After spending much of her article rehashing various attacks on the HSR project, Wood finally gets around to her point. (She wrote earlier in the day, before the OCTA board unanimously approved the letter described below.)

A draft letter scheduled for a vote by the OCTA’s 17-member board states it has “grave concern over what appears to be missing elements and unrealistic components of the [newest business] plan.”…

The draft letter by OCTA states the “project has the potential to provide significant improvements to California’s transportation infrastructure, but must be done with prudent planning and judicious use of public funds.”

It urged the High-Speed Rail Authority to abandon its plan to begin construction in the Central Valley and instead use a “bookend” approach, starting in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas and moving toward the Valley.

That approach would ensure more riders would immediately begin using the trains, the draft letter said. It also commended state high-speed rail officials for switching to a “blended” approach, which initially integrates the system with existing commuter lines in the large urban areas of Northern and Southern California, including the Anaheim-to-Los Angeles corridor.

The draft noted that “the funding plan is largely speculative and lacks any firm commitment of funding beyond the initial construction section.”

The draft added that the high-speed rail’s funding plan puts it in direct competition with local rail agencies, including OCTA, for “scarce” federal rail and other transportation money.

These criticisms don’t make much sense from the perspective of building a statewide high speed rail system. If the goal is to simply improve existing service in Orange County, however, it makes sense to attack the notion of starting in the Central Valley. Even though the 2012 Business Plan indicated this was a prudent way to begin, OCTA apparently prefers to just take the money right now and run.

Of course, it’s not even clear how much one could buy for $6 billion in LA/OC or the Bay Area. One of the main reasons for starting construction in the Central Valley is that it’s cheaper to build there given the less amount of urban landscape to deal with. Building rail infrastructure in Southern California is not cheap, and starting at the ends does nothing to fill in the missing link between SF and LA.

Further, as the OCTA should know, the federal government has not shown any interest in allowing the federal money to be moved from the Valley to the endpoints. OCTA may be hoping to influence the Obama Administration to allow this, but that still appears to be an uphill battle.

Orange County surely needs better regional rail. But it also needs high speed rail in order to help travelers from Northern and Central California reach OC, and vice-versa. Orange County’s only airport, John Wayne, is at capacity with no room for expansion. Plans to build a new and larger airport at the former El Toro Marine base were abandoned ten years ago, and there’s nowhere else to put new flights. So Orange County either has to build high speed rail, or simply give up on the idea of more people coming to visit the county for work or pleasure.

OCTA should not be in the business of making long-term decisions based on short-term considerations. The best thing for OCTA to do would be to help get the high speed rail project underway in the Central Valley and fight hard to get the funding it needs to build out from there toward San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Orange County.

Former Anaheim Mayor and Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle resigned from the California High-Speed Rail Authority Board today, saying in a letter he would like to focus on a his lobbying firm and “other responsibilities.”

Which is ironic since Pringle stepped down as both mayor of Anaheim and as a member of the Orange County Transportation Authority at the end of 2010 after coming under criticism for supposedly holding “incompatible offices” – apparently sitting on a local transportation agency and on the CHSRA board was somehow a bad thing.

There’s no indication that Pringle’s resolution was directly tied to that, but with Democrats retaking the governor’s mansion – and an Orange County Democrat, Tom Umberg, recently elected chair of the CHSRA board, it may have been that Pringle, a Republican, felt his influence had faded, his time had passed.

Pringle’s resignation makes him the fifth person to leave the nine-member board in the last few months. In fact, one might wonder why exactly we need the Alan Lowenthal bill that would replace the Authority board when in fact a majority of the board will already have been replaced.

Assessing Pringle’s legacy is difficult. He was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tool on the board, and while Pringle did help land about $3.5 billion in funding, he also didn’t do a particularly good job navigating the anti-HSR minefield placed by people like Lowenthal, the NIMBYs, and right-wingers.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with Mike Rosenthal’s take on Pringle’s tenure, particularly the state of public opinion about the project:

Public opinion of the project swung significantly during his term, especially among fiscal conservatives and on the Peninsula, as the cost of the project soared, with the authority securing a fraction of the funds it needs to build the railroad.

I don’t see any evidence at all for Rosenberg’s claim that public opinion swung significantly. I actually haven’t yet seen any evidence public opinion has swung at all. 52% of voters approved Prop 1A in November 2008. In February 2011 a Harris Poll found 70% of Californians still support state and federal HSR funding. The flawed criticisms of the HSR project have only gained traction among people already opposed to the project.

Overall, I think it’s a good thing that there’s a new chair of the CHSRA board, and it can’t hurt to have new blood on the board. Of particular interest will be the status of the LA-Anaheim segment, and the plans for running tracks into ARTIC. Pringle had championed a particularly expensive option for the approach to ARTIC, for which he had come under criticism from other board members such as Quentin Kopp. Both Kopp and Pringle are now off the board, and presumably the ARTIC issue will be at least revisited.

From a CHSRA press release:

“California’s high-speed rail project is a historic undertaking – the coming year is critical as we focus on the initial construction of the statewide system,” said Umberg, who was appointed to the Authority Board in 2008 by the Speaker of the Assembly. “I am dedicated to representing the people of the state in guiding the successful implementation of the system envisioned by voters. I’d also like to thank Curt Pringle for his leadership and the long hours he has put in over the last two years as chairman.”
 
