California High Speed Rail Authority

Greetings Again

One wishes that one could find enough excuses to share my technical difficulties. Only kidding. There are no excuses for not placing daily things of interest on this web site. It's my human failure to not set aside enough time for reading and typing a few lines.

Well enough written on that subject.

The following was the presentation made today to the California High Speed Rail Authