Since these issues emerged last fall, the California High Speed Rail Authority has been working to propose methods to ensure that the tracks would not act as a barrier between the neighborhood and the riverfront park, or potentially cause the demolition of housing near Union Station. The latest set of proposals, included in the Palmdale-LA Alternatives Analysis report, involves burying and even tunneling the tracks through the area:

It would head due north from the station, passing over Vignes Street and descending under Main Street, to enter a tunnel at Spring Street. Other roads between Vignes Street and Spring Street would need to be closed or grade separated. It would transition from cut and cover to bored tunnel construction within LASHP. The bored tunnel would continue due north deep below the Elysian Park neighborhood and Elysian Park, curve gently northwest beneath I-5 and the southern tip of the Elysian Valley neighborhood, and align with San Fernando Road or the existing Metrolink tracks. It would surface at the south end of the Rio de Los Angeles State Park.

This also protects houses in the neighborhood near Union Station. It seems a solution worth of further consideration.

However, even this has generated criticism, as LAist reports:

With recently-released proposals showing where tracks could be placed throughout Los Angeles as part of California’s high speed rail project, some residents and environmental groups are ready to fight at least one possible route. That’s because it could temporarily shut down Los Angeles State Historic Park, one of the few green spaces around downtown, for several years, according to the Downtown News…

An attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council called the proposal unacceptable. “Downtown is one of the most park-poor areas in the country, and in a neighborhood that doesn’t have green space, we have this amazing resource just blocks away from home that people can enjoy,” Damon Nagami told the Downtown News.”It’s something the community fought hard for and we can’t lose.”

Of course, Nagami does not appear to be aware that the proposal would not close the park permanently, but that it would merely be a temporary closure in order to build an environmentally-friendly mass transit system that can run on 100% renewable energy and make a significant dent in pollution, carbon emissions, and oil consumption in California.

To be clear, I’m not at this point advocating for or against any solution. But a temporary closure of a park in order to build this system doesn’t seem like a dealbreaker.

There needs to be a sense of perspective here. Our dependence on oil is causing massive environmental damage to California, particularly to central Los Angeles. One of the top environmental priorities we have as a state is to build sustainable mass transit alternatives. Obviously that has to be balanced against other environmental needs. If permanent closure of a park were on the table, I’d probably agree with the criticism. But a temporary closure, while inconvenient, seems worth it given the massive rewards the community would gain from the HSR project.

This is true not only for HSR. Other environmentally-friendly and sustainable systems require some tradeoff. For example, massive wind power projects in the Pacific Northwest are facing problems due to electrical grid limitations produced by environmental opposition to building new transmission lines. Southern California has seen some environmentalists fight the construction of transmission lines to enable new solar projects to be built in the Mojave Desert.

If we refuse to build renewable energy or sustainably powered trains because they would impose changes on the existing landscape, we are merely condemning ourselves to suffering the environmental and economic damage from our dependence on oil. There has to be a way to build these projects economically and affordably. A temporary park closure isn’t ideal, but if that’s the best way to build the tracks, then it would seem worth doing.

California experienced a similar spill 41 years ago. An oil rig in the Santa Barbara Channel had a similar rupture at the wellhead in 1969, causing significant damage to the ocean, beaches, wildlife, and the region’s economy. It was this spill that initiated the big push against offshore drilling, not just in California but nationwide. California has held the line against offshore drilling, even though in recent years it’s been close, as Republicans nearly succeeded in opening the Santa Barbara coast to a new drilling project at Tranquillon Ridge.

As it becomes clear that the Gulf oil spill is almost impossible to cap, and similarly difficult to clean up, we are reminded of the desperate need for us to reduce our dependence on oil. We cannot drill our way out of our dependence crisis. Al Gore likened the desire to drill to a junkie searching for veins in his toes. For example, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would do next to nothing to help:

But it’s not enough to say we don’t need new drilling. It’s time we wound down offshore drilling entirely. The risks to our environment and our economy are too great.

Of course, we are still very, very dependent on oil for our transportation needs. We must reduce that dependence for our future prosperity (because it’s only going to keep costing us more money) and to protect our environment. So how do we get out of it?

One fantasy – and it is a fantasy – is that hybrid and electric cars will do it for us. This is the favored solution of all those who irrationally refuse to let go of the 20th century model of American life, dependent on sprawl and on the car. Just swap out a gas tank for a battery and we’re fine, or so the argument goes.

Of course, this ignores the traffic problems choking many American cities, including the Bay Area, which originally motivated the revival of passenger rail in the late 20th century. The cost to expand freeways to handle the traffic would be far higher than the $43 billion to build the HSR line from SF to Anaheim.

