In the Central Valley — where unemployment averages more than 15%, more than 40% in some cities — the [HSR] project would bring jobs and better connections with the coastal economies. It would relieve traffic congestion on roads and at airports.

But Denham’s having none of it. He laments that construction on the first 29 miles of track between Madera and Fresno will start soon.

Denham’s constituents and residents across the state should demand more from their congressman. He should be representing the Central Valley, California and the transportation interests of the nation — not pitting the Northeast region against all others.

Not much else to add to this aside from the political analysis that Denham is not going to be helped at all by having one of the major media outlets in the Valley denouncing him in such strong terms. Denham is still vulnerable in his new district, and has only been in Congress a term and a half. As the Valley becomes more politically moderate, Denham’s full throated embrace of an extremist right-wing agenda will become an increasing liability to his political career.

Supporting HSR is the right thing to do on the merits. It’s also the right thing to do for Jeff Denham. We’ll see if he listens to his constituents or if he continues to appease the out-of-state right-wing donors who he now answers to.

UPDATE: The Modesto Bee, which serves Denham’s district, piles on with their own editorial:

While we share his concerns about the cost of California’s high-speed rail project, we think Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, was way out of line with his comment that $6 billion in federal and state money earmarked for the California project should go to the Northeast corridor of Amtrak instead….

Denham has a responsibility to represent Californians and especially the Central Valley, where the unemployment averages more than 15 percent.

The high-speed rail project is on track to proceed. Construction on the first 29 miles of track between Madera and Fresno will start soon. Opponents like Denham need recognize that they’ve lost this political fight and to turn their attention to cutting costs and making sure it works.

While it is understandable that he questions the federal dollars, over which he has influence, going to California’s high- speed rail, he should not be suggesting — even in an off-hand way — that California money should go to the other side of the country.

Denham’s anti-HSR attitude is shaping up to be a big problem for him back home. As it should.

If you try to reach Los Angeles from the Central Valley and points north, the Tehachapi Mountains stand squarely in the way.   This mountain range, crisscrossed by earthquake faults, forms a great barrier to California’s high-speed rail network and will (by geological and topographical necessity) result in one of the highest-elevation high-speed rail mountain crossings anywhere in the world.  Reaching even the lowest passes requires a roughly 1000 m (3300 ft) vertical climb from the floor of the Central Valley, with sustained steep grades and tunnels and bridges of considerable length.  The Tehachapi mountain crossing will surely be the most spectacular, complex and expensive section of California’s nascent high-speed rail backbone.

Crossing the Tehachapis is feasible at several topographically favorable locations, among which are Tehachapi Pass (to serve Palmdale and the Antelope Valley, as selected by the California High-Speed Rail Authority) and Tejon Pass, also known as the “Grapevine” or I-5 alignment.  Two possible HSR alignments through these passes are shown in the map at right.  The map, oriented such that the SF-LA axis is vertical, highlights one of the basic trade-offs of California high-speed rail: detour through the fast-growing but geographically isolated Antelope Valley, or take the direct shortcut to Los Angeles.

This trade-off was never technical.  For political reasons that will not be discussed here, Tejon Pass was never seriously considered for high-speed rail.

During Roelof van Ark’s brief stint as CEO of the rail authority, staff and consultants were directed to reconsider the options and produced the Conceptual I-5 Corridor Study, published at the January 2012 board meeting–the same meeting where van Ark resigned his post.  This study was tailored, rather blatantly as we will see, to reconfirm the route via Palmdale.  The technical rationale for dismissing Tejon Pass alignments was built on numerous contrived assumptions and constraints that warrant close examination.  A sophisticated path optimization tool, known as Quantm, was used to evaluate thousands of possible alignments through the Tehachapi Mountains, giving the false impression that they had been exhaustively researched; however, the tool was carefully tweaked to avoid some of the most promising alternatives.  While thousands of alignments may have been considered, the hundreds that weren’t are far more interesting.

A Good Tejon Pass Alignment

The map below shows a reasonable Tejon Pass HSR alignment, by no means the best, in comparison to the probable Antelope Valley alignment.  This map serves as a key to the rest of this article, and is even more revealing after downloading the KML file and opening it in Google Earth, where many of the locations, landmarks and topographical features discussed below are easily visualized in 3D.

View Larger Map

Myths About Crossing the Tehachapi Mountains

Twelve myths have developed around the complex issue of the HSR southern mountain crossing, and are often trotted out to support the Antelope Valley alignment via Palmdale.  These myths, all of them wrong, include the following:

1. Tejon Pass HSR alignments cannot cross into Tejon Mountain Village property
2. Tejon Pass HSR requires more tunneling than the Antelope Valley
3. Tehachapi Pass is the easier mountain crossing, as the Southern Pacific Railroad figured out way back in the 1870s
4. Tejon Pass HSR suffers from greater seismic risk, compared to Antelope Valley HSR
5. Tejon Pass HSR via Santa Clarita would significantly impact Newhall Ranch
6. Antelope Valley HSR via Tehachapi Pass alignment can just plug into the electric grid
7. Bakersfield can be crossed at 220 mph
8. Bakersfield must be served with a downtown station
9. Tejon Pass HSR is only 3-5 minutes faster than Antelope Valley HSR
10. HSR can operate at 220 mph on long and steep down grades
11. Tejon Pass HSR costs about the same as Antelope Valley HSR
12. Tejon Pass HSR screws Palmdale.  Palmdale will never get a fast rail connection to LA unless it is on the HSR main line

A blog post is the wrong medium to address such complex issues; instead, the following presentation dismantles each of the myths using numerous figures and diagrams to illustrate each point.  These 75 slides are also available for download, 7MB PDF in much better resolution than provided by Scribd.

The conclusions are stunning.  Compared to the Antelope Valley alignment currently being planned with a stop in Palmdale, the more direct Tejon Pass HSR alignment would have the following advantages:

• 12 minutes faster (7% of the SF – LA trip time)
• 34 miles shorter
• 10+ fewer miles of tunnel
• 20 fewer miles of bridges
• $5 billion cheaper to build
• $175 million/year more profitable to operate

You might ask yourself at this point how some guy on the internet can come up with this stuff and claim that it undercuts years of studies by professional consultant teams paid hundreds of millions of dollars.  The point is that when it comes to math and physics, the numbers don’t lie.  The numerous advantages of a Tejon Pass alignment will not be lost on potential private investors, who will spare no effort to produce their own untainted investment-grade analysis of the mountain crossing.  If their numbers turn out anywhere close to this (and they will!) there simply won’t ever be any private investment.

Considering that the 2012 business plan relies on $13 billion of private capital (about 20% of the $68 billion overall budget), choosing the wrong mountain crossing could make or break HSR in California.  If the numbers presented here are to be believed, the smart money will demand a Tejon Pass alignment.  Failing this, private capital will stay away, and California’s high-speed rail system is unlikely to be completed as planned.

That’s why smart HSR supporters, those who are analytically-minded and open to new information, should place their full support behind the re-alignment of California’s high-speed rail backbone via Tejon Pass.

But that won’t be happening. Instead the STB today ruled in favor of the California HSR project, granting the section from Merced to Fresno an exemption from STB approval rules:

After considering the entire record on both the transportation and environmental issues, including FRA’s Record of Decision and final environmental review documents, as well as the public comments filed in this proceeding, we are granting the Authority’s petition for exemption, subject to environmental mitigation conditions, including the condition that the Authority build the route designated by FRA as environmentally preferable.

This is the last regulatory hurdle for the HSR project before groundbreaking can take place later this summer. The last legal hurdle is the lawsuit charging that the construction plan violates Prop 1A. That suit was heard a few weeks ago in Sacramento Superior Court, and we should get a ruling on that in the next month or two.

Republicans like Jeff Denham were playing up the possibility of the STB denying the petition for exemption as a way to derail the HSR project. And once again they’ve lost. The STB made the right decision here, one that will help promote good passenger rail transportation and help ensure that the California HSR project in particular gets under construction sooner rather than later.

Most of the drop came from decreased business travel. Understandable, given the economic Depression imposed on Spain by the EU. In response, RENFE has lowered ticket prices and even in Spain’s severely distressed economic situation, ridership has soared as a result:

Spain’s Ministry of Transport this week reported that ridership on Renfe AVE services has risen 14% year-on-year in the last four months to 4.7 million passengers, following an 11% cut in all tourist class tickets in early February.

The fare cuts were introduced as part of a raft of measures including the launch of 10-trip passes, an increase in tickets sold by yield management, and the introduction of more flexibility in return tickets, with the aimed of stemming the decline in high-speed passenger numbers, which fell 2.6% last year.

