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.

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.

An alignment alternative along the east side of U.S. 101 would enter South County on an aerial track to make room for wildlife crossings, returning to ground level just north of the city. Then the tracks would ascend to an aerial structure to cross over Cochrane Road, East Main Avenue and East Dunne Avenue.

South of Dunne Avenue, the route would diverge easterly from the freeway as it crosses over the city’s Outdoor Sports Center on Condit Road. After crossing Tennant Avenue, the train would return to ground level and realign with U.S. 101 near East Middle Avenue, eventually reaching an HSR station east of Gilroy, on Leavesley Road.

Another alternative would carry the high-speed train along the east side of U.S. 101 until it reached Maple Avenue south of Morgan Hill. At that point, the train would pass underground through a trench to the west side of the freeway, en route to the state’s preferred station site in downtown Gilroy.

Both alternatives that travel along U.S. 101 would require the train to be trenched underground through the CHP truck scales on the freeway, and adjacent to the South County Airport. The tracks have to be underground near the airport, as a 30-foot-tall aerial structure would carry trains through restricted airspace, according to Parsons Senior Project Manager David Wemmer.

But the HSRA’s preferred alignment is still along the east side of the existing Union-Pacific and Caltrain tracks – a route the railroad company steadfastly objects to. Through Morgan Hill, this alignment would require new grade separations to bring major streets over the UP and HST tracks, as well as Monterey Highway, north of town.

At Cochrane Road, the train would continue along the UP tracks along an aerial structure through downtown, until it returned to ground level at Maple Avenue. The route would then swerve to the east or west in Gilroy, depending on where the South County station ends up.

This option would also require relocating Monterey Highway to the east on the north side of Morgan Hill, in order to create room for a bullet train right-of-way up to 60 feet between the UP right-of-way and the road.

Morgan Hill officials have noted that they prefer a track alignment along U.S. 101, as it would not create a new dividing line through the community as a downtown track would.

So to sum up: Morgan Hill city officials support the 101 alignment. The CHSRA prefers the Monterey Highway alignment but Union Pacific is obstructing this, leaving a 101 alignment a near-certainty to be chosen.

But that doesn’t sit well with folks who live in that area, who voiced their concerns at the meeting:

The most common complaint aired at Thursday’s meeting were from rural property owners who live in close proximity to the different alignments and are worried about property values and other impacts – including the possibility that the state will take their properties.

“One of the reasons I moved here was because it was quiet, and now that’s going away,” said north Gilroy resident Ginna Raahauge.

If the 101 alignment is chosen, it will still be about as quiet as it is now in north Gilroy. The HSR trains will not add a meaningful amount of noise, unless you’re standing very close to the tracks. In such a case, you’d also be very close to Highway 101 right now, which certainly isn’t a quiet transportation facility.

The HSR tracks have to go somewhere. And that means someone is going to be impacted, inconvenienced, and perhaps even see their home or property taken to eminent domain. There’s no way around it. The same would be required if Highway 101 were ever widened, and a Gilroy station would be a major boost to South County residents who would want to travel to other parts of the state – or to bringing people to their region. I can imagined packed HSR trains on the weekend of the Gilroy Garlic Festival (seriously – if you’ve never been, you should definitely go, and make sure you have some of the garlic ice cream – it is amazing).

If the HSR station were built in downtown Gilroy, it would also help preserve the rural character of the land east of Gilroy. That’s where a series of battles have been fought against sprawl, many of which have been won, in order to protect the farmland and stop it from being paved over with subdivisions.

If the people living east of Morgan Hill don’t want the HSR tracks to parallel Highway 101, they need to take it up not with the CHSRA or their local officials, but with the Union Pacific Railroad. And they should contact their members of Congress, particularly their two U.S. Senators, in order to get Congress to finally apply pressure to UP to stop its costly, wasteful, damaging obstruction to HSR.

There’ll be another HSR meeting in South County soon, on Monday June 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn on the south side of Gilroy (where Highway 101 and Monterey Highway intersect) from 6 to 8pm. I’m going to do my best to attend that meeting.

The basic issue is whether the tracks and station should go through downtown Gilroy, or whether they should pass just east of town, east of both Highway 101 and the Gilroy Outlet Mall. The image below indicates the two primary options (east is the top of the image):

Recent discussions in Gilroy have produced a growing consensus among city officials and community leaders that the preferred implementation would be a downtown station, located approximately where the current Gilroy Caltrain station is – and that the tracks be trenched in order to reduce noise and vibration impacts.

