California’s high speed rail program was in danger before the debt ceiling debate in Washington. Given the desire to cut trillions of dollars from federal spending that both sides of the debate advocate, seeing a $20 billion payment to California’s questionable high speed rail system is doubtful.

As Governor Jerry Brown’s spokesman said earlier this week, by that logic everything the state does in under threat, from public schools to law enforcement. The teabagger Congress’ commitment to the basic stability and prosperity of this country is doubtful. We should not then suddenly give up on our future just because of a temporary fit of insanity in the House of Representatives.

And yes, it is temporary. Nancy Pelosi is very well positioned to become Speaker again in 2013. The GOP is going to lose seats across the country in 2012. The public is fed up with their extremism, and the wingnuts who won office in 2010 are going to have a difficult time keeping their seats in 2012, especially with an Obama-friendly turnout. So blowing up HSR because 2011 is a difficult year for sanity in Congress is not a smart move.

If the federal money fails to appear, private investors are unlikely to kick in with their expected share of the project. That leaves Californians on the hook.

Not so. It’s entirely possible that private investors could kick in the money even if the feds won’t. It might not be wise, but it’s possible. There is a lot of money to be made on high speed rail, which Joel Fox, being an ideologue, refuses to acknowledge.

As to Californians being on the hook…um, no we’re not. We can if we want to be, though. If voters decide they want to fund a statewide rail plan, then yeah. But if no other funding materializes, we don’t build the entire system. Simple as that. No risk.

Since that time, reviews and studies on the proposed rail system have criticized the project. Projected ridership numbers that were attacked during the campaign have been continually challenged many times since the measure passed. The lack of a business plan has been cited. Costs estimates have grown — no surprise there.

The reviews and studies come from project opponents or from people like the Legislative Analyst’s Office who have no expertise in the subject. The ridership numbers have been challenged but never debunked, and a cursory glance at HSR ridership across the globe – including the Amtrak Acela – show high ridership numbers that will be repeated here. There is no reasonable, evidence-based case to be made that HSR ridership in California will not be high.

Proponents of the plan say, “Don’t worry,” money is not always lined up immediately for big infrastructure projects that have become a reality. The plan is needed, they say, because California’s projected population growth will demand alternative transportation systems.

But, if the money is not there to build the system, how does it get built? If only pieces of the system are put in place, how does it continually get funded if the original cost projections are low and the ridership projections are high?

Notice how Fox ignores the very important questions he raises, and instead changes the topic. If we want to build it, we can go out and find funding. It’s not difficult. A combination of federal taxes and bonds, combined with state, local, private and overseas contributions, can do the job. Fox’s problem is that suddenly we’re talking about taxes, and oh my god taxes are evil. At least they are if you’re a right-winger like Fox is.

Maybe the real question to ask is: Would the voters reconsider their decision on authorizing the bond sale?

All the polling suggests the answer is no, they wouldn’t.

How’s this sound: Resolved, being made aware with new information from current studies and projections that the high speed rail plan is unsustainable, we rescind the bond authorization.

If Fox thinks he can sneak that hugely misleading title and summary past Attorney General Kamala Harris, he’s deluded. And if he thinks he can raise the $2 million to get it on the ballot, and the $10-$20 million to pass it, he’s got even more money to burn than I realized.

Given the situation with the state budget, the dollars designated for the bond could be used elsewhere. Something like the above resolution is worth considering.

HSR will be a net contributor to the state budget, not only repaying its own state bonds but creating enough jobs, economic activity and tax revenue to make California much better off – to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.

Fox doesn’t tell you that either. Instead he wants Californians to be chained to their cars and their gas pumps. He believes the status quo, of 12% unemployment, is just fine. Why do anything new that might save the state money and create new jobs and revenue?

He can fantasize about going back to the ballot all he wants to. The facts are clear: HSR is good for Californians, good for the state’s bottom line, and remains popular with the public.

The legislature found that out the hard way when Brown vetoed the budget for the first time in known memory. When the legislature sent him a revised budget, he signed it, but with some line-item vetoes that came as a surprise to BART, Caltrain, and others who expected the governor to ratify their share of the Prop 1A funds.

Proposition 1A, approved by voters in November 2008, included $9 billion for high speed rail and $995 million for other passenger rail, including services that “connect” to the HSR system. Under that provision, BART and Caltrain had applied for funding and the legislature had appropriated $154 million to them and other systems.

But Governor Jerry Brown line-item vetoed that funding last Friday. Here’s his veto message:

Item 2660-104-6043 – For local assistance, Department of Transportation. I reduce this item from $154,261,000 to $7,000,000 by reducing:

(1) 30.10-Mass Transportation from $154,261,000 to $7,000,000.

While I am sustaining $7,000,000 to fund positive train control projects in various local rail corridors, I am reducing this item by $147,261,000. These funds are available from Proposition 1A bond proceeds to enhance local transit lines as feeder routes to the high-speed rail system. The High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority), the Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and local jurisdictions should work together to develop a comprehensive statewide rail plan. The projects identified by Caltrans and the California Transportation Commission appear unrelated to the high-speed rail project or an integrated rail plan. As plans for the high speed route are further developed, the Authority should work with local agencies to build mutually beneficial projects.

So what is going on here?

Wyatt Buchanan and Marisa Lagos of the San Francisco Chronicle shed more light on the cuts:

The largest vetoes were for items not in the general fund, however, including $234 million in mass transit projects that would have been funded through the high-speed rail bond. Included is $35 million that would have been used to replace and upgrade BART train cars and $27 million for the Muni Central Subway project in San Francisco.

