At yesterday’s California High Speed Rail Authority board meeting in San Francisco, staff – led by Peninsula Rail Project head Bob Doty – presented the Supplemental Alternatives Analysis report for the San Francisco to San José segment of the HSR project. Based on community feedback, particularly the desire to build the project within the existing right-of-way so as to keep property takes to an absolute minimum, the following three options were carried forward, as reported by the SF Chronicle:

Three options will be the focus of further study. All leave the Transbay Terminal in a covered trench to the Fourth and King streets Caltrain station, then travel at ground level to South San Francisco.

– One option relies almost entirely on ground-level and elevated structures – either earthen berms or concrete or steel viaducts – to travel from San Francisco to San Jose.

– Another option uses ground-level and elevated rails until Atherton, then mixes ground level, elevated, trench and tunnel designs on the southern part of the Peninsula with tracks placed in open trenches in stretches through parts of Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto and Mountain View.

– A variation of the second option would place tracks in a long trench stretching from Atherton to Sunnyvale.

(UPDATE: Mike Rosenberg’s Mercury News article has a very good graphic showing the different options.)

The Supplemental AA report noted that the long tunnel would not only be extremely costly to build, but has two other problems that contradict the expressed desires of those in the community that spoke out:

• It would be difficult to build the tunnel while maintaining existing Caltrain operations

• It would be difficult to build the tunnel without an expanded right of way at the transitions into and out of the tunnel, requiring more property takes than the public would likely support.

As the article indicated, a tunnel could still happen in the southern Peninsula area, including Palo Alto – and if the public expresses a desire for a tunnel and is willing to accept Caltrain disruption and more property takes, a longer tunnel could be back on the table.

That would still require it to be funded. Here, the Peninsula Cities Coalition would do well to help their own case and stop attacking the HSR project and instead work collaboratively and constructively to ensure HSR is funded by Congress. When PCC member cities such as Atherton or Menlo Park sue the Authority and play up claims that the ridership numbers are flawed, it does not help the cause of getting more HSR funding from Congress, which the Peninsula cities will need to construct their desired designs.

The fact that aerial structures are still on the table will likely revive discredited claims that it would be a “Berlin Wall” that would “divide” communities, a claim that does not acknowledge the fact that Peninsula cities are already “divided” by the existing tracks, whether they’re at grade or above grade, and that an aerial solution would actually help reunite these communities by making the rail corridor more permeable and safer.

Of course, some of these cities already have built their own aerial structures and haven’t suffered as a result, with San Carlos being a high-profile example. Clem reminds us of another example from San Mateo:

The elevated structure spans across several blocks of San Mateo, like a gash through the heart of downtown. Its 67-foot width casts vast shadows onto downtown shoppers, like a freeway overpass, although women and children seem to pass underneath without being attacked. The concrete structure, strangely free of graffiti, provides a full 16 feet of free clearance underneath it for trucks. Three stories up above, the side walls of the elevated bridges loom a full 25 feet over the street. To add insult to this injury, metallic poles tower another 18 feet above the structure, bringing its overall height to an incredible 43 feet!

If you know San Mateo, you might have guessed this describes the Central Parking Garage, a structure with presence, visual impact, and context-sensitivity resembling the elevated, four-track high-speed rail corridor that residents fear.

There are examples of aerial passenger rail structures that are integrated well into their communities and have spurred growth and activity. We highlighted several in March 2009. Unfortunately, there still remains a bias in the US against aerial structures, equating them with blight.

One of these biased sources is, once again, the folks from KALW News, who for some reason that I cannot quite understand, have been given a platform at the SF Chronicle’s website on their Bay Area Transit blog. This is despite the fact that these reporters appear to not have much familiarity with the HSR project, or with the years of accumulated knowledge built up by the transit blogging community, and despite the fact that other writers for the Chronicle’s Bay Area Transit blog, such as Greg Dewar and Matthew Roth, have far more experience, knowledge and insight on Bay Area transit issues.

Today’s post by Casey Miner is a great example. Miner, who apparently had little understanding or familiarity with the HSR project until very recently, had this reaction to the Peninsula Supplemental AA report:

As anyone who’s lived near an elevated BART station knows, the noise, vibration and general aesthetics of those kinds of tracks aren’t always the greatest. And they can indeed wreck a neighborhood—just look at what happened to West Oakland’s 7th Street.

