Another holiday weekend, another trip to Orange County, another time I desperately wish for HSR. Those who doubt the public desire for HSR probably haven’t driven across our state lately. The Berkeley ITS study made much of the cost comparison between driving and taking HSR; yet apparently they didn’t consider the time comparison. 7 hours in a car versus 2-3 hours in a train (depending on destination) leaves the train looking a hell of a lot better, especially in a digital age. And I’m sure that the parents among us can explain why it’s vastly preferable to spend just a few hours on a train as opposed to most of your non-sleeping day in a car with a toddler.

On the drive back to Monterey today, my wife and I decided to break things up with a stop in Santa Barbara, a town my wife had never actually been to (multiple trips through it on Highway 101 notwithstanding). We wound up parking a block away from the Santa Barbara train station, and as we walked toward State Street and the beach, we saw Pacific Surfliner #763 arrive at the station and disgorge a big load of passengers, who promptly headed toward the shops and the beach.

Those passengers and local businesses know well the benefits of passenger rail service, and would likely all immediately and instinctively understand the benefits of a train that was nearly three times as fast as the Surfliner, a train with frequent service that was rarely, if ever, delayed.

Unfortunately, there remain many people in California who refuse to look at HSR’s global success or at California’s own passenger rail success (the Surfliner is a wildly popular train, second busiest in the Amtrak system, and the Capitol Corridor is the third busiest with a record of reliability and high ridership). Instead they remain absolutely convinced, for reasons that we may never know, that HSR will be a failure in California. And some of them seek out evidence to confirm this pre-existing conclusion.

That description seems to fit State Senator Alan Lowenthal. Longtime readers of this blog know that we’ve been very critical of the chair of the Senate Transportation Committee for his repeated statements that obfuscate the truth about the HSR project. He claims to be an HSR supporter, but this appears to be merely the case so he can criticize and undermine the project without being seen as an outright opponent, in which case his criticisms could be more easily dismissed.

One of his most notorious anti-HSR statements is his frequent assertion that HSR ridership numbers “don’t pass the smell test”. Lowenthal made these statements often in late 2009 and early 2010, without offering any evidence to back them up. It was an entirely inappropriate thing for a state legislator to say, but Lowenthal not only went ahead with it, but he got his colleagues to order the Berkeley ITS ridership report partly on the basis of his claims. That shouldn’t be seen as a coincidence – Lowenthal must have known that Samer Madanat, lead author of the study, was an HSR critic based on the flawed report he wrote last fall. It seems plausible to believe Lowenthal handpicked Madanat to lead the ridership report on that basis.

Why? So Lowenthal could set up the strawman he could then knock down. Lowenthal had no evidentiary basis for his claims about HSR ridership numbers “not passing the smell test,” but now he does. And once the study was released last week, Lowenthal wasted no time at all in using it to justify his attack on the HSR project.

Which is bad enough. Worse is that Lowenthal went FAR beyond the actual conclusions of the report to make accusations that even Madanat himself refused to make. Here’s Lowenthal quoted in Mike Rosenberg’s article on the ridership report:

“This is quite an indictment. Nobody was watching the store,” said state Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, chairman of the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, which called for the report and has been overseeing the high-speed rail project. “It makes you think after reading this that they told (their consultants) that they wanted certain things to come out in a certain way.”

Make no mistake, Lowenthal is accusing the CHSRA of telling Cambridge Systematics to cook the books of the ridership study to produce the numbers the Authority supposedly wanted. This is an enormous charge, and if true would likely warrant a criminal investigation.

But Madanat explicitly disavowed that possibility. See Michael Cabanatuan’s article on the ridership report from Friday:

Madanat said, however, that the report’s conclusions and criticisms should not be seen as evidence Cambridge Systematics rigged its report to show higher ridership figures, as some high-speed rail opponents have suggested.

“This is the best firm in the business,” he said. “They have a reputation to protect. I would not say, and I would have a hard time believing, that they skewed the numbers. And there is no evidence of that.”

Unfortunately, some gullible folks fell for Lowenthal’s gambit – like Nathanael Johnson, the SF Gate blogger we discredited on Friday. Here’s Johnson’s update to his blog post from Thursday:

This is what sources have been muttering to me for a while now, but no one has wanted to come out and say it on the record. It’s probably a little more complex than this. First of all, there’s no “they” here. There are a bunch of different people facing various pressures – and placing different pressures on consultants. But it has been definitively demonstrated that planners usually understand which side their bread is buttered on, and frequently produce results that will keep the butter flowing (to extend the metaphor).

Wow. Just…wow.

That is an extremely unprofessional post. Johnson mentions unnamed “sources,” so we are unable to verify the veracity of who has been feeding him this information. I’ve heard the same things, but it always comes from HSR critics, many of whom post on this blog. I’ve never heard anyone actually involved with either the Authority or Cambridge Systematics make these claims. It is deeply irresponsible for Johnson to repeat this without evidence.

As you saw, Johnson then went on to slam the entire ridership modeling industry as being nothing more than a bunch of hacks paid to provide whatever numbers their clients want. This sweeping accusation is accompanied by no evidence whatsoever, just Johnson’s assertion that it has been “definitively demonstrated.” That claim needs more than just a “citation needed” tag – it ought to be stricken entirely by Johnson, who should know better than to toss around insinuations and blanket accusations like that.

But that’s the sort of thing that Lowenthal enables when he too tosses around accusations that he can’t or won’t back up with evidence. And he does this in the name of an ostensible HSR supporter, even though his statements and proposals tend to undermine the project.

There’s a name for this kind of behavior: “concern trolling”:

A concern troll is a false flag pseudonym created by a user whose actual point of view is opposed to the one that the user’s sockpuppet claims to hold. The concern troll posts in web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts to sway the group’s actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed “concerns”. The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt within the group….

For example, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair accused a conservative New York Daily News columnist of “concern troll” behavior in his efforts to downplay the Mark Foley scandal. Wolcott links what he calls concern trolls to Saul Alinsky’s “Do-Nothings”, giving a long quote from Alinsky on the Do-Nothings’ method and effects:

These Do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, ‘I agree with your ends but not your means.’

Lowenthal appears to be the leader of the concern trolls, at least when it comes to California HSR. Unfortunately, he’s not just some random dude, but is the chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, where he pledges to grill the Authority at a hearing this coming week. These hearings give Lowenthal power over the Authority. But it also raises a question about Lowenthal’s own long record of misleading statements against the HSR project:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?