Lawyers for the group asked Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny to block the California High-Speed Rail Authority from proceeding with a route between San Francisco and the Central Valley. They say planners made flawed estimates of ridership and ignored traffic problems and other possible impacts.

I fully expect Kenny to reject these claims as he rejected the vast majority of their claims in 2009. In fact, if that was all that went on I probably wouldn’t even write about it. But this following quote from Stuart Flashman that appeared in the Mercury News article was too absurd to leave without comment:

“There will be congestion on highways south of San Jose that people won’t be aware of, and they should have been made aware,” said Stuart Flashman, attorney for the coalition.

Is he serious? I am guessing Stuart has never actually been on a highway south of San José. If he had, he would know that there is already a huge amount of congestion on those routes, particularly Highway 101 to and from Monterey.

Stuart and anyone else who thinks there isn’t already a major traffic problem down there should get up tomorrow morning around 9 AM and drive from the Bay Area to Monterey. From the 101/880 interchange in San José it should take you about 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to Cannery Row. On a Saturday heading south it will take between 2 and 2.5 hours. On a Sunday afternoon heading north it can take as many as 3.

HSR can help resolve those traffic problems. The Transportation Agency of Monterey County has plans to connect Monterey and Salinas to the Gilroy HSR station with rail, enabling visitors and residents alike to get to and from Monterey County without having to clog up Highway 101. HSR can help people get to their destinations around the state. Sure, some people will still drive, but they’ll find much less traffic.

Flashman might also be talking about traffic in south Santa Clara County. Here again he shows his ignorance – rush hour traffic on 101 between San José and Gilroy is already pretty bad. HSR could help reduce some of that traffic by giving people a commute option for Gilroy – and improved Caltrain service can help shoulder even more of the load. Robust transit service can support transit-oriented development, reducing traffic impacts even further.

If that’s what the HSR deniers are reduced to arguing in their attempts to derail the project, they’re even more desperate than I imagined.

The California High Speed Rail Authority has two proposals for a Gilroy HSR station: one downtown, roughly where the current Caltrain station is along Monterey Street, and one east of town, behind the outlet mall on what is now agricultural land.

At a City Council meeting in Gilroy on Tuesday night, councilmembers and the public expressed concerns that an east Gilroy station would destroy downtown:

High among their concerns was the possibility that a station in the rural area east of the Gilroy Premium Outlets would divert interest and development away from the city’s historic downtown.

“You can kiss downtown goodbye,” said Councilman Peter Arellano, “This will be the new downtown.”

Councilmember Perry Woodward expressed similar concerns:

Woodward said residents’ vision for a downtown station, which included residential and retail structures, would create a dense economic base.

“The same thing is true, of course, if you put it out east of town,” Woodward said. “It’s going to be an economic center of gravity. We all kind of know intuitively that that’s going to happen.”

A station east of Gilroy, however, which residents think could include a hotel or convention center, could effectively kill off downtown, Woodward said.

“I’m worried about that,” he said. “I’m afraid that putting a station east of town is going to have a long-term negative impact on the community.”

Some residents who oppose high speed rail are critical that the visioning process isn’t including their views, but they lost that battle in 2008 when Californians approved the project. The city is properly moving ahead to better understand their choices, and from what they’re learning, a downtown station might be the better option for the city’s economy.

And that makes sense. A downtown station enables great transit-oriented development, with downtown San José and San Francisco a short train ride away, with downtown LA about two hours away (the same amount of time it can take to drive to SF on a busy day). It builds on the economic base that’s already there, and downtown Gilroy certainly has room to grow upward. It also allows cross-platform transfers to connecting rail service, especially to the Monterey Bay region.

East Gilroy, on the other hand, is the place where just a few years ago a planned Wal-Mart Supercenter was defeated, with the land kept agricultural. An eastern station would not only cost some agricultural land (which is not a problem in and of itself, but all the better if it can be avoided) but would suck economic activity away from downtown. East Gilroy might see some benefit, but small and local businesses downtown would be devastated. It’s hard to see how that’s the best choice for Gilroy.

The two station proposals each have two vertical alignments, which you can view in a PDF file on the Gilroy Patch article. Downtown would have either an at-grade or a trench, and east Gilroy would have either an at-grade or an aerial viaduct.