But even if that wasn’t a consideration, there’s another issue: where do you get the electricity? Currently 50% of electricity in the US comes from coal, with natural gas and oil playing a big role as well. Coal is just as dirty as oil, causes perhaps more carbon emissions, and its trail of environmental devastation is about as extensive as oil’s – West Virginia has been environmentally destroyed by coal, just as the Gulf coast is now getting hammered by oil.

Coal deposits are non-renewable. Same with natural gas, same with oil. And as China and India demand more coal, more gas, and more oil when their economies recover from the recession, those costs will keep on rising.

So what happens when you add a truly massive new amount of demand to the US energy grid in the form of mass ownership of electric vehicles? The cost of electricity will soar. It was only 10 years ago that California had its own energy crisis, and although it hasn’t returned, that is largely due to an aggressive and successful conservation program. We don’t have much electricity capacity to spare to enable the growth of electric vehicles unless we bring new generating stations online. And unless we want to merely recreate the economic and environmental costs of using fossil fuels, those new sources will have to be renewable.

But will Californians accept huge solar panel projects? Projects in the middle of the Carrizo Plain and the Mojave Desert have already faced criticism from NIMBYs and environmentalists, and wind turbines are notorious for producing NIMBYism. While we can and should push aside those objections, it’s not at all clear that even renewables will help meet the overall electricity demand if everyone in America drives an electric car. If we could meet the physical demand, the cost is not likely to be cheap.

It’s also massively inefficient. Moving more people by high speed train is better than people sitting in their electric cars for 6 hours on the way to LA or SF (if their car can even hold a charge that long!). Moving people within a metro region, or a megaregion, by electric commuter or high speed train is also more efficient than a bunch of electric cars sitting on the Bay Bridge or on Interstate 580 over the Altamont Pass.

Given those considerations, it would seem that high speed rail is a vital piece of the strategy to reduce our dependence on oil in an affordable, efficient manner. If we’re going to stop offshore oil drilling and protect our environment, we need to make sure California’s high speed rail project happens as planned.

It’s enough to make you wonder why city councils such as Palo Alto’s are making a de facto alliance with oil companies to prevent building those alternatives. Why does Palo Alto mayor Pat Burt oppose energy independence? Why do HSR critics and opponents believe we should have more offshore drilling, despite the risks? Because even though they may construct a fantasy world of affordable electricity for affordable mass electric car usage, the reality is that if you oppose or block HSR, you are merely deepening our dependence on polluting, damaging, even devastating oil extraction, at a massive economic cost to us all.

The new British coalition government supports HSR, with some changes to the Labour proposal, and Scotland is insistent that it be included in the project. The environmental benefits, particularly reduction of carbon emissions, are significant. HSR will help reduce the need for flights and car trips between Britain’s cities. And of course, the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull showed the benefits of high speed rail.

And yet there are those in England who think those benefits are outweighed by their own aesthetic preferences. Sadly, NIMBYism is a common phenomenon in the western world, as the United Kingdom is discovering, as anti-HSR NIMBYs organize in England:

A route between London and Birmingham with a future extension to northern England and Scotland was announced by the former Labour government in March.

The new Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition government has committed to the scheme but not said what the route should be.

But groups in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Buckinghamshire have vowed to fight it….

But [some] residents have said they are upset at the effect the route will have on their homes and livelihoods.

Separate protest groups have been formed since the plans were announced but now, they have decided to merge.

This will probably give some added fuel to Peninsula NIMBYs, but we’ve seen this movie before. As Emma pointed out in the comments last week, several German cities fought and blocked HSR, only to regret their decision. And in Southern California, many former opponents of local rail, such as subways have come around in support of the project.

Unfortunately, that d’oh moment would come too late for England, which faces the same problems of dependence on rising oil prices that we face here in California. For English NIMBYs, as for Peninsula NIMBYs, that future apparently doesn’t exist – or even if it does, the NIMBYs are betting they will survive just fine, even if everyone else around them suffers. Anything to protect their aesthetic values, no matter the destructive impact on their own wallets, their own communities, and their own societies.

We’re clearly living through a key moment in the development of passenger rail in the western world. Will California and England embrace a sustainable high speed rail future? Or will they be seduced by those small number of people, mostly prosperous if not outright wealthy, who claim the tracks are too ugly to be allowed, no matter how much they are needed?

In both places it’s a question of weighing the needs of the many against the desires of a few. Let’s hope that in California and England, common sense and the greater good win out over pandering to a small group of people whose priorities are badly out of whack.

UPDATE: You can find the NIMBY website here. It looks pretty familiar to those of us in California who have dealt with this stuff – they paint HSR as some kind of invader, say it will reduce property values, and go directly to undermining the business case for the entire route, suggesting they’re willing to blow up the whole project to suit themselves, just as are California NIMBYs.