The Board policy requires that Board members elect a chair and vice chair from amongst themselves annually. Members are elected to serve one-year terms, and no more than two consecutive terms. Today’s election was a unanimous vote of the members present.
 
Mr. Umberg is an attorney with the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, specializing in federal and state policy and regulatory matters. Earlier in his career, Mr. Umberg was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles and Orange County.  As a federal criminal prosecutor, he tried numerous white-collar and civil rights cases. Umberg was appointed Deputy Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1997. He served three terms in the California Legislature, most recently between 2004 and 2006. In the state Assembly, he chaired the Environmental Safety and the Elections and Redistricting Committees.

Curt Pringle’s term as chair had been controversial at times, although much of that controversy stemmed from anti-HSR folks looking for someone to personalize as the face of a project they don’t like. Pringle was chair during the term of a Republican governor, and Umberg might be the right fit for the first year of a Democratic governor’s (third) term.

While I don’t know the details of the relationship between Umberg and Jerry Brown – or if Umberg still has any strong ties to anyone left in the Assembly (term limits mean that anyone he served with in the Assembly from 2004 to 2006 is no longer in the Assembly) – Umberg’s relationships could help block the notorious SB 517, the sneak attack on the HSR project by Alan Lowenthal.

It may be 2011, but it’s still not Curt Pringle’s year. After stepping down from the OCTA Board of Directors in order to keep his seat on the California High Speed Rail Authority Board, several remaining board members turned on Pringle’s signature project, the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center – aka ARTIC. OCTA HSR opponents, led by right-wing Orange County supervisors Shawn Nelson and John Moorlach, are claiming that ARTIC is ineligible for Measure M funds and that the HSR project is a bad idea anyway. They’ve never been supportive of the project, but appear to be using Pringle’s departure to make their move:

Several board members of the Orange County Transportation Authority say they doubt that the so-called ARTIC station is eligible to receive about $99 million currently earmarked for the project from a county half-cent sales tax. They say the Measure M road and transit money should be used to pay for improving existing stations, not building new ones.

They also assert that if the state’s high-speed rail project is canceled because of money problems, it could turn the $184-million station into a white elephant. According to ARTIC’s environmental impact report, about 90% of the station’s train passengers would come from high-speed rail.

These are two separate issues, but are being linked by anti-HSR OCTA board members. The city of Anaheim’s director of public works, Natalie Meeks, said that the Measure M matter “has never been brought up before” and that legal counsel has ruled there is no conflict, and argued (correctly as far as I am concerned) that ARTIC is an improvement of the existing Anaheim Amtrak/Metrolink station.

Here’s what the LA Times says about the language of Measure M, a 1/2 cent sales tax in Orange County originally approved in 1988 to widen freeways (and yes, that IS a subsidy for roads) and renewed in 2006:

According to its guidelines, Measure M established a competitive program for local governments to convert Metrolink stations into regional gateways that can accommodate high-speed trains. The three main objectives call for the improvement of existing stations, the expansion of transit options for regional travel and projects related to the initial segments of high-speed rail service where feasible.

My reading of that is ARTIC does qualify under Measure M rules, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some HSR opponent litigate it anyway. But the critics have other arguments against the station:

If the tracks are shared, high-speed trains won’t travel much faster than conventional trains, which experts say can be improved to increase their speed.

“What is the point of doing high-speed rail when you can get the same performance with the equipment you now have?” said Moorlach, who added that he is looking forward to the funding debate. “There are some very compelling arguments.”

Pringle’s response was that the benefit to HSR from LA to Anaheim was avoiding a transfer at LA Union Station, instead offering a one-seat ride to any destination on the HSR system. Moorlach and Nelson rejected that too:

“They want a seamless link, but at what cost?” Nelson said. “Debt is a major state and national issue. If it costs a few billion just to avoid a transfer, it would be better to take a plane. It’s not efficient sometimes to accommodate everyone’s design.”

Unsurprisingly, this misses the point almost entirely. This is about much more than “avoiding a transfer” – HSR ridership is greatly boosted by a single-seat ride, as numerous studies have shown. Taking a plane isn’t going to be a viable or desirable option for a lot longer. And of course, this ignores the huge economic benefits that HSR will create for Anaheim and Orange County as a whole by enabling the rest of California to reach the region quickly and affordably and vice versa.

I’m guessing neither Nelson nor Moorlach really care about those benefits – and they probably don’t believe they’ll ever materialize, despite a mountain of evidence from around the globe. Still, this will be worth watching. Orange County needs to be part of the HSR system, and while there’s been controversy about the ARTIC design, it is still something that OC will be better off with than without.

UPDATE: An OCTA committee backed ARTIC and a plan to rewrite their guidelines to be able to use Measure M money for ARTIC. OCTA’s counsel told the committee that the courts “probably would not uphold using Measure M funds for ARTIC under the guidelines as currently written,” leading to the proposed changes to enable ARTIC to get funded.

Yet we HSR supporters keep on pushing, partly because we are convinced that, in the end, reality cannot be denied, at best it can merely be evaded for a while – and therefore the significant benefits of HSR will eventually prevail.