While there’s still a ways to go in the visioning process, it sure seems as if the Council is moving toward a downtown station.

• High speed rail will be a boon to California sports fans. Although it won’t solve the problem of Dodger fans attacking Giants fans in the Dodger Stadium parking lot…

• Breaking news: NIMBYs come up with excuses to oppose project even though every other HSR system in the world has met its ridership goals.

• The California High Speed Rail Authority might want to consider bringing this British sound simulation to the Gilroy area, where train noise is the latest excuse being made by NIMBYs against the train. Sadly, British NIMBYs are making the exact same anti-HSR arguments as their American counterparts.

I respect the British government for trying to reason with these people, but as they will soon learn, there is simply no reasoning at all with NIMBYs. They are NIMBYs precisely because they are elevating their own selfish beliefs above the good of the community. It’s an irrational position to hold, which means you can’t win them over with logic. Instead you have to rally enough supporters to simply overwhelm the NIMBYs and move ahead anyway. Once the rail line is built, the NIMBYs will either realize it’s not so bad, or if they just can’t stand it, they’ll move.

A study of two proposed locations for a high-speed rail station in Gilroy will address concerns of traffic circulation, parking, land use, economic impacts and other factors, a city official said during a South County Joint Planning Advisory Committee meeting Thursday night in Morgan Hill.

David Bischoff, Gilroy director of planning and environmental services, told the committee the study would also focus on the pros and cons of three different track alignments: at-grade, aerial and trenched.

The study, which is funded by a $150,000 matching grant from the Valley Transportation Authority, will go before the Gilroy City Council, which then will send a station recommendation to the rail authority based on the knowledge gained from the study, Bischoff said.

This is a reasonable thing for the city to do. Instead of whining that the Authority should do the study, or suing to complain about this or that element of the project, Gilroy is being proactive and looking into the matter itself.

That isn’t stopping people from making their voices heard (nor should it). Yvonne Sheets-Saucedo, a critic of the east Gilroy alignment who has expressed her strange belief that HSR will somehow damage the quality of life in South County (because $4 gas and long traffic jams on Highway 101 are the pinnacle of human civilization) teamed up with CARRD to introduce the claim that a previous agreement with Santa Clara County would preclude a station from being placed in east Gilroy:

Yvonne Sheets-Saucedo read a statement from Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design claiming the east Gilroy station violated an existing 20-year agreement between Santa Clara County’s Local Agency Formation Commission, the city of Gilroy and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

According to the statement, the east Gilroy station would fall within a protected area, as described in the “Strategies to Balance Planned Growth and Agricultural Viability” which was approved Gilroy, LAFCO and the county supervisors in the fall of 2006.

“The proposed east Gilroy station would be in the northernmost part of the protected area in the unincorporated part of Santa Clara County,” Sheets-Saucedo read. “The alignment would bisect this protected area and would include a station with commensurate parking and other structures with the intent of creating a very dense area around the station.”

But Gilroy City Administrator Tom Haglund disagreed that this was a legal barrier:

“At this point there is no basis to say that conducting the city’s grant-funded east side visioning process requires the city to first revisit the strategy document as suggested by CARRD, nor is there reason for the previously awarded VTA grant funds to be withheld from the city,” Haglund wrote.

And in fact, the agreement does not appear to be a binding contract. Still, the city of Gilroy and perhaps Santa Clara County would have to amend their general plans to allow an east Gilroy station.

Which might be a good idea, or it might not. The other option is a downtown station, which makes a great deal of sense for a number of reasons, including protecting farmland, channeling growth into the existing urban footprint, and enabling a same-station transfer to other rail services, particularly something to connect to destinations in the Monterey Bay area.

It would be preferable for those who dislike an east Gilroy station to argue for a downtown Gilroy station, instead of trying to undermine the project as a whole. The tracks and the station have to go somewhere, and not building this is simply not an option. I’m actually sympathetic to the arguments being made against an east Gilroy station, but those who oppose it need to do so from the perspective of supporting the HSR project as a whole – and they’ll have to become active supporters of a downtown station too. Otherwise their opposition can and probably should be dismissed as mere NIMBYism, when they have the chance to instead stand up for something positive and constructive.

After the CEO for the California High-Speed Rail Authority met face-to-face with members of a Gilroy and Morgan Hill joint task force this morning, three things are clear.

