By Roger Rudick

Near Antwerp, Belgium, there’s a two-mile section of high-speed rail (HSR) line with solar panels over the tracks to help power the system. That kind of technology is essential to maximizing environmental benefits from California’s proposed bullet train, according to a new study co-authored by Berkeley’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. California is poised to begin construction of an HSR line from San Francisco to Los Angeles early next year.

CA High Speed Rail Authority

How "green" California's bullet train is depends in part on how electricity for it is being produced.

But before the electrically powered trains start cleaning up California’s air, they have to make it dirtier. That’s because the construction generates pollution. “We calculated after ground breaking, so the net benefits come at best 10 years after the system starts running,” said Mikhail Chester, a professor at Arizona State and a study author.

And some of that depends on how quickly people switch from driving and flying to using the train, he added. According to the study, entitled “High-speed rail with emerging automobiles and aircraft can reduce environmental impacts in California’s future,” 67% of the construction pollution for HSR comes from making cement.  “But construction is a one-time cost…the benefits continue for the life of the system,” he said.

“We have long supported HSR as an alternative to oil-powered automobiles and jet planes,” said Darrell Clarke, co-lead of the Sierra Club’s national “Beyond Oil” campaign. “The alternative is not doing nothing. The state is growing. Instead of building HSR we could widen highway 99, expand airports—so you’re going to use all those bulldozers and pour all that concrete anyway.”

The study compared HSR trains in Germany with the estimated carbon emissions of future automobiles, assuming a mix of 35-to-55 mpg hybrid and all-electric cars become the norm in California. Under all scenarios, HSR showed benefits in the long run.

“I think the point about running smaller trains during off-peak times is important, to avoid excess capacity,” said Rick Geddes, Associate Professor, Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell, in reference to the study. He also pointed out a difficult trade-off: the faster the trains, the more power they consume. But higher speeds attract riders from heavily polluting airplanes—so it’s important to find the sweet spot that does the most to reduce emissions over all,
he said.

That’s why HSR builders are working on faster, more energy-efficient designs. The latest version of the TGV, France’s high-speed train, goes 220 mph—about 30 mph faster than the previous generation. But it’s lighter and consumes less power, said Adam Pratt, a spokesman for Alstom, which builds the train.

Even if California HSR is powered by wind and solar, bad regulations could negate the benefits, according to the study. Under a cap-and-trade policy in which the right to emit carbon is sold on the open market, the efficiencies of the train could drive down the price of carbon offsets. In other words, if the “cap” is too high, the train could just end up making it cheaper for other sectors to pollute.

But assuming the state can avoid self-defeating policies, the only other way to reduce carbon emissions is to impede travel, said Clark. “Because under any scenario, California’s going to continue to grow.”

Lawmakers authorized $4.5 billion in state funds, to be matched by $3.2 billion in federal funds. The initial segment would run from Fresno to Bakersfield, with concurrent work to improve commuter rail services in Northern and Southern California. The trunk of the project will eventually stretch from Anaheim to San Francisco and cost $68 billion.

Roger Rudick has closely covered the evolution of California’s High Speed Rail project. His documentary work on is profiled at www.trainwars.net.

By Alex Schmidt

It really is true that decent public transport to Angelenos is like the Holy Grail to Indiana Jones — especially on L.A.’s Westside. Looking a bit more deeply into transportation in L.A. makes you check certain assumptions that you may have grown up with. There are, after all, over one million people who ride public transport here every day, and most of that takes place on buses.

L.A. Metro bus stop headed downtown..for now. (Photo: Alex Schmidt)

Now, and when bus cuts were previously threatened L.A. (notably when the Red and Gold lines opened on the east side of town), Metro has been accused of racism. In fact, in 1996, the NAACP and Bus Rider’s Union sued the MTA in federal court and won a consent decree to expand the bus system every year for 10 years. Now that the consent decree has ended, bus lines have been cut regularly. And once again, the Bus Rider’s Union has filed a complaint with the FTA’s Office of Civil Rights. Such investigations take many months, and sometimes as long as a year, so it’s not likely that it will halt the cuts this time around.

While playing the race card may sometimes be effective at halting bus cuts, such a tactic may drown out more detailed and pragmatic conversations that need to be had about the efficacy of Metro’s plans. Every planning expert I talked to for this story, including Allison Yoh, the very expert Metro pointed me to, said that rail was not an ideal public transit solution for L.A. in most places — having little to do with race, and mostly to do with ridership patterns, density, and budgets. Knowledgeable folks have been yelling about this for years, and yet even the existence of this argument comes as a surprise to many.

