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.

Republicans are uniting in opposition, and three key Democratic state senators — Joe Simitian, of Palo Alto, chairman of the budget subcommittee overseeing transportation; Alan Lowenthal, of Long Beach, chairman of the Select Committee on High-Speed Rail; and Mark DeSaulnier, of Concord, chairman of the transportation committee — have started applying the brakes.

The three have supported high-speed rail and voted to put it before the electorate in 2008. But in separate interviews last week, they indicated that the current plan could not win their vote.

If these three legislators are going to buck the will of the voters as expressed in November 2008, they had better have a damn good reason. If they’re going to turn their backs on thousands of immediate jobs in a place with some of the state’s highest unemployment, they better have a damn good reason. If they’re going to side with right-wing extremists like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and California Republicans like Jeff Denham, they better have a damn good reason.

As it turns out, they don’t.

They voiced concerns about plans to start in the Central Valley with a 130-mile link that will not attract enough riders and could become California’s version of the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere.”

“This is an albatross potentially,” Lowenthal said.

What Borenstein doesn’t mention is that Senator Alan Lowenthal has been an opponent of this high speed rail project since at least 2009, and has been pushing since that time to gut the project and spend the money only on upgrades to local rail. That’s all he cares about. You’d think that would be important context, but it’s not given here.

More importantly, Lowenthal is deliberately ignoring the construction phasing plan. Nobody is talking about operating HSR from Fresno to Bakersfield alone. Lowenthal knows this. Instead the plan is to start construction in the Valley but have the Initial Operating Segment connect either to the Bay Area or to LA. The Authority’s business plan indicates that riders will use that and that the private sector will be interested at that point.

That distinction is lost on Lowenthal, who is deliberately using right-wing framing to undermine President Barack Obama, job creation in California, and intercity rail. And remember, this guy wants to become a Democratic member of Congress!

We know Lowenthal is a hater. But it is sad to see Senator Mark DeSaulnier, who I respect a lot, join in:

Instead, they are pushing to begin in urbanized areas. “You need to spend the money where the need is and where it will attract private-sector funds,” DeSaulnier said. “You need to put it where the ridership is.”

And the ridership, Senator, is in a statewide system that goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It’s not in the small pieces within those regions. After all, does Caltrain generate a profit? Does Metrolink? Does the Pacific Surfliner? None of them do. To be absolutely clear, those are all excellent passenger rail systems that do not need to generate a profit to be valuable, and they each deserve more investment (which they will get under the provisions of Prop 1A).

But the ridership comes with the Initial Operating Segment, which provides the intercity service that California currently lacks.

After all, if simply investing in regional rail was the secret to building high speed rail, we’d already have done so. But we’ve made those investments and it has not led to high speed rail. You have to fill in the missing link, and the Central Valley is a key part of that missing link.

But it’s Senator Joe Simitian’s quote that made me the most annoyed:

“Whether they are federal funds or not, they should be used wisely,” Simitian said. “Whenever someone tries to hustle you into a quick decision, that should give you pause. I feel like we’re getting jammed by the threat of losing the federal funds.”

As he points out, the state should not “make a $100 billion mistake to save $3 billion” from Washington.

A quick decision, Senator? California has been debating high speed rail for 30 years – since the last time Jerry Brown was governor. The current high speed rail plan has been under development since 1996. Californians heard the debate and voted in favor. This project has been developed for 15 years. The plans are solid and detailed and have been subject to endless scrutiny. An independent peer review found the ridership projections were sound.

So who’s husting and rushing who here? Looks to me like the hustle is coming from Simitian and Lowenthal, with (the mark) DeSaulnier falling for it. They’re the ones rushing to act, insisting that California side with right-wing extremists to abandon its high speed rail project and abandon federal stimulus funds. They’re making these claims based on flawed interpretations and in ignorance of the evidence.

Looks like a hustle to me.

Hopefully the rest of the Democratic caucus in Sacramento will side with President Obama, Senators Feinstein and Boxer, and Governor Brown rather than follow Lowenthal and Simitian’s lead and side with Scott Walker and Jeff Denham.

Spain is also very similar to California. Both have a Mediterranean geography, with large metro areas separated by expanses of plains, deserts, and mountains. Their demographics are similar and their population densities are similar. The SF and LA metro areas are bigger than Madrid and Barcelona.

So it makes sense to look at Spain’s high speed rail system to get some ideas about how high speed rail would function in California. After all, this blog has repeatedly done so. My own interest in high speed rail developed after a December 2001 trip on the AVE from Madrid to Sevilla. While watching the Southern California-like landscape roll by at nearly 180 miles an hour, my immediate thought was “this makes total sense for California – why don’t we have it there?”

The Fresno Bee’s Tim Sheehan also saw the parallels between Spain and California, and recently went to España to see the AVE for himself. His article, Spanish Lessons: What California Can Learn From Spain’s High Speed Rail is now live, and is being syndicated across the state. That makes it a significant article in its own right and worth examining.

Unfortunately, the article misses many crucially important points about the Spanish HSR system. It is largely shaped by Sheehan’s own preconceptions. When I mentioned last night on Twitter that Sheehan’s article reflects his preconceptions, he responded by saying he didn’t have an agenda. And I agree with that. The difference is that an “agenda” assumes he went there already knowing what conclusions he wanted to make, with a specific ax to grind. But I chose my words carefully. By “preconceptions,” I meant that Sheehan went to Spain with specific questions he wanted to ask, specific areas on which he wanted to focus, and it seems, some pre-existing assumptions about what kinds of lessons would be important to draw, although not about what the content of those lessons would be.

Sheehan is a good reporter and I certainly think he didn’t try to fit his reporting to premade conclusions. But like most other American reporters, unfortunately, his preconceptions wound up limiting what he discovered and what he wrote about. Most American journalists no longer go out and try to find “the truth” – instead they try to fit events and issues into a pre-existing set of ideas, values, and assumptions that one might call the “conventional wisdom” rather than trying to develop new insights and knowledge. And that means the “lessons” he offers are themselves of quite limited value for understanding what Spanish high speed rail can teach California.

The main preconception is that HSR should be judged by whether it can pay for itself, rather than by the economic and transportation benefits it creates. Sheehan assumes it’s reasonable to ask whether HSR can cover both its operations AND construction costs, despite the fact that nobody ever asks that question of highways:

Ulied and Germà Bel, a professor of political economics at the University of Barcelona, agree that none of the Spanish high-speed rail routes has enough riders to make the system financially sustainable.

“There is no question whether it can cover its costs. It cannot,” Bel said. “It actually has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment. The government claims they are recovering the operating costs, but the numbers are not clear.”

Sheehan quotes only expert critics but not expert supporters, so we don’t actually know whether these claims are justified or not. In fact, Bel seems to be confusing the issue here. RENFE says it is recovering the operating cost and there’s every reason to believe this is the case. We don’t know the evidence these guys are using to justify these claims – Sheehan basically takes them at their word rather than investigating or even asking RENFE for a response. (If he did ask them, their reply wasn’t in the article.)

As to recovering the infrastructure investment cost, so what? The estimated cost in 2006 dollars of building the Interstate Highway System is $450 billion. The federal government paid 90% of the cost of construction, funded by gas taxes. That’s directly analogous to the European Union helping Spain build HSR. And the farebox recovery rate of an Interstate freeway is 0%.

More importantly, these questions are never asked of freeways because there is widespread public agreement that they provide economic benefits to the state and the locality. A visit to Spain is a good opportunity to see whether high speed rail is delivering similar economic benefits as well. That would require moving beyond the centrality of the “does HSR cover its costs?” question, and examining whether it’s a sound investment that pays off in other ways than direct cost recovery.

Instead Sheehan assumes that during a severe recession, it’s sensible to scale back on major spending, even though it is widely acknowledged that austerity policies are destroying the European economy:

Over the next decade, the Spanish government plans to spend up to $77 billion more to expand and improve its high-speed lines, said Juan Ignacio Campo Jori, director of international projects for ADIF, another government-owned company that manages and operates Spain’s railway infrastructure.

But with no sign of Europe’s financial crisis letting up, some say the government needs to slow its spending.

Well, we know that those who say the government needs to slow its spending are advising an extremely destructive course for Spain, a country that needs to create jobs and economic growth if it’s to avoid the kind of brutal suffering being experienced in Greece – where two years of austerity have failed to render Greece solvent.

Sheehan’s focus on ridership and cost questions meant he didn’t focus on other important aspects of the Spanish HSR system. There was no discussion at all of the profound economic boost to smaller cities that stems from high speed rail in Spain:

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.”

Sheehan didn’t examine any of this at all. For a reporter from Fresno, a city with much in common to Ciudad Real, that’s pretty surprising. Especially since Sheehan’s colleague at the Bee, Bill McEwan, made similar arguments about HSR just a few months ago.

Sheehan visited Valencia and spoke to some locals, but appears to have missed some key insights:

Maria Jose Martin, who manages the nearby C&A clothing store, said the company typically sends people on the train for business trips because it’s cheaper than flying.

“I think it’s good,” she said through an interpreter. “It brings Madrid and Valencia closer together and allows for more flow of people between the two cities.”

And, she added, the trains are good for Valencia’s business community because they bring more tourists on day trips.

But Martin acknowledged that “the ticket price is still pretty high” for families on holiday.

You can tell a lot about someone’s preconceptions by their choice of words. Look at that last sentence. “But Martin acknowledged” sets up for the reader the idea that what is to come is a core truth, implying that what came before may not be as important.

Even if the ticket price is “still pretty high” for families on holiday – and consider that this is in Spain, a nation reeling from high unemployment and idiotic austerity policies, look at what she said earlier. Sheehan didn’t really investigate it closely, but Californians should. She pointed out that for C&A, a major European retailer, HSR generated a lot of cost savings for the company and helped support local businesses by closing the distance between major cities.

Those are pretty damn important lessons. Right now many American businesses are focused on cutting their costs. As fuel prices increase again (something else Sheehan never once discussed) that drive to cut costs will continue. So far most companies prefer to cut costs by laying off workers or cutting wages. That’s catastrophic for the economy because it sets off a downward spiral that’s hard to escape.

So it makes sense – it in fact becomes imperative – for Californians to find other, less destructive ways to help companies cut their costs. And one of Spain’s lessons is that high speed rail can help do that.

Another lesson that was offered to Sheehan in Valencia was the importance of closing the distance between cities. Sheehan’s preconceptions meant that he didn’t see the importance of this lesson either. In the 20th century freeways closed the distance within metro areas and airplanes closes the distance around the globe. But air travel has become expensive and inefficient, and rising fuel prices mean that there needs to be another form of travel offered between metro areas that are less than 500 miles from each other.

