When Prop 1A passed in November 2008, it included $950 million for other passenger rail systems that would connect to the HSR line. Much of that money will be awarded in May, and Bay Area agencies are in the hunt:

Five Bay Area train operators say they are entitled to as much as $400 million of projects to accommodate the $42.6 billion bullet train that would run along the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to San Jose on its way to Los Angeles. They include the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, San Francisco Muni and the Altamont Commuter Express….

The California Transportation Commission reserved $745 million for 10 transit agencies in December, leaving each train operator this week to apply for its share of the money and prove its projects qualify. The commission calculated each agency’s share based on track length, service levels and ridership.

Three other intercity rail corridors will get $142.5 million ($47.5 million each). The $745 million then goes to those agencies that apply. Mike Rosenberg’s article lays out who is asking for what (final applications are due on March 15):

BART appears on track for more than twice as much money as any agency in the state, and on Thursday its board of directors is expected to approve an application for $257 million.

BART would put $150 million of the 1A money toward its $1 billion project to replace its rail cars. It says it has federal money for the rest of the project. The rest of BART’s high-speed-rail money would go toward increasing seat capacity in cars, the Hayward yard maintenance complex, Embarcadero and Montgomery station upgrades, train control reliability and an operations control center.

Caltrain, meanwhile, will apply for $40 million as part of its project to electrify its diesel railroad, which will be necessary to accommodate bullet trains. VTA is eligible to apply for up to $26 million. It said it may use part of its share for Caltrain electrification, while Muni said it will seek $61 million to improve rail connections. ACE train operators said they will apply for $15 million for upgrades to service, Altamont corridor environmental studies, track enhancements and connectivity improvements.

The amounts requested are not arbitrary, but conform to CTC guidelines published last month, which is why BART is asking for $250 million and ACE only $15 million. In each case the funds appear set to go to help pay for planned upgrades, although not for new routes or service.

As high speed rail planning proceeds along the proposed SF-LA-Anaheim route, more details become known, and more potential conflicts and obstacles appear. That’s an inevitable aspect of planning a project this significant and this big. It’s also an unfortunate side effect of the CHSRA having been a sparsely-funded agency for so many years, making it difficult to do persistent outreach to local governments. That’s not to say no contact was made – the CHSRA has often been in touch with local governments along the proposed route, many of which appear to have treated high speed rail as vaporware. Rather than assigning blame or fault, the best solution is for both the CHSRA and local governments to quickly identify possible conflicts and work intensively and openly to resolve them.

One such example can be found in Buena Park, which finally got a Metrolink station in 2007. Transit-oriented development is still being built at the station – it wasn’t completed at the time of the Google Maps satellite shot of the station below.

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In recent weeks, Buena Park officials have learned that the CHSRA’s plans for building high speed rail along that corridor might require either the station or the transit-oriented development to be moved:

Mayor Art Brown spent years pushing for a commuter train station combined with nearby housing in his community. But as townhouses are being finished around the $14 million Metrolink station, he’s facing the prospect that California’s high-speed rail line may plow right through his beloved project.

“The only option they presented to us was either losing the condo units or losing our train station,” Brown said of an engineering presentation to city leaders last year….

“The idea that they would spend millions for a new station and remove it is a colossal waste of time and money,” said Mark Goldsmith, a resident of the “transit village” next to the Buena Park station.

Why yes, yes it is. It’s an unfortunate example of the lack of coherent, integrated transportation planning that happens in this state, where numerous local governments and agencies are conducting plans that don’t always match up. The CHSRA claims they had been in touch with city planning departments since 2005, so perhaps there was a point at which Buena Park learned of the HSR plans and said “screw it, let’s go ahead with these Metrolink Station/TOD plans anyway.” Or perhaps the CHSRA’s outreach was insufficient and Buena Park didn’t know the full details of what was being planned. In any case, it’s a rightly frustrating situation.

The LA-Anaheim Alternatives Analysis from June 2009 shows the issue (look on pages 60-61). The plan is to add HSR tracks just to the south of the current alignment, requiring 45 feet of ROW acquisition. That’s where the TOD in question is located.

