I’m a historian. I’ve written a book on the transcontinentals (Railroaded). I know that the first thirty years of the old relationship between train and California were more than bad. They were horrid.

The transcontinentals promised us everything, and they lied. Much of the growth they promoted was dumb growth that came with high social costs. They corrupted our politics and our press and ruined our economy more than once. We fought the railroads for the rest of the nineteenth century.

California should have learned something from this. Do not build large railroads ahead of demand. Do not quickly fund those things that we might be able to do at less cost, more efficiently, and with improved technology later when we really need it. Do not funnel huge amounts of public money into private hands on the basis of only promises of benefits. Remember to calculate capital costs accurately.

I’m a historian too, though not nearly as accomplished as White. He’s right that the first 30 years of relationship between train and California were horrid.

But he goes off the rails when he implies that the HSR project, being planned by the democratically elected government of California and the democratically elected Obama Administration, is somehow corrupting the state. There’s no evidence, at all, for that innuendo.

Further, White assumes that the financial case for the project is flawed. Here he makes his core mistake, misreading the evidence and coming to conclusions that are totally unsupported:

Californians have already voted $9 billion in bonds toward their new life with high-speed rail. It is only a small part of the cost of the system. The federal government supposedly was going to pay most of the rest—but now, apparently not. And once the system is up and going it will pay its own operating costs. We can live happily ever after.

Promises, promises, promises. Sometimes it is better to consult an accountant rather than one’s heart. Listen to the promises, go to the California High-Speed Rail website, but then talk to the accountants. In this case the accountants have a webpage. It is at the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail.

This is serious. California has its children and their future to think about. The accountants say that the California High-Speed Rail Commission has underestimated the cost of the project, overestimated the willingness of investors to put private capital at risk, overestimated the ridership, and miscalculated the cost of servicing the immense debt that will be accrued to build it. They have the system meeting its operating costs, when it most likely will not do so for years and perhaps forever. Servicing the debt alone will put an immense burden on state and local governments when the money is desperately needed elsewhere.

White doesn’t tell his readers that “the accountants” are biased – one of them is a self-declared NIMBY who opposes the train because, and I quote:

An elevated railway would be hideous and intolerably noisy. We like to eat outdoors in the summer, but with such noise we would not be able to hear each other talking. And it would wake people at night. It would transform our pleasant semi-rural environment into an ugly urban environment.

White holds up “the accountants” as conveyors of truth. He expects us to believe that “the accountants” are correct in attacking the ridership numbers.

Except they’re not. White never mentions, and may not even be aware of, the independent peer review of the HSR ridership numbers that said the projections were sound.

White’s other claims are similarly flawed. He says that the willingness of private investors to step up was overestimated, but that misreads what is going on. The private sector has shown a great deal of interest in the system. They have been consistent in saying that they will not yet step up until there is a significant state and federal contribution.

White argues that the federal government won’t step up, even though Barack Obama has shown consistent support for federal funding, as have Democrats in Congress, and despite polls showing Democrats are likely to retake the House.

White claims that the system will never cover its costs, even though virtually every other HSR system in the world does so, including the Acela.

Of course, when we cite successful HSR systems around the world, White is ready to counter that claim too:

High-speed rail can be happy without us. It still has Paris and Tokyo. It may very well find a future between Boston and Washington DC. But it is too rich for our Californian blood and not suited to our conditions. We have plenty of other challenges.

In the end, Richard White is simply just one more person who is convinced that somehow Californians will never ride trains. He completely ignores all the evidence that disproves such a claim – including high ridership on existing intercity trains and data that shows California’s HSR route compares favorably to other successful routes, implying that the ridership base and the demand do exist.

And of course, White also commits the same error that virtually every other HSR critic makes: he never asks what is the cost of doing nothing. Even if HSR costs $60 billion, the cost of not building HSR could be as high as $100 billion.

White argues that HSR will only suck away value and money from other priorities, but in fact it will create a green dividend for California that could be as high as $10 billion a year for Los Angeles alone.

Richard White is a very good historian and a good intellectual. If he wanted to engage in a serious debate on HSR, he knows how to marshal evidence and have that discussion. That’s why it’s such a shame that he prefers to rely on flawed evidence and disproven claims to attack high speed rail.

Dueling ridership forecasts in a political arena heated by cultural antagonism makes it difficult to assess costs and benefits. As a result, some say it’s better to delay the project, or for Californians to drop high-speed rail altogether. Those with a need to generate readership, or wish to get noticed for a statewide run for office, purposefully craft the environment that creates that frustration.

Framing specious arguments against high-speed rail as a cultural issue drives a level of distrust that allows shoddy research and uninformed opinion to color perceptions. Californians should fight against being used to score political points when the state’s economic future is on the line.

Grisby, a Deputy Policy Director for Reconnecting America, is certainly right about this. He marshals a lot of statistics to show that high speed rail will help people who commute, who travel for recreation or business, boost downtowns, and reduce congestion at airports and on freeways. Everyone benefits from this.

And he correctly identifies the people who are trying to convince Californians and Americans that those benefits are illusory – the right-wing Cato and Reason think tanks. As we know, Reason is funded by oil companies who have every reason to want to undermine high speed rail. Grisby is right that we should not cast HSR as being part of a “culture war” and show that it is instead a common-sense solution to a wide range of problems, that many people will embrace, especially because people around the world have already done so.