Roelof van Ark and the CHSRA will return in late January, build the entire station in Gilroy along with a parking garage and conduct a noise study associated with the bullet train.

The article goes on to clarify that all cities will have a station and parking garage paid for by the Authority (which hopefully will create internal pressure to reduce the size of the parking requirements). The Authority would work with cities on the design, but that any “frills” (not sure what that means) would have to be paid for by the cities themselves.

Van Ark also discussed trenches:

During the meeting, it was revealed trenching would not be an option in any city, unless the city wanted to pay for the trenching itself.

Overall this is a sensible approach – the Authority, responsible to the taxpayers of California, builds a basic and functional HSR system, and if localities want special things, like a trench or a tunnel, they fund it themselves. While I would love nothing more than for this state and this country to get over the absurd notion that we should build infrastructure on the cheap – and instead realize that it’s perfectly OK to pay more for something if it provides greater utility and value – we all know that’s not how politics works these days. Funding the entire SF-LA route alone is going to be a challenge given Republican control of the House, and the Authority will simply not be in a position to fund anything other than the basic infrastructure.

Overall, van Ark’s meeting seemed to produce more positive feelings about the project and the Authority from Gilroy HSR critics:

[Councilman Perry] Woodward, who pays close attention to transparency, said he was worried about Gilroy getting railroaded by a state agency with a lot of money and its own agenda.

“I feel better coming out of the meeting,” he said. “I thought it was very positive, very encouraging and I look forward to the meeting next month.”

That’s welcome news. Van Ark and the Authority appear committed to improving outreach and communication with localities, and that can only be to the project’s benefit.

A recent Gilroy Dispatch article did a good job of explaining the study and the surrounding issues:

Up for vote will be $150,000 to fund rail experts and grant applications for the highly-criticized California high-speed rail project that could not only split downtown but has divided the Council in the past….

The staff is eyeing a $150,000 Community Design in Transportation grant – not to be confused with the amount requested from Council – from the Valley Transportation Authority. It’s meant to help cities in transportation-related planning studies, and requires cities to match the grant by 20 percent.

In Gilroy’s case this means a $30,000 matching fee and $7,000 to pay a bullet-train expert to help draft the 20 to 30-page application. According to the VTA, the deadline is early January.

The remaining $113K of the $150K amount approved by the Gilroy city council tonight would be used for “future bullet train grants and related issues,” including hiring consultants to study which of the proposed routes would be better for Gilroy – going along the current UP/Caltrain corridor, or going east of the city:

“The concern is that we don’t want HSRA coming in and saying, ‘well, we’ve selected the station here’ and in six months we have to react,” [Gilroy City Engineer Don] Dey said. “We have a limited time to react and if we don’t do our homework we can’t respond adequately.”

This is in response to an October vote by the Gilroy city council, narrowly approving a resolution showing a “lack of confidence” in the CHSRA’s oversight of the project. By following up with this expenditure, Gilroy city leaders are saying they do support the HSR project itself, and are rejecting the NIMBYism and HSR denial coming from the usual small but vocal group of people who have found their own prosperity and prefer to deny Gilroy – a city that could use an economic boost – a shot at becoming a major center of the 21st century economy in California.

Gilroy is further saying that if they aren’t totally happy with the CHSRA, they’ll start doing their own research to ensure the outcome is a good one for their city. I read this as an effort at constructive engagement – which is apparently how the NIMBYs read it too:

“It really sends the wrong message,” said Yvonne Sheets-Saucedo, Gilroy resident and high-speed rail critic. “The message it sends is that we’re supporting their process and we’re not. Our no confidence resolution says, ‘we don’t have confidence in your process,’ so why are we going to spend money to engage in a process we don’t believe in?”

Sheets-Saucedo has been a prominent critic, the Morris Brown of South County, but as we’re seeing, her views are not shared by her neighbors. In fact, tonight the Gilroy city council seated a new member, Peter Leroe-Muñoz, who ran a pro-HSR campaign calling for a downtown Gilroy station. If Gilroy didn’t actually support HSR, he would never have won that election.

Tonight’s vote also helps boost Gilroy’s position when Roelof van Ark comes to town later this month:

It comes on the heels of the California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO, Roelof van Ark, announcing his Dec. 16 visit to the area after a vote of no confidence sent Oct. 18 by the city.

