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.

CA4HSR realizes the need for folks all around the state to participate in and benefit from the high-speed rail project in the near-term. We are encouraged about what we are hearing so far from the Governor’s office in terms of how to rethink the project to garner more support, save on costs, and accelerate benefits throughout the state. CA4HSR has recently been more aggressively in advocating for near-term investments in the “bookends” due to the longer time frame envisioned in bringing HSR to the major urban areas. Of course our recent efforts to promote such urban projects is not at the expense of the Central Valley. CA4HSR still strongly supports moving forward in the Central Valley without delay.

Our hope is that this joint letter will provide more impetus in getting stakeholders around the state to come together to improve the current project by moving forward with the Central Valley section while at the same time figuring out ways to get more money to the major urban areas earlier for projects in corridors where HSR trains will eventually travel.

“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.

In 2011 a Republican House did gut HSR funding, but again this was not the CHSRA’s fault. But in a new report the State Auditor continues to hold the CHSRA responsible for Congress’ failures on funding transportation policy. The result is yet another flawed report from a State Auditor who does not appear to have a strong grasp of transportation funding.

Although the Authority has secured funding for the Initial Construction Section (construction section)—the first portion of the program—the program’s overall financial situation has become increasingly risky, in part because the Authority has not provided viable funding alternatives in the event that its planned funding does not materialize. In its 2012 draft business plan, the Authority more than doubles its cost estimates for phase one of the program, to between $98.1 billion and $117.6 billion. Of this amount, the Authority has secured approximately $12.5 billion to date. The success or failure of the program consequently depends upon the Authority’s ability to obtain between $85.6 billion and $105.1 billion by 2033.

So the Authority gives itself 21 years to get as much as $85 billion from the federal government (although they will need much less – once an Initial Operating Segment is open, private money will step up to the plate). They’ll obviously need money sooner than that, and while this present Congress isn’t likely to give it, this present Congress is not going to last beyond the end of this year. Democrats continue to dominate the generic Congressional polls, a key indicator of their growing chances to reclaim the House in November. So the chances of the Authority getting more federal funding in the near future are not nearly as bleak as critics imagine.

The State Auditor doesn’t explain any of this. Instead they continue to bash the project as “risky”:

In its 2012 draft business plan, the Authority identifies the federal government as by far the largest potential funding source for the program, yet the plan provides few details indicating how the Authority expects to secure this money. Further, the plan does not present viable alternatives in the event that it does not receive significant federal funds. In fact, one of the funding options the Authority characterizes as an alternative is not yet approved for use on high-speed rail projects. Although it is possible that the Authority may obtain the necessary funding to move forward with the program, it risks significant delays or the inability to proceed if it does not.

The problem is that this isn’t unique to high speed rail. Many transportation projects, like BART to San José, rely on getting federal funds that they’re not guaranteed to receive.

But we can make a bigger point. If Republicans prevail in November, winning the Senate and the White House in addition to the House, one could then say that pretty much everything the State of California does is “risky” since federal budget cuts could undermine virtually every service and program currently provided by the state, from schools to parks to roads. The State Auditor isn’t really telling us anything useful here.

Some of the State Auditor’s concerns border on the absurd:

Further, the Authority’s 2012 draft business plan still lacks some key details about the program’s costs and revenues. In particular, only within the business plan’s chapter about funding—more than 100 pages into the plan—does the Authority mention that phase one could cost as much as $117.6 billion, whereas it uses one of its lower cost estimates of $98.5 billion throughout the plan. Moreover, neither of these cost estimates includes phase one’s operating and maintenance costs, yet based on data included in the 2012 draft business plan, we estimate that these costs could total approximately $96.9 billion from 2025 through 2060. The Authority projects that the program’s revenues will cover these costs but it does not include any alternatives if the program does not generate significant profits beginning in its first year of operation. Further, the plan assumes, but does not explicitly articulate, that the State will not receive any profits between 2024 and 2060, because private sector investors will receive all of the program’s net operating profits during these years in return for their investment.

