The following post is a guest post from UC Riverside PhD student and blogger Justin Nelson. It appears that planning for HSR stations along the Los Angeles to San Diego Section is moving away from the Authority’s commitment to downtown stations in favor of greenfield sites (described below), or in the case of San Diego, at the airport (rather than their vibrant downtown). This does not bode well for ridership along this portion of the system and indicates that the Inland Empire and San Diego still have not fully embraced a more transit-oriented future and continue to see HSR stations like airports, places where people drive and park, rather than places that great urbanism is built upon.

Guest Post by Justin Nelson:

As followers of this blog are well aware, the California High Speed Rail project offers us the best chance to change Californians’ transportation habits in probably all of our lifetimes. When I say this, keep in mind that I’m 23. However, out in the Inland Empire, already one of the worst offenders in the area of suburban sprawl, planning efforts are underway to ensure that – instead of transformative change – we get more of the same.

This article in Riverside’s local paper, the Press-Enterprise, shows that City officials are making an “aggressive push” to put an HSR station near March Air Reserve Base (what I’ll call “March Field”). The site would be at the intersection of Alessandro Ave. and Sycamore Canyon Blvd. on the fringes of the city and nearly 8 miles from its rapidly re-developing downtown.

I’ll launch into why this is a terrible idea in a second, but first, a little background. When CHSRA first proposed their project-level alignment for the LA-SD segment, they planned on placing a station next to UC Riverside, alongside the then-planned Metrolink Perris Valley Line station that was to be located there. While UCR is still around 4 miles from downtown, the area around the University is the second-densest in the city, housing thousands of students, faculty and staff within walking distance of both the campus and nearby amenities, so it was a fair compromise. However, the residents of the neighbourhood complained bitterly about the siting of a Metrolink station there. First, they expressed concern about parking and traffic impacts, and when the local transportation commission agreed to remove all on-site parking, they complained about noise until the station was removed from the project altogether.

In what must be an attempt to placate these residents, local officials have simply moved the HSR station to the next station down the proposed Metrolink Perris Valley Line, the station at Alessandro. Unlike the station at UCR, the Alessandro site is on greenfield land, with nearly nothing within walking distance, and nothing but suburban sprawl surrounding it on all sides.

The proper and obvious location for a station here in Riverside should be downtown, at the existing Riverside-Downtown Metrolink. Like both UCR and Alessandro, downtown will be a station on the Perris Valley Line (an extension of Metrolink’s 91 Line), but it is also a station on the IE-OC Line, the Riverside Line, and the San Bernardino Line on weekends. With 4 Metrolink lines, Riverside-Downtown is the most connected station in the Metrolink system after Los Angeles Union Station. It’s also a stop on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief to Chicago and for Amtrak California buses that connect to the San Joaquins trains in Bakersfield.

City officials are also currently working on the design of a brand new multi-modal transit centre that will be located adjacent to the downtown station. This centre will be the primary hub for local and express buses serving the region, of which the Riverside Transit Agency has several. (There’s even an attractive “system map” of express buses throughout western Riverside County here, although that map misses the Omnitrans 215 express which links downtown Riverside and downtown San Bernardino.) Greyhound and other intercity buses will also serve the station, which will allow direct connections to places like the Coachella Valley, the Victor Valley, Barstow and Las Vegas.

Downtown Riverside is undergoing a rapid re-development process at the moment, and the City is a major investor in that process. We just spent a considerable amount of money renovating the Fox Theatre, an early 20th century movie theatre that is now a state-of-the-art performing arts centre hosting everything from films to professional theatre to major performing artists. A new hotel and condo-centred mixed-use development, with restaurants and shopping at ground level, is going to be built soon, and construction has already begun on a new office tower.  And despite the use of the word “re-development”, downtown is already a pleasant place to be right now, with a hearty helping of restaurants, bars, clubs, the requisite cozy coffee shop and speciality retailers. Of course, all of this development is walkable and transit-adjacent (if not transit-oriented), unlike anything being built nearly anywhere else in the city. It seems like a natural fit for high-speed rail.

City officials have said that March Field is an ideal fit for HSR because there is room for “development.” The unstated assumption here is that the sort of development that will surround HSR will look precisely like the sort of development that most of suburbia has seen for most of the last century- auto-dependent, low-density, and poorly served by transit. Proponents of this site seem to think that high-speed rail stations of the future will necessarily look like airports of today: easy freeway access and plenty of long-term parking. Some proponents of the March location say that access to Metrolink will provide convenient car-free connections to downtown, or that RTA will provide ample transit service to the station once it is built. If Metrolink connections are indeed desirable, then the downtown site (with 4 lines) is much better than March (with 1). As far as transit provided to the March site, I have no doubt there will be – right now, RTA runs the #20, an hourly bus route, along Alessandro – but while this may serve to get transit-dependent riders to the train, the surrounding area will never allow for the kind of transit service that would influence development outcomes: frequent, all-day transit.

As of right now, it seems that CHSRA is not pursuing a downtown Riverside station – the current alignments being debated are either via I-15 and Corona, with a stop at the Dos Lagos area (more miserable sprawl) or via I-10 and I-215 and northern Riverside, with a stop at March. There is an alternative – the UP railway alignment travels nearly directly from the Ontario Airport to downtown Riverside, with straight, nearly-flat tracks and ample room along most of the corridor for expansion. (HSR will probably have to move to elevated tracks as it enters Riverside, but that was the Authority’s original plan anyway.) The downtown station could easily be re-developed to include the necessary parking and station facilities for HSR, putting it within walking distance of the most vibrant neighbourhood in the Inland Empire and connecting it to nearly everywhere else in Riverside and the eastern San Bernardino valley via transit. However, this alternative is not being considered, and unless we make an issue out of it now, it won’t be.