This is quite ridiculous, to claim that West Oakland’s 7th Street was “wrecked” by BART. As Miner may not know, the true damage was done by the Cypress Street viaduct, which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It also didn’t help that West Oakland suffered 40 straight years of economic dislocation, brought on not by freeways or BART (in fact, BART was welcomed by local residents as a bringer of jobs and access to other employment centers around the region) but by state and federal economic policies that starved the community of jobs and other economic resources. I’ve studied Oakland history, and am very familiar with the work of others that have done the same, and no historian has yet claimed that BART was what “wrecked” West Oakland.

In fact, one can see places where BART aerial structures haven’t “wrecked” a community – Albany is a pretty good example – and places where it may even have helped, with Fruitvale being another example.

But that error is minor compared to Miner’s next statement:

But what seemed more salient to me was a comparison to this country’s last big infrastructure project: the interstate highway system.

The dream of futuristic highways soaring over the land led many cities to build freeways right through the middle of neighborhoods. By the time people started to rethink those ideas the damage had been done. It’s only now that some groups are gaining traction in their efforts to take down sections of freeway and re-unify the areas they divided. The push to tear down part of Interstate 280 is the latest local example.

It’s been a long time since we built BART and the freeways, and it may be that engineers are able to solve some of the problems with aerial tracks. I’ll be looking into those issues in the coming weeks and will let you know what I find.

This is a totally inappropriate comparison for several reasons, all of which indicate Miner’s basic lack of understanding of transportation issues and therefore call into question her fitness to write the Bay Area Transit blog for SFGate.com:

1. The Peninsula HSR project is entirely unlike the Interstate projects because, unlike those projects, the HSR project will not be built on a new alignment. The tracks already act as a barrier. An aerial structure would, in practice, not be all that different, except things would be safer and more permeable to vehicles and pedestrians. This is totally unlike a freeway project, however, because the HSR project isn’t being blasted through a neighborhood on a totally new alignment.

2. Rail corridors behave very differently for communities than freeways. This is especially true for the Peninsula corridor, which was built up around the tracks. Downtowns and urban development patterns emerged around rail stations, which is totally and completely different from most freeways, which ignored existing development patterns and blasted through them, causing disruption. Whether the Peninsula rail corridor is aerial, at-grade, or in a trench/tunnel, it would still act to bring the community together through its stations, whereas a freeway does not bring community development activities toward it by its very nature.

Miner then compounds her already-flawed post by not showing any understanding of the backstory between the CHSRA and Peninsula HSR opponents:

People’s reactions to the plans weren’t only about the engineering. They also revealed a deeper mistrust of the Authority board’s motives. Several objected to the fact that the plans had not appeared on the Authority’s website until some time after the meeting started, when they had been promised to the public earlier. And when the time came to vote on the staff recommendations, Authority board member Rod Diridon sparked yells of disbelief when he declared that “the board doesn’t have an entrenched position.” It seems clear that some trust issues will need to be ironed out if this project is going to move forward effectively. The board seemed to acknowledge this fact, even making a point of asking that all information be posted online in a timely manner. But there’s still a long way to go.

Miner basically assumes that the critics and “yells of disbelief” are authentic displays of community anger, when in fact they are calculated statements by known project opponents designed to discredit the Authority and its work by giving the inaccurate appearance of a lack of community support.

In other words, it’s exactly the same thing as the teabaggers who disrupted town halls across the country a year ago.

I really do not understand why KALW News has such a prominent perch at SFGate.com when their reporting is so consistently flawed on the HSR project, including Nathanael Johnson’s notoriously biased HSR report that failed to interview a single HSR project supporter.

Miner, Johnson and the KALW News folks appear to suffer from what I would call the “Tracy Wood problem” after the notoriously anti-HSR biased reporter for the Voice of OC. Like Wood, the KALW News folks don’t appear to have very much knowledge of transit issues at all, especially HSR. But they are attuned to the idea that government sometimes screws up and sometimes doesn’t listen to the public. So they walk into the HSR issue, see a bunch of HSR critics complaining about this and that, and suddenly believe they’ve found some huge story about a flawed government agency.

In reality, they’ve found no such thing. But like Donny from The Big Lebowski, they’re like someone who walks into the room in the middle of a movie: they have no frame of reference. Lacking an understanding of transit issues or the HSR project and its critics, they misinterpret what they see without even doing the basic due diligence that once was taught as standard practice in journalism school.

The HSR project remains popular around the state, and thank god for reporters like the SF Chronicle’s Michael Cabanatuan who understand the HSR project and the debate around it, and who can provide fact-based, neutral reporting that is useful. The KALW News folks could learn a thing or two from that model.