In his veto statement, Brown said funds for BART and other agencies “appear unrelated to the high-speed rail project or an integrated rail plan.” The bond has money set aside for local transit agencies to connect and integrate with high-speed rail.

BART spokesman Linton Johnson said the agency is hoping to receive $250 million eventually from the high-speed rail bond for BART cars – a $3.2 billion project – and that the current cars are on their “last legs.” He questioned Brown’s reasoning.

“The governor, who used to ride our trains, may have lumped us in with other projects where that may very well be the case. But clearly there’s going to be passengers who leave the BART system and go on high-speed rail and vice versa.”

I’m all for new BART cars too, and Linton Johnson makes a very good point here. But Governor Brown seems to be making a different point: that there needs to be a statewide rail plan, and that the Prop 1A funds should not be treated as candy to be handed out to local systems without there being some clear coordination between the Authority and those local systems.

A bigger target of these cuts might be Caltrain. Perhaps not in a monetary sense, but in a political sense. Caltrain has become increasingly aggressive about wanting to chart its own course without being too strongly tied to the high speed rail project, and now counts Senator Joe Simitian as an ally in that effort. Senator Alan Lowenthal, of course, has long wanted to use all the Prop 1A money for local rail projects and doesn’t care one bit about high speed rail or connecting SF to LA and the Central Valley. It is possible that Brown’s line-item vetoes are a kind of brushback pitch, a warning to Caltrain that they have to play nice and participate in a true statewide rail plan and not just be out for themselves.

If so, that’s a good move. California needs a true statewide rail plan, figuring out how we move people around the state, between and within regions, and within cities. The plan should use the high speed rail project as a spine and local systems, such as Caltrain, Metrolink, BART, Muni, Metro Rail, and others as the bones, arteries, and nerves.

But it also matters what Brown has in mind with a “statewide rail plan.” Is he suggesting that the HSR route be modified along the lines of Simitian’s “two tracks forever” model? Or is he a full-throated supporter of the current HSR plan and thinks local systems haven’t been playing along as they ought to be?

That’s a key question here. Brown’s veto is typically hard to read, another Brown specialty, and so it’s not clear whether someone like Alan Lowenthal has won or lost. What it does remind us is that Jerry Brown makes up his own mind, isn’t easily lobbied, and is not afraid to ruffle feathers and outright piss people off with his actions. Once again, Jerry Brown is the key figure in the story of California high speed rail, just as he had been 30 years ago when the project was first proposed.

There’s an interesting agenda item to be discussed at Friday’s Peninsula Cities Consortium meeting – scroll down to Item #7:

PCC Agenda 041610 Final

I don’t know who requested this item be placed on the agenda, though that would be interesting to know. It is worth discussing here on the blog, if only for the PCC members to understand how very unlikely it is that changing or repealing Prop 1A can be achieved.

Here’s why. First, it is virtually impossible for a repeal of Prop 1A to be placed on the November 2010 ballot. Not only is the cost of gathering the necessary signatures likely to be at least $2 million, but they’ll have to work really quickly – the Secretary of State’s office indicates the last day to file signatures with county election officials is…Friday, April 16. Same day as the PCC meeting.

That leaves the state legislature, which could place an initiative on the November ballot to change or repeal Prop 1A. A repeal is highly unlikely to happen, unless the California legislature wants to piss off Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and President Barack Obama.

What about a change? It’s possible, but not very likely. What exactly would the change be? Cutting out the SF-San José portion would incur the wrath of Speaker Pelosi, so that’ll never pass the legislature. Cutting out the LA-Anaheim portion? Not when it’s one of the four segments to qualify for stimulus funds. Legislators and members of Congress will be loath to support cutting that either, as it would jeopardize stimulus funds and make them all look bad for sending stimulus funds to a segment that then gets deleted.

What about changing the mandated 2:40 running time between SF and LA? What about changing the number of stations, or the route alignment? This causes massive political complications – reopening the number of stations will raise the ire of the Sierra Club, which backed Prop 1A in 2008 because of the pledge to limit the stations to 24, ensuring no Los Banos station would be built. Changing the route alignment blows up any number of existing EIRs, delays the construction timeline significantly, risks stimulus funds, and would generate an angry reaction from the likely targets of such a move, the Highway 99 corridor cities. And changing the mandated 2:40 time (that’s in hours and minutes, in case anyone wasn’t clear) between SF and LA would rightly cause a public backlash against a dumbed-down HSR system.

It’s not at all clear that any changes would stand a chance of clearing the legislature to make it onto the ballot. Once on the ballot, it’s even less clear whether voters would go for it. The changes the PCC would seek would undermine the HSR project significantly, devastating potential ridership and jeopardizing the project’s ability to cover its operating costs. A train from San José to Los Angeles with a stop in Tracy and Santa Clarita isn’t exactly going to generate a lot of voter interest or support. I could easily see such a ballot proposition going down in flames.

The PCC tries to claim it’s not opposed to high speed rail. We’d like to take them at their word. Doing so requires the PCC to accept the will of the voters as expressed in the November 2008 election: Californians want this system built as planned. It’s perfectly legitimate for the PCC to organize and offer its input to the CHSRA as the project is planned in their communities. But it makes no sense for them to start talking about trying to reverse the outcome of 2008.

PCC members would do well to heed the warning shot fired by Southern California newspapers recently, painting PCC members’ efforts as wanting to “take the price over the moon.” Californians have a financial stake in this as well, and won’t stand for a few Peninsula cities unnecessarily driving up the cost of HSR for everyone else.