The Buena Park Metrolink station can accommodate four tracks (there are currently two). But the Dedicated HST Alternative identified in the Alternatives Analysis involves six mainline tracks, two HSR-dedicated tracks and four for freight/Amtrak/Metrolink, between Redondo Junction and Fullerton Junction. Because of BNSF’s heavy usage of this corridor, the CHSRA and their consultants determined this was the necessary solution for HSR implementation. Hence the need for more tracks, and the conflict at Buena Park.

As the AP article makes clear, it’s not just Buena Park that is concerned:

Buena Park joined a coalition of gateway cities demanding a chance to evaluate all options and their potential impacts before moving into the environmental review process. The demand for better coordination was recently agreed upon in a memorandum of understanding with the authority.

“We’re not trying to be obstructionist NIMBY types, but it has to make sense to us,” said Ernie Garcia, city manager of Norwalk.

Which is sensible enough. Because of an apparent lack of coordinated planning for this portion of the LOSSAN corridor, these conflicts are there, and will have to be dealt with. It’s a good sign that these cities are avoiding the approach taken by their counterparts in the Bay Area – suing the Authority and giving fuel to anti-HSR, NIMBY sentiments. And if push came to shove, Buena Park’s mayor made clear he’d make way for HSR:

In Buena Park, Mayor Brown still could face his dilemma. But he said that if forced to choose, he would sacrifice the train station where his name is prominent on a plaque marking its opening.

“I would not take the homes away from those people,” he said. “They saved all their lives in some cases to buy a home with good transportation nearby.”

CHSRA deputy director Jeff Barker was quoted in the article pledging to work with Buena Park and the other “gateway cities” such as Norwalk and La Mirada (where my wife is from), and that pledge was reinforced in the memorandum of understanding recently signed between the cities and the CHSRA.

There’s every reason to believe that these conflicts, frustrating as they are, will be effectively resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. I’m not going to propose a solution myself, but it is good to see that the cities are adopting a constructive approach to these matters. Let’s hope that attitude is shared across the state so that high speed rail can get built on-time, on-budget, and in a way that meets the needs of Californians for generations to come.

In a New York Times op-ed today, Christian Wolmar argues for focusing national HSR efforts on the Northeast Corridor, upgrading the Acela as a demonstration of HSR’s value:

Yet the $8 billion set aside for high-speed rail in his 2009 stimulus package, split among 31 states, includes only two genuine high-speed rail projects — in Florida and California. And even that money will do little more than kick-start the schemes. The rest of the package will go to upgrading various sections of the Amtrak network….

And that’s what makes the Acela lines from Washington to Boston the best opportunity to create a real high-speed, high-frequency service to compete with air travel along the Northeastern Seaboard.

Of course, the Acela is already a successful example of sort-of-high speed rail in California America, with 60% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor according to recent stats. While the Acela needs to be upgraded to even faster speeds, HSR will get more lasting support in Congress if HSR in new states is supported. The Clinton Administration would up focusing its HSR efforts on the NEC and as a result, no lasting HSR funding project was achieved until Barack Obama became president in 2009.

So it would not be sensible from the perspective of generating national support for HSR to just focus on improving the Acela. The most valuable thing to do to get a national HSR system up and running would be for Congress to create a significant, stable, long-term funding source for HSR, and Wolmar doesn’t propose that here.

But Wolmar offers some other good places to look at in order to speed up HSR in the US:

It’s not just a matter of money, though. The government must do away with a host of state and federal regulations that reduce train speed and are far too restrictive.

Wolmar didn’t go into details here, but we can. One of the most important reforms involves Federal Railroad Administration rules that make it difficult to bring off-the-shelf European and Japanese style high speed trains to existing railroads. Instead trains must be made heavier, slowing speeds and travel times.

Another issue is environmental regulation. As I’ve discussed here before, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) needs to be reformed in order for sustainable infrastructure projects like HSR to be built, with a more holistic statewide process created that can supplant the existing, flawed CEQA model that doesn’t effectively engage public input and gives too much power to NIMBYs. All sides should support sensible reform, because in its absence, the legislature is moving instead to exempt more projects from CEQA entirely, which isn’t an ideal solution.

