

There is an unfolding and horrifying story coming out of Palo Alto that directly impacts not only the high speed rail project, but the whole community. In the last two months two students at Gunn High School have committed suicide by throwing themselves in front of passing Caltrains. Last night passersby helped stop a third student from doing the same:

The 17-year-old boy, a student at Gunn High School, apparently walked to the East Meadow Drive crossing at about 7:45 p.m. Thursday and was contemplating suicide when he his mother came on the scene, police Agent Dan Ryan said. The motorist saw the mother pleading with her son and stopped to help, as did a Palo Alto police officer, Ryan said.

Police called Caltrain dispatchers, and an approaching northbound train was stopped in Mountain View, Ryan said.

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

This is particularly the case on the Caltrain corridor, where people are routinely hit or killed along the at-grade tracks, despite an intensive public education campaign by Caltrain.

So why are Palo Alto NIMBYs fighting to preserve such a deadly situation? I have less objection to those supporting a tunnel - they're being unrealistic, but aren't calling for the preservation of a clear untenable situation. For those who argue from a "tunnel or nothing" position, or who claim that the status quo should be preserved, I'd like to hear their thoughts on why the deadly corridor isn't worth doing something about.

Obviously grade separations on the Caltrain corridor aren't a cure for teen suicide, nor are they going to ensure that there is never a deadly accident of any kind ever again in Palo Alto. But shouldn't the death toll be as much a part of the conversation, if not moreso, than a bunch of people whining about property values?

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

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

Until now.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

"Context Sensitive Solutions?"

Back to the Peninsula this Saturday afternoon, where Palo Alto is working to find allies to demand a "tunnel or nothing" approach to HSR:

At the same time, city officials have been getting a plethora of free assistance from a group of city residents who, over the past few months, immersed themselves in rail-related issues. One of the group's leaders, Sara Armstrong, has been reaching out to neighborhoods both inside and outside Palo Alto to strengthen the citizen coalition. Residents Rita Wespi and Elizabeth Alexis have been tracking the web of rail-related bills passing through the state Capitol, while Nadia Naik has joined Councilwoman Yoriko Kishimoto in advocating a "context-sensitive solution" to the design of the new system.

We will be doing the same kind of work in tracking rail-related bills - if anyone wants to help, drop me an email (my last name at gmail).

But the part that really stood out to me, as you can tell by the title of the post, is Kishimoto's "context-sensitive solution." Just as with Redwood City and "stakeholders" how you actually define these terms matters a great deal. What is the "context" that Kishimoto describes? Is it a very narrow notion of context, including the 1/4 mile next to the Caltrain ROW? Or is it a holistic notion of context, including the community as a whole, the economic, environmental, and energy context? Do finances play a role? As the news this week shows, there isn't exactly a whole lot of money lying around to build a tunnel. Or are those things arbitrarily excluded from Kishimoto's notion of "context"?

The residents recently formed a new group -- Citizens Advocating Reasonable Rail Design -- which lobbies for more transparency for the $40 billion project and for the context-sensitive approach, which requires outreach to stakeholders before development of a transportation project and a focus on local context when designing the project.

So what looks to be the case here is "local context" which is probably defined as "whatever a small group of Palo Alto residents who bothered to organize the group want the HSR to look like." I would be pleasantly surprised if finances, job creation and ability of ALL residents to afford travel, impact on air quality and global warming, and on energy independence are included as part of the "local context." If those things are not included, then this "context-sensitive solution" will not be context-sensitive at all, and it certainly would not qualify as reasonable rail design.

Dominic Spaethling, project manager for the San Francisco-to-San Jose segment of the proposed line, said the rail authority and Caltrain are both sensitive to the concerns of the various communities. But he warned that cities could have different ideas for how to collaborate with the rail authority on design ideas.

"It's important to acknowledge the need for collaboration in design, but it's not a 'one size fits all' situation," Spaethling said. "Charrettes may be fine for Palo Alto, while other cities may have other approaches."

Which is a key point, since Palo Alto is trying to impose a solution on the CHSRA and Caltrain - and the whole of the state. And unfortunately, the city is still trying to undermine Caltrain service by demanding that the 101 corridor be studied:

On Monday, the City Council attempted to make this dialogue smoother by adopting a set of guiding principles for its newly established ad hoc committee. The committee, which includes Kishimoto and councilmen Pat Burt and John Barton, is authorized to speak on behalf of the full council on rail-related issues whenever the city's input is needed on short notice.

