Lighten Up
I am writing to tell you that I find your newspaper stories entirely negative and depressing. I have recently become enamored of Alameda, and picked up two copies of your paper to see what life was like in these parts. According to your version of “life,” I don’t see why anyone would take their life in their hands and actually live there. I suggest that you balance your stories with some of the social successes that I’m sure exist in abundance in your fair locale. Of course, that might mean you might have to actually work. Seek out positive info; you seem to rely entirely on the police blotter. I still plan to spend time in Alameda. And I will look at your newspaper again to see if there is light at the end of the tunnel.
William Carter, Mariposa
Not Yet What It Was
It’s as wonderful as it was unpredictable that the Express is locally owned once more. The plethora of right-wing, “subtly” racist articles aimed at the Express‘ rather progressive audience during the New Times reign was nauseating. And yet. The Express has not (yet) become what it was in the pre-New Times days: a publication that readers actually looked forward to and read with genuine pleasure in the latter part of each week. Why not?
I’m guessing that it involves a combined absence of: the personal ads, so much more creative than those on Craigslist (no doubt gone forever); the edgy, polarizing music, art, and cultural criticism by Gina Arnold and others; a substantial monthly literature section; Lynda Barry’s “Ernie Pook’s Comeex” and Matt Groening’s “Life Is Hell;” and the lead articles of a personal nature, written not necessarily by aspiring journalists so much as by literate citizens whose idiosyncratic articles expressed in their particular ways something of the texture of life in the East Bay.
The old Express did not become great overnight. In 1986 it was still a fairly provincial paper, a junior sibling to the Bay Guardian. It took until the very late ’80s, as I recall, to begin to sizzle. And it can sizzle once again; if you get your bearings and gradually reintroduce some of the elements that could make the paper as great as the community in and for which it is published.
Eric Leimseider, Berkeley
“Who Said Building a Railroad Was Easy?” Feature, 1/9
Myths and Facts
Matthew Green’s article about the California High Speed Rail System and the environmental, political, financial, and other issues swirling around it was generally well done. However it contained several major errors which continue to circulate despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Myth: People traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles would get there faster with a Pacheco HSR alignment than with an Altamont alignment. Fact: According to the HSR EIR/EIS released last July, the trip would be faster via the Altamont alignment.
Myth: The Altamount alignment will be “far more costly” than the Pacheco alignment. Fact: According to the EIR/EIS, the cost of the two alignments, including Altamont’s rail bridge across the Dumbarton Strait, would be about the same.
Myth: There would be “four to six tracks” through the Tri-Valley area. Fact: There would be up to six tracks only at stations. Through most of the area there would be only two passenger rail tracks.
Gerald Cauthen, Oakland
They Cannot Be Trusted
After the CA High Speed Rail Authority’s choice of the Pacheco Pass Route over the Altamont, I can’t in good faith advocate for this project anymore. It’s not just that it will impact wetlands, as the environmentalists say, or even that it is a significantly less useful route (specifically for anyone in Sacto or Stockton who wants to get to the Bay Area). What’s really important is that, by making such a vital decision as the basic route for high speed rail based on political lobbying, rather than honest evaluation of facts, the CAHSRA has demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to manage a $40 billion investment.
Nicholas Kibre, Redwood City
Rezoning the Big Valley
The author of your piece on California’s high-speed rail project, as well as the persons he interviewed, believe that this project will be a high-speed rail system just like the ones they have in Europe. In fact, it will be quite different, much more expensive, and much more questionable environmentally.
The idea was to have a rail system that would take people between San Francisco and Los Angeles in no more time than flying. This would clear the airways, reduce air pollution, and reduce airport congestion. If the state had stuck with this plan, the system could have been built by now.
Instead, Central Valley interests insisted that it also serve the cities in the valley, such as Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield. The line was therefore routed to the east side of the Valley, rather than the west side, which would have been the shortest, cheapest route to Los Angeles. That is why the map you published shows an eastward kink. Property acquisition costs will be much higher there, because land costs are higher, and construction costs will be higher because there is much more infrastructure already in place that must be allowed for.