The State Auditor doesn’t examine the rising cost of oil or other globally successful HSR systems (virtually all of them, including the Amtrak Acela, cover their own operating costs), simply assuming that the system will somehow have trouble, unlike all the other HSR systems, in covering its costs. If the State Auditor still thinks gas will be at $4 a gallon 50 years from now they are simply delusional.

As to the state not receiving any profits, well, unfortunately that’s by design. But that isn’t a problem for the HSR project, since Prop 1A mandates that the state not subsidize its operations. That’s a moronic and stupid rule, but it is also a rule the system can meet. If the system covers its own costs, as global evidence suggests it will, then the state faces no obligations and if private sector investors get all the profits, that’s stupid but not necessarily a financial problem from the state’s perspective.

The State Auditor makes their own anti-rail biases clear in the way they attack the ridership studies by innuendo:

The accuracy of the Authority’s estimates of the program’s profits depends upon its ridership projections, which are thus fundamental to private investors’ interest. The ridership model the Authority presents in its 2012 draft business plan assumes an average ticket price of $81 and projects that passengers will take a total of 29 to 43 million annual trips by the completion of phase one. However, when the Authority’s chief executive officer commissioned a ridership review group to independently assess the ridership projections, he handpicked the group’s members, which may call into question the independent nature of their assessment.

OK, this is simply bullshit. If the State Auditor cannot actually find technical fault with the ridership recommendations or the peer review of those numbers, they have no business impugning the peer review group or Roelof van Ark for putting it together. This kind of baseless attack has no place in an official report such as this.

The report goes on to make a number of recommendations regarding contract oversight and those are all well and good. But it is frustrating to see the State Auditor continuing to hold the CHSRA responsible for Congress’ failures, and their unfair attack on the peer review of the ridership numbers is a particularly ridiculous move that shows their inherent biases.

The “Stop The $100 Billion Bullet Train to Nowhere Act” is currently pending at the Attorney General’s office, awaiting a title and summary before it can be circulated for signatures. The key question is whether LaMalfa and Radanovich have any money to pay for signature gathering to put this on the ballot – it would cost at least $2 million to gather the 800,000 or so signatures required and given that there is not a lot of time to do so, with most other paid signature gatherers busy on other pending initiatives, they’ll need deep pockets if this were to have a chance at all of making the ballot.

My guess is, as of right now, that LaMalfa and Radanovich don’t actually have the money. They’re filing an initiative in hopes that someone will step up and fund it for them. This is not so different from when LaMalfa helped file an initiative to repeal AB 32 in 2010 – once he filed it right-wing and oil company money flowed in to put it on the ballot as Prop 23. But Prop 23 went down in flames in November 2010, suggesting that Californians support green jobs and sustainable projects and have little interest in following Republicans down a path of oil dependency and ruin.

LaMalfa is also running to replace the retiring Wally Herger in Congress, so this may be a bid for national attention and potentially national money in his run for Congress. As we know, House Republicans are vehemently anti-rail, as they are currently in thrall to their oil company donors (such as the Koch Brothers), so this could be LaMalfa’s attempt to prove to a national audience that he is just as wingnutty as Jeff Denham, Kevin McCarthy, and the other yahoos in the California Republican caucus.

Unless funding materializes to actually put this on the ballot, I’m not going to worry about it. Still, it is a good reminder for HSR advocates that the opposition feels emboldened, and believes that Californians really would be willing to sacrifice their future on the altar of right-wing dogma. Now would be as good a time as any to push back hard in defense of high speed rail and in defense of California’s future.

Transportation planners once dreamed that super-fast trains would whisk Southern Californians at more than 300 mph across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas.

But the idea of a magnetic levitation train didn’t stick around for long in regional transportation plans developed by the Southern California Association of Governments. Local planners instead are concentrating on connections within Southern California, so that when — and if — bullet trains ever come, conventional trains have a steady and direct route to get to them.

So 11 years after maglev made its debut in the regional transportation plan for Southern California, the agency overseeing the road and transit plan has deleted most of the Anaheim-to-Vegas route once proposed, saying maglev is not moving forward and is falling behind a competing project. As a result, the 2012 transportation plan under consideration by the Southern California Association of Governments does not include the $12.1 billion California-Nevada Super-Speed Train.