The principles proclaim the city's support for consideration of alternative alignments (other than the Caltrain right-of-way). They also call for a collaborative approach to urban design, more transparency in the design process and an economic study that would help determine which design alternatives are feasible.

Councilman Greg Schmid, who wanted the principles to explicitly state the city's concern about elevated trains, was the only council member who voted against adopting the principles (Barton and Vice Mayor Jack Morton were absent).

Hey Greg: if you're going to have a process where all implementations are fairly studied, you can't stack the deck by saying "we hate elevated trains." Of course, the rest of Palo Alto's work is merely an effort to stack the deck using more subtle means.

It's entirely possible that Kishimoto's efforts are well-intentioned and meant to get HSR built in a way that's acceptable to both Palo Alto and the state they are still a part of. But the way the efforts are set up and defined strike me as being too much of an effort to force CHSRA and Caltrain to accept a tunnel. And in the absence of a reasonable discussion of finances, it is difficult to take seriously those that demand a tunnel.

The Big Picture on the Peninsula HSR Battle

by Robert Cruickshank

Given my own rather strong opinions on the topic I felt it made sense to take a step back and assess the big picture of the HSR battle on the Peninsula. I know I'm more strident on this than even many other blog readers and HSR. But my assessment is that in arguing that HSR would "harm" cities, the opponents of HSR have allied with people who aren't HSR deniers but who don't really take the project seriously or don't see its importance to their cities' futures, and by doing so have successfully built a coalition that threatens the HSR project itself.

I reach that conclusion for the following reasons:

1. The notion that HSR will damage the cities is powerful, if not based in either evidence or common sense, and creates a strong motivation to ensure the project is either killed outright or severely damaged by not including the SF and Peninsula on the route. It's not easy to talk rationally with people who are certain that a project is the infrastructural equivalent of a "Death Star". The "Berlin Wall" frame is effective at mobilizing city officials to try and compromise the project.

2. Despite the statewide public support for the HSR project, the backing of prominent statewide political leaders and even President Barack Obama for HSR, the Peninsula NIMBYs actually have more political power than the CHSRA and Caltrain regarding the Peninsula corridor. This is because the cities are coalescing into a tunnel-or-nothing bloc whereas there is no countervailing force in the Bay Area to systematically push back against their arguments and claims. The prominent politicians, for their part, are not that interested in this level of detail. You're not likely to see Barack Obama go to Palo Alto and chide the NIMBYs for blocking 21st century progress, as wonderful as that would be. You're not likely to see Gavin Newsom go to Sacramento to lobby State Senators to ignore the NIMBYs, even though that's a necessary move if he wants his Transbay Terminal to include HSR. And as we know, Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't care about the details of governance, since he merely plays a governor on TV. Instead the legislative debate appears dominated by people whose commitment to HSR is weak at best, like Alan Lowenthal, or who are unwilling to stand up to the NIMBYs, like Joe Simitian.

3. The CHSRA has few defenders and many detractors, and the Peninsula NIMBYs are effective at mobilizing a FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) campaign. I am not a blanket defender of the CHSRA, but I do believe that even HSR supporters aren't really aware the extent to which their own criticisms of the CHSRA are used to support a NIMBY attack. It's easy to paint the CHSRA as a typical "big bad bureaucracy" but to do so is to miss the point entirely. I would strongly suggest that the legitimate criticisms of the CHSRA - and there are many - be made with care so that they don't wind up bolstering the NIMBY cause.

4. A tunnel is not going to happen. It is financially impossible. Neither the federal government nor the state government will contribute a dime to it. And when push comes to shove neither will Peninsula residents be willing to tax themselves to the tune of tens of billions of dollars to underground the HSR trains from Belmont to Palo Alto. Yet the NIMBYs have done such a good job of convincing their fellow residents of point #1 that lots of residents and councilmembers see a tunnel as the only viable implementation of HSR along the corridor. Since a tunnel isn't possible, I am very concerned that the cities will revolt against HSR itself when the CHSRA rejects a tunnel, causing many years of court delays that could hurt the project's ability to be properly funded. I also believe this is the heart of the Martin Engel/Morris Brown strategy in the aftermath of their failure to stop Prop 1A in November.

