California High-Speed Rail Authority
California’s $45 billion bullet train “is in trouble because of mistakes,” says the former San Francisco lawmaker who has been a driving force for the project for nearly two decades.
But the mistakes are “not uncorrectable” and are not “particularly surprising mistakes,” either, says Quentin Kopp, a retired legislator and judge and longtime advocate for this ambitious public works project.
And in the end, despite intense criticism over everything from financial projections to route selection, he says the 800-mile rail link between Northern and Southern California is likely to be built pretty much as planned.
As chairman of the state Senate Transportation Committee, Kopp helped shape the bullet train from the beginning: In 1992, he was co-author of the measure authorizing the first study of the concept.
Then, 14 years later, after leaving the Legislature and serving on the San Mateo County bench, Kopp was named chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the board in charge of the project. He served during a critical period – the ramp-up to the 2008 election, when state voters approved $9.95 billion in rail construction bonds. He left earlier this year.
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As California Watch and the Orange County Register recently reported, the project is the target of intense criticism, with the state Legislative Analyst's Office and other officials warning that the state may be billions of dollars short of the money needed to build it.
Kopp says the bullet train also gets buffeted because the rail authority hasn’t done a good job of explaining the rationale underlying key decisions.
Poor communication is “about half the problem,” Kopp said in a recent interview.
For example, the rail authority has come under withering criticism for deciding to begin construction next year with a $4.7 billion, 140-mile line from near Fresno to Bakersfield. Critics have mocked the route as “the train to nowhere.” State Treasurer Bill Lockyer recently told California Watch that starting in either the Bay Area or the Los Angeles Basin would have been a better choice.
“One of the mistakes was the failure to explain the reasons for selecting that section, which are entirely rational,” Kopp said.
“First of all, you must test the trains at maximum speed. Maximum speed is about 220 miles per hour. You cannot operate at that speed from Los Angeles to Anaheim or San Francisco to San Jose.”
Needing a “test section” where trains can run at full throttle, the rail authority decided to start in the open spaces of the Central Valley, Kopp said. But that rationale isn’t well understood, he said.
Kopp also disputed the contention that the valley line will fail as a stand-alone route if funding stalls and the entire system cannot immediately be built. That issue was raised in May in the legislative analyst’s tough report.
“That 140 miles, if the high-speed project is not consummated, can be used for the San Joaquin corridor train and Amtrak and possibly even in some way with the Capitol Corridor” line that links the Bay Area with Sacramento, Kopp contended. But he said the point wasn’t getting across.
He said another compelling rationale for beginning construction in the valley is the terrible battering the region has taken in the recession.
“Unemployment in that portion of California is the highest in the state, about 20 percent, maybe more in some towns between Chowchilla and the Bakersfield city line,” he said. The rail project will create thousands of construction jobs where they are desperately needed, but that also seems to get lost in the debate, he said.
Kopp said poor communication was part of the dynamic in another hotly contested rail issue: the route of the rail link between San Francisco and the Central Valley. The rail authority has opted to run the line south for the length of the San Francisco Peninsula, then cross the Diablo Range via the Pacheco Pass, south of San Jose.
A rejected alternative route would cross the bay south of San Francisco International Airport and enter the valley via the Altamont Pass – the route of the I-580 freeway.
Fearing the bullet train project will bring traffic, noise and blight, opponents -- including several Peninsula cities – twice have sued the rail authority on environmental grounds. But Kopp contends the Altamont route would raise many more environmental concerns because trains would have to cross the bay.
“There is no way that another bridge or tube will be built across San Francisco Bay, and such a bridge or tube is necessary to bring high-speed rail through the Altamont Pass to San Francisco,” he said.
“I tried some 20 years ago as a state senator to lay the legislative foundation for another bridge or a tube connecting (San Francisco International Airport) to Oakland airport,” he said.
It became apparent that another bay crossing “can’t be done politically, for the environmental objections,” he said.
One proposal for the Altamont route would run bullet trains through the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, a stopping point for the Pacific Flyway. That will never work, he said.
Kopp said he chafes at criticism of the bullet train. He was galled by the legislative analyst’s report, which recommended that lawmakers consider pulling the plug on the project because billions in needed federal funding may never materialize.
The report was “devoid of data, devoid of informational fact, embarrassing,” he said. Worse, he said it seemed to ignore the benefits that a completed rail system would bring to California and the costs of other transportation options.
He contends that building high-speed rail will be far cheaper than paying for the transportation infrastructure that would otherwise be needed to serve California’s burgeoning population, which some say will reach 50 million in 25 years.
“Building 3,000 new lanes of freeways and five new airport runways” would cost twice what high-speed rail will cost, he said.
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