The author says communities in the Livermore area fought the train because they didn’t want it in their backyards. The San Joaquin Valley cities are dying to have it in their backyards. And that is where it will be. The transportation corridor in the cities will be six tracks wide — two high-speed, two auxiliary passenger, and two freight — and the high-speed trains will travel at 225 miles per hour literally through the backyards of Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield. The noise will be appalling. And there will be 96 trains per day. In Europe the 225-mph trains are out in the countryside, where few residents are around to be bothered.
Once the trains are running, the developers will arrive, armed with their big smiles and their fat checkbooks. Valley counties will be unable to resist the pressure to rezone agricultural land to residential, and the farms of central California will disappear under a sea of gimcrack suburban houses, the residents of which will be able to commute to San Francisco or Los Angeles, thanks to the generous taxpayers of California.
The Valley communities should be a bit more careful about what they ask for. They might get it.
Michael Mahoney, San Francisco
Diesel Would be Fine
In the basic engineering sense, Pacheco Pass is better than Altamont. The high-speed rail line need only reach Bay Area rail network at San Jose. The decision favoring Pacheco Pass is engineering, not politics. That said, I must repeat what I’ve several times urged Gov. Schwarzenegger to consider: line electrification and a top speed of 200-plus mph is unnecessary.
Electrification is at least 30 percent of the project’s capital cost and several years of construction. Eliminating electrification reduces top speed to about 150 mph. However, even with electrification the average top speed is still only about 150 mph.
The most significant environmental benefit of high-speed rail is not electrification. The line will only serve a small fraction of the long-distance travel market. The mostly rural route will suffer little environment impact of standard diesel-electric locomotive emissions.
The real environmental gain is how California’s languishing city centers along the route are afforded an opportunity to guide growth and development and thereby mitigate the far more severe environmental impacts of inner-city travel currently dominated by cars and trucks. All modes of travel (walking, bicycling, and local mass transit) should benefit with the opportunity to guide development.
Adding electrification at some later date is still possible, and the less expensive train sets passed on to other regions in the US struggling to build fast enough high-speed rail.
Art Lewellan, Portland, Oregon
Spend it on BART
While the Express‘ High Speed Rail story provided an accurate enough assessment of the current situation regarding the system’s chances of being approved by the voters, it didn’t dwell long enough for my tastes on what a successful HSR buildout will mean for us here in the East Bay where most Express readers live.
While some space was given to Sierra Club concerns and the response of HSR staff, the economic impact of the system — particularly to Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and all the municipalities in between — has to be dealt with so that bewildered voters can decide whether San Francisco, San Jose, and Silicon Valley should be the sole beneficiaries or whether we, too, might be allowed to share in at least some of the windfall that will certainly come to the Bay Area via increased commerce with the rest of California.
So far, we’ve been told by various authorities, mayors, and MTC insiders that the system has to come over the Pacheco Pass because, Cronkite-like, that’s the way it is. From San Jose to Sunnyvale to Palo Alto and then on to San Francisco, HSR will wend its way entirely on the west side of the Bay, presumably because East Bay folks will be ecstatic to contribute copiously to a bond issue that does nothing for us and everything for West Bay interests.
If, on the other hand (or shore), the Altamont Pass were to be selected, with the train then stopping in, say, Union City, on to the Coliseum, downtown Oakland, and from there over into San Francisco, wouldn’t all those West Bay voters suddenly feel like they’d been shortchanged and left facing a pretty bleak future with no nearby stop to assure what was to have been their hyper-improved connectivity with the rest of the state?
Putting forth this “us or them” choice by MTC is either paranoid or nutzoid: there is a better solution for everyone, but one that is being kept off the table, perhaps in the fond hope that voters will be encouraged enough by the ecological argument for the train (electric, as opposed to the huge amount of fuel any airport hop requires) that we’ll simply go along with the agency line we’re being fed. So let me ask you, what would you do with the $10 billion that it will likely take to bring HSR through the Bay Area, assuming that, of the $40 billion total for the entire system (and that official estimate from the “experts” just has to be another Bay Bridge-like joke), $20 billion is needed to connect the Bay Area with the LA area, and the other $10 billion will be there to build LA’s stations, purchase rights of way, bypass milk stops, build intermodal links to other systems, etc.