I myself was car-free in L.A. for seven months in 2009. I commuted from my home in Westwood to my job in Santa Monica along Wilshire Boulevard, on the 720 bus — and it was great — on time, regular, clean, fast. But once you go back to the car, that world seems far, far away. I forgot that a system of buses can work, and got caught up in the magic bullet myth of rail, until I reported this story. A few weeks from now, I may be cheering for rail as a cure-all once again. Why so many Angelenos return to this position may have to do with ineffective messaging coming from the leaders in this fight — leaders on both sides of the debate.

Alex Schmidt is a freelance reporter based in Southern California. Her companion radio feature to this post, airing Friday on KQED’s The California Report, was produced in collaboration with Spot.Us, a non-profit organization that supports independent journalists.

All radio and web features from our series, “Miles to Go: Building a More Sustainable California,” are posted on our special coverage page.

(Photo: Craig Miller)

A new study from the Brookings Institution finds that compared with the rest of the nation, the Bay Area offers pretty good public transportation options.

Among 100 major metropolitan areas, San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont ranks 16th, and San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale ranks second.  Areas were ranked according to how accessible transit is to riders, how long it takes to get to work on transit and how often the systems run during rush hours.

So…if Bay Area transit is so good, why doesn’t anybody seem to take it?

Just one out of ten people in the Bay Area commute by public transportation, according to John Goodwin of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. He says that number hasn’t changed much over the years, despite huge investments in the system. And the Bay Area isn’t alone in that. A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that between 1990 and 2008, the share of commuters taking transit increased by less than one percentage point, from 5% to 5.5%, despite the construction of 217 new rail stations, and the fact that more than a third of California’s transportation spending since the early 1980s has gone to public transit.

“The California public likes the idea of public transit in the sense that they highlight it as a place where we should be investing a lot of our dollars,” said the PPIC’s Ellen Hanak. “But there is a gap between what people say, and how they actually sort of vote with their feet. It’s almost like people would like their neighbors to take transit so they could have fewer cars on the road.”

That sentiment fits what I found in my reporting for a companion radio segment on The California Report.  Every person I talked to liked the idea of public transit, but most of them don’t take it very often. Everyone seemed to have a slightly different reason, but the broad themes were the same: time, convenience, cost, reliability, and, to a lesser extent, cleanliness/quality of experience.

Those issues aren’t likely to get much better in the near term, with Bay Area public transit facing a shortfall of $1 billion a year for the next 25 years, according to Goodwin.

“The situation facing Bay Area transit right now is quite bleak,” said Goodwin, adding that over the last two-to-three years, “virtually every transit agency” has either cut service, raised fares, or both.

He says that since 1997, while the cost of operating Bay Area transit has increased 52%, service has increased only 16%, and ridership has increased just seven percent, which, he admitted, is a “crummy” business model.  Right now MTC is in the middle of a two-year analysis called the Transit Sustainability Project, which is looking at how to make the Bay Area’s public transportation better and more cost-effective.

But the transit itself is just one piece of the puzzle. And it’s a big puzzle.

According to PPIC, transportation makes up 37% of all greenhouse gas emissions in California. Passenger cars and trucks account for almost three quarters of the transportation slice, or 28% of all emissions. Senate Bill 375 was passed in 2009 to address this by prodding regional planning agencies to find ways to link land use and transit in ways that will get people to drive less.  Last year the California Air Resources Board set reductions targets for each region. They vary but most aim for about a seven percent reduction by 2020 and 15% by 2035.

MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments have released an “Initial Vision Scenario” that outlines how the Bay Area might meet these goals.The agencies are currently accepting public comment on the plan, holding public workshops through the end of May.

According to the PPIC study, our best bet for getting Californians out of their cars is to increase high-density development, improve alternatives like bike lanes and carpooling programs, and use pricing strategies to raise the cost of driving alone and parking.

“No single policy on its own is going to work”, said Hanak. “Price signals are the most effective strategy on their own, but even with pricing it’s more effective to combine that policy with better land use and transportation policies.”

For more on the opportunities and the challenges facing California’s efforts to plan for sustainable growth, and to try out your own “vision,” visit our Miles to Go series page.