While community input is both an important and welcome piece of the process for building high speed rail, it is simply inappropriate and unfair for these cities to consider demanding so much power while leaving the rest of us with the cost.

The proposed “core message” was discussed at yesterday’s PCC meeting. I only have it in .jpg form – Page 1 and Page 2 – but I’ve included the key points below, with my commentary following.

Suggested Core Message for PCC

Cities belonging to the Peninsula Cities Consortium believe that high speed rail should be built right – or not at all. By “right,” we mean that the rail line should integrate into our communities without disrupting their current livability, according to criteria determined by each city that includes a collaborative process with their neighboring cities.

This is entirely inappropriate. It is not for the PCC to decide whether high speed rail will be built. That decision was made by the people of California at the November 2008 election, and only the people of California can undo that decision. The PCC cities do not, and should not, have the power of life or death over the HSR project.

Further, the notion that their support is contingent upon “livability” is a very vague and, in my mind, flawed metric. One person’s notion of livability is different from another’s. Some Peninsula residents believe a city dependent on oil, choked with traffic, and with an extremely dangerous at-grade railroad that kills dozens of people each year is “livable.” Others believe a city that is more walkable, not dependent on oil, with robust transportation options and a grade-separated railroad that does not pose a danger to residents is far more “livable” than the current situation. For the PCC to implicitly embrace the former definition without public discussion is to arrogate to themselves a power they do not deserve to have.

After setting out that initial statement, the PCC goes on to propose the following specific principles:

We believe that the California High Speed Rail Authority should abide by these principles:

• Provide a valid business plan and financial plan to support the project
• Provide valid ridership studies to support the project

Here, as with “livability,” “valid” is in the eye of the beholder. So far the CHSRA has produced business plans and ridership studies that many, including myself, believe to be valid. Further, you cannot guarantee any ridership model – they are projections that by their very nature come with less than 100% certainty. However, that fact can and probably will be used by the PCC to pronounce any business/financial/ridership plan as “invalid.”

• Increase and enhance local Caltrain service and improve Caltrain infrastructure as a condition of using the Caltrain corridor

This bullet point suggests to me that whoever wrote this particular item has not been following the HSR project very closely, if at all. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the actual situation on the ground.

From what I can tell, the CHSRA absolutely wants to increase and enhance local Caltrain service and improve Caltrain infrastructure. It is Caltrain, not the CHSRA, that is not playing along here. Further, if the HSR project is to improve Caltrain service, that is going to likely require a four-track fully electrified and grade-separated solution that the PCC seems to oppose. So this bullet point is fundamentally inconsistent with the PCC’s apparent desire to prevent such infrastructure from being built.

• Fill all positions on the Peer Review Committee, ensure members review all items detailed in AB 3034, and provide them a budget and a staff to do their job

Does the PCC still oppose the bills in the state legislature that would fund additional staff for the CHSRA? Would the PCC still see a Peer Review Committee as legitimate if they considered all the evidence and pronounced the CHSRA’s current plans as valid and reliable?

• Affirm that design rather than finances, will determine the alignment chosen for each section of the rail line and that the design alternatives balance transportation goals and community values and goals equally

This is unacceptable and illegitimate. The PCC has no place telling the rest of California – and the rest of the country – that they must pay more money to provide the gold-plated infrastructure that PCC members desire. The PCC needs to be willing to put up their own funding if they are going to be making this kind of demand – and no such funding is mentioned anywhere in the proposed document. In fact, as you’ll see in a moment, they expressly say any local cost contribution demand will be cause for them to oppose HSR.

Further, we see again the arrogation to themselves of defining what “community values” are. Most residents of these communities want grade-separated high speed rail. But they’re unrepresented by the PCC, which seems little more than an institution designed to impose a uniform aesthetic standard than a collaborative project to design a good railroad.

• Empower community leaders to be an integral part of the decision-making process regarding the final alternatives

This where they are demanding veto power, something they have no right to demand. Community members and community leaders already are an integral part of the design process. They are being consulted and will continue to be consulted. However, it is not for them to decide the final alternatives. Because this is a statewide project, it must be a decision made by the representatives of the people of California – or in this case, the representatives of those representatives, the members of the board of the CHSRA.

The CHSRA is almost certainly going to place great weight on what the communities want, but cannot make that the sole determination. They have a responsibility to deliver the best project for an affordable price, a responsibility the PCC proposes to ignore if they adopt these principles.

• Secure funding that will allow the full range of alternatives to be considered without expecting local cities to contribute to the cost

In other words, they want people in Redding, San Bernardino, South-Central LA, and Santa Barbara to pay for their tunnel, even though a perfectly workable and much more affordable alternative exists. This is ridiculous and should not be given any serious consideration.

