Virtually every post on this blog ultimately revolves around the economic benefits of high speed rail, which continue to be systematically denied by HSR critics who are still unable to mount any strong, evidence-based arguments against those benefits. In some ways it’s because they’re not really trying; HSR opposition isn’t so much about deconstructing claims of HSR’s prosperity-inducing nature as it is about making appeals to things they just assume people will accept as true, whether it’s a defense a failed 20th century model of transportation (automobile dependence) or whether it’s insinuations that “nobody really rides trains anyway, certainly not in California, so of course we can claim the HSR ridership studies are baseless even though nobody’s ever actually demonstrated it.”

Yet we HSR supporters keep on pushing, partly because we are convinced that, in the end, reality cannot be denied, at best it can merely be evaded for a while – and therefore the significant benefits of HSR will eventually prevail.

It helps that our case is so firmly grounded in the evidence. We got a reminder of that last week when the UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies published a new report on HSR titled Thinking Ahead: High Speed Rail in Southern California. Although the study is focused on Southern California, and Orange County in particular, it provides data and analysis that is useful for considering the statewide benefits of the HSR system.

The UCI ITS study starts from the premise that HSR enables California to achieve two policy goals at once: “delivery of both economic and environmental benefits.” HSR deniers routinely ignore environmental benefits, though as we noted yesterday, doing so is a case of false accounting. Specifically, the study argues:

[HSR] therefore represents an important convergence of policy objectives, an opportunity to shift the terms of the debate by demonstrating how a transformative large-scale infrastructure project such as high-speed rail would contribute favorably to both desired outcomes: more robust employment growth, specifically in the “green” jobs sector, and a lighter carbon footprint for each of Southern California’s projected nearly 21 million residents by 2035. The project’s positive economic impact deserves to be more thoroughly analyzed and understood not only by regional planners and policymakers, but the public at large.

As we go forward, keep in mind that HSR critics do not see either outcome (more jobs or a lighter carbon footprint) as being important, particularly the small but vocal group on the Peninsula who believe their aesthetic values come before jobs and carbon reduction.

The Summary of Findings is quite significant:

During its construction phase (2012-2020) the CAHSR project will contribute a regional income benefit of $701m (NPV @ 4%) to Southern California workers who would have otherwise been unemployed. Together with design/engineering work for Phase II of the system, it will provide the equivalent of over 57,000 full-time, one-year jobs (or multi-year employment for approximately 15,200 workers). Construction of the Anaheim Regional Intermodal Transportation Center (ARTIC) will create an additional 3,500 to 5,000 jobs in Orange County based upon estimated project costs of $179m.

This is a significant economic stimulus to a region and a state in desperate need of it. The benefits of those jobs, from the stimulative impact on the broader economy to the tax revenues state government will welcome, are extremely important and yet are consistently overlooked or ignored by HSR critics, probably because to acknowledge those benefits would be undermining their own case.

By 2035, high speed rail will attract over 127,000 permanent jobs to Southern California that would not have otherwise been created, thanks to the region’s increased livability and enhanced transportation network. The opportunity to locate these jobs near HSR stations and other transit hubs is valuable and should be encouraged through supportive zoning and additional policy incentives. Compared to other metropolitan areas with HSR corridors, the percentage of Southern California jobs located in or near downtown areas/CBDs is low. The concentration of business and industry around HSR stations would be reciprocally beneficial both to system ridership and the regional economy. The sectors in Southern California most conducive to this type of clustering and agglomeration benefits include health care and financial/real estate services.

This point is usually outright denied by HSR critics, who refuse to accept that California might ever have any other spatial model than suburban sprawl tied together by the automobile – despite the fact that many of these critics, at least on the Peninsula, live in communities that were created around a spatial model that owed nothing at all to sprawl and freeways and owed everything to passenger rail.

Dedicated to the defense of a failed 20th century model, some HSR critics might charge that we’d never see companies take an HSR station into consideration in terms of locating job centers, even though this is already routinely done in Europe. As we can learn from the HSR debate currently taking place in Wisconsin, however, companies are already taking transit hubs into account. A former chief economist to a Republican governor of Wisconsin wrote a pro-HSR op-ed, which generated the following comment from the executive director of Gateway to Milwaukee, a group of businesses near the Milwaukee airport, about how the region is already suffering job losses due to a lack of transit hubs:

Here’s an intresting anecdote. A local entrepreneur had a business plan and a need for $5 million in capital. Potential investors from Seattle were very interested, willing to invest $2.5 million and paid for research on greater Milwaukee. Their strong preference was to start the company in Chicago, possibly start it in Madison, but they had no interest in Milwaukee. The plan called for hiring 60 young IT and creative design professionals in 120 days and they did not want to take the risk of doing so in Milwaukee. A primary reason was the concern about transportation for these young people – generations X & Y – around Milwaukee and even between Chicago and Milwaukee (the KRM would have been a solution). So the business ultimately started in Chicago – 200 feet from a train station.

The basic point is that because southeast Wisconsin is inadequate in its overall transportation structure versus other metropolitan areas, the start-up capital and the jobs went somewhere else.

One could just as easily substitute “Palo Alto” or “Fresno” or “Anaheim” for “Milwaukee” in this story, with SF, San José and LA playing the role of Chicago or Madison. HSR deniers don’t want to accept this fact, but businesses are already looking for better mass transit options, and are starting to make their hiring and location decisions based on the available infrastructure. This isn’t the 1960s, or even the 1990s, where the assumption was that everyone would drive to an office park. Those days are gone.

Perhaps that’s a reason why the Bay Area Council, representing the Bay Area’s largest employers, strongly supports HSR. It’s unfortunate that some Peninsula local governments have chosen to disregard that – one has to wonder if these cities are so prosperous, with such bright job growth, that they can afford to dismiss what their most important businesses are saying and requesting.

The UCI ITS study lists several other benefits, including its role in spurring the growth of “green” jobs, reduction in pollutants including CO2, and helping achieve the “sustainable communities” goals of SB 375. The study even puts a number on the amount of money likely to be saved through the improved health of HSR users:

HSR commuters who ride at least four times a week would directly benefit from increased levels of physical activity from walking and/or biking for some portion of their trip. Improved health outcomes attributable to HSR, achieved in tandem with the development of walkable, transit-oriented communities, would total between $50 million and $132 million in reduced medical costs over a fifteen-year period (2020-2035, discounted in 2010 dollars at 4%), depending on the ridership scenario.

Those are just the “Summary of Findings” – the full study provides detailed evidence in support of those conclusions. It’s much more than we ever get from HSR critics, who are hoping that shouting loudly instead of reasoned argument and evidence will help them convince governments to block or kill the HSR project.

In a state with record unemployment, in the depths of a prolonged recession, desperately in need of good, lasting jobs that will also help clean up our environment and provide sustainable transportation, HSR is a necessary project whose benefits are desperately needed. No wonder large majorities of Californians still support the project – they understand HSR is part of our path back to prosperity.