Thanksgiving Open Thread

Enjoy your holiday, everyone!

I'm staying here in Monterey for the occasion, as I can't imagine a better place to spend a long weekend. But many Californians have taken to the crowded roads this week, an 8% increase over last Thanksgiving (on the roads, at least). I'm sure a lot of them could have used a high speed train option for their in-state travels.

Sunday Open Thread

Busy Sunday for me, so please use this as an open thread for anything HSR related.

I do also want to give an update on the new site. I'd like to invite you all to come test the new California High Speed Rail Blog. Right now there's a test post, and a copy of yesterday's post on LA-SD scoping comments. Please take a look around and leave a comment about what you think, especially in terms of layout. I will be making the final switchover during the Thanksgiving break.

Some notes:

1. The header needs to be fixed. I have barely any CSS or PHP skills, and I need to find a way to move the search box into the menubar and render the header image in the CSS properly. Help on this would be greatly appreciated.

2. ALL posts and comments from this blog will be imported over to the new one. Until yesterday I had been keeping a running import of all posts and comments, but the most recent update import wound up duplicating all existing posts. So I decided that the easiest thing to do will be to import everything at once, during the upcoming long weekend. Nothing from this blog - not one post, not one comment - will be lost.

3. This site will be kept as an archive, but no new posts or comments will be made.

4. You may wish to register your username. I am not going to require people be registered to post, but I will prevent people from using "Anonymous" as a username. Pick something, even if it's a pseudonym.

5. Any unforeseen problems may result in delay of switchover.

November CHSRA Board Meeting

Use this as an open thread for anyone interested in discussing the November CHSRA Board Meeting. Click here for the agenda, which includes a board vote on whether to accept the staff recommendation of Ogilvy for the $9 million communications contract, and a presentation from the authority's "French partners" (I assume this is SNCF? Agenda isn't clear on this). Click here for the live webcast (link updated) of the meeting for those of us who can't make it to Sacramento for the occasion.

Saturday Open Thread

A few updates:

• I'll be in San Carlos today for a joint RailPAC-NARP meeting to discuss several passenger rail projects around the state, including high speed rail. I'll also be talking with several folks about ramping up HSR advocacy efforts. This blog was founded to fill a vacuum in early 2008, since there wasn't any place putting out frequent information on the project, and some of the other pro-HSR sites had gone dormant. The blog was never meant to be a stand-in for a full-scale pro-HSR effort, though we have often worked with others backing HSR, from CALPIRG to NARP, in support of HSR. Now it's time to step it up and get this thing built, especially now when the various process issues threaten to undermine the project. So be on the lookout for more robust grassroots HSR advocacy work.



• Speaking of the blog, I know we've discussed this for a while now, but we really are going to move this to a unique URL and to a WordPress platform, and soon. Not only will it offer a cleaner look, WordPress offers greater functionality in the comments - from requiring people to pick a username to threaded comments (where you can actually reply to a specific comment, and thereby follow a discussion thread). The new place is already set up, but we need to do some customization work before we throw the doors open. If anyone reading this has experience customizing WordPress themes, or wants to offer any other technical assistance, send an email to my last name at gmail and we can get going.



• Wired Magazine thinks NIMBYs won't be a problem in getting HSR built. I certainly hope they are right, and that the political backing behind the project, its self-evident benefits, and broad public support are enough to overcome the very, very small group of people who think their own personal version of urban aesthetics trumps all other social, economic, and environmental needs.

Friday Open Thread

Some California high speed rail items to keep you occupied and engaged as we approach the weekend. Apologies for not being able to offer a more in-depth post, but after that wild storm came through this week, the beautiful weather here in Monterey calls me outside.

• The Caltrain/California High Speed Rail Authority’s Policymaker Working Group met last night to get their work off the ground in providing advisement to Caltrain and the CHSRA about the rail improvement project. As Gina Papan's comments showed, not only is misinformation widespread, but there's a disturbing willingness of elected officials to believe whatever they hear from constituents.



• Merced Mayor Ellie Wooten and Merced County Supervisor John Pedrozo published a pro-HSR op-ed in the Merced Sun-Star today. It offers some very good restatements of the basic case for HSR, from jobs to the environment, but the main reason for their op-ed is to reiterate their case for building the maintenance hub at Castle Airport.



• A recent HSR scoping meeting in Escondido showed that NIMBYism can be found virtually anywhere in the state. Although most attendees supported the project, one whiner claimed "I'm going to fight it" because he's convinced the noise will lower his home values. Someone living in Escondido, which currently lacks a direct link to either the LA metro region or to the job centers in San Diego, should think twice about leaving their city's fate in the hands of oil and freeways. (Yes, Escondido has a rail link to downtown SD via the Sprinter and the Coaster, but it is indirect, requiring a transfer at Oceanside.)



• Over at the Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark criticizes the FRA's preliminary rail plan that avoids pissing anyone off (a classic trait of the Obama Administration) and therefore doesn't actually offer any specific recommendations about how to develop a national rail program.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

Labor Day Open Thread

In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, it's worth keeping in mind that HSR in California is projected to create 160,000 construction jobs and 450,000 permanent jobs. Even if you quibble with the numbers, it's worth considering that California desperately needs new jobs, and anything that can produce long-term sustainable growth and employment should be embraced. The current recession has reversed all the job gains of the 2000s - fewer people are employed in California in July 2009 than in January 2000, which is an even more worrisome stat when you consider that we have 3 million more people living here than we did at the beginning of the decade.

Job creation has to be one of the state's top priorities. The best kind of jobs program during a severe economic contraction is exactly what we did during the Great Depression - put people to work building long-term infrastructure. In the 1930s that meant dams and bridges. In the 2000s and 2010s that will mean, among other things, high speed rail.

This isn't going to be cheap. But does anyone have a better idea of how to create jobs? Or are we just going to give up and not try to produce economic recovery at all, just wallow in misery and refuse to undertake proven efforts to address the problem? Especially given that almost all observers expect unemployment to remain high for some time, it is vital that we use government to create as many jobs as possible. The up-front costs are sizable, but they will be repaid many times over during the rest of the century, and as I've repeatedly pointed out, it's a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

Friday Open Thread

Been a somewhat quiet day on the HSR front here in California, so use this as an open thread.

• The SF Business Times briefly examines foreign companies that are advising the CHSRA, as part of formal advisory agreements that will help ensure that CHSRA gets top-level expertise from around the world.

Friday Open Thread

by Robert Cruickshank

Posting via iPhone from the Pacific Surfliner on the way from SNA to LAUS. It's packed to the rafters this morning, as was the Metrolink train I took south yesterday afternoon. It's great to see passenger rail remains popular here in SoCal - and that the demand for more, faster trains is still here.

Plus there looks to be plenty of ROW here, though several of the Metrolink stations will need to be reconfigured, and numerous grade separations rebuilt to accommodate more tracks.

I'll be offline for most of the next 2 days, so use this as an open thread.

Sunday Open Thread

by Robert Cruickshank

Back in the USA after two wonderful weeks in Portugal. There was a fair bit of HSR news while I was over there - the ruling Socialist Party made the surprising announcement that the final decision to move ahead with the planned HSR line to connect Lisboa to Madrid was going to be postponed until 2010, after this year's legislative elections. The PS and its prime minister, José Sócrates, are worried about losing to the rival Social Democrats (PSD), who are not exactly strong supporters of the line even though Portugal and Spain have signed agreements to build it, and even though the EU has already planned to contribute financially to the project.

The PS wants to make the PSD look uninterested in solving the economic crisis, and Sócrates seems to think that making an election issue out of the HSR project would give his party a boost, as the proposal is generally popular with the public, and Portugal doesn't have to foot the entire bill. But the nakedly political ploy could well backfire. The EU was not pleased with the postponement, and Portugal's president, Aníbal Cavaco Silva (of the PSD), had to step in to ease concerns and promised that the project would still go forward. News reports spun it as a sign of weakness on the part of Sócrates and the PS.

So we will see what happens. I'm still getting over jet lag, so use this as an open thread. Tomorrow I'll be back to discuss our own HSR project here in California.

Monday Open Thread

Comment starter: Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny has been promoting a bill, SB 409, to create a Department of Railroads. Good idea? Bad idea?

UPDATE: Live from Porto, Portugal, it´s your blog proprietor! Currently waiting for the 11:45 Alfa Pendular south to Coimbra. I have some pictures of Portugal´s rail network but they´re not uploaded yet. The Alfa Pendular is a Pendolino tilting fast train that shares tracks with freight and slower rail (including the intercidades and suburbans). The top speed we achieved coming north from Lisboa was 210 km/h (about 130 mph), but that was rarely sustained, and in fact there were several dead stops in the middle of nowhere and plenty of slow orders. We arrived at Porto Campanhã about 15 minutes late as a result. I have no idea what the typical on-time performance of the Alfa Pendular is.