Further, if the PCC really wants to secure funding, they can start by stopping their talking down of the HSR project. Have PCC members signed the Four Billion for HSR message? Have they lobbied our Congressional delegation to approve the $50 billion for HSR in the new Transportation Bill? Or have they been dismissing the federal stimulus and criticizing the HSR project?

• Provide funding to allow cities to hire experts to study reports requiring feedback

• Provide funding to allow cities to engage community members and accurately capture their concerns and suggestions

This is not appropriate for the CHSRA to fund. If the cities want to hire experts, they must do so at their own expense. The PCC has been doing that for some time now, and clearly they can afford to do that instead of spend that money keeping other services open. Further, it sounds like the PCC wants a poll of their constituents? Why not do that themselves?

• Clearly define the points at which the public can influence the process, the deadlines for comments and the decision-making process

This has already been done.

• Allow adequate time (a minimum of 90 days) to fully involve the public in Alternatives Analysis and EIR discussions, and conduct these reviews at separate times

The current time allotted is more than sufficient to allow for all of this.

• If Context Sensitive Solutions is employed, allow sufficient time to carry out this very thorough eight-step process and explain how this work will be integrated into the high speed rail plan

And how does the PCC propose to make up for the loss of stimulus funding for the corridor if this means the project can’t make the September 2012 deadline?

• Answer questions from community members promptly and accurately, and post these answers on a website where others can read the answers

That’s what the EIR process is for. Responses to comments and questions are posted online when the EIR is completed. So far, from what I can tell, the CHSRA has been very responsive to community requests for information.

• Provide for realistic renderings of what the various alternatives will look like in each community and sound/vibration simulations that accurately reflect their impact

This demand should not even be considered until the PCC permanently abandons any “Berlin Wall” framing of an above-grade solution. Of course, the way this demand is written indicates that the only renderings and simulations that will be deemed “realistic” and “accurate” are those that meet their preconceived notions.

• Treat community members with respect and refrain from labeling them

I don’t even known what this is about – I’ve never seen CHSRA officials treat community members with anything but respect. Perhaps they’re thinking of me and this blog, but if that’s the case, they should say so. Besides, my labeling of many of the HSR critics as “NIMBYs” seems to be proven by the list of demands made here.

The proposed “core message” document closes with this:

Until these principals [sic] are in place, we believe high speed rail should be put on hold.

Overall this is a very unfortunate and disappointing proposal, one I hope the PCC rejects in its entirety as being entirely inappropriate for the project and for the PCC.

The PCC itself serves a valuable role in mobilizing community input on the HSR project. That input is not only welcome, it’s necessary to an effective project.

But the PCC appears to have lost sight of what constructive engagement with the HSR project looks like. Under the influence of the NIMBY tendency on the Peninsula, the PCC seems to be considering eschewing a collaborative approach to the project. They seem to forget that successful planning requires compromise, not a list of “our way or the highway” demands.

It is my hope that the PCC scraps this document in its entirety, and instead focuses on the Alignment Alternatives before it, offering their feedback and constructive solutions as to how the Peninsula Rail Corridor should be improved for the benefit of all Californians – including, but not limited to, their own constituents.

The Pacheco Pass alignment, rather than one through the Altamont Pass further to the north, was the fastest and “most environmentally responsible option” for the high-speed train system, minimizing impacts on wetlands as well as the San Francisco Bay and eliminating the need for another San Francisco Bay crossing, bridge or tunnel,” the authority says.

Other arguments included Pacheco being more direct and allowing for faster service, as well as enabling more service to San José, the state’s third-largest city and one of its most important economic hubs, and more and faster service on the popular San Francisco – San José corridor.

The debate over Altamont and Pacheco went on for a LONG time but it was ended in July 2008. I remained neutral – each option had its pros and cons which evened out in the end. Once the choice was made, however, it seemed sensible to accept it and move on for the sake of the project. Voters approved the choice in November, and for nearly two years the entire project has been built on the assumption that Pacheco would be the route.

However, certain groups never accepted this. One of them is David Schonbrunn’s TRANSDEF, who claimed to support HSR but opposed Prop 1A, partly because of the choice of Pacheco over Altamont. Another is Richard Tolmach, who has also become a critic of HSR and has long been pushing for a revival of Altamont. And Gary Patton’s Planning and Conservation League have similarly been fighting high speed rail, apparently in pursuit of Gary Patton’s agenda of opposition to passenger rail that has led to environmental damage and lost money across Northern California.

At the same time, Peninsula HSR critics and opponents, primarily motivated by NIMBYism, began to call for a revival of the Altamont alignment. Their logic was that it would enable a bypass of Palo Alto and part of Menlo Park (though not the neighborhood along the Dumbarton rail route). That would leave much of the Caltrain corridor unimproved, and San José in limbo, but those were acceptable outcomes for these opponents.