It helps that our case is so firmly grounded in the evidence. We got a reminder of that last week when the UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies published a new report on HSR titled Thinking Ahead: High Speed Rail in Southern California. Although the study is focused on Southern California, and Orange County in particular, it provides data and analysis that is useful for considering the statewide benefits of the HSR system.

The UCI ITS study starts from the premise that HSR enables California to achieve two policy goals at once: “delivery of both economic and environmental benefits.” HSR deniers routinely ignore environmental benefits, though as we noted yesterday, doing so is a case of false accounting. Specifically, the study argues:

[HSR] therefore represents an important convergence of policy objectives, an opportunity to shift the terms of the debate by demonstrating how a transformative large-scale infrastructure project such as high-speed rail would contribute favorably to both desired outcomes: more robust employment growth, specifically in the “green” jobs sector, and a lighter carbon footprint for each of Southern California’s projected nearly 21 million residents by 2035. The project’s positive economic impact deserves to be more thoroughly analyzed and understood not only by regional planners and policymakers, but the public at large.

As we go forward, keep in mind that HSR critics do not see either outcome (more jobs or a lighter carbon footprint) as being important, particularly the small but vocal group on the Peninsula who believe their aesthetic values come before jobs and carbon reduction.

The Summary of Findings is quite significant:

During its construction phase (2012-2020) the CAHSR project will contribute a regional income benefit of $701m (NPV @ 4%) to Southern California workers who would have otherwise been unemployed. Together with design/engineering work for Phase II of the system, it will provide the equivalent of over 57,000 full-time, one-year jobs (or multi-year employment for approximately 15,200 workers). Construction of the Anaheim Regional Intermodal Transportation Center (ARTIC) will create an additional 3,500 to 5,000 jobs in Orange County based upon estimated project costs of $179m.

This is a significant economic stimulus to a region and a state in desperate need of it. The benefits of those jobs, from the stimulative impact on the broader economy to the tax revenues state government will welcome, are extremely important and yet are consistently overlooked or ignored by HSR critics, probably because to acknowledge those benefits would be undermining their own case.

By 2035, high speed rail will attract over 127,000 permanent jobs to Southern California that would not have otherwise been created, thanks to the region’s increased livability and enhanced transportation network. The opportunity to locate these jobs near HSR stations and other transit hubs is valuable and should be encouraged through supportive zoning and additional policy incentives. Compared to other metropolitan areas with HSR corridors, the percentage of Southern California jobs located in or near downtown areas/CBDs is low. The concentration of business and industry around HSR stations would be reciprocally beneficial both to system ridership and the regional economy. The sectors in Southern California most conducive to this type of clustering and agglomeration benefits include health care and financial/real estate services.

This point is usually outright denied by HSR critics, who refuse to accept that California might ever have any other spatial model than suburban sprawl tied together by the automobile – despite the fact that many of these critics, at least on the Peninsula, live in communities that were created around a spatial model that owed nothing at all to sprawl and freeways and owed everything to passenger rail.

Dedicated to the defense of a failed 20th century model, some HSR critics might charge that we’d never see companies take an HSR station into consideration in terms of locating job centers, even though this is already routinely done in Europe. As we can learn from the HSR debate currently taking place in Wisconsin, however, companies are already taking transit hubs into account. A former chief economist to a Republican governor of Wisconsin wrote a pro-HSR op-ed, which generated the following comment from the executive director of Gateway to Milwaukee, a group of businesses near the Milwaukee airport, about how the region is already suffering job losses due to a lack of transit hubs:

Here’s an intresting anecdote. A local entrepreneur had a business plan and a need for $5 million in capital. Potential investors from Seattle were very interested, willing to invest $2.5 million and paid for research on greater Milwaukee. Their strong preference was to start the company in Chicago, possibly start it in Madison, but they had no interest in Milwaukee. The plan called for hiring 60 young IT and creative design professionals in 120 days and they did not want to take the risk of doing so in Milwaukee. A primary reason was the concern about transportation for these young people – generations X & Y – around Milwaukee and even between Chicago and Milwaukee (the KRM would have been a solution). So the business ultimately started in Chicago – 200 feet from a train station.

The basic point is that because southeast Wisconsin is inadequate in its overall transportation structure versus other metropolitan areas, the start-up capital and the jobs went somewhere else.

One could just as easily substitute “Palo Alto” or “Fresno” or “Anaheim” for “Milwaukee” in this story, with SF, San José and LA playing the role of Chicago or Madison. HSR deniers don’t want to accept this fact, but businesses are already looking for better mass transit options, and are starting to make their hiring and location decisions based on the available infrastructure. This isn’t the 1960s, or even the 1990s, where the assumption was that everyone would drive to an office park. Those days are gone.

Perhaps that’s a reason why the Bay Area Council, representing the Bay Area’s largest employers, strongly supports HSR. It’s unfortunate that some Peninsula local governments have chosen to disregard that – one has to wonder if these cities are so prosperous, with such bright job growth, that they can afford to dismiss what their most important businesses are saying and requesting.

