This week's StreetSmart brings in not one, but two experts on California High-Speed Rail.
Joining me are Adriana Rizzo and Roger Rudick.
Adriana Rizzo is with Californians for Electric Rail, a non-profit advocacy group that is "dedicated to connecting transit advocates and railfans with environmentalists, unions, good government advocates, and other supporters of environmentally-friendly, union-made, cost-effective rail."
Roger, hopefully you know.
Also, a quick programming note. These first three episodes were a sort of "proof of concept" and feature a quartet of people that are very much in the Streetsblog family (a board member, a past board chair, an editor and a three-time contributor). We're using these episodes to get listed on the podcast distributors including itunes and to book more guests. We'll be on hiatus for a week or so and we'll be back with a weekly schedule of podcasts.
If you have any ideas for future podcasts, either topics or guests, feel free to reach out to damien@streetsblog.org.
Past Episodes:
"Demystifying the CTC with Jeanie Ward-Waller," here.
"State of Transit Funding in California with Juan Matute," here.
Transcript:
Damien Newton
So as mentioned in the pre-show, I'm Damian Newton. I'm here with Roger Rudick of Streetsblog San Francisco and Adriana Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail. I'm going to note here, we are recording the audio, but I can see them and they both just waved to me.
So hi.
Roger Rudick
Hi.
Adriana Rizzo
Hello.
Damien
So today we are talking about high-speed rail. It's a big issue that we cover a lot at Streetsblog California. Roger's with us, even though he's the Streetsblog San Francisco editor, because he's done a lot of that coverage over the years. But let's just start off with the basics.
In some of the pieces that I was working on earlier this week, I saw Republicans saying, not a single track has been laid yet. But that's not true, if I understand….
Roger
I mean the Caltrain electrification project and the upgrades to Caltrain did involve adding some tracks here and there.
Adriana
You could actually ride a high-speed rail already if you ride electric Caltrain, I would argue.
Roger
Yeah.
Adriana
That's one of the early success stories of California high-speed rail.
Roger
That's a totally valid argument, yeah.
Adriana
They've already had a 54% increase in ridership, you know a lot better service. They're saving money on diesel fuel. They're paying less for energy than they were before that. So, caltrain electrification wouldn't have happened without that funding from California high-speed rail. That's a huge success story already, but second of all construction has been underway on 119 miles of right of way in the Central Valley between a little north of Madera and Turlock.
So, that is the majority, but not quite all of the initial operating segment, which will be from Merced to Bakersfield. And they've been building dozens of bridges, a viaduct…a lot of intense construction on this project. And they've actually recently switched to the track laying phase a couple of weeks ago.
Roger
I think one of the things the Republicans or the people making those arguments, so I'll assume they're being genuine about it, failed to understand is: what Adriana was just describing is the hard part. Building those viaducts, clearing the right-of-way. One of the things that you don't see, unless you're specifically looking for it, is there are just you know mile after mile after mile of area that's been acquired, graded, and tamped down and just made ready for tracks.
So you know now they've established the railhead, which is just the terminology for where they're going to start, you know building the tracks and alerting them.
After that, it's basically a giant robot that puts the tracks down. And then when that's done, another robot goes through and starts putting up electrification poles. I mean, there's a lot of humans involved, obviously, but a lot of this is automated, and it's sort of the easier part. So, to say they haven't laid tracks is just not true in a literal sense. But the major track work is just getting underway, and it's also not the major challenge here.
Adriana
If you travel through the Central Valley, you will see there's quite a lot of structures that involve heavy engineering. Sometimes people say, “Oh, why do they have to build all that stuff? It's flat?”
Well, it's like there's all of these rivers and other features and roads and other features that you need to do to build some kind of structure to run a train over.
The Central Valley segment is going to be entirely grade separated, which is really important if you want to actually run a train at 200 miles an hour. If you're running it, if it's not grade separated, you get cars or freight trains crossing into your right of way. That's really dangerous to have something going at 200 miles an hour. They might not be able to stop in time.
All of this stuff that they're building is really important for having a grade-separated route that can actually run at 200 miles an hour. You can contrast that with Brightline West, which gets a lot of praise for being cheaper, allegedly, than California high-speed rail. That's running in a freeway median.
