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"It's about the real estate, stupid," a wise rail planner once said. Meaning one can build all the low, medium, or high-speed rail in the world, and it will fail if the interaction between its stations, the rest of the transit network, and the city fabric around it aren't fully considered.
In other words, don't let people who plan airports design your train stations. "The biggest difference with airports is they tend to be inward-oriented, while train stations have to be outward oriented," explained Deike Peters with Soka University of America, during a SPUR talk today on how high-speed rail could do the most to benefit San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.
Peters and others on the panel advocated for looking at successful station designs in Europe, such as in Lille, Munich, Berlin, and Rotterdam, seen in the lead image. One does not see giant parking lots. One does see cafes, walkways, bike infrastructure, basic services, and local and regional transportation all linked together.
A slide from the SPUR presentation showing how to knit your station into the city
Also key is that high-speed rail has to be seen as a larger network, not just a line between Los Angeles and San Francisco (or Berlin and Munch, Paris and Lyon, etc). HSR should be seen as a "an integrator among all the counties of the state, to unify them, activate them, in one statewide rail modernization plan," explained Agustin Arizti of ARUP. In other words, HSR is a way to unite Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak, Los Angeles Metro, and even San Diego's transit lines into a single system. "Nothing in the state has been so far reaching" in connecting all those systems, said Arizti.
That is consistent with Caltrain's electrification efforts and plans to improve ACE, which aim to "blend" or integrate services, through standardized electrification, platform heights, some track sharing, schedule coordination, etc. The chart below shows the core of the HSR project on the left and then overlays it with other planned and existing commuter and regional rail systems that will integrate with it to one extent or another.
The challenge is for the three biggest cities - Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco - to continue to grow their local and regional transit networks and downtown stations in ways that prepare for high-speed rail and the transformation it can bring. "We have to be thinking about track and transit infrastructure - how they are physically going to connect to each other and other modes," said SPUR's Laura Tolkoff. "How do we do these earlier projects [in a way that doesn't] foreclose opportunities?"
San Jose is developing the area around Diridon Station with the Google Development. "San Jose has completed two major planning efforts in recent years, focusing on the station elements, tracks, and the space between them," said Tolkoff. "Many plans are starting to get built."
A rendering of San Jose's future "City View" development. Image: Jay Paul Co.
And what about Los Angeles? Arizti said Los Angeles will be getting high-speed rail faster than many people think. "Very soon, though, after the initial phase begins operation," he explained. When that happens, "Los Angeles will receive hundreds of trains a day connecting it with the rest of the state." He says that a properly integrated HSR system will also serve stations going south to San Diego and Orange County, allowing one-seat rides from all over the Southland to points north.
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