That all being said, I wish I could agree that we can pull HSR out of a “culture war” framework. Not because HSR supporters are invested in it – we’re really not. This blog’s most consistent approach to HSR advocacy is that high speed rail simply makes sense and is supported by a mountain of evidence. Yet we spend a lot of time here debunking criticism – sometimes aggressively – and this blog might well be seen as a key battleground in an HSR culture war.

That’s because of how culture wars work. They are not waged by both sides of an issue. Culture wars are waged by one side alone – the side that resents and resists change. The other side, which supports and is promoting the change in question, doesn’t view it as a war at all. The thing they are advocating for, whether it’s marriage equality or high speed rail, is simply seen as a logical outcome of compelling evidence and common sense.

Those who resist the change know they cannot win on the grounds of evidence and reason. They can’t win a fair fight. So they wage an unfair fight. They make up arguments, distort evidence, and try to change the conversation away from facts and towards more elemental and visceral things, where they might have an advantage.

In 2008, the Palo Alto City Council unanimously endorsed Prop 1A to bring high speed rail to the Peninsula. There was broad interest in an HSR station for the city. The project was evaluated on the merits and passed with flying colors and with 60% of the community voting for it.

That wasn’t the end of the story, because HSR critics learned the same thing that marriage equality opponents learned: you can’t win on the facts, but you might just win if you make it about values and culture. Soon after Prop 1A’s passage, HSR critics changed their tune and began focusing on the ways in which trains would somehow “destroy” the communities of the Peninsula. The entire claim was absurd, and not just because passenger trains had been operating there for over 150 years, and not just because other Bay Area cities had found no problems at all with aerial rail structures.

It was absurd because it was specifically intended to pull the discussion away from evidence and toward deeply held values. HSR critics realized that if they could convince their neighbors that the prized aesthetic values of the Peninsula would be destroyed by the train – even though HSR will be quieter, won’t spew diesel into the air, won’t kill children, and won’t produce traffic jams the way the current at-grade tracks will – then they could circumvent the factual arguments in support of HSR.

People wage culture wars precisely because they already lost the factual discussion. And if they make the discussion more of a shouting match, a fight, or even a war, they score even more points, because they make reasonable dialogue impossible. If you have a farm in the path of the proposed HSR route in Kings County, you could try and argue moving the tracks somewhere else on the basis of facts and merit, but the reason your farm is in the path in the first place is because factual considerations suggested it was the best location for the tracks.

So if you really really don’t want to sell your farm to the state of California, you could instead go around the county riling up people by claiming the California High Speed Rail Authority is waging a war on farmers, wants to destroy agriculture, and generally hates Kings County. You would have no evidence of this whatsoever – in fact, the Authority was happy to just bypass Kings County entirely until officials from Kings and Tulare Counties and the cities of Hanford and Visalia began lobbying hard to get a station. But you can tap into deep-seeded resentments and turn what should be a reasoned, factual discussion into a culture war.

Through scorched-earth tactics such as shouting down opposition and claiming that a simple passenger rail project is either the Death Star or a Berlin Wall, HSR critics are not so much trying to win the argument as they are trying to tire people out of the issue. As defenders of the status quo, they win if they convince everyone else that all the rancor and ugliness just isn’t worth the trouble and maybe we should just postpone HSR indefinitely for the good of the community.

That’s how culture wars are designed to work. And that’s why HSR is very much the subject of a culture war.

Grisby’s argument is essentially that HSR advocates should not get drawn into the culture war and should stick to the facts. That’s a wise policy, and this blog has followed it for the 3+ years we’ve been around.

But there is also a place for pushing back, showing how the critics are wrong, and pointing out the motivations behind their actions. This blog will continue to do that too. Because it is true, in the end, that HSR advocates are pushing for change. We push for it not because we are partisans in a culture war, but because we see a society and a civilization in evolution and believe we should push that forward in sensible, reasonable ways. And most anti-HSR people are indeed motivated by their hostility to that change. If we could persuade them on the basis of facts, then they would already have come over to our side.

We know they won’t be persuaded. Nor do we really expect they will be. Our job as HSR advocates is to withstand their assault and ensure they don’t succeed in destroying our projects. In the end, they will fade, because logic, evidence, and the population at large are on our side, and will only be increasingly supportive as the years go by.

That’s the thing about culture wars – the people waging the war eventually tire out and fade away, because they are fighting an uphill battle. And as long as the people who embrace change are persistent and don’t lose heart, they will eventually prevail.

Assemblymember Cathleen Galgiani, author of California’s voter approved $10 billion high speed rail bond, today strongly condemned efforts to redirect the bond funds to non voter approved projects. This amounts to a bait-and-switch effort by certain interests to take money away from the high-speed rail system, and use it to cover shortfalls in funding the Caltrain commuter rail system on the San Francisco Peninsula,” said Galgiani. “It is highly suspect that the same few wealthy communities on the San Francisco Peninsula who want to stop the High Speed Rail project, would cynically work to divert the money to meet their existing obligations to the Caltrain system.”…

“Mr. Simitian is trying to syphon $1 billion of high-speed rail bond money for the Caltrain system in his district and proposes to make it legal under Proposition 1A by running one High Speed Train. This is the Great Train Robbery,” stated Galgiani. “Californians voted for a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco, not a piggy bank for legislators.”