The federal government can also help by reforming the way railroads are regulated. Currently the state of California has very little leverage over Union Pacific, which enjoys immunity from state regulation and eminent domain dating back to the Gilded Age and is no longer necessary here in the 21st century.

These are just some of the state and federal regulations that could be reformed to help accelerate HSR planning and construction. I’m sure you all can offer more in the comments, and I invite you to do so.

As California’s budget crisis continues, the usual arguments about the $10 billion high speed rail bond are getting dredged up again. The Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters includes HSR as one of the reasons he says state politicians are digging their fiscal hole deeper:

The state has tens of billions of dollars in unsold bonds, and Treasurer Bill Lockyer has warned that with the state’s lowest-in-the-nation credit rating he may market new debt only sporadically….

The High-Speed Rail Authority is paying a public relations firm $8 million to peddle the deeply flawed project with “a coordinated statewide communications program” because advocates are eager to break ground and commit the state to the project before its deficiencies become toxic.

Walters’ column also includes assumptions that global warming deniers are right (despite the controversy over leaked emails from a British climate research institute, the overall scientific consensus that global warming IS happening has not been dented), suggesting his ideas are really a grab bag of conservative criticisms of efforts to change a failed status quo. His column boils down to “government spending is bad.”

This is despite the fact the only reason there are any signs of economic recovery is because of massive federal deficit spending. When the recession was under way and the scale of the state budget crisis was known in 2008, California voters rejected the arguments of the new Hoovers and agreed that spending $10 billion in bond debt to create jobs via sustainable transportation that wasn’t dependent on ever-rising oil prices was a good thing.

It’s clear that California’s budget mess is ongoing. Without considering the sale of the Prop 1A bond, or the $11 billion water bond on the November ballot, the state still faces an annual $20 billion deficit for at least the next 3 years. Even if we didn’t sell another dime of the Prop 1A bond (and forfeited at least $2.25 billion in federal funds) the state would still be in a deep fiscal hole and would be giving up as much as 160,000 jobs that could help fill the state’s coffers.

Ultimately, California is going to have to raise taxes, mostly on the wealthy and on large corporations, to deal with the budget gap. The alternative is to shut down health care programs, whole education programs ($20 billion is half of the total cost of K-12 education in the state), or other important services that are necessary for a prosperous modern society.

High speed rail would help get us out of the mess by building infrastructure the state needs for a 21st century economy and creating jobs that can put the state back to work and put more tax revenue into Sacramento’s pocket. Those jobs will be created, though it’s possible it won’t be as high as 160,000. Even if HSR doesn’t break even or meet its ridership numbers (a remote though possible outcome), those jobs and the tax revenue it spurs would be there, helping power the state’s recovery. And over time, as the state grows and takes in more money, the annual debt service will become an ever-smaller portion of the state budget.

There’s plenty of precedent for this – it’s how the bay bridges were built in the 1930s, during the depth of the Depression – but embracing the idea of deficit spending to create jobs also means rejecting the status quo. It means refusing to accept long-term unemployment, refusing to embrace 21st century forms of transportation, and refusing to invest in our future.

Which is exactly what some wish to do. Usually these are people who have made enough money off the 20th century that they feel they can continue to prosper here in the 21st century while everything that made 20th century prosperity possible is torn to pieces.

It’s true that there is an upper limit on the state’s bond debt. But during a recession like this, that limit isn’t something we’re anywhere close to, especially when the state leaves billions of dollars on the table through its refusal to effectively tax the fortunes of the wealthy and the enormous profits of its largest corporations.

In fact, California’s bond debt of $83.5 billion is just 4.5% of our state’s $1.85 trillion GDP. In contrast, some of the European nations whose debt levels are generating so much attention have far higher ratios – Greece’s government debt-to-GDP ratio is 112%.

In short, HSR bond money isn’t really a major factor in the state’s budget crisis. California deliberately doesn’t take in as much money as we need to in order to operate our public services at desired levels. We either have to generate new revenue, or accept a lesser level of public services. Punishing one of the few government services that will pay for its ongoing operating costs – high speed rail – strikes me as a very foolish thing to do.