Unsurprisingly, the Peninsula HSR critics and Schonbrunn/Tolmach have now realized they have common interests. Tomorrow morning at Burlingame High School, Schonbrunn, Tolmach and PCL will be joined by Palo Alto Mayor Pat Burt and Burlingame Mayor Cathy Baylock (and potentially others) to announce they have partnered with a French design team to propose a new Altamont alignment. Their press release is below:

Altamont Revival Press Release

Detail can be found on the TRANSDEF site. A look at Exhibit C shows the route they plan to use from SFO to Tracy.

The route is notable for several reasons:

1. Proposes routing the trains onto Highway 101, despite the fact that this would likely significantly depress ridership by bypassing the dense urban centers of the Peninsula (and yes, the Peninsula rail corridor is dense), could drive up costs significantly by requiring reconfiguration of interchanges or very tall HSR viaduct structures

2. Proposes then routing the trains over the Dumbarton rail corridor, despite known concerns about environmental impact

3. Proposes then routing the trains through Fremont, perhaps through a costly cut-and-cover tunnel under the power lines, or perhaps with aerial structures in Fremont neighborhoods (which apparently is OK to Peninsula proponents of this plan, since it seems Fremont doesn’t count as much as Palo Alto)

4. Proposes then routing the trains through open land southeast of Pleasanton and Livermore without a station there, despite claims going back years by TRANSDEF and others about the Altamont corridor supposedly having so many more riders

5. Is vague about how to connect the route to San José, despite the city being the third-largest city in the state and one of North America’s most important hubs of economic activity, as if San José was just an afterthought.

Their proposed Altamont route appears to be a recipe for sprawl at the expense of ridership. This is very ironic, given the fact that one of TRANSDEF’s chief criticisms of Pacheco is that it fuels sprawl. The route would run to the south of Pleasanton and Livermore through what are currently vineyards and open land, instead of following the existing Altamont rail corridor. That would avoid running it through those two cities, but it means any possible Pleasanton/Livermore station would be a “greenfield” station – which is much more likely to fuel sprawl. That’s significant in the Tri-Valley area, especially Livermore, which has been battling for years to limit sprawl and preserve open space.

The plan relies heavily on the French model of HSR, which sometimes bypasses city centers (though not Paris) in favor of greenfield stations, although that model has produced questionable results. They seem to ignore the Spanish and Japanese model of running through city centers, choosing to cherry-pick for unclear reasons.

When the proposal is unveiled tomorrow, it’s going to be cast as an answer to all the project’s problems. But it comes with many unknowns and huge downsides. Depressed ridership, potentially higher cost, inefficient service to San José, inability to help upgrade the Peninsula rail corridor, and unknown but likely significant environmental and community impacts – it all seems like quite a lot just to appease a few Altamont diehards and a few Peninsula NIMBYs.

Which is all this really is. Instead of sitting down and figuring out a sensible solution to implement the plan voters approved, including a San Francisco to San José segment eligible for $2 billion in federal funding over the next two years, these critics and city leaders want to waste more time and toss away that money in favor of a study that is inherently designed to suit their own desires. Rather than working with us to ensure we have the federal funding to get the system built properly, or to help advocate for the best design on the Caltrain corridor, this group still thinks they can make one last go of it, massively changing the project at the last minute for their own reasons.

Ironically enough, late design changes are usually the number one of cause of cost-overruns on megaprojects.

Yet another risk to the project the State Auditor strangely left unmentioned.

Economic development, no matter when or where it occurs, is profoundly subversive of the status quo.

This applies quite well to California’s high speed rail project. It is a fundamental element of our state’s economic development plans for the 21st century. I would go so far as to say that it is necessary to economic development, given California’s need to provide fast intrastate transportation that isn’t dependent on oil or on spending well above $100 billion on expanding freeways and airports or on flooding parts of San Mateo County with seawater when global warming melts icecaps.

At this blog, we’ve consistently made these arguments, pointing out that the cost of doing nothing is not zero. As Bianca said in a recent comment, the State Auditor didn’t analyze the risk to the state of the CA HSR project not getting built on time.

Why isn’t that examined? And why do NIMBYs and those who doubt HSR’s value and effectiveness wield such disproportionate influence over the process of implementing the will of the voters?

It goes back to Jane Jacobs’s quote. HSR means a change to the status quo. American society – including our politics and our economics – is now defined primarily by a fundamental divide. One side is comprised of those that understand the status quo has totally failed, producing political paralysis and widespread economic misery, not to mention environmental catastrophe, and therefore significant change is necessary and inevitable.