The resolution had critics claiming a small victory after the Council voted 4-3 to tell the CHSRA that it didn’t agree with its policymaking.

I love how the Dispatch framed the October resolution – “a small victory” for critics that basically said they disagreed with the CHSRA’s process. However, it is quite clear that Gilroy very much wants HSR, and its leaders understand that their city’s future depends on this project getting built. We’re starting to see momentum coming together for Gilroy and the CHSRA to reach some sort of common ground that will enable project planning for this very important segment to continue. That riles up the NIMBYs, because they’re realizing that their neighbors reject their desire to keep Gilroy economically destitute.

There’s no doubt that the Authority’s public outreach has needed improvement. But it is good that cities like Gilroy are refusing to use those problems as an excuse to attack the project. Instead Gilroy is going to spend its own money to figure out how to make HSR work, a constructive and assertive approach that will produce more positive outcomes for its residents than the confrontational and negative approach adopted by cities further north. Their council is to be commended for making the right move tonight.

Note: Those of you looking for my comments on the recent California High Speed Rail Peer Review Report – you can wait one more day for it.

This blog has consistently argued that high speed rail will provide badly-needed economic growth to California at a time when we desperately need it. Mired in the worst recession in 60 years, California is not in a position to turn down projects or infrastructure that will provide significant long-term economic growth and job creation prospects.

Several studies have already indicated California’s HSR project will create jobs, including the recent UCI Institute for Transportation Studies report, and the US Conference of Mayors report.

Now the London School of Economics is out with a new report showing that existing HSR lines produce demonstrable and meaningful increases in economic growth to the cities they serve:

Economists discovered that towns connected to a new high-speed line saw their GDP rise by at least 2.7 per cent compared to neighbours not on the route. Their study also found that increased market access through high-speed rail has a direct correlation with a rise in GDP – for each one per cent increase in market access, there is a 0.25 per cent rise in GDP.

The findings, from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Hamburg, may be used to support arguments for high-speed networks which are already being planned in the UK, US and across the world. Until now, no one has demonstrated that high-speed rail brings clear economic gains along its routes….

Their research focused on the line between Cologne and Frankfurt, which opened in 2002 and runs trains at almost 185mph (300 kmh). The authors looked at the prosperity and growth of two towns with stations on the new line – Limburg and Montabaur – and compared them with more than 3,000 other municipalities in the surrounding regions.

The new line brought Limburg and Montabaur within a 40-minute journey of both Cologne and Frankfurt. Over a four-year period, the researchers found that both towns and the area immediately around them saw their economies grow by at least 2.7 per cent more than their unconnected neighbours.

This should be required reading for city council members in cities such as Redwood City, Palo Alto, Gilroy, and Bakersfield, where debates over how the tracks should be built threaten to overshadow the recognition of the significant economic benefits that HSR stations would bring to their cities and their economies. Gilroy, which faces an unemployment rate of 17%, and Bakersfield, facing a 16% unemployment rate, are two cities in particular that would massively benefit from the HSR stations being proposed for them.

In Gilroy’s case, this blog has repeatedly made the case about how Gilroy will benefit from HSR. By providing a fast and affordable method of travel, HSR will encourage companies to locate in Gilroy and will encourage workers with jobs in SF and San José to move to Gilroy, providing a massive boost to property values and creating significant numbers of jobs. Without an HSR station, however, Gilroy risks becoming a backwater, left behind by the 21st century economy and mired in high unemployment.

These arguments hold true for the other cities where a station is proposed, including the Peninsula cities. That’s one reason why such large majorities support the project there, in spite of the efforts of a small but vocal group of prosperous HSR critics to prevent that economic growth from coming to the Peninsula.

Once again, we see the stark economic terms in which the battle over building HSR is being fought. Those who oppose it are fighting to prevent anyone else from sharing in the economic security the critics enjoy. It is an inherently elitist position (even if not every critic is in the elite), one that ruthlessly ignores and denies the dire economic realities that are being experienced across the state, a position that aesthetic values are more important than jobs, that the role of local government is to protect property values instead of providing for broadly shared prosperity.

The LSE study deserves a wider audience – especially in the cities that will gain the most direct economic benefits from this transformative infrastructure project.

