Will California's high-speed hopes be derailed?

Earlier this fall, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced $2.4 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail around the country.

RAY LAHOOD: I believe this: in less time than it took to plan and pave America’s interstate system, you’ll see trains shuttle significant numbers of passengers across the country.

Then came the midterm elections, which threw many of the high-speed rail plans around the country off track. Here’s what Wisconsin’s new Republican governor Scott Walker had to say about the project in his state, back when he was campaigning in August:

SCOTT WALKER: Secretary LaHood, when you say we can’t stop the train, we have a simple message: yes we can!

If high-speed rail is going to happen anywhere, it will be in California. Back in 2008, voters approved a $10 billion bond measure to fund a train that zips people from L.A. to San Francisco in just two-and-a-half hours. But even though the Golden State’s high-speed future is on a fast track compared with the rest of the nation, it’s still hitting a lot of roadblocks. KALW’s Casey Miner reports.

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CASEY MINER: When Bob Doty stands in the commuter train station in downtown San Francisco, he doesn’t have any trouble imagining high-speed rail.

BOB DOTY: We have this golden opportunity in our little Golden State.

Doty’s an engineer with the California High-Speed Rail Authority. To him, the project’s benefits are obvious.

DOTY: Riding on that train behind you right now is 30 times safer than driving that auto right over here to the side. 30 times. Why we don’t do everything we can in the United States to put people on rail is sort of crazy.

That’s not how Pat Burt sees it. He’s the mayor of Palo Alto, about 30 miles down the line from San Francisco. It’s a college town: leafy streets, local businesses. When Burt stands at the city’s downtown train station, he doesn’t have any trouble imagining high-speed rail, either. What he imagines, though, is something that looks like a giant freeway passing right through the middle of his town.

PAT BURT: This would be, in the worst-case scenario, an elevated structure. The entire thing would be over 50 feet in the air, racing through the center of the city at 125 miles an hour with a train every few minutes.

Palo Alto is one of three cities south of San Francisco that are suing the state’s rail authority to keep the train out. They have a lot of concerns, a big one being property values – and how a new rail line might affect them. 

BRIAN STANKE: This is one of the most controversial areas in the state for this project.

Brian Stanke is executive director of Californians for High-Speed Rail, an advocacy group. He and others believe that all that controversy has cost the Bay Area priority treatment from the federal Department of Transportation. Their proof? In November, officials announced that all the federal money given to California’s project so far has to be spent in the Central Valley. The Peninsula segment won’t even get an environmental report until sometime this spring, maybe later. Jeffrey Barker is a spokesman for the Rail Authority.

JEFFREY BARKER: Obviously the Central Valley is where California’s system will be true high-speed rail.

Compared to the density of San Francisco and Los Angeles, a lot of people think the Central Valley is the middle of nowhere. But Barker says that’s not a bad thing for the train.

BARKER: It’s where it will hit the highest speeds. It’s where there will be entirely new infrastructure. And that’s key in the near term obviously because it means a tremendous amount of work and job creation on the ground.

So the first segment will be the easiest to build, and it will let officials showcase what their train can do, which is reach a top speed of 220 miles per hour. But unless the state finds the money to build the other segments, it won't actually get many people anywhere. Palo Alto mayor Pat Burt says that proves the project is a waste of money.

BURT: If we were as voters promised a high-speed rail system, but instead we have a train system that goes back and forth between Fresno and Bakersfield, is that what we were promised?

Pat Burt’s just one guy. But his skepticism? That’s something a lot of people share. California has a shot at proving how great the trains can be, but it’s going to be a while. Jeffrey Barker of the High-Speed Rail uthority says they’re not even going to buy train cars until at least 2015, never mind run them.

BARKER: It wouldn’t be until about 2017 – on this kind of hypothetical, optimistic timeline – that we would actually run service.

With that kind of timeline, one of the project’s biggest challenges is going to be keeping taxpayers motivated – at least according to Brian Stanke with Californians for High-Speed Rail.

STANKE: The voters of California didn’t say, “Build a quarter of a project and make that the best quarter of a project you can.” They voted to build the whole project. We need to plan to build the system out, not plan to build half the system and then stop.

Building the train is risky. If people think it’s a waste of money, they won’t want to give it more money – which means it will end up being a waste of money. Either way, it looks like the first high-speed ride in California is still many years away.

In San Francisco, I’m Casey Miner for Crosscurrents.

Get up to speed on the current state of high-speed rail by listening to this interview with transportation reporter Casey Miner.