Still, I think it is a very good model for how some of the HSR corridors in the US can be upgraded. The Amtrak Cascades are intended to achieve similar speeds, and Amtrak uses Talgo trainsets on the route for precisely that purpose, although more sidings and trackwork needs to be done to enable the Cascades corridor to achieve the high speeds. I could also see the Midwest HSR corridors using a Talgo or Pendolino system to achieve higher speeds and quicker travel times (and I believe Ray LaHood has indicated this is his preference for that corridor).

Of course, tilting trains of 130 mph capability aren´t a permanent solution, even if they are a very good first step toward improving the passenger rail network. Today the Portguese parliament is holding hearings on the government´s proposals to build an AVE-like system to connect Lisboa to Porto, and to connect Lisboa to Madrid. Eventually the government wants to build south to the beach resorts of the Algarve, although that´s a lower priority for now.

Saturday Open Thread

Have at it in the comments. Play nice. And anons, pick a username and stick with it. Rafael is working on some site upgrades. Once we nail down the site design, I think it will be time to explore different options for providing comments. Any thoughts on good services? (I can still remember when all you could do on Blogger for comments was use Haloscan. Those were the days...)

Thursday Open Thread

So I'm off to Portugal for 2 weeks, and you will be in the capable hands of Rafael and Matt Melzer, who will be doing some guest posts. There will be some open threads every other day, although if any of the guest posters want to move one of those to another day in order to post something, particularly if it is timely, they're welcome to do so.

Today's topic: rising gas prices. Breaking the magic $3 mark across the state. It was when gas prices stayed above $3/gal for an extended period in mid-2006 that the housing bubble burst. Sure, the bubble was going to burst eventually, but it burst at a specific time and due to specific causes, which we can't overlook. Further, the gas price spike of 2008 surely helped play a big role in sending the economy into a tailspin in the latter half of that year.

As a number of economists are coming to realize, any economic recovery could be strangled by rising gas prices. The underlying factors are still there - peak oil, exacerbated now by slackening investment in production. Any hint of recovery is going to send gas prices soaring.

So tell me again why we would NOT want to be investing in a form of transportation that is not dependent on the fluctuating price of oil? That could promote economic growth instead of throwing a drowning economy an anvil?

Sunday Open Thread

Been an unusually busy weekend for me, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot happening on the HSR front (still looking into details about the recent Senate Budget Subcommittee hearing). So use this as an open thread.

• Ray LaHood tells Midwest "you need a czar" to coordinate HSR efforts. I think it runs deeper than that - there has to be extremely strong commitment from the top levels of state government. California has a kind of HSR czar - Quentin Kopp has a strong position as chair of the CHSRA board - but he lacks the support in Sacramento that he needs to get his job done. Some may lay the blame for that at Kopp's feet, but I'm not seeing anyone in Sacramento really step up to help HSR either.

• Florida HSR was given a big boost by Ray LaHood's recent comment that FL and CA are "in the lead" for HSR funds. The FL HSR Commission met last week to decide what to do about their newfound (and judging by the articles, unexpected) position as likely HSR stimulus recipients. Back in '03 they had selected a bid from Fluor-Bombardier, but Jeb Bush's opposition helped kill the plan. The FL HSR Commission decided to wait on whether to consider the Fluor-Bombardier bid still alive or whether to solicit new bids.

Thursday Open Thread

Busy day here, and my train-related thoughts are currently occupied with a meeting this evening at Monterey City Hall on the debate between building light rail or bus rapid transit along the Monterey Branch Line from Castroville to Monterey. I'll be speaking in favor of a light rail solution, as that's likely to generate more riders and more transit-oriented development, but we'll see what the rest of the community's reaction is. The ROW is already publicly-owned. I'd like to think my city isn't populated by the same kind of NIMBYs we've seen on the Peninsula, but we'll see.

Not much happening around the HSR-sphere today. There has been an interesting discussion about the mid-Peninsula station in the comments to the previous post.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is busy trying to scare voters into backing his May 19th budget ballot propositions. Whether they pass or fail the state is still facing a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall, which may generate pressure to cut the CHSRA's budget, and will make it more difficult to sell the Prop 1A bonds. Democrats are busy lobbying Congress to pass legislation allowing the federal government to back California's short-term cashflow borrowing, which would greatly help matters.

Inauguration Day Open Thread

As critical as I've been of Barack Obama's stimulus proposals, it is nice to be waving goodbye to George W. Bush, who didn't lift a finger to help high speed rail, attempted on several occasions to kill Amtrak, and whose second Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, did much to undermine light rail projects around the country.

