HSR advocates from around the country, including Californians For High Speed Rail, have united to launch an effort to contact elected leaders and urge them to continue supporting the project. Stand Up For Trains is a project that includes CA4HSR, Midwest High Speed Rail, NARP, America 2050, USHSR, Transportation For America, USPIRG, and other regional HSR organizations. Spread the link far and wide and make sure you contact your state legislators. If you’re not in California, the site also allows you to suggest to friends who are in California that they contact their legislators to support HSR.

Organizing and messaging go hand-in-hand. To that effect, the California Alliance for Jobs is airing a new radio ad in Sacramento and the Bay Area in support of the high speed rail project. You can listen to the ad here – it’s narrated by comedian Will Durst, who narrated a Yes on Prop 1A ad back during the 2008 campaign. The script for this new ad:

“Hey guys, Will Durst here. Let’s talk about vision — and when I say vision, I’m not talking about some guy doing Lasik surgery in a van down by the river. I mean looking at the future and doing something positive to effect it. And that’s why I was happy to hear Governor Brown’s vision for high-speed rail.

“As with any project of this scope, there are problems to overcome, but we can do this. You know, in 1939, naysayers called the proposed interstate highway system ‘New Deal, jitterbug economics.’ In 1966, some called the planned BART system a billion-dollar fiasco.

“There will always be skeptics. Heck, some people would vote against sunshine and hugs. But we need a fast, green, inviting way to move around California. Are we going to let this great project be sunk by the naysayers or elevated by the visionaries? It’s time to do the right thing – put people to work now and build something momentous for our future.”

This is excellent messaging, because it emphasizes the need to focus on solving problems and embracing a sustainable, smart vision for California’s future. The HSR critics want us to quit when we face problems, give up on our vision, and embrace defeatism. None of the issues currently facing California HSR are unsolvable, and infrastructure that California depends on today faced their challenges when they were being planned and designed. We overcame those challenges then, and can overcome them now – but only if we organize and act.

And if you need another data point to bolster the case for high speed rail, there’s this news that Amtrak’s ridership and revenues are up:

After a record year last year, 2012 is off to a strong start for Amtrak with revenue and ridership up in January.

Amtrak carried 2.23 million passengers systemwide in January, up 4.8 percent from a year earlier. Revenue rose 4.5 percent to $134.8 million last month. Ridership on its Northeast Corridor, including regional and Acela high speed train, was up 7.5 percent from a year ago.

The critics want everyone to believe nobody will ride trains in America. We know that’s false. Now it’s time to spread the word and contact Sacramento legislators and tell them not to give up on California’s future.

The three supervisors who voted against HSR did not bother to come up with an alternative solution to their 13.4% unemployment rate, to their county’s dependence on oil, and how it would threaten to make Bakersfield even more cut off from the Southern California metropolitan area. Presumably they don’t believe they need to think about those concerns – they must assume that the status quo is working out just fine and the bigger threat comes from taking action rather than standing still.

This vote won’t stop the project, of course, but it is another sign that high speed rail is facing some political struggles. It’s one thing for House Republican ideologues to defund it because they hate trains. It’s another for California elected officials to oppose a project this state desperately needs, and will benefit from just as other countries have around the world, because they don’t understand that the greater risk comes from doing nothing.

Some may point to the rising cost projections as an explanation of HSR’s struggles. The spate of official reports claiming the project is “risky” simply because House Republicans are attacking HSR – a principle which, if faithfully followed, makes virtually everything the State of California does a “risk” given Congress’ desire to slash funding for everything in sight – aren’t helping. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, claims that HSR will struggle to get riders persist. NIMBYs have proven to be quite effective in scaring local politicians to flip-flop and oppose a project they once backed.

All of these factors matter. But the main problem is that we live in a country that is increasingly giving up on its future.

In the 20th century, both California and the United States were places where elected leaders generally preferred to solve problems rather than use them as excuses for doing nothing. California built dams, canals, bridges, freeways and universities that still power economic activity to this day.

It’s hard to imagine any of those things happening now. California as we know it today could never be built today. It would be too expensive, to risky, too unfamiliar, and piss off too many NIMBYs.

The difference is that for much of the 20th century, Californians understood that to have prosperity, you could not simply stand still. You had to build. You had to innovate. You had to do something new and sometimes do something a little bit risky.