The highest ridership increases have been on Barcelona – Malaga (26%) and Barcelona – Seville (28%) services, while the number tickets sold for Madrid – Barcelona trains increased by 16%.

There are a couple of things going on here. Catalonia is a more prosperous part of Spain (one reason why many Catalans are seeking independence) so lower fares make it more attractive for Catalans to take the bullet trains to other parts of Spain for pleasure.

But it’s also a reminder that it matters what you prioritize when setting HSR operations policy. If the goal is higher revenue, then set fares higher to attract more prosperous business travelers. If the goal is higher ridership, then set fares lower to attract a broader base of pleasure travelers. HSR systems around the world generate operating profits as well as high levels of ridership. But the balance between the two is up to policymakers.

My preference is to emphasize ridership. There would still be profits, they’d just be smaller. And that’s fine, because the goal of high speed rail should be to maximize ridership rather than to maximize revenues. In an era of climate change and sky-high oil prices, the highest priority of electric transportation systems like high speed rail should be to get as many riders as possible so as to reduce carbon emissions and oil dependence. And of course, lower fares are better for the economy since it allows more people, especially lower income households, to reap the benefits of high speed rail.

As we move from debate and design to construction, these operational questions will become increasingly important for California HSR. The Authority will come under pressure from some politicians to maximize revenue even at the expense of ridership. That would be the wrong approach, and would miss a great opportunity to use HSR to achieve some important environmental and economic goals.

Congressman Bud Shuster was at the same event in New York where Denham had given those remarks. And according to Shuster, they don’t want to use that money for HSR. No, they’d use it just to maintain the status quo:

“Across the country I have seen the need to fix our nation’s ports, bridges, tunnels and rails so we can have a more efficient and reliable transportation network in the future,” said Shuster, who participated in the hearing. “However, we recognize that we do not have unlimited funds, so we need to focus on what makes sense and prioritize investment in infrastructure that we know is achievable. High-speed rail, while great in theory, is not realistic given the NEC’s immediate need for state-of-good repair improvements.”

So this is really nothing more than a Republican attack on high speed rail, motivated by pique, ideology, or some combination of the two. They oppose HSR in its entirety, no matter where it would be built, no matter its proven record of success.

Just further evidence that America will not see meaningful forward movement on passenger rail as long as Republicans remain in control of the House of Representatives.

Jeff Denham provides the latest example. Once touted by some in Sacramento as a moderate, Denham has since shown himself to be just as extreme – and nutty – as any of the other far-right Republicans in Congress. Of course, you can’t be any other way and survive as a Republican member of Congress these days. And so Denham has joined the job killing attack on his own constituents.

The most recent example is Denham’s bizarre yet totally unsurprising move to use California HSR funds on the Northeast Corridor instead:

Rep. Jeff Denham, the chairman of the railroads subcommittee in the House of Representatives and like many fellow House Republicans a critic of California’s high-speed rail project, said the money should go instead to Amtrak’s busy but aging Northeast Corridor, which serves the nation’s most densely populated region.

“Given that there are over 11.4 million Amtrak riders and over 200 million commuters that use the Northeast Corridor every year, it would be an investment in an area where we have proven ridership,” Denham said at a hearing at the site of the future Moynihan Station in New York, which is intended to replace the cramped Penn Station across the street….

“I believe the $6 billion that was given to the California High-Speed Rail Authority could be better spent on such upgrades, as these projects are both clearly identified, and necessary beyond dispute,” Denham said.

What a bunch of nonsense. The federal government has the ability to easily pay for the entirety of the California high speed rail project, the NEC upgrades, and a whole bunch of other projects. Republicans refuse to do so simply because they don’t want to tax the rich.

That’s bad enough. But by proposing to move the California HSR money from the next county over to the Northeast Corridor, Denham is saying to his constituents that they don’t deserve to have jobs, that people in New Jersey and New York should have those jobs instead. His district has an unemployment rate of around 14%, and an HSR project just a few miles down Highway 99 would provide a big jobs boost to people living in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties.

California’s Republican Congressional delegation is openly siding against California jobs, California infrastructure, and California’s future. No wonder they lost so many seats there last fall. With attitudes like Denham’s they’re likely to lose a few more seats, perhaps including his own.