There are numerous political and practical reasons that should suggests the PCC quickly dismiss the notion of even examining changing or repealing Prop 1A at this Friday’s meeting. What’s done is done. Californians have demonstrated they want HSR built, including on the Peninsula rail corridor. The PCC would be better off focusing on the recently released Alternatives Analysis and considering their preferences and response to that document.

UPDATE: It has emerged that the PCC will be discussing this because one Morris Brown has asked them to do so. The PCC put out an amended agenda that clarified the nature of the Prop 1A discussion:

Citizen Request to establish a PCC subcommittee to explore changing or revoking Prop 1A

Morris Brown’s letter includes the Palo Alto Daily Post’s article calling for an all-out fight against HSR, which clearly inspired him to ask this to be placed on the agenda.

It’s still not clear to me why the PCC would even be willing to consider this proposal merely because Morris Brown asked for it. As I explained above, this is a non-starter for the PCC, which has better things to do with their time. Let’s hope the PCC rejects this proposal and moves on to more constructive work.

UPDATE 2: Mike Rosenberg looked at this issue and got some quotes from Menlo Park Mayor Rich Cline suggesting this wasn’t likely to go anywhere:

Such an endeavor would be difficult and time-consuming, and local officials and residents should instead strive to make sure the project is done right, rather than not at all, said Menlo Park Mayor Rich Cline, who heads the group that will consider the idea….

Personally, although he is willing to allow his colleagues on the consortium to discuss the idea, Cline does not see the value in trying to nullify the bond.

“We have to continue to look at how to form this thing when it comes rather than look at ways to undermine it,” said Cline, who was an opponent of Proposition 1A. “That’s always been my position; I am respectful of elections.”

My own view is that it was a mistake to even put this on the agenda. If the PCC wanted to describe the ways Prop 1A impacts HSR planning, that would have been fine, but placing this on the agenda – even as a citizen request – gives the appearance that the PCC believes repealing Prop 1A is a concept worth examining.It’s good to see that Cline does not believe it is worth examining, and let’s hope he and the other PCC members continue to focus the organization on more constructive work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Bay Area train operators say they are entitled to as much as $400 million of projects to accommodate the $42.6 billion bullet train that would run along the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to San Jose on its way to Los Angeles. They include the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, San Francisco Muni and the Altamont Commuter Express….

The California Transportation Commission reserved $745 million for 10 transit agencies in December, leaving each train operator this week to apply for its share of the money and prove its projects qualify. The commission calculated each agency’s share based on track length, service levels and ridership.

Three other intercity rail corridors will get $142.5 million ($47.5 million each). The $745 million then goes to those agencies that apply. Mike Rosenberg’s article lays out who is asking for what (final applications are due on March 15):

BART appears on track for more than twice as much money as any agency in the state, and on Thursday its board of directors is expected to approve an application for $257 million.

BART would put $150 million of the 1A money toward its $1 billion project to replace its rail cars. It says it has federal money for the rest of the project. The rest of BART’s high-speed-rail money would go toward increasing seat capacity in cars, the Hayward yard maintenance complex, Embarcadero and Montgomery station upgrades, train control reliability and an operations control center.

Caltrain, meanwhile, will apply for $40 million as part of its project to electrify its diesel railroad, which will be necessary to accommodate bullet trains. VTA is eligible to apply for up to $26 million. It said it may use part of its share for Caltrain electrification, while Muni said it will seek $61 million to improve rail connections. ACE train operators said they will apply for $15 million for upgrades to service, Altamont corridor environmental studies, track enhancements and connectivity improvements.

The amounts requested are not arbitrary, but conform to CTC guidelines published last month, which is why BART is asking for $250 million and ACE only $15 million. In each case the funds appear set to go to help pay for planned upgrades, although not for new routes or service.

DOJCHSRA

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

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

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

Look, this country need to rebuild itself. We are still living off the Eisenhower era and off the Roosevelt era when they built the thousands of bridges and the thousands of government buildings and the roads, the highway system and all of those things. What’s the new thing that we’re building? We haven’t built anything in decades. We need a high speed rail. We need new infrastructure. We need to think about it because we have countries like China and Europe that are very fast gaining on us and surpassing us. So we got to get our act together and really make this country kind of live in the 21st century, not be with the infrastructure in the 20th century.

And yet Arnold’s real legacy for HSR is much less golden. He continued to delay the vote for the $10 billion in HSR bonds well beyond the original 2004 date. That may have worked out to HSR’s benefit, since 2008 saw a gas price spike that proved the need for high speed trains and saw the election of a very pro-HSR president, but that wasn’t anything Arnold intended to happen. Instead he spent the intervening years attacking the CHSRA’s funding and putting the project in significant jeopardy.

Even today, with Prop 1A approved and the first federal funds having been awarded, it’s clear that Arnold Schwarzenegger has damaged HSR in some very important ways. The CHSRA’s lack of funding earlier on meant it never could do the kind of massive public outreach that could have ensured that some of the current problems over design and implementation were dealt with earlier on. While the claims of the NIMBYs that the CHSRA did no public outreach whatsoever on the project prior to 2009 are simply wrong, more ought to have been done, but without money the CHSRA couldn’t do it. Instead of fighting the governor and the legislature to keep the lights on in 2007, staff could have instead been out talking to residents, local governments, and potential HSR riders about the project.