We know that what Sheehan saw in Valencia can be applied to California. Shops in San Francisco can cater to visitors from Los Angeles, and vice versa. More importantly for Sheehan’s Fresno audience, HSR can bring people to smaller cities like Fresno to shop, work, or live. As I discussed above, however, Sheehan didn’t grasp the lessons from smaller cities like Ciudad Real or Zaragoza. Instead his preconceptions that ridership is an issue and that HSR should focus on covering its costs meant he simply accepted service cuts to smaller cities rather than exploring what this would mean for a place like Fresno – and whether a focus on costs over creating value and business really was the right way to assess an HSR project.

Economic observers like Richard Florida have argued that because of this ability to close distances, high speed rail is essential to recovering from this deep recession. Florida in particular argues that we are facing a deep structural economic crisis that can only be resolved by making fundamental changes to the way we live and travel:

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…

It’s now time to invest in infrastructure that can undergird another round of growth and development. Part of that is surely a better and faster information highway. But the real fix must extend beyond the cyber-economy to our physical development patterns—the landscape of the real economy.

How this plays out in Spain is an important lesson for California. Spain is going through many of the same economic problems as is California – suffering from the effects of a burst property bubble, with austerity politics making matters much worse. How is HSR helping Spain get through the crisis? How is it positioning Spain for later recovery? That would have been an excellent issue to examine and include in the article.

But Sheehan didn’t do that. One reason is that for most American journalists, the issues that Florida discussed are simply taboo. The average reader of a newspaper, usually someone above age 40, does not want to hear that the “American way of life” rooted in the automobile that they were taught as kids was The Greatest Thing Ever is failing and that change is needed. So that never gets discussed, with rare exceptions. Journalists don’t really discuss the severity of unemployment, the need for major changes to address it, or innovative solutions to fix it.

In fact, journalists actually treat with extreme skepticism efforts to produce innovative change. Solar power and green jobs get hit with that all the time. And so too does high speed rail. American journalists are trained to see government-backed innovation as inherently risky. That’s one of their central preconceptions. It’s damaging our country in profound ways, and it is one of the main reasons why Sheehan’s article turned out the way it did.

Sheehan went to Spain to see what he thought he needed to see based on the media-driven discussion of HSR in California. As a result, he missed out on some very important lessons for California that were staring him right in the face. California can learn a lot from Spain’s HSR experience, but the most valuable insights didn’t find their way into Sheehan’s article. That’s unfortunate. But at least we know what those insights are, and we can share them with other Californians ourselves. As we can see, we may be the only ones who are able to do so.

I am writing to express my strong support for your plan to move the California High Speed Rail Authority into a Transportation Agency under your Administration’s direction. I encourage you to act swiftly to address the high speed rail project’s problems, which I fear will put more than $3.5 billion in Federal funding at risk if not addressed.

Deploying the expertise and resources of CalTrans towards this effort over the next six months – in direct cooperation with the California High Speed Rail Authority – could permit a rapid reassessment of the route, decisions regarding the stages of construction, and substantial progress on acquiring right of way, in order to expedite the beginning of construction by the Federal government’s Fall 2012 deadline.

…As I have discussed with you previously, putting this project on a steady path to success would demonstrate that California remains capable of building big projects, putting thousands of our citizens to work, and leading the nation. I am concerned that our state’s future would be greatly hindered if this project either failed to get off the ground, or failed to be completed. I have spoken to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood about the importance of utilizing CalTrans’ expertise, and we both agree that your leadership in this area could improve prospects for success.

Feinstein and Brown have been allies before (and Feinstein officiated at Brown’s 2005 wedding to his wife, Anne Gust) so this is likely a show of support more intended for state legislators than the governor, though it’s easier to just write to one governor than 120 legislators. Still, it’s significant that Feinstein weighed in on this and her words will carry weight in Sacramento, particularly since she is one of the state’s most powerful politicians. It will force legislators to give serious consideration to the concept, and make it harder for them to dismiss the consolidation proposal. And adding Ray LaHood’s imprimatur to the concept just makes the argument even more compelling.

Perhaps just as importantly, Feinstein also addressed the Peer Review Report in her letter:

The California High Speed Rail Peer Review Group’s recent report, which failed to endorse state funds for the California High Speed Rail project until further steps to reduce project risk are taken, vividly identifies the need to act quickly. As you know, without the Legislature’s approval of this appropriation, more than $3.5 billion in Federal funding competitively awarded to California would be at risk. Specifically, the Group called for the Authority to:

* select an initial operating segment as soon as possible,

* include a deployment plan for electrified high speed trains with positive train control systems,

* further develop the business plan to address risk and cost issues,

* involve the private sector in project design,

* increase project management capacity,

* subject demand forecasts to greater scrutiny, and

* “reduce the risk to the state of a stranded project” by investing initial funding in the segments that currently serve significant train ridership (San Jose to San Francisco and Anaheim to Los Angeles).

I find it very hard to debunk some of the Group’s key conclusions. But I also believe that many of the concerns could be addressed quickly with a concerted effort under your leadership.

The first five of these make sense to me and are, from my perspective, uncontroversial and sensible. I don’t quite know what she means by “subject demand forecasts to greater scrutiny” – an independent peer review (by a different group, not by the authors of the report Feinstein references) did indeed subject the ridership forecasts to greater scrutiny and found the forecasts to be sound. I continue to be confident that further review will only reconfirm that conclusion but at some point this gets to be ridiculous.

The last bullet point of hers is the most troubling. She is clearly suggesting that the money be moved from the Central Valley to the endpoints. She didn’t say that the White House or LaHood agreed with this approach, but if Feinstein is going down that path then it certainly raises the possibility that the Obama Administration may indeed give in and allow the money to be moved.