If your answer was not to spend on HSR but rather to invest that same $10 billion to upgrade BART, give yourself an “A” for thinking rationally, because there’s no reason whatsoever to think that being able to get anywhere in the Bay Area within 30 minutes — including a Grand Central HSR Station, wherever it might be — isn’t better for everyone, not just some SF banker, say, who needs to pop down to LA so he or she can ink deals selling us all out to foreign interests.
Let’s face it: BART is showing its age and needs a huge infusion of funds to (a) ring the Bay, (b) institute Express service, and (c) become the Transit Village icons of smart growth that our transportation agencies are forever citing but doing way too little about.
If you answered any other way, you’re either a born and bred San Franciscan, a Silicon Valley booster, or Quentin Kopp himself. Let’s hope Matthew Green will use his analyzing skills to probe deeper into the East Bay’s role in bringing HSR into the Bay Area.
Steve Lowe, Oakland
Do the Math
Matthew Green’s parroting of the press releases of the CHSRA does not do your publication proud. There are other points of view that differ sharply with his. Let’s begin with a summary of why this high-speed train project will be such a disaster: It will be a photo-op luxury train for the rich and famous. It will be on TV and make the promoters into celebrities. It will be a bottomless money pit, an endless deficit operation. It will be a continuous drain on the state budget. It will be the “Disneyland Express,” an expensive train for tourists. It will be the largest pork-barrel boondoggle in the history of the United States.
The decade-long construction process itself will generate immense amounts of pollution and greenhouse gases. Although it will take very little vehicle traffic off the roads, it will demand high electric loads just as electricity is to be generated by ever-increasing coal-fired power plants. It will be a money trough for construction companies, consultants, lobbyists, developers, the rail bureaucracy, Parsons Brinkerhoff and their subcontractors, and too many corrupt government employees and politicians. It is destined to be hugely over-budget by several orders of magnitude. All the costs are understated and the productivity and performance overstated.
Tragically, it will not solve the major traffic gridlock problems or urban commuting and transit problems in the Bay Area or Los Angeles Basin. So far very few appear to be arguing effectively that 220-MPH trains running up and down California is really a dumb idea, and would make California look like the state with expensive high-speed trains and cheap low-speed schools. The California High Speed Rail Authority has ignored the well-known and costly lesson that brought the American passenger rail system to its knees: “They thought they were in the railroad business when they should have understood that they were in the transportation business!”
Amtrak, the surviving, vestigial, money-losing passenger rail system, is continuously on the verge of collapse, sustained only by the heart-lung machine of revenues from Congress. In short, building a high-speed people mover using 19th century steel-to-steel technologies in California in the 21st century is taking a giant step backward. In the future, while freight rail will continue to be profitable and make good sense, people-moving requires far more creative and imaginative new technology solutions.
Europe and Japan have it? Sure. But they also have far higher-density urban centers and far shorter routes. Japan has 339 people per square acre. California has 84. Unlike the US, they have traditionally been rail-based cultures for the masses while automobiles were only for the rich. The rail culture and society have evolved together and rail is an integral component of that society. Europe is, to all intents and purposes, one large metropolitan area. The economic history of Europe is one of high taxes and extensive services provided by the government. Rail transit is one of them. The CHSRA promoters love to cite these foreign examples as exemplars, but as actual analogies they are non-compatible: different context, different problem, different solution. The United States is a culture of individualism and autonomy. Passenger mass transit has never been profitable and, after the automobile, never fulfilled its promise.
Here’s a comparison: Remember the futuristic, but now defunct trans-Atlantic Concorde? It was the Mach 2 supersonic high-speed icing on the British Airways and Air France cake. It was also the least cost-effective mode of flying outside of NASA. These trans-Atlantic flights were never more than advertising; the plane was a photogenic promotional icon. Huge development costs. Huge always-in-the-red operating costs. These flying sculptures now reside in museums. We will remember them as expensive money losers that served the “rich-and-famous.” Isn’t there a lesson here? There is a saying in engineering: “Because something is possible doesn’t make it necessary or even desirable.” California’s high-speed train will be like the Orient Express, a photogenic, luxurious promotional icon, hugely expensive, unaffordable to most of us, and underutilized.