With the grades that they have on that Freeway median, they are not going to be able to run at maximum speed for that entire time between LA and Vegas. And there are a lot of disadvantages to not doing it the way you know California is doing it.
Roger
I think it's important to point out they've also made a lot of comparisons to the original Brightline in Florida and talked about how much cheaper that supposedly is. But Brightline in Florida, while it seems like it's a great service, is not high-speed rail.
They took a diesel locomotive, coupled it to some train cars, and you know the diesel has a nice fancy front and nice paint and everything, and it looks like a beautiful train…but It's not high-speed rail. It's just not going really much faster than the stuff that we already run in the state. So those cost comparisons are kind of absurd. And, as Adriana pointed out, that you Bright Line West, they're building in the middle of a freeway. So the grade separations and everything are done already, which, as I mentioned, are the hard part.
I'm weird about this, but I like to travel on the slower trains sometimes, so I do take Amtrak to the Central Valley pretty regularly.
Adriana
Me too.
Roger
And you see a whole lot of the construction out the windows of the high-speed rail project. And there's actually points where you see these big viaducts that go over the Amtrak tracks, because you've got to have everything separated.
Roger
There just can't be anything in the way. And when you go, as I have, on true high-speed sets and or systems in Europe…I've been on the one in France…I've been through the tunnel more times than I can remember. I've been on high speed rail in Germany and Belgium and in Japan…
There's no interference with the tracks. The tracks are fenced in. They're isolated. There's no grade crossings. And to be fair to the High Speed Rail Authority, a hell of a lot of the work that they've had to do and pay for wasn't actually technically about the trains. It was about the highways that they have to reconfigure to get over the tracks.
And in a lot of cases, what started as a smaller two-lane road in the Central Valley, they built it up to more multi-lane roads, more Caltrans freeways.
I've seen a bunch of these crossovers. And somehow that ends up on the ledger of the High Speed Rail Authority, which I don't truly understand. But that's sort of the way we're doing it in this state.
Adriana
I could speak a little bit about why exactly is a high-speed rail authority paying for these gold-plated highways that are along the road.
There's a couple of reasons. One of them is the local design standards.
So California high-speed rail has had to adhere to local design standards in every county or local government that does…in a lot of cases are requiring these roads that are built to go 65 miles an hour. To grow capacity when they're really questionable whether that's really needed. You would hope you’d be able to override or have its own set of statewide design standards for these roads.
The second reason is local permitting.
California high-speed rail needs local cities and utilities to provide construction permits for them to start building. Many cities in the Central Valley have used this to extract different concessions from California high-speed rail, including building all these roads and and and whatnot for them.
If the high-speed rail authority were able to self-certify, to issue its own construction permits, or if the cities were required to issue permits unless there was some sort of obvious violation, then we would be able to avoid a lot of these expensive roads that we're paying for with rail money.
Roger
So bottom line, it could have been done a lot more cheaply. That's part of the reason it's been so expensive is a lot of stuff that has to do very little with actually running a train or building a track.
The other reason it's been so expensive is that it's often misreported that the original cost estimate was something like $32 billion dollars back in 2008. I think it was 45.
Nonetheless, the cost estimates have more than doubled.
A lot of that is because of the reasons we were just discussing. But you know good luck trying to do any kind of a major project where every time the congressional majority changes or the president changes, suddenly all your funds are being cut off or even attempts are being made to pull back that you have to fight.
That greatly increases cost. I don't think you can exaggerate how ridiculous that is.
If you had given the high-speed rail authority the 45 billion that it wanted in 2008, would it have finished it for 45 billion? Probably not. California doesn't seem to be able to get anything done on cost and on budget.
Would it have ended up going up two times the price or two and a half times the price? No. A lot of that is attributed to just the political games that keep getting played with the high-speed rail authority, which, as you know you know, we've written a ton about over the years.
Adriana
Additionally, I also like to mention that those additional cost estimates were made before all the design work had been complete, and we still haven't even completed all the design work for the entire system, just for the Central Valley portion. Those cost estimates were probably not very realistic to begin with. ah There's a lot that can change in the process, but a lot in the cost that depends on specific aspects of the design process.
