Excerpts from the April 2010 Bay Area Monitor http://www.BayAreaMonitor.org
All Eyes on High-Speed Rail
by Deirdre Newman
California High-Speed Rail Authority adjusts its timeline for the statewide bullet train in order to meet deadlines imposed by the federal govern-ment in the disbursement of billions of dollars in stimulus funds, the project is being met with crit-ics from all sides who are alarmed about the high cost of construction and the potential impact of the route.
The recently announced disbursement of $2.25 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding from the Obama administration is contingent on the project winning environmental approval by the fall of 2011 and construction starting by the fall of 2012.
While California received the largest amount of funding of any state for high-speed, intercity rail, the authority is now in the precarious position of having to abide by federal deadlines while the project draws intensified scrutiny due to the award. A report on various alignment alterna-tives for the San Francisco to San Jose section has already been delayed twice and is now ex-pected in April.
If the deadlines are met, the award will ulti-mately be divvied up among specific projects -- including the San Francisco-San Jose section -- that are part of the system's first phase, an ap-proximately 520-mile route from San Francisco to Anaheim. The entire system, when extended north to Sacramento and south to San Diego, is expected to span about 800 miles.
The high-speed rail project garnered enough sup-port for voters to pass a $9.95 billion bond act, Proposition 1A, in 2008. This bond measure was essentially a down payment on the project, which will be funded by a combination of state, federal, local, and private funds. . . .
. . . The sections that will likely be built first in-clude Los Angeles to Anaheim, Merced to Bakers-field, and San Francisco to field, and San Fran-cisco to San Jose, based on the federal grant de-termination.
As far as the route for San Francisco to San Jose is concerned, the obvious part was identifying the Caltrain corridor for that purpose since the tracks are already there. Now the question is how to create the alignment for the bullet train to share that route with Caltrain. And that is proving to be a particularly thorny ques-tion. The authority is currently in the process of getting environmental reviews ready so they can be certified. For the San Francisco to San Jose section, the authority is conducting an alternatives analysis, which is the second step of the environmental review process. This is when engineers and planners look at the possible configurations including at ground level, above ground level, or below ground level. Once these analyses are put into a re-port, there will be a chance for more public input, before the report goes to the authority for certification, following review by other agencies. This approval must come by fall 2011 in order for the funds to be used, but the re-port has already been delayed to more clearly refine the alternatives, after an initial public presentation. . . .
. . . While some residents along the Peninsula have asked for the project to stop in San Jose, that is not an option, Barker said. During the environmental process, every project has to include a "no build" option by which to com-pare the environmental effects of building. But this option is just for comparison and the trains will definitely finish the intended route into San Francisco, Barker explained.
Editor's Note: This last paragraph above suggests one of the problems that local opponents of the planned SJ-SF route always point to: the California High Speed Rail Authority leaders have their minds made up and do not listen to (or, in any case, do not act on) local objections and ideas.
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