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Dan Walters Needs Our Help on High Speed Rail in California

By Robert Cruickshank

Dan Walters is one of the leading opinion writers in California today. His conservative commentary has filled the pages of the Sacramento Bee for over three decades, and he's regularly syndicated in other local papers across the state. So when he devotes a column to high speed rail it's worth our attention.

Especially when he shows a total lack of understanding of the reasons to build it.

So Dan Walters needs our help in grasping why this project is so necessary to California's future.

After describing some of the very real issues with the overall funding plan, he devotes the second half of his column to an attack on high speed rail:

“The most romantic bullet train vision is the lightning-fast trip from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco. But how many people really want to make that trip each day, and would it represent a marked improvement over the very frequent air travel now available?”

I can anecdotally provide him with about two dozen names of CDP convention attendees who expressed the desire for a high speed train to connect San José to their homes in SoCal. But we can answer this charge much better by explaining why HSR will be not just an attractive - but necessary - transportation option.

First, attractiveness. We dealt with that last week when discussing the 5% increase in Acela market share on the Northeast Corridor. Acela isn't even a true high speed rail system - ours would provide double the speed. LA-SF is one of the busiest air corridors in the country, and if a flawed high speedish train can take nearly half the market share from airlines there, it should suggest it'll work here two.

Second, necessity. Walters assumes that present conditions will last for some time to come. But nowhere in his column are the words peak oil mentioned. Nor does he discuss soaring gas prices. Both will make it difficult and unattractive to continue flying between the two halves of our state, causing either supply disruption or fare increases beyond the ability of most Californians to pay. Walters may not believe in peak oil, even though it is a fact. But the constant rise in oil prices is going to have to eliminate cheap fares sooner or later.

He goes on to try and undermine the CHSRA claims on air travel:

“The High-Speed Rail Commission's environmental impact reports contain some underlying air travel projections that are very difficult to swallow. It would have us believe that air travel demand between Northern and Southern California would nearly double between 2000 and 2010.

“That flies in the face of actual airport traffic figures and seems to conflict with another commission projection that in the absence of building the bullet train, air travel times would increase only fractionally between 2000 and 2020.”

This passage essentially says nothing. Demand may well have increased, but traffic figures have not met demand. Airports are congested - witness LAX or OAK on a weekend. Most California airports lack the capacity to add slots - Orange County is limited to 14 gates, LAX expansion has languished for three decades, SFO and OAK physically cannot expand any further into the bay. If peak oil is not real, then that means our population really will continue to expand - and without new terminals and runways, and in the absence of airplane innovation (most airplane R&D goes to fuel economy, as supersonic transport appears to be a dead concept) air travel times cannot physically increase.

“How about auto travel? The commission projects that driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, seven hours in 1999, would take eight hours by 2020. But as anyone who makes long-distance drives through the state knows, Interstate 5 is very lightly used now, at least outside urban areas.”

This is wrong on two points. First, Interstate 5 is NOT lightly used outside urban areas. Certainly not in the San Joaquin Valley. It is a very heavily used artery. I have on several occasions been stuck in traffic jams in the middle of nowhere in Fresno County on I-5, and on several occasions found it took nine hours to drive from OC to Berkeley.

Second, those urban areas continue to expand. When new development pops up further north on I-5 near Castaic, or in the Tracy area, that adds congestion that a long-distance commuter will encounter on their drive between LA and SF. There never used to be a regular traffic jam on 580 in Livermore, but it's a fact of life now. One used to be able to drive through the Santa Clarita area on the way to LA without encountering much traffic, but that is now difficult.

“California's traffic congestion is an urban condition, and the most likely patrons of high-speed rail wouldn't be long-distance travelers but commuters – a poor use of expensive, sophisticated technology.”

Again, this is simply not true. Interstate 15 between SoCal and Vegas is another example of a non-urban interstate that regularly sees massive traffic jams. And Walters' argument that most users would be commuters is itself flawed - either because it is flat wrong (ridership on Amtrak California's intercity trains has been steadily rising for years now) or because it doesn't take into account the attractiveness of a quicker commute.

“That explains why the most ardent support for bullet train service is to be found in the Central Valley, which is poorly served by airlines and whose main artery, Highway 99, is highly congested with auto and truck traffic.

“Bullet trains would make commuting to and from places like Fresno, Modesto and Bakersfield easier. But wouldn't that merely encourage the sort of sprawl that we are supposed to be discouraging?”

Sprawl is a product of land use laws and cheap oil. We're already losing the cheap oil, which itself is going to stop most sprawl in its tracks. As to land use practices, why should HSR be responsible for the lack of good smart growth planning in the Central Valley? The state ought to step in and subject all local land use planning decisions to AB 32 guidelines on carbon emissions, and localities need to improve farmland protection and infill development rules no matter what HSR's fate is.

Walters argued that: “…even the most ardent advocates have yet to present a persuasive, fact-grounded rationale for spending so much borrowed money on an entirely new transportation system.”

Well, Dan, my blog is intended to be exactly that persuasive, fact-grounded rationale. HSR is necessary to our state's future.

Robert Cruickshank is a historian, activist, and teacher living in Monterey. He is a contributing editor at Calitics.com and works for the Courage Campaign, in addition to teaching political science at Monterey Peninsula College. Currently he is completing his Ph.D. dissertation in US history, on progressive politics in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. A native Californian, he was raised in Orange County and educated at UC Berkeley. This article was originally posted at the California High Speed Rail Blog.

Posted on April 03, 2008

Comments

Walters is right ... but for entirely the wrong reasons.

California (and by extension the US and the world) desperately needs a successful, cost-effective, and high-quality high speed rail system linking its major cities.

Unfortunately the planning process -- at least in Norther California, where I have direct experience -- has been hijacked by rent-seeking corruption, in which the most expensive and least useful and most environmentally unsound route has been "chosen" in order to maximize cost and maximize political payback.

What we have is a situation in which a state-wide program of global importance has been perverted to ensure that it does not compete with a monumentally wasteful but politically juiced boondoggle to build a $8 to $10 billion BART (local subway-type system) line through fields and past an auto factory to the "bustling" City of San Jose.

Instead of routing HSR where it will do the most good for the most Californians -- up the Valley from LA, through Stockton, and approaching the Bay Area via the congested I580 corridor over the Altamont Pass -- the City of San Jose and the BART constructions interests for which it is a front have forced upon us a route which explicitly avoids rail service in the San Jose-Fremont (= BART competition) corridor, avoids the congested and populous Tri-Valley area (Tracy, Livermore, San Ramon, Fremont), maximizes cost, cuts off the northern Central Valley -- including Sacramento!!! -- and runs instead through undeveloped (= spraw-inducing) open space and farmland to the south of Mighty San Jose.

Instead of building infrastructure which could serve all of the state's needs -- including the very valid local and regional issues raised by Walters -- we're set to build something which is little more than a very expensive "flight level 0" airline.

Instead of placing tracks where they could be used by both the highest speed longest distance trains (eg San Jose-Los Angeles, San Francisco-Bakersfield, etc) as well as high-speed regional trains (eg San Francisco-Sacramento, San Jose-Tracy, Sacramento-Fresno, Fremont-San Jose), the politically craven HSR Authority is set to build a line with minimal utility, because it will sit around idle, depreciating (at over $10000/mile/day!) between infrequent airline-replacement-style trains (fewer than 4 trains/hour longest-distance by any reasonable estimated.)

If instead the tracks were built so that the huge extra capacity (modern high speed train tracks and signals can run up to 15 trains per direction per hour) were available for local and regional trains as well we'd really be talking about something that provided a HUGE bang for the buck for Californian taxpayers and for California's economy.

But what we have on the table today is a fiscal black hole which rewards corruption and minimizes the return on the huge investment the public is being hoodwinked into making.

California desperately needs a world-quality high speed passenger rail backbone (in addition to its freeways, airports, freight railroads, ports, etc), but the boondoggle before us isn't it.

Fortunately, it's easy enough to fix, and a few years of delay until such proven failures in transportation policy as the HSR Authority's chair Quentin "BART to Millbrae 30% of riders and 200% of cost" Kopp and board member Rod "San Jose Light Rail the worst performer in the entire world" Diridon have finally exited the stage.

But until wiser heads prevail, this dog needs to be put down.

Posted by: Richard W at April 3, 2008 11:58 AM

Richards Blog comment is right on! This is more of a boondoggle than necessity.

Article quotes and rebuttals:

"Most California airports lack the capacity to add slots - Orange County is limited to 14 gates, LAX expansion has languished for three decades, SFO and OAK physically cannot expand any further into the bay"

LAX expansion hasn't "languished", it is opposed by local residents. The City of LA isn't taking care of the combined citizenry in making LAX expand.

SFO WANTS to expand. It wants to move runway 28R out into the bay to get more separation (i.e. more capacity) combined with runway 28L. But environmentalists oppose this.

Same Bay expansion available for OAK. The Dutch in Holland have reclaimed land from the sea, including that of Sciphold (sp?) airport. Must be some mud sucker the environmetalists think is more important than airports...

“Bullet trains would make commuting to and from places like Fresno, Modesto and Bakersfield easier.

The Central Valley already HAS AMTRAK Train service in its "San Joaquins" connecting Bakersfield to SAC and Oakland/San Fran and points in between. (You can go to/from LA by AMTRAK bus from Bakersfield). These trains are fast, run on time, have good ridership BUT ARE RARELY FULL. Increased need would be solved by adding additional passenger cars to existing trains.

Highway 99 is LESS congested than I-5. It is a 3 lane vice 2 lane highway like I-5 is from the Grapevine to Delano. It could use the 3rd lane added from Delano to near SAC to make it even better. Relatively cheap to do.

Carbon emissions? This website had a recent article on stopping more use of nuclear power. To be "green" this train should be ELECTRIC, yet we already DO NOT have enough power on the grid for an expanding population. One critic of nuclear power said "diesel equipment, which pollutes too much, would be used to build powerplants...". Well, what equipment would be used to build HSR? "Polluting" heavy equipment or picks & shovels, nitro and some imported labor?

Point being the "left/progressives" have some internal dealings to solve before they can move forward with this concept...

Last but not least, tell us HOW you will get a 200MPH train through/over Soledad Canyon and Tehachapi Pass where current track speeds are 20-25MPH? The grades are steep and the curves are sharp (recall the "Tehachapi Loop"?) so going 200MPH will be an engineering nightmare to keep trains from flying off the tracks and cost BIG-BIG BUCKS. Don't forget the San Andreas Fault in these locations either...

Reason usually triumphs over emotion. Lets hope it does this time too or the taxpayers will get a real soaking...

Posted by: Jay Gould at April 3, 2008 03:00 PM

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