Adriana
And this was exacerbated by some of these political conditions, as Roger was saying. So they were forced to start construction due to federal funding deadlines in the Obama era before they had finished design. And this led to a lot of change orders where they had to go back and change all their contracts, redo a lot of what they said they were going to initially do, and have already committed funding to after because the design changed because they just started building and started work before it was done. A lot of other countries approve the funding after things are fully designed, and then you can have a lot less uncertainty about your costs.
Damien
This is one of the things that comes up a lot when people are bad mouthing the project because obviously voters in 2008 approved a bond for high speed rail. We always say,”This has been voter approved.” The counter argument is, “voters didn't really know what it was going to cost.”
Roger
But all the subsequent polling has still shown that if you put it back on the ballot it would pass, which is why I think the opponents don't want it put back on the ballot…or at least I've never seen a serious effort to do it. All the polling has shown it, you know a small majority still supporting the work. So that argument really is pretty vacuous.
Damien
I wrote a piece for Streetsblog LA…I can't remember if we've done one for Streetsblog California over the years…where I actually went and looked at the candidates for office that made “high speed rail stinks” part of their campaign.
We looked at how they did in elections. And the answer is pretty poorly. No seats have ever been flipped over high-speed rail as an issue that I could find.
Maybe there's something farther away from LA.
Roger
Their election managers didn't read the polling, obviously.
Damien
But down here, if you listen to the radio or read the newspaper, which has been getting better, but you know, the LA Times has been the la one of the loudest cheerleaders against the project…So, if you read the newspaper or listen to any sort of political show, even some of the left leaning ones, it sounds like this is a giant political loser, but I have never actually seen it lose.
Roger
You're right. And actually, if you go to other countries and look at the history of their high-speed rail projects, and I'm including the original, I guess it's the Tokyo Osaka Shinkansen line in the 1960s, they went through a lot of this too. The challenges they faced were much greater because at the time high-speed rail was unproven.
We have an advantage if we're building something that's standard around the world. We have the disadvantage that we've never done it before. I think that moving forward things will go more smoothly, once there's a minimum operating segment, the Central Valley segment is running, that people will, the naysayers will, melt away. We do haveCaltrain running, and that doesn't seem to have had much effect on a lot of the naysayers.
Damien
Well, but it's only been running since September. It's only running up in the Bay area. Caltrain was previously existing. I've seen zero coverage of Caltrain outside of the expansion, outside of, well, Streetsblog, train magazines, and a few of the smaller publications up in the Bay. I haven't even seen it in the Chronicle or anything like that.
Roger
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Adriana, to remind me where they are right now, but they've got bids out for high speed rail equipment, or they're they're shopping for it, or what's what's the status for now?
Adriana
Yeah, and they put out a request per purchase for the rolling stock backfill trains. I believe they've selected a vendor and they've shown some preliminary design ideas of what the trains are going to look like.
Roger
Oh yeah, that I know they've done. Yeah, the interiors, but are they looking at TGV or a German train?
I think it's probably going to be one of the other.
Adriana
So they've selected Siemens as a vendor.
Roger
Siemens OK. As soon as they're able, I would hope that they could do some kind of a new stunt.
You could call it and just get one of those train sets. If they have to drag it out to the capturing quarter, but bring it into one of the cities where people can take a look at it. um And work with Amtrak to get some discounts so people can get out to the Central Valley and experience it.
It's really important to make it tangible. You know, that said, I wonder if anyone's ever done any research about how many people in California have actually ridden one of these systems while on holiday somewhere or on a business trip?
I have noticed that the opposition has changed. It used to be “high-speed rail has worked in other countries, but it's not going to work here for some mysterious reason.” Now they're making the argument that “High-speed rail would be great. California is just not capable of building it.”
I don't think that argument is going to work because they are building it. In a few years, there's actually going to be some trains running.
I think the state has to be mindful on continuing or doing a better job of communicating with the voters of California and the taxpayers, the people who are actually paying for this, so that they don't get bought up or or buy into the narrative that was promulgated by the LA Times for so long…a lot of which was nonsensical.
The writer, who shall not be named, was quoting farmers who didn't want the tracks going through their property and didn't want to lose their property. Sometimes homeowners, famously on the Peninsula, NIMBYs…but he was quoting them as experts or not even naming them and never mentioning, “Oh, yeah, this person lives a few feet from the tracks or this person is going to lose some of their land.”