Maglev, with its far greater construction costs, was always a longshot for the SoCal-Vegas corridor. It had received millions in federal funding for studies, but as the DesertXpress project gained more momentum and support, particularly owing to its much lower construction cost for building a standard steel-wheel high speed rail system, maglev sank further and further behind. In 2010, Senator Harry Reid switched his support away from maglev and to DesertXpress. Without Reid’s backing, further federal funding for planning seemed unlikely, with federal backing for construction seeming to be almost out of the question.

With that in mind, SCAG wisely decided to abandon the maglev plan. This is a sensible approach, since the DesertXpress project can serve the same demand – at least if it is connected to LA via Palmdale.

SCAG is backing high speed rail as well:

Local officials in fact are asking for more than 20 percent of the $9 billion in high-speed rail money California voters approved in 2008 as part of Prop. 1A. McCallon said SCAG officials have concluded in the transportation plan that $1 billion should be spent in Southern California — and $1 billion in Northern California — getting passenger rail lines better connected to high-speed hubs.

The money would be used to improve service mostly along Metrolink’s Antelope Valley corridor north of downtown Los Angeles, and along the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo rail corridor that carries Amtrak trains. Some money could come to the Inland area via track and railcar improvements, and possibly even more trains scheduled to ferry passengers.

Better track and safety improvements could help those Amtrak and passenger trains travel at higher speeds; as fast as 110 mph potentially along the LOSSAN corridor.

It sounds like SCAG wants to divert the HSR money from the Central Valley to their backyard, which an understandable if flawed approach to take. Their best bet is actually to push for the LA-SF portion of the system to be completed and made operational, which will generate demand and momentum to extend the system eastward to Riverside or San Bernardino on the way to San Diego.

The overall SCAG 2012 transportation plan, looking several decades into the future, envisions spending $525 billion on a variety of projects, especially more freeway lanes. But they may want to reconsider that plan, and add a lot more transit and rail, after today’s news that Attorney General Kamala Harris is suing the San Diego Association of Governments over their transportation plan:

The San Diego Association of Governments was the first regional agency to have to comply with a new state law requiring its transportation plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 25 years. The governor’s office and state Attorney General Kamala Harris said the plan didn’t go far enough to get San Diego drivers off the road and into buses, trolleys or bike lanes.

On Monday, Harris sued, putting more heft behind a similar lawsuit that local and national environmental groups filed after Sandag approved its plan last year. The suits both show that neither the state nor environmentalists want to see Sandag’s approach become precedent in California — and are willing to fight.

“The 3.2 million residents of the San Diego region already suffer from the seventh worst ozone pollution in the country,” Harris said in a news release. “Spending our transit dollars in the right way today will improve the economy, create sustainable jobs and ensure that future generations do not continue to suffer from heavily polluted air.”

This will be a very important case for California’s transportation future, and one I’ll be watching very closely. If SANDAG loses, then they’ll have to spend more money developing transit and rail – including high speed rail. Already there’s strong economic, environmental, and sustainability reasons to do that. But Kamala Harris is indicating there may also be legal reasons as well. This could be a transformative case for California and make high speed rail an even more attractive option by finally making it clear to people that just building more freeway lanes is not an option any longer.

At the very least, SCAG should pay attention to this case. They might even want to start revising their plans now to include more rail and less freeways, before Kamala Harris turns to them next.

Sheehan’s discussion of the Alta Velocidad Española (AVE) trains’ impact on farmland is very useful, although as before Sheehan does not necessarily draw the lessons from what he sees and hears:

On a crisp fall Saturday morning, Luis Valciente and Mercedes Martin enjoy the quiet of their farm about 20 miles northeast of Seville.

The retired husband and wife bought their patch of land in 1987, several years before Spain’s first high-speed trains started running between Madrid and Seville.

“It’s very tranquil, which is what we like after all these years,” Martin says through an interpreter.

Without warning, a loud “swoosh” briefly interrupts the couple’s conversation with a reporter. Within seconds, the noise subsides, and the couple picks up the chat, unruffled, right where they left off….

The AVE trains speed by the small farmstead several times an hour, “and it hasn’t affected us at all,” Valciente said.

“We don’t even feel them,” added Martin. Even though their house is so near the tracks, she said, the high-speed trains create no wind turbulence and are less bothersome than the slower-moving regional commuter trains because noise from the AVE trains passes so quickly.

Because conventional trains were already there when Valciente bought the farm, he doesn’t think the AVE trains affected his property value, and if the neighbors have any complaints, he says he hasn’t heard them.

This is a pretty insightful experience right here, but Sheehan misses its significance. He talks later about how the HSR tracks were engineered to have less impact on farmland, and we’ll discuss that in a moment. But the key lesson right here is, and I’ll bold it because it is very important, high speed rail isn’t as disruptive as some Californians claim it will be.

This conversation that Sheehan has with the couple is one that, to hear NIMBYs tell it, will never be able to happen again anywhere near the HSR route. They’re convinced that HSR will destroy their quality of life, although nobody Sheehan has talked to in Spain appears to believe those fears have become real in their experience. Sheehan, therefore, has exposed a pretty big flaw in NIMBY reasoning. It would be nice if he had called that out.

But his focus was instead on how HSR was engineered to have less impact on farmland, and it’s true that Spain took steps to do that. And Sheehan, to his credit, points out that the California HSR project proposes to do the same:

In Spain, the government worked with farmers from the outset to head off such concerns, said Pedro Pérez del Campo, environmental policy director for ADIF, the government-owned company that runs the track system.

“It’s in our interest to make it easier for the farmers,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. Pérez del Campo said the first priority is to make sure that farmers whose properties are divided by the tracks can still reach the other side of their land.

“About every 500 meters, there is the ability to pass from one side of the rail to the other,” he said. “We are obligated that if the rails were to cross your property, we have to give you the ability to cross.”

That access doesn’t come cheap. To prevent collisions, bridges and tunnels carry roads over or under the line. There are no at-grade crossings. Likewise, California proposes to build its high-speed line without at-grade crossings but with bridges and underpasses for selected roads and streets. It’s not clear yet how many crossings would be provided for farms in the Central Valley.

If building a bridge or tunnel for a farmer is too complicated, Pérez del Campo said, it can be cheaper for ADIF to pay more than the land is worth to simply buy the remnant parcel from the owner. That eliminates the need for the farmer to cross.

Pérez del Campo was adamant that the train system hasn’t hurt farming: ‘Especially in the wine industry, which is very important to Spain’s economy, if there were an issue, we would know by now.

If I were Sheehan’s editor at the Bee, I’d suggest that his next article be a follow-up on this very topic, examining exactly how it is that California HSR is going to be engineered and designed to address farmland impacts. He might even seek out the truth and determine whether the criticisms coming from Kings County farmers are accurate. He would also do well to examine the fact that addressing the impacts to farmers increases the cost of building the system, setting up a conflict between the two groups of HSR critics – the NIMBY types (I include farmers here) and the people who believe against all evidence that spending money in a recession is somehow a bad thing.

Sheehan also discussed briefly the impact of high speed rail on cities. Here again he missed a rather important point of comparison: that the way Spain built its high speed lines in urban areas is very, very similar to how California plans to build its high speed rail:

In larger Spanish cities such as Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Cordova and Barcelona, stations for high-speed trains are in already-developed central-city commercial districts, often near existing train stations to minimize disruptions. In Barcelona, preservationists’ fears about a train tunnel under the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia forced extensive and expensive engineering measures to avoid damaging the iconic church.

Merchants doing business near the stations generally say high-speed rail is good for commerce, even when they are unsure if it has directly helped their own stores and restaurants.

Stations for California HSR will also be in already-developed central-city commercial districts. In fact, they will in most cases be built as part of existing train stations, in order to minimize disruptions. And the results are positive. Merchants tend to be a fussy bunch, whether they’re in North America or Europe, highly sensitive to perceived impacts on their business. If they are convinced that HSR is good for their bottom line, then there’s a good chance they’re right. If it wasn’t good, they would not be shy about saying so.

One of the key discussions in the article is HSR’s impact on smaller mid-line cities. I criticized Sheehan last week for not discussing that in his first article, so it’s good that he covers the topic in the new article. However, Sheehan only talked to critics of HSR’s impact on smaller cities, and did not speak to those who believe its impact to be positive, meaning Sheehan doesn’t tell his readers that there are indeed a lot of people who believe HSR is a benefit to the smaller mid-line cities:

In Ciudad Real, a city of 75,000 people about 100 miles south of Madrid, hotel beds and hotel stays more than doubled between 1990 and 2007. The city’s population also grew at a much faster rate than the rest of Spain during the same period.

Renfe, the government-owned company that operates the AVE trains, said high-speed trains have made it easier for students and professors to commute to Ciudad Real’s University of Castilla-La Mancha and for people in the town to commute daily to Madrid for work….

But academic researchers, including Chris Nash of England’s University of Leeds, say it’s difficult to measure the effects of high-speed rail on commerce, employment, and the economies of cities and regions. Most of Spain’s high-speed lines are too new to have made a significant mark. And experts are still looking for ways to distinguish the influence of high-speed trains from other economic factors–especially when stations are built in already-established city centers.

“The issue of wider economic benefits remains one of the hardest to tackle,” Nash wrote in a 2009 International Transport Forum article. “Such benefits could be significant, but vary significantly from case to case, so an in-depth study of each case is required.”

This is a fair conclusion, but Sheehan goes further to spin HSR’s impact as being negative:

[Germà] Bel, a professor of political economics at the University of Barcelona, said it’s much more likely that smaller cities along the line between Madrid and the larger destinations suffer economically because most of the travel and commerce by residents flows to the big cities.

“High-speed rail encourages the centralization of activities in the large hubs, especially in the services sector,” Bel wrote in a new book on infrastructure economics to be published this year. “The primary hubs of the network–more dynamic–can benefit at the expense of intermediary cities, which are usually the big losers of high-speed rail. For this reason, the efforts by many smaller-sized cities to get high-speed rail stations can be unfruitful and even counterproductive.”

Bel simplified his ideas in an interview at his university office. “If you are the small guy, you get sucked. Most of the trips go to the big hubs, not to the small cities,” he said.

Not everybody in Spain shares this bleak assessment. In 2009 the Wall Street Journal looked at Ciudad Real and heard much more positive things about the impact of high speed rail:

Perhaps the most striking example is Ciudad Real, a scrappy town 120 miles south of Madrid in Castilla-La Mancha which, [José María Ureña, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Castilla-La Mancha] says, “had completely vanished from the map.” In medieval times, the town was a key stopover point on the route between the two of most important cities of the time, Córdoba and Toledo. But the railway and the highway south later bypassed the town, and Ciudad Real began to wither.

Now it has an AVE station that puts it just 50 minutes away from Madrid, and Ciudad Real has come alive. The city has attracted a breed of daily commuters that call themselves “Avelinos.” The AVE helped attract a host of industries to Ciudad Real, and the train is full in both directions.

Indra, an information technology company, moved a “software factory” to Ciudad Real a decade ago. “Along with the University, the AVE was one of the key reasons we moved here,” says Ángel Villodre, the director of the center.

The University of Castilla-La Mancha’s campus here has grown sharply in size and importance. “The school is here because of the AVE,” says Mr. Menéndez, the department head. “Without it, it would be impossible to attract the high-level staff we need.”

Those are pretty important impacts to Ciudad Real that Sheehan didn’t examine. Instead, following Bel’s lead, Sheehan argues that Fresno might not thrive with high speed rail:

“If you want to go to San Francisco for a theater performance or a concert, you could jump on the train and be back that night,” he said. “And more people will start coming here. The Save Mart Center (at CSU Fresno) is one of the most-used concert venues on the West Coast these days. People will be coming to Fresno to do stuff.”

But Bel has his doubts. “In California, nobody in San Francisco is going to travel to Fresno to buy things,” he said. “From time to time, somebody from Los Angeles will travel to Bakersfield. But they will not be going every weekend to Bakersfield.”