City officials from Morgan Hill and Gilroy were unable to attend the meeting, but in December the cities signed a joint resolution supporting the Pacheco Pass option, a single station to be located in Gilroy and that the tracks run east of U.S. 101 and not adjacent to the Union Pacific tracks. In April, the councils recommended that they should review a “visual analysis” to assess “how the alternate alignments aerial structures would impact views of the nearby hills and adjacent commercial facilities,” according to Morgan Hill’s staff report.

City Manager Ed Tewes said both cities are anticipating the next phase of the EIR, which they hope will detail the design ideas, including whether the train will operate at grade or elevated.

“We’re not just interested in a colored-line on a map,” Tewes said.

Tewes and Gilroy City Administrator Tom Haglund, “are asking for a thorough environmental impact review of those options with design concepts sufficient enough for us to investigate,” Tewes said.

These are all reasonable things, although it shouldn’t be taken to assume that the question of where a Gilroy station would be located has been settled (it hasn’t, and it’s a key issue). Gilroy and Morgan Hill want to see some specific proposals of what this might look like, and that’s going to be a very important element of the debate about where exactly in South County the tracks ought to go.

The article from the Morgan Hill Times is refreshingly honest about what is driving the small but vocal number of HSR critics in the region:

The cities await more details with particular interest in if the train will run at ground-level or if it will be elevated. The aesthetics of the latter have been a major concern of South County citizens opposed to the rail.

An elevated solution won’t be particularly high, and a ground-level track next to Highway 101 will be barely noticeable, making an extremely minimal impact on the region in terms of both aesthetics and noise. Again, the location of the Gilroy station matters a great deal, to the question of the vertical alignments as well as the lines on the map.

As we’ve argued several times on this blog, HSR will be a godsend to South County and to Gilroy in particular, bringing jobs, higher property values, and new businesses to a city that would become an important economic hub of 21st century California. In a city with a 17% unemployment rate you would think those are extremely important considerations.

To most residents, they are. To some, they’re not, as apparently their own aesthetic values take precedence over their neighbors’ financial security:

The words “careful” and “thoughtful” aren’t likely the first two that come to mind when Gilroy resident Yvonne Sheets-Saucedo describes the planning of the state’s high-speed rail system.

“It’s concerning on every level,” said Sheets-Saucedo, who has organized numerous community awareness and outreach meetings. “It’s all about pushing through this process in a very hasty and, quite frankly, irresponsible manner.”

Right, because a project that has been under development and intensive study for 12 years is hasty.

As with other HSR critics and deniers, Sheets-Saucedo prefers to mobilize the latent belief among some Californians that “nobody rides trains anyway,” to insinuate without a shred of evidence that the ridership numbers are flawed:

Running bullet trains through South County will change the face of the region, starting with the possibility of a 6,600-space parking garage in Gilroy, said Sheets-Saucedo, who echoed the same sentiments many residents have expressed by questioning the rail authority’s ridership figures.

“Everything about the system and the way it’s designed is triggered by ridership figures,” she said. “Here in quiet Gilroy, we’re going to have ridership figures that require 6,600 parking spaces? That’s absurd.”

The Revised Final Program EIR did not adequately address these ridership issues, Sheets-Saucedo said.

The parking spaces issue is going to continue to be hashed out, and I would not be so sure that Gilroy should expect to have to build 6,600 parking spaces. But Gilroy should expect significant ridership at their station, which is the transfer point (if you will) for Californians headed to the tourist destinations here on the Monterey Bay, and how the 700,000 or so residents of the region will access the rest of California. Gilroy itself is also likely to become a destination, whether for new jobs or for new residents, as the HSR station attracts new businesses.

Let’s hope South County residents recognize just how important and positive HSR will be for their lives and their futures, and that they let their city council know that they want sustainable transportation and jobs – instead of letting a few people hold the city back from prosperity in the pursuit of their own ideas about aesthetic value.

As Caltrain seems increasingly likely to end its Gilroy service, you’d think that the city council there would recognize that its future prosperity depends upon getting a train station that can enable their residents to reach jobs in Silicon Valley and San Francisco – and can enable people from across California to come to Gilroy for events like the Garlic Festival.

Unfortunately, as a recent article makes clear, there’s still some work to do to show Gilroy why HSR is a godsend the likes of which they haven’t seen since the 101 freeway was built 50 years ago:

Though the severity of their distaste for the state’s high speed rail project ranges from mild irritation to unreserved outrage, Gilroy city council members aren’t ready to collectively speak out against the undertaking.