The UCI ITS study lists several other benefits, including its role in spurring the growth of “green” jobs, reduction in pollutants including CO2, and helping achieve the “sustainable communities” goals of SB 375. The study even puts a number on the amount of money likely to be saved through the improved health of HSR users:

HSR commuters who ride at least four times a week would directly benefit from increased levels of physical activity from walking and/or biking for some portion of their trip. Improved health outcomes attributable to HSR, achieved in tandem with the development of walkable, transit-oriented communities, would total between $50 million and $132 million in reduced medical costs over a fifteen-year period (2020-2035, discounted in 2010 dollars at 4%), depending on the ridership scenario.

Those are just the “Summary of Findings” – the full study provides detailed evidence in support of those conclusions. It’s much more than we ever get from HSR critics, who are hoping that shouting loudly instead of reasoned argument and evidence will help them convince governments to block or kill the HSR project.

In a state with record unemployment, in the depths of a prolonged recession, desperately in need of good, lasting jobs that will also help clean up our environment and provide sustainable transportation, HSR is a necessary project whose benefits are desperately needed. No wonder large majorities of Californians still support the project – they understand HSR is part of our path back to prosperity.

Unfortunately, Orange has also been governed by right-wing extremists for as long as I can remember. Back in my misspent youth, I was in a Rush Limbaugh Fan Club that met at an Orange restaurant (this was around 1993 or so), with members of the Orange city council regularly in attendance. The council and the school board were almost always in the news for embracing this or that element of the far-right agenda.

Sadly, times don’t seem to have changed. Yesterday the Orange City Council passed a resolution opposing the HSR project – which isn’t even going to go into Orange itself, at least not initially.

The Orange resolution is an HSR denier’s dream. It cites all the discredited anti-HSR studies, such as those of the State Auditor and the Berkeley ITS group. But the resolution went further than those reports intended. They claim the ridership studies “were inflated in order to move this project forward with unachievable goals” and that “the project costs are now estimated at $45 – $80 billion for project completion,” despite there being no actual evidence for either claim.

Project opponent Cynthia Ward, writing at the right-wing website Red County, commends the Orange city council for passing this resolution:

Rather than using State resources to pummel a City government for standing up for their own people, I would prefer to see the CHSRA show us where Orange is inaccurate in their assessment of the situation. We will be waiting for that statement for a very long time, because the CHSRA no longer has a leg to stand on in this argument. They continue shoving blindly forward on an underfunded project whose benefits have been exaggerated, and kudos to the City of Orange for taking a stand. This Resolution was not only appropriate, it is a model that could be lifted word for word and used by other communities up and down the State. I envy the people of Orange their bold leadership, and congratulate those at City Hall who were behind this Resolution, written so carefully that even proponents of the project can find no reason to deny their yes votes to protect the people of Orange. Good work.

In fact, as I just explained, the resolution wasn’t written carefully at all. Instead it makes unproven allegations that people like Ward then insist the CHSRA respond to, even though the allegations themselves are false. It’s the exact same thing as asking someone “when did you stop beating your wife?” A flawed statement is made, passed off as truth, and when the Authority says the statement is untrue, critics pounce and accuse the Authority of stonewalling and refusing to admit a “truth” that isn’t true at all.

The Authority’s response to the Orange resolution was given by Deputy Director Jeff Barker:

“The California High-Speed Rail Authority is working with hundreds of communities throughout the state – we value their feedback and want to work together to develop the best high-speed train project possible. So it is disappointing that the elected officials in the city of Orange have declined the opportunity to help shape this historic project and have declined to represent residents of their city – especially at this early stage in our development when input and constructive feedback is so vital. In opposing the high-speed rail project, the city council is opposing the creation of tens of thousands of jobs, opposing improved air quality, and opposing a needed new transportation option that will ease congestion on our freeways and in our airways. The Authority will continue to reach out to the residents of Orange and listen to their ideas about the high-speed rail project because we know we cannot develop the best train system possible without their feedback.”

This is the right response for the Authority to make. From the perspective of HSR supporters like ourselves, we can go further and call out the city of Orange for their misleading claims and their open embrace of obstructionism.

It’s not the first time an Orange County city has tried to undermine a California HSR project. In 1983 the city of Tustin hired researchers to knock down the HSR project Governor Jerry Brown had authorized the previous year. Their report did help push the Legislature to kill the project, but the project was on life support anyway – the Legislature had never really embraced it, and the new governor, Republican George Deukmejian, wasn’t a supporter.

Things may not be different in Orange in 2010, but they are very different around the state. California voters approved the project and $10 billion in bond money for it in November 2008. The governor and the state legislature have been much, much more supportive this time around, as have our Congressional delegation and the president. And the poll released yesterday shows that public support remains very high for this project.

So Orange can pass its resolution if they want to. I’m sure they’ll find some other councils controlled by right-wing opponents of passenger rail to pile on board. But those won’t be representative of the true views of the people of California, who continue to reiterate their support for the project and their desire to see it completed.

David M. Thomson, an engineer with the consulting firm STV, said the rail authority has pushed back publication of its draft environmental impact report to January to allow some of those issues to be sorted out. The document originally was scheduled to be finished in May. He made the announcement during this week’s Buena Park City Council meeting.

State officials on Wednesday said pushing back the environmental studies will not affect more than $2 billion in federal stimulus funds that have been given to the project.

