Despite AB 3034, Los Banos Still Wants an HSR Stop
In the summer of 2008, the high speed rail bond proposal was altered in order to address criticisms some project supporters had about possible sprawl in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. AB 3034, the bill that became Prop 1A and was approved by voters that fall, specifically ruled out any station location between Gilroy and Merced. This meant that a possible station at Los Banos, on Highway 152 just east of Interstate 5, is now ruled out under that voter-approved law.
But Los Banos isn’t giving up so easily, as this Merced Sun-Star report shows:
As the California High-Speed Rail Authority prepares to hold an informational meeting in Los Baños next week, Mayor Tommy Jones is working to come up with a location near the city where a station could be placed.
The rail authority will meet with the public Tuesday from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the Police Annex building, 535 J St.
Los Baños is not one of the sites chosen for a stop on the high-speed rail route. However, Jones believes having a location picked out is one of the critical steps in lobbying the rail authority to change its decision.
“I talked to the people who did BART. They told me a lot of stops were added,” Jones said, comparing Bay Area Rapid Transit to the high-speed rail project. “It’s going to have to be a fight, (but) we’re going to get the process started.”
Jones must be a master of understatement. This is going to be more than a fight. It would be a major battle between Los Banos and environmental advocates, including but not limited to the Sierra Club.
So far, however, it seems to just be Jones who is trying to revive the dead station. There’s no evidence so far that many officials, aside from a few, are backing this. And there is no evidence that any HSR planners are either (their planned meeting in town is focused on the route between Gilroy and Merced).
At this time a Los Banos station does not appear to be a good idea. The ridership would not only be low, it would certainly encourage sprawl, whereas the other San Joaquin Valley stations are located downtown and so will help limit sprawl and protect farmland.
Jones argues that Los Banos residents would be inconvenienced without a station:
Jones and Merced County Supervisor Jerry O’Banion believe there should be a stop on the Westside.
Jones said he’s considering a location near Santa Nella as a place where a high-speed rail station could be constructed.
“The train is going south to Fresno. It doesn’t make logical sense to go north to Merced,” Jones said. “I think the only reason a stop was not here was politics. Politics is the reason California is in the shape it’s in.”
O’Banion is not convinced that commuters in Los Baños will use the high speed rail system if they are forced to go to Merced to board it.
“The whole reason for the rail is to eliminate car traffic,” O’Banion said. “I don’t think people in Los Baños or on the Westside are going to drive all the way over to Merced to cross the mountain and come back to Los Baños.”
Jones said because Los Baños has been declared a population growth center in the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint — a document listing goals and assumptions for the region in the next few decades — it is necessary for the city to have a stop along the high-speed rail route.
This argument could be made for countless cities along the proposed route. And I’m not unsympathetic to it – it’s good that civic leaders understand that HSR can benefit their cities and want a station for that purpose.
But that doesn’t mean every place that wants a station deserves a station, at least not in the first phase. Jones may be right about the development plans for the San Joaquin Valley, but the environmental groups fighting those plans have a point that sprawl in and around Los Banos is not exactly the best long-term planning for the region or the state. Better that such growth be directed to existing urban centers such as Merced, Fresno, and other such places.
Who knows, maybe in a few decades there might be an ability to expand the current HSR ROW, add some more electrified tracks for other local rail services, and maybe then Los Banos can be reconsidered. But it doesn’t seem to be a place that will ever be all that high on the list of desirable station locations even once the first two phases of the HSR project are built.
There should be dedicated, robust headway bus service infiling communities between HSR stations that aren’t on another rail route (the Amtrak San Joaquin, Caltrain, etc.) which Los Banos is not. Some infill stations could even be added to the San Joaquin if ridership is induced enough.
Also, for what it’s worth I strongly disagree with the notion that HSR induced development could ever be sprawl. Sprawl is automobile induced and dependant development.
It will be interesting to see what places like Lancaster/Palmdale and Temecula will become when they get HSR. They will surely grow but will do so differently than the way that they did in the last years of the last century. You’ll see a lot of buses, TOD style villages and even streetcar LRT I think.
Dennis Lytton Reply:
June 13th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
The bus feeder network should have through ticketing. Like Amtrak California’s very successfull system with the corridor services.
