It was a very interesting (and long) evening in Palo Alto, with lots of fodder for blog commentary. I’m going to have to keep some of this brief for now in order to get through it all, and will expand on certain points in posts over the weekend.

Some key things that we learned from the meeting:

HSR support is much broader and deeper than the opponents and critics would have you believe. The room was packed with HSR backers, well over half the audience. Many left after the 9PM break, so the overall comments delivered skewed towards the critics and deniers, but many of those whose names were called and who weren’t there were supporters. The Alliance for Sustainable Transit and Jobs did amazing work on getting the word out on this meeting, and many of their members gave powerful comments in support of the project. They are truly are a game-changing addition to the cause.

Our voice was strong and our arguments powerful. The unions, one after another, pointed out the truly dire employment situation on the Peninsula. The state’s official unemployment rate is 12.4%. But in construction, it is closer to 30%. That is, as many union reps said, an outright “depression” for construction work.

Others pointed out that there were doubters of other infrastructure projects we now see as utterly foundational to our economy and way of life, from the transcontinental railroad to the Golden Gate Bridge to the Interstate Highway System. The TGV had its doubters. But none of us would today claim we would have been better off if we didn’t build it.

Two people deserve to be singled out here. One is Brian Stanke, Executive Director of Californians For High Speed Rail (I’m the chairman of the board for CA4HSR). Stanke explained that in 2008, voters were asked to approve a project that wasn’t fully funded, whose key details hadn’t been decided, in the midst of a severe recession and state budget crisis. And voters said “yes.” Voters understood exactly what they were doing in November 2008 when they approved Prop 1A, and they very much want HSR to happen.

The other is Emily Lam, who lives near the Hillsdale Caltrain station. She explained that she bought a house recently near the tracks – and she wants HSR to run through her backyard. “We need to think beyond our narrow self interest,” she explained, which drew scowls from many of the NIMBYs, who thrive on tenaciously defending their own self-interest at the cost of others.

Assemblymember Cathleen Galgiani made the trip out from Tracy to speak on behalf of the project, and she made some other excellent points about the cost of doing nothing, and defended the Authority’s work to date.

San Carlos vice-mayor Omar Ahmad gave an excellent presentation on the rail overpasses in his city, explaining how they have generated economic value – property values near the tracks are higher than they were before the grade-separation – and improved safety dramatically, an important consideration in Palo Alto. Ahmad said that not everyone is happy with the berm, but that it was a tradeoff and done in a way that was buildable and generally acceptable.

As I predicted yesterday, the hearing was a coming out party for HSR supporters. The battle has finally been joined.

Simitian and Lowenthal are key figures, but their concerns are different. Both of them are going to play a big role in how the HSR project moves forward. Neither are easily pinned down – Simitian seems a stronger supporter than Lowenthal, who appears to me to be just barely on this side of being an outright HSR denier.

But their concerns are different, meaning different approaches need to be taken. Lowenthal is hung up on the question of ridership. If and when the Authority can offer a clearer set of numbers, he might be more easy to handle. He still worryingly seems to want to use the Prop 1A bond to build glorified commuter rail, and doesn’t appear to get the need for or importance of a statewide system.

Simitian on the other hand seems most interested in the financial issues and the business plan. Obviously ridership is part of that, but he wants to make sure that the state isn’t going to be on the hook for any more money than what was authorized in the Prop 1A bond.

However, they aren’t unbiased. Neither one had ANY questions of the PCC folks (Palo Alto mayor Pat Burt and Menlo Park mayor Richard Cline), but grilled both Jeff Barker and Bob Doty. As I pointed out in my comment, someone needs to conduct oversight of local government as well as the CHSRA, to ensure that local governments aren’t getting away with presenting misleading information, as they clearly did last night with their deeply flawed ridership chart (more on that below).

There are two kinds of HSR critics: Outright deniers, and those who seek to find weak points in the implementation. Many of the commenters were outright HSR deniers, people who don’t think it’s worth the money, think it’ll destroy their communities, don’t think anyone will ride it, on and on. Some of them said truly offensive things: one man called HSR a “tar baby,” a term generally assumed to have racist connotations. Another woman said “we might as well lie back and get raped” by HSR.

Alongside these wackos are another group – those who criticize the project by zeroing in on its weak points in an effort to try and undermine HSR and get it to not be built, in whole or in part. While they get less press, they are the more effective of the two groups of HSR critics. Not all HSR critics are project opponents – the women of CARRD say they don’t oppose HSR and are primarily out to ensure it’s not built above grade. While I suspect they wouldn’t be upset if the project died, and while they have a tendency to frame issues in the worst possible light for HSR, they’re at least reasonable people. And therefore, somewhat effective in getting their ideas across.