Buena Park has been one of the more vocal communities along the LA-Anaheim segment about the HSR plans. Unlike the controversy on the Peninsula, this isn’t about whether HSR should happen or not, or whether it should be tunneled or not, but is about a rather specific and focused concern about the impact of HSR on the Buena Park Metrolink station and nearby TOD:

The city’s two-year-old Metrolink station may or may not need to be destroyed to make way for the bullet train, so city officials asked that a new one be built as mitigation — and placed where the railroad tracks cross Dale Avenue, a location near the current station. The Buena Park Metrolink station, popular with commuters, opened in late 2007 at a cost of $11 million.

Even if their homes remain intact, the residents there want to save the station because they bought condos near it, Mayor Art Brown said. If the station were wiped out, Brown said, the residents worry the complex would become “a run-down slum.”

A new $11 million station seems like a perfectly legitimate form of mitigation for Buena Park. And it’s notable that Buena Park officials believe that having mass transit nearby is the difference between a desirable development and a “run-down slum” (which is a ridiculous way to describe condos not near a station).

As long as this doesn’t jeopardize stimulus funds, I’m all for examining track sharing, under reasonable circumstances (very limited sharing with freight, if any at all; passenger service integrated with HSR, HSR trains not slowed or delayed by any other user on the tracks). There’ll be lots of details to discuss between now and early 2011.

This being Orange County, of course, at least one HSR denier had to get a word in:

“I like this better than what I’ve seen before,” Councilman Jim Dow said. “But I think this is one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer dollars I’ve ever seen. This is a bunch of old men wanting to play with electric trains.”

Whatever, dude. Orange County and the state as a whole are going to innovate our way into the 21st century with high speed rail whether you like it or not.

Instead, working off a limited knowledge base of passenger rail operations that too often rests on the assumption that it is unprofitable and unpopular, and trained to be skeptical of government officials and government programs, too many California journalists find themselves willing to believe just about whatever they’re told by an HSR denier who has the sense to frame their denialism in moderate-sounding language. The result is that journalists get used as transmitters for anti-HSR talking points that are full of inaccuracies and distortions, because the journalist in question is either too unfamiliar with HSR to know any better, or too lazy to fact-check what these people are telling them.

We’ve seen a lot of these stories over the last two years, and unfortunately we’ll see many more. But it’s especially sad when a new news venture launches with a flawed story full of misleading HSR denialism as one of their feature stories.

That’s what’s happened with the Voice of Orange County, a new online news operation put together by veterans of the Orange County Register and the LA Times. As an Orange County native, I’m very excited to see such a journalistic effort be launched – and therefore am very disappointed to see their efforts sullied by a deeply, deeply flawed attack on HSR by Tracy Wood.

Wood is no journalistic slouch. According to her bio on the site:

Tracy Wood is a former foreign correspondent in Asia and a California investigative reporter and editor. As a reporter for United Press International, she was one of the few women assigned as a combat correspondent during the Vietnam War.

She joined the Los Angeles Times in California where she was an investigative reporter for 17 years, covering political and government corruption. Later she became the Orange County Register’s Investigations Editor, leading the paper’s investigations team when it broke the story of former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona’s ties to Nationwide Auction Systems founder and former Assistant Sheriff Donald G. Haidl.

As anyone familiar with OC politics knows, that story was particularly explosive. Sheriff Carona was seen at the time as “America’s Sheriff,” an up-and-coming media star and politically untouchable. But when the media broke the story of Carona’s misdeeds with his associate Haidl, it eventually led to the destruction of Carona’s career.

Unfortunately, instead of using those skills to provide a well-researched and informative look at the HSR project, Wood appears to have instead accepted without question the arguments of HSR deniers, in an article headlined “High Speed Rail Veers Off Track”:

California’s proposed $42 billion high-speed rail line, which is supposed to whip millions of passengers up and down the state at up to 220-miles-an hour, is so poorly thought-out at this point that even supporters say the plans might have to be completely overhauled.

“The (ridership and construction cost) numbers keep changing,” complained Sen. Alan Lowenthal, chair of the state Senate’s Transportation and Housing Committee. “I want to see real numbers.”

I am personally unconvinced Senator Lowenthal is an HSR supporter. He claims to be one, but in practice he has had nothing but criticism for the project, much of it unfair. Here he is embracing HSR denier terms. The ridership numbers haven’t changed since 2007, and the cost numbers haven’t really changed either – what did change was the year in which the costs are being priced. The 2008 cost estimate was in 2008 dollars. The 2009 estimate was in year of expenditure dollars, as mandated by the federal government. The “increase” was merely a shift in estimate based on anticipated inflation over the next 10 years. It’s not a sign that project costs have soared.

The Long Beach democrat, a supporter of high-speed rail, is among an increasing number of policymakers and experts who are worried that voters who approved the 2008 high-speed rail ballot initiative are becoming victims of a classic bait and switch.

“If history is any guide, rail projects have drastically over-estimated the ridership and drastically underestimated the cost,” said Eric Morris, a doctoral researcher in urban planning at UCLA and a supporter of passenger rail transit.

This is simply false, but has also gone almost totally unchallenged by Wood. The Metro Gold Line East Extension opened on-time and under budget. The Phoenix light rail line exceeded ridership projections by 33% – and that’s in America’s sprawl capital. The Seattle light rail line was also built on-budget.

