After a campus visit by rail planners last month, the High-Speed Rail Authority backed away from proposals to cut through or bridge over the Miramar College campus, saying such a route would have a significant negative impact on the community.

“It is clear that the only (route) that should be considered through Miramar College is a bored tunnel option, deep enough to cause insignificant impacts to the college,” wrote Timothy Buresh, Southern California regional director for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, in a letter dated Sept. 30.

The whole article actually provides a very good and detailed discussion of the issues with tunneling in the Miramar area and the two alignments that are being considered. The alignment that would impact Miramar College is the original one that would run from Interstate 15 to the LOSSAN corridor via Miramar and Rose Canyon. It would include a stop at University Towne Center near UCSD, where a San Diego Trolley extension is already planned. The other option is along Highway 163 to Interstate 8 in Mission Valley and a long sweeping curve down toward the airport and downtown.

I’ve always felt that stopping at UTC and picking up the UCSD population was better than Mission Valley, although it would be interesting to see ridership projections. It may not make all that much difference in the end, and the costs of tunneling under both Miramar College and UTC would almost certainly be much higher than a 163/8 alignment that would have fewer tunnels.

I’m sure some in or near Mission Valley would complain about aerial structures, but given the enormous size of some of the freeway interchanges, it would be hard to take those complaints seriously.

Figuring out this question will be easier thanks to funding provided by the state legislature and approved by Governor Jerry Brown:

A bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown this month allocated $4 million in rail bond funding to the continued planning of the Los Angeles to San Diego corridor, a segment which had not received funding in the governor’s budget. Some $2.8 million will go toward engineering design while $1.2 million will be spent on acquisition activities and public outreach.

Sen. Christine Kehoe (D-San Diego), member of the Senate’s transportation committee, advocated for the passage of the bill.

“Our quarter, the Los Angeles to San Diego quarter, is the second most trafficked in the country,” said Deanna Spehn, Kehoe’s policy director. “Funding would have stopped. All work would have stopped. The people working on the project would have been assigned to other duties. You lose the momentum and you lose money.”

This gets to the point I made yesterday – more funding helps solve a lot of these problems. It allows for better designs and for mitigation to help address neighborhood concerns. But the same people who raise those concerns tend to be the ones who drone on about what we can and cannot afford, while remaining silent as the night about the jobs crisis or the fact that the 1% have hoarded the country’s wealth.

This is the self-defeating irony of HSR critics and opponents. If they cared about improving design, they would lead the charge for more funding. Instead they are convinced that the best chance to kill a project they dislike is to ensure it is starved of funds, which usually actually just produces a project that isn’t designed as well as it ought to be.

But then that assumes HSR critics and NIMBYs actually have any interest in seeing the project built at all, which nine times out of ten, they don’t.

Since the San Diego section is Phase II and therefore unlikely to be built before 2025 at the earliest, there’s time to revisit these questions.

The CHSRA board was shown yesterday an updated presentation and route maps. The presentation acknowledged the considerable opposition to a Rose Canyon alignment, and included the following options for dealing with it:

Some of these proposed alignments, including SR-56, SR-163, and I-8, were suggested by Californians For High Speed Rail in our scoping letter submitted in November. These options seem sensible to study given the need to bring the trains downtown – remember that the trains should go where the riders are – but apparently some of the critics of the Rose Canyon alignment are also criticizing some of the alternatives:

After zipping south along Interstate 15, San Diego County’s planned high-speed rail line could zag west along Highway 56, state rail authorities said this week.

That’s something few people on the east-west corridor know about, San Diego City Councilwoman Sherri Lightner said Thursday. The councilwoman said she didn’t realize it either, until recently.

Highway 56 connects Rancho Penasquitos, Del Mar Mesa, Carmel Valley and other communities to Interstate 5, along sloping terrain dotted with oak trees and upscale subdivisions.