Bel may be doubtful, but other urban scholars like Richard Florida argue that HSR is essential for bringing places like Fresno into the urban clusters, much like freeways brought places like Santa Clara County into the San Francisco urban cluster 50-60 years ago:

Instead of further encouraging the growth of an auto-housing-suburban complex, the government should promote those forces that are subtly causing the shift away from it. Chief among these are the creation of inter-connected mega-regions, like the Boston-Washington corridor and the Char-lanta region (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh Durham) and ten or so more across the United States. Concentration and clustering are the underlying motor forces of real economic development. As Jane Jacobs identified and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas later formalized, clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates the diversity required for new ideas to fertilize and turn into new innovations and new industries.

In fact, the key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic of 1873 and long downturn was forged by the transition from an agricultural nation to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs, which again intensified and expanded our use of space. Renewed prosperity hinges on the rise of yet another even more massive and more intensive geographic pattern—the mega-region. These new geographic entities are larger than the sum of their parts; they not only produce but consume, spurring further demand….

That means high-speed rail, which is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns. If the government is truly looking for a shovel-ready infrastructure project to invest in that will create short-term jobs across the country while laying a foundation for lasting prosperity, high-speed rail works perfectly. It is central to the redevelopment of cities and the growth of mega-regions and will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars. High-speed rail may be our best hope for revitalizing the once-great industrial cities of the Great Lakes. By connecting declining places to thriving ones—Milwaukee and Detroit to Chicago, Buffalo to Toronto—it will greatly expand the economic options and opportunities available to their residents. And by providing the connective fibers within and between America’s emerging mega-regions, it will allow them to function as truly integrated economic units.

Sheehan doesn’t discuss this, in part because these ideas are taboo for modern American journalism. Why that’s the case isn’t exactly clear. Perhaps it’s because many journalists see themselves as defenders of the status quo. Or maybe it’s because the average age of a newspaper reader is 55, and many (though thankfully not all) people of that age are currently among the most resistant to change in America. Whatever the case, the notion that HSR can and has brought a lot of benefits, and that new ways of arranging the state’s urban and economic geography are necessary for future prosperity, are just not looked on very kindly by reporters these days.

In fact, a dose of common sense can show us why Ciudad Real’s success is likely to translate to Fresno and Bakersfield. HSR has turned Ciudad Real into three things: a bedroom city for Madrid, a university hub, and a desirable place to do business. By being located an hour or so away from the Bay Area (in Fresno’s case) and LA (in Bakersfield’s case) via HSR, those San Joaquin Valley cities are poised to repeat all three of Ciudad Real’s successes.

Both cities have lower property values than the coastal metropolises, which will prove attractive to workers in the coming decades. After all, we saw the concept of the Valley serving as bedroom community to the coast proven during the ’00s when Stockton, Tracy and Manteca became bedroom communities for the Bay Area. The rising price of oil stopped that from continuing and helped touch off the wave of foreclosures in that area. But HSR, powered by electricity, has more stable and predictable operating costs, making it easier to support commuters.

Both Fresno and Bakersfield already have universities, but HSR can make those universities even more significant as nodes of research and innovation. HSR can make those schools more attractive locations for top faculty members, as it closes the distance between the Valley and the coastal metropolises. It’s easier to recruit and keep faculty if you can explain that downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles are just an hour’s train ride away rather than a four or five hour car trip. And HSR makes it easier for top students to be willing to live in the Valley, as they would much more easily be able to visit family and friends on the coasts. Of course, it’s also possible, perhaps likely, that HSR would transform Fresno and Bakersfield and make them more desirable centers of culture and social activity.

Finally, it makes sense that HSR would play a big role in attracting businesses to Fresno and Bakersfield. Land values are cheaper there, and so are salaries. A startup based in San José or LA could rent factory or industrial space in the Valley at an affordable rate and employ local workers much more easily than they could now, since HSR closes the temporal and spatial gaps that currently keep coastal and inland metropolises apart.

There’s no guarantee that any of those things will happen, of course. But the case of Ciudad Real shows they are plausible. Nobody expects Bay Area residents to get their fashions in Fresno rather than in Union Square. Fresno, however, could be a place where they take classes, start a business, or maybe even purchase a home.

So while I’m glad that Sheehan touched on the Ciudad Real story, it’s also unfortunate that he did so in an incomplete and uneven way, without showing the full story or publishing what the supporters have to say about the example.