Last month the Los Angeles Times had a very good article about the debate over where to put HSR tracks on the Fresno to Bakersfield initial construction segment, focusing on the competing concerns of farmers and cities. About 1/3 of the article was devoted to a discussion of the benefits of HSR for the region, including interviews with residents and local elected officials who put the route dispute in context. The result was an article that accurately informed readers about the issues regarding the HSR route, but did not try to make it sound like the dispute was jeopardizing the project, because there’s simply no evidence that’s actually happening on that segment.

Today’s New York Times ran an article on the exact same subject, but with a very different outcome. The article, titled “Worries Follow Route of High-Speed California Line”, is not very informative to readers about the nature of the route dispute or what it means for the project overall. It is written to make it sound like the California HSR project is in trouble, especially in the Central Valley, which it simply isn’t. Not only does the article lack context, it takes quotes and information out of context, in order to put a bad spin on a project that is popular in the San Joaquin Valley.

MADERA, Calif. — The area just south of this agricultural city is not much to look at: miles of farmland, a collection of dingy fast food outlets and a gold rush ghost called Borden, where all that remains is a tiny cemetery devoted to long dead Chinese workers.

But sometime soon, this flat-on-flat expanse — about 150 miles southeast of San Francisco — may well be home to a first-in-the-nation destination as the initial northern terminus of California’s ambitious high-speed rail network….

Federal and state authorities have committed some $5.5 billion to the first leg of the project, which will connect Bakersfield, the valley’s southern hub, and the unincorporated area south of Madera.

Already you can see the problem here. Jesse McKinley, the author of the article, repeats uncritically the discredited and misleading argument that Borden will be the “northern terminus” of the initial construction segment. It won’t be. It’s just the northern end of the first part of a much larger project, selected because that’s where the tracks can rejoin the BNSF mainline if needed. Nowhere in this article does McKinley mention the two stations at Fresno and Hanford/Visalia, which along with the Bakersfield station will serve a combined metropolitan population of over 2 million. And only at the very end of the article does McKinley acknowledge that there is no intent at all to make dusty Borden an actual destination:

Mr. van Ark pleads for patience, saying, “This is not about building a line in the Central Valley.” And indeed, while the first link may run from Bakersfield to that ghostly area outside Borden, that is not the final destination anyone has in mind.

“This is all about building an intercity, high-speed network,” he said. “One must put that above where this will start.”

Look at how McKinley frames this. “Pleads for patience” – really? Van Ark is just telling the truth. The CHSRA is building a system from SF to LA, which just happens to be starting construction in the Valley. It seems clear that McKinley is trying to spin this to make the HSR project look bad.

Another example of the article’s spin is how Congressman Dennis Cardoza’s concerns about the route are handled:

But despite the potential bounty of jobs, high-speed rail has not been fully embraced. After the rail authority approved the initial route in early December, Representative Dennis Cardoza, a Central Valley Democrat, disparagingly referred to it as “the train to nowhere.”

“For the California High-Speed Rail Authority to choose this route is to significantly undermine the public’s trust, marks a gross misuse of taxpayer funds and will alienate significant supporters of the project,” he said.

Part of that agita, of course, may be that the first section of high-speed rail will not pass through his district.

“May be?” As we well know, Cardoza’s angry statement was solely the result of Merced being excluded from the initial segment and Cardoza’s concern that Merced was going to be excluded from Phase I entirely. Cardoza has been a strong supporter of the HSR project, but McKinley makes him sound like an HSR critic, and Cardoza is anything but that. McKinley didn’t provide that clear context here, and as a result, misconstrues the meaning of Cardoza’s statement.

McKinley’s lack of knowledge of the project leads to other errors:

But the congressman is not the only person complaining. Several towns have passed resolutions opposing the project because of worries about the disruption of a 220-mile-an-hour train zipping through downtown districts.

The only town in the Valley that has passed such a resolution, to my knowledge, is Chowchilla. Palo Alto and a few other Peninsula cities have passed such resolutions, but those did not reflect the actual views of city residents, aren’t about 220-mph trains, and in any case aren’t in the Valley. Gilroy would qualify under the criteria the author listed, but that’s about it.

McKinley also presents a one-sided view of local officials’ attitudes about the project:

And that uncertainty unsettles local leaders.

“The communication has just been atrocious,” said Mayor Robert Poythress of Madera. “If there have been any messages, they’ve been mixed.”

Ronald W. Hoggard, the city manager of Corcoran, to the south, echoes that sentiment, worrying that the big money involved in the high-speed project — the eventual price will be more than $40 billion — will roll over his small-town concerns. “When they talk about ‘the train to nowhere,’ we’re not nowhere,” Mr. Hoggard said. “We’re Mayberry.”

Of course, the mayors of Fresno, Visalia, and Merced (just to name a few) along with many county officials in Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern Counties have given a number of pro-HSR statements. But you wouldn’t know that from McKinley’s article.

About the only useful thing in the NYT article is the discussion of where to put the tracks in Corcoran:

Mr. Hoggard says Corcoran, a city of 26,000 — including 12,000 “guests of the state” at nearby prisons — had spent years painstakingly restoring its main street, repainting store facades and improving City Hall, and he worries that the train will distract from the city’s carefully shaped character.

“If they were to come through town, with an elevated track, at 85 decibels?” he said. “It’s just inconsistent.”

Mr. van Ark said elevated lines passing through city centers were a possibility, but he played down their impact on small-town life. “Trains do run through the centers of town in the rest of the world,” he said.

The Central Valley is accustomed to rail lines, with freight trains loaded with double-decker cargo cars rolling day and night. And Corcoran itself has a small, quaint Amtrak depot in its downtown core.

Van Ark is correct, though one can understand where Corcoran officials are coming from. And of course, if Corcoran were bypassed, that would mean impacts on farmers and wetlands, which would cause defenders of both to make their own arguments about why the tracks should go right through Corcoran.

As an article in the NYT, this would have benefited from drawing comparisons to the Acela, which does have some segments of track where trains operate at 150 mph – not quite 220, but close enough to make some comparisons. How do cities along those tracks handle the noise? Have they seen negative impacts from the high Acela speeds? Or has it not really affected anything?

The NYT would be providing some very useful information to readers by such a comparison, bringing valuable facts to bear on the conversation. Instead they seem content with a flawed article that doesn’t really do a good job of telling readers what’s really at issue in the Valley with HSR and what locals actually believe about the trains. That’s too bad – but then, we have the LA Times to provide a much better and more informed article on the topic.

UPDATE: In the comments, datacruncher noticed something is missing in the NYT map at right that accompanied the article. Can anyone guess? I’ll give you a hint: half a million people live there.