Today, California is governed largely by people who are afraid of risks. Governor Jerry Brown is a notable exception, but that runs against the grain of a political and media class that got where they were by being cautious. Sure, that caution came at the expense of addressing problems, and one of the reasons we are in such a deep economic crisis today is because people found it easier to avoid taking action than to proactively solve problems. But caution and doing nothing was easier in the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, and those who thrived during that period by doing nothing are now in positions of leadership and power. Brown, who attained political power in the ’70s, comes from a different era and is thus immune to the defeatism that is so pervasive in California politics.

This political defeatism is rooted in those segments of the state’s population that also thrived during the long, slow decline of the last 30 years. This group is best personified by the Palo Alto NIMBYs, folks who have more than enough money to handle any possible impact of high speed rail but who believe they don’t have any obligation to make such concessions. They are convinced that they got where they were by ignoring the needs of the society around them in order to live in their own narrowly conceived vision of an idealized 20th century community. Any effort to address the state’s economic, environmental, or transportation problems is immediately seen by them as a threat to their privileges, and rather than work together to solve those problems, they just prefer to ignore those challenges or somehow assume that their privileges will carry them through it just fine.

They’re the liberal side of a coin whose reverse is the right-wingers who believe that spending government money on anything other than services that benefit them exclusively is wrong. These Tea Party types see the cost of high speed rail, ignore the cost of doing nothing, and conclude that we shouldn’t spend money on trains or anything else that might help pull us out of the economic or environmental crisis because they too believe that it will come at their own expense.

On their own the Tea Partiers and the NIMBYs aren’t nearly powerful enough to influence policy. But when politics are controlled by defeatists who believe the way to solve problems is to ignore them, members of the public who have readymade arguments and justifications for doing nothing suddenly have a lot more power and influence than their numbers would justify. After all, the opponents of HSR lost the 2008 and 2010 elections badly, at least in California. But the political class enables them because they need someone they can point to in order to rationalize inaction.

As to the media, they are busy clinging to their vanishing audience. Rather than try and build a new audience among the Millennial generation, the largest generation currently alive, they are instead focusing on the Silents (folks about age 65 and over) and Boomers (about age 50-65), generations that have now grown deeply defensive of the fading 20th century values they were raised to believe were the Greatest Thing Ever. Most Tea Partiers and NIMBYs come from those age groups. The average age of a newspaper subscriber is 55. The media is skittish about challenging the values of that generation – and of course, most publishers and editors come from that cohort and share those values anyway. To them, high speed rail isn’t a noble idea but a classic example of the “omg government run amok!!!” story that they love to chase. The media, then, also act to justify political inactivity, giving it the veneer of respectability, even truth.

Four years into the economic crisis and at least seven years since California strongly embraced Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, the majority of the state’s population still believe that government ought to do something about unemployment and global warming. Californians heard all these same anti-HSR arguments in 2008 and rejected them, and rejected them again when Meg Whitman made them in 2010.

But with a political class unwilling to act to solve our problems, a media that refuses to see the need to change, and well-organized groups of people looking to prevent change, you have a powerful alignment of forces that can do something like slowly grind down the HSR project.

None of those forces will last much longer. Massive political change is coming. The newspapers will either adapt or die, and their moment of truth is not far away. The Tea Party and the NIMBYs will soon fade away as demographic replacement works its way through the generations. By the 2020s, perhaps sooner, public tolerance for inaction, defeatism, and giving up on our future will be at an end, replaced with a loud and proud demand for doing something to build a better future.

HSR is unfortunate to be just barely on the wrong side of that timeline. Even after 30 years of planning and four years after voter approval, the political forces that don’t want to change or take risks remain just strong enough to present a challenge. And the forces that want change and want to innovate are not yet able to reverse the situation.

This isn’t meant as an obituary for the HSR project. It’s not dead, and in fact its future remains bright, especially as long as both Governor Brown and President Obama support it. But it is important to recognize the nature of the challenge we face. Mobilizing public support means convincing people that the bigger risk is to stand still and do nothing.

Most other major projects in California faced a similar white knuckle moment. The Golden Gate Bridge project financing nearly fell apart after the successful public vote in November 1930 to authorize bonds. The California Aqueduct was nearly killed by the state legislature in 1959. It took decades for Shasta Dam to get approved. In each case, political leadership came together to solve problems and ensure that the infrastructure got built, and Californians have reaped the benefits ever since.

High speed rail will come through this rough patch. The case for it is too strong to be denied now, unless California really does want to go full Tea Party and abandon passenger rail in order to ignore the economic and environmental challenges the state faces. That won’t happen unless HSR advocates remain persistent and strong. The other side wants the advocates to give up. But they misunderstand us.

We won’t give up on HSR, because unlike them, we won’t give up on California’s future.

But will these government agencies and legislators apply the same logic to virtually every other mass transit project in California now that the House Republicans have voted for massive cuts in transit spending? Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic explains:

The Ways and Means Committee acted to eliminate the Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund, destroying public transportation’s source of steady federal financing for capital projects, first established in the 1980s. The members of the committee determined that to remedy the fact that gas taxes have not been increased since 1993,* the most appropriate course was not to raise the tax (as would make sense considering inflation, more efficient vehicles, and the negative environmental and congestion-related effects of gas consumption) but rather to transfer all of its revenues to the construction of highways. Public transit, on the other hand, would have to fight for an appropriation from the general fund, losing its traditional guarantee of funding and forcing any spending on it to be offset by reductions in other government programs.** This as the GOP has made evident its intention to reduce funding for that same general fund through a continued push for income tax reductions, even for the highest earners.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a transportation reauthorization bill on partisan lines (with the exception of one Republican who voted against it, Tom Petri of Wisconsin) that would do nothing to increase funding for transportation infrastructure in the United States over the next five years despite the fact that there is considerable demand for a large improvement in the nation’s road, rail, and transit networks just to keep them in a state of good repair, let alone expand them to meet the needs of a growing population….

The committee eliminated the Obama Administration’s trademark TIGER program, which has funded dozens of medium-scale projects throughout the country with a innovative merit-based approach. Instead, virtually all decisions on project funding would be made by state DOTs, which not unjustly have acquired a reputation as only interested in highways. Meanwhile, members couldn’t resist suggesting that only “true” high-speed rail projects (over 150 mph top speed) be financed by the government — even as they conveniently defunded the only such scheme in the country, the California High-Speed Rail program.

The House version of the Transportation Bill, where these cuts are being proposed, even eliminates the Safe Routes to School program which helps fund improvements to pedestrian infrastructure so kids are safe as they walk to and from school.

These proposed cuts are insane, and a sign of how pathologically reckless and out of touch with modern America the House Republicans are. And they jeopardize any number of projects in California, from BART extensions to BRT in the East Bay to Los Angeles’s 30/10 plan of rail expansion.

Democratic State Senators like Mark DeSaulnier, Joe Simitian and Alan Lowenthal should have been leading the charge against right-wing attacks on rail. Instead they’ve been allies of the House Republicans, working hard to validate their attacks on passenger rail by attacking high speed rail in Sacramento. Lowenthal wants to go to Congress. Now is a good time for him to show voters whether he will help the Republican attacks on transit or try to stop them.

Thing is, Lowenthal can’t have it both ways. An effective defense against Republican anti-transit attacks requires defending all forms of passenger rail, from HSR on down to light rail and streetcars. By enabling the right in their attacks on HSR, he has emboldened them to go after other transit too.

Yonah Freemark is right. It’s time to fight. And not just against the House Republicans, but against their allies in Sacramento, regardless of which party they’re in.

The Southern California Association of Government’s Regional Council Thursday approved a memorandum of understanding with the California High Speed Rail Authority with an eye toward claiming $1 billion in voter-approved bonds. The bonds would not go directly to the proposed L.A. to San Francisco bullet train, but rather be used to upgrade local Amtrak and Metrolink lines and stations that can, in turn, help serve the future high-speed line. The improved existing regional systems would work as feeders into the high speed lines.

SCAG recommended that the high speed rail authority use $1 billion out of $9.95 billion in Proposition 1A funds for Southern California rail improvements and make it an amendment to its 2012 Draft Business Plan.

The so-called “blended systems and blended operations plan” concept could be a boon to aging Metrolink commuter rail lines that go to Los Angeles, either from from Anaheim to Industry or from San Bernardino through Claremont, Covina, Baldwin Park and Monterey Park.

The bulk of the listed projects include new train stations in Palmdale, part of the newly aligned high speed rail project. Also, stations in Anaheim would be upgraded.

In the San Gabriel Valley, the money could be used to “double track” Union Pacific Rail Lines in Industry, West Covina, Irwindale and Alhambra, according to the SCAG document. These types of improvements to existing commuter lines would enhance speed and capacity, while helping develop a state-wide high speed rail system.

