How to slow a speeding train

There aren't many easy answers to the environmental crisis facing California, a state with a fossil fuel-dependent culture that's cooking the planet, congesting the freeways and airports, and hastening a tumultuous end to the oil age. But there is one: build a high-speed rail system as soon as possible.

All the project studies indicate this should be a no-brainer. San Diegans could travel to San Francisco in less than three hours at a fraction of the cost of flying. And the system-eventually connecting San Diego, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Sacramento-would generate twice as much money by 2030 as it costs to build. The trains use far less power than planes or cars and can be powered by renewable resources with no emissions. The system would get more than 2 million cars off the road and single-handedly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 12 million metric tons per year.

High-speed rail is a proven green technology that works well everywhere it's been implemented, including most of Europe and Asia. In France, the TGV line from Paris to Lyon connects the country's two most culturally important cities in the same way that Los Angeles would be linked to San Francisco-from one downtown core to the other-allowing for easy day trips and eco-friendly weekend jaunts. Advocates for high-speed rail say it's an essential component of California going green and the only realistic way to meet the ambitious climate change targets approved last year in Assembly Bill 32.

“The next generation of transportation system that this state is going to build is high-speed rail, and we're already at the point of need because our freeways are at capacity, [and] our airways are congested,” said Lori Holt Pfeiler, the mayor of Escondido and chair of the San Diego Association of Governments' (SANDAG) now-defunct High Speed Rail Task Force.

The train's positive impact on productivity, she said, would be enormous. “It just connects the entire state much more seamlessly, so that if I need to have a meeting in Los Angeles or San Francisco, I can get there effortlessly.”

Yet for some strange reason, the idea of high-speed rail has barely clung to life since San Franciscan Quentin Kopp first proposed it more than a decade ago as a member of the state Senate and set the studies in motion, all of which have found the project feasible and beneficial. Today, Kopp, a retired judge, chairs the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), which has fought mightily to move the project forward despite severe underfunding and sometimes faltering political support.

Growing awareness of climate change has increased support for high-speed rail among legislators and in public opinion polls (among Democrats and Republicans), leaving only one major impediment to getting energy-efficient trains traveling the state at 220 mph: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While posing for the April 16 cover of Newsweek with the headline “Save the Planet-or Else” and touting himself around the world as an environmental leader, Schwarzenegger has quietly sought to kill-or at least delay beyond his term-high-speed rail.

The $10 billion bond issue to build the L.A.-to-S.F. section was originally slated for 2004, then pushed back to 2006, then pushed back to 2008 because Schwarzenegger worried it would hinder Proposition 1B, the $20 billion transportation bond measure, which focused mostly on new freeway construction.

Part of the deal to delay the train bond involved giving the CHSRA the money it needed to start ramping up the project, which included $14.3 million last year, the most it has ever received. But rather than give the authority the $103 million that it needs this year to honor contracts, set the final Bay Area alignment, start buying rights-of-way, and complete the engineering work and financing plan, the governor's budget proposed offering the agency just $1.3 million-only about enough to keep the lights on and not fire its 3.5 staffers.

Last week, the Senate and Assembly budget subcommittees voted to augment the governor's proposal by $40 million and $50 million, respectively. Those figures will be reconciled by the Legislature and the governor later this summer.

Asked to comment on the governor's miserly stance, Holt Pfeiler said, “I can't comment on that because I don't understand it. It doesn't make sense to me.”

And now Schwarzenegger is asking the Legislature to once again delay the 2008 bond measure, which would take a two-thirds vote of both houses. “Investing in it now would prevent us from doing bonds for any other purposes,” the governor's spokesperson, Sabrina Lockhart, said, citing prisons, schools and roads as some other priorities for the governor. “It's not cost-effective in the short term.”

The stand baffles environmentalists and other high-speed rail supporters, who say the project is expensive but extremely cost-effective over the long term (although it gets less so the longer the state delays, with about $2 billion tacked on the price tag for every year of delay).

“If the governor would get up on his bully pulpit and talk about high-speed rail to the California people, we would be starting construction in 2009,” Kopp said. “What you have is political fear instead of political will.”

Asked why Schwarzenegger doesn't seem to understand the importance of this issue-or how it relates to his green claims-CHSRA Executive Director Mehdi Morshed can only guess. Some of it is the daunting price tag and long construction schedule and some of it is that the governor tends to defer to the Department of Transportation for his transportation priorities, “and they're in the business of building more roads, so that's what they say we need.”