Still, the CHSRA is working to overcome that handicap, and since 2008 Arnold has been more help than hindrance to the project. The question we now face here in 2010 is whether his successors will do the same.

Jerry Brown is likely to be the only Democrat running for governor in 2010, and as you all probably know, has been governor before (elected in 1974, reelected in 1978). Like all governors elected prior to 1990, he is exempt from term limits, so he can run for a third term. He has a history with high speed rail – during his governorship he was a strong supporter of HSR, despite opposition from some powerful state legislators. In 2003 Richard Trainor published an article on Brown’s HSR efforts, a fascinating if incomplete read. Brown, with the help of one Mehdi Morshed, rushed a bill through the legislature in late summer 1982 to create an HSR system with Japanese contractors, exempt from CEQA and Coastal Commission review.

1982 was Brown’s last year as governor. That year he ran for US Senate and lost to Pete Wilson. By 1983 anti-HSR forces, led by the Southern California Association of Governments, began attacking the HSR project. They tried to debunk the ridership studies using a “white paper” produced by the city of Tustin (my hometown – sorry!) and authored by Trainor. Soon thereafter, without support from Brown’s successor, Governor George Deukmejian, and with only weak support in the legislature, the HSR project collapsed.

Nearly 30 years later, California’s HSR project has not only been revived, but is stronger than ever. It has $10 billion in voter-approved bonds, over $2 billion in initial federal funding, and is very nearly finished with the full set of environmental reviews (when the CHSRA was created in 1996, the project was not exempted from CEQA). Initial construction is just two and a half years away.

Jerry Brown would be very well poised to come in and provide leadership and institutional support that the HSR project desperately needs. It’s likely that he would not only support it but would work to see it properly and effectively implemented. CHSRA might get new board members (Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed the majority of its present membership) or it could be folded into an executive branch department that Brown would oversee.

Brown isn’t an officially declared candidate yet, though he is definitely going to run for governor, so he hasn’t yet taken a position on the project. As Attorney General, his office has been supportive of the project, and backed the CHSRA’s controversial position on the Transbay Terminal project studies last September.

Brown is still espousing a vision of “elegant density” for California’s future, as he did 30 years ago, a vision that was never really implemented after the Reaganite turn politics took in the 1980s, but a vision that holds urban density and mass transit at its core. There is every reason to believe Brown will continue to support HSR today.

His likely November opponent is Meg Whitman, a Republican and a former eBay CEO. She appears to be a more openly right-wing version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and seems to believe that advocating for higher unemployment is a winning campaign strategy. So far she has made no public statements on high speed rail, so guessing her position is going to be rather difficult. She wants to slash state spending, but then so did Arnold Schwarzenegger and he ultimately backed HSR. Whitman does not appear to be an anti-rail ideologue, but she does live in Atherton, and might well share some of the NIMBY attitudes of that city’s leadership. It’s possible she would continue Arnold’s support of the project, but it’s equally possible she wouldn’t. Definitely worth watching closely.

We have a clearer picture of where the other Republican candidate, Steve Poizner, stands: he opposes it:

Based on his remarks about our deficit and debt service I asked him for his opinion on the CHSRA High Speed bullet train especially in light of the fact that we have neglected our transportation infrastructure. Steve said he is a frequent flyer on Southwest Airlines and that all factors considered “he opposes the project.”

Thank god he isn’t likely to even make it out of the Republican primary – the last thing we need in government is someone who thinks that because Southwest has regular flights right now between SoCal and the Bay Area, we don’t need HSR. As we’ve repeatedly explained here, Southwest’s fares will rise along with everyone else’s in the coming years, and besides, door-to-door HSR is comparable in travel time to flying. In other heavily traveled air corridors, such as the Northeast Corridor or Madrid-Barcelona, HSR has been able to take as much as half the market share and generate profits in the process.

Poizner not only doesn’t understand that fact, he also is convinced that California has too much debt and that the answer is to delay the sale of authorized bonds, including Prop 1A. In short, he seems to be an HSR denier’s dream. Unfortunately for them, he isn’t likely to get anywhere near the governor’s office.

So the 2010 gubernatorial election will come down to Jerry Brown, a known and long-time HSR supporter, and Meg Whitman, whose views on the topic are totally unknown. I don’t know whether HSR will play a role in the campaign or not, but I believe it is to Brown’s benefit if it does. I’ll keep you all updated on how the gubernatorial race impacts HSR – and vice versa – between now and November.

That was the year that was:

The status quo strikes back. 2008 was the year of change. It culminated in November 2008 with some of the highest voter turnout in generations, who gave a mandate for doing things differently. Here in California that included a full-throated embrace of passenger rail, as funding for at least four major projects were approved by voters – not just Proposition 1A for high speed rail, but Measure R in LA County, massively expanding their rail system, Measure B in Santa Clara County, further funding the BART extension to San José, and the SMART train linking Sonoma and Marin Counties.

But in 2009, the defenders of the status quo fought back. While frustrating much of President Obama’s agenda in Washington DC, California defenders of the status quo – those people who are quite happy with a depressed economy, the threat of rising sea levels, and a state dependent on fossil fuels whose price is volatile on a long-term upward trend – mobilized to try and frustrate the passenger rail agenda Californians approved. Defense of the status quo is often made easier during an economic crisis, when those who propose change have fewer resources at their disposal.

The California High Speed Rail Authority wasn’t prepared for this, conceptually or organizationally. However, they have made a series of good moves over the course of 2009 to adapt to the need to present a clearer and more consistent argument for HSR that engages the public to the maximum possible extent.