The last thing CAHSR is any more drama..NO Los Banos station
The idea is not just to eliminate car traffic. The idea is to eliminate/minimize development in unsustainable and/or environmentally sensitive areas.
Dennis Lytton Reply:
June 13th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Agreed that we do not need a Los Banos Station for the drama among other things.
We need to accomodate development in this country to continue to grow. Much of that should be focused on urban infill but probably all of it cannot be. HSR for places like the Antelope Valley and the Temecula area will help it to grow sustainably.
Dennis Lytton Reply:
June 13th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
Come to thing of it we are probably the only HSR country that plans to grow into the future, that doesn’t either want to constrain its growth (China, and fairly successfull at it) or has reached ZPG (Europe & Japan). We need to channel growth into urban infill and new “elagant” density. HSR dependant communities if you will.
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 1:08 am
Ironically, Los Banos would probably embrace transit-oriented development near the station with a vengeance if that were a hard precondition for getting one in the first place, if only because long-distance commuters with jobs in Silicon Valley might anyhow want to live closer to one another than to folks already living in the town. TOD housing in Los Banos might be affordable but don’t expect too much in the way of cosmopolitan flair.
Western Merced county probably isn’t the best place for this type of population engineering. TOD infill is harder to achieve in areas that are already built up, but that’s where it should gradually happen over the next couple of decades.
Alon Levy Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Urban China is growing much faster than urban America. Nationwide it has low population growth, but there’s so much movement to the big coastal cities that the cities with HSR stops are seeing rapid population growth.
rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 1:50 am
China is undergoing a wave of industrialization, poor farmers are moving from the countryside to the cities in search of economic opportunity. I don’t think the analogy is relevant in the California context, where most of the population growth is due to inward migration from other states and countries plus plain old fecundity.
Alon Levy Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 2:09 am
California has negative domestic net migration.
But it doesn’t really matter whether population growth come from people migrating from a third-world country on your border or from a third-world region within your country.
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 7:57 am
“California has negative domestic net migration.”
Right now it does, because homeowners who default on their mortgage tend to leave the state in search of new employment and a lower cost of living elsewhere.
Alon Levy Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 9:58 am
On the contrary, the domestic net emigration was at its highest during the housing bubble, when people sold overvalued houses in California and bought houses in Arizona and Nevada hoping to make an additional profit.
Peter Reply:
June 15th, 2010 at 8:46 am
But that’s not why it’s happening now, I think Rafael was right about the current reason…
The answer will be no for awhile. Until the area reaches a population of 250k, you will not see an HSR stop.
Rafael Reply:
June 13th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
250k is probably too high a requirement, there are places smaller than Bakersfield that are getting stations. However, without a stop, Los Banos won’t even reach 100k. Chicken, meet egg.
Roger Christensen Reply:
June 13th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Well, if 250k is the critieria, that justifies the East Hanford station. Kings and Tulare Counties have a combined population of 600,000. The biggest populations in between Visalia/Tulare and Hanford/Lemoore. However no elegant density here in the middle of any city large or small.
Roger Christensen Reply:
June 13th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
I am being an IMBY. I currently live on a ranch 10 minutes north of the proposed Kings/Tulare station.
I have plans to sell my Sherman Oaks condo and purchase in my beloved stomping grounds of downtown LA. My golden years could be so fun!
rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 2:02 am
There’s no hard-and-fast population number for deciding if a city or region should get a station. CHSRA’s ridership analysis indicated that Kings/Tulare would be marginal because the cities you mention are quite far from one another. The station may still happen, if only because every county the line runs through (except Madera) has been slated to get at least one station. Again, not a hard-and-fast rule but rather, a reflection of political reality.
The entire west side of the Central Valley is being starved of water as a result of a federal ruling that cut flow in the California aqueduct by 1/3 to protect the Delta smelt, a unremarkable but endangered little fish species that many consider essential to the food web in the estuary between Stockton and Vallejo.
The water shortage is forcing farmers to uproot almond trees and take other measures to conserve even more, even though many of them already have drip irrigation systems etc. More than a few are being forced out of business, so Los Banos in struggling. Firebaugh and Mendota are at risk of becoming ghost towns. In stark terms, the complex $11b water bond on the November ballot will be about sacrificing the fragile ecosystem in the Delta vs. sacrificing (some) agricultural production on the west side of the Central Valley, where natural rainfall is comparable to Morocco’s. The topsoil there is fertile and should be preserved for future generations, but fiscally-challenged California needs another major water distribution system like it needs another hole in the head. Whisky is for drinking and water is for fighting over. Farmland south of Los Banos that can no longer be sufficiently irrigated for food production should gradually be turned over to renewable electricity farms, perhaps closed-cycle algal oil production. That would concentrate the available water at fewer farms, which could then stay in business.