I am not sure that would be a good idea. We’ve tried the path of investing in existing systems in those locations and while it’s helped build ridership, it also hasn’t done a damn thing to generate momentum to close the system gap between Bakersfield and Los Angeles. Folks like Paul Dyson have correctly been advocating for closing that gap for years now, but I have to believe the problem is the incremental approach.

If they’re only going to fund investments in urban areas, then what they are doing is a de facto investment in local rail service. It will be seen as such and won’t do anything to generate political momentum to provide the intercity connections that the Central Valley Initial Construction Segment – and a Bay Area to Valley or Valley to LA Initial Operating Segment – would provide. Building in the Central Valley, however – as part of an Initial Operating Segment that connects either to San José or LA – helps fill the gap and build on the promise of intercity rail.

It’s not quite clear what Senator Feinstein is after here. Maybe she wants the other changes and is less focused on where the ICS is located. But it’s worth making a stand for the Valley as the beginning of construction. The jobs impact will be the most significant there, but crucially, it will also help fill in the missing link needed to connect the regions of California – like a high speed rail project should.

As a result, Brown had the foresight to avoid the mistake of his recent predecessors in the Governor’s Office. Instead of looking at the state budget as a revenue or spending problem, Brown has proposed a strategy of “realignment” that would shift more state responsibilities to local governments. At first this might seem to be nothing more than a political ploy, but it’s actually not. Just as defining the relationship between the states and Washington is the central question of a federal government, the same is true for states and local government.

And that’s where high speed rail comes in.

For the first time in a generation, the state actually has a project that puts statewide priorities and assets ahead of local ones. And that is why opponents are so hopping mad. For example, the campaign director for Proposition 13, Joel Fox, will happily tell you the motivation behind it wasn’t just stopping higher taxes. It was also about the miscalculation that conservatives (like Ronald Reagan) made about adopting a full-time Legislature in Sacramento. But as Fox might be reluctant to admit, it was Prop 13 that made the full-time Legislature (and the initiative process) the behemoth it has become. Now counties, school districts, cities, and the like are heavily dependent on the state apportioning money from its taxes as opposed to using local sources.

In other parts of the country, property taxes are much higher, but counties and cities aren’t necessarily better off. That’s because in the West, property usually was not valuable without improvements like roads or irrigation. In the South, Midwest and East, the opposite is true. Most cities there had ample rainfall to grow crops and many cities were settled on the fall line where rivers became no longer navigable. Thus, states have engaged in all manner of tax policy that often pay little heed to effects on local jurisdictions.

That is the core of the anti-HSR movement. Why spend money on some new project when there isn’t enough to go around already? It’s a great question rhetorically. But it’s not logical. For example, someone living in Modoc County is eligible to attend a University of California school. They are able to drive on state roads, and are protected by state law enfoecement regardless of wherever they go. They can visit state parks and beaches. And they can receive unemployment or food stamps. But they can’t enroll their child in Siskiyou County for school. Nor can they vote in another county, nor can they purchase a car in another county and not be charged the reciprocal sales tax rate. And perhaps, most tellingly, they can’t get a library card outside their home county as well.

So it’s no surprise that as counties fall short of attracting financial resources for burgeoning problems like air quality, homelessness, epidemics, and even home health care, the state has stepped in and sacrificed all its signature assets like the UCs and state parks to save those held hostage by their local Board of Supervisors. But as Governor Brown knows all too well, counties have become too reliant on statewide funding.  And cities are not that far behind.

So like Alexander the Great, Brown has responded by slashing the Gordian Knot in two. Dismember those functions that belong at the local level, and fund what the state should do properly. Like bridges, prisons, universities, mental hospitals, beaches, aqueducts, and the like.

Still it’s natural for a resident of California’s far-flung counties to ask why high speed rail confers a statewide benefit to them specifically.  This is especially true if  you live outside the Bay Area or L.A. and won’t live anywhere near a station. Why is HSR like unemployment benefits, the UC system, state parks, prisons, and not like libraries? In a word, capacity.

HSR frees up capacity on existing roads and railways in the San Joaquin Valley to ship more freight. It lowers the amount of jet fuel needed to produced at refineries and allows more to be put towards lighter fluid, gasoline, and other consumer products. But it also increases efficiency, allowing the state to spend less money on mobility and more on education, law enforcement, and vaccines. And it reduces the amount of subsidy that the state has to pay for highways and train service that rely on gas or diesel.

Make no mistake, the argument for “realignment” is far from academic. Governor Brown has the highest approval rating of any politician in the state. Most Californians acknowledge there are structural problems that must be fixed. But because we live in demographically (and hence politically and socioeconomically) divisive times, it’s important to recognize that realignment is happening everywhere. The Baby Boom generation’s influence and its core of native-born, white Americans is dwindling and leaving behind a system that is dysfunctional by design. Realignment, and by extension, HSR, is the ultimate solution not just to high unemployment or skyrocketing gas prices but to California’s seemingly broken government.

High speed rail is not, as Robert suggests, the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Hoover Dam or some sort of Depression Era sop. It is the Salt River Project, a development that will change how the country lives and works forever. And though it will always be vulnerable to human shortcoming, it’s important to recognize that there’s no turning back. There’s no point, as others have pointed out, to attempt to convince voters why it cannot be done. Instead, as Jerry Brown’s approval ratings show, the focus must be on what is possible instead of what’s not.