This comes on the heels of recent news that San Gabriel Valley cities are “warming up” to HSR:

“We are still very much against taking homes on either side or the elevated (high-speed rail),” said Rosemead Councilwoman and COG board member Margaret Clark, who voted in favor of the new agreement.

Barbara Messina, an Alhambra councilwoman and first vice president of COG, said the high speed rail authority has a new attitude. “I hope they have learned their lesson as to how they ignored the San Gabriel Valley cities by turning a deaf ear to what had been said,” she said Friday in an interview.

Many in the media, egged on by die-hard high speed rail opponents, believe that the CHSRA doesn’t listen to or work well with communities along the route. But here again, as with their adoption of a blended proposal on the Peninsula and their willingness to explore alternate routes in Kings County, we see that the CHSRA is very much willing to work with localities on HSR routing and design. Of course, that has to be a two-way street to be successful. When cities like Palo Alto or counties like Kings oppose HSR for ideological and selfish reasons, they’re not working with the CHSRA in good faith.

As to the substance of the SCAG-CHSRA agreement, it opens the door to spending some money immediately to upgrade rail in Southern California. That’s something CHSRA Board Chair Dan Richard has been hinting at and it makes sense – alongside the Initial Construction Segment in the Central Valley, there would be some work done in urban areas that could help carry passenger trains in the interim while true bullet train tracks are built in the urban areas, which will be a costly and longer-term process.

This was also enabled by SCAG abandoning their maglev plan as being too costly and unworkable, a message nobody apparently bothered to deliver to Steve Lopez at the LA Times.

We can expect a new draft of the 2012 Business Plan in the very near future, and it certainly looks as if the pieces are being put in place to make urban rail a part of it.

PS: The Pasadena Star-News is eating the LA Times’ lunch on this story.

One of the main problems with Lopez’s column is that it follows the common but deeply misleading approach of presenting the issue as the people versus the government, with the newspaper on the side of the people. It’s a convenient fiction, but has the effect of silencing the large number of people who do back the project. Watch how Lopez dismisses HSR supporters:

Readers by the hundreds weighed in after that column. Many of them were still passionate about moving ahead, while others insisted it’s time to give up the dream. And quite a few couldn’t believe Gov. Jerry Brown is still pushing the project despite the state’s staggering financial burdens.

That one short fragment of a sentence – “Many of them were still passionate about moving ahead” – is all that Lopez has to say about HSR supporters and our arguments. He feels a journalistic obligation to note that we exist, but that’s about it. He is clearly throwing in his lot with the skeptics, even though HSR backers marshaled some compelling points he chose to ignore.

Instead Lopez, siding with the critics, gave credence to some absurd ideas that fly in the face of evidence:

I told [CHSRA Board Chairman Dan] Richard I’d heard from lots of readers who worried that we might be investing in a railroad whose technology is outdated, if not obsolete, when it’s finally finished. High-speed, computer-programmed driverless cars are no longer the stuff of science fiction. And then there are cheerleaders for high-speed Maglev trains, a magnetic levitation system that’s already in use in Shanghai, among other places.

So, actually, high-speed driverless cars and long-distance maglev trains remain the stuff of science fiction – nobody has ever made them workable. And the cost of building them is far, far, FAR higher than the cost of building traditional, proven, successful steel wheeled bullet trains. It’s ironic that Lopez can’t bring himself to deal with any of the arguments made by HSR backers, but he treats fanciful and extraordinarily expensive gadgets as some kind of realistic alternative.

But what’s driving Lopez’s skepticism is the same thing that drives every other piece of HSR skepticism: a belief that Californians, unlike everybody else in America and the world, won’t ride bullet trains:

But will enough drivers get out of their cars in 2033, or give up on air travel? Will millions of people who don’t live near a high-speed station, and can’t easily get to one because of heavy traffic and inadequate regional transit, ever ride the bullet?

We know the answers to these questions already, but Lopez simply did not bother to look them up. Drivers are already getting out of their cars. Vehicle miles traveled is in decline. A recent study found that car use in LA has declined by 2% and in SF by 4.8%. Californians are buying less gas. As I explained to Lopez on Thursday, this is part of a long-term shift away from driving that has car companies scared to death – a shift that Lopez hasn’t heard a thing about. Maybe he should go ask people whether they’d rather sit behind the wheel in traffic or sit on a comfortable train seat with their BlackBerry or iPad.