On the other side are those who adamantly refuse to believe that change is either necessary or desirable, who believe that the status quo works just fine and absolutely must not be changed. Some of them instinctively know that change is coming, but because they have invested so deeply into the 20th century model of America – sprawling, dependent on oil, dominating the world yet delusional about the costs of maintaining that dominance and prosperity – they see any proposal to change as some kind of inherent attack on their America.

The primary form that divide has taken is between the “Tea Party” movement and progressives. But here in California, and to a lesser extent in Seattle as well, the divide manifests itself somewhat differently. It’s not between decent society and a bunch of wacko racists claiming that the president wasn’t born in the US. Instead the divide is between those who seek greater public investment in building the elements of 21st century prosperity – including but not limited to high speed rail – and those who refuse to see such investment as necessary or desirable and come up with reason after reason why we shouldn’t do it.

HSR opponents are just one aspect of this. You can see it in Berkeley where a bunch of NIMBYs are blocking a BRT line. You can see it in those who advocate for privatizing public schools instead of investing more to ensure all of California’s children can learn.

Although the forms of the divide are different in California, the effects are the same. The defenders of the status quo – who are actively resisting efforts to produce change that can ensure greater prosperity for all – are generally people who already enjoy considerable political and economic privilege. This is not to say they are wealthy, although a good number of them are, but that they enjoy a kind of economic security most of the rest of us lack. They can look at something like HSR and see it as unnecessary because, hey, they’ve got theirs. Why worry about the rest of us who look at rising oil prices and a lack of jobs and see a situation that threatens to permanently exclude us from prosperity?

This is especially annoying because the divide is entirely unnecessary. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of high speed rail will be the very NIMBYs who are fighting it. Their property values will rise when noisy diesel trains are largely removed from the Peninsula rail corridor, when traffic isn’t blocked by at-grade crossings, and when children no longer risk death crossing the tracks. Peninsula cities will become more attractive to businesses, and residents will have access to more jobs since HSR opens up more of the state to them. They will benefit from the Green Dividend. And they will benefit when younger generations are able to enjoy prosperity and pay for the benefits and home values of the older generations.

But because those changes require shifting mindsets and acknowledging that the status quo no longer works, the defenders of the status quo find themselves unwilling to go there. And so California, a state which in the 20th century was a synonym for innovation and global leadership, falls under the control of those who refuse to innovate and eschew leadership.

The forces of change will win. It is inevitable. But it would be nice if it didn’t require this ridiculous, pitched battle. Between 1930 and 1960, Californians agreed that we needed hydroelectric dams, bridges, freeways, aqueducts, and a education system the envy of the world in order to provide for future prosperity. There wasn’t a pitched battle over this; Californians agreed on the need and built it. And the prosperity that remains in this state exists only because of those investments. Yet those beneficiaries now ask us to refuse to make similar investments for a new century and new conditions.

When we see some institutions of state government captured by the “defend the status quo at all costs” mentality, like the State Auditor, it’s another depressing sign that it does require a pitched battle to help bring change to California. November 2008 proved that Californians want change and want HSR to be part of their state’s future. It’s up to us to see that mandate through, even when a very small but vocal group of people would prefer we chain ourselves to a failed, obsolete, and dying model of what America should be.

The plans to build a high speed rail line near the Los Angeles River and through Cypress and Glassell Park has drawn opposition from river advocates, including Councilman Ed Reyes. So, after several years of lobbying federal officials and state railway builders, engineers involved in with the California High-Speed Rail Authority Line are looking at possibly shifting the rail line away from the river. Instead, after leaving Union Station, the train, under one scenario, would travel through a tunnel underneath the state parking now taking shape near Chinatown, Dodger Stadium and Elysian Park before emerging on the other side of the river, Reyes said today. “They are going to very careful how they come up the river way,” Reyes said at a luncheon hosted by the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum. “At Union Station, they are going look at going underground … under the Cornfield, under Dodger Stadium, under Elysian Park and pop up on the other side of the 2 Freeway or at Taylor Yard” near Cypress Park.

This appears to be a situation where the CHSRA is willing to examine the proposal as part of their alternatives analysis in order to keep the LA City Council happy, but isn’t necessarily set on actually doing this tunnel. As with other tunnel proposals, this too seems worth examining in full.

Of course, funding is also going to have to be part of that examination. HSR skeptics and critics who have been pushing the flawed State Auditor report are about to discover that report is going to rebound on them. Because of that report, it’s much more likely that things like a tunnel are going to have to have a clear source of funding identified if they are to be carried forward. Whether it’s an LA City Councilmember or a Palo Alto NIMBY, anyone who thinks they can just call for a tunnel without explaining how they’ll pay for it is going to have difficulty being taken seriously, especially by the Legislature, in the future.