So here’s a heads-up for staff and public officials at cities, counties and any other government agencies involved in construction projects: If you’re measuring job-years, say job-years. If you want to talk about jobs, then translate your job-year statistics before making public pronouncements. High-speed rail’s 1 million job estimate shrank under Mercury News reporter Mike Rosenberg’s scrutiny to about 60,000, once he’d parsed the methods, and the authority’s credibility, already shaky, took another plunge.

Watchdogs need to be on the alert, particularly when the public or legislators are going to vote on projects based in part on creating jobs.

Here’s my response: who cares?

Seriously. Why is this even an issue? 1 million job-years, 60,000 jobs, it’s a non-issue that obscures the fact that HSR will provide a badly-needed economic stimulus to the state. Maybe if California were functioning at full employment this might be a useful exercise. But with unemployment still above 11%, it’s absurd. The Authority was clear that it was speaking in “job-years” and while that term doesn’t really make sense to anyone but bureaucrats, it is a legitimate concept, as the Mercury News editorial notes:

Job-years is an excellent tool to calculate the amount of work needed to complete a project. A job-year is one year of work for one person; a new construction job that lasts five years is five job-years. It is a more precise measure because an individual job may last for six months or a year or forever.

So the Authority was using a more precise measurement, but because that number was far larger than another measurement, the anti-HSR Bay Area News Group paper had to attack it in order to make the Authority look bad:

In a weak economy like today’s, construction jobs are a factor to consider for projects like stadiums and transit systems. But the main consideration has to be the long-term value to the community, once construction is finished. What’s especially unfortunate about high-speed rail is that the real number of likely jobs, some 60,000, is substantial. Only because 1 million were touted is the rail authority’s credibility further damaged.

The only people who believe the Authority’s credibility is “damaged” by using what the Mercury News termed a “more precise measure” is the Mercury News. Most normal people don’t care. They understand that the jobs are “substantial.” More importantly, they understand that HSR provides clear long-term value to the community in the form of the ability to affordably and quickly travel from Santa Clara County to the other major metropolises of the state without having to depend on volatile oil prices.

Still, it’s worth continuing to push back against the Mercury News’ silly arguments. Writing at Fox and Hounds Daily, Michael Bernick, a former director of the California Employment Development Department defends the Authority’s approach to measuring jobs:

Recently, I reviewed ten projections associated with a range of infrastructure investments in California and the United States. The projections varied widely in the number and types of job years estimated for each $1 billion spent in investment. Some of this variance was due to the different types of infrastructure (water, transit, highway), and some was due to whether the jobs were in the region, state or nation. Yet even controlling for these factors, the estimates for direct construction jobs, indirect jobs (i.e. suppliers) and induced jobs (jobs created as project expenditures spread throughout the economy) yielded varied estimates for job years per dollar spent.

The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) estimates that the high speed rail construction will generate 6600 construction job years for each $1 billion spent. This falls roughly in the middle of the projections. Similarly, the CHSRA estimates that the project will create around 13,400 indirect and induced job years per $1 billion—which falls also around the middle of projections.

Bernick points out that the 2012 Business Plan was not always consistent, sometimes referring to “jobs” instead of “job-years” but that this small error can be corrected in the next revision. He also provides some good analysis of the impact of the jobs that the Central Valley project will create:

Using the estimate of 6600 construction job years per billion, the Central Valley Initial Operating Section (IOS) priced at $5.8 billion will create roughly 38,280 job years for construction-related direct employment. As the IOS will be built over a 5 year period, the number of workers employed at any time will fluctuate as the works ramps up and down. On average, using the Authority estimates, the IOS will be employing roughly 7000 workers at any time.

This employment will by no means “solve” California’s 11.3% current unemployment rate. However, two observations might be put forward on IOS employment impacts.

First, the number of these construction jobs dwarfs the construction jobs on all other highway and transit projects in California. Most of our highway and transit projects, even the larger ones, generate less than a hundred workers at any time; only a few projects even reach over a hundred workers at any time. High speed rail will generate more construction jobs than the current highway and transit projects in the Central Valley and nearby areas combined. The impacts will be greatest as the jobs can be targeted at construction workers in the Central Valley—where building trades unemployment has been over 25%-30% for the past few years.

This is particularly important given that Central Valley Republicans like Jeff Denham, Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy have been trying to argue that the HSR money should go to freeway projects in the Valley instead. What Bernick points out is that HSR will create more jobs for the money than a freeway project would. And of course, HSR would cover its own operating costs, unlike a freeway, as well as not contribute to pollution, traffic, sprawl, and fossil fuel dependence.

Second, even more than the direct employment, if the Authority’s Small Business Plan currently under consideration is properly structured, the Central Valley economy will benefit from developing an expertise in high speed rail construction. The Central Valley segment is the first segment to be built in the United States. Businesses, including environmental, design, and construction management—that work on this first segment will be positioned for work on other segments in California and throughout the country, possibly the world.

In other words, the Central Valley would get to develop a high speed rail industry, helping to diversify the region’s economy. That’s a significant boost too, especially given the region’s ongoing and severe economic woes.

The Mercury News doesn’t seem to care much about this, focusing instead on a distinction its own editorial seems to acknowledge is small, to attack the high speed rail project for using a metric the Mercury News admitted was actually more precise.

I’m not sure what their approach adds to the discussion in California over high speed rail, jobs, and stimulus. But it does reveal a disturbing belief among the Mercury News editorial writers that playing “gotcha!” is somehow more important than helping the state to economic recovery.

