Over concerns of a pair of Bay Area cities, the California High-Speed Rail Authority board finalized its choice of a route alternative for about 49 miles of tracks between San Francisco and San Jose. Thursday’s actions included certification of thousands of pages of environmental analysis for the stretch, in which high-speed trains will eventually share an upgraded and electrified rail corridor with the Caltrain passenger train service on the San Francisco Peninsula. The 8-0 vote (with one board member absent) took place in a meeting held by teleconference among rail authority board members scattered across the state.

It represents the latest step in providing the environmental clearance for a statewide system that is ultimately planned to link San Francisco with Los Angeles and Anaheim by way of the San Joaquin Valley, with electric-powered trains carrying passengers at speeds up to 220 mph. “Today is really a momentous event, with a tremendous amount of work behind it to get where we are today with an environmentally cleared project from the Bay Area through the Central Valley,” Tom Richards, a Fresno developer and the authority board chairperson, said after the vote. “If nothing else, what it does is prepare and move this entire project forward toward construction.”

Brian Kelly, the rail agency’s chief executive officer, said certification of the San Francisco-San Jose corridor means the agency has now completed and certified its environmental analyses for all but two sections of the 500-mile San Francisco-Los Angeles/Anaheim system. The only gaps in clearance are a 38-mile segment between the Mojave Desert city of Palmdale and the San Fernando Valley community of Burbank, and a stretch from downtown Los Angeles to Anaheim. “A lot of people have lost sight that this project is about San Francisco to Los Angeles,” Kelly told The Fresno Bee after the vote. “With today’s environmental document being certified by our board, we have now cleared San Francisco into Los Angeles County.”

“It really reflects what we’re trying to do: get service started in the (San Joaquin Valley) where construction is under way, and we’re trying to advance that full Phase 1 system from San Francisco to Los Angeles,” Kelly added. “By getting this done, we can now start designing those other segments as we bring operations forward in the Valley. We can advance the design, start talking about acquiring right of way, and figuring out the rest of the San Francisco-LA project.” CONCERNS RAISED DURING MEETING On Wednesday, during public comments on the environmental analysis, representatives of the city of Millbrae, which is south of San Francisco, expressed concern with some aspects of the plans. They asserted that the documents did not fully consider the effects that the bullet-train project and potential station locations could have on the city’s development plans near its transportation station that is shared by both the Caltrain commuter trains and BART trains that connect communities throughout the Bay Area.

In response, staff for the high-speed rail authority noted that the environmental documents don’t represent a final design for stations. They pledged to collaborate with local city officials in Millbrae on future plans for expanding and sharing the BART/Caltrain station. They also said they will work with officials in nearby Brisbane on plans for a maintenance facility near a former landfill along the east side of the Caltrain corridor. Improvements to the Caltrain line to accommodate high-speed trains will include some grade-separated crossings, while other roads will have enhanced crossing gates to bar drivers from going around barriers when trains are approaching.

Gary Kennerley, director of Northern California projects for the rail agency, said those features, along with installing overhead electric systems to replace Caltrain’s current fleet of diesel-powered trains, are expected to allow the high-speed trains to operate at speeds up to 110 mph, an increase of about 30 mph compared to current speeds on the peninsula corridor. Earlier this year, the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s board approved a route from San Jose to Merced; a segment from Burbank to downtown Los Angeles was approved last year. In the San Joaquin Valley, the rail agency currently has three construction sections under way between the northern end of Madera and the community of Shafter in Kern County – a 119-mile stretch that will include a station in downtown Fresno but stops short of future station sites in downtown Merced and north-central Bakersfield.

Click here to read the full article at the Fresno Bee

Many wonder if the high-speed trains will be powered by windmills, solar panels, cooking oil and algae

“If it is built, California’s High-Speed Rail would be the largest public works project in state history. That fact alone appears be intoxicating to state officials, in a perpetual quest to have California be the first state to do anything,” I reported in 2011. That’s how long California’s High Speed Rail has served only as a jobs program and a really bad joke on California voters and taxpayers.

By 2011, it was apparent that the High Speed Rail Authority was violating important mandates in the 2008 initiative, passed by voters. Proposition 1A, $9 billion in bonds for high-speed rail, included numerous mandates, none of which can be legally bypassed on the way to building the massive train system.

Top on the list is that the rail system must be high-speed. “Electric trains that are capable of sustained maximum revenue operating speeds of no less than 200 miles per hour,” the law states. However, much of the first segment between Fresno and Bakersfield is not high-speed; nor will high-speed be attainable in dense cities.

