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.

On the agenda are discussions of several Alternatives Analyses – LA to Palmdale, LA to Anaheim, and LA to San Diego. You can find links to those reports here. Some items of note:

• LA to Palmdale: The Authority is now discussing a bored tunnel under Elysian Park, avoiding the Rio de Los Angeles Park area entirely by going on the opposite side of the LA River. A station at the Burbank Metrolink stop and at Pacoima Wash are not recommended to be carried forward.

• LA to Anaheim: No draft EIR is expected until fall 2012. 2011 will be spent meeting with the communities along the route. There is a proposal to trench the tracks near the Buena Park Metrolink station.

• LA to San Diego: Alignments along I-10 and SR 60 are proposed to be carried forward, at least as far as the 605 freeway. East of there, alignments along Holt Avenue and 1st/State streets will be considered for reaching Ontario Airport. From there, two I-215 alignments (one via San Bernardino and one via I-10, bypassing San Bernardino but potentially having a station in the Colton area) and an I-15 alignment will be carried forward. From there to San Diego, two alternatives – LOSSAN (via Rose Canyon or a tunnel under University City) and SR 163/I-8 – are proposed to bring the tracks from the I-15 corridor to the San Diego airport.

I don’t think any of these are particularly noteworthy developments, except maybe the Elysian Park tunnel concept.

Anyone here going to be at the meeting? It starts at 9AM.

In 1982, the PBS show NOVA did an episode titled “Tracking the Supertrains.” It’s very dated, but also quite interesting – includes an interview with the Las Vegas mayor about maglev from SoCal to Vegas. The segment below is focused on the LA-SD HSR project that would replace the San Diegans (rebranded in 2000 as the Pacific Surfliner), the plan that Governor Brown embraced:

Segment 6 was quite critical of the “California shinkansen” plan, and may have played a role in the later demise of the plan (more about that below) but it’s still worth watching for the history lesson.

One might be tempted to snicker at how little of this ever came to pass. But my reaction is one of sadness. Even as late as 1982 there was a lot of interest and research in maglev and high speed trains in the US, as memories of the 1970s energy crisis remained strong. But Reagan got elected, oil prices crashed, and transportation budgets were slashed. The US shackled itself to the automobile, and by the 2000s, when the energy crisis returned for good, we had thirty years of catching up to do.

On the LA-SD route, the expected congestion has materialized and a trip between the two city centers by car typically takes much longer than the 2 hours it would take on an open freeway. We spent billions of dollars to widen I-5 in Orange County (subsidized by sales tax dollars) in the 1990s and might spend at least $4 billion to widen I-5 in San Diego County. But had Brown’s plan been sustained – the legislature began criticizing it in 1983 after anti-HSR cities like Tustin (where I was born and raised) pledged to bitterly fight it and the American High Speed Rail Corporation folded soon thereafter – then we would have been much further along in our efforts to develop sustainable intercity passenger rail transportation.

It is fitting that California, which approved the high speed rail plan in November 2008, is about to bring back to the governor’s office the one political leader we’ve ever had who was willing to be honest about – and do something about – our state’s energy and transportation crisis. We already wasted 30 years dithering on the high speed rail project, although since the 1990s that time has been used to craft a solid and sensible plan to finally build it. Now that we’re close to breaking ground on the first segment, we need to resist and reject the voices that would have us waste another 30 years, and instead move ahead with the California high speed rail project with all deliberate speed.

So why isn’t our HSR project fully funded? Because for the last 30 years, a political decision was made to use that wealth to let the rich get richer, while infrastructure needs are neglected (along with social services, job creation, and wage growth for everyone but the top 5%). Money that should be helping build the HSR project is instead sitting in the bank accounts and on the asset books of people living in Pebble Beach, Bel Air, and Atherton. It sits in the accounts of the nation’s largest corporations, who are hoarding at least $1.8 trillion in cash, money that should instead be used by government to meet the needs of the jobless and the distressed, in part by building the infrastructure that will fuel further economic growth.

This political imperative – to bleed the nation dry in order to give more wealth to those who already have plenty of it – is a major reason why the Transportation Bill reauthorization, with $50 billion for high speed rail, and the National Infrastructure Bank, which would help fund mass transit projects at a net surplus to the federal government, are stalled in Congress despite the support of the Obama Administration. A conservative working majority of Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans has made sure that infrastructure bills will not even be considered before the November election, but an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is something this conservative working majority is demanding with increasing success.