The trouble with this kind of expert analysis, though, is that it seldom takes politics into account. Planners didn’t have much choice but to place the initial segment where they did, because to qualify for federal stimulus money they had to guarantee that construction would begin quickly, and the Central Valley portion was thought to be the only part of the line that would be ready to meet Washington’s deadline. No source of future funding, such as a higher gasoline tax, has been proposed because the economy is rotten and voters would be unlikely to approve it right now. So does that mean the whole thing should be scrapped?

As they explain, the answer is clearly “no,” but their explanation of the politics matters a lot here. I know that the more technical-minded folks out there get driven crazy by these political factors, but there has yet to be a human society without politics of some kind. And so far, in my view, the political factors have not compromised the value, benefits, or operational sense of the HSR project.

The LA Times continues in their defense of the project, making some interesting comparisons that aren’t exactly the first ones that come to my mind – but then again, maybe comparisons to the Interstates, the California Aqueduct, Shasta and Boulder Dams, and the Bay bridges are getting old:

The project’s current political ills remind us of the firestorm that erupted over L.A.’s subway, when sinkholes appeared on Hollywood Boulevard, construction mismanagement led to cost overruns, and voters became so disillusioned with subways that they approved a measure in 1998 forbidding the expenditure of county sales tax money to pay for them ever again. A decade later, they realized how shortsighted they had been; failure to complete a subway to the sea contributed to worsening gridlock on the Westside, and the subway had such clear benefits for riders that its construction troubles were largely forgotten. The result: County voters approved a new measure in 2008 to raise the sales tax to pay for, among other things, more subway construction.

Well, OK, this comparison is actually a pretty good one. Even after voters had approved Metro Rail in 1980, there was a great deal of debate about whether it was a good solution for a famously car-dependent metropolis. As construction began, as sinkholes appeared, and as stores exploded momentum began to halt. Even after the first segments of rail opened in 1993, controversy led to the infamous 1998 vote. Today, support for rail is virtually unanimous in LA County, with only a few scattered groups of NIMBYs and deniers left to try and hold back the pro-rail tide.

Of course, we hope HSR won’t face the same kind of problems that plagued the Wilshire subway (and one way to ensure it doesn’t – build fewer tunnels in urban areas!). But as we found with Metro Rail, delays don’t solve anything. They just drive the price up and generate greater costs and inconveniences in the short term.

One of the common comparisons for HSR is to Boston’s Big Dig. Normally it’s a derisive comparison meant to signify that HSR would be some sort of “boondoggle.” But the Times recognizes that, on the whole, the Big Dig has been a boon for Boston:

The same phenomenon is already happening in Boston, home of the nation’s most expensive transportation project. The Big Dig highway tunneling scheme was a political catastrophe a few years ago, what with mistakes that prompted severe delays and caused the price tag to skyrocket. Although the Big Dig is nobody’s idea of the right way to build infrastructure, Bostonians are now reveling in a downtown park built on what used to be an expressway, and a tangled traffic mess has been unsnarled. In a few more years, the headaches will probably have been forgotten.

They’re certainly right about the big picture. And one of the reasons for the Big Dig’s high costs was poor planning – constant delays and politically-motivated changes to the design being the main culprits.

The Times even reaches back into ancient history:

Worthwhile things seldom come without cost or sacrifice. That was as true in ancient times as it is now; pharaoh Sneferu, builder of Egypt’s first pyramids, had to try three times before he got it right, with the first two either collapsing under their own weight or leaning precipitously. But who remembers that now? Not many people have heard of Sneferu, but his pyramids and those of his successors are wonders of the world.

Well, at least we can be assured that California’s HSR system won’t suffer the same fate, given that HSR has been built countless times around the globe. And rather than being built by slave labor, it will be built by well-paid, unionized workers, providing a significant economic boost to a state that could really use it.

Their conclusion is excellent:

The point is, you can take the long view or the short view toward the bullet train. The expert panels are taking a short view; we prefer the long. In the end, if Californians have the patience and the political will to stick with it, they’ll have a project with extraordinary environmental, economic and transportation benefits. If they don’t, they’ll have worsening congestion, rising pollution and soaring transit expenses as gasoline prices continue their inevitable rise. We like the first vision of the future better.

All in all, another solid and strong op-ed from a newspaper that has been a key supporter of the project since at least 2008.

At least, their editorial pages have been supportive. Maybe one of them can have a talk with their HSR reporter, Ralph Vartabedian, the shockingly anti-HSR biased reporter who is using the LA Times’ pages to spin misleading stories and sow misinformation about the project. Their reporting shouldn’t have to follow the dictates of the editorial pages, of course, but their reporting should also be honest, focused on facts and evidence, and not characterized by a clear and obvious bias. That’s not happening right now, and it’s a serious problem for the LA Times.

California has already won about $4 billion of that stimulus money, and combined with the voter-approved Prop 1A money will be enough to get construction started on the Initial Construction Segment in the Central Valley, connecting Fresno and Bakersfield.

That is, if the state legislature agrees to release the Prop 1A funds. That will be, by far, the top battle California high speed rail supporters will have to fight in 2012. A coalition of people who share an opposition to creating jobs and to doing anything that might move California away from its 20th century transportation model are working hard to ensure that the legislature overturns the will of the people and blocks this funding. Even some Democrats like State Senator Alan Lowenthal would have California follow the lead of right-wing extremists like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and Florida Governor Rick Scott and reject billions in federal stimulus and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with it.

On the other hand, most California Democrats still support the project. That group is led by Governor Jerry Brown but it includes many other state legislators, as well as the once and future Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both our US Senators, and many Democratic constituency groups including the state labor federation. And of course, President Barack Obama remains a strong supporter of high speed rail. Would Democrats in the legislature really deal Obama a high-profile blow mere months before he is up for re-election? I have a very hard time imagining they would do that. (Including Sen. Lowenthal, who will be running for a seat in Congress this year.)

