Tim Sheehan at the Fresno Bee has an important article on the debate over the high speed rail ridership numbers. The article is very valuable in showing the flaws in assuming numbers produced for an EIR can serve the needs of a revenue forecast. But it also repeats some things about the ridership study – and about the Berkeley ITS report – that are simply not accurate. Here’s the set-up:

Rail officials say the ambitious projections were not meant to forecast revenue. Rather, they were developed to help planners account for the harshest possible effect of the system on the environment, they say. That means the numbers needed to be as high as could reasonably be expected.

It’s far too early to make accurate revenue projections, said Jeffrey Barker, the authority’s deputy director — but the authority felt pressured by lawmakers to do so.

“The Legislature told the authority they wanted us to discuss revenue projections in our business plan, so it forced a premature discussion,” Barker said.

Now those projections are coming under fire from critics and lawmakers, threatening legislative support for high-speed rail and fueling skepticism about its economic viability.

In many respects, it’s the Legislature that is at fault here. Ridership modeling is not an easy thing to do and it’s not a quick thing to do. Demanding a fully worked-out plan be delivered immediately, as the Legislature did in 2008 and again in 2009, doesn’t make a lot of sense and isn’t going to produce the best results – particularly when the same Legislature has failed to deliver on-time budgets to fund the Authority’s work. But the Legislature demanded it anyway, so the CHSRA had to comply with what they had available – and that was the 2005 study done by Cambridge Systematics.

That’s not to say the study is flawed, as critics charge. What it does mean is that a revenue forecast requires more time and more careful work if it is to be gotten right – and that the Legislature ought to help make that happen, rather than causing more problems through unreasonable demands based on uninformed speculation.

What’s fueling this, of course, is Senator Alan Lowenthal’s embrace of right-wing anti-passenger rail talking points, notoriously saying at once point that the ridership numbers “don’t pass the smell test.” Here’s what he said at a recent committee hearing:

Even legislators who support the system are skeptical about the projections.

“For this project to succeed, it must be financially sound,” Lowenthal said in the committee hearing.

But because of the uncertainty of the projections, among other things, Lowenthal added, “in my opinion, the jury is still out.”

Lowenthal apparently has not been to Europe or Japan, where passenger rail ridership is very high – and got there very quickly. Spain’s AVE link between Madrid and Barcelona saw rapid ridership growth as soon as it opened in 2008 – taking passengers from one of the world’s busiest air routes. He, like other HSR critics, simply cannot imagine that a lot of Californians will ride the trains. They’re convinced that unlike other HSR systems around the world, operations will need an ongoing public subsidy because for some reason, Californians prefer to be sexually assaulted or be photographed in the nude in order to fly, or prefer to spend a lot of money at the pump and a lot of time stuck in a car, unable to use their digital devices or get other work done.

But because of this pervasive, inaccurate, and uninformed speculation that somehow California won’t have the same levels of ridership as other countries, the CHSRA is constantly forced to justify its plans in the face of such baseless skepticism. Unfortunately that skepticism will not change until the trains are actually operating and in service.

Until then, the CHSRA is taking a very positive approach to these issues, welcoming public scrutiny and inviting others to replicate their findings:

Barker said the current ridership-prediction model is good for evaluating the maximum environmental effects, but it isn’t designed for providing the finer estimates needed by investors who will be sought to put up the money to build and buy the trains and take on the financial risk of operating the passenger service….

“We are continuing to refine the inputs to the model, and that’s going to take a couple of years,” Barker said. “When we get to that stage, that’s when we’ll be using the projections to lure private investment.”

That’s the right answer, and the Legislature is not helping matters by freaking out and trying to rush the process along. The specific revenue models that the trains will use will not be finalized until soon before the trains begin revenue service. There can be reasonable projections before then – and while I believe the Cambridge Systematics numbers are entirely reasonable, since HSR will be a godsend for a state needing fast, affordable transportation alternatives to oil-based methods and will help spur a boom in the Valley cities it serves, I’m also willing to let the CHSRA get those projections right. Senator Alan Lowenthal, who is termed out in two years, should be willing to let that happen, instead of using his anti-rail skepticism undermine the project that Californians have twice supported in statewide elections (Prop 1A in November 2008, and rejecting anti-HSR candidate Meg Whitman in November 2010).

Sheehan’s article makes some unfortunate errors regarding both the comparison of HSR to other transportation modes, and about the Berkeley ITS study itself:

Based on Cambridge’s model, overall Valley ridership between the Valley and California’s major metropolitan centers is expected to generate about 12.6 million trips a year — about 30% of the total ridership in 2035.