In that sense, an HSR stop in the Los Banos area would help the regional economy gradually diversify away from thirsty agriculture. It wouldn’t just be an opportunity to grow the town’s population and associated tax base. The suggestion to site the station near Santa Nella Rd, right next to I-5, would put it well west of the sensitive grasslands that the Sierra Club was concerned about. Still, that’s farmland right now and located right next to the San Luis reservoir. If any small part of the west side is viable for agriculture in the long run, it this one.
Add to this potent mix Santa Clara county’s long-standing if unofficial policy of propping up real estate values in Silicon Valley by keeping housing within easy commute distance of hi-tech jobs there artificially scarce via zoning laws. Even Gilroy is subject to strict limits on development, ostensibly because it’s in a 100-year flood plain. However, Silicon Valley also doesn’t want it to become a low-cost bedroom community. Hollister and even tiny San Juan Bautista, both in San Benito county and located on higher ground, could yet go that way thanks to the planned HSR station in Gilroy. That’s a risk Pacheco proponents are apparently willing to take, at least that stop is supposed to also serve the cities of Monterey and Watsonville. By contrast, there are no sizeable population centers within 30 miles of Los Banos.
Finally, CHSRA is counting on running at maximum feasible speed in the Gilroy-Chowchilla section of the starter line. A stop in Los Banos would require very long sidings to avoid impacts on the main line. Think in terms of a couple of miles of quad tracking in both directions. Of course, this is also true of other stations in the Central Valley. However, the proposed site near Santa Nella Road in Los Banos is so close to the mountains there may not be enough level terrain to let westbound trains to gain sufficient momentum before the gradient picks up. Ergo, CHSRA has operational reasons for resisting calls for a Los Banos stop in that particular location.
I don’t see how the political winds could possibly change for the town, since the prohibition on a station there was explicitly written into AB3034 and approved by a majority of state voters as part of the package. Any attempt to amend that law would trigger calls for countless other amendments and the whole project would unravel or a least take a giant leap backward.
Matthew Melzer Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 11:53 am
Driving to/from LA via 1-5 this weekend, it was impossible to ignore all the signs screaming “CONGRESS-CREATED DUST BOWL”. But beyond those property lines is dry landscape that reveals the true natural ecology of the Central Valley and makes those signs seem entitled. There was no way that irrigation-intensive monocrop agriculture could be sustainable there in the long run. Just like the upheaval we face in shifting towards less energy consumption (and more alternative energy production), it would be arduous to realign our country’s food production in a way that isn’t totally at odds with ecological needs, future population growth, and desired public health outcomes. A whirlwind of change in agricultural subsidies, food distribution systems, and land use would be needed. But, as a non-expert lay observer in this field, taking a long view it’s hard to not see such change as inevitable. I’m sure many farmers rightfully feel threatened, but the problem is far bigger than them. Just like workers in dirty energy production with soon-to-be-obsolete skill sets, they will need to be assisted in retraining and/or relocation. We’ll need more food than ever, but we’ll need it to be grown in appropriate climates depending on the crop and in ways that don’t cause topsoil loss, air pollution, groundwater contamination, and an underclass of desperately poor worker-serfs.
Certainly HSR will help the Central Valley diversify its economy and provide direct economic benefit to people formerly completely dependent on agribusiness. Unfortunately the West Side of the Valley is indeed poorly positioned to benefit anytime soon, account its low population and the apparent HSR operational needs. It’s easy to see truck stop kingdoms like Santa Nella as Kunstler-esque dystopia in the making.
The people of Los Banos are not subhuman monsters. Why are they prohibited from wanting to grow while no one bats an eye if a total Greenfield station gets built in Gilroy? Oh yeah, the Central Valley is nothing but “illiterate & irrelevant.”
I don’t think it makes much economic sense to build a station with 1A funds but I say if Los Banos wants to raise the funds for a station they should be allowed to no matter how much the wine snobs think they should just crawl into the ground and die.