“The thousands of people who live on this corridor need to know if their backyard is going to be considered for a train,” Lightner said Thursday, speaking in front of the California High Speed Rail Authority’s board of directors in downtown San Diego. Lightner’s District 1 includes the 56 corridor….

Lightner said she prefers the I-15 route to Qualcomm, saying it’s the straightest, cheapest option.

Well, now they know. The Authority will indeed be holding public meetings in that community to propose a 56 corridor route, as they will with a 163 route, as they will with an I-8 route.

Unfortunately, Lightner falls into the “straight is best” trap. HSR has to go where the people are. It’s actually more expensive to build it on a straight line, because you’ll get fewer riders and therefore will require more public funding to build. This Tolmach argument that bypassing huge pockets of riders would somehow help HSR is madness, and strikes me as being designed to set HSR up to fail.

Not all San Diego officials were making critical comments. Mayor Jerry Sanders expressed his support for the project:

“We stand firmly behind high-speed rail and will do all that we can to bring it to San Diego,” he said. “It will fuel our economy, help the environment and improve our quality of life.”

Of course, for that to happen, the issue of how HSR gets downtown has to be resolved. The above image indicates the primary options. All of them need to be considered openly and fairly – Lightner’s outright NIMBYism shouldn’t be the determining factor. What are the impacts on costs? On ridership? On travel times?

In assessing this, CHSRA and the community should keep an open mind. They should also not place undue weight on a Qualcomm Stadium station, which strikes me as being pretty much unnecessary. I’ve not been convinced that a University City stop is all that necessary either. What IS necessary is bringing HSR trains downtown, where there is a lot of urban density and destinations that passengers would want to go.

• I had the chance to interview Janice Hahn, LA City Council member and candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 2010. We’ll have the video up on a Calitics soon. One thing I asked her about was high speed rail – she’s shown strong support for HSR recently, and I asked her if she’d be willing to be a statewide advocate for HSR should she be elected, since we seem to lack such an advocate right now. “Absolutely,” she said, and proceeded to make a strong case for why California needs HSR.
• Daniel Krause and I took a quick scoping tour of the proposed HSR route in San Diego, from the Santa Fe Depot north to Rose Canyon and University Towne Center. It seemed clear to us that a downtown station would be the best location for an SD station. Downtown San Diego has become a major regional destination, has a lot of density, and is well-served by the existing mass transit (San Diego Trolley). An airport station, which has a lot of local momentum, would be much less effective from the perspective of potential riders and certainly from the perspective of linking HSR to urban densification (which downtown SD has accomplished quite well). We also took a look at Rose Canyon, where CHSRA proposes an at-grade implementation. BNSF still uses this route for freight service, so track-sharing is an issue. Adding new tracks would mean encroachment on Rose Creek, which is what worries locals. Finally, we drove up to University Towne Center mall, which is an awful TOD location and doesn’t seem like a good place for an HSR station. A possible alternative to Rose Canyon is possible though via a tunnel under UTC, along Nobel, and then south along I-5.
• Scoping comments for the LA-SD route are due Friday, November 20th. From Dan Krause:
  

  It appears that most folks making comments support a downtown San Diego station. Unfortunately, the political momentum in the San Diego area is to eliminate the downtown station in favor of an airport station. While I think there is merit considering a scenario where there would be both a downtown and airport station, it is absolutely necessary for the downtown station to happen for a successful project segment.

  Comments are due for the scoping for the LA-SD section of the project-level eir-eis on Friday November 20th. Please consider sending a note to the following address and let them know a downtown San Diego needs to be preserved.

  Mr. Dan Leavitt, Deputy Director
  California High Speed Rail Authority
  Attn: Los Angeles to San Diego via the Inland Empire Section EIR/EIS
  925 L Street, Suite 1425
  Sacramento, CA 95814
  comments@hsr.ca.gov

Feel free to use this as an open thread for anything HSR-related, whether it involves San Diego or not.