Still, HSR advocates will need to step up and work hard to provide public pressure and mobilize support for getting construction under way. Here are some of the key issues to push forward on as the year unfolds:

• HSR construction will provide a desperately needed jobs boost to the state. The Initial Construction Segment will create over 100,000 jobs during its five year construction timeline, a figured confirmed by the Mercury News’ recent analysis. That’s a big, big jolt to California and to the Central Valley in particular. Unemployment in California is still at a sky-high 11.7% rate, with Fresno County – the heart of the ICS – suffering from a shocking 15.7% unemployment rate. It is simply irresponsible for the legislature to reject this golden opportunity to provide a massive stimulus to the state’s economy. Any legislator who proposes to defund HSR needs to explain where they will find 100,000 jobs to replace those they would be destroying.

• HSR construction does not obligate the state to anything other than building an Initial Construction Segment. Some claim that California can’t afford the potentially $98 billion cost of high speed rail – even though such claims ignore the fact that California isn’t obligated to pay a dime more than the $10 billion voters approved back in 2008. Even if no more federal money materializes, then the state would have new rail infrastructure that other passenger rail systems can use.

• The ICS would have independent utility. Let’s just come right out and say it: Ralph Vartabedian is a liar for claiming in the LA Times that the concept of Amtrak using the ICS as a fallback option is a “sham”. Amtrak has indicated it likes the idea of using that track in concept, but details still have to be ironed out. In other words, if no more HSR money ever materialized, then California would still have created 100,000 new jobs and improved Amtrak California service in the meantime. Seems sensible to me.

• Support for HSR is strong in the San Joaquin Valley. Another criticism of Vartabedian’s article was its intellectually dishonest refusal to mention the numerous local governments that support the project after he mentioned that some local governments oppose it. Supporters include the city of Fresno and Fresno County, the city of Merced and Merced County, the city of Visalia and Tulare County. And there are a lot of HSR supporters in Hanford and Kings County who have been unfortunately shouted down. A lot of people in the Valley want this train and want these jobs.

• Californians embrace innovation and solve problems. Let’s remember the reason why Californians voted for high speed rail in the first place. A post from November 2011 lays out the case well, with plenty of citations and links.

The basic pitch: Like Boulder Dam, the California Aqueduct, and Interstate 5 before it, the high speed rail project is an essential element of getting out of this economic crisis and building lasting prosperity in California. Current infrastructure is not getting the job done, and expanding what we already have would cost significantly more than building HSR. By providing savings on transportation and environmental costs, the HSR project will spur billions in new economic activity that the state desperately needs. HSR has been a proven success everywhere else it has been tried and there is every reason to believe it will succeed here.

Despite what people like Alan Lowenthal, Doug LaMalfa, Elizabeth Alexis, and Gary Patton say, the legislature is still inclined to want to get HSR construction under way. And they will get a great deal of behind the scenes political pressure from higher ups to do so. But that isn’t sufficient. The public has to be mobilized too. And that’s the job of HSR advocates in 2012: to rally the public to push the legislature to get high speed rail under construction, as planned, this year.

California faces nothing less than a severe jobs crisis. That doesn’t mean any old job is a good job. But when you have an opportunity to create tens of thousands of jobs per year while building sustainable infrastructure that can save money and spur new growth for the rest of the century, you would be crazy to dismiss it. California didn’t dismiss those opportunities during the Great Depression, building dams and bridges that put people to work immediately and still help create economic value 75 years later.

But some in the media believe we should indeed dismiss these opportunities. Concerned more with breaking a story than with playing a meaningful role in building a better California, they prefer to find reasons to not do something useful to address unemployment.

And so you get Mike Rosenberg’s attack on high speed rail jobs in today’s San Jose Mercury News:

Though California’s high-speed train faces an intensifying backlash over its $99 billion price tag, political leaders from Washington to Sacramento justify the cost by touting another huge number: 1 million jobs the rail line is supposed to create.

But like so many of the promises made to voters who approved the bullet train, those job estimates appear too good to be true.

A review by this newspaper found the railroad would create only 20,000 to 60,000 jobs during an average year and employ only a few thousand people permanently if it’s built.

My reaction? So what! I have been consistent on this blog in saying that whether HSR creates 20,000 jobs or 1 million jobs, it’s still a good idea and still would provide a badly needed economic boost to the state of California.

First off, 20,000 to 60,000 jobs a year is a very significant number. Rosenberg dismisses it (though one wonders how he’ll feel the next time the Bay Area News Group conducts another round of layoffs) but we can see just how big that number is by making some comparisons.

Apple Computer, based in the Mercury News’ backyard, employs 60,000 employees. About 10,000 are in Cupertino, but looking at their overall workforce, Rosenberg is saying HSR could create the equivalent of Apple Computer once every year and that’s somehow a bad thing.

Microsoft employs 55,000 people in the USA, most of them in Washington State but some of them in Silicon Valley.

Cisco employes 17,000 workers in Santa Clara County, the county itself employs 15,000, and Kaiser Permanente employs 13,000.

If any one of those companies closed or left the state it would be a blow to the economy. So for Rosenberg to dismiss 20,000 to 60,000 jobs per year is just an absurd thing to do, suggesting he is deeply out of touch with the tough economic conditions many Californians face right now.

But there are specific problems with Rosenberg’s analysis that deserve to be called out too.