As to ridership, this is where, once again, California journalists fail to consider global HSR success. For some reason, they never ask “do other HSR systems meet ridership goals?” The answer is unfailingly yes, even if it typically takes about 5 years or so for the ridership goals to be met. Sometimes it happens sooner.

But you’d know none of this from reading Wood’s article. She merely quotes so-called “experts” as if they are speaking truth, instead of fact-checking what she has been told.

Among the things that make Lowenthal and others uneasy is a current business plan that estimates almost one-third of the expected 41 million annual riders will stay within the Los Angeles basin or in the San Francisco Bay area. And one that appears to compete with existing lines for fares.

In short, this indicates that 1/3 of the riders will be commuters of some sort. Is that such a crazy expectation? If service between San Francisco and San Jose takes just 30 minutes, or service between LA and Anaheim takes just 20 minutes, that would beat all other transportation options. It stands to reason that people would indeed choose the fastest option for intraregional travel.

As to “competing with existing lines,” that seems a fundamental misreading of the situation. If one’s travel plan is downtown LA to ARTIC, then sure, you’d take HSR over a Metrolink or Amtrak train that makes more intermediate stops. But if your travel plan is downtown LA to Fullerton, or downtown LA to San Clemente, or Santa Ana to San Bernardino, or Van Nuys to San Gabriel, well, you wouldn’t take HSR. HSR would handle certain point-to-point service, but would enable Metrolink, Caltrain, and Amtrak to beef up service for other routes and other destinations. Plus, as Wood doesn’t mention at all, HSR investment helps those other rail lines get improved infrastructure to enable their own faster speeds, boosting their ridership and farebox recovery.

They also must deal with the rail line’s impact on local communities (like Buena Park), the accuracy of financial estimates and the need for a professional staff accountable to state taxpayers rather than teams of temporary consultants.

There are also questions about the rail authority’s qualifications to oversee the high-speed train system. One alternate proposal would replace the current rail authority with a state agency to oversee and coordinate all passenger rail issues.

It’s true that the CHSRA has to deal with these things. But that doesn’t mean, as Wood clearly implies, that all these charges are valid. The CHSRA does need to have more staff, but that also means they need more reliable funding – something Senator Lowenthal has not supported.

Wood continues her bias toward quoting HSR deniers:

And GOP Assemblywoman Diane Harkey of Dana Point has introduced a bill that would stop the train altogether.

“While high speed rail may benefit certain areas of the state, the lack of specifics as to cost, subsidies, financing, and ridership, added to the state of the state’s finances, should cause the Legislature to reconsider its overall value to the people of the state of California,” said her staff summary of her bill blocking construction of the rail system. “Public resources might be better spent on a steady supply of water, roads, prisons and schools.”

What is never mentioned anywhere in Wood’s article, however, is that all HSR projects cover their operating costs through fares. None needs an ongoing operating subsidy, including Amtrak’s Acela. Readers don’t know that based on Wood’s article, however, and Asm. Harkey’s claims stand unchallenged.

Also unchallenged are the vague and unsourced claims of passenger rail critics:

Experts like UCLA’s Morris talk like they’re watching the first act of a play they’ve seen over and over. Overblown ridership estimates, he said, sometimes were intentional ploys. But in other instances, they were the result of an “optimism bias…an honest misreading of things because you’re excited about things and you think it might work.”

Prof. Eric Heikkila of USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, another passenger rail supporter, sounds a similar warning. “It seems that for rail projects around the country before the fact,” he said, projections “have been, in many cases, wildly optimistic.”

This is where a Wikipedia citation needed tag would be useful. Where is Morris’s evidence that the California HSR project’s estimates are flawed or deliberately overstated? As Wood should know, you don’t just report claims like that which lack supporting evidence. She wouldn’t have let Sheriff Carona get away with it, but she lets this doctoral researcher do it because it suits her overall argument? Other questions and assertions are left unchallenged – which rail projects were wildly optimistic? As I showed, in Phoenix (just one example of many) the ridership estimates weren’t accurate because they were too low.

Lacking knowledge and expertise in HSR – and unwilling to seek out such knowledge to judge what she reads – Wood winds up totally misinterpreting the Taiwan HSR experience:

A Senate Transportation Committee staff analysis noted Taiwan financed and constructed a $19 billion, 208-mile high-speed rail line using private resources.

The private company was supposed to operate the rail line for 35 years and then turn it over to the government. Service began in 2007, according to the staff report, and by 2009 had only 87,000 riders a day when ridership forecasts had predicted 280,000.

In the end, the government had to bail it out financially, exactly what voters were promised won’t happen in California.

The Taiwan experience, the Senate staff report said, “suggests that an overly optimistic original forecast was made.”

Wood regurgitates a State Senate staff report without challenging it or its assumptions. The truth about the Taiwan HSR project is that a series of flawed decisions made during the design and construction phase, largely to please politically connected friends of the government, led to cost overruns that in turn forced the system to open without full buildout. Although the trains were showing steady ridership growth year over year and had grabbed a majority market share away from planes and buses, the underlying finances of the system fell apart.