And that's where that narrative came from. It just got repeated over and over and over again by television and other broadcasters who just didn't check to make sure that the articles that they were referencing were valid, and a lot of the times they weren't.
Streetsblog wrote a bunch of pieces pulling those stories apart. It actually wasn't challenging to do. I mean, you just had to find out who this person they're quoting. I remember a story that the LA Times ran claiming that the High Speed Rail Authority wasn't paying farmers for their land when they used eminent domain.
It was total garbage.
It's just utter nonsense. It was made up. The LA Times ran a lot of stories like that. I'll totally stand by that accusation if anybody wants to challenge it.
Adriana
This has become a bigger issue. It's almost like a symbol. It's like high-speed rail is this mirror for your views on California. Right wingers really love to hold this up as this example of blue state incompetence. California is a failed state, that sort of thing. But a lot of those arguments don't have a lot of teeth once you dig into the details.
Once the project is complete, it's really going to be a great example of California pride, a really shining example of the best that our state has to offer. But it has become this almost culture war issue to attack California on. We've seen that with some of the political opponents of high-speed rail. So recently, it has been congressional Republicans who have vowed to defund high-speed rail, Kevin Kiley is spearheading that.
More recently, some California Republicans have introduced bills to basically get rid of all of the state funding for it and redirect that to highways, which is absolutely despicable.
Roger
Well, not as despicable as claiming that it was about fighting the LA fires, which was just revolting and really just gross.
Adriana
That's true. Yeah. Yeah.
I think hopefully those state level attacks won't get too far. But I do think we are in trouble right now in terms of the federal funding, given the Trump administration. Elon Musk has long been an opponent of California high-speed rail.
He launched his completely vaporware hyperloop idea in order to just distract the media from supporting high-speed rail. He's continued to attack it through his quasi-governmental doge office. There is a very real threat of the current administration taking and axing the federal funding for this project.
Roger
And by the way, that Hyperloop nonsense, the Hyperloop scam…the original paper that Elon Musk wrote, the white paper, um there were some...
Damien
Do you think Elon Musk really wrote it?
Roger
Huh?
Damien
Do you think Elon Musk actually wrote it?
Roger
You may have, I don't know, but...
Damien
Because on one hand, it's nonsense, so maybe.
Roger
But it was supposed to float on a cushion of air like a hockey puck was what he claimed. There were some NASA engineers who looked into that. And I remember when I read it…I'm not a physicist, but that doesn't really make a lot of sense that that would work. A hockey puck is very, very light. A heavy thing is not. I don't understand how that would work. Is he talking about a hovercraft and a vacuum? How would that work?
And sure enough, it wouldn't. Some NASA engineers looked into it and wrote a paper and it would just sit there in the tube and be unable to move. So, it was definitely a con from the beginning. But now we have him “helping to run the country.” And he's certainly got his sights on it. I would say the response from the state should be, “Okay, you want to turn this into a big political football? Let's get it finished.”
If the trains start running and we're able to finish the thing, the opposition is gone. There were opponents to the English Channel link in the UK. There were, as I mentioned, opponents in Japan. Once these systems get going, they'll become part of your society, part of your fabric, part of your everyday life.
So anyway, you know my recommendation for the state is you know is kind of to write off Washington because I just don't think we're going to get any love from them about pretty much anything. And we have such a huge economy. There's absolutely no reason we can't finish this thing ourselves.
Adriana
Prior to the Biden administration, the majority of the funding was actually coming from the cap-and-trade.
The bipartisan infrastructure law provided $3.3 billion dollars for the project, which was a big big infusion of funds. But it has been primarily state funded. That's going to be the way forward. And the ap-and-trade program is getting reauthorized later this year. So that's going to be an important moment, too, that could be make or break for the future of California High-Speed Rail, I think.
One thing I was not able to find out any more detailed info about…I'm wondering if you do, Roger, has all of that bipartisan infrastructure law money has already been spent or allocated because Trump is currently impounding like all of unspent bipartisan infrastructure law money and refusing to send it out to states. So that could be another potential issue for high speed rail.