5. As someone pointed out in the comments to one of the recent posts, cities talk to each other. If NIMBYism is able to exert power over the final project design of HSR on the Peninsula, that emboldens similar forces in the Central Valley and Southern California. What happens on the Peninsula is precedent-setting.

In short, I think the NIMBYs are filling a power vacuum on Peninsula HSR that is created by the lack of strong leadership for the project either in San Mateo County or in Sacramento. That in turn leaves me very concerned that a political deal could be cut to preserve the HSR project by cutting it off at San Jose, which for reasons I've articulated before, would do severe damage to the financial viability and overall effectiveness of the project.

So ultimately I find myself in disagreement with those who claim that the Peninsula NIMBYs are overblown and not really a threat to the project. I think they are an extremely serious threat and I believe we ought to find ways to defuse that threat. I'm also open to new suggestions of how to accomplish this - my stridency may not always be the best solution.

Here's what I believe are the necessary pieces of a counter-strategy:

1. Provide high-profile responses to the NIMBY arguments whenever possible. Ideally this would involve getting prominent political leaders who support the HSR project to participate in the process as they can garner TV news coverage. In most reporting I've seen, the NIMBY position is given prominence merely because they're organized and have locally-based leaders who can speak for them, whereas the only pro-HSR side tends to be the CHSRA, which is not preferable since they must maintain neutrality, and because they do not have a strong local base (that's not really their job anyway).

2. Specifically, promote local pro-HSR voices. 65% of San Mateo County voters backed Prop 1A. That's a large pool of support for this project. We need to find ways to amplify their voices, and thereby show that the NIMBYs are working counter to the will of the majority of Peninsula residents and to the detriment of those residents' ability to take meaningful action on global warming, traffic, energy independence and economic recovery.

3. Undermine the "tunnel or nothing" position. Point out early and often that a tunnel is going to be extremely expensive and that the Peninsula will have to pay for this on their own. CHSRA must be neutral on this during the project-level EIR process, so someone else will have to make these points known. Show that the NIMBYs are proposing a Bay Area Big Dig that the Peninsula cannot afford. Nothing undermines a position like pointing out its inherent fiscal irresponsibility. Note that this doesn't mean we attack the concept of a tunnel, but instead those who argue it must be a tunnel or no HSR at all.

4. Undermine the "HSR will destroy our cities" narrative. Much of that narrative is based on deliberate distortions, such as the "Berlin Wall" propaganda that has been shown. CHSRA hasn't been quick enough to produce alternative modeling to show how an above-grade solution can be elegantly implemented, though we have explored that topic here. We know that the "city-killer" claims are absurd and baseless. We have to more strongly make that argument by showing how above-grade HSR will help improve mobility, connectivity, and safety in these cities.

5. Remind people of the ultimate purpose of HSR. Saving on gas money, reducing traffic, fighting global warming, boosting mass transit, creating jobs, etc. How it connects to longstanding local priorities to improve Caltrain service, and local support for Prop 1A. This is probably best done in a positive way with the general public, but in a more antagonistic form with the NIMBYs - i.e. "why are you against" all that I just mentioned.

It's a question of leadership and public advocacy. It's time we offered both.

Why We Call Them NIMBYs

"High-speed rail opponents hope to shed 'NIMBY' image" is the headline of a San Jose Mercury News article examining the attitudes of a handful of people along the Peninsula toward the HSR project, and their lobbying efforts up in Sacramento. I find it interesting that they realize "NIMBY" is something they don't want to be seen as, which suggests to me that we were on the right track after all in leveling that criticism at the folks who are demanding an expensive tunnel or a gutting of the proposed HSR system. Here's what Ben Fuller, a resident of east San Carlos who claims that the above-grade tracks have isolated his neighborhood, and Sara Armstrong of Palo Alto had to say:

Fuller and Armstrong said the consortium should also help dispel the NIMBY, or "not in my backyard", stereotype often tagged on homeowners who oppose high-speed rail. By working together as a regional group, they hope to prove that they represent the interests of many property homeowners in the region and not just their own backyards.

In fact, they said a better name might be YUMBY, or "Yes Under My Backyard," a reference to their preference for tunneling the train.