Whether the LA tunnel idea will ever get to that level of seriousness is unclear:

The tunnel proposal remains just that, and no decision has been made on what the final route will be. The council office itself has not decided whether it would support the new route under Elysian Park, said Jill Sourial, the council office’s point person on Los Angeles River issues. Reyes just wanted other alternatives than the 100-foot-wide trenches and massive bridges the rail authority had been proposing, Sourial said. “Give us some reasonable alternative to just the straightest line between points A and B,” she said.

It seems to me that what’s going on here is the LA Council needs to be able to tell the folks living near the LA River – whose concerns are typically overblown – that other options were explored and that the LA River route really is the best, cheapest option for the people of California and their high speed train system.

Going back to the Auditor report for a moment, it shows a rather important double-standard that is still used by too many officials in Sacramento. The Authority is unfairly excoriated because Congress hasn’t yet delivered the long-term funding source (and because the Auditor chose to ignore the many signs that federal funding is coming), but NIMBYs and others who want to drive up the project’s cost are given a pass. If the Authority was going to be blamed for things outside its control, then why didn’t the Auditor look at the full range of factors that could pull the HSR project apart?

That increase had a number of important effects. When the price of a gallon of gas broke $3 and stayed there in 2006, it brought an end to the state’s real estate bubble, as buyers were no longer able to afford both the cost of a commute and the cost of their mortgage. When the price of a gallon of gas neared $5 in California in the summer of 2008, it helped shove the state into the worst recession in 60 years.

That 2008 spike had another important effect: it convinced Californians that they needed much more passenger rail service. Voters in Los Angeles County, Santa Clara County, and Sonoma and Marin Counties approved sales tax increases for passenger trains, with over 2/3rds of the voters saying yes. And of course, 2008 was the year that voters approved the $10 billion high speed rail bond, Prop 1A.

Californians didn’t just vote for passenger trains as a result of the rising cost of oil: they have also been using them. Take a look at the Capitol Corridor’s ridership since 1999, which tracks the price of oil very well:

Significantly, the place on this chart that does NOT closely track the price of oil is in FY 08-09. The price of oil crashed temporarily, but since has recovered, trading on Monday March 29 at $82/bbl. What didn’t crash is Capitol Corridor ridership, which is below 07-08 numbers, but is still above 06-07 numbers, a truly remarkable feat considering that 08-09 witnessed the severe recession. In fact, while ridership is down by about another 5% in FY 09-10, over half of that is due to state worker furloughs. Once the economy recovers, many of those workers will return to full-time employment, and more riders will use the trains. And on the other two intercity rail services, the San Joaquins and the Pacific Surfliners, ridership is higher in February 2010 than in February 2009, indicating that public demand for intercity trains remains strong.

Of course, as the economy recovers, the price of oil is almost universally expected to rise along with it. Economic recovery means more demand for oil, which will drive the price higher, particularly as growth fuels major demand expansion in countries like India and China. Imagine every new Tata Nano as another straw into the pool that is the global oil supply.

It’s a pool that is not being replenished. Instead, as the US Department of Energy acknowledges, a decline in production is expected as early as next year:

Page 8 of the presentation document of the round-table, a graph shows that the DoE is expecting a decline of the total of all known sources of liquid fuels supplies after 2011.

The graph labels as “unidentified” the additional supply projects needed to fill in a gap that is expected to grow after 2011 between rising demand and decline of known sources of supply that the DoE supposes will start that year. The declining production foreseen by the DoE concerns the total of existing sources of liquid fuels plus the new production projects that are supposed to come on-stream before 2012.

The DoE predicts that the decline of identified sources of supply will be steady and sharp : – 2 percent a year, from 87 million barrels per day (Mbpd) in 2011 to just 80 Mbpd in 2015. At that time, the world demand for oil and other liquid fuels should have climbed up to 90 Mbpd, according to the presentation document.

While one might argue this will merely fuel more searching for and production of oil, the fact is that the easily found oil has already been pumped. New production consists of more difficult sources, such as the Alberta Tar Sands. The high cost of production requires high oil prices to be profitable.

Rising demand and decreasing supply means only one thing: rising oil prices. Soon enough we’ll see a run at $4 per gallon, and then $5. That could happen in 2010 or 2011, depending on the strength of the economic recovery.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Deutsche Bank believes this will produce oil prices of $175/bbl by 2017, perhaps sooner. In practice that would put California pump prices at between $5 and $6 per gallon.

If California hasn’t already gotten started on building out an electrified passenger rail system to connect our cities, and provide service within them, we are screwed.