If any of you have any opportunities to comment on the LA-SD leg of the HSR project, please tell CHSRA and any applicable politicians that you want a station in a vibrant downtown, not a sprawl-surrounded parking lot.

I’m in Hawaii this week for a bit of rest and relaxation before the big push through to the November election. There’ll be more guest posts this week, including more from fellow Californians For High Speed Rail members.

Meanwhile, you should head over to the European Tribune to read DoDo’s latest post on Taiwan’s HSR system, particularly about its financing. The system was overly reliant on private funding, which made up about 80% of the construction cost, and suffered from some flawed design choices that could have been more easily avoided. Still, the system’s ridership has been steadily growing, and the system is now emerging from the red.

PS: Yes, today is indeed Tuesday. Sorry for the erroneous title on this post. Too much salt water and sun.

Addendum by Rafael:
Orange County Transportation Association, Veolia Transportation, HDR Engineering, NRG Energy West and Brandman University are hosting a conference called ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Planning for High-Speed Rail in Orange County and Southern California‘.

Why: The conference is a discussion and exchange of ideas on real solutions for increasing our mobility, reducing our emissions and planning for high speed rail in southern California.

When: Thursday, AUGUST 26, 2010 at 9:00 A.M.

Where: Brandman University 16355 Laguna Canyon Road, Room 111, Irvine, California 92618

by Rafael

Just a quick post to let you know I’ve added a Glossary page. The link is located just underneath the banner logo, in-between “Comments Policy” and “Log Out”. This will be updated every now and then, but I hope even this initial version will prove useful to any readers unfamiliar with the railroad terminology and acronyms that tend to pop up in our posts and comments from other readers.

The idea of stopping high-speed rail (HSR) in San Jose and having HSR passengers transfer to Caltrain continues to be proposed by some along the Peninsula. Unfortunately, these people are not thinking through the implications for the Peninsula of this scenario. Aside from making it much more inconvenient for thousands of people HSR riders to reach HSR stations on the Peninsula and in San Francisco, the impact to the Peninsula traffic patterns and pedestrian safety would be significant.

Stopping HSR in San Jose is obviously predicated on the assumption of avoiding the impacts of building HSR infrastructure (i.e. new tracks, grade separations, etc.) along the Peninsula.  This assumption, however, is incongruent with moving huge numbers of new San Francisco- and Peninsula-bound HSR passengers and the growing number of daily Caltrain commuters. Without massive upgrades to the rail infrastructure along the Peninsula, the idea of stopping HSR trains in San Jose begins to break down due to a lack of capacity.

For Caltrain to accommodate all the HSR passengers and the projected additional Caltrain passengers, they will have to run significantly more trains, obviously. In fact, they would need to have trains meet each and every HSR train that would terminate in San Jose, as a large portion of riders will be proceeding northward. This is in addition to their existing commute trains. Without adding tracks and grade separations, the current problems of traffic backing up behind rail cross guards and pedestrian safety will be significantly exacerbated.

As for the traffic, the increased number of trains will lead to cross guards being down much more frequently and potentially longer per cycle than they are now. In fact, the problem of cross guards being down a very long time is a common problem along the Peninsula, especially during peak hours. For example, where Palo Alto Ave/Alma Street crosses the tracks, the cross guards come down, not only for one train, but often stay down as another trains is approaching from the other direction, making the wait time for cars exceedingly long. This intersection, like numerous others up and down the Peninsula, will see traffic condition greatly worsen. This situation will happen much more frequently when the number of trains is increased.

In addition to traffic, the issue of pedestrian safety has been a major issue for the last few years. Recent deaths on the tracks (including children) have been a major concern of a large number of people on the Peninsula. By blocking upgrades now, this problem will not be resolved, and in fact, worsened. More trains on today’s infrastructure will likely lead to even a higher rate of deaths in the future.

Unless folks along the Peninsula want to increase their suffering in respect to worsening traffic congestion and dangerous pedestrian conditions, they are going to have to admit at some point that upgrading the Caltrain corridor significantly is an absolute necessity, with or without HSR on the Peninsula. Such an upgrade to Caltrain will entail many of the same impacts that HSR would have. To increase capacity for Caltrain to accommodate both increasing numbers of commuters and HSR riders, it is wishful thinking to assume we can just leave things as is or only do minor upgrades to the Caltrain corridor. Further, the HSR project is the only possible source of money to accomplish these needed upgrades in the foreseeable future.

It should also be noted that Caltrain has already been making plans to increase the capacity of the corridor to four tracks on an incremental basis with the support many of cities along the line. For example, both Menlo Park<http://www.menlopark.org/departments/trn/gradesep_pres.pdf> and Redwood City<http://www.redwoodcity.org/phed/planning/precise/final_plan.html> commissioned have created plans that included proposals for aerial grade separations of Caltrain in 2004 and 2007 respectively. The question needs to be asked, that if these were reasonable solutions then, why are these cities so against similar solutions now?

To conclude, the critics and opponents on the Peninsula of the HSR project seem to be forgetting that the HSR project will improve traffic and pedestrian conditions on the Peninsula immensely. It is seems reasonable to assume that many Peninsula residents will perceive a direct benefit in the daily experience due to the reduction of traffic congestions the upgrades HSR will bring, not to mention the elimination of train horns and diesel pollution. The idea of stopping HSR trains in San Jose is pure folly, is illegal per Proposition 1A, and is not in the best interest of the vast majority of Peninsula residents. If Peninsula critics and opponents are successful in killing HSR on the Peninsula, the fate of the Peninsula will be sealed for the next 20 years – a traffic morass and more pedestrian deaths (including children).