At yesterday’s California High Speed Rail Authority board meeting, Rod Diridon was able to convince the other board members to keep the trench on the table as an option:

Staff had recommended that putting the tracks underground be scratched because of added costs. However, Authority board member and former Santa Clara County Supervisor Rod Diridon said trenching was important to Gilroy residents. Due to his lobbying, the board did not eliminate the trenching option.

“What happened was really a tribute to (the Gilroy Dispatch’s) editorial board meeting last week,” Diridon said after the meeting.

Both editorial board members and local council members favored trenching over aerial tracks, he said.

Trains would potentially be traveling through Gilroy at up to 150mph, and since locals have no experience with this, they’re convinced that a trench is the only acceptable option for implementation through town.

There’s also a desire to channel growth into the city center itself, and concern that a station east of 101 would generate unwanted sprawl in that area, where Gilroy residents fought off a planned Wal-Mart a few years back. Gilroy’s downtown has room to grow upward, and an HSR station would help make that happen.

Further, a downtown station could be (and should be) intermodal, offering easy transfer to Caltrain – not only to serve the stations between San José Diridon and Gilroy (such as Morgan Hill) but also to transfer to expected passenger rail service to the Monterey Bay. Caltrain and the Transportation Agency of Monterey County (TAMC) had been very close to signing an agreement to provide daily service to Salinas when Caltrain pulled back due to budget problems. The concept and plans are still very much alive, if not quite as close to fruition as they used to be. TAMC is also looking at a possible Capitol Corridor extension to Salinas, and there’s still the plans to revive the Coast Daylight from SF to LA via the Coast Line, and in the future that could conceivably be scheduled to provide a cross-platform transfer to HSR at Gilroy.

Santa Cruz County is also nearing an agreement to purchase the tracks from UPRR from Davenport to Pajaro, with the aim of instituting passenger rail service. That could easily be extended to serve the HSR station at Gilroy as well.

There is also an emerging consensus in south Santa Clara County about what the overall alignment should look like:

[Gilroy] Mayor Al Pinheiro said Wednesday that the council on Monday will discuss a joint resolution with Morgan Hill’s council that supports a high-speed train station in Gilroy and U.S. 101 alignment through Morgan Hill.

While Pinheiro said there has been some opposition to the route in northern Santa Clara County, that’s certainly not the case in Gilroy or Morgan Hill, he said.

Diridon said Pinheiro was a supporter of the project early on, and he has appreciated the council’s input.

“I’ve especially enjoyed the mayor’s thoughtfulness and courage on this issue,” he said.

This overall plan seems workable – downtown alignment through Gilroy, 101 alignment (which is straight and on a corridor with room for the tracks) north past Morgan Hill to the San José area. The primary concern, of course, will be cost:

Dave Mansen, regional manager for Parsons Corporation and regional team manager for the Authority, said that trenching the tracks near Gilroy would add as much as 20 percent to the costs of the San Jose-to-Merced portion of the project. Although the entire project is expected to cost $45 billion, specific costs of the various project alternatives have yet to be determined.

As with the Peninsula, the best solution would be for the city of Gilroy to find a way to fund the trenching project itself, potentially as part of a redevelopment project. Gilroy doesn’t yet have a redevelopment agency, but as Rod Diridon argued, they probably ought to, especially if they want a downtown station and its economic benefits.

Further south, the situation is much more complex, additionally so because it is this segment for which the judge ruled the EIR was inadequate in Atherton v. CHSRA, specifically the matter of using UPRR ROW between San José Diridon and Gilroy.

As a result, some of the key route decisions are still very much up in the air. And here too you have NIMBYs fighting what seem to be the most commonsense solutions, including the Gardner neighborhood (which, I should correct, did actually exist before the railroad – the neighborhood was subdivided in the 1880s and again in the 1900s, whereas the SP line was built during the Depression in the mid-1930s). Down in south Santa Clara County Gilroy residents have voiced concerns about using the existing rail alignment, especially based on the factually incorrect statement that trains would run at 220mph through central Gilroy. And there is the matter of a protected grassland near Los Banos that the HSR trains are currently planned to use.

The CHSRA produced a useful document showing the alignment options along this segment, focusing on the three toughest parts: how you get from Diridon Station to either the UPRR ROW or Highway 101; how you run trains through Morgan Hill/Gilroy, and the Los Banos section.

One of our commenters, Peter, attended the San José meeting last night and had these comments, shared in the comments to yesterday’s post and reproduced here:

The presenters were brutally honest regarding expected noise levels, eminent domain, frequency of trains, etc.

People definitely preferred the relatively straight tunnel at an angle to Diridon as the alignment they thought the Authority should adopt. They weren’t very concerned that it meant the station would be over 100 feet underground.