“Despite the warnings of a nearly $100 billion ballooning price tag, no track laid, no trains running, decreasing legislative support and even opposition from diehard rail advocates, the High-Speed Rail Authority is steaming ahead full throttle with plans to build the most expensive high-speed rail system in history.” That is also from 2011 – 11 years ago. And nothing has changed except more spending on the train to nowhere.

A 2011 Field poll found that two thirds of Californians want a new referendum on the project. And by a two-to-one margin, they say they’d vote to derail it, only three years after passing Prop. 1A.

California Senate Republicans just issued a “Myths vs. Facts” report on California’s High Speed Rail debacle. They reported, “14 years later, this ‘efficient’ bullet train was supposed to be completed in the early 2020s, but it is nowhere near completion, while the cost has ballooned to $105 billion from $33 billion. In the 2022-2023 state budget, Legislative Democrats earmarked another $4.2 billion for the first phase of the project, which would run from Bakersfield to Merced.”

“Adding insult to California voters, the California High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) has published a website peddling myths about the bullet train,” Senate Republicans said. “While they suggest they are trying to ‘dispel myths’ and separate ‘fact from fiction,’ their own website is rampant with more opinions than facts.”

Even in 2011, California’s High Speed Rail pushers were agitating for the $3.5 billion in matching federal funding for the rail plan. However, that federal money came with a requirement of use exclusively in the economically depressed Central Valley.

A 2011 report by the Legislative Analyst found that future High-Speed Rail funding sources were “highly speculative,” and the economic impact analysis included in the rail authority’s plan “may be incomplete and imbalanced, and therefore portrays the project more favorably than may be warranted.”

Ya think? It’s 2022 and High Speed Rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles is still just a pipe dream – especially the “high speed” part.

In February 2019, President Trump called for California to return all federal rail funding, following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state of the state address where the Governor vowed to kill High Speed Rail saying, “there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA.”  However, Newsom flipped on his promise within the week, announcing he was allowing one odd segment of the rail project to be built in the Central Valley, nicknamed “the conjugal express,” going from prison to prison, Madera to Bakersfield.  The goal for the strange and unnecessary rail line was so California would not have to return $3.5 billion to the federal government.

California Senate Republicans take a deeper dive and break down the real myths vs facts:

Myth: High-Speed Rail will “establish a clean, efficient 220 MPH transportation system.”

Fact: “There has been nothing efficient about high-speed rail in California. The original cost of the project was projected to be $33 billion and is now expected to be at least $105 billion before it is completed. What is worse, the plan no longer even includes purchasing trains. So, the state doesn’t have a way to test if the system works, or if the trains can even go the promised 220mph.”

I reported in 2011, “Complicating matters, the first segment of the rail system won’t even run high-speed trains until the entire system is built. The initiative required the train to be only high-speed.”

Myth: High-Speed Rail will allow travel “from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 2 ½ hours for about $50 a person.”

Fact: “Way back in 2015 the Los Angeles Times conducted a study and determined the cost to ride high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco under the best of circumstances would be between $83 and $105. With the cost rising from $33 billion to at least $105 billon and inflation at a 40-year high, the likely cost will be considerably more, if, (or when) the system is ever completed.”

Myth: High-Speed Rail will be completed as early as 2020.

Fact: That date has come and gone. The first leg of high-speed rail, from Merced to Bakersfield, now has an estimated completion of 2029.

Remember, the initiative was passed by voters in 2008.

According to to Proposition 1A, The California High-Speed Rail Authority must have all of the the funding ahead of time, before any construction starts on a new segment.

Pacific Gas &Electric and Southern California Edison will be providing the electricity for high-speed rail, with estimates of additional demands for electricity already coming in at 1 percent to 5 percent of the state’s total energy usage. “Even Cal ISO doesn’t have any estimates for the cost,” a Capitol staffer told me in 2012. “High-speed rail has got to consume a great deal of power. Where will the power come from?”

That question was never answered. And with California’s deficient electricity grid, electric car owners are told not to charge their cars on hot summer afternoons. It’s clear the state can’t handle the energy requirement for the high speed train, or electric cars. they are trying to convince everyone to purchase.

Here’s what lawmakers and the High Speed Rail Authority knew in 2011:

According to a July 2011 energy usage analysis prepared for the California High-Speed Rail Program Management Team, total electricity usage for the proposed rail system would be “8.32 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) per day,” and more than 3 billion kWh per year.

The average three-person household in California is about 6,000 kWh per year, or a little more than 2,000 KWh per person.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe