Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Media Background Links

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d97483w_3hcn4mh8t

Presentation to the Senate Budget Subcommittee #2 on Resources, Environmental Protection, Energy and Transportation on January 19, 2010

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/la-me-cap17-2009dec17,0,5941984.column

Column by LA Times veteran Sacramento observer George Skelton.
Summary:  Payments on bond borrowing are becoming uncomfortably high, crowding out funds for universities, healthcare, parks -- and all the other government services being slashed these days.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20040822/ai_n14580705/?tag=content;col1

Oakland Tribune story on how the high speed rail bond measure got onto the ballot.
Summary: Just pay $1 million to the right people.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/03/local/me-rail3
$9 million PR Agency contract conflicts.
Summary: They almost got away with it.

http://innovations.coe.berkeley.edu/vol3-issue9-nov09/highspeedrail

A sobering analysis of the facts by highly respected experts who have studied high speed rail systems around the world.
Summary: “Even if high-speed rail attracted everyone who drove and flew between the Los Angeles basin and the San Francisco Bay Area during the year 2007, it would amount to only eight million passengers per year, nowhere near the numbers projected by the California High Speed Rail Authority, explained CEE professor Mark Hansen. But even that estimate is optimistic. HSR would be extremely unlikely to capture most current air travelers due to lack of transportation connectivity in most California cities and regions.”

http://www.sacbee.com/walters/story/2405294.html
Column by Dan Walters of the SacBee.
Dan Walters is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and an expert on California politics. He has been a journalist for more than 40 years, working almost exclusively for California newspapers. He has written more than 6,000 articles about California and its politics, and his column now appears in more than 50 California newspapers. His articles have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.  He is also the founding editor of the California Political Almanac, and co-author of The Third House: Lobbyists, Money and Power in Sacramento, a book on lobbying.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/dec/18/high-speed-myths-business-plan-shows-deceit-bullet
Editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Summary: “Advocates said annual ridership would be so enormous – 117 million – that the project would become massively profitable and would have vast environmental and traffic benefits by getting tens of thousands of polluting vehicles off the state’s roads. Ridership would be so voluminous that economies of scale would hold the cost of trips from Los Angeles to San Francisco to just $55 and that 450,000 non-transportation-related jobs would be created as a result.

There was just one problem: The ridership figure that was central to all these claims was seemingly invented out of whole cloth. The entire Amtrak system, which has more than 500 destinations in 46 states, has but 26 million passengers a year. The 117 million estimate was also vastly inflated from rail advocates’ own initial estimates – almost certainly because an honest estimate would have been a harder sell.”

http://www.sustainable-transportation.com/
Two UC Berkeley experts have completed the first comprehensive environmental life-cycle assessment of automobiles, buses, trains, and aircraft in the United States. Their report directly and dramatically contradicts the claims of the High Speed Rail Authority about the environmental benefits of high speed rail.

Summary: “While many consider high-speed rail an environmental silver bullet for transportation in California, Arpad Horvath, Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing, punctured those assumptions. "Our transportation decision-making is based on atrocious environmental data," he told the audience. Decisions about which transportation modes are greenest must be made not only the basis of tailpipe emissions, but rather, a total life-cycle assessment of the various modes. These must include manufacturing of the vehicles themselves, their required infrastructure, and the fuel used to power them. High-speed rail will produce some 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year during its construction, said Horvath. It will need to run very full trains almost immediately to offset the emissions expended in building tracks, stations, rail cars to "compete environmentally" with air or road travel. In addition, if the train's electricity is produced by coal-fired or natural gas-fired plants there will be substantial, harmful emissions produced until cleaner, alternative fuel sources, such as wind power, are available for use. The bottom line, he said, was high-speed rail "only outperforms other modes if there is a very high passenger load or a very clean energy source, neither of which is assured at the moment."

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14005901#ixzz0Zz8qiy6C

Opposition to high speed rail is growing everywhere.
Summary: “The brainchild of public agencies in four states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Utah — the rail alliance believes "the future mobility of people and freight in the West depends on high speed rail lines." Yet in supporting this dubious thesis in their opening press conference, officials misstated so many elementary facts as to cast doubt on whether they'd studied the issue at all.”

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/11/30/30greenwire-foreign-suitors-lining-up-for-us-high-speed-ra-44368.html
Foreign Suitors Lining Up for U.S. High-Speed Rail Payday
Summary: “Still, most of the work that lies at the heart of the systems would be done outside the United States, with the firms simply revamping existing technology to meet the needs of the U.S. market, said Gary Schulman, who leads Booz Allen Hamilton's government transportation consulting business. "They'll assemble them here, but of course the engineering will be done back in the homeland," he said.”