They were very surprised to hear the maximum permissible noise levels for freight trains (the locomotive) at 55 mph and HSR at 150 mph are the same at 90 dba. The freight cars can apparently be even louder.

They were very upset at the planned peak level of operations of 11 tph in each direction. They were upset despite the fact that the presenter made clear that this was for 2035.

In other words, HSR through the Gardner and Willow Glen areas wouldn’t be louder than the existing trains, and like their counterparts on the Peninsula, believe they have some right to dictate the operations of the train corridor (which they don’t). Peter continued:

And when I say above that the presenters were “brutally honest,” I mean that when they didn’t have the answer yet and had not yet studied the issue in-depth enough to have an answer, they said so.

I know people are going to claim they were hiding things, but I just didn’t get that impression.

The presenters stated that they were shooting to go as fast as they could between Diridon and Gilroy. It sounded like they liked the idea of the curve around Morgan Hill in order to enable them to possibly 220 mph.

There was one crazy still trying to get Altamont, and he even had a handout (“This is a better choice”)with an alignment splitting in Pleasanton and one spur going south to San Jose International and another going via a Transbay Tube and ending beneath SFO.

Two San Jose Board of Supervisors members were there and they made their pitch for the “straighter” tunnel alignment that allowed the trains to go faster, and oh, by the way, would mean they would be out of sight, out of mind.

Oh, and supposedly they are now considering a Morgan Hill station instead of Gilroy….they are considering the Morgan Hill station because the City of Morgan Hill asked them to. All of the alignment alternatives raised are being considered because they have to be. I highly doubt they’ll put a station in Morgan Hill, same as I think a 100 foot deep underground station at Diridon is ludicrous.

Here again I’ll say the same thing I said about the Palo Alto HSR design workshop: if San José and/or Santa Clara County want a tunnel from Diridon Station southward, they need to come up with a way to pay for it. That strikes me as even less likely given that the county is already on the hook for a multibillion dollar tunnel, to bring BART to downtown San José.

As Clem noted, the CHSRA does listen to and incorporate public feedback – in this case, the “Thread the Needle” plan floated by Gardner/Willow Glen residents, which as you can see on the image below, has been incorporated by the CHSRA as an alignment option:

The simplest solution to me looks like the existing Caltrain corridor through the Gardner neighborhood. If residents want another solution, whether a costly tunnel or a costly and tightly-curved aerial structure shown in green, they’ll have to find a way to pay for it. It’s not government’s nor the public’s job to subsidize their home values.

For getting the trains out of central San José, there’s the issue of what to do if the UPRR ROW along Monterey Highway is unavailable. The solution as proposed below involves using the Highway 87 and Highway 85 corridors.

I wish I had more specifics on this, because those corridors are already being used by VTA light rail. I do not believe it is either wise or desirable to sacrifice VTA light rail for HSR, and the cost of widening the ROW along both routes would be quite high. Still, if there’s no federal pressure put on UPRR to come to an agreement about the ROW, this may have to be explored.

Next up is Morgan Hill, where a station is being considered at the request of the city of Morgan Hill:

As Rafael noted, a Morgan Hill station would not be optimal for those of us living in the Monterey Bay Area (and there are almost a million of us, not an inconsequential number). A Gilroy station is both ideal and still the most likely option.

Of course, the other interesting thing about this map is the possibility of following the Highway 101 corridor. I drive that corridor pretty frequently, including last Saturday, when I took a close look at the options for placing HSR tracks alongside the road. This is very doable. The east side of 101 has more space in the Morgan Hill area, and the west side has more space through San Martin. Because the 101 corridor here is straight and not built up, unlike the Peninsula, it strikes me as an appropriate place to put HSR tracks.

I’m skipping over the slide on the Pacheco Pass and moving directly to the Los Banos region, where a wide range of options are on the table:

As you can see, there are three main issues here: Can the CHSRA build through the grassland? What do you do with the wye at Chowchilla? And can you use the UPRR/Highway 99 alignment? I have no strong preferences here, although the Firebaugh alignment would seem to rule out a maintenance hub at Merced.

Obviously there’s quite a lot going on here. To me the best solution is to use the existing Caltrain ROW through Gardner, use federal mediation to reach an accommodation with UPRR in the Monterey Highway area and along the Highway 99 corridor, and use the straightest and most direct route through a narrow portion of the grassland.

I would prefer the HSR trains go through central Morgan Hill and particularly central Gilroy. Those cities are under intense pressure to build urban sprawl, and an HSR station in downtown Gilroy, where the existing Caltrain station is located, would instead help channel that growth back into the existing urban center. That being said, I’m open to a 101 alignment, especially east of Morgan Hill, if that can enable trains to go at a faster speed.