But not because HSR is inherently flawed. Instead the problem was that the specific way the Taiwan HSR project was funded was flawed. Yonah Freemark explained it well at the Transport Politic last September:

The Taiwanese system, which cost more than $15 billion, was the first in the world built entirely with private funds — 80% of which were secured through bank loans at high interest rates. Though the line’s fare revenues, lower than projected, make up for operations, maintenance, and even most interest payments on the initial capital costs, elevated depreciation charges put the railroad into its misery. The recession, which decreased interest in travel, put the final stake in the company’s heart.

The problem in Taiwan was that the project was overleveraged and overindebted, and when ridership was not high enough to meet the staggering debt service levels, a bailout was forced. What the Taiwan experience suggests is not that HSR is doomed to fail, or even that private funding of HSR to some extent is always a bad idea. Instead what it shows that that too much private funding is massively risky, but public funding such as that used in Spain or France seems pretty damn reasonable.

Significantly, those successful HSR experiences are never discussed in Wood’s article.

Wood continues with the fear, uncertainty, and doubt-laced article:

But once construction is completed in 2035, planners haven’t figured out how high-speed rail will pay for itself. So far, according to the rail authority’s most recent business plan, the most profitable system appears to rely on about 12 million of the expected 41 million annual riders staying inside the boundaries of the Los Angeles basin or traveling among stops in the San Francisco Bay area.

Again, as mentioned above, this is not implausible. That would still leave well over half the ridership revenue coming from travelers going across the state, between north and south.

Perhaps one reason Wood’s article is so biased toward HSR deniers is that’s almost all she interviews. Wood does not talk to a single HSR supporter that’s not affiliated with state government – I would have happily spoken with her had I been contacted. The only pro-HSR statements come from Curt Pringle (Sen. Lowenthal does have a quote that’s favorable to HSR, but he is not a project supporter). Instead Wood sets up a storyline of “flawed, overpriced, misleading government vs. a few brave critics.” It’s a familiar trope for investigative journalists, and sometimes is true. But in this case, it’s not. Yet you wouldn’t know it from Wood’s article, since she did not take the time to speak to independent project supporters or fact-check the quotes she was given from her sources.

This article isn’t going to make or break HSR. But it is yet another example of why it’s important to combat HSR deniers, since their misinformation tends to find its way into media stories on HSR, written by journalists who don’t understand passenger rail, who won’t look around the world at successful HSR projects, and who apparently can’t be bothered to do those things.

Orange County residents and Californians deserve better. It’s not impossible to get HSR journalism right – but you wouldn’t know it by reading the Voice of OC. And that’s a shame.

Metro/OCTA letter to CHSRA

As you can see, the letter argues that shared use of the corridor would provide “coordinated and integrated” passenger rail service. But another key motivation is the language on the top of the second page regarding “reduced impacts upon the LOSSAN corridor communities” from LA to Anaheim by “not requiring viaducts, aerial structures and trenches” and creating “the opportunity to limit the number of required grade separations, resulting in reduced right-of-way impacts.”

The fact that the letter comes from both Metro and OCTA is significant, as both agencies carry a lot of weight both locally and with state government. This comes on the heels of criticism of the LA-Anaheim HSR segment plans by some local rail advocates, including RailPAC, who have argued that the proposed dedicated HSR tracks aren’t necessary and that the number of grade separations should be limited.

The Metro/OCTA request is not a time-waster like the “end it in San José” concept. Still, the CHSRA has studied this in previous EIRs, as the letter acknowledges, and concluded that the combined passenger and freight traffic on this segment necessitated the construction of HSR-specific tracks. It’s not quite clear what Metro/OCTA believe was missed or was in error with those previous studies, but they are asking that the Alternatives Analysis for the corridor, to be released on April 24, to be delayed in order to include a new look at a shared use of the corridor.

Metro/OCTA are also mindful of stimulus deadlines, so this does not appear to be a delaying tactic along the lines of what some Peninsula NIMBYs have proposed. No word yet on the CHSRA’s response. From my perspective, I would be interested to know more about Metro/OCTA’s perspective on the corridor and why they believe shared use should be revisited – and why they disagree with CHSRA’s earlier rejection of the concept.

UPDATE: Curt Pringle has responded to the Metro/OCTA letter, on behalf of the CHSRA. He thanked CEOs Leahy and Kempton for the letter and promised to put the issue on the April 8 CHSRA board meeting agenda.

The president assures us there will be no pork in the $3.8 trillion federal budget for 2011. That may be true if we ignore the proposed $2.3 billion high-speed-rail grant for California. An undetermined amount of that money would be spent as a down payment on a $42.6 billion proposal to connect Anaheim with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco and Los Angeles with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Las Vegas. That’s an “oink-oink” if I ever heard one. I can understand the Las Vegas high-speed link to accommodate the thousands of Californians who want to flee to Nevada to escape California’s high taxes.

First, HSR is not pork any more than the Interstate Highway System was pork. It is a national project that was awarded on the basis of merit. Right-wingers love to frame any spending they don’t like as “pork” in hopes of delegitimizing the project.

Second, it’s amusing to see that while he calls out Pelosi and Reid, Stegemeier doesn’t note that one of the HSR corridors funded by the stimulus grant connects Los Angeles to “Curt Pringle’s Anaheim” – or did the Register, long an ally of Pringle’s and the OC Republican Party, veto that reference?