"We're not NIMBYs," Fuller said. "We care about what happens to communities throughout California."

Really? So do you support the Palo Alto city council's reckless demand that the CHSRA consider terminating HSR trains at San José, which throws the financial viability of the entire system into question? Do you believe that it's a tunnel or nothing? If so I would indeed say you're NIMBYs.

Why? Because in this instance, a NIMBY position is one that says the HSR system must be built according to the specifications of a few neighbors or shouldn't be built at all. THAT is a classically NIMBY position. If they do not reject an above-grade solution, then they're not NIMBYs. If they do reject it, then they are.

The key question underlying everything is this: Do you believe that your aesthetic preferences about how the train should be built in your neighborhood are more important than what is operationally or financially necessary? Then you're putting yourself above the needs of the state as a whole. Perhaps the term "NIMBY" doesn't quite capture what they are exactly saying, but the outcomes are the same: you think that the train should be built your way or not built at all.

I don't see how that is a defensible position. It is arrogant and self-interested, denying the very real need for HSR as part of the solution to the state's dire economic, energy, and environmental crises. Unfortunately these few people seem to have bent the ears of two Democratic legislators who ought to know better:

The groups have bypassed local officials and gone directly to their state representatives, having held meetings recently with state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, and Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, D-Los Altos.

Ruskin said that after meeting with the group recently he called California High Speed Rail Authority officials into his Sacramento office and relayed the residents' concerns, including their preference for tunnels or some other non-bridge option.

"I share their concerns," Ruskin said. "I got the assurance from the high-speed rail people that there would be a below-grade (option studied) as part of the (planning) process.

"I really admire that they have become a part of the process and want their voices heard," he said.

If all Ruskin did was relay concerns, that's fine. But Ruskin has a higher duty - to ALL his constituents, and to the state as a whole - to ensure that HSR gets built on time and on budget. Ruskin has made a name for himself as a leader in environmental legislation. So one would assume that he will be supportive of the HSR project.

Especially when he and Sen. Simitian are facing a major budget crisis. The great unanswered question here is who will pay for the tunnel that pretty much the entire Peninsula wants. Tunnel proponents assume that either the state or the federal government will pay.

I am here to tell them that will not happen. There will be NO support at the state level to pay for a tunnel through these wealthy neighborhoods. None whatsoever. Anyone who thinks there will be is deluding themselves about fiscal and political realities in California.

There might be a possibility of getting federal money, but I believe this to be very, very small. Maybe a 10% chance. Consider that the Democrats who control Congress and President Obama are NOT going to see Peninsula voters as a particularly important constituency ahead of the 2010 and 2012 elections. Obama in particular needs to hold on to states he won that went for Bush in 2004 - Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada. You can bet he will find a way to direct a lot of federal infrastructure money there. If it comes down to paying for the Peninsula's tunnel or paying for a rail project in Virginia, or a bridge in Ohio, he will pick the latter. Peninsula residents have barely any leverage federally.

Ruskin and Simitian must know this. They must also know that the Peninsula's tax base is finite, and that in an era where core city services are imperiled, perhaps it might not be the best use of local tax dollars to buy a tunnel for a few people when libraries, schools, and hospitals are in need.

What's at the heart of the NIMBY and "tunnel or nothing" attitudes? A mistaken but powerful belief that anything that divides cities is inherently negative or destructive to neighborhoods and the city as a whole:

Greater East San Carlos group president Ben Fuller said his neighborhood feels isolated from the city's downtown because of the Holly Street grade separation along El Camino Real, built in the late 1990s. He added that nearby sidewalks have been narrowed, making it difficult to walk through the area, and that noise and vibrations near the tracks have increased since they were elevated.

"What they chose to do is literally just separate us from everybody else," Fuller said. "We just want to be part of 'The City of Good Living,' " he said, referring to the city's motto.

And while city officials say the majority of residents favor the Holly Street rail bridge — which has improved safety and traffic flow — the east neighborhood group says its special interests as direct neighbors of the rail line should be heard. The group has found friends in neighborhoods such as Felton Gables in Menlo Park and Charleston Meadows in Palo Alto, which also lie next to the tracks, and they hope that together their voices will be louder as a regional group.