Alon Levy Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Gilroy is less environmentally sensitive.
rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 2:05 am
That, plus the pervasive garlic odor isn’t to everyone’s liking. Also, Gilroy is in Santa Clara county, which has restricted development due to flood risk.
rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 2:30 am
If state voters felt the entire CV is “illiterate & irrelevant”, as you put it, why did they approve a network that includes stations in Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, Modesto, Stockton and Sacramento? HSR is supposed to link cities, not small farming communities.
Frankly, though Robert Cruickshank who runs this blog lives in Monterey and will benefit from the Gilroy station, I’m not 100% persuaded that there should be one even there. Caltrain ridership there is currently something 120 boardings on an average weekday, but that’s with only three daily trains. TAMC is trying to get Caltrain to extend limited service out to Watsonville and Salinas to cope with congestion on 101, with a light rail line connecting Monterey to a transfer station in Castroville. However, unless the HSR station ends up downtown Gilroy – where the ROW is very narrow – these services would be no more than commuter rail to San Jose and SF. They would not function as effective feeder services for HSR. Besides, Caltrain has bigger fish to fry right now, perhaps TAMC will need to ask for an extension of the Amtrak Capitol Corridor route instead. It’s a long way, though, and Placer county is next in line.
On a separate note, you might want to be really, really careful with historically loaded epithets like “subhuman”. The decision against a station in Los Banos wasn’t about avoiding cost, let alone casting aspersions on its residents. It was about avoiding development risks to prime farmland and the grasslands. Madera, Manteca/Lathrop and Elk Grove, to name a few, are all larger than Los Banos and none of them are getting a stop, either. Hanford is a borderline case, analogous to Gilroy in that there are other cities “nearby”. HSR only works if there’s enough distance between stops and enough ridership at each one. Los Banos could not deliver the latter and the HSR project isn’t supposed to induce the creation of brand-new cities or even districts in greenfield locations.
Travis D Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Taiwan built at least two stations in the middle of nowhere with the idea that future cities would be built around them later on. Check it out on Google Earth.
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
So California should take its cue from Taiwan, which foolishly insisted on private financing that led to beet field stations for the developers that provided it? They went bust during the financial meltdown and the government had to bail out the HSR operator by taking on its debt liabilities. Now it has beet field stations that aren’t serving the downtown areas of certain cities at all well and no developers to create the hoped-for new districts.
Over time, other developers probably will take advantage of the opportunity. As a funding model, Taiwan HSR failed badly and predictably: HSR lines the world over can generate operating profits, so they don’t need operating subsidies. They cannot service the debt on the starter line.
The routing and station decisions for California’s HSR system should not be compromised to let ambitious developers reap massive profits if their plans succeed yet socialize the liability via bankruptcy if they don’t.
Caelestor Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
Basically, TaHSR sort of represents what HSR would be like if you bypassed the CV.
Alon Levy Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
The main issue with private financing was not the route. The route was already selected; SNCF and DB probably made many of those decisions. What’s more important is that because THSR had no access to government funding, it had to borrow money at subprime rate. It was operationally profitable within four months of opening, but it had to pay 8% interest on its debt, which was unusually high to begin with because the line is viaduct-heavy.
Joey Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 7:42 am
Los Baños has about half the population of Gilroy, and no real regional market to speak of either (Gilroy has the Monterey peninsula etc). Even if you disregard the environmental aspects, it doesn’t really make sense to put a station there.
Travis D Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
I don’t buy the “protect the environment” ploy here. Most of the area west of Los Banos is scrubland, not prime agricultural land. Of course I think that if the owner of some prime agricultural land wants to do something else with it they should be allowed to anyways. I’m not a fan of what zoning laws have done to most of our communities here in California.
So the only real argument against it is water and that makes no sense because a huge course of (channelized) water that flows down into LA, a place no one seems to be trying to stop from growing, runs just west of Los Banos. It arguably makes much more sense to just use that water in a huge Los Banos development than to use it to allow more suburbs to be built in Riverside.
We need to wake up to a reality that the jobs are in the Bay Area but affordable housing is not. So it’s stupid to try and stop the creation of affordable housing in the few places it can exist while allowing people to keep their jobs. Besides a person living in a new mega-condo in Los Banos would arguably be closer to their work in San Jose than someone in lives in the Inland Empire and works in LA.
