Monterey residents like to tell a story that may or may not be true, but is certainly plausible. A man is working the night shift at the front desk of a hotel downtown, near Fisherman’s Wharf. He gets a call from a guest who is complaining about the loud dogs that are barking all night long. “Can’t you guys do something about that noise?” he asks. The man at the front desk responds “Sir, those are the sea lions. They’re what you came here to see.”

I actually like the sound of barking sea lions at night, which I can hear from my apartment a few blocks away. I’m used to it (as I am also used to the VERY loud bugle calls played over the PA system at the Presidio of Monterey just a block from where I live). I can see how it might be a bit surprising to someone, but they might as well complain about the sound of crashing waves or foghorns.

In short, experience matters. Most of us here on the blog have some personal experience on high speed trains. I’ve been a convert to HSR ever since a 2001 trip on Spain’s AVE system. So when we talk about HSR, we have some sort of experience in mind. We know what the trains look and sound like, we know how the grade separations look, we know that the routes integrate pretty well with the urban landscape.

Your average Californians, on the other hand, doesn’t have that experience. When they think of trains they think of loud and long freight trains or commuter trains. Those things are clearly an annoyance to people living nearby, and often pose a genuine safety risk, as Palo Alto understands well.

So when people hear about “high speed trains” they may not have any experience with actual bullet trains, and start flipping out, assuming that the CHSRA is planning to destroy neighborhoods with intrusive rail infrastructure that serves loud trains blowing horns and rumbling by at all hours of the night.

We can see this at work in the debate over using the Taylor Yard in LA:

One committee member, who asked to remain anonymous, said she generally supports the project so long as it does not increase the noise pollution in the area.

“Is there going to be noise?” she asked. “I’m right next door and I hear the horns of [Union Pacific Corporation] trains all night long.”

As a homeowner, she has fruitlessly tried for years to persuade Union Pacific to alter its operations to reduce the noise during late hours. As a private company protected by federal law, Authority representatives acknowledged that the Authority has no oversight on the rail companies that currently utilize Taylor Yard.

“Yes, there will be noise,” Ortman answered bluntly.

Ortman said the high-speed line does not utilize horns. Ortman said the amount of noise the line will create would not be known until the EIR is completed sometime in the middle of 2011. He said a “noise analysis” is included in the report.

A big issue for residents, especially after several high-profile rail accidents, is train safety for a system that is proposed to boast speeds of over 200-miles-per-hour. Ortman, assured committee members that by design, the project will be safe because it requires as little interference as possible. For example, although one proposal requires the line to share a right-of-way with Union Pacific freight trains, the line itself will have separate tracks and will be barricaded to prevent collisions.

A lot of that seems common-sense to us, but it’s not to a lot of the public. We also know that there are ways to build this train in a way that complements the park – the CHSRA has its own simulation showing how that can work and I hope they showed this at the meeting in LA.

More of that needs to happen. CHSRA simulations are very useful, especially for contentious sites. But it’s also worth using the magic of technology to bring the world of HSR to California. We can and should continuously show people some of the key details about how HSR works, how it looks, and how it sounds – that it’s very different from Metrolink and Union Pacific.

For example, this image from Sweden appeared in a recent article on CNN about “green trains”:

Obviously HSR on, say, the Peninsula would be wider. But we’ve also shown other examples of above-grade rail that work elegantly with their surroundings. From Italy:

Two from Berlin:

And from Lambeth Road in London:

None of these look like a Berlin Wall. All of them have become accepted parts of the urban landscape, in parts of the world where aesthetics matter every bit as much as in California, if not moreso (you can be sure that the Italian beach town shown above cares very much about how the rails look).

As the CHSRA works to build and rebuild support across the state for its designs, they would do well to show people as much as possible more than just lines on a map, and even more than the very good simulations from NC3D – they need to show examples and, ideally, video of actual, operating HSR. This one from Spain is still one of my favorites, not the least of which is because the landscape resembles California so well:

The more we can show things like this to Californians, the more successfully we can push back against the NIMBYs. Their opposition to HSR is rooted in their desire to preserve the economic and political arrangements in this state which benefit them immensely, even at the expense of others. We’ll never overcome that by showing images of how HSR actually works. But the more we can do to make HSR seem less strange and more familiar, the more success we’ll have at getting through the planning process with a minimum of fuss.