But we’ve not heard very much about that in 2009. When oil prices retreated from their 2008 peak, many older Californians assumed it was the return of normalcy. Having lived their lives with low oil prices, with the 1970s seemingly acting as an anomaly, they came to expect that low oil prices had returned for good, and that there was no need for what they viewed as the “inconvenience” of building things like fast, electric, grade-separated high speed trains. At the same time, state legislators made a series of crippling cuts to public transit agencies even though they had seen dramatic ridership increases in 2008, which were generally sustained through 2009.

When – and yes, it is a matter of when – oil prices begin to rise again, those who advocated cuts to mass transit service and those who argued high speed rail was unnecessary will be exposed as having been very, very wrong. Public willingness to tolerate their delaying tactics, already small, will evaporate entirely as NIMBYs will be clearly seen as standing in the way of affordable transportation solutions.

We should start viewing HSR opposition as a “bubble” phenomenon. Enabled by a temporary lull in the upward trend of oil prices, it can only be sustained as long as those prices do not rise further. Once that happens, the anti-HSR bubble will burst as rapidly and as completely as the real estate bubble burst starting four years ago.

Just as it would have been foolish to make fundamental economic or infrastructure decisions during the housing bubble, it would be equally foolish to make the same decisions during the anti-HSR bubble. California must plow full speed ahead with the HSR plans as approved by voters in November 2008, otherwise we will have a much more difficult time dealing with higher oil prices than we’re already going to have.

Yet the $8 billion set aside for high-speed rail in his 2009 stimulus package, split among 31 states, includes only two genuine high-speed rail projects — in Florida and California. And even that money will do little more than kick-start the schemes. The rest of the package will go to upgrading various sections of the Amtrak network….

And that’s what makes the Acela lines from Washington to Boston the best opportunity to create a real high-speed, high-frequency service to compete with air travel along the Northeastern Seaboard.

Of course, the Acela is already a successful example of sort-of-high speed rail in California America, with 60% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor according to recent stats. While the Acela needs to be upgraded to even faster speeds, HSR will get more lasting support in Congress if HSR in new states is supported. The Clinton Administration would up focusing its HSR efforts on the NEC and as a result, no lasting HSR funding project was achieved until Barack Obama became president in 2009.

So it would not be sensible from the perspective of generating national support for HSR to just focus on improving the Acela. The most valuable thing to do to get a national HSR system up and running would be for Congress to create a significant, stable, long-term funding source for HSR, and Wolmar doesn’t propose that here.

But Wolmar offers some other good places to look at in order to speed up HSR in the US:

It’s not just a matter of money, though. The government must do away with a host of state and federal regulations that reduce train speed and are far too restrictive.

Wolmar didn’t go into details here, but we can. One of the most important reforms involves Federal Railroad Administration rules that make it difficult to bring off-the-shelf European and Japanese style high speed trains to existing railroads. Instead trains must be made heavier, slowing speeds and travel times.

Another issue is environmental regulation. As I’ve discussed here before, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) needs to be reformed in order for sustainable infrastructure projects like HSR to be built, with a more holistic statewide process created that can supplant the existing, flawed CEQA model that doesn’t effectively engage public input and gives too much power to NIMBYs. All sides should support sensible reform, because in its absence, the legislature is moving instead to exempt more projects from CEQA entirely, which isn’t an ideal solution.

The federal government can also help by reforming the way railroads are regulated. Currently the state of California has very little leverage over Union Pacific, which enjoys immunity from state regulation and eminent domain dating back to the Gilded Age and is no longer necessary here in the 21st century.

These are just some of the state and federal regulations that could be reformed to help accelerate HSR planning and construction. I’m sure you all can offer more in the comments, and I invite you to do so.

DOJCHSRA

For NIMBYs who have argued that the CHSRA’s 2009 Business Plan is “illegal” because it floated the possibility of revenue guarantees to turn around and propose ending in San José is the height of hypocrisy. (I’m not a fan of those revenue guarantees, and if Prop 1A indeed banned them, then that would be a solid argument against their inclusion in a financial plan. Just so we’re clear.)

Of course, there are other reasons to oppose ending the HSR route in San José aside from the inconvenient truth that Prop 1A forbids it. Ridership would plummet since many riders won’t want to transfer to a commuter train that lacks the on-board amenities of HSR, and would traverse the SJ-SF route at a slower speed, increasing the travel time. And with less ridership comes less revenue, making it much more difficult for the trains to cover their operating costs and repay private investors.

Let’s hope this puts an end to what was always an unproductive discussion. HSR will traverse the Peninsula to serve San Francisco. What remains to be determined is exactly how that will happen – above-grade? In a trench? In a tunnel? Some mixture of those? That discussion is going to intensify considerably once there are actual alternatives put on the table, hopefully at the end of this month. And that is the discussion that matters most.