No argument there. In fact in a representative democracy, those are precisely the people who are tasked with keeping themselves in the loop about such things.

“Nobody told me” is not a justifiable excuse when it’s your job to keep yourself informed.

If Sacramento and the private sector are under the impression that the people along the LOSSAN are OK with this, they are in for a shock. After the presentation, where I was invited to correct the misinformation presented by Council and staff, many members of the community spoke to me, asking about how to register their opposition to the Alt Analysis, and the word “lawsuit” came up repeatedly. When the citizens in the city governed by the CHSRA Chairman have not been notified of the existence and contents of the Alternatives Analysis yet, we have a problem!

I’ve mentioned many times before, but I have friends who live near and next to (literally backing up to the ROW) the LOSSAN corridor. They are adamant that the only thing they care about is getting rid of the (apologies robert) “F*cking horns”. They don’t even care about the heavy freight trains that rumble through, they just care about the horns. I’ve had the pleasure of spending the night near the tracks on several occasions, you can hear those damn horns coming from miles away, and those diesel locomotives are quite loud. The horns have gotten even worse recently, as Metrolink was trying to make nice by putting them lower on the locomotives so that the sound wouldn’t carry as far, but the FRA made them put them up higher. This makes the difference between a 110DB horn at 15-foot off the rails versus the 70-ish DB noise coming predominantly off the bogies of an electric trainset much greater and makes the horn noise much more difficult to mitigate.

If the Peninsula isn’t blighted by Caltrain, it won’t be blighted by HSR.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District does not deal with noise. They deal with other types of air pollution. They only impose those environmental regulations for those pollutants that they are permitted to regulate under the Clean Air Act (ozone, etc). Their regulations are meant to help the District come in compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. California does have some stricter standards, but for the most part they are actually the same as the NAAQS. The authority to impose such stricter standards is granted to California by the Clean Air Act. That does not mean that CA has the authority to regulate train noise, an area that clearly falls under the Commerce Clause, and has been regulated by the federal government, which most likely preempts state regulation of the same.

While the Clean Air Act does have a section on noise pollution, that area fell off the legislative agenda and has become irrelevant.

Also, like I stated earlier, the noise standards are in the process of being reviewed and revised, by the proper authorities. The regulated entities (the railroads and the manufacturers) expect revised and stricter regulation. So your comment is not adding anything to the discussion, except to fling further unsubstantiated froth.

And also like I said, there is no reason to expect that the Acela actually runs at 90 db. This is the max that it is allowed to do by regulation. This is something that you apparently ignore.