With Obama in the White House we have the chance to finally make the national investment in sustainable transportation and passenger rail in particular that has been desperately needed for several decades now. The fight will continue, of course, to make the opportunity a reality. But after the last 8 years, it's nice to know that Americans and Californians are willing to embrace change and admit that a new direction is needed.

Saturday Open Thread

I'll be back on Monday to continue the high speed rail conversation. For now use this as an open thread to discuss whatever's on your mind that's HSR related - even if only tangentially.

Some articles that have appeared over the last few days regarding California HSR:

• CHSRA officials optimistic about federal funding (SF Chronicle)



• Vegas resident argues for conventional HSR to LA - not maglev (Las Vegas Sun)



• Texas officials hopeful for federal HSR money (and showing that CA isn't going to be alone in asking Congress to open its wallet for HSR) (Dallas Morning News)

Thursday Open Thread

I'm in Arizona celebrating Christmas, probably freezing my ass off in the mountains and snow, but likely having a good time anyway. I hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday season, whatever it is that you celebrate (my wife and I are more into the solstice, but we're not going to turn down a nice big Christmas dinner either!).

I think we all got our present several weeks early, when California voters approved Proposition 1A and setting us on the path to finally building high speed rail. Of course we're going to have to defend it in 2009 as the economic crisis and residual HSR deniers and New Hooverites continue to swirl overhead. We built a solid foundation for HSR activism this year and next year it's going to accomplish even bigger things.

Tuesday Open Thread

I'm headed to Arizona for the holidays and will be back on December 29. So in the meantime we'll have a few open threads every other day to tide us over.

I wish I had more time to write about this, but Yonah has an excellent post on HSR privatization over at The Transport Politic. He looks over the two kinds of privatization - of infrastructure and of management - and concludes, rightly, that both are unworkable and unnecessary. With John Mica aggressively pushing privatization it is worth taking a close look at this and pushing back against ideologically-driven efforts to fix something that isn't broken. Public entities have had great success operating HSR around the world and the US should emulate that model.

One of the very first posts on this blog reached similar conclusions about HSR privatization. Worth a look.

High Speed FAIL!

Most of the time, discussions on this blog are altogether too serious. I have tried to make up for this lack of levity by submitting ever-longer verbiage of my own in the comments. A few days ago, Robert Cruickshank kindly decided to invite me to submit posts of my own, perhaps in the forlorn hope that I will at least acquire an appreciation of brevity. So here goes:

HSR, you're doing it wrong!

The townsfolk of Sables D'Olonne are apparently well-connected in high places. SNCF now runs TGV trains directly from Paris. The last section from Nantes to their town isn't electrified, so the trains are towed by a diesel locomotive. All just so the tourists can avoid a transfer.

Not to be outdone, DB runs high-speed tilting diesel trains called ICE-TD with a top speed of 200kph (125mph) on the winding legacy tracks in East Germany. They also come in handy on the Hamburg-Copenhagen route. Until the Fehmarn Belt bridge is completed in 2018, very slightly more modest speeds are involved.

Further east still, Russian military intelligence officers came up with their own version of high speed rail. It avoided not only electrification but also the expense of having to construct actual tracks. Apparently, they are hoping for orders from China.

Aviation of a different kind was apparently the objective of this young man. I don't think this is quite what CHSRA has in mind, though.

UPDATE: apparently, reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated (h/t to Loren). If true, he is just really, really eager to win a Darwin Award. Perhaps this sort of thing is best left to machinima artists.

On a real-world note that is only marginally lighter, how's this for transit-oriented development?

Thanksgiving Open Thread

According to the San Francisco Chronicle holiday travel was unusually light at SFO yesterday - the economic crisis keeping more folks at home? Perhaps people chose to drive to their in-state destinations but as anyone who has tried Interstate 5 around a holiday knows, the two lanes get backed up very fast. It once took me 10 hours to make it back to Berkeley from Santa Ana the day after Christmas on I-5 - nearly twice the usual travel time.

Obviously you know where I'm going with this. Ten years from now travelers won't have to choose between expensive airfares, costly and time-consuming car trips, or staying home for the holidays. High speed rail will provide a fast and affordable way to visit your family or friends. I can only imagine the TV reports from November 2018 - busy scenes at the Transbay Terminal, Diridon Station, LA Union Station.

Ten years from now high speed rail will become part of the fabric of everyday life in California. We'll wonder - rightly - how we ever got along without it.

And what am I thankful for? The 6,512,189 Californians who voted to make HSR a reality by passing Proposition 1A earlier this month.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, everyone.