As to getting to a bullet train station, the inconvenience of getting to LAX hasn’t stopped people flying to and from that airport. In fact, LA Union Station will be one of the easiest places to get to for Angelenos, sitting at the center of the region’s transportation network. By 2030 Union Station will be the hub of an extensive rail network.

We don’t know what jet fuel will cost, or how long airport security check-in will take in 2033. High-speed rail folks say the projected cost of a train ticket from Los Angeles to San Francisco — a trip of 2 hours and 40 minutes — will be 83% of the cost of a plane ticket. But like everything else, that’s speculative.

We actually have a pretty good idea of what oil-based fuels will cost in 2033. Oil market analysts, such as those at Deutsche Bank, project the price of oil will have $100/bbl as a floor, with regular spikes well above that amount. Even the $100/bbl floor assumes demand destruction and development of alternatives, such as high speed rail. There is no rational argument anywhere out there that jet fuel costs will come down in the future, but there is a lot of evidence that it will continue to rise.

As to whether people will ride HSR, there’s nothing speculative about that at all. The facts are in and they are clear: people will choose trains over planes when given the choice. Riders have flocked to HSR from planes around the world and in the Northeastern United States. Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, even the Amtrak Acela. And California compares favorably to those globally successful routes.

While there may well be reasons to be skeptical of HSR, and reasons to look closely at the project’s price tag, Lopez’s reasons just don’t stand up to scrutiny. In the end he’s just another reporter who refuses to drop his outdates, obsolete preconceptions and look at the world around him, look at the evidence, and draw conclusions based on what he sees rather than what he assumes.

Lopez concludes his article with a strained effort at trying to convince readers he isn’t really biased against HSR:

Some of us who want to be believers need a lot more convincing.

And I’d like to believe Lopez has an open mind about this, but if he continues to pretend that HSR supporters don’t exist, if he continues to ignore the considerable weight of evidence that shows his concerns and assumptions are totally unfounded, then it’s going to be hard to convince me Lopez is anything but a project skeptic.

Van Ark said the companies have formed into five teams that the authority has qualified to compete for a contract on a stretch of the line through Fresno, from the San Joaquin River at the north end to American Avenue at the south end. The contract is expected to be worth $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

The builder teams are:

* California Backbone Builders, a consortium of two Spanish construction firms — Ferrovial Agroman and Acciona.

* California High-Speed Rail Partners, composed of Fluor Corp. of Texas, Swedish-based Skanska, and PCL Constructors of Canada.

* California High-Speed Ventures, made up of Kiewit Corp. of Nebraska, Granite Construction of Watsonville, and Comsa EMTE of Spain.

* A joint venture of Dragados SA of Spain, Denver-based Flatiron Construction Corp., and Shimmick Construction of Oakland.

* Tutor Perini Corp. of Sylmar, Zachry Construction of Texas and Pasadena-based Parsons Corp.

The project includes building 12 street overcrossings or underpasses, two elevated viaducts, a tunnel and a bridge across the San Joaquin River. Laying the tracks will be done later under a separate contract.

Some quick background on each…

California Backbone Builders (Ferrovial and Acciona): These are two Spanish companies with experience in building transportation infrastructure and other civil engineering projects. Ferrovial built the beautiful Terminal 4 building at Madrid’s Barajas airport, and Acciona built Lisboa’s landmark Gare do Oriente rail station in 1998. Together Ferrovial and Acciona have built portions of the Madrid-Barcelona AVE route and are currently working on the AVE extension north from Barcelona to the French border.

Ferrovial also operates several pieces of transportation infrastructure through its wholly owned subsidiary Cintra. Cintra is deeply involved in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor and owns a number of toll roads, including the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road (both of which were very highly controversial privatizations).

California High-Speed Rail Partners (Fluor, Skanska and PCL): These are three very big names in major civil engineering projects. Fluor used to be based in Orange County until a recent move to Texas, and one of their current major projects is building the new East Span of the Bay Bridge. They’re also working on Dutch high speed rail. Back in the ’90s they were part of the winning bid to build Florida high speed rail (which was sadly killed by Jeb Bush). Skanska is, among other things, working on the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project in Seattle, the Second Avenue Subway, and the PATH/World Trade Center station reconstruction project in NYC. They also built the Bothnia rail line in Sweden and were part of the huge Øresund Fixed Link project. PCL Construction has been working on the Central Corridor light rail project in the Twin Cities, and was interested in Florida’s HSR project in 2010 before another right-wing governor killed HSR there.

