The Fresno Bee is out with a damning new editorial, saying that Representative Jeff Denham “Betrays the Valley”:

In the Central Valley — where unemployment averages more than 15%, more than 40% in some cities — the [HSR] project would bring jobs and better connections with the coastal economies. It would relieve traffic congestion on roads and at airports.

But Denham’s having none of it. He laments that construction on the first 29 miles of track between Madera and Fresno will start soon.

Denham’s constituents and residents across the state should demand more from their congressman. He should be representing the Central Valley, California and the transportation interests of the nation — not pitting the Northeast region against all others.

Not much else to add to this aside from the political analysis that Denham is not going to be helped at all by having one of the major media outlets in the Valley denouncing him in such strong terms. Denham is still vulnerable in his new district, and has only been in Congress a term and a half. As the Valley becomes more politically moderate, Denham’s full throated embrace of an extremist right-wing agenda will become an increasing liability to his political career.

Supporting HSR is the right thing to do on the merits. It’s also the right thing to do for Jeff Denham. We’ll see if he listens to his constituents or if he continues to appease the out-of-state right-wing donors who he now answers to.

UPDATE: The Modesto Bee, which serves Denham’s district, piles on with their own editorial:

While we share his concerns about the cost of California’s high-speed rail project, we think Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, was way out of line with his comment that $6 billion in federal and state money earmarked for the California project should go to the Northeast corridor of Amtrak instead….

Denham has a responsibility to represent Californians and especially the Central Valley, where the unemployment averages more than 15 percent.

The high-speed rail project is on track to proceed. Construction on the first 29 miles of track between Madera and Fresno will start soon. Opponents like Denham need recognize that they’ve lost this political fight and to turn their attention to cutting costs and making sure it works.

While it is understandable that he questions the federal dollars, over which he has influence, going to California’s high- speed rail, he should not be suggesting — even in an off-hand way — that California money should go to the other side of the country.

Denham’s anti-HSR attitude is shaping up to be a big problem for him back home. As it should.

Below is a guest post from Clem Tillier, who also writes the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog

If you try to reach Los Angeles from the Central Valley and points north, the Tehachapi Mountains stand squarely in the way.   This mountain range, crisscrossed by earthquake faults, forms a great barrier to California’s high-speed rail network and will (by geological and topographical necessity) result in one of the highest-elevation high-speed rail mountain crossings anywhere in the world.  Reaching even the lowest passes requires a roughly 1000 m (3300 ft) vertical climb from the floor of the Central Valley, with sustained steep grades and tunnels and bridges of considerable length.  The Tehachapi mountain crossing will surely be the most spectacular, complex and expensive section of California’s nascent high-speed rail backbone.

Crossing the Tehachapis is feasible at several topographically favorable locations, among which are Tehachapi Pass (to serve Palmdale and the Antelope Valley, as selected by the California High-Speed Rail Authority) and Tejon Pass, also known as the “Grapevine” or I-5 alignment.  Two possible HSR alignments through these passes are shown in the map at right.  The map, oriented such that the SF-LA axis is vertical, highlights one of the basic trade-offs of California high-speed rail: detour through the fast-growing but geographically isolated Antelope Valley, or take the direct shortcut to Los Angeles.

This trade-off was never technical.  For political reasons that will not be discussed here, Tejon Pass was never seriously considered for high-speed rail.

During Roelof van Ark’s brief stint as CEO of the rail authority, staff and consultants were directed to reconsider the options and produced the Conceptual I-5 Corridor Study, published at the January 2012 board meeting–the same meeting where van Ark resigned his post.  This study was tailored, rather blatantly as we will see, to reconfirm the route via Palmdale.  The technical rationale for dismissing Tejon Pass alignments was built on numerous contrived assumptions and constraints that warrant close examination.  A sophisticated path optimization tool, known as Quantm, was used to evaluate thousands of possible alignments through the Tehachapi Mountains, giving the false impression that they had been exhaustively researched; however, the tool was carefully tweaked to avoid some of the most promising alternatives.  While thousands of alignments may have been considered, the hundreds that weren’t are far more interesting.

A Good Tejon Pass Alignment

The map below shows a reasonable Tejon Pass HSR alignment, by no means the best, in comparison to the probable Antelope Valley alignment.  This map serves as a key to the rest of this article, and is even more revealing after downloading the KML file and opening it in Google Earth, where many of the locations, landmarks and topographical features discussed below are easily visualized in 3D.

View Larger Map

Myths About Crossing the Tehachapi Mountains

Twelve myths have developed around the complex issue of the HSR southern mountain crossing, and are often trotted out to support the Antelope Valley alignment via Palmdale.  These myths, all of them wrong, include the following:

1. Tejon Pass HSR alignments cannot cross into Tejon Mountain Village property
2. Tejon Pass HSR requires more tunneling than the Antelope Valley
3. Tehachapi Pass is the easier mountain crossing, as the Southern Pacific Railroad figured out way back in the 1870s
4. Tejon Pass HSR suffers from greater seismic risk, compared to Antelope Valley HSR
5. Tejon Pass HSR via Santa Clarita would significantly impact Newhall Ranch
6. Antelope Valley HSR via Tehachapi Pass alignment can just plug into the electric grid
7. Bakersfield can be crossed at 220 mph
8. Bakersfield must be served with a downtown station
9. Tejon Pass HSR is only 3-5 minutes faster than Antelope Valley HSR
10. HSR can operate at 220 mph on long and steep down grades
11. Tejon Pass HSR costs about the same as Antelope Valley HSR
12. Tejon Pass HSR screws Palmdale.  Palmdale will never get a fast rail connection to LA unless it is on the HSR main line

A blog post is the wrong medium to address such complex issues; instead, the following presentation dismantles each of the myths using numerous figures and diagrams to illustrate each point.  These 75 slides are also available for download, 7MB PDF in much better resolution than provided by Scribd.