Unlike Orange, a city in Southern California whose city council recently voted unanimously to oppose California’s proposed bullet train, Gilroy council members aren’t ready to formally cast their vote against the project, but their frustration with a lack of answers from the organizing agency is rising.

This is how a city should respond to the high speed rail project when they have concerns: be open about those concerns, but don’t try to destroy the whole project over it.

As we’ll see, it’s not exactly clear that the problem is the California High Speed Rail Authority not providing answers, but Gilroy not getting the answers they want. But given some of the anti-HSR attitudes among some Gilroy council members, it’s good that they’re not trying to stop HSR from happening, and recognize their duty to implement the will of the voters. Especially when you read Councilman Bob Dillon’s comments:

“I wish they would go away,” Councilman Bob Dillon said. “I’ve been against it since the get-go. It stands no chance.”

According to his calculations, the $45-billion, 800-mile system will cost more than $56 million per mile of track, and nearly $1,000 per inch, Dillon said.

“I would rather have my teeth pulled with no anesthesia” than support the project, he said.

As we know, HSR is going to happen – it doesn’t “stand no chance,” especially after voters approved the project and Congress funded part of it. Another Gilroy city councilmember, Dion Bracco, indicated he would “definitely” support an anti-HSR resolution along the lines of what Orange recently passed, but other councilmembers aren’t ready to go there.

For Gilroy city councilmembers who aren’t HSR deniers, the issue they have is with the Authority’s presentations to the city, and what they consider to be a lack of detail:

“Initially, there was a lot of optimism but I think that has changed a little bit as we learned more about the project,” Gartman said. “In listening to (the High Speed Rail Authority’s) presentations, it doesn’t seem like they’re very well organized. I can’t believe that they aren’t better prepared. They don’t know the answers that they should.”

However, the council appears to be frustrated that the plans at this point are conceptual and that the specific route hasn’t been finalized. Instead of just doing whatever the Authority tells them, Gilroy actually has the ability to help shape the route. They’re not passive actors, but active collaborators. I’m not sure the council recognizes that.

Here’s what the CHSRA project manager for the segment had to say:

According to Gary Kennerley, a regional project manager with the California High Speed Rail Authority, part of the challenge is relaying to residents that what the authority proposing isn’t set in stone.

Last month, the rail authority released a draft document outlining the possibility of aligning a rail line with the Monterey Street corridor, with U.S. Route 101 east of Gilroy or a combination of those two routes.

“It has been hard to convey to people that this is just an identification of alternatives,” Kennerley said. “No final decisions have been made.”

Gilroy needs to decide where it wants the trains to go. On the east edge of town, where it will fuel sprawl? Or along the existing rail corridor, where growth can be channeled into the city center and help grade-separate the tracks, improving safety and traffic flow while promoting economic growth?

The deeper problem seems to be that Gilroy officials just haven’t recognized that HSR will be a major benefit to their community, enabling it and its residents to enjoy prosperity for the rest of the 21st century:

Councilwoman Cat Tucker, who has expressed concern about the lack of hands-on meetings thus far, said she would prefer if the rail authority would run the bullet train over the Altamont Pass instead of the Pacheco Pass and bypass Gilroy altogether. Even though she considers herself an advocate for public transportation, she found both alternatives – either running the tracks through farmland or through downtown – unfavorable.

“It’s going to be one big, ugly monster coming through Gilroy,” she said.

You’re not an “advocate for public transportation” if you place aesthetics over usefulness, and especially not if you are willing to close your city off from the workhorse method of travel in 21st century California.

Mayor Al Pinheiro said he originally thought a downtown alignment might be beneficial for the local economy, attracting business from commuters who catch the bullet train in Gilroy.

But after further consideration, “I’m not thinking people are going to do much collateral spending in the downtown,” he said.

I don’t think Pinheiro has thought this through completely. It’s not just commuters from Hollister, Los Banos and Monterey who would use the station. With an HSR station, Gilroy itself would become a destination for commuters to live in – and instead of wanting to live in a sprawl-based community on the edge of town, they’d likely prefer to live downtown, in close proximity to the train station.