The HSR battleground is starting to shift. Whereas in early 2009 it was primarily framed in NIMBY terms, here in 2010 the debates seem more technical in nature – how to fund the project? How to build it? This is much more favorable ground for us HSR supporters, yet it is not without considerable risks. It is at this stage that transit planning can sometimes go badly awry, as extremely bad decisions get made to appease this or that group, at the expense of ridership or cost savings. Holding the line over the next 2 years is going to be critical to ensure the budget isn’t busted.

Ridership is still a major point of contention – but is misunderstood. Alan Lowenthal opened by saying he liked HSR as a concept but said the CHSRA ridership numbers “didn’t pass the smell test” – which gave a big opening to the HSR opponents. Problem is, nobody EVER, once, explained WHY the ridership numbers are flawed. It was constantly asserted, but never explained.

The worst offenders, by far, were the Peninsula Cities Coalition. They presented a powerpoint, which isn’t yet available, that showed 2008 Amtrak boardings at certain NEC stations, compared those to 2035 projections at those stations, and compared those to 2035 projections for CA HSR. One of these showed 24,000 daily boardings in SF, but only 11,000 in NYC. Palo Alto mayor Pat Burt pointed to the Gilroy estimates of about 4,000 daily boardings per day as an example of how the CHSRA ridership numbers were supposedly “absurd.”

Yet Burt didn’t explain WHY that was absurd. We were supposed to just accept, on its face, this hugely flawed and misleading comparison between a weak quasi-HSR system and a fully-fledged bullet train that is more properly and more accurately compared to the TGV, the Shinkansen, or the AVE.

Nor did he delve into the matter of why Gilroy might conceivably have 4,000 daily boardings (for example). Gilroy might be the center of significant growth in south Santa Clara County and San Benito County over the next 25 years. More importantly, Gilroy will be the main HSR station for those people coming to and from Santa Cruz and Monterey, major tourist destinations and regions with a combined population of about 1 million right now. So the notion of 4,000 daily boardings on HSR is plausible, especially if HSR is used by people to commute up to points northward.

On the other hand, the Gilroy numbers might not hold up. But you have to explain why and how they don’t add up. The PCC and Senator Lowenthal just assume we’ll accept their assertion that the numbers don’t make sense. Sorry, that’s not how it works. If you want the CHSRA to explain their estimates better – a reasonable request – you are also obligated to explain your criticisms of those estimates.

More importantly, the whole question of “ridership” is being totally misunderstood. Too many people are using it to try and make the Authority and the project look bad or flawed, instead of using it to improve the project.

Ridership estimates are that – merely estimates. There is no one single magic number that has to be reached. Ridership estimates only matter in relationship to your funding mechanism. How many riders do you need to generate an operating surplus? That isn’t difficult, since every HSR system in operation generates an operating surplus. Virtually all of them have met their ridership goals, even if it took up to 5 years (remember the five year curve).

Ridership is a function of your funding plan, not a driver of it. If you want to build tunnels up and down the Peninsula, then you need to get the ridership to pay for it. If you want a bunch more private money than you’d originally intended, you need to get the ridership to pay for it. If you want to instead of low fares, high service, and a lot of public money for the project, you need to get the ridership for it. And the level for each scenario is necessarily going to be different, and any change from one to the other isn’t some kind of sign that the project is flawed.

The Authority has shown its numbers. Some want to see explanation of how those numbers were arrived at. That’s fine. But too much of the criticism is of the “omg nobody will ride trains in California” variety, or “there’s no way we can outperform Amtrak” when in fact that is precisely what WILL happen and there is ample reason to expect it to happen.

Keep in mind that not all of the ridership criticism is coming from totally unbiased sources. PCC has a vested interest in showing the numbers don’t add up. As DoDo showed, in the 1970s French TGV opponents produced ridership numbers far below the SNCF estimates – and that turned out to be far below the actual ridership numbers that came in once the TGV opened in 1981.

I expect that Lowenthal and Simitian will insist the CHSRA have the ridership numbers independently audited, which is fine. But it doesn’t address the deeper issue, which is how the train will be funded. Instead of acting as passive judges, the legislature should be proactive in helping ensure HSR is indeed properly funded at the construction phase. If it is, then these concerns become much less nettlesome.

CSS is popular, but nobody agrees on what it actually is or means. Everybody likes Context Sensitive Solutions. The CHSRA, Caltrain, the legislature, project opponents, critics, and supporters. What’s not to love?

The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be conceptual agreement on what it actually means or how it actually should work. CA4HSR’s vice-chair Dan Krause spoke in favor of potentially going mile-by-mile and doing a close look at each part of the project, which is a good idea. But others seem to think CSS is their platform to try and change the route (it’s not) or insist that it’s a tunnel or nothing.

There seem to be unresolved issues over the CSS process itself – how often the meetings are happening, things of that nature. Resolving that is preferable to ensure a good public process occurs. But I worry that everyone expects CSS to produce the outcome that best suits their preconceived notions, and it won’t. I hope CSS isn’t being set up to fail.