If that number comes to pass, it would dwarf the current levels of Valley train and airplane ridership to points in California.

In all of 2000 — the figures used for modeling in the Cambridge report — Amtrak’s conventional San Joaquin line from the Valley to the Bay Area had about 703,000 boardings. That same year, commercial passenger flights from Fresno Yosemite International Airport and Bakersfield to cities within California had a total of just over 31,000 boardings.

Comparing HSR to a conventional rail line that is not only MUCH slower than HSR, but doesn’t even connect to Los Angeles is just not credible. At all. It’s like pointing at a two-lane rural road and saying nobody would use a freeway there, while ignoring the proven effects of induced demand as well as development plans for that area that would provide the expected users. HSR provides a service that currently does not exist – at all. It cannot and should not be compared to existing travel modes, particularly without considering what might change in Fresno in 35 years’ time.

The 2035 numbers are totally credible for the following reasons:

1. HSR would serve Valley residents who will commute to jobs in SoCal or the Bay Area, whereas such commuting is now so costly or time-consuming that it rarely occurs.

2. Because such a commute becomes much easier, Fresno and other Valley cities will see a population boom because of HSR, of potentially significant scale. That in turn fuels more HSR trips on the system, brings more businesses to the cities, and turning the HSR boom into a sustainable new period of growth for the San Joaquin Valley. Hopefully, with better land-use planning and the attraction of a downtown station, that new population growth will come in the city centers.

3. It is not credible to assume that oil prices will remain at their present levels for much longer. As this blog has repeatedly explained, the arrival of peak oil means Californians will seek out alternatives to increasingly expensive oil-based transportation. By 2035 most Californians will not be able to afford frequent long-distance car trips, and HSR will make up the difference.

There is every reason to expect high HSR ridership. But that isn’t enough to base a ridership plan on. It needs to be backed by credible analysis, which Cambridge Systematics provided. Sheehan’s article repeats some of the Berkeley ITS criticisms of that study, but doesn’t accurately explain those criticisms:

UC Berkeley professor Samer Madanat and UC Irvine professor David Brownstone said Cambridge Systematics made incorrect assumptions and cooked the numbers to inflate ridership figures to meet preconceived expectations.

This is not true. The Berkeley ITS study did NOT claim they “cooked the numbers.” Madanat has previously disavowed that conclusion:

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.”

I will be writing the Fresno Bee to seek an immediate correction of that rather grievous error. Sheehan did allow space for Cambridge Systematics to defend themselves:

But the Cambridge researchers defended their projections, denying that they changed the data to conform to prior expectations and insisting to the Senate committee that any adjustments they made were appropriate.

“In every model development problem, we have to balance theory and academic rigor with practicality, budget constraints, data availability and schedule. That’s just the way it is in the application world,” said Lance Neumann, president of Cambridge Systematics. “It doesn’t mean you can take shortcuts, it doesn’t mean you can develop models that don’t give good, reliable results, but compromises have to be made. … Every model is some science and some art.”

Sheehan provided some other quotes from the Berkeley ITS study, which certainly did challenge some of the methodological assumptions used in the Cambridge Systematics report. But that’s all it did. That report did NOT prove that the ridership numbers were faulty, just that the numbers could be off, and could overstate – or understate – the actual ridership that will be achieved.

Of course, ridership projections are just that – projections. We assume that the world in 2035 will basically resemble the world of 2010, but with a few more people. We extrapolate present realities and assume that those will still hold true in 2035. Of course, they might not. An epidemic could wipe out half the state’s population. Global warming could start causing major weather dislocations in California and make Fresno uninhabitable. The price of oil could suddenly collapse, money might somehow magically be found to widen Highway 99, and robot-driven cars could become commonplace, making HSR less desirable than it now seems.

But when you look at the facts – including peak oil, global HSR success, and the ridership study itself – there is every reason to believe that California’s HSR system will generate a lot of riders and a lot of surpluses. Exactly how many riders is what the revenue projections need to foresee. The state legislature should support the Authority’s efforts to produce such a projection, instead of giving free rein to uninformed speculations.

Ultimately, it’s entirely reasonable to expect that Fresno can generate the number of trips claimed in 2035. In fact, I’ll place a bet right now with anyone who wants to take it that in 2035, there will indeed be 4,500 daily trips from the Fresno HSR station, and 12.6 million annual trips from Valley cities to other destinations in California. The only condition is that when I collect, it has to be in-person at the Fresno HSR station on November 21, 2035. You’ve got 25 years to set aside the money.