Last week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote to DOT Secretary Ray LaHood regarding a proposed “demonstration” high speed rail run from Los Angeles to San Diego on existing infrastructure. It would have an implementation date of November of this year. Schwarzenneger-Lahood Demo Train First, it’s important to emphasize what the letter does not suggest.  This would [...]

There is a longstanding double standard in California infrastructure planning. Freeway widening projects are simply accepted, even though their costs are enormous, even though they usually fail to improve travel conditions, and even though they have significant impacts on communities. I’ve argued before that in the case I’m most familiar with, the widening of Interstate [...]

Last week we learned that the California High Speed Rail Authority is “strongly considering” a shift in the plans for stations in the San Fernando Valley. Instead of a station at Sylmar and one in downtown Burbank or downtown Glendale, there appears to be increasing momentum for just one station in the Valley, at the [...]

Although the Peninsula Cities Consortium has been the most prominent organization with the initials PCC to be involved in HSR recently, there’s another PCC that could play a key role in HSR for some years to come. That group is the Pacific Coast Collaborative, formed by the governors of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, as [...]