I would say that HSR supporters weren’t quite prepared for the reaction from the status quo either. Even though I’d been warning of that at this blog in late 2008 and early 2009, it took some time for the unions, environmental groups, and business groups backing the project to grasp this and begin their own organizing to support the project.

2010, as we will see in the next post, will be the year the supporters of change and of HSR strike back.

NIMBYs have too much power. When I was growing up in Orange County, I attended a high school right next to Interstate 5 – and we lost half our front lawn to the freeway widening project in the early 1990s. My parents’ home, where they still live now, backs up to one of the busiest intersections in the city and is a half block from a fire station – we constantly heard loud sirens, screeching brakes, honking horns, etc. But somehow we made do. We didn’t go to the fire department and ask them to turn down the sirens, for example. We understood the purpose and the situation.

Unfortunately, that attitude is not shared across this state. Way too many homeowners believe that the government’s duty is to protect their property values and do so in part by giving them veto power over everything that happens in their neighborhood. Both premises are absurd, but deeply held.

Government’s job is to provide services that benefit the whole population, not cater to the whims of a select few. It’s bad enough that NIMBYs along the HSR route do not understand the ways the project will benefit them – in Palo Alto, for example, the rash of suicides and other deaths can be ended for good, and the city made more whole by grade separations. But our politics and our laws give disproportionate power to them, narrowly defining as “stakeholders” only those who own property near the route, leaving out entirely the riders of current and future systems and others who would benefit from the trains.

NIMBYs are very much part of the status quo defenders described above, and in 2010, HSR supporters will need to organize and mobilize to show local and state governments that there are other residents whose voice deserves to be heard, considered, and included in the HSR planning process.

The feds are there for us – to a point. As we eagerly await the FRA’s decision on HSR stimulus grants, due to be released sometime in January, it’s worth considering how much the federal government has done for HSR this year – more than any other year since Congress funded the high speed Metroliner project back in 1965.

It began in February when President Obama inserted $8 billion in HSR stimulus into the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, revealing a pent-up demand among the states for HSR. In early October over $50 billion in HSR grant applications were submitted, including a $4.7 billion request from California. Ray LaHood has frequently said California is one of the states most likely to get some of that $8 billion.

The bigger question is whether this will be sustained. Earlier this month we learned that the Congress agreed to include $2.5 billion in annual HSR funding in the 2010 budget, a number that wasn’t as high as the $4 billion the House had approved, but is still an important start and a sign that Congress intends to fund HSR over the long term.

Exactly how that will happen remains unclear. In April Obama announced a long-term HSR plan but the funding element is not yet determined. The reauthorization of the federal Transportation Bill has been delayed all year long, has now been kicked into 2010, where it seems unlikely that an election-year Congress will have the appetite to increase taxes to fund anything, even the soon-to-be-insolvent highway trust fund, not to mention HSR. It may take until 2011 to see development of a permanent HSR funding solution.

Private investors make all the difference. The current recession notwithstanding, there is every reason to believe there will be private investors lining up to put their money into a project that has every reason to expect to generate revenue, as does every other HSR route in the world, including the Acela. The question therefore isn’t “will they come” but “under what terms?”

The 2009 Business Plan indicated higher costs for the first phase of the project, owing to the federally-mandated shift to “year of expenditure” accounting. CHSRA proposes – and note that right now it is only a proposal – to make up the difference with greater private investment, and charge higher fares to repay that investment, even if it means fewer riders than previously assumed. Note also that CHSRA projections still show the system will generate revenue at those higher fares, as does Spain’s AVE, another “high fare” system.

But that isn’t an optimal solution. Although this issue became prominent only at the end of the year, we’ve been discussing it here since March, when what I believe to be the most important HSR article of the year was written: DoDo’s Puente AVE. DoDo showed how HSR ridership follows a five year curve, not attaining its potential until the fifth year. This causes problems for systems that overuse private investment, since it’s not usually possible to repay the investors until the 5th year. Taiwan’s HSR system had to be bailed out by the government because it couldn’t repay investors even after hitting its ridership targets. The system was funded 80% by private investors, which wasn’t a sustainable level.

I’ll say more about this in the look ahead to 2010, but the role of private investors was an underreported HSR story in 2009, and will become a major story in 2010.

The state legislature is a broken institution. It defies logic that an institution that sets a national model for fiscal irresponsibility is going to lecture the CHSRA, a body it created, about fiscal responsibility. The California legislature in 2009, a broken institution that was mired in its own financial crisis, was either unable or unwilling to help exercise the kind of leadership on HSR that would match the voters’ support as shown by Prop 1A. Normally legislators fall all over themselves to take credit for something that’s popular with the public. Unfortunately, the state legislature generally hasn’t been willing to do this with HSR.

Instead legislators such as Alan Lowenthal and Joe Simitian have thrown monkey wrench after monkey wrench into the HSR works, saddling the CHSRA with inefficient and inflexible rules and mandates that don’t help get a system this state needs for the future to get built.

2009 was a lost opportunity for the state legislature to step up, as has Congress, in providing leadership to help implement Prop 1A and get high speed rail built. 2010 will need to be a year where this changes, and where legislators actively seek to support a project that will bring desperately needed jobs to their constituents.