According to Galgiani’s release, her concerns were sparked by Simitian’s comments at a legislative hearing yesterday:

Yesterday, in a Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Subcommittee No. 2 hearing on the bond allocation to match Federal funds for the first segment of High Speed Rail, Senator Simitian told the executive director of the High Speed Rail Authority, “I don’t want to see an EIR completed for a project that will never be built.”

“Senator Simitian has continually criticized the High-Speed Rail Authority while failing to recognize the shortcomings of the rail system in his own back yard. Simitian should fix his own system, not tell the HSRA how to build theirs,” said Galgiani.

When talking about the authority’s proposed phased system, Simitian, chair of the Subcommittee, also said, “We’re saying there is a (one) phase and then you’re done.” He added, “If we run one High Speed Train from San Jose to San Francisco, at any time of day, we will comply with Prop. 1A”

That statement by Simitian is beyond the pale. He has been trying to occupy a middle ground, supporting high speed rail while seeming to be responsive to NIMBY concerns (for no understandable reason; he is termed out next year). But by threatening the project like this, Simitian is going too far. It is inappropriate for him or any other legislator to make threats like this.

Further, Simitian is basically trying to undermine the core premise of the project in a very fundamental way. He is clearly implying that SF to LA is an option, that a token one train per day would satisfy the Prop 1A requirement.

I’ve got news for you, Senator: Californians did NOT vote for a single token train. We voted for a true bullet train service, with numerous trips per day from SF to LA. We voted for it because we understood that because of rising gas prices, we needed high speed rail to move people around the state. Simitian is suggesting that he override the wishes of California voters merely to satisfy a very small number of NIMBYs in his district, people he isn’t willing to stand up to.

Here’s the background, for those of you new to the story. In November 2008, a clear majority of Californians voted to build a high speed rail system that can carry passengers from SF to LA in 2 hours, 40 minutes, using bullet trains like you’d find in Japan, Spain, or France. They also appropriated $10 billion in bond funding to get started. Voters wanted a true system that would provide fast train service all day long, from downtown SF to downtown LA while serving high-population communities along the way. That was the entire point of doing high speed rail.

However, after Prop 1A was approved, a small group of wealthy people living near the proposed HSR route in the Palo Alto area started to flip out. They didn’t want the trains in their backyards – even though the trains would use the Caltrain corridor, which has been carrying passenger trains for 150 years. Although the Palo Alto City Council unanimously voted to endorse Prop 1A in 2008, although 60% of voters there approved the project, and although a poll last year found that despite NIMBY whining residents there still supported the project by large margins, elected officials began to start chickening out. Palo Alto city councilmembers began criticizing the project, even joining a frivolous lawsuit against it.

Now, Senator Simitian appears to have succumbed to the vocal minority of NIMBYs. Last week he joined Congresswoman Anna Eshoo and Assemblymember Rich Gordon to propose “blending” HSR with Caltrain. That’s an idea worth exploring, but Eshoo immediately began suggesting that the HSR trains stop at San Jose instead of going to San Francisco as promised. Eshoo was rebuked by Nancy Pelosi for that suggestion and she backed off.

But Simitian’s new argument, that we only have to run just one train a day from SF to LA to satisfy the law and the will of the voters, would effectively mean trains stop in San Jose and not San Francisco. Again, I hope he checked with Nancy Pelosi before trying to undermine the project.

Why would stopping in San Jose, or running just one train per day to SF, be a problem? Not only would it violate the law, not only would it be a big “fuck you” to the people of California, but it would destroy the HSR project’s viability. The project by law cannot rely on government operating subsidies, and so it needs to get a lot of riders to make ends meet. That’s also a good goal because the more people that ride the train, the fewer carbon we emit, and the less we spend in gas.

Simitian’s proposal, which includes limiting the Caltrain corridor to two tracks forever, would cripple high speed rail. It would mean an artificial and permanent limit on the number of trains that could go from LA to SF – all because Simitian won’t tell the NIMBYs that they’re wrong and don’t deserve to be prioritized over the rest of the state.

Galgiani’s criticism is motivated by this concern, and her statement matches what other sources have told me about what Simitian is doing. Basically, he is now demanding that the proposal he, Eshoo and Gordon made last week is an ultimatum. He’s taking high speed rail funding hostage, and will destroy the project if he doesn’t get his way – and that way would undermine the project anyway.

Galgiani’s anger is entirely appropriate. Simitian is way out of line here. His “blended” proposal is worth considering, but it is totally inappropriate for Simitian to demand that it be accepted, without study, or else the project lose funding and collapse.

In her statement, Galgiani vowed to fight the Great Train Robber:

Galgiani responded, “Senator Simitian essentially put a gun to the Authority’s head and said, do it my way or no way. Well, I’ve got news for him. This is not Florida, this is California. Proposition 1A is a voter mandate, and if we have to, we’ll sue.”

Right the fuck on. Good for Galgiani. But it’s not enough for her to stand up. We need to stand up to Simitian too. You can contact him here – or by phone at the numbers below. Keep in mind that calling during work hours on Monday is best (calling on a Friday night or the weekend would be pointless):

Sacramento
Phone: (916) 651-4011

Palo Alto District Office
Phone: (650) 688-6384
or (408) 277-9460

Santa Cruz District Office
Phone: (831) 425-0401

We cannot, and we will not, let Joe Simitian destroy high speed rail.