HSR critics and opponents are now targeting the federal stimulus money. One new revelation introduced by Pat Burt in the PCC presentation was that they think the federal stimulus timeline is “rushing” things and that slowing down would be better, even if it meant not going for stimulus funds.

There’s really only one response to this: Are you nuts? That’s $3 to $4 billion in federal funding that’s being jeopardized and/or rejected by this attitude. It’s as if Palo Alto and Menlo Park city leaders are oblivious to or unsympathetic to the widespread unemployment that many workers and constituents are suffering.

As to the notion of delaying the stimulus deadlines (project plans by September 2011, steel in the ground by September 2012), this is simply not going to happen. I floated this by some contacts I have on Capitol Hill this morning, and their response was to laugh at the suggestion. Obama and the Congress staked a lot on getting that money out the door quickly, and even the 2011/2012 deadlines for HSR were a push. If they pushed those deadlines back further, they open themselves up to Republican criticism that the “stimulus” is just pork. So it is very, very unlikely that the deadlines will be pushed back.

It’s called “stimulus” for a reason – the economy is in a dire state, and jobs are desperately needed. We can ensure that HSR is designed well, with meaningful public input, while moving with all deliberate speed to get this project moving.

Peninsula residents haven’t made their case to the people of California. There was an interesting moment in Menlo Park mayor Rich Cline’s presentation, where he said that “bloggers don’t have to worry about finances the way city officials do” and that “We need to make sure that we don’t get leveraged against a tunnel because Californians think we’re picking their pockets” (both are my paraphrases).

Which suggests to me the Peninsula residents critical of or opposed to the HSR projects have totally failed to make their case to the rest of the state, and perhaps see no need to do so. Your humble blogger is a taxpaying resident of the state of California, so I very much have a financial stake in this. So do the other 6.5 million people who voted “yes” to Prop 1A.

And of course, people think Menlo Park is trying to “pick our pockets” because that’s precisely what they want to do. In the 1960s, the city of Berkeley raised taxes in order to fund a bond issue to put BART underground. Neither the state nor the rest of the Bay Area did it for them. Yet Menlo Park’s approach appears to be to demand that the state or feds pay for their tunnel, which is neither fair, practical, nor realistic.

If they want a tunnel, I don’t object to that concept. But they have to come up with a credible answer to the question of how it will be funded. So far, they haven’t done so.

Ending the train at San José is still popular, although clearly illegal. I was a bit surprised at how many people called for terminating the train at San José. This idea is quite easily dismissed. First, it’s illegal. Prop 1A explicitly said the terminus would be at the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, something that the Attorney General’s office agreed with earlier this month. For people who complain about the “illegal” parts of the business plan to then turn around and say that we should stop at San José is hypocritical.

It’s an impractical idea too. Ridership drops off dramatically if you terminate at Diridon Station – folks won’t transfer to Caltrain. Caltrain isn’t designed as an intercity rail service, it’s designed as a commuter railroad. And without riders, the finances don’t work out. Again, people who complain about ridership and funding have no basis to propose doing things to the HSR system that would undermine both.

It’s also nonsensical. Many of the “end it at San José” people said we should electrify and grade-separate Caltrain. Um, if that happens, why not just send the HSR trains up to SF?! I just don’t get it.

The “revote” concept is growing in popularity among the deniers and critics, despite it being extremely unlikely. Look, I’d love to have a revote on the 2000 presidential election. It produced a fiscally reckless outcome that ultimately destroyed our economy and left our country in tatters. Same with the 2003 recall – can we redo that too? While we’re at it, I’d like a revote on the 1980 election, Prop 13 in 1978, the 1968 election, and definitely the 1950 California US Senate election (does anyone here disagree history would have been better off had Helen Gahagan Douglas beaten Richard Nixon? Didn’t think so).

But as Simitian said last night, “elections have consequences.” California voters approved this project. It’s going to happen. Trying to go back to the ballot until you get the result you want on something like this just doesn’t make sense.

Now some of you might say “but Robert, you work for the Courage Campaign, an organization that calls for going back to the ballot to repeal Prop 8. Isn’t that inconsistent?” The answer is no, it is not, because these are two totally different things. You cannot compare an infrastructure project to people’s basic rights. Prop 8 should never have been allowed on the ballot, and will hopefully be ruled unconstitutional by the federal courts shortly – whereas Prop 1A should have been on the ballot and is a perfectly legitimate thing for the people of California to approve. But it is a fundamentally different set of issues than an infrastructure project. They really ought not be compared directly.

In closing, while I know I’ve left a ton of stuff out that I’m sure you’ll go over in the comments, it was another sign that HSR really is going to happen, and overall a very positive evening for the project and its supporters.