But mostly, it's a failure to understand the kind of transportation gridlock that's headed California's way if we do nothing. “It's an alternative to meeting the travel demand with more highways and airport expansions,” said Carli Paine, transportation program director with the Transportation and Land Use Coalition. But as Morshed said, “The governor doesn't suffer much on the freeways, and he has his own plane.”

The person doing Schwarzenegger's dirty work on high-speed rail is David Crane, an attorney turned venture capitalist who, although he's a Democrat from San Francisco, is one of the governor's top economic advisers and his newest appointee to the CHSRA board. Despite thick stacks of detailed studies on the project, Crane seems to want to return the project to square one.

“There's never been a comprehensive plan for how you're going to finance this thing,” Crane said, noting that the L.A.-S.F. link is likely to cost far more than the bonds would generate. “The bond itself is a red herring. You could raise the $10 billion now and still not have a high-speed rail.”

Yet supporters of high-speed see the Schwarzenegger-Crane gambit as mostly just a stall tactic. While Crane argues that private sector funding-which could account for about half his estimated $40 billion in total project costs (other documents say around $26 billion)-needs to be nailed down first, supporters say California must firmly commit to the project if it's going to happen.

“Private capital won't be interested unless they know there is a public commitment,” Kopp said.

“You need to take a leap of leadership. When there is something that makes sense in so many ways, you need to have that initial public buy-in,” said Bill Allayaud, legislative director for the Sierra Club California.

Support for that stance also seems to be strong in the Legislature, where Assemblymember Fiona Ma of San Francisco has emerged as the point person on the issue. She even went on a fact-finding mission in France, aboard the TGV train when it reached 357 mph to break the world rail speed record.

"We can't do it until we have that public investment," Ma said, noting that holding detailed financial debates right now is a diversion.

"My assembly caucus is extremely positive about high-speed rail. Right now it's on the ballot for next year, and I think it's going to stay there.

"The governor needs to get on board. This is an important environmental issue," Ma said. "For him not to be behind it doesn't make sense."

Californians also seem to have a hard time fully understanding the project, probably because polls show that only about 10 percent of them have ever used high-speed rail in another country. Yet polls show climate change is a top public concern among Democrats and Republicans.

"Number one, the dollar figure is daunting," Kopp said. "Number two, we're Americans, and we just haven't experienced it."

Yet when the project and its benefits are explained, it doesn't seem to have any opponents outside the Schwarzenegger administration. Morshed said not even Big Oil and Big Auto-two deep-pocketed entities with a history of fighting large-scale transit projects-have opposed high-speed rail. Once people get it, everyone seems to love it.

"The reaction you get almost every time is ‘Why aren't we building it?' That's the thing that is universal, people saying, ‘Why don't we have this? What's wrong with us?'" Morshed said.

For such a massive project-with construction spanning almost the entire state-it's notable that none of the state's major environmental groups have challenged the project's environmental impact reports, which were certified in November 2005. That's largely because the route uses existing transportation corridors and has stops only in urban areas, thus not encouraging sprawl.

"Environmental groups generally don't like big projects, but they like this one," the Sierra Club's Allayaud said. "There aren't a lot of negatives that we're having to balance out, and there are a lot of positives."

After much debate, the SANDAG High Speed Rail Task Force concluded that a coastal route in San Diego County was a nonstarter for environmental reasons and unanimously supported a track along Interstate 15 up to the Inland Empire.

Yet politics being what it is, other obstacles are likely to present themselves. The CHSRA is now setting the route into the Bay Area, either through the Altamont Pass or the Pacheco Pass, both of which have political and environmental concerns.

Also, the first phase of the project would be the route from San Francisco to Anaheim and leave out San Diego and Sacramento, which might turn off some politicians and many voters.

Linda Culp, SANDAG's high-speed rail project manager, said the bullet train is a crucial part of San Diego's future transit plans, and there's no time like the present to get moving.

"It would be nice to have [Schwarzenegger] a little more supportive than he's been," she said. "I would like to see a bigger commitment from the state. The long-term vision for our corridor has to include some other alternatives than what we have now.

"This is a multiyear program, and especially if we do end up being the next leg that they work on, that pushes it out even a little more," Culp said, "so it would be nice to start a little sooner rather than later."

Got something to say? E-mail us at editor@sdcitybeat.com.