“We have many houses close to the railroad in the multiple millions in value,” said Atherton Mayor Jim Dobbie. “We just hope the project dies.”

That’s a perfect, succinct statement of what the “debate” on the Peninsula is really all about. Wealthy people with homes the envy of the rest of the state telling Californians suffering from $4 gas prices that the project voters approved in 2008 should just die in order to protect their high-value asset. It’s a stunningly elitist statement that says the rich are more important than everyone else. Simple as that.

Usually Peninsula NIMBYs are more careful than this, couching their self-interested opposition in bogus claims about ridership numbers, funding, or enormous cost overruns. Their usual trick is to mobilize public assumptions that nobody rides trains in America, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. But I guess when you’re talking to the Wall Street Journal, sometimes the rich feel right at home and let their guard down.

It’s also nice to see that there are more folks getting organized to support HSR on the Peninsula:

Such strenuous opposition to a high-tech rail line from the capital of high technology strikes some proponents of the system as ironic. “The success of Silicon Valley and California as a whole has been an ability to embrace innovation,” said Scott Klemmer, a Stanford University assistant professor who is a member of the group All Aboard Palo Alto. “It’s a real shame that we’re seeing a baseless fear of change in our own backyard.”

Well said, Scott. Silicon Valley thrived by embracing innovation and technology, not by holding back when innovation threatened some rich man’s property values. Happily, he speaks for the majority of his neighbors, and not for the small but vocal minority of NIMBYs who have been allowed to dominate the conversation by local elected officials.

Let’s hope Sacramento and Washington DC hear voices like Scott’s, and properly ignore the rich NIMBYs.

One of the many flaws to this logic is the fact that the Altamont route wouldn’t be any less contentious – there are NIMBYs there too, and they probably do not want to be the Peninsula’s dumping ground. As if there was any doubt about that, the Pleasanton City Council threw a NIMBY temper tantrum this past week over the proposed Altamont Rail Corridor Project, which would improve the tracks from Stockton to San Jose to enable higher speeds:

Possibilities include having the rail line go through downtown Pleasanton through tunnels or on elevated tracks.

Councilman Jerry Thorne said he strongly opposed the idea.

“It’s basically over my dead body,” Thorne said….

“I can’t be more strong in my objection to having it go through downtown Pleasanton,” Vice-Mayor Cheryl Cook-Kallio said. “It seems that there’s a misunderstanding of what’s there.”

Councilman Matt Sullivan wanted to know who would have the authority to approve a plan to have a railway go through Pleasanton without the city’s approval.

City attorney Jonathan Lowell responded that the city would contest such an action and would go to court to stop it.

“I can’t fathom under any circumstances putting this alignment through downtown Pleasanton,” Cook-Kallio said. “I just, in the strongest terms, want to indicate to you all that universally, we will be extremely difficult and lengthy in terms of dealing with us, and would use every option at our disposal to ensure that it goes somewhere else.”

Let’s be clear: these claims are absurd; these councilmembers are ridiculous. Pleasanton is a city that has bet heavily on automobile-dependent sprawl, and it’s a bet they’re about to lose. With gas prices parked above $4 per gallon for the foreseeable future, cities like Pleasanton need passenger rail if they’re going to thrive. Pleasanton doesn’t have much going for it – it’s too far from population and job centers and the cost of traveling to and from Pleasanton is going to keep rising. The Dublin/Pleasanton BART station is on the edge of town in the middle of a freeway – if the Livermore BART extension gets built to downtown Livermore as is planned, Pleasanton will lose land value, jobs, and tax income to their neighbor to the east.

The Altamont corridor project won’t destroy Pleasanton. Instead it will be a key piece of 21st century prosperity for Pleasanton, ensuring its residents and businesses have an advantage over others in the region by having a fast connection to the rest of the Bay Area and Northern California. Pleasanton has had a rail corridor for nearly 150 years; much of the city grew up around the train station.

Unfortunately, Pleasanton’s current leaders appear to be suffering from the same delusion as electeds on the Peninsula – believing that the late 20th century model of automobile dependence is the Greatest Thing Ever for a community; that any deviance from that is Certain Doom; that no town can be a pleasant place to live if there’s a fast, reliable train serving it. This is total nonsense, as residents and electeds from who lived in Pleasanton before World War II would surely explain. They seem to have had a quite enjoyable life before sprawl, when the train was their primary connection to the rest of the region.

So in an era of high gas prices, where a train station and a fast connection to job centers is one of the most important things for a city to prosper, the Pleasanton City Council’s NIMBY attitude is indefensible. As with all NIMBYism, it is an elitist attitude that embraces wealth and privilege and denies it to anyone else who doesn’t have it.

It’s also a sign that an Altamont alignment for the SF-LA high speed rail trip won’t be any easier than Pacheco. Sadly, there are vocal NIMBYs across California, people who refuse to accept that the 20th century is over, who refuse to let anyone else have a chance at prosperity. They are vastly outnumbered, thankfully, and they won’t be able to stop high speed rail. Whether the NIMBYs are on councils in Pleasanton or Palo Alto, they need to be pushed aside so we can move ahead building for the future. It’s not any easier on the Altamont alignment. We might as well proceed on the Peninsula – and in the Tri-Valley – for the sake of the 37 million Californians whose prosperity depends on us getting this right.