Do you think that the “Concorde” analogy is not close enough to the high-speed train? How about the Eurotunnel, the 31-mile long tunnel under the English Channel that fast trains run through? Called the “Chunnel,” this project was projected to carry 16 million passengers per year between London and Paris. After nearly sixteen years, it is carrying 9 million. A ticket goes for about $200. And, they carry freight.
Here is a quotation from a Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Channel Tunnel (2004): “The history of large capital projects suggests that almost invariably capital costs tend to be underestimated (and revenue costs overestimated).” Original costs were projected to be around $7 billion. The most recent number is around $15 billion. The financiers recently “restructured” their loans again. They have not been able to make adequate payments on their debt service, much less the outrageous cost overruns of the construction. Why, for heaven’s sake, would our project here in California be any different? Their over-estimates of riders and underestimates of costs are mind-boggling.
Here are the “facts” as presented by the CHSRA, taken from their web site:
“The transportation and economic consulting firm of Cambridge Systematics (CS) presented new ridership and revenue forecasts for the Authority’s proposed high-speed train system. The CS study, which was prepared for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), shows the potential ridership of the high-speed train system in the range of 86 million to 117 million passengers per year and annual revenue of between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion by the year 2030. These projections exceed the previous forecasts in the Authority’s 2000 Business Plan that projected up to 68 million passengers annually and up to $1.8 billion in annual revenue by 2020. The new projections represent a 72 percent to 104 percent increase in annual ridership and a 110 percent to 170 percent increase in annual revenue.”
$40 billion for capital development? $2.6 to $3.9 billion annual revenue? 86 to 117 million passengers per year? By 2030? That’s 23 years from now. How can they possibly know? Predicting business numbers 23 years out is like predicting the weather 23 years out. There is no other word for these numbers: nonsense. I’m guessing that Cambridge Systematics told their clients exactly what they wanted to hear.
Let’s reconsider their high-speed “facts” with the following. As it happens, the United States already has a high-speed train system that’s operational; it’s the Acela, a part of Amtrak that runs from Washington DC to Boston, about the same distance as from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
This Acela high-speed train had its best year in 2006, with 3.1 million riders, and $403.5 million in revenues. This train serves a regional population of 44 million. That’s greater than California’s total population. Furthermore, the federally subsidized parent rail company, Amtrak, which runs on 21,000 miles of track in the United States, reaching 500 destinations had a record 25.8 million passengers in 2006. The total revenue was $2.2 billion. Shouldn’t all these numbers raise a few eyebrows when reading the CHSRA projected expectations?
Who will be the ridership on the HSR? The same executives, managers, sales staff, and other professionals now flying up and down California. (But only if it’s less expensive and more convenient than flying.) It will NOT be serving the great working majority of the California population. This will NOT be another local commuter mass transit system. It will be a heavily tax-subsidized luxury train for the well-to-do. Overpriced and underused; is there a better reason for not putting a mindless tax burden on our children and their children? Reminder: bond funds are not free money; they still put huge demands on our state budget. Every dollar borrowed will cost $2 dollars in interest over the life of the bond. Bonds, like mortgages, cost interest on the debt, and the principle has to be paid back. Who pays? The promised profits from the train? When you vote for a bond issue, you are voting for a mortgage. Should we be mortgaging even more in this cash-strapped, deficit state? I don’t think so!
It is disingenuous for the CHSRA to seek a bond issue on the ballot in 2008 for $9.95 billion without fully apprising Californians of what the actual ultimate costs will be for this train system. The current cost projections are, as some of the media say, “less than $50 billion.” I would venture to suggest that it would end up somewhat more, perhaps three times as much!
They claim that by 2030 the HSR will carry as many as 117 million passengers per year. And that works out to 321,000 passengers per day, each day of the year. And that works out to three annual trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles for each and every Californian. That’s marketing blather.
A fast intercity “commuter” travel system already exists. It’s called flying. The high-speed train people argue that this new rail system would relieve overburdened airports. In that case, fix those and/or build new ones. Think what the presently projected total costs of $40 billion for this project could do to enhance an air shuttle service among the key cities and to develop it to go more efficiently, faster, and safer, and develop new shuttle air terminals reached by existing and expanded ground systems. The newest jets are far more fuel-efficient and far less polluting.