California High-Speed Ventures (Kiewit, Granite, Comsa): Kiewit has worked on many of the bridge retrofit projects in the San Francisco Bay as well as the T-Rex transportation project in Denver. Granite is a major construction player on the Central Coast, and led the project to trench the Union Pacific rail line through downtown Reno. Comsa has been involved in many pieces of AVE construction in Spain, including the original Madrid-Sevilla line and the route from Madrid to Galicia.

Dragados, Flatiron, Shimmick: Dragados S.A. was one of the two key partners in building LGV Perpignan-Figueres, connecting France and Spain. Dragados is also the lead contractor on the Seattle waterfront tunnel, which will include the largest tunnel boring machine ever used. Flatiron is working a lot of rail projects in California, including the Expo Line, the Oakland Airport Connector, and the Sprinter. Flatiron is also owned by Hochtief, which had some rather important building contracts in Nazi Germany, which should make things interesting given the recent issues related to California high speed rail, SNCF, and the Holocaust. Shimmick worked on the Golden Gate Bridge retrofit and a bunch of rail projects in California as well, including the new West Dublin/Pleasanton BART station, the Caltrain maintenance facility in San José, and part of BART’s Warm Springs extension. The members of this consortium may not be big names like some of the folks listed above but their experience with California rail projects is significant, making them a sleeper pick for the contract.

Tutor Perini, Zachry, Parsons: Tutor Perini is based in Sylmar and were the lead contractors on the BART to SFO project and the Alameda Corridor rail project. Parsons was also in on BART to SFO, is a “general engineering consultant” for Caltrain, and worked on the Channel Tunnel, Taiwan HSR, and the Northeast Corridor. The website indicates the consortium is Tutor Perini and Parsons, so I’m not quite sure where Zachry fits in. They’re based in Texas and have done a lot of highway projects there. They were also a partner with Cintra in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor.

All five have an extensive background in major transportation projects, including rail. I think the first group, California Backbone Partners, is probably something of a longshot given their comparative lack of experience on California transportation projects. The others all have an extensive background, which also means they likely have their share of critics based on some of those projects.

There’s still a ways to go before a contractor is selected, and as some of these guys know, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll actually start building HSR. But if California avoids following the Tea Party down the path of opposing rail transportation projects, one of them should start building California HSR in Fresno this fall.

The LA Times’ Steve Lopez, whose columns I enjoy, sometimes falls into this camp. His column today, Should California bite the bullet on high speed rail?, suffers from the problems of an assumed conservatism and a lack of background on the issue. Lopez’s primary error is ignoring the evidence from both the ridership studies and from around the world showing that California high speed rail will generate high ridership. By instead assuming that it’s doubtful that the train will attract riders, Lopez suffuses his entire approach to the issue with a skepticism that is unwarranted by the evidence:

But when I spoke to rail passengers at Union Station on Monday night, and to air travelers at Burbank on Tuesday morning, I got roughly the same amount of support for high-speed rail as I did criticism of the project. This mirrored my own thinking. I like the concept. I just don’t know if it’s a realistic or even sane idea at the moment, despite Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent cheerleading efforts….

“That much money is obscene,” said Kevin Lundby, a human resources manager who was waiting for a train to get him home to Santa Clarita.

But “if it can support itself” (that’s a very big if), and “if it creates jobs” (which it certainly will, despite disagreements over how many), he’d be willing to at least try taking the train.

In fact, it is NOT a “very big if” whether the train can support itself. It’s actually highly likely that it will be able to do so. It’s not like California is proposing to do something radical and untested. We’ve known for 50 years that high speed rail works. And it turns a profit – in Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, even the Amtrak Acela. And California compares favorably to those globally successful routes. In most of these cases, riders have flocked to HSR from planes – including the Acela.

Many HSR critics and opponents are motivated by their belief that nobody will ride trains in California. Those arguments are completely baseless, fly in the face of the available evidence, and should simply not be taken seriously. Amtrak California is setting ridership records. Remember that the independent peer review found the HSR ridership numbers to be sound.