State bullet train leaders on Thursday approved the start of construction for California’s $69 billion high-speed rail line, choosing the cheapest but least qualified firm to build the first leg.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority asked its staff questions for more than an hour, but ultimately said it was confident in choosing a Southern California firm that promised to save the state at least $100 million.

The board voted 6-0 to select a developer group led by Sylmar-based Tutor Perini to lay the physical groundwork for the first 29 miles of track between Madera and Fresno, with work starting as soon as late summer. CEO Jeff Morales is expected to sign the formal contract with the developer in coming weeks following final negotiations.

Tutor Perini’s $985 million bid beat the state’s initial $1.2 billion estimate and the bids offered by four competing firms from around the world, which ranged from $1.09 billion to $1.54 billion. But state rail officials graded Tutor Perini’s technical score as 68.5 out of 100, last among the finalists, whose quality scores ranged from 69 to 92.4. Still, all five firms met the authority’s basic standards for quality.

That’s a good overview, though I quibbled with the idea that Tutor Perini is “least qualified” when I spoke on the phone with Mike Rosenberg yesterday. As Rosenberg states at the end of the quoted section, “all five firms met the authority’s basic standards for quality.” What I argued was that the technical scores were NOT a reflection of quality. They don’t necessarily mean that the higher scoring bids were of higher quality and lower scoring bids were of lower quality. They are all “quality” bids. What we don’t know is what led to the different scores.

Rosenberg reported accurately my comments on this whole situation:

“I think after the last five years you have a ton of politicians, activists and media outlets screaming about the cost of high-speed rail — of course they’re going to pick based on price,” said Robert Cruickshank, who runs a popular high-speed rail blog supportive of the project.

Let’s assume for a moment that the Authority had the ability to go with the highest cost bid. Can you imagine the reaction if they did? The media would be all over it, legislators would throw a fit, and anti-HSR activists would be denouncing a bid that in their minds proves that project costs will invariably rise.

But the winning bid came in lower than expected, throwing off the “omg HSR will be a boondoggle!” arguments. So HSR critics and opponents had to find a new angle of attack and the technical score is it.

This vote doesn’t mean the contract is a done deal. It authorizes Morales to conduct final negotiations, but barring any unexpected obstacles, we should expect that to be done in just a few weeks.

It’s great news and a big milestone. And assuming the courts continue to rule in HSR’s favor, there should be a groundbreaking near Fresno sometime later this summer.

By June 17 the STB is expected to rule on California’s request to exempt the HSR project from STB approval rules. The Board already concluded it had jurisdiction over the project, but also gave Florida’s putative HSR project an exemption a couple of years ago, setting a precedent for doing the same for California HSR. California leaders, including Governor Jerry Brown, have been lobbying the STB to grant an exemption. Anti-HSR forces, including Jeff Denham, want them to refuse an exemption and trigger a long drawn out review that would significantly delay construction and risk the federal stimulus funds.

What will happen? McClatchy’s Michael Doyle takes a look:

The final decision will be made by people who aren’t usually in the public eye.

[Board Vice Chair Ann] Begeman formerly worked as a top staff member for Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Citing the “scope of the project and significant public interest,” Begeman in her May 20 statement indicated that she’d like the board to “fully analyze” the California proposal. She sided with skeptics in urging a longer public comment period.

Overall, she appeared to be inclined to reject California’s request to exempt the project from board oversight. “In my view, continued regulation by the board is necessary here,” Begeman declared in an April 18 statement.

The board chairman, Daniel R. Elliott III, formerly was an attorney for the United Transportation Union, an Ohio-based organization that represents rail workers. The third member, Francis P. Mulvey, is an economist with an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate from Washington State University. He formerly was a Democratic staff member on the House rail subcommittee.

Neither Elliott nor Mulvey have clearly tipped their hands concerning the California project in publicly available statements or writings. Because it’s an ongoing application, no board member would comment on it Friday.

But in a case that split the board in December, Mulvey opined that Florida’s high-speed rail project should be federally regulated.

So basically, you’ve got two Democrats (Elliott and Mulvey) and one Republican (Begeman). Another 2-1 split in favor of high speed rail exemption seems a likely outcome just based on that alone. In December it was, ironically enough, Elliott and Begeman who ruled in favor of exempting Florida HSR. But the political pressure here is much more intense and different. It is impossible to say how the STB will rule.

