Here's Alameda's analysis of Prop 1 - any thoughts?
We all believe in attractive alternatives to driving, especially sleek electric trains designed in Europe, but the promises in Proposition 1 are too good to be true.
The cogent reason for Greens to oppose the high-speed rail project is that it is a public works fraud scheme specifically designed to appeal to gullible environmentalists. If we vote for Proposition 1, as it is currently on the ballot, the only guarantee is that billions of dollars will be spent on engineering, land acquisition, demolition, and construction of part of a guideway.
Out front, the promoters say this is a $45 billion system. The $9 billion provided by the ballot measure for high-speed rail is only 1/5 the project cost, and project proponents are likely to come back asking taxpayers for additional tens of billions from taxpayers. There is no guarantee that there ever will be a workable rail system, and under current law, no consequences for project managers if they waste every dime. The idea is apparently to start a very big hole in the ground, then come back and ask for more bucks. Federal funding is as imaginary as private investment, as Amtrak high speed rail funding belongs to the 20 senators in Northeastern states.
The firm which has been prime contractor for all work authorized to date by the High Speed Rail Authority is Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), notorious for unsigned engineering drawings on sections of the Wilshire Subway that caved in, and for choosing the wrong concrete epoxy for the tunnel in Boston?s out-of-control Big Dig. The cost of the Big Dig ballooned from $2 billion to $22 billion over the course of the project, and the tunnel still leaks seawater. PB and other firms were fined $450 million under their settlement with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the rest of the money is gone, with not very many feet of highway to show for it.
PB also was responsible for the multi-billions of cost overruns on the San Jose light rail line, the Wilshire Subway, and the BART-SFO line, and their overall business model doesn?t seem to have changed much since. For example, one of the most recent PB productions was a plan for a $1 billion Sacramento airport line.
On the high-speed rail project, not only the cost figures are ballooned beyond belief. The Rail Authority predicts an annual ridership of 117 million passengers on the 24-station line. As a reality check, France?s most popular high-speed train, the TGV- Southeast carried 18 million passengers during its 10th year of operation. Eurostar, the London-Paris high-speed train you may have heard about, finally managed to carry more than 10 million passengers for the first time last year, a decade and a half after it started running. It is hard to believe that California trains will outperform European routes with more population.
The Authority claims that the project will have no operating deficit, but the Legislative Analyst has produced an opinion in the ballot that the operating cost would be about $1 billion annually, and suggests that some proportion of this would have to be covered by state subsidies (likely in the hundreds of millions annually). This would directly harm all transit service statewide.
The Rail Authority has been actively goosing the Merced County real estate market with statements about the "new California gold rush" and its selection of the Pacheco Route, a repeat of the UC Merced land scam with the same participants. Stations in Gilroy and Palmdale will be minutes from the Peninsula and Los Angeles, respectively, causing huge incentives for new exurban sprawl. The staff says they won't build a Los Banos station but Angelo Tsakopoulos and his investor corporations have purchased 3500 acres of land there within three miles of the proposed stop, so the station and sprawl are likely to happen if the route is built.
Severe negative environmental impacts on the Pacific Flyway (disruption of nesting and avian mortality from striking 220 mph trains), and noise impacts on communities on the Peninsula, and in Santa Clara County, Los Angeles County, and Orange County are also a major concern.
Promised environmental benefits are questionable. According to British studies, 220 mph trains do not produce greenhouse gas reductions or energy savings, because of the exponential increase in energy requirement of trains above about 120 mph. France has GHG reductions from HSR only because the trains are 100% nuclear powered. The proposal here will depend on additional coal-fired plants in the Southwest.
-- John-Marc Chandonia (jmc@sfgreens.org) http://sfgreens.org/