More than any other city in California, Gilroy has the potential to be the Ciudad Real of the California HSR system – a reference to the Spanish city that is 50 minutes away from central Madrid via the AVE high speed rail line that opened in 1992. As the Wall Street Journal described it last year:

Perhaps the most striking example is Ciudad Real, a scrappy town 120 miles south of Madrid in Castilla-La Mancha which, Mr. Ureña 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.”

Gilroy leaders need to pay very close attention to what is being said here. Ciudad Real went from being a small town outside the Madrid urban core to a major center of residential and high-tech activity. Gilroy doesn’t have a major university, but it could very easily be a hub for high-tech industries that would love the lower costs of the South County region and the connectedness to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and the rest of the state.

Mayor Pinheiro seems to be looking at HSR from a 20th century mindset. And true, from that mindset, an HSR commuter station in the middle of downtown might not seem all that valuable. But from a 21st century perspective, when access to high speed trains will be a very desirable thing, the station will be what gives Gilroy a huge competitive advantage over competing cities like Morgan Hill, Hollister, Los Banos, and even places like Salinas.

The HSR station makes a compelling reason for people to want to live in Gilroy as opposed to an automobile suburb, and a compelling reason for employers to want to locate there as opposed to some other place that has to be reached by automobile.

There’s no doubt that the process of designing and building HSR isn’t easy. It requires cities to make tough choices, including in Gilroy. But they can and should take a more constructive approach to this. Decide whether they want the station in town or on the edge of it – the CHSRA is more interested in hearing what Gilroy wants rather than forcing something on them.

I’m cheering for Gilroy here. As I said before, I taught at Gavilan College for a time when I returned to California in 2007, and got to know the city and its residents well. I like Gilroy a lot and think it has amazing potential, especially with a downtown that can easily accommodate transit-oriented development and the businesses that will sprout up to serve those residents. It would be a place many companies would seriously consider locating, especially high-tech businesses – and that growth can happen without fueling sprawl, which Gilroy has fought to prevent.

All this requires Gilroy to recognize that the 20th century is over, and that they need to position themselves for a 21st century economy and 21st century methods of travel. The people of California have delivered a gift to Gilroy that may be quite literally priceless – after HSR opens, cities across the state will be clamoring to get a station of their own. Gilroy will already have one, and be well on the way to prosperity. Let’s hope their current leadership recognizes the opportunity they have, and is willing to make the most of it.

And then there is Gilroy.

Like the rest of the cities along the route, including Palo Alto, it’s likely the case that a strong majority of residents still support high speed rail – but a small minority of people who don’t want to admit the benefits of high speed rail, and worry about its impact on their community, are coming to dominate the conversation there.

A Gilroy city council meeting last night saw some of this HSR denial voiced, as reported by KSBW/8 (one of the TV news stations here in the Monterey area):

Some residents in Gilroy said Monday evening that they fear a proposed high-speed rail route will destroy the serenity of their small town.

“Quality of life in Gilroy as a whole would be completely devastated,” resident Yvonne Sheets-Saucedo said.

Whenever someone speaks of “quality of life” they apparently believe there’s just one definition – and one alone – of what that means. In fact, there are several definitions. To me, living in a city where unemployment is high and the downtown is, to put it charitably, in need of some help is not exactly the highest quality of life one might have.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a slam at Gilroy. It’s a wonderful town. I taught on the southern edge of town at Gavilan College for a while after I moved back to California in 2007, and got to know the town and many of its people during that time. I’ve had some great times at the Gilroy Garlic Festival (coming up this weekend!) and have often visited its stores, whether the outlets or shops downtown.

But Gilroy can be more, and it can be better. Instead of being a small suburb of San Jose, it can be a more vibrant city. A high speed rail station can bring significant transit-oriented development opportunities, protecting the east side of town from sprawl and channeling growth into the city center, currently dominated by low-rise buildings dating to the 1950s and 1960s. As with other cities along HSR lines in close proximity to major cities, Gilroy can experience dramatic economic growth and new job creation without destroying its agricultural heritage, and without having to make dramatic changes to the current city landscape.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen all over California, despite the desire of the majority of people to embrace this future, there’s always a minority that fears change. And that’s what we saw at the Gilroy city council meeting. Back to the KSBW report:

“No one ever though these alignments were going to come straight through communities,” Sheets-Saucedo said.