First, it's pretty amusing that even though the Holly Street rail bridge has improved conditions in the city, a few people are convinced it is somehow a negative. Fuller hasn't explained how literal separation means that East San Carlos is somehow not a part of the rest of the city. Are they being deliberately denied city services? Are they being denied business and jobs? Are they being denied representation? Fuller assumes that we should take his claims at face value, but to be honest, I'm not seeing anything here that makes me feel for his position.

I'm no stranger to this issue. I grew up in a city in Orange County - Tustin - divided in two by Interstate 5.


View Tustin divided in a larger map

The area to the south of the 5, which has no name but is sometimes known as South Tustin, sometimes seems separate from the rest of the city. But in practice the freeway isn't that much of a barrier. We learned to adapt to it. If you have friends south of the freeway, as I did, or if your church was south of the freeway, as ours was, you just drove under the overpass. Sometimes we walked to a friend's house south of the freeway from our high school, just north of the freeway. No big deal. Even when the freeway was widened in 1992 and the structure made wider and taller, you didn't let it change your habits.

I currently live in a city divided into four parts by various natural and man-made features. Monterey has at least four distinct neighborhoods:


View Monterey divided in a larger map

I live in New Monterey, the neighborhood that runs uphill from Cannery Row (signified by the blue pin). We're wedged between Pacific Grove and the Presidio of Monterey, which cuts us off from the rest of Monterey. Ours is a very distinct neighborhood, but it is vibrant and thriving. Sure, it can be inconvenient to get downtown on days where there's lots of tourist traffic, but we manage. Our neighborhood doesn't suffer because of it.

Lake El Estero is another divider in Monterey, separating the older downtown (dating to 1770, signified by the red pin) and the neighborhood immediately to the east. And that in turn is separated by Highway 1, a freeway built through town in the 1960s. North Monterey is the neighborhood beyond Highway 1 (green pin), and that is indeed cut off from the rest of Monterey, and generally neglected by city government.

But is that a causal factor? North Monterey and New Monterey are physically separated from the city center. But whereas New Monterey is vibrant with thriving businesses and a high perception of quality of life, North Monterey has none of these things. I wouldn't ascribe that to the freeway, however. The problems are based in class and bad urban design. North Monterey, located just across Laguna Grande from Seaside, is a diverse low-income community built in the 1950s and 1960s. There's no real community center, and North Fremont Boulevard is full of strip malls and doesn't serve as the thriving commercial center Lighthouse Avenue is here in New Monterey. City government apparently hasn't done much to try and apply better urban design principles to North Monterey and it doesn't have a whole lot in the way of city services.

That was the case prior to the freeway, and persists not because of the freeway, but because the small population of North Monterey is generally disempowered anyway because of size, lack of an economic base (New Monterey has Cannery Row), and lower income. Monterey can and should devote more attention to this neighborhood, but the freeway doesn't make that impossible.

If you look at most cities in California, America, or the world, you'll see they're divided by any number of features, natural and man-made. Every city has neighborhoods, and in every city there is political jockeying among them for resources, tax dollars, services, and jobs.

Especially on the Peninsula, where a rail corridor has divided cities for a century and a half. I'm sure that if those tracks weren't already there, and Caltrain proposed to build them, Menlo Park and Palo Alto and every other city would flip out and raise all kinds of objections. Yet now they defend the existing tracks - because they found a way to keep their cities together in spite of - and perhaps because of - the tracks.

This notion that an above-grade structure that can be built elegantly is some kind of city-killer is totally absurd, especially when there's already a rail corridor there. Cities and neighborhoods can and should work to ensure that these structures, as with a creek or a university or a large park, do not prevent different neighborhoods from getting different treatment. Nor should they prevent the different neighborhoods from being effectively integrated - otherwise there would be four Montereys, two Tustins, a hundred Los Angeleses, and so on.

If "omg you're going to divide our city!!!" is all that these Peninsula residents have...then I see absolutely no reason to let their objections shape HSR implementation policy. They can find ways to manage, as numerous other cities have. If this was a totally new ROW, or if a large number of homes were to be demolished, then they might have a point. But it isn't. They have successfully managed the existing rail corridor. They can do so with an above-grade solution. The only thing holding them back is their own preconceived 20th century automobile-centric notions of what a good city or neighborhood is like. If they want to pay for that preconceived notion, well, it's their money. But if they think the rest of us will pay for it, they are not in touch with reality.