CEQA needs to be reformed. Back in November I called CEQA the biggest obstacle to HSR in California. It is a land use planning process that is unable to deliver large infrastructure projects quickly and affordably. CEQA is set up on the theory that government construction projects are bad, are threatening, and that stakeholders are already in a reactionary, even adversarial position. CEQA was written with a 1970s logic, reacting to a 1960s California Department of Highways that really did behave as a giant bulldozer not giving a crap about what anyone else in the state thought of its route choices, neighborhood impacts, or environmental consequences.

CEQA wasn’t designed to promote smart, sustainable growth. It was written to enable people like Gary Patton to have legal recourse to stop projects they don’t like, no matter the reason. The mentality is one that assumes the status quo is just fine, that the cost of doing nothing is actually zero – if a project isn’t built, no problem, we didn’t really need it anyway.

California’s planning process should not be a tool for NIMBYs to stop projects they dislike. It should be a vehicle for public involvement in a project development, and to ensure that a project does not cause damage to the environment. CEQA currently fails to meet these objectives. 2009 showed that CEQA needs to be reformed to meet the environmental needs of the 21st century.

Environmental groups are split between those living in the 1970s and those living in the here and now. Whereas the Sierra Club understands that California’s current reliance on oil is ruinous for the environment, especially as it contributes to climate change, groups like the Planning and Conservation League believe that carbon emissions are just fine, that global warming is no cause for concern, and that the late 20th century model of massive pollution should be sustained in order to stop HSR from going through the Pacheco Pass.

The CEQA process was set up to preserve the 1970s model – no new growth, but sustain the way things are currently done as far into the future as possible. Worsening drought, a more intense fire season, potentially rising sea levels, and other problems should make it absolutely clear to anyone who cares about environmental quality the status quo must change. We must reduce our carbon footprint and shift to sustainable infrastructure as quickly as possible.

Environmental groups that fight HSR are implicitly saying they don’t care if we keep on polluting and spewing carbon dioxide into the air, causing a climate crisis. It’s a ridiculous position to hold, but 2009 showed that it’s still popular in some quarters.

Progress was made on the key project implementation decisions, though the final choices haven’t yet been made. Much of 2009 was spent focusing on the scoping process on the various parts of the project, where public input was solicited across the state on how HSR should be built. In some places the issue was whether a tunnel or above-grade solution should be chosen (Peninsula, Anaheim) and in others the route details were still a bit unclear (such as San José to Gilroy). A lot of this happened below the radar, although on the Peninsula it became a very public process through the use of Context Sensitive Solutions. 2009 therefore will have generated a lot of information and input that will, in 2010 and into 2011, result in the final details of how HSR will be built here.

Some of these decisions may already have been made, such as Curt Pringle’s preference for a tunnel through Anaheim. This would be a very bad and unfortunate precedent. But one of the first things we’ll attend to in 2010 is the situation in Anaheim and getting some clarity on what is happening there and why.

HSR is the only job creation vehicle on the horizon in California right now. That was one of the most consistent messages I heard at an Economic Recovery Summit sponsored by the California Labor Federation earlier this summer. Professors, economists, and labor leaders all agreed that in California, sitting at a higher unemployment rate than anytime in the last 60 years, has pretty much NO meaningful job creation on the horizon except for high speed rail. Back in the Great Depression we built bridges and dams to help alleviate unemployment and provide for long-term growth. In a similar situation, we need to return to the infrastructure well and ensure HSR gets built if California is to have economic recovery.

Some criticize this model of recovery. Most, if not all, of those critics are weathering the recession pretty well. It’s a case of the haves telling the have-nots they can’t have job creation or prosperity.

The media does not understand passenger rail. At all. It’s become pretty clear to me that the media, in California and across the nation, simply has no comprehension of how passenger rail works, what its overall value is, and why it matters. They see it as a curiosity, as something unusual and alien. And that lets them use it as an opportunity to prove to their readers that they can hold government accountable. Even though road projects routinely soar beyond their budgets, and even though California spends billions more on roads every year than we’ll spend on HSR in any given year in the coming decade, we rarely hear about cost overruns and other problems with road projects (the East Span of the SF Bay Bridge is a notable exception to the rule).

The media doesn’t view rail passengers as a significant constituency, so they give more time to homeowners and NIMBY critics than to the people who would regularly use a system. They don’t view rail projects as commonplace or legitimate infrastructure, so they carp about “subsidies” even though the roads and freeways they use daily were built by tax dollars and are heavily subsidized to this very day.

This ignorance leads some of them to become susceptible to HSR denialism such as Edward Glaeser’s discredited attack on HSR in the New York Times earlier this year.

UC Berkeley economist and blogger Brad DeLong is fond of exclaiming “why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?” 2009 leads me to reach the same conclusion about the sorry state of HSR coverage in California mainstream media.

California HSR came one year closer to completion. Despite some of the negative things I pointed out above, on the whole 2009 was a productive year for high speed rail in the Golden State. The debates over implementation have shown the public that this project really will get built, after 30 years of effort. As we enter a new year and a new decade, we’re going to make sure that it is the year and the decade of high speed rail.

Feel free to add your thoughts on HSR in the year just past in the comments.

And so it is with Jon Coupal, who is the head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a right-wing organization determined to oppose government spending because somehow, somewhere, it might lead to someone’s taxes going up. Coupal ran the No on 1A campaign in 2008, such as it was, and had a decent amount of success getting pliant reporters to repeat his often errant claims.

He’s resurfaced as an HSR critic this week with a post at Fox and Hounds Daily, a conservative website focusing on California politics. The post repeats many of the same claims as in the debunked MNG and San Diego Union-Tribune editorials, but also introduces a few new ones, so it’s worth taking apart Coupal’s nonsensical attacks on HSR.