Roger
I think it's been allocated, but do they get it secured in an escrow account that they'll be able to access or is there some way for Trump to claw it back? I know he tried to do that in his first term and was unsuccessful.
Fortunately, we seem to have a surplus in the state budget. We seem willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on freeway expansions. It's not like we can't just move forward. And cap-and-trade has obviously been pivotal, but I really wish they would work on some new legislation to fund the entire state rail plan that would include money for bridging the Tehachapis…getting high speed rail into the L.A. basin.
But, Gavin Newsom has been supportive at times and kind of lukewarm at others. If it is going to be a political football, I wish the state would focus on trying to win that game.
Damien
Well, I mean, it's more or less than a couple of weeks after when the state released its electrification plan, that rail electrification plan to Great Ballyhoo, and obviously the fires happened.
Adriana
Yeah.
Damien
So that's going to take some of the air out of the thing, but I haven't heard it mentioned outside of conversations I've had about either this particular episode of this podcast ah or other conversations internally.
Adriana
So the News Administration did put out a press release for its release and they tied that to a kind of big photo op media event that they did around the beginning of the track lane phase in the Central Valley. So I wouldn't say that it's been totally ignored, but yeah, agreed.
I do think it would be nice to see more energy around the state rail plan outside of our very niche transit communities because it's really ambitious, it's really transformative, and it's going to bring benefits to every part of the state. I think we should all be talking about more but maybe let's talk a little bit about what's in the state rail plan because it does very much tie to high speed rail.
Damien
That was the last bullet point on our outline, so this is excellent timing.
Adriana
States are required to release, starting the Obama administration, states were required or suggested to release these state rail plans, talking about the rail infrastructure. Our last one was in 2018. The latest state rail plan calls for this ah statewide integrated rail network with a lot more service than we currently have.
Adriana
And it's all a large portion, and about 1,500 miles of it will be electrified. That's the goal. So California High-Speed Rail is the spine of this. These other projects are building off of California High-Speed Rail in some way.
We've got Metrolink electrification that's in the state rail plant.
They've got a new high speed rail line to Arizona that's in the state rail plan. We're talking about Capitol Corridor electrification, a second Transbay tube that's going to connect Caltrain to the East Bay.
There's a lot of big ambitious investments in here, and they really only make sense if you do high-speed rail.
Roger
The spine of the system. That's how it's been sold since the beginning with the idea being that all of these other lines will feed into it.
And that follows the European models that you have, especially the ones I'm most familiar with, the French model where you have built the first spine between Paris and Lyon.
Most of their lines were electrified outside of that area already. So they were able to have trains slow down and continue to other cities in the country. And then they built new high-speed lines as they went. And that's a great model for California. Unfortunately, we're 100 years behind. And we don't really have mainline electrification except the Caltrain corridor now. So the state rail plan is aspirational and it's great.
I hope Adriana knows more about this, but getting a fix on getting this actually funded, so it becomes a project.
Adriana
Part of the state for and part of the state rail Caltrans has indicated a commitment to to take a more active role in planning and coordinating for regional projects. They've already sort of taken on some role for Link 21. There was a bill that passed last year that incurred that incentive by the man to take more of a role with the low sand corridor that remains to be seen what they've actually done there.
And, you know, I think if there's a lot of really good reforms in this bill that are basically moving towards Caltrans taking on a lot of the capacity planning capacity, a lot of the project management for the for implementing the state rail plan, which would be really good.
Roger
How about building it? Forget about planning it. Why not have Caltrans build it? That's what I keep asking.
Adriana
I agree, they should,.
Roger
We are talking about fundamental transportation. We're not talking about making ice cream cones here. We're talking about moving people around.
Adriana
Yeah, totally with you there, Roger, but I think there's a step in the right direction at least.
Roger
I'm spending so much time dealing with Caltrans about adding bike lanes to state highways that go through cities and things like that. It's frustrating because you hear a lot of stuff about, oh yeah, we'll get involved or not.
Adriana
We talk a lot of time about a just transition for Caltrans engineers. A lot of these people have skills building freeway interchanges and whatever that could easily translate to building viaducts for rail or things like that.
We'd really like to see some of those folks get moved towards projects that are good for the environment rather than building highways.
