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WA Democrats ask Buttigieg for $200M to plan B.C.-Seattle-Portland bullet train
(www.seattletimes.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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There's a few good videos on this, but the central valley isn't nowhere. Along the central valley alignment, just talking about the cities where stops are planned, you've got a little over a million people who would be delighted to have an easier way to get to San Francisco or LA than a short-haul airline or a car, and that's not counting people from satellite towns and cities that might use the rail as well. I live in Merced, where the central hub of the CAHSR is planned, so I feel that I can speak with a little authority here. Yes, outside of the metros, the valley is dazzlingly empty, but Bakersfield alone is basically the same population as Tulsa, OK. Fresno is the 33rd most populous city in the country. It's not exactly like they're trying to connect to Nome, Alaska here.
If you'd like to watch something a little more entertaining than me, banksrail did a pretty good video on it here: https://youtu.be/66CO4bHFlqY
https://youtu.be/iF01CkXslt8
There's also a political question that can't be ignored. The valley is really, really conservative. Building the rail through the valley second gives fox news time to rile up the conservatives here and mount resistance to the project, which already saw quite a lot of resistance as-is. This is a case of swallowing your frogs first; once the valley's out of the way, building in the metros will be politically easier, and the conservatives now have a stake in the venture's success unless they really just want the San Joaquins part 2: Going Past Cows Fast As Fuck. There's also the question of political will in the cities. San Francisco and LA politicians in the state legislature have made it abundantly clear that they want theirs and couldn't give a fuck if the valley gets a goddamn thing. One of the loudest efforts to torpedo the CAHSR recently was led by politicians from SF and LA that wanted to divert all CAHSR funding meant to benefit almost the entire state into their own local transit authorities. So, it's as likely as not that once LA and SF got what essentially amounts to high speed commuter rail segments, they'd brush their hands off and say "good job, team" and either lose interest in or try to nuke the remainder of the project.
The whole point of this project is to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles, so you are going to need to build through the Central Valley to do so. I don't see SF and LA giving up on the project after they get better commuter rail. It is really more trying to build more useful initial operating segments first.
And the Central Valley cities are car dependent cities with poor mass transit. There is a good reason to take the train into SF or LA, but why take it into downtown Fresno? Even when you get to the train station, are you going to be able to get to the building you want to go to? I can easily see operations start on the first segment and there are tons of stories of empty trains used to try to kill the rest of the project.
And as for the politics, it seems like it would be a better political sell to Fresno to get them to agree to a train going to San Francisco than it would be for a train to Bakersfield.
And if the project stalls, it is better that it stalls out with useful track.
Well, the Bay Area is using CAHSR money to upgrade Caltrain already. That project should be done in a year or two.
What Rendon wanted to do in Socal with Metrolink was to use the money to not do any electrification and use battery-electric trains, which would have been useless.
I agree that battery trains would be useless.
Better urban environments is a fight that's going to have to happen (and currently IS happening under Newsom) all along the HSR alignment, including LA and SF. Central valley cities tend to look like a bomb went off that decapitated any building taller than two stories, but that's something that can be changed with consistent effort over time, and I believe that it will. One of Newsom's top priorities right now is housing affordability and homelessness, and his administration's been fighting with (mostly bay area) NIMBY cities that are desperate to keep their densities low and their housing supply slim. YIMBY movements are starting to spring up all around California, and I've got hope that reforms to promote better, denser urbans are coming down the pipe. What's more is that CAHSR, in addition to several other bills, are helping to find more robust transit and transit oriented development across the state.
As-is, yes, travelling by public transit in central California blows ass. The only saving grace, really, is that CAHSR actually goes THROUGH the cities (for the most part, I think Visalia is the exception), so that you're automatically at your destination when you step off. This is compared to riding the San Joaquins, where it's a total crap shoot whether you'll get dumped in the middle of nowhere (Turlock, Modesto, Madera I think, probably a few others) or somewhere actually kind of useful. So, if our cities can get their shit together, and I think they can in time before the rail opens, then it could actually be a pretty nice experience.
Yeah, if.
I get that HSR will be a benefit to those cities over time, but a lot of that initial benefit would come from connecting a car dependent area to a car hostile area to encourage people to start to take the train. Being close to the train could then spur increased density in housing, which could provide a nucleus for mass transit.
I would definitely go south of the Merced Y before going north, but I feel like the value of HSR to those communities is connecting them to either Los Angeles or San Francisco, not to other Central Valley cities.