For purposes of full disclosure, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association ran the unsuccessful campaign against Prop 1A (not to be confused with 2009’s Prop 1A, an attempt to raise $16 billion in new taxes). Our most potent weapon was a devastating study by the Reason Foundation which revealed that the proponents’ representations regarding costs, fare price and profitability were pure fantasy. But, from the start, we had an uphill battle convincing voters how poorly thought out this measure was. The California Legislature had already stacked the deck by providing such a biased title and summary for the measure that the issue of that deception is still the subject of litigation today. The deceptive ballot material, in addition to the campaign contributions from those who would profit from the project, was enough to ensure victory at the polls – albeit by a very small margin.

In other words, Coupal is saying California voters were stupid and fell for politicians’ tricks instead of believing what the Reason Foundation said. Of course, this blog thoroughly debunked that report, which was full of misleading statements and bad analysis. He cannot bring himself to accept the fact that Californians saw through his claims and voted to approve HSR in spite of his arguments.

Coupal claims the new business plan proved their claims that HSR somehow wasn’t viable:

Although this revised plan calls into question the entire viability of the project, the news is bound to get a lot worse. In short, even these revised figures by the Authority were born in dreamland.

But this is just plain wrong. The revised plan shows how HSR is viable. It calls nothing into question. It shows that even with the federally-mandated cost calculation shift, HSR can still pay back private investors and meet its operating expenses by attracting enough riders even with higher fares than previously anticipated. The business plan shows a resilient system that meets pent-up and significant demand for this service. I personally don’t like the higher fares, but they do show a system that is financially viable. Coupal is wrong to claim otherwise.

Another fantasy: “The cost of the project — recently pegged at $33.6 billion in 2008 dollars — is now estimated at $42.6 billion in time-of-construction dollars.” Sure, that’s a projected increase of about $10 billion, which is jaw-dropping by itself. But the Reason study suggests the final costs will be more than twice the revised projection. Many who analyze the trend lines of these megaprojects think that, if it is ever built, the cost will far exceed $100 billion.

Coupal here omits the explanation for the increase, which is that the federal government mandated a shift to “year of expenditure” accounting. In 2008 dollars, the cost only increased by $1 billion, owing to the adoption of a tunnel for part of the LA-Anaheim segment. That’s a small increase, and certainly disproves Coupal and Reason’s argument of inherent cost increases in megaprojects. They still have no explanation or justification of how it would ever cost $100 billion – it’s just a number they’re throwing out there because it looks and sounds big.

Those are familiar arguments from Coupal. He has a new one though: an argument that somehow HSR won’t actually help the environment. This is a case of what is often called “concern trolling,” where someone pretends to share an ideological view merely in order to raise “concerns” to others of that view. In this case Coupal, who normally is a strong opponent of laws and programs to help the environment, pretends to be interested in the issue in order to raise “concerns” about how HSR would reduce carbon emissions:

But it turns out that, from an environmental perspective, this is not so simple. Recent studies by the University of California regarding the environment life-cycle assessment of various passenger transportation systems cast specific doubt on California’s high speed rail project. In reporting on those studies, the Institute for Transportation Studies noted that “if high-speed rail draws only half the ridership it says it will attract, its environmental performance will be twice as bad per passenger mile traveled. And, if compared to typical aircraft travel in situations where 70 percent of rail passenger seats are filled, high-speed rail performs worse (the crossover occurs when high-speed rail achieves 65 percent of estimated ridership compared against current aircraft utilization rates at 70 percent).”

This refers to research presented at a HSR forum in Berkeley earlier this year. We’ve written about this before, particularly about the extremely biased way the forum was reported by the Institute for Transportation Studies.

Coupal is specifically citing the work of UC Berkeley professor Arpad Horvath, who claimed at the forum that HSR wouldn’t generate the carbon reductions it needed without “very high ridership.” But Horvath’s claims, based on research that hadn’t been peer reviewed at the time it was presented at the forum, makes some curious assumptions:

These must include manufacturing of the vehicles themselves, their required infrastructure, and the fuel used to power them. High-speed rail will produce some 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year during its construction, said Horvath. It will need to run very full trains almost immediately to offset the emissions expended in building tracks, stations, rail cars to “compete environmentally” with air or road travel.

In addition, if the train’s electricity is produced by coal-fired or natural gas-fired plants there will be substantial, harmful emissions produced until cleaner, alternative fuel sources, such as wind power, are available for use.

The bottom line, he said, was high-speed rail “only outperforms other modes if there is a very high passenger load or a very clean energy source, neither of which is assured at the moment.”

There are two problems with this: specific and conceptual. The specific problem should be obvious, that HSR will indeed by powered by renewable energy, by official policy of the California High Speed Rail Authority.

The conceptual problem is this: Horvath is assuming that the cost of doing nothing is zero, that if we just sit on our hands and don’t build HSR, that global warming won’t cause any kind of crisis. Yes, the construction of HSR will generate carbon emissions, but we have no other choice if we are going to build long-lasting infrastructure that will reduce carbon emissions. I agree with Horvath that the state should maximize the reductions by maximizing ridership, but that’s not what Coupal wants – because to maximize ridership means using more public money to construct the system, which he opposes.

And perhaps that’s the greatest irony of all. The new business plan shows higher costs largely because that’s what’s needed to help attract private investment – which is what Coupal and Reason Foundation have been saying all along, that the private sector should be doing this. CHSRA has no apparent plans to seek more money from the state of California, so Coupal should be dancing a jig that even though he lost the Prop 1A battle, he’s winning the subsequent battle to prevent more state money from helping build the thing.