Damien
We're hitting the end of our time limit here. Is there anything you guys want to add sort of as closing thoughts? But I interrupted you. So why don't you say what you were going to say, and then we'll do closing thoughts.
Adriana
I was just going to talk a little bit more about some of the benefits we're already seeing from high speed rail and then other stuff that we could see if we continue in the short term, if we continue to invest in that. So we've already talked about Caltrain electrification. There's also the 1300 jobs that have been created from building the Central Valley segment, which is pretty substantial.
And then another thing is Link Union Station, which is what LA has chosen to use their high-speed rail funding for, which will allow free running at Union Station.
So what that means is that once that's done, you'll be able to have a single seat ride from like the San Fernando Valley to Irvine or from you know Riverside to Glendale or something like that. And it's going to make MetroLink run a lot better.
Roger
On the other hand, sorry to interrupt, but Metrolink could be doing that now. They would just have to reverse the trains. It would take a little bit longer, but Amtrak does that on the Los Angeles corridor.
Adriana
Yeah, but I think there are some issues with the capacity and some and the design of the station that would make that challenging.
Roger
Of course, Union Station needs to straighten out. it's ah just asking those tracks to do a lot more than they can do right now in that configuration.
Adriana
We need some leadership from Metrolink in Southern California for Metrolink electrification. The state rail, the high-speed rail plan, calls for the electrification from Burbank to Anaheim, where it's going to share tracks just like Caltrain does.
If We had some commitments from SoCal electeds, we could very easily start doing that very soon before they even finished the tunnel work, just to get some immediate benefit from that and make it easier to help the LA section going.
Roger
Yeah, I should have been working on that when Caltrain and everybody in Northern California was lobbying…just just don't complain when the majority of the funds are going to Northern California.
Damien
Well, you know, we'll get around to it. We got a lot to worry about when it comes. You know, we got a lot going on. We have the rail out to the San Gabriel Valley thing. I mean, we're very busy.
Roger
Uh-huh. Okay. I wasn't picking on LA as a whole. I was picking on Metrolink and things that are related. At least that was my intention.
All I know is Metrolink is running a hydrogen train thing way out in Riverside, right? And every time I talk to anyone from Metrolink over the years and decades, actually, at this point, and brought up electrification, I always got poo-pooed.
Damien
The only reason we're using hydrogen is we never quite figured out how to bottle rainbow energy like we had hoped.
Adriana
LA Metro is doing a lot of very ambitious rail expansion, like rail and subway, light rail, subway expansions, but Metrolink is a very troubled agency with a very dysfunctional governance structure, I would say, and they're really not empowered to do much of anything right now.
Damien
No, I think I think that's fair. Juan and I were talking about this on our second podcast.
I just took the train to Oceanside the other day. The amount of trains I would have had to take to actually go to Carlsbad, my final destination, was difficult even though Metrolink has an Oceanside stop and a Carlsbad stop.
Roger
And the San Diego coaster, which is the Metrolink for San Diego, but for whatever reason, it's not the same agency.
They're not aligned and the train will pull in and pull out two minutes before you could have made the transfer and it's just it's…
Damien
I mean, usually I don't like talking at the same time as someone else in the podcast, but as we are both talking at the same time, it exemplified the confusion of how difficult it was.
Adriana
The state rail plan does talk about this issue. And they do, they call for statewide schedules that align to maximize transfers across all systems, which is, really, really great.
To make that happen, it’s going to need some kind of governance reform. Californians for Electric Rail put out a white paper in the beginning of 2024, calling for the Coaster and SurfLiner to be consolidated, management for those to and to be consolidated under one agency.
Whether it's a regional regional agency or whether Caltrans ultimately takes control of all state agencies, either way you're going to need some kind of consolidation of governance to get this greater level of coordination in terms of fares and schedules that riders really need.
Damien
On that note, we drifted into local rail, but it does all tie in. In the end, I think I'm going to say thank you both for being here. We'll probably touch base again a little later on in the year when we have an idea of what the legislature is or isn't doing on high-speed rail.
But thank you both for being here today. We went a little over, but it was ah it was fun talking to you both.
Adriana
Great. Yeah. you too. Thanks so much, Damien.