While I’ve sometimes disagreed with State Senator Joe Simitian on high speed rail, I’ve always respected him. He does support the project and does seem interested in finding workable solutions, even if he is too willing to give credence to unfounded criticisms of the project.

One reason I respect him is he gets the importance of certain things, like ensuring the viability of the system as a whole is not threatened by mid-Peninsula mitigation measures. But that also means he and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo – his partner in Monday’s announcement – are suddenly very deeply split on a key issue. Eshoo supports forcing HSR riders to transfer to Caltrain at San José, a reckless proposal that would crash HSR ridership and call into question the project’s financial viability.

Simitian, on the other hand, understands why a forced transfer is a bad idea, and said so:

California State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) emphasized Tuesday night at a meeting with City Council that he supports a high-speed rail project running from San Jose to San Francisco on the same tracks as Caltrain.

He wanted to make sure people understood he envisions passengers who ride up north from Los Angeles to San Jose could continue with high-speed rail all the way up the peninsula, he said.

“People who want to get off in San Francisco would keep going on the same train and on to Los Angeles,” he said. No one would have to get off in San Jose, walk across the station, and go onto another train, he said. “Federal authority has been granted that would allow high-speed rail to stay on the same rail as Caltrain uses,” he said.

This is a very good thing to hear. And as the article indicates, Simitian defended HSR going all the way to SF on the Caltrain tracks to the Palo Alto City Council last night, and his clear statements of support are very welcome, especially in light of some of the more troubling aspects of the Monday statement.

Most HSR advocates – certainly myself – are quite open to collaboration and compromise on the Peninsula. If there’s a workable way to “blend” HSR and Caltrain along the lines of what Simitian proposed, we should absolutely pursue it. And as long as that compromise solution doesn’t compromise the HSR system itself – or its ridership – then it is worth considering.

It’s great to hear that Simitian understands the importance of a one-seat ride all the way to Transbay. But Eshoo apparently doesn’t. I hope Simitian can show her the reasons why it matters – otherwise this new “blended” solution may fall apart before it gets off the ground.

UPDATE: Jim Lazarus of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce – who is a rather important figure in San Francisco politics – wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle to denounce a forced transfer:

Peninsula politicians need to reread both Proposition 1A and the November 2008 election results. Rep. Anna Eshoo’s suggestion that local concerns be met by upgrading Caltrain service or having passengers transfer in San Jose is not the high-speed rail system approved by California voters, including more than 60 percent of San Mateo and Santa Clara County voters and 78 percent of San Francisco voters.

Prop. 1A establishes legally binding construction priorities; Phase One San Francisco Transbay Terminal to Los Angeles Union Station and Anaheim, in specific corridors including San Francisco to San Jose to Fresno. Most important, the measure provides that “passengers shall have the capability of traveling from any station on that corridor without being required to change trains.”

Prop. 1A also requires that maximum nonstop travel time from San Francisco to Los Angeles be two hours and 40 minutes. Changing trains or running high-speed trains on Caltrain tracks is not legal under Prop. 1A, nor is it what Californians approved in 2008. Weighing in on design issues to minimize impacts along the route is an appropriate role for local legislators; suggesting alternatives that violate the law is not.

In the comments to this post, Nadia suggests Anna Eshoo may have been misquoted by the Chronicle yesterday. I’m looking into that and will have more info as I get it.

UPDATE 2: And here we are with a clarification on Eshoo’s statement:

Following Monday’s announcement by Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo, Senator Joe Simitian and Assemblyman Rich Gordon, there appears to be some misperception about what they have proposed.

Congresswoman Eshoo, Senator Simitian and Assemblyman Gordon wish to make clear that they are not calling for high-speed trains to stop in San Jose, forcing riders from the south, for instance, to transfer to Caltrain to reach San Francisco. There would be no transfers. The idea is to upgrade the Caltrain corridor so that high-speed trains can run on the same tracks.

High-speed trains would run northbound and southbound all the way between San Francisco and Los Angeles, as required by Prop 1A. On the Peninsula, they would operate on the same tracks as Caltrain, overtaking slower Caltrain trains at certain passing points, just as Caltrain’s baby bullet trains overtake and pass local trains today.

Excellent news. Glad to hear that everyone is in agreement – forced transfers at San Jose are illegal and simply a bad idea.

There’s still a lot to be worked out here, including how an overtake would function in practice, but those are things that can and should be discussed in the spirit of collaborative solutions.

This blog has been railing against that kind of phenomenon for years now. When NIMBYs in Palo Alto and surrounding communities began fighting the high speed rail project, many tried to claim that they were somehow “liberal” when they were fighting a project supported by the people that would reduce carbon emissions, make it more affordable to travel the state, and create jobs – especially when the only reason they were fighting it was because they were convinced that it would hurt their own property values. As we’ve seen, these NIMBYs believe in the supremacy of the automobile, take the side of oil companies against action on climate change, and don’t care how many jobs are lost to dependence on soaring oil prices as long as their precious property values aren’t touched.

In an honest discussion we would call those policies for what they actually are – right-wing. But because “liberal” NIMBYs in places like Palo Alto know that they would be promptly ignored if they were cast as right-wingers, they have tried to have it both ways – espousing conservative policies, even allying with the right to kill a liberal project, and yet claiming they are liberal all along.

