kevin_standlee: (High Speed Train)
[personal profile] kevin_standlee
It's a dark day for supporters of high speed rail in California. As reported here and elsewhere, the California High Speed Rail Authority has, by default (allowing the staff recommendation to stand) selected the Pacheco Pass ("Highway 152") alignment from the Central Valley to the Bay Area over the Altamont Pass ("Highway 580") alignment. (If you need a map of the alternatives, have a look at this PDF.) Basically, the CHSRA buckled under to political pressure from South Bay politicians who couldn't bear the thought of such a system being built without all trains being required to stop in San Jose.

I am not complaining just because the proposed Altamont route probably would have come near where I live in Fremont and therefore there's a chance I could have been close to a station. By the time this thing gets built, it seems unlikely I'll be here anyway -- I'll be lucky if I'm still alive by the time trains are actually running! The Altamont route picked up important Central Valley cities that will now be skipped. Oh, the CHSRA talked of other solutions for that area, but those are just talk and will result in no action.

The Altamont might have been longer, but it was easier to build, traversed less sensitive areas, and would have served more people. It apparently is easy for people to forget that high speed rail is more than just moving people between the end-points in the LA and Bay Areas -- it serves intermediate points as well. Just look at the three types of Shinkansen services in Japan: Kodama stopping services that stop most places; Hikari limited services that stop at some stations; and Nozomi super-expresses that make very few stops. All use the same high-speed equipment. (Some people seem to think that the slower trains are using slower equipment, which is not so; they just make more stops.)

An Altamont route would have required either trains splitting/joining to serve both San Francisco and San Jose, or alternate-city service, neither of which would have been that big a deal, I think, except maybe in this country where we mostly have forgotten how to run a railroad.

I was annoyed to hear politicians (or possibly the reporters who reported those politicians) saying things like "we don't need another bridge across the Bay." Yes, the Altamont route requires a bridge across the south end of San Francisco Bay. But there is already a railroad bridge there -- it's just not been used and has been waiting for rebuilding these past twenty years.

Make no mistake: this decision is not about serving the most number of people on a value-for-money basis. It's about the clout of South Bay politicians relative to those in the Central Valley, and to a lesser extent short-sightedness from other politicians, such as my own city, which I understand opposed the routing because of the disruption building a high-speed rail line along the existing rail corridor (which runs just south of where I live) would cause.

If the CHSR rail bond actually makes it to the ballot, I'll still vote for it, but I'm very unhappy with the decision. It's the wrong route, for lots of reasons, and people will curse this decision for many years to come if the system ever does get built.

Date: 2007-12-21 04:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kevin-standlee.livejournal.com
I don't understand why you'd be happier with the suboptimal Pacheco routing. HSR is good for Caltrain no matter which route it takes, and probably better if it draws more money for rehab on the Dumbarton, since Caltrain said (in principle) that it would operate trans-Dumbarton service. (And I sure hope they do so; we do not really need yet another operator with yet another mutually-incompatible fare system.)

Given that CAHSR trains would run to both SJ and SF under any routing, what's the advantage of the Pacheco routing from your point of view?

Date: 2007-12-21 06:52 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trinsf.livejournal.com
I'm honestly exhausted by spending some portion of every day for the past 6 days having people yell at me about trains. (Today, for example, I got 17 minutes of yelling because BART is discontining service to SFO from Millbrae, and evidently that is my fault personally, even though I have absolutely nothing to do with BART, and I better the hell do something about it, because the taxpayers don't pay my salary so that I can give them a big "EFF-YOU". Or something.)

Because of that, I'm not interested in debating this particular issue with you. Maybe we can talk about it in the future sometime.

Date: 2007-12-21 04:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kevin-standlee.livejournal.com
Well, I'm sorry someone did that to you. I wish I could have talked to them as well -- since taxpayers don't pay my salary, I would have told him where to head in. I would have been happy to tell him, "You're complaining to the wrong people. You might as well complain at her about delayed flights at SFO or unpaved roads in Sutter County, because SamTrans has the same amount of responsibility for those as for how BART decides to behave." But of course most people haven't a clue about how anything works, and Lake Merritt is much too far away to go to complain about something, and besides, the Great BART Empire is never going to change its mind about anything based on mere public input.

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