So the long “experiment” in growing the American economy by giving money and, increasingly, power to the plutocrats instead of attenting to our infrastructure needs, continues. One would think that the current recession would prove this “experiment” to be a colossal failure, but the defenders of plutocracy have a response for everything, and in this case, their argument is that the problem isn’t too much tax cuts, it’s that there was too much government spending, including on infrastructure.

That’s the current political environment in which the California High Speed Rail project is being developed. This state and this country have more than enough money to build it entirely ourselves, at public expense, and with low fares designed to attract as many riders as the system can handle. But instead our leaders prefer to give that money to the rich, and so we have to look elsewhere for the remaining funding.

This is where China, Japan, and maybe even Korea come in. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trip last week resulted in pledges from China and Japan to help fund the HSR project. The details – including just how much they’ll offer – remain to be worked out. But it’s a solid vote of confidence in California’s HSR system, and a strong rebuke to those who have repeatedly claimed that the proposal doesn’t make financial sense. Neither China nor Japan are in any position to make a reckless financial decision, especially when it comes to billions of dollars of loans to an infrastructure project.

The good, then, is that foreign countries are confident in our HSR system and are willing to help fund it. Because HSR is so vital to our state’s future prosperity – particularly in meeting our desperate need for transportation systems that aren’t dependent on oil – it really doesn’t matter where the money comes from. The bad is that we shouldn’t have to turn to any other country for these funds, and the fact that we may have to do so is a sign of just how little our Congressional representatives seem to care for our infrastructure needs.

Of course, if one espouses an ideology that refuses to use public funds for infrastructure so that you can continue the “experiment” in giving the nation’s wealth to those who already have it, in the vain hope that they’ll use it to provide the kind of infrastructure and broadly shared economic prosperity we enjoyed in the mid-20th century, then you can’t really criticize the possibility that some of the HSR project’s funding will come from abroad.

That is, unless you write editorials for the train-hating San Diego Union-Tribune.

Today’s SD U-T editorial page included an attack on the possibility of international funding for the HSR project. After making a number of inaccurate claims about everything from HSR ticket prices (nothing has been decided yet) to whether taxpayer subsidies will be needed for the system (they won’t be), the editorial attacks the proposed international funding:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent trade trip to Asia was billed as being partly about generating interest from Asian firms in bidding on high-speed rail construction contracts. Instead, it seems to have also been about generating interest in investing in the project not from private entrepreneurs but from foreign governments. Wire services reported that Chinese rail officials said they were prepared to design, finance and build the entire project, while Japanese officials indicated a willingness to loan California tens of billions of dollars to make the project viable.

Huh? Where did this come from? Yes, Proposition 1A does say the CHRSA would not be “limited to (seeking) federal funds, funds from revenue bonds, and local funds” to augment the $9.95 billion in bond money. But where it was suggested – or even hinted – that Beijing and Tokyo were what the rail authority had in mind?

Who cares! Shouldn’t it be seen as a positive thing that state leaders are aggressively seeking out HSR funding from willing participants? This is a lame attempt at “gotcha” journalism. If anti-government types like the San Diego Union-Tribune editors are going to deny the public the ability to fund this project through public funds, then they have no place in criticizing it when elected officials go find that money.

If China wants to give California a high-speed rail system and indefinitely subsidize its operation, that’s all well and good. But who really thinks such a tidy, no-lose arrangement is in the offing? And if the offer is serious, a huge culture clash looms – at the least. A legislative transportation consultant told us last week of Chinese officials’ surprise to learn that Schwarzenegger couldn’t unilaterally approve a Sacramento-Beijing high-speed-rail partnership. They also appear unaware he will be governor for only a few more months.

Here again the SD U-T is just attacking the project for its own sake, based on nothing more than their own speculation. If it is true that Chinese officials lacked information about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role – and I would be very surprised if they did; Chinese government officials are not idiots – then that just means the details of a possible loan, which will have to be worked out anyway, will take those matters into consideration.

The U-T is well known for its anti-train attitude, even though many of their readers ride trains all the time – from the SD Trolley to the Coaster commuter rail to the popular Pacific Surfliners operated by Amtrak California. The U-T doesn’t appear to have any concern for the state’s transportation problems or our dependence on oil, nor much understanding of the popularity of the region’s passenger rail systems. If they did, they would be not only more welcoming of the proposals for international funding for HSR, but more willing to use our own nation’s wealth to build infrastructure, just as we did in the 1950s and 1960s, instead of giving that wealth to those who already have it while our other priorities continue to be neglected.

Schwarzenneger-Lahood Demo Train

First, it’s important to emphasize what the letter does not suggest.  This would not be regular service but a demonstration run only. This is due to the fact that 50% of the Los Angeles to San Diego corridor is single-tracked and the signaling system is not capable of controlling trains past 90mph.  The current number of trains can barely be squeezed through the corridor on time, let alone a true bullet train.  The 79/90 mph speed limit will be dealt with when Positive Train Control (PTC) is implemented in the next few years.

However, a one day demonstration run from Los Angeles to San Diego and back would be a godsend.  It would involve the following quite doable steps:

• At least a half-day “take over” of the railroad on a Saturday or Sunday.  Regular passenger and freight train movement would be suspended or at least greatly curtailed.
• Importation of a true HSR consist and at least two or three diesel locomotives to quickly accelerate the demo train to about 120 mph (probably the maximum “waiver” speed of Amtrak’s diesel-electric locomotives).
• “One day” FRA demonstration waivers that would allow the demo train, which would “own” the railroad, to push the train to the maximum speeds allowable by the track geometry and the diesel locomotives push-pulling it.

Such a train could possibly make the non-stop 128 mile long trip in around an hour and 15 minutes. The current Amtrak Pacific Surfliner’s scheduled time is about two hours and 50 minutes.

(Take note that the Los Angeles to Fullerton right-of-way is owned by BNSF and would thus require their cooperation. It’s not to be taken for granted, of course. However, BNSF CEO Matt Rose has been a cheerleader of public HSR investment and their company has been cooperating with HSR on infrastructure planning thus far.)

The benefits of the “demo” train would be numerous. For too many people, despite it’s presence in countries as diverse as France, Spain, and China, HSR is still “vaporware” whose benefits they have a hard time imagining. This “demo” train would be “facts on the ground” near their own homes. The earned media generated by this event would have statewide and nationwide scope. If the event is properly promoted it has the potential to be a public relations game changer.

Which means that if the proposed LA to SD run is successful, the same train should do a demo run from San Jose to San Francisco.  Ditto for the Amtrak San Joaquin corridor from Bakersfield to Martinez.  It would be the first time that anything like true HSR, albeit in demonstration form, has pulled into any American train platform.

Let’s hope that the Governor’s office, the FRA, Amtrak, and the Authority can get this done.

Few Californians bat an eye at the multibillion dollar costs of these freeway projects But when it comes to high speed rail, every dollar is scrutinzed, every projected rider is closely examined, any uncertainty, any problem, any discrepancy is seen as a sign the project is a horrible wasteful boondoggle that will render the Peninsula uninhabitable and destroy California’s budget and economy.

The hypocrisy stems not from any hard numbers or facts, but from a basic bias. Many Californians are trained to see freeways as necessary – so vital that we don’t even need to ask any basic questions about their value.

Well, it’s time we started. There’s a huge freeway widening project being proposed in San Diego County that strikes me as a true boondoggle – a colossal waste of money that will never be recovered, throwing good money after bad on a facility that increases our dependence on oil, while alternatives can be funded for a fraction of the cost.

The project is a massive six-lane widening of Interstate 5 on a nearly 20-mile stretch between Oceanside and La Jolla. Much of this would overlay a major widening project just north of the 5/805 “Merge” that was done about 10 years ago. Here’s the overview:

Interstate 5 would grow by as many as six lanes — including a roadway-within-a-roadway for car pools, buses and toll-paying solo drivers — under a plan crafted by transportation officials.

Four lanes would be built along the middle of the freeway between La Jolla Village Drive and north Oceanside, similar to the express-lane network on Interstate 15. Two conventional lanes could be added to the regular segment of the coastal freeway as well.

Caltrans plans to release an environmental study on the project as soon as late June and then stage a series of public hearings. Cost estimates for the expansion range from $3.3 billion to $4.5 billion.

The size and cost of this project is jaw-dropping. It would resemble the massive reconstruction of Interstate 5 done in Orange County, started in 1989 and is nearing completion over 20 years later in Buena Park near the LA/OC line. Caltrans is confident that the ridership is there:

Daily traffic on the 30-mile stretch between San Diego and Oceanside averages 700,000 vehicles, from short hops to long-distance commutes. Caltrans expects that figure to swell to a million cars by 2030.

Has anyone examined these projections? Has Senator Alan Lowenthal determined whether they pass his smell test? Has Elizabeth Alexis performed her in-depth econometric analysis? Has the State Auditor determined whether there’s enough funding, and if not, when can we expect her breathless “oh my god the sky is falling this project is DOOOOOOMED!!!” report on the San Diego County I-5 boondoggle?

I’m not asking those questions to be snarky. For example, this proposal is not fully funded:

Half the money needed for construction would come from TransNet sales tax revenue. SANDAG wants to secure the rest from state and federal sources.

The exact cost hinges on the number of lanes built and the layout. Caltrans officials say the soon-to-be-released environmental study will lay out four options.

This is very similar to the situation facing HSR. It’s why the State Auditor published her misleading and flawed report saying the HSR project has a funding problem. So either we can expect her to publish a similar report slamming this proposal, or we’re going to have to ask some very tough and uncomfortable questions of the State Auditor about the biases that went into the HSR report.

As for Sen. Lowenthal, if Caltrans is going to ask the state to fund this, surely he would want to ensure that the numbers pan out. After all, he’s demanding the same of the HSR project.

Further, the massive cost is intended to be paid partly through tolls, and that is looking shaky:

Recent U.S. Census figures show that the percentage of commuters in the county who carpool or vanpool has dropped to 13 percent from 15 percent in 2000. SANDAG officials have reported that traffic counts on I-15, including the FasTrak lanes, have dipped during the recession — a trend that other toll road operators have also noted.

The drop in traffic has raised questions about whether toll roads or high-occupancy lanes are worth building, but transportation planners say they will eventually pay off, once the economy fully rebounds.

Whereas we have a huge pile of evidence from around the world showing HSR meets its ridership projects and pays its own operating costs, we also have plenty of evidence from here in California indicating that tolling doesn’t quite work as a method of funding new lanes. In the 1990s a private contractor built toll carpool lanes in the 91 freeway’s most heavily trafficked portion, between the 55 freeway in Anaheim and the 71 freeway in Corona. If you’ve ever been caught in traffic here, you know this is one of the epic traffic jams in all California. But the 91 toll lanes failed to turn a profit, and the Orange County Transportation Authority had to bail them out and take over the system. The other toll roads in Orange County aren’t faring much better.

Surely you’d think those experiences would lead the HSR critics to flock to the I-5 project and run their fine-toothed combs through the project. So far, I’m not seeing that happen. Why not?

The answer ought to be obvious. It’s not about the accuracy of ridership projections, or about finances, or about benefit to the community at all. HSR is being attacked because people cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that California cannot have broadly shared economic prosperity in the 21st century without fast passenger trains. HSR has much, much less impact on its communities than this insane freeway project will have, but HSR is the one getting all the controversy while this wacko boondoggle skates on by.

The difference is that HSR critics see freeways as perfectly normal and legitimate things, and cannot imagine a world where they are not the primary means of travel. They see passenger rail as optional, as a toy, as a gimmick, as something designed by people who, for whatever unknown reason, are bent on destroying their communities.

It’s not about the numbers at all. It’s about an unwillingness to part with preconceived notions.

Importantly, there is an alternative to this costly I-5 project. And it’s passenger rail:

“Six new freeway lanes?” San Diego Councilman Todd Gloria wrote on Twitter. “No thanks. Prefer $ be used to extend trolley & bike lanes.” …

The San Diego Association of Governments and other agencies are also talking about major improvements to the coastal rail line. Transit officials continue to seek federal funds to complete the construction of a second set of tracks and on related improvements. The estimated cost: $1.3 billion.

Only parts of the route are currently double-tracked — and that severely inhibits operations. Once a second rail line is complete, that opens the door to more Amtrak and Coaster commuter train runs, officials say.

Other local residents understand the need for building light rail and commuter rail instead of spending billions more on yet another I-5 widening project:

That is just amazing. Three years after widening Interstate 5 to be the widest roadway in America we need to do it again? I don’t think so.

Really, with thousands of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico every day, with two wars stemming directly from the “need” for more oil, with nuclear problems in the Mideast because of, yes, oil, with global warming threatening in particular those on the immediate coastline, it’s still “let’s build more roadway for billions of dollars”?

Let’s get off this oil dependency. Come on, people, build a light rail-based system that works to move us, not more cement.

DOUGLAS LAPPI
Del Mar

Another resident, this time in Solana Beach, had a similar take back in January when this project first arose:

It is hard to know where to begin the objections that many of us have to both of these proposed projects, but let me try:

1) You cannot escape gridlock by “pouring more concrete.” Just look at Los Angeles.

2) Residents living near the present freeway are assaulted by noise and air pollution that I believe violates present California and U.S. EPA limits.

3) Jack Hegenauer and the Clean and Green team of Solana Beach have made the assessment that 60 percent of the greenhouse gases generated in our city come from traffic on I-5, which Caltrans wants to expand by 50 percent, in violation of state law AB232.

4) Twenty years of construction in the North County will result in 20 years of gridlock: Is this all for the sake of our descendants?

5) Kevin Costner had it right, “If you build it, they will come!” Every freeway expansion in world history has led to increases of traffic, leaving things no better off.

Please join with me, with members of PLAGUE and all clear-thinking citizens in opposing this grotesque expansion of our freeways. It is time to get smarter about transportation and not rely on thinking from the 1950s.

If $1.3 billion were spent on double-tracking the Coaster, and $1.2 billion spent on extending the SD Trolley to UCSD and University Towne Centre, you’d be able to take a LOT of traffic off of I-5 and provide capacity to handle new growth without having to spend $3 to $4 billion on this freeway widening project.

Most importantly, you’d be spending money on building a transportation system that reduces, not increases, our dependence on oil. A system that can be powered by renewable energy (if you electrified the Coaster track, that is) and reduce pollution and carbon emissions. Finally, if you add in HSR along the I-15 corridor to downtown SD, you provide yet another option for alternative travel on the key north-south corridors in San Diego County.

It’s good to see that these questions are being asked by people in San Diego County. But where are the rest of the transportation critics? Those who are so quick to interrogate the HSR project ought to be right there on Caltrans about this true boondoggle. Or else we might start wondering what’s really driving their unfair and often unwarranted criticism of HSR.

High-speed rail representatives are strongly considering a stop near Bob Hope Airport as the sole San Fernando Valley station for the planned 800-mile system, local officials said.

Rail representatives early this year expressed a preference for station options in Burbank along the San Fernando Road corridor, either in the city’s downtown area or near Glendale, on Alameda Avenue. But after hearing public concerns about connectivity to the airport, the authority is instead considering a stop near Bob Hope, at Hollywood Way…

Authority representatives have also reacted to local concerns about station locations with a plan to choose one stop in the San Fernando Valley, rather than two, as was previously discussed, said Jano Baghdanian, Glendale’s traffic and transportation administrator.

Representatives have indicated that they would choose a stop between sites either in San Fernando or Slymar, or in Burbank, rather than placing two stops in the valley, officials said.

This is in response to the city of Burbank’s request that an airport stop be studied. You can see the proposed airport stop, and the two downtown stops that had been under discussion in previous months, on the map below:

View Burbank HSR in a larger map

The questions I asked in March still apply:

1. Is it better to have a station near downtown Burbank or near Burbank Airport? Downtown Burbank has some density, and could have more in the future, but is it a more compelling source of riders than the nearby airport? Is it worth moving the station nearer the airport at the expense of downtown?

2. Is Burbank Airport equipped to handle the ridership that HSR might bring? Burbank is already a popular option for people flying to points in downtown LA and nearby areas, as it’s easier to get there from Burbank than LAX. HSR service would be a huge advantage for Burbank, as LAX can never hope to have service to downtown LA as fast as an HSR link from Burbank. But Burbank isn’t a large airport and may not be able to handle a big increase in passengers. Then again, if HSR succeeds in grabbing most of the market share of the LA-SF corridor, then that would free some space at Burbank.

3. What happens to connections to Metrolink and Amtrak? Since the Burbank station is so close to Union Station, this might not be as big an issue. It would mean that people wanting to get to HSR from points westward on Metrolink (currently as far as Moorpark) and Amtrak (as far as Santa Barbara, maybe even San Luis Obispo) would have to go all the way to Union Station to transfer to a northbound HSR train.

The report in the Burbank Leader doesn’t indicate any answers to those questions. But it does suggest that Burbank officials seem to think, bizarrely, that downtown would be better off without HSR than with it:

The new options could mean that Burbank may not have a stop at all, a change that city officials may not consider a major loss because of the accompanying traffic and infrastructural impacts associated with adding another transportation hub to the area, Kriske said.

“I think its probably still mixed,” Kriske said. “I think there’s probably still some sentiment to question whether we want it at all even with the airport still being an option.”

I’m not sure I buy this. An HSR stop would bring a lot of travelers, commuters, and others to Burbank. It would enable Burbank to diversify its downtown, potentially landing conference facilities or other destinations that could leverage the HSR station. Burbank seems to think that the late 20th century conditions will persist indefinitely, which as we all know isn’t going to happen. Downtown Burbank will eventually regret moving the HSR station to the airport, although the city as a whole might not mind it if the airport station were to become a new hub of its own (and it’s difficult to see how that happens; TOD and airports aren’t exactly a great mix).

But this does raise an intriguing possibility. If the San Fernando Valley loses a station, that opens up a possibility for a new station somewhere else. The most likely possibility might well be Visalia/Hanford, which has been clamoring for a station for some time. It could also enable a two-station solution in central San Diego, with one at their airport (Lindbergh Field) and another downtown.

On the other hand, the San Fernando Valley, with a population of 1.76 million, would seem capable of supporting two stations. Without a Sylmar station, residents in the Santa Clarita area would be left without a convenient HSR station. Presumably a station could be added there later, although AB 3034 would have to be modified.

Without having taken a closer look at this proposal, it would seem to me that there needs to be a regional approach to the station location decision. It can’t just be driven by Burbank. The cities of Los Angeles, Glendale, Santa Clarita, and even little San Fernando, need to come together to discuss the region’s needs and consider the HSR station location in context of regional planning priorities.

One of the PCC’s top priorities is high speed rail:

For the Pacific Coastal region to remain competitive, we need transportation systems that will facilitate the movement of people and goods north to south while reducing the number of vehicles on our highways. Rail, particularly high speed rail, can deliver significant benefits to the region including advancing climate change goals, energy conservation, congestion reduction, and job creation for the citizens of the region.

And HSR came up again at the PCC meeting in Vancouver, as Arnold Schwarzenegger included it in his remarks:

Schwarzenegger said it’s his intention to continue building the hydrogen highway all the way up to Canada. He also said that developing a high-speed rail from San Diego all the way to Vancouver is crucial. “It makes no sense for our trains to move at the same speed they did one-hundred years ago. Economic power is how fast you move people and goods around.”

We can dismiss this “hydrogen highway” concept Arnold has been pushing for a few years now as something that is indeed unlikely to materialize. High speed rail IS going to happen, both in California and in the Pacific Northwest, albeit at slower speeds than what we’re planning.

Of course, HSR may not link Vancouver, BC to San Diego for quite some time. That’s because, as anyone who has driven Interstate 5 or taken Amtrak’s Coast Starlight between Redding and Eugene knows, there’s a rather substantial set of mountains between the two HSR corridors. While I would be a regular user of HSR service between California and the Pacific Northwest, it isn’t exactly the highest priority. The cost of construction will remain prohibitive for some time to come.

That being the case, what’s the point to Governor Schwarzenegger even talking about border-to-border HSR? It helps to build support for HSR as a regional project, a regional priority. Instead of California, Oregon, and Washington being out for themselves, they can combine forces to lobby for federal funding for their HSR projects as part of a regional development strategy. This is exactly the approach that has been taken in the Midwest, and it was rewarded last month with over $2 billion in funding for HSR projects in that region.

Further, since Vancouver, BC is part of the greater Pacific Northwest economic region, it makes sense to include them in a regional HSR plan. The Vancouver Olympics have led to a second daily Amtrak Cascades roundtrip from Seattle to Vancouver, and that could be the basis for a true HSR link to connect the cities that are only 150 miles apart.

For Pacific Coast HSR to become a reality, Governor Schwarzenegger will have to do more than just give speeches about it. HSR could be Arnold’s only positive legacy to Californians, since his governorship has been a complete and even catastrophic failure in virtually every other respect. In 2010 he needs to work to ensure that HSR gets shepherded through the planning and funding process so that when he hands the executive office off to his successor in January 2011, HSR will be on a solid path to success.

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.

Wish I had more to offer you all in terms of meeting coverage, but use this as an open thread for items related to the board meeting or anything else HSR-related.