After two years of fighting against this dishonesty, this blog is no longer alone. The New York Times has begun to call out this hypocrisy in a weekend article on a spat over bike lanes in NYC. Their analysis is that it boils down to people refusing to give up their unaffordable privileges and admit the need to change:

Robert B. Cialdini, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University who studies environmental behaviors, points to two phenomena:

Humans hew to the “normative” behaviors of their community. In places where bike lanes or wind turbines or B.R.T. systems are seen as an integral part of society, people tend not protest a new one; if they are not the norm, they will. Second, whatever feelings people have about abstract issues like the environment, in practice they react more passionately to immediate rewards and punishments (like a ready parking space) than distant consequences (like the threat of warming).

Test yourself: When a sign in a hotel bathroom exhorts you to reuse your towel for the sake of the planet, do you nonetheless tend to throw it on the floor to get a new one? (Me: Guilty.) “I’m a persuasion researcher, and here you have convenience and luxury working against you — just like in the bike-lane issue, “ Professor Cialdini said.

We can see this in the Bay Area. As I have explained on several occasions, aerial passenger rail structures and a desirable neighborhood with high property values can and do coexist – just look at Albany or Rockridge (where the rail aerial is in the middle of a freeway that divides the neighborhood, to no apparent ill effect). Albany and Rockridge have dealt with those things for nearly 40 years. They have become normal. And the neighborhoods adapted just fine.

In Palo Alto, for example, the norm is apparently that an at-grade railroad crossing, with extremely loud, slow trains that spew diesel into nearby homes and have a shockingly high death toll, is just fine – but any attempt to build an aerial structure is somehow the end of the world. In reality, this is nothing more than an assumed norm (at-grade rail is just the way it’s always been) being defended against a beneficial change merely because people cannot bring themselves to accept that the norm no longer works and that in this case, change is good.

If anyone wonders why I have never had any sympathy whatsoever for Peninsula NIMBYs, this helps explain why. Their concerns aren’t based in anything logical. They’re simply afraid of change. And as we know, change is necessary. The status quo has failed, and anything that prolongs it does so at the expense of everyone who is not rich enough to buy their way out of the crisis. We don’t have the luxury of catering to privileged people who are simply whining about change. We’re all adults here. Approaching a policy issue like a child who doesn’t want to do their homework is no way to run a society.

Ryan Avent makes this point well, that NIMBYism is simply incompatible with liberal values:

Of course, the obstruction of development is offensive for lots of reasons: it makes housing and access to employment unaffordable, it reduces urban job and revenue growth, it tramples on private property rights, and so on. But the environmental hypocrisy is galling, and it’s not limited to New York. My old neighborhood, Brookland, voted overwhelmingly for Obama (about 90-10, as I recall). Many of the locals are vocally supportive of broad, lefty environmental goals. And yet, when a local businessman wants to redevelop his transit-adjacent land into a denser, mixed-use structure, the negative response is overwhelming, and residents fall over themselves to abuse local rules in order to prevent the redevelopment from happening.

…

To the extent that public opinion matters and can be shaped, I think it would be a huge boon for humanity for attitudes toward NIMBYism to turn decidedly negative. People should be ashamed of this behavior, which is both selfish and extravagantly dismissive of property rights.

I completely agree with Avent here. Liberals are way too tolerant of NIMBYism. This blog has been trying to rally people to understand just how damaging NIMBYism is and to show how it ought to be unacceptable in our political or project discussions. It is also probably time to amend the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in order to stop NIMBYs from abusing it for their own purposes, to ensure that projects which actually help the environment get approved and that land use practices that are bad for the environment, like sprawl and like car-centric design, are no longer protected.

Grist picks up on Avent’s article and adds an important element as well:

By preventing highrises and putting whole neighborhoods off limits for historical reasons, residents of America’s most beloved cities are in effect pricing others out of those cities. This means more sprawl on the outskirts, more transit by car and a higher average per capita carbon footprint for everyone.

It’s not just about sprawl and carbon footprints, but about basic economics. NIMBYism reinforces inequality by pricing people out of the areas that are best able to withstand climate change and soaring gas prices. It is an elite phenomenon that benefits the elite.

We cannot build a sustainable 21st century prosperity with NIMBYism. NIMBYs exist to protect the failed status quo. It’s good to see so many other writers coming to realize the threat posed by NIMBYism to our future. Hopefully this will lead to long overdue policy changes that can finally level the playing field and ensure the NIMBYs can’t abuse the process any more.

UPDATE: This fantastic NY Times post mocking how anti-bike lane arguments echo the Tea Party would work almost exactly for anti-HSR arguments as well.

Saving Caltrain is essential. But that effort is harmed by the emergence in recent years of a virulent group of train-hating NIMBYs on the Peninsula, whose conception of their urban communities has no place for a modern railroad. While they claim to have been interested in attacking high speed rail, their effect has been to rip the foundations out from underneath Caltrain, and make it very difficult indeed to stabilize and save the vital service. Caltrain needs short-term revenue, but for long-term revenue stabilization they need to electrify and grade separate, so that trains can be run more frequently and more quickly, thereby increasing income. HSR money provides the long-term revenue stabilization, so anti-HSR attitudes are therefore inherently anti-Caltrain attitudes.

