Leaving on a jet train Leaving on a jet train (April 09, 2004)

High-speed rail could put L.A. just 2 hours away
by Jeb Bing

Imagine that one day you can board a bullet train in Pleasanton, travel through the Altamont Pass at speeds up to 220 mph and reach Sacramento in less than an hour. Or Los Angeles in just over two.

As Buck Rogers a concept as that might sound, it's a goal of the publicly funded California High Speed Rail Authority that is pressing for bullet train service between Northern and Southern California. Groups such as the Bay Area Open Space Council, Sierra Club and the Mountain Lion Foundation endorse the project but want the Authority to consider Pleasanton and an Altamont Pass link to its main trunk line through the Central Valley instead of a Pacheco Pass route that the train authority now favors.

The two sides sparred last Friday in a meeting hosted by the Tri-Valley Vision Project Transportation Committee, a section of the Tri-Valley Business Council that includes local and regional government and business representatives. Headed by Chris Kinzel Sr. of TJKM Transportation Consultants of Pleasanton, the organization proposes and reviews transit issues affecting the area.

Dan Leavitt, deputy director of the High Speed Rail Authority, told the committee that his group has identified 700 miles of major corridors for the electrically powered passenger trains that would connect the urban centers of Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego and the Bay Area cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Public hearings on a draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) required to get the project rolling start Tuesday in San Francisco, with hearings in other California locations scheduled through a final review date at the end of August.

Even with an approved EIR, however, it will be up to California voters to make the decision on funding the $30 billion system, which would be the largest public works project in the state's history. Former Gov. Gray Davis had won the Legislature's approval to place a $10 billion bond measure to launch the rail system on this November's ballot. But Leavitt said that because of the state's current budget shortfall, it's likely that the train bond measure vote will be delayed until 2006.

Even so, initial work continues on a draft environmental report that shows a preferred main rail corridor routing along existing north-south rail tracks parallel to State Highway 99 from downtown Sacramento, Central Valley cities and into downtown Los Angeles, then on to Irvine and San Diego.

Somewhere along the main trunk line, high-speed trains would also use a major rail link to be built to the west to connect to San Jose, San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco and Oakland. Among the considerations are a Pacheco Pass link at Chowchilla on Highway 99, a Diablo Range link heading west from Livingston or the Altamont Pass link from Modesto. In all proposals, the rail authority plans to have its trains traveling at speeds of 220 mph, except in heavily urbanized areas where they would be throttled back to speeds more like 125 mph, Leavitt said.

"We are looking at the same aerodynamic, steel wheel and steel rail technology that the Japanese bullet trains and French and German high speed trains have been using extensively for years," Leavitt said. "These trains have proven to be the safest, most reliable form of transportation ever, with complete double-track, grade-separated routes that have no crossings with any other type of transportation."

"In Japan, they've carried well over 6 billion passengers without a single train-related fatality and a near-perfect on-time performance," he added. "The average train operates with an arrival or departure schedule latitude of about 20 seconds. If your train is five minutes late, they refund your ticket. That's the type of performance we plan to achieve in California."

The High Speed Rail Authority estimates travel times between San Jose or Sacramento and Los Angeles of two hours; between downtown Los Angeles and downtown San Francisco, two-and-a-half hours; San Francisco to Fresno, just over an hour; and about the same from Fresno to Los Angeles.

Besides speed, Leavitt cited the need for a transportation alternative to ever-increasing demand. Studies conducted for the High Speed Rail Authority project that California's population will grow by about 11 million over the next 20 years, with an estimated statewide population of 60 million by 2040.

At that growth rate, Leavitt said the state will need 90 new airline gates and five new runways - three in Southern California and two in the north - to meet air travel demands and 3,000 additional lane miles of highways to handle vehicle traffic.

"Even without any more people than today, California has the most severe highway congestion in the nation," Leavitt said. "Plus, the air traffic corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco is not only the most heavily traveled air traffic corridor in the country, but its problems are getting worse."

Leavitt said it would cost taxpayers two-to-three times more to build the needed highway and airport expansions to meet 2020 demand over the $82 billion estimated for putting a high speed rail system in place.

"A high speed train system also would have far less environmental impact than adding highways and runways," Leavitt said. "It would spur job growth, increase productivity in major markets and the inland parts of California, decrease energy consumption and reduce air pollution."

With voter approval of the first $10 billion bond measure, now expected to be on the November 2006 ballot, Leavitt said the system could be operating 120 trains a day, 60 each way and spaced about 10-15 minutes part in peak travel by 2020. As passenger demand increases, the system can add more cars to its trains and reduce the spacing to allow frequencies as little as three minutes apart as is common in Europe and Japan.

But for all the praise Leavitt and his agency are receiving from California's major environmental and transportation groups, some are opposed to a Pacheco Pass corridor into Bay Area designations.

John Woodbury, director of the Bay Area Open Space Council, which represents 50 separate public agencies, said that a link to the main Central Valley high speed rail trunk line through the Altamont Pass would be cheaper with far less environmental impact. It would also generate more ridership as commuters from stations in Stockton and Tracy climbed aboard, either to connect to the BART station in Pleasanton or to continue to stops in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco.

"According to the Authority's own estimates, the Altamont Pass route would cost about $70 million a year to operate, compared to just over $100 million for the Pacheco Pass route," Woodbury said. "That's almost a 45 percent difference in operating costs."

He told the Tri-Valley Transportation Committee that public opinion primarily favors the Altamont Pass route, and said most cities in the northern San Joaquin Valley have passed resolutions supporting the Altamont route.

Woodbury's coalition said the Altamont route would follow I-580, one of the Bay Area's busiest freeway corridors, often using existing freeway medians That alignment would be more direct, requiring fewer miles of track and less operating and maintenance costs, and its construction could be coordinated with the already planned Dumbarton railroad bridge reconstruction project to allow both commuter and high speed train service across the Bay.

"Altamont is about 50 minutes quicker from Sacramento to San Francisco than the Pacheco route," Woodbury said, "and it could also offer service to commuters from Tracy, Manteca and other outlying cities into Pleasanton and its BART connection."

He said Leavitt and the High Speed Rail Authority moved too quickly and without adequate comparison studies to choose Pacheco over Altamont as their preferred route into the Bay Area. Kinzel's Transportation Committee agreed and voted to ask the Authority to reconsider its Pacheco Pass endorsement before finalizing the EIR.

Leavitt argued, however, that Woodbury's group and the Transportation Committee's recommendation ignore years of careful and cautious planning that led to the Pacheco Pass decision. As important as San Joaquin County commuters and a Pleasanton station link to BART are, the objective of the high speed rail system is to move a heavy volume of long distance passengers quickly and conveniently between California's major hub cities. By using Pacheco, trains and their passengers can move into Gilroy and then north to San Jose, San Francisco International Airport and San Francisco with few stops and no changes.

"For high speed train service along the San Francisco Peninsula, sharing track with an improved Caltrain service is the only feasible choice for a direct link," Leavitt said. "Trains would travel the 48 miles from San Francisco to San Jose on two new high speed center tracks in a 100-foot right of way that already exists in less than 30 minutes. Another corridor would take the trains into downtown Oakland, where riders could transfer to BART train service to reach East Bay destinations, including Pleasanton."

"While the Altamont route has some appeal, what we would end up with is high speed rail service that stops at Union City," Leavitt added. "We wouldn't be in Oakland, San Jose or San Francisco - the places we want to be. We'd have to build separate lines to serve those cities and split our trains toward different designations. It's just not practical."

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