San Jose’s terminal could continue to expand. Oakland is still underutilized. There are (at least) five commercial air terminals in the LA area. Air commuting could operate even more cost-effectively the way JetBlue and Southwest do now, without help from taxpayers. Air travel will have lower per-mile seat costs than this train and does not require the annual tax subsidies that now sustain Amtrak, and would be required for the high-speed train.
For that matter, think what $40 billion could do to solve the urban and regional transit problems in the northern and southern population centers of California. That is a far higher priority for the economic recovery of this state.
If speed/time benefits are the ostensible reason for these fast trains, air travel is twice as fast and that commuter system is already well established. It takes about one hour from SF to LA by air. The train advocates say their trains will take over one hour longer. Regardless, it’s really about how fast you can get from your house in SF or Sacramento to your desk in LA or San Diego (or vice versa), and that’s a local transit problem at both ends. Does anyone really believe that air transit users will stop flying (at lower ticket costs) and start riding the slower (and higher ticket cost) trains?
A research study by Professors Levinson, Gillen, Kanafani, and Mathieu at the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies (1996) is titled “The Full Cost of Intercity Transportation — A Comparison of High Speed Rail, Air and Highway Transportation in California.” The title and article are long, but the findings can be stated briefly: high-speed rail travel, when you do full-cost accounting, is more expensive than either by air or automobile.
In a report by the US Congressional Budget Office (2003), “The Past and Future of US Passenger Rail Service,” a team of transportation scientists and researchers identify many of the drawbacks for a high-speed train such as proposed for the California north-south corridor.
Also, research shows that no one will get out of their car to ride this train. The fact is that California’s major traffic problems are intra-city and regional, not inter-city. Urban commuter traffic is certainly in crisis, but a 700-mile long train ride in California — no matter how fast — won’t solve it.
Final development costs for the entire high-speed train — you already know this — will NOT be the presently projected $40 to $50 billion. It will be three times as much by the time it’s finished. (Bay Bridge, or Boston “Big Dig,” anyone?) Even after capital construction and its huge debt burden on the state taxpayers, the operating costs will continue — permanently — to require massive subsidies from our tax dollars. Time to ask, who really benefits, such as, who owns property on or along the finally selected right-of-way?
“Passenger rail policy is a classic case in which most of the benefits are concentrated among a few identifiable groups but the costs are borne widely by taxpayers.” (pg. 31, CBO U.S. Rail Study)
Parsons Brinkerhoff of “Big Dig” cost-overrun fame has been identified as the prime contractor and will have their hands in the HSR cornucopia of mega-funds; that is, if they ever materialize. Parsons Brinkerhoff has a history of waste, fraud, and abuse; also corruption and bribery. They continue to be under indictment in Massachusetts. They are to be the lead contractor for the high-speed train. What is wrong with this picture? Watch for those promoters, landowners, lawyers, consultants, developers, contractors, and lobbyists, all standing in line. It’s a boondoggle for the rail bureaucracies and their friends. It’s the 19th-century rail robber barons all over again. Could “pork-barrel” politics be an appropriate term for this? California High Speed Rail is a financial train-wreck waiting to happen. And all California taxpayers will be the victims.
Finally, there is one more way to understand this project. There are many supporters — political leaders — who don’t really care that this project involves a high- speed train. Their real agenda is to pump money into California’s flagging economy, and if the HSR can accumulate private or federal funding support, so much the better. These train promoters see the opportunity for expanded employment and development; they see this not in transportation terms but in economic terms. It’s a terrible way to run an economy, and it will come at the expense of all California taxpayers.
The state is approaching a $14 billion deficit. Some have already said it could go as high as $20 billion. The governor is calling for a fiscal emergency. He also wants to provide a water management program and health care coverage for everyone in the state at a cost of $14 billion.
Boy, here’s a hard decision! Shall we have a $100 billion boondoggle luxury high-speed train for the well-to-do with an initial cost of $10 billion, paid by a mortgage — sorry — bond issue on the ’08 ballot?
Or shall we make sure we have enough drinking water and health care coverage for everybody in California? That’s really a tough one, isn’t it, Judge Kopp?
By the way, will future bond issues in California be like subprime mortgages in the current financial markets? Will the high-speed rail bond issue be like that? And, if that’s the case, wouldn’t we, the taxpayers, have to bail them out?
Martin Engel, Menlo Park
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