Of course, this is simply not true. The alignment has been intended to go through cities for many years now. The California High Speed Rail Authority held public meetings in Gilroy before the November 2008 vote explaining that very point. Of course, in Gilroy, it might not necessarily go through the city. There is another alternative, to send it east of town through farms and open space. Of course, people live out there too:

“There are four routes in consideration. One goes through the back of my property, through horse facilities. One goes in between my house and barn, making my house unlivable. It’s literally 100 feet from my back door,” said Carmen Patane, who lives in unincorporated Gilroy.

No matter what happens, someone is going to be impacted. If Sheets-Saucedo gets her way, Patane would get the impacts. If Patane gets her way, Sheets-Saucedo would get the impacts. It’s an unavoidable situation.

Of course, some prefer to avoid it altogether by claiming the trains don’t have to be built at all. It’s the same thing we see on the Peninsula – faced with the fact that most Californians and even most of their neighbors want high speed rail, some opponents and critics turn to trying to undermine the solid case for bullet trains in the first place:

Transportation attorney and project critic Joe Thompson said he was more concerned about the solvency of the project than which route it would take. Taxpayers would be left footing the bill, he said.

“This is going to break the backs of the few remaining small businesses that we have left,” Thompson said.

This is also not true. Gilroy small businesses will benefit significantly from the added customers that would be brought in by the high speed trains, whether to serve riders waiting to transfer to connecting service to Monterey, Salinas, and Santa Cruz or by new residents living downtown who can bring wages to spend at those small businesses.

In fact, with the possibility that Gilroy might lose its Caltrain service due to cuts on that system, the city is going to need HSR to help sustain long-term passenger rail service. Without trains, Gilroy will wither on the vine. Workers at Silicon Valley jobs will not be willing to spend the money on gas to drive to and from Gilroy every day when prices rise. I know for a fact that Gilroy’s younger residents share that sentiment, and strongly agree that passenger rail is a necessary part of their city’s future.

And it will help boost property values as well, just as it has in Europe. A study was shown to some members of the public on the Peninsula demonstrating that point, according to a staffer for a state Assemblymember representing a district along the Caltrain line (I’ve been promised a copy of that study and will post it as soon as I can get it). That will help ensure Gilroy thrives in the 21st century.

As any visitor to this weekend’s Gilroy Garlic Festival will know, traffic is also a major problem there. HSR would help bring people from all over California to that festival, pouring money into the local economy. (Seriously, if you’ve never gone to the festival, GO! It is awesome. The food is delicious.)

That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate issues to be worked out regarding Gilroy HSR. The city council is concerned about the parking requirements made by the Authority:

“We’ve been told they’re only paying for the tracks and for the platforms for people to get on and off,” Gilroy City Councilman Perry Woodward said.

“We would need to build as many as 6,600 parking spaces in a garage. That is something the city of Gilroy simply cannot afford,” Gilroy City Manager Thomas Haglund said.

This is a very legitimate issue that definitely needs further study and review. While I’m sure the Authority has solid reasons for making the request, it may be necessary to examine ways to reach an accommodation between the project and the city on the parking matter – as with the route.

Gilroy will see an influx of new residents without causing sprawl, bringing jobs and money, will become a key crossroads for travelers going from the rest of the state to the Monterey Bay (and vice versa), and will enable Gilroy to become a destination in its own right.

As with most other cities in California, the status quo in Gilroy is not tenable. Change is coming. It’s a question of whether the change comes in the form of decline and decay, or whether it comes in the form of innovation and prosperity. As a big fan of the city of Gilroy, I hope they choose the latter option – an option that can only be achieved with high speed rail.

Note: I’m going to be in Las Vegas over the next few days for the annual Netroots Nation, a gathering of progressive online activists and bloggers from across the country. I’ll be speaking on two panels, including one about how to turn California from a failed state into a progressive laboratory – and high speed rail plays a central role in that vision. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will be on a panel on Thursday morning that I’m attending, so let me know if you have any questions you might want asked of him, though I’ve got plenty of my own.

Anyhow, posting might be a bit lighter than normal in the coming days. This would be a good time for any of you who’ve always wanted to write a post for this site on an issue related to high speed rail to do so – send me an email and let me know what you have in mind. I’ll also be in Hawaii the last 2 weeks of August, so I’ll be looking for guest posters during that time as well.