Alon Levy Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
The issue is not agriculture; it’s wildlife preservation.
YesonHSR Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
like those PCL yuppies would like a mountain lion dragging there kids off by the neck screaming
Peter Reply:
June 15th, 2010 at 8:45 am
I think people who move into recently destroyed wildlife habitat in the name of sprawl deserve whatever they get in terms of wildlife. At least the cops in Gilroy have learned to scare mountain lions off without killing them (go pepper ball guns!).
$100K.
The amount of lobbying money needed to get a Los Banos station built. Money is fungible. The money will come from some other pot and the station will be built. This is basic politics 101.
Anyone who thinks that the Los Banos will not get built within 5 years of the tracks being laid through Los Banos is a delusional.
BTW – this is just one of many reasons why Pacheco Pass continues to be a stupid idea.
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 2:56 am
It’s precisely to avoid this risk that lawmakers explicitly excluded Los Banos as a station candidate in the text of AB3034. Politics is politics and the law is the law. Since this particular law was passed via a ballot initiative, I believe the state legislature doesn’t even have the authority to amend it. Lawmakers aren’t interested in putting any amendments on the ballot in the foreseeable future and, it would take an expensive signature drive to achieve that as a grass roots effort. Even then, Los Banos would still need to persuade state voters to approve such an initiative.
As for the wisdom of choosing Pacheco Pass over Altamont, we’ve gone over that many times before on this blog. The Los Banos station issue was arguably one of the less potent arguments put forward in that context.
Btw, Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution explicitly prohibits Bills of Attainder. I don’t think the Los Banos exclusion in AB3034 qualifies as an example, though, because it doesn’t refer to criminal law.
Victor Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 9:09 am
And a station is a thing, As It is not human, So I’d agree, It does not qualify, As how can a train station commit treason?
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
The attainder argument would of course apply to the citizens of Los Banos, not the station. Still, they’re not being singled out for criminal punishment here, they’re “just” being explicitly cut out of service plans for the statewide HSR project. Also, other small towns along the line, many of which are due to get 220mph trains blasting through not past, are not getting stations, either. Others will get service later or won’t be anywhere near a station, ever.
Travis D Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Other towns may not get a station but how many of those other towns were explicitly excluded from ever getting one by law?
It’s one thing to say that Madera won’t get a station because nearby Fresno and Merced will. It would be another if you made it a law that Madera never could ever get a station even if no station is ever built nearby and the city balloons to 350,000+ residents. That’s what hypothetically could happen with Los Banos.
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Right, so the folks who framed AB3034 and those who voted for prop 1A accepted that as part of the package, growth at Los Banos should not be encouraged, on environmental grounds. I’m not exactly sure why CHSRA could have used the normal planning process to simply say no to a station there.
There is also a limit of 24 stations total. It’s not clear if either restriction applies permanently or merely to the maximum that AB3034 funds may be used for. My guess is the latter, but that’s a matter of interpretation.
Let every burg have their hsr station. With the Palmdale gerrymander the precedent has already been set. Once you have trod the path to perdition there’s no turning back.
Let the dumbdown proceed.
Hans Laetz Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 10:48 am
Palmdale is no gerrymander.
With trains, the fastest distance is not a straight line. It is the level line.
You checked out the Grapevine lately? The whole train would need to be in tunnels or on bridges, through unoccupied and unoccupiable land (except for the Tejon Ranch, where speculators are planning Irvine II).
Rafael Reply:
June 14th, 2010 at 11:06 am
The gradient of the north slope up Tejon Pass is 6%, much steeper than current HSR trains capable of 220mph operation can handle. The alternative CHSRA looked at involved a single long tunnel from Grapevine to a point south of the pass, plus additional shorter tunnels across to Santa Clarita. The total number of miles tunneled would be larger than for the Tehachapis alignment, which also permits crossing both the Garlock and the San Andreas faults at grade.
A new study needs to be done on Tejon because the previous ones were tainted by an a priori political decision in favor of Palmdale developers. Bechtel is too politicized to be objective.
I am reminded of the language the Vartican used some years to announce a major change in doctrine: “We have made some new discoveries.” I just love that line. The CHSRA could use it when proclaiming a move back to Tejon.
Yeah, I see Bechtel as about as rigid and orthodox as the Vatican. As well as being tied to fixers.