Ideally Congress would step in and in the interest of getting high speed rail built find some way to clarify the issue in favor of HSR and without requiring pointless STB oversight. But Congress is broken, with Republicans having basically ground the federal government to a halt since early 2011. So we are instead left to hope that two of the three STB members will come to their senses and support a reasonable, justified exemption for the California HSR project.

Until then we’ll all be holding our breaths. Not literally. Sorry.

Officially, the board will vote on whether to authorize the rail authority’s CEO, Jeffrey Morales, to finalize negotiations and execute a contract with the Tutor Perini/Zachry/Parsons team. “We’ll still have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s,” Morales said Tuesday. “We expect to have the contract itself done in the next few weeks.”

The Tutor Perini team and other construction teams submitted their bids in January, and in April, after the technical merits of all five teams were evaluated, the bid results were announced. Since that time, the authority has been in limited negotiations with Tutor Perini to work out details.

My guess is the board will vote to authorize this action and the contract will be finalized by the end of June. Groundbreaking would then happen sometime in August, assuming no new issues arise, though the outcome of last week’s trial hearing in Sacramento Superior Court on the last anti-HSR lawsuit could delay the process even further.

We also got some more details on the contract itself:

In a memo to the authority board, chief program manager Frank Vacca reported that the Tutor Perini team “offered certain innovations which have the potential to achieve contract savings” for the cost of the project. Also, he added, the Tutor Perini team provided “a commitment to a six-month-early completion date.”

According to the conditions under which contractors submitted their bids, the authority expects the construction work to be substantially completed by December 2017, with final acceptance of the work the following February.

I didn’t say they were complete or revealing details. It would be nice to know just what the “certain innovations” are. Apparently they have to do with “Alternative Technical Concepts”:

Included in these innovations is an Alternative Technical Concept (ATC) proposed by the joint venture as well as a commitment to a six-month early completion date. As discussed later in this memo, all ATCs included in the five Proposals are able to be incorporated into the program, as appropriate.

But the memo doesn’t say what the ATCs are exactly. Would be nice to know.

I hope that Tutor Perini will be able to meet the six month early completion date as well as bring this segment in on budget. Of course, some cost overruns should be expected and are not the end of the world, assuming they aren’t of enormous size. Getting this built the right way should be the priority.

After five long years of advocacy and combat in the legislature, on the ballot, and in the courts, it will be a big milestone if the CHSRA board does indeed vote to authorize finalization of the contract. Construction is getting oh so close!

during Friday’s testimony, rail officials admitted they will likely miss their July groundbreaking date because of other issues. The hope now is for late summer and you can blame several factors: eminent domain related to property owners refusing to sell their land, negotiations with contractor Tudor Perini, which is building the line’s first track in the Central Valley, and a bureaucratic snafu related to a late application sent to the federal Surface Transportation Board. Regardless, rail authorities remain bullish on a summer start to work–should the trial go their way.

I think they are right to remain bullish, since each of those issues can be resolved. Using eminent domain to purchase land from unwilling sellers is common in government projects. You want to get the negotiations done right, and Tutor Perini knows well the federal stimulus deadlines that are involved. The STB application is frustrating but neither is it a major obstacle.

That leaves the lawsuit. Tim Sheehan provided good coverage of Friday’s hearing:

[Plaintiff Stuart] Flashman said the law requires the funding plan specify where the authority expected to receive all the money it would need to build its “initial operating segment” from Merced to the San Fernando Valley. But he argued that the plan falls short because it did not identify a realistic source of expected funds beyond the $6 billion available for the rail authority to build a 130-mile stretch from Madera to Bakersfield.

Michele Inan, a deputy with the state Attorney General’s Office, said the language of Prop. 1A instead suggests the funding plan “was for the benefit of the Legislature” and was not a guarantee to voters.

Inan is technically correct, which is of course the best kind of correct when you’re in a court of law. I’m sure HSR opponents will make a big deal out of that argument, but it is designed to win a case and that is what matters most. Besides, Flashman’s arguments don’t really hold much water. As I read AB 3034, both at the time and today, it only mandated that each segment between stations that was being built had to have funding identified. The Central Valley Initial Construction Segment meets that rule and that’s what is at stake in this case.

Judge Kenny ruled in favor of the California High Speed Rail Authority before, in 2009′s Atherton v. CHSRA case, and I expect he’ll do so again here. The ruling may not come until late July, but since groundbreaking was going to be delayed anyway, August seems like as good a time as any to get the shovels in the dirt.