Lopez doesn’t appear to be aware of any of this. I’m guessing he’s only been reading Ralph Vartabedian’s biased and flawed reporting on the project. But if Lopez is serious about getting more public feedback on the project – as he suggests in his column – then he’s going to have to confront these facts that directly challenge his preconceptions.

Lopez also fails to ask what the cost of not building HSR would be. It’s at least the same as the possible $100 billion cost of HSR, is perhaps as high as $170 billion, and that’s before you include the cost of maintenance, of oil, and of lost economic activity because of the rising cost of oil. Lopez quotes someone from Lompoc who actually points out the cost of oil, but it’s tacked on at the end:

Parks, who was on her way to her best friend’s funeral in Omaha, said she thinks our gluttonous oil dependence should be a strong consideration. There’s been much difference of opinion as to how environmentally friendly high-speed electric rail will be versus air travel or auto travel — all vehicles might be electric in 20 years — but Parks’ point goes beyond that. She’s concerned about diminishing supplies of fossil fuel, and the many costs of going after it.

“Someday, we’re going to have to face this,” she said.

Lopez also needs to think through the electric vehicle issue. If the state’s population keeps growing, then even if you somehow convert the entire private automobile fleet to electric vehicles you still have to face the costs of widening freeways to accommodate those vehicles.

Even then, are people going to want to drive? Lopez seems to still be in a 20th century mindset, where driving is seen as the most flexible way to travel. That’s no longer true in the 21st century, since time spent behind the wheel is time spent away from one’s digital device. The great shift away from driving has been under way for some time now. Driving is inconvenient in the age of the iPad and the Blackberry. So too is flying, for that matter. But a high speed train allows you to stay online and connected through the duration of your trip. That’s a big advantage.

At the very end of his column, Lopez invited readers to email him your thoughts on high speed rail. I’ve emailed this post to him. I hope you’ll also share your thoughts – nicely, of course – as to why high speed rail is a very good and a very important thing for California.

“Phase 1, I’m trying to redesign it in a way that in and of itself will be justified by the state investment,” Brown said. “We do have other sources of money: For example, cap-and-trade, which is this measure where you make people who produce greenhouse gasses pay certain fees – that will be a source of funding going forward for the high speed rail.”

Cap-and-trade is the name given to the system established by AB 32, passed in 2006 and supported by voters in 2010, to address carbon emissions and global warming. AB 32′s cap-and-trade fees go into effect later this year and that makes money available to help reduce carbon emissions. We know high speed rail will reduce carbon emissions – after all, transportation accounts for 39% of California’s carbon emissions, the largest of any kind of source. So on that basis alone it makes sense to use some cap-and-trade funds to help build high speed rail.

It could also help get tracks from the Central Valley to the coastal metropolis – the essential step to getting to an Initial Operating Segment and bringing private capital on board to help finish the entire route from SF to LA. Brown hinted at this possibility in the ABC7 interview, talking about using money to bring Metrolink up to Palmdale to help connect to a segment between Bakersfield and Palmdale. This may be what Dan Richard had in mind when he said last week that the urban areas would be included in the upcoming business plan revision.

This is the kind of thinking I’d like to see more of from the state legislature. Senators like Mark DeSaulnier, Joe Simitian and Alan Lowenthal ought to be figuring out how to make options like this work, rather than joining right-wingers to try and kill the high speed rail project. California should be a state where problems are solved, rather than used as excuses for giving up.

Brown also challenged claims that the project would cost $100 billion:

“It’s not going to be $100 billion,” the Democratic governor said on ABC 7′s Eyewitness Newsmakers program. “That’s way off….It’s going to be a lot cheaper than people are saying.”

I hope he’s right, even though I’m not as worked up about costs as others are.

Ultimately this interview shows how Governor Brown is key to the survival of California high speed rail, and how his refusal to embrace what he calls “defeatism” (as, sadly, Senators DeSaulnier, Simitian and Lowenthal appear to have done) about the state’s future is making a difference to the project at a time where it needs a strong champion.

As it turns out, Richard remains strongly supportive of starting in the Valley:

“There are a number of people who would be just as happy to give that money back, and there are people who would say, ‘Let’s take it out of the Valley and put it in other places,’ but I oppose that,” said Richard, who acknowledged that he was originally skeptical about building first in the Valley.

“This is the place to start building.”

I strongly agree. The Central Valley is part of the key missing link in connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco via train. Building there makes sense not only because it’s flatter and cheaper, but also because closing that gap helps bring high speed rail much closer to reality in a way that building in urban areas alone never will.