High-speed rail as part of a short-term economic stimulus package is nonsense if it takes a decade or two to build.

Of course, if construction work is taking place in that time, it very much counts as stimulus. Or does he think magic faeries will build the tracks and trainsets?

The environmental impact statement itself will take years.

Yes, it has. And it’s almost done. In fact, as a condition of spending stimulus funds, a Notice of Decision/Record of Decision that officially closes the EIR/EIS process must be in place by September 2012 on stimulus-funded corridors.

Acquiring 680 miles of right-of-way will be contested in thousands of eminent domain lawsuits and will take at least a decade to complete.

That’s rather doubtful, and as is the standard practice with HSR deniers, Stegemeier offers no evidence to back up this claim. Most of the ROW will be bought from willing sellers. Where eminent domain must be used, it won’t take a decade to complete.

If high-speed rail serves intermediate cities then it will increase travel time, create noise and interrupt traffic flow at thousands of intersections. If it bypasses smaller cities to gain the advantage of speed, then it serves only the end terminals and disadvantages everyone in-between.

Reading this, I have to believe Stegemeier has never been on a high speed train in his life. As we know, California HSR will do both – it will serve intermediate cities AND the end terminals, with a mix of express and local service. The noise will generally be less than the loud diesel trains and their horns, and since it will be fully grade-separated, traffic flow will actually be improved.

The right of way to Las Vegas must cross or encroach on multiple wilderness areas. Some are controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, others by the Forest Service and the National Park Service. The Department of Interior and the EPA would certainly contest this proposal.

This isn’t entirely accurate. There are no federal “wilderness areas” along the Victorville-Vegas route, though the Mojave National Preserve reaches up to the southern side of Interstate 15 between Baker and Mountain Pass. That Preserve will be an issue for HSR. But getting BLM permits may not be so problematic. Of course, Vegas HSR wasn’t funded at all by the stimulus, so there is time to sort this out.

The French TGV train reaches 190 mph for the three-hour trip between Paris and Marseille, a distance slightly longer than Anaheim to San Francisco. Each train carries up to 345 passengers, slightly fewer than wide-body airplanes. Without government subsidies the fare would be two to three times the price of flying.

Lots of nonsense here. How many widebody planes serve the SoCal-Bay Area route? Southwest’s planes seat either 122 or 137 passengers. Last time I looked, 747s aren’t flown between LAX and SFO as part of the regular shuttle route.

Of course, what would the fare be without government subsidy for air travel? Some airports are built and operated with subsidies. The airlines themselves have received tens of billions of dollars in subsidies in the last decade, most notably in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Stegemeier’s main point, however, seems to be that HSR isn’t a good deal when it comes to fuel conservation:

So, what are the advantages of high-speed rail, considering that an airline infrastructure is already in place? It conserves fossil fuel. On the Paris-Marseille route, each TGV train trip consumes about 30 megawatt hours of electricity that’s produced from France’s nuclear power grid. Because of California’s aversion to nuclear power, we can’t do that. Almost 65 percent of our electricity comes from coal or natural-gas-fired plants. Today’s power generation in California would take about 1,500 gallons of jet fuel equivalent to make enough electricity for the Paris-Marseille trip by rail. That’s slightly more than four gallons of fuel per passenger.

Of course, California is embarking on a project to produce more renewable power. HSR is a core element of that project, with the Authority having committed to seek 100% renewable power sources for its electricity, providing a guaranteed buyer of solar, wind, and other renewably generated electricity.

A Boeing 747 can make the same trip in about half the time. It carries slightly more passengers but would consume a little more than twice as much fuel, or nine gallons per passenger, one way.

Again, is Stegemeier serious? My grandfather flew 747s for TWA for 15 years. His route was usually LA-London, or LA to some European/Middle Eastern destination, not LA-SF. Those planes are enormous and totally unsuited to routes like those HSR will serve.

Statistics show that there are about 100 round-trip flights each day between the Southland and San Francisco, carrying more than 6 million passengers a year. If all airline travel ceased on that route, 50 high-speed trains, serving all those passengers, could save about 30 million gallons of fossil fuel, or about one gallon for every Californian, each year.

Of course, all airline travel won’t cease on that route. But as we’ve seen in Spain, Taiwan, China, and even the Northeast Corridor, HSR will take as much as half of the market share on the route from airlines, if not more. As to fossil fuel, the California High Speed Rail Authority estimates that HSR will save 12 million barrels of oil annually.

The economics of high-speed rail are bleak. Interest alone, at 4 percent on a $42.6 billion municipal bond, would cost $1.7 billion per year – almost $300 per projected passenger. That’s triple the cost of an airline ticket, just to cover the interest on the debt. It’s also $60 per gallon of fuel saved. Surely, there are better investment opportunities for taxpayer dollars than this fantasy.

Of course, that would come out to roughly $47 per year for all 36 million Californians – or 9 cents a week. Brother, can you spare a dime?

It’s almost comical that the Register turned to a former oil company CEO to attack HSR – and that he did such a bad job of it. But then at least they went directly to the source, rather than relying as the usually do on oil company-funded think tanks like the Reason Foundation.