But, as we know, Coupal isn’t interested in something that helps private enterprise. Like many right-wingers, he’s internalized the false argument that passenger rail is anti-conservative, doesn’t help anyone except the poor, doesn’t help business, and is just plain bad.

There’s a reason the California Chamber of Commerce has joined the Sierra Club and the California Labor Federation in support of high speed rail – unlike Coupal, they actually understand that HSR will be a major economic boon to the state at a time when we desperately need it. If Coupal wants to avoid tax increases, he needs to support the creation of jobs, which in turn generates tax income for the state. High speed rail will accomplish it, in spite of Coupal’s ideological and misinformed objections.

UPDATE: Jeff Barker of the California High Speed Rail Authority has a response to Coupal up at Fox and Hounds Daily, pointing out the ways in which high speed rail is actually gathering momentum, instead of losing it as Coupal claimed.

On December 4th, Californians For High Speed Rail (CA4HSR) submitted the comment letter to the California High Speed Rail Authority (Authority) for the Altamont Rail Corridor Project. Our letter focused on three key topics: expanding the scope to cover the Altamont destinations described in Prop 1A, station location criteria, and alignments/station locations to be studied..

CA4HSR Scoping Comments – Altamont Rail Corridor Project

To understand the Altamont Rail Corridor Project, it is important to know the background on how it has came about. From 2004 to 2008, the Bay Area was caught in a big fight over whether the Altamont or Pacheco Pass would be used to connect the Bay Area to the Central Valley. CA4HSR remained neutral in this fight. As a regional compromise, the nine-county Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Authority picked the Pacheco Pass alignment but agreed to support a separate “Altamont Commuter Overlay” project separate from the High Speed Rail project. At the time the overlay project was more imaginary then real, as it had no funding for construction.

Up until early 2009, the Altamont Rail Corridor Project was more paper than real. However, two things changed the status of the project. First, President Obama had $8 billion inserted into the stimulus for high-speed rail and committed to ongoing funding of high speed rail (HSR) through the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). Secondly, the Authority and the San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission (the Altamont Commuter Express-ACE manager) were able to convince the FRA that the Altamont overlay would be “intercity” rather than “commuter” rail, thus qualifying it for national HSR funds. This means the former “paper project” from 2008 is now eligible to compete for up to $50 billion in HSR funding that may be included in the transportation bill re-authorization next year. Therefore, CA4HSR believes that the Altamont Corridor Rail Project is now a real project that has a fair chance of being constructed.

Californians For High Speed Rail is delighted by this progress and views the San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission’s pro-active stance as a model for California transit agencies. ACE commuter service currently runs three one-way round trips a day, between Stockton and San Jose. The service is slow, and its capacity is limited due to its secondary position to Union Pacific. The Commission’s leadership wants to transform the existing ACE service into the leading passenger rail service in Northern California. The Commission envisions eventually running modern, electric multiple unit rail cars on passenger-only tracks from Sacramento and Merced to/from the Bay Area. The Altamont Rail Corridor Project, at full build out, will have the necessary infrastructure to allow California High Speed Rail trains to access the corridor. The current planning process will lay out how to incrementally construct new high-speed rail compatible tracks, as funding comes available, until the ultimate vision is achieved. This is exactly how transit agencies should think and plan ahead long-term. CA4HSR’s objections to the current scope are not that it is too ambitious, but that it is too limited.

Proposition 1A, which is funding the Altamont Rail Corridor Project EIS/EIS, defines the Altamont corridor as a “high speed train corridor” in Article 2 Section (B)(3). Specifically it reads, “Merced to Stockton to Oakland and San Francisco via the Altamont Corridor.” CA4HSR enthusiastically approves of adding San Jose to the scope of the Altamont Rail Corridor Project, but believes San Francisco and Oakland must be studied as well to meet the intent of Proposition 1A. We also reject the concept that future high speed service from Altamont can be provided to San Francisco and Oakland by utilizing BART service for large potions of the routes to the two cities by forcing patrons of the Altamont service to transfer to BART trains in either Livermore or Warm Springs.  Rather, San Francisco should be reached via a new high bridge to replace the old Dumbarton rail bridge and the Peninsula. Oakland should be accessed by either a new Transbay tube from the San Francisco Transbay Terminal or by upgrading the current Capitol Corridor line from Union City/Fremont to downtown Oakland. CA4HSR’s letter includes five new alternatives through southern Alameda County that could accommodate efficient access to San Francisco and Oakland from the Altamont.

At this point Californians For High Speed Rail is not endorsing any one alternative but wants to insure that Northern California ends up with the best interregional rail plan possible. The region and the State have to opportunity to now plan for such interregional rail service. If you wish to join us in the effort contact us at: brian.stanke@ca4hsr.org The planning for Altamont Corridor Rail Project service has just begun and the more that people get involved, the more of an impact we can have.

About Californians For High Speed Rail

Californians For High Speed Rail is a grassroots, statewide coalition of high speed rail supporters advocating for the high speed rail project approved by California voters in November 2008. Founded in 2005 and re-launched in 2009, we exist to educate, inform, and organize Californians about ways they can help make high speed rail a reality in this state. Additionally, Californians For High Speed Rail also encourages sustainable development of the high speed rail system, promoting the building of stations in city centers and surrounding transit-oriented development, as well as developing and improving feeder transit systems.