I ask him if the new-and-improved business plan that Gov. Jerry Brown wants on his desk any minute now will have any surprises in it. “Yes, there’s a very big surprise,” Richard says, calmly removing his classes and rubbing his eyes. And that is…? “I think it will surprise everyone that we’ve actually listened to our critics for a change,” he says with a fraction of a smile. About what, specifically? “We simply can’t ignore urban areas when we build this thing,” he says.

Cryptic, no doubt, but potentially significant. What exactly is Richard saying here? Critics of the project may hope he’s saying that the money will be moved from the Central Valley Initial Construction Segment to the ends of the route, investing only in upgrades to existing rail service that could at some future time be used by high speed trains.

That is what Senator Alan Lowenthal has been gunning for since at least 2009, and it would mean essentially abandoning the high speed rail project. While upgrading urban rail is a very good idea, high speed rail’s promise is connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco via the Central Valley, providing a new form of transportation that can give travelers an alternative to flying and driving that they don’t have. It’s a choice that, as we’ve seen around the world, will likely prove very popular with Californians, create jobs, and provide a significant economic boost by saving money on oil.

If building better urban rail in SF and LA is the key to getting intercity high speed rail, well, wouldn’t that have happened by now? Metrolink has been around for 20 years. The Pacific Surfliner (originally the San Diegans) have been operating since the late 1970s. The passenger rail service now known as Caltrain has been in operation for nearly 150 years. Those are all very valuable, successful services that can and should be improved. But they haven’t helped produce statewide high speed rail.

That’s because the problem is the gap between SF and LA. The main gap lies between Bakersfield and Palmdale through the Tehachapi Pass. But even if that were closed, a lot of new track still has to be laid in the Central Valley and through the Pacheco Pass to connect the Bay Area metropolis to the SoCal metropolis.

In short, the key to California high speed rail is track in the Central Valley. Starting there makes sense because once that gap starts to get filled in, then you get the political momentum to connect that track to the Bay Area and to SoCal.

If you do it the other way around, however, and build better tracks in SF and LA, you do nothing to address the gap problem. Instead you’re deferring it to an uncertain future. Worse, by caving to the “omg you can’t build in the middle of nowhere” bullshit, you’re actually making it harder to eventually close the gap because the precedent has been set that building outside the urban areas isn’t a good idea.

There are other practical problems too. Could high speed service within the Bay Area or SoCal generate a profit? Neither the Surfliners, Metrolink not Caltrain do so. Nor should they have to, as the purpose of passenger rail is to connect people rather than make money. But Prop 1A forbids a state operating subsidy and more significantly, one of the political arguments against the Central Valley section is that it won’t attract enough riders to be successful. Never mind the fact the CHSRA has no intention to just operate a Central Valley-only system; the Initial Operating Segment would connect either to the Bay Area or SoCal.

But an urban-only rail system would have an even more difficult time generating ridership to be profitable. That’s because the universe of choice riders is likely much smaller. Around the world, in places like Spain, many of HSR’s riders switched from planes. And in California, spending less than 3 hours on a train from SF to LA would be a far more attractive option than spending 6 hours in a car, unable to use one’s digital devices.

Within urban areas, however, the choices are different. Nobody flies between SF and San José. A bullet train connecting those two points could save you 30 minutes over driving (perhaps more at rush hour) but that’s not as great a savings over driving between SF and LA. Perhaps there would still be enough riders to pay the operating costs of urban HSR, and I’m willing to be convinced if there are ridership projections indicating that’s the case. But based on what I can see, it doesn’t look promising.

In short, moving the money to the urban areas looks to be more risky than the current plan.

Now it’s not at all clear that’s what Dan Richard was intending to say. The federal government hasn’t signaled a willingness to move its share of the funding away from the Central Valley. And Richard may have been indicating a desire to fund upgrades to rail in the urban areas, perhaps with the $950 million in Prop 1A earmarked for rail systems that connect to HSR. That’s a good idea.

Prop 1A requires a federal or private match for any of the $9 billion that is directed to HSR, but perhaps the CHSRA has found a way to spend some of that money in the urban areas while also proceeding as planned in the Central Valley. I would be quite strongly supportive of this too.

But as of right now, it doesn’t seem like moving the money out of the Central Valley entirely makes any sense. I hope that’s not what Dan Richard has in mind. We will find out soon enough.