The conclusions are stunning.  Compared to the Antelope Valley alignment currently being planned with a stop in Palmdale, the more direct Tejon Pass HSR alignment would have the following advantages:

• 12 minutes faster (7% of the SF – LA trip time)
• 34 miles shorter
• 10+ fewer miles of tunnel
• 20 fewer miles of bridges
• $5 billion cheaper to build
• $175 million/year more profitable to operate

You might ask yourself at this point how some guy on the internet can come up with this stuff and claim that it undercuts years of studies by professional consultant teams paid hundreds of millions of dollars.  The point is that when it comes to math and physics, the numbers don’t lie.  The numerous advantages of a Tejon Pass alignment will not be lost on potential private investors, who will spare no effort to produce their own untainted investment-grade analysis of the mountain crossing.  If their numbers turn out anywhere close to this (and they will!) there simply won’t ever be any private investment.

Considering that the 2012 business plan relies on $13 billion of private capital (about 20% of the $68 billion overall budget), choosing the wrong mountain crossing could make or break HSR in California.  If the numbers presented here are to be believed, the smart money will demand a Tejon Pass alignment.  Failing this, private capital will stay away, and California’s high-speed rail system is unlikely to be completed as planned.

That’s why smart HSR supporters, those who are analytically-minded and open to new information, should place their full support behind the re-alignment of California’s high-speed rail backbone via Tejon Pass.

Congressional Republicans and others opposed to the California high speed rail project had been hoping the Surface Transportation Board would give them a big win and block construction of the HSR project this summer.

But that won’t be happening. Instead the STB today ruled in favor of the California HSR project, granting the section from Merced to Fresno an exemption from STB approval rules:

After considering the entire record on both the transportation and environmental issues, including FRA’s Record of Decision and final environmental review documents, as well as the public comments filed in this proceeding, we are granting the Authority’s petition for exemption, subject to environmental mitigation conditions, including the condition that the Authority build the route designated by FRA as environmentally preferable.

This is the last regulatory hurdle for the HSR project before groundbreaking can take place later this summer. The last legal hurdle is the lawsuit charging that the construction plan violates Prop 1A. That suit was heard a few weeks ago in Sacramento Superior Court, and we should get a ruling on that in the next month or two.

Republicans like Jeff Denham were playing up the possibility of the STB denying the petition for exemption as a way to derail the HSR project. And once again they’ve lost. The STB made the right decision here, one that will help promote good passenger rail transportation and help ensure that the California HSR project in particular gets under construction sooner rather than later.

Unemployment in Spain is at 27% and that means the whole country is struggling, especially under the weight of cruel, damaging, and entirely unnecessary austerity measures forced on the nation by external powers. In that situation it’s no surprise that Spain’s AVE high speed trains saw a dip in ridership in 2012. But it may be a surprise that the dip was small – only 2.6%.

Most of the drop came from decreased business travel. Understandable, given the economic Depression imposed on Spain by the EU. In response, RENFE has lowered ticket prices and even in Spain’s severely distressed economic situation, ridership has soared as a result:

Spain’s Ministry of Transport this week reported that ridership on Renfe AVE services has risen 14% year-on-year in the last four months to 4.7 million passengers, following an 11% cut in all tourist class tickets in early February.

The fare cuts were introduced as part of a raft of measures including the launch of 10-trip passes, an increase in tickets sold by yield management, and the introduction of more flexibility in return tickets, with the aimed of stemming the decline in high-speed passenger numbers, which fell 2.6% last year.

The highest ridership increases have been on Barcelona – Malaga (26%) and Barcelona – Seville (28%) services, while the number tickets sold for Madrid – Barcelona trains increased by 16%.

There are a couple of things going on here. Catalonia is a more prosperous part of Spain (one reason why many Catalans are seeking independence) so lower fares make it more attractive for Catalans to take the bullet trains to other parts of Spain for pleasure.

But it’s also a reminder that it matters what you prioritize when setting HSR operations policy. If the goal is higher revenue, then set fares higher to attract more prosperous business travelers. If the goal is higher ridership, then set fares lower to attract a broader base of pleasure travelers. HSR systems around the world generate operating profits as well as high levels of ridership. But the balance between the two is up to policymakers.

My preference is to emphasize ridership. There would still be profits, they’d just be smaller. And that’s fine, because the goal of high speed rail should be to maximize ridership rather than to maximize revenues. In an era of climate change and sky-high oil prices, the highest priority of electric transportation systems like high speed rail should be to get as many riders as possible so as to reduce carbon emissions and oil dependence. And of course, lower fares are better for the economy since it allows more people, especially lower income households, to reap the benefits of high speed rail.

As we move from debate and design to construction, these operational questions will become increasingly important for California HSR. The Authority will come under pressure from some politicians to maximize revenue even at the expense of ridership. That would be the wrong approach, and would miss a great opportunity to use HSR to achieve some important environmental and economic goals.