But HSR won’t fill the $30 million hole in Caltrain’s budget this year. As most people know by now, Caltrain has no dedicated source of operating funds other than the farebox, whereas most other Bay Area transit agencies do. Caltrain basically gets whatever VTA, SamTrans and Muni have left over, and these days that’s not very much. In order to save Caltrain, several groups are organizing meetings this month to mobilize support behind a solution. But what will the solution be? Judging by a Silicon Valley Leadership Group summit late last week, there’s no agreement on the answer:

Local transportation agencies should be merged and their funds used to support a regional transit agency, state Assemblyman Jim Beall (D-San Jose) said at the Save Caltrain summit at Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research on Friday (Jan. 21) morning.

“We should get rid of some of these organizations. We need a regional source of funding for a regional agency,” Beall said.

This is definitely something to explore. But the devil is in the details. What would a regional agency look like – meaning, what would it include? Would it merge Caltrain, Muni, SamTrans, and VTA alone – or would it add in AC Transit? BART? Golden Gate Transit? A regional approach is sensible given the regional nature of movement in the Bay Area. But SF’s needs aren’t the same as Palo Alto’s or Hayward’s, so there would still need to be some attention to local needs within a regional context. And of course, Caltrain could just as easily get lost again in a regional agency as it has as a Joint Powers Board.

Participants raised other possibilities:

Panel and round-table discussions suggested local traffic-impact fees on new construction, trading carbon credits that businesses can buy to mitigate for their carbon footprint, extending bridge-congestion pricing to other bridges beyond the Bay Bridge.

Dedicating revenue to Caltrain from a high occupancy/toll (HOT) lane on Highway 101 and a possible voter-approved gas tax increase as ways to generate stable revenue, were among other ideas suggested, officials said.

The latter three proposals in particular deserve very serious consideration. Caltrain is suffering because we massively subsidize driving. This economic crisis is proving to us that such subsidies must end. Caltrain’s ridership is rising, which makes sense – a 21st century economy prizes digital connectivity over wasting time and money sitting in a car on a freeway. Whether it’s congestion pricing the other bridges, 101 itself, a gas tax, or all three, it is long past time to stop subsidizing driving and instead start properly funding our mass transit systems.

Not everyone agrees that the public would go for a tax:

But San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed said getting a new tax in the current economic climate would not go over with voters, and it would take years to accomplish.

“Caltrain will be dead by then if we just focus on a tax,” he said.

I’m not so sure I agree. While I’d like to see this be polled, I think Bay Area voters actually do understand the issues here, and would be willing to fund mass transit through a gas tax. Gas prices are rising anyway, and a 10 or 20 or even 30 cent increase won’t be noticed as prices skyrocket toward $4 a gallon anyway. While I wouldn’t yet put a gas tax increase to California voters (although one did pass in 1990, when California was less blue than it is today) it seems reasonable to believe voters in the Bay Area core would support such a proposal.

That is, if the anti-train forces don’t get their way first. While the anti-HSR folks believe their arguments can be compartmentalized and won’t bleed over to hurt Caltrain, that’s not really how political communications works. The arguments about the visual impact of new railroad infrastructure on the Peninsula – especially regarding catenary wiring and aerial structures – will be used against Caltrain too when they seek their necessary upgrades. The arguments about the fiscal problems of HSR will bleed over to Caltrain, especially since Caltrain actually can’t pay for its own operations (whereas virtually every HSR system in the world does). The basic frame that a modern passenger railroad is inappropriate for the park-like villages that some Peninsula residents believe their towns still are (but haven’t been since at least 1960) will hit Caltrain as well.

Saving Caltrain is therefore about more than just finding revenue. It’s about making the case for passenger trains, period – and marginalizing and disempowering those who criticize passenger trains on the Peninsula. While some want to draw distinctions between HSR and Caltrain, in practice those distinctions don’t really exist. This is about saving the Peninsula Rail Corridor, where passenger trains predated the cities. Short-term AND long-term fixes are both needed, and that means HSR has to be part of the solution. It doesn’t pencil out any other way.

Let’s hope that message gets delivered at Saturday’s “Save Our Caltrain!” summit at the SamTrans office in San Carlos. Organized by Palo Alto’s Yoriko Kishimoto, it’s a grassroots effort to try and solve Caltrain’s funding crisis. In attendance will be Congresswoman Jackie Speier and Michael Brune of the Sierra Club. I can’t make it, but I hope others can:

Location: Samtrans Auditorium, 1250 San Carlos Avenue, San Carlos (near Caltrain)

Date: Saturday, January 29, 2011 Time: 9:00 am to 2:30 pm.

RSVP here: http://friendsofcaltrain.com/register

Robert Doty, director of the Peninsula Rail Program (a partnership of Caltrain and the rail authority), released a statement Friday afternoon saying that the decision by the FRA and the rail authority to give Central Valley the priority “will likely impact the prioritization of the environmental review process for all high-speed-rail sections currently under study.”

“This means that the scheduled December 2010 release of the Draft EIR/EIS for the San Francisco to San Jose section will need to be rescheduled for a future date,” wrote Doty, who is responsible for the design of the Peninsula segment.

He did not specify when this document will be released.

This is good news. Californians For High Speed Rail voted at our board meeting last weekend to support a delay in the publication of this EIR. We were actually in the process of drafting up a letter to call for the delay when we got the news that Doty was indeed going to do it.

However, the delay should NOT be indefinite. Our proposal is to delay it to April, enabling more discussion and collaboration on the Peninsula but also keeping the project on track and moving forward in a timely manner.

