SAN FRANCISCO — Advocates of a California high-speed rail system continue to engage in a heated debate over the best route alignment for bringing bullet trains into the San Francisco Bay region.
But a conspicuous lack of high-level support for the rail system and the nearly $10 billion bond measure that would help finance it may make the argument over route alignments as irrelevant as a dispute over dinner seating on the Titanic.
The $9.95 billion general obligation bond measure sits on the November 2006 ballot.
Originally scheduled to go before the voters in 2004, the rail bond has already been postponed once, and Sacramento politicians who are eying a vast array of other potential bond-financed infrastructure projects may well postpone the rail vote this year if they don’t kill it altogether.
None of this has stopped sniping among bullet-train advocates who disagree on the route any high-speed rail line should take.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority, which was created in 1996 to plan and build a bullet train line, has already chosen a preferred alignment to send the planned 200-mile-per-hour trains from Los Angeles into the Central Valley.
The key dispute is over which way the trains will move from the Central Valley over into the Bay Area.
One alternative would parallel the main highway route and an existing freight railroad from the valley to San Francisco Bay, over the Altamont Pass. After the route enters the Bay Area, the line would split, sending some trains south to San Jose and some north to San Francisco.
The other option is a more southerly route through Pacheco Pass. Officials in and around San Jose favor the southerly alignment because it means every train between Los Angeles and San Francisco would have to go through San Jose. They have formed a lobbying group — the Silicon Valley High-Speed Rail Coalition — to support that view, winning resolutions from several local governments as well as the support of local chambers of commerce.“It’s a more efficient way of being able to serve the three major cities in region and a more efficient way of providing a fast north-south connection,” said Laura Stuchinsky, the transportation and land-use director for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a member of the rail coalition.
But the Altamont Pass route would best serve the entire Bay Area, including San Jose, according to another rail advocacy group.
“We do prefer the Altamont route because the two main cities that need to be connected are San Francisco to Los Angeles,” said Daniel McNamara, chair of the high-speed rail task force of the Train Riders’ Association of California. “Altamont would give the best end-to-end time between Los Angeles and San Francisco.”
Furthermore, McNamara said, San Jose’s Pacheco Pass advocates understate the real potential of such a system. If it delivers two-and-a-half-hour travel times between the Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin, demand would be such that San Francisco and San Jose could each support their own dedicated train services to the Southland, he said.
“It’s kind of silly having trains coming from San Francisco that are going to be half or three-quarters full coming to San Jose, when San Jose needs its own seats,” McNamara said.
“Honestly, to be nice about it, San Jose has an inferiority complex,” he added. “They don’t have a bridge. They don’t have Fisherman’s Wharf. When we try to discuss it with them at all on an engineering basis, they just don’t want to hear it.”
This year, the California High-Speed Rail Authority completed its program-level environmental impact report and environmental impact statement for most of the system — though it must still prepare a separate EIR and EIS comparing the two proposed routes into the Bay Area.
Planners say the first high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and the San Francisco area will be the initial spine for a system that will grow to link Sacramento and San Diego.
But all the arguments may well become moot. The bill placing the high-speed rail bill on the 2004 ballot was passed in 2002.
In 2004, lawmakers voted to defer the bond referendum two years, to 2006. A bill to defer it two more years was introduced last year, passed the Assembly, and — though it stalled in a Senate committee — was carried over to this year’s session. And Senate president pro tempore Don Perata and Democratic Caucus chairman Tom Torlakson are proposing their own infrastructure bond measure this year for the November ballot, which would eliminate the rail bond, though it would include smaller passenger train projects.
With its staff of three, the High-Speed Rail Authority is something of an unloved orphan, lacking the support that it would need to thrive but continuing to survive because nobody wants to have their fingerprints on the murder weapon.
The lawmaker who sponsored the high-speed rail bond bill, state Sen. Jim Costa, has moved on to the U.S. House of Representatives. The governor who signed it, Gray Davis, has been recalled.
“It is in jeopardy, no doubt about it,” McNamara said. “You really need someone like a governor to appoint a Peter Ueberroth to advance high-speed rail,” he added, referring to the head organizer of the successful 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The high-speed rail system was seen as an important tenant for a planned new San Francisco train station. But the core purpose of the new Transbay Terminal project is to bring the terminus of the existing Caltrain commuter rail system into downtown San Francisco, said project spokesman Adam Alberti.
The $2 billion project, which includes residential construction and a bus station for services to Oakland and other East Bay cities, is to be funded with a variety of sources, including debt backed by local sales taxes, tolls on area bridges, and redevelopment tax-increment financing.
“The project can stand on its own with the [commuter] rail extension to downtown, though it’s currently configured to include high-speed rail,” Alberti said.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority is composed of the city of San Francisco, the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District, which runs commuter buses to the terminal, and the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, which runs Caltrain.
“We have all of our environmental approvals and we are free and clear of litigation around [California Environmental Quality Act] issues and eminent domain,” Alberti said. “We are putting together an implementation strategy about what gets built, when, and how, with the funds available.”