But state leaders, it turns out, quietly beefed up employment estimates. First, they counted every year of work as a separate job. So if one person were to work 10 years, that would count as 10 jobs. Next, they figured outside companies, such as restaurants and retailers, would hire two new people for every single construction worker.

Grand total: 20,000 construction workers and 40,000 “spin-off” employees — each working the entire 22-year project — would count as more than 1 million jobs.

As it turns out, there really are secondary job growth effects of employing people on major projects. Look back up at that list of Santa Clara County employers. Cisco, Kaiser, Apple, and government workers all have to eat somewhere. They all have to have their cars serviced. They all have to buy clothes. Rosenberg is implying that the notion that one job doesn’t create the conditions for another job, and that’s just denying reality.

More importantly, I’m not entirely clear what the difference is between Rosenberg’s analysis and what the CHSRA is saying. Let’s go back to his lede:

A review by this newspaper found the railroad would create only 20,000 to 60,000 jobs during an average year and employ only a few thousand people permanently if it’s built.

Notice he doesn’t say what an “average year” is. If the project is 22 years long, and say 50,000 jobs per year are created, well, you’re at 1.1 million.

Just as important as what Rosenberg said is what he left out of his analysis. Nowhere in his article does he discuss the green dividend – the economic activity created by the money saved on oil purchases. As people buy less oil, they have more money available for other purchases thereby supporting new growth. In Portland the annual green dividend is estimated at $2.6 billion.

The same holds true for high speed rail. In 2010 the US Conference of Mayors estimated that HSR would generate $10 billion in green dividend for the Los Angeles area alone – statewide it could be double that amount. That includes new jobs.

As to long-term job creation, Rosenberg appears skeptical of that too. But here again, he just isn’t paying attention to the realities around us. We also know from global experience that HSR spurs the development of mid-line cities. In California that is crucial, given the sky-high unemployment in the Central Valley. That unemployment costs the state government billions and acts as a drag on the economic potential of the entire state. California’s recovery requires a Central Valley recovery.

HSR can help provide a boost to places like Gilroy, Fresno and Bakersfield. It brings those cities into the globally competitive coastal economy, allowing residents there to get jobs on the coasts and allowing coastal businesses to set up shop inland where land values are cheaper.

Rosenberg frets about job losses that might stem from construction:

What’s more, officials have not taken into account the potential job losses from the railroad, which will displace many businesses along the train route, including several along the Caltrain corridor between San Francisco and San Jose.

This is pretty fundamentally misleading. First, the businesses that are displaced don’t die out. They’re bought out and can relocate to continue operating. More importantly, there’s no analysis at all that suggests any jobs lost to construction would come anywhere close to even 20,000 a year. Rosenberg is just idly speculating here.

And he doesn’t discuss the other drags on the economy that come from relying too much on oil to get around. After all, the present economic crisis – which Rosenberg barely mentions – is the product of reliance on oil at a time when its price continues to rise.

So what Rosenberg has done is the typical move of a contemporary reporter. Instead of actually talk about the project in context, he treats high speed rail as an isolated thing disconnected from the rest of the economy and from our other natural resources. He assumes that the status quo is just fine, that if we don’t build HSR we won’t have any other costs or threats to jobs.

This is the default perspective of most modern American journalists. And it is corroding our society. Journalists shouldn’t act as boosters. But they also have a responsibility to help pull this country out of its present crisis. Instead journalists are trained to break stories by finding incidents of government being misleading, rather than breaking stories by finding examples of fundamental problems being ignored. This is particularly true when it comes to green infrastructure, which is so important to our economic future. It’s as if journalists are crabs in a barrel, pulling back down anyone who tries to climb out.

Even if Rosenberg wants to focus on job projections, he did so in a biased way, excluding important other facts and analysis that challenge the skeptical conclusions he drew.

Rosenberg is a smart reporter, so it’s depressing to see once again a journalist throw their integrity to the winds in order to try and make the high speed rail project look bad. It’s unfortunate that he chose that approach. But Californians have rejected these kinds of arguments before, and they should continue to do so now.

Watching their neighbor’s increasingly warlike stance, Tulare County, which strongly supports the project, has been looking for a way to insure the fast growing population in the two county region — nearing 1 million by 2030 — has a station. So instead of partnering up with Kings County as had been planned, they have decided to go it alone.

The city of Visalia will take up the idea at its Dec. 21 council meeting, Olmos said. “Now that we know they will be building the first leg of the route right here, we understand that it has moved up our chances to get a station. We’ve been told that if we want a station we need to apply fairly quickly.”

With the clock ticking on funding, Visalia and TCAG will jointly apply to do a $800,000 planning study they note will serve a regional population that includes both Kings and Tulare counties, with Tulare’s population three times that of Kings.

Visalia understands that not being involved in the HSR project – and especially not having a station – means that job growth and new economic activity will quite literally pass them by:

Without a station, scores of daily 200 mph trains could barrel through Kings County, but none of them would stop — just what Visalia, and the bypassed towns of the earlier rail era — feared.

It’s good to see that Visalia and Tulare County get why HSR is such a good idea and are fighting to bring it to their community. As the gateway to Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks, Visalia is poised to get tourists from across the state more easily with high speed rail. And with a downtown that has affordable land available, located just over an hour via HSR from downtown LA, Visalia could attract businesses and skilled workers as other mid-line cities on European HSR lines have been able to do.

Hanford and Kings County may be willing to spend the rest of the 21st century watching Visalia and Tulare County take the jobs and business growth that they rejected. At least the rest of the San Joaquin Valley knows better.