There’s a good reason why the Peninsula should want this done soon – uncertainty is not good for anyone involved. While I’ve never believed that HSR would hurt property values, I can envision property values being hurt if nobody is sure what will happen on the corridor. Even a “stale EIR” would at least let businesses, residents, and planners know and price in the impact of whatever vertical alignment is chosen.

HSR is going to be built on the Peninsula, and it’s going to be built soon. We should keep this process moving in a timely manner, for the benefit of everyone involved. The delay is the right thing to do, but it must not become an indefinite “kick the can down the road” delay that just serves the interests of the small minority of HSR opponents. Residents along the segment route still support the project and expect it to be built. Let’s make sure that we use this delay to make the project better, instead of making the project stop.

Palo Alto doesn’t want a high-speed rail station in its city.

At its Monday night meeting, the council unanimously voted to tell the California High-Speed Rail Authority — as well as other regional, state and federal agencies — it does not want Palo Alto to be considered further for a station along the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route….

The council fell short Monday night of taking a formal stance against a station anywhere along the mid-Peninsula, saying it doesn’t want to speak for other cities.

“I’m a little uncomfortable with telling Redwood City what to do,” said Council Member Larry Klein, as the council considered a recommendation by Council Member Greg Scharff to expand the letter to express opposition to a station anywhere on the entire mid-Peninsula, rather than just Palo Alto.

Before we get into the specific issues raised by the council, let’s just keep in mind the big picture here. At a time when the price of a gallon of gasoline is higher than it has ever been (except for 2008) and when analysis expect oil to soar to $175/bbl this decade, during the worst recession in 60 years, with serious concerns about climate change and traffic gridlock, the Palo Alto City Council has decided to turn down a golden opportunity that many European cities would kill to have – to get a station on a high speed rail system that is already going through their city, that will connect to the state’s major economic and jobs centers, that can relieve the burden on two-lane city streets like University Avenue and already-jammed arterials like El Camino Real. Instead of using the HSR station to attract new jobs and new businesses, Palo Alto has apparently decided to cede the 21st century to Redwood City. I’m sure they’ll know what to do with this priceless opportunity.

It’s the equivalent of turning down paved roads because you believe that it will hurt the horse and buggy industry, or turning down disposable diapers because it will put the diaper services out of business. I mean, WTF?

What possible justification could Palo Alto’s city council have for such a self-defeating move?

Council members cited a number of reasons in their opposition to the station, including a required parking structure for which the city would have to cough up the costs.

This is a reasonable concern. The parking requirements are absurd. And cities should not be expected to fund a structure. That being said, this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. San José was able to force some changes to the CHSRA’s plans for the HSR route south of Diridon Station. Surely Palo Alto could have said “well we’d like a station but the parking requirements are a problem.” And while some might argue the CHSRA wasn’t particularly accommodating, it doesn’t seem that Palo Alto – the same city whose council passed an anti-HSR resolution and voted to sue the Authority – tried all that hard to get those requirements changed.

But the council made it clear they had other – and quite silly – concerns:

The council also argued the station would create more traffic, that the rail authority doesn’t have the funds to build a station and that it could adversely impact regional airports such as San Jose International and may also hurt Caltrain.

None of these points are credible. Regarding traffic, an HSR station would be much more likely to reduce it by giving commuters another option to access Stanford University, the shopping center, and downtown Palo Alto. It would also act as a magnet for connecting transit, additionally cutting down on traffic.

The point about not having the funds is a canard; plenty of projects are approved before all the funding is secured and delivered.

As to somehow “hurting” airports, that’s just ridiculous. SFO strongly supports HSR. Burbank, San Diego, Palmdale and Ontario airports are all eagerly awaiting an HSR station that can link directly to their terminals, as they realize it will help travelers access their flights more easily as well as free up precious gate space for medium and long-haul flights that HSR cannot serve. For this same reason, airlines like JetBlue support HSR.

In reality, it seems clear that the Palo Alto city council simply has an ideological opposition to HSR and was fishing for reasons to oppose a station in its city. Granted, there were issues that needed to be addressed to ensure the station would bring the maximum benefit to the city – but the council’s attitude was totally dismissive, as shown by their flirtation with a motion to flatly oppose any station on the Peninsula. In fact, there were supporters of a station who spoke up last night:

Jumana Nabti, however, argued in favor of the station.

“A station in Palo Alto should be seen as a huge opportunity, not a problem,” said Nabti, who told the council she is a Palo Alto native and an urban planner who has worked on a number of transportation projects.

Nabti acknowledged design flaws in the rail project but said all transportation models are based on assumptions. It’s difficult to forecast a final result for larger projects. She argued the project would ultimately be beneficial to Palo Alto, reducing traffic and noise and increasing safety.

Unfortunately for Palo Alto residents, the council’s mind was already made up: they don’t want 21st century prosperity, and prefer to string out the 20th century as long as possible. It’s their loss, really. Redwood City is now poised to get the station, should they want it, and let’s hope they do – Palo Alto may have Stanford and the Sand Hill Road venture capital firms, but Redwood City is about to vault past it as a center of jobs and prosperity on the Peninsula. And when Palo Alto is choked by traffic, future generations will look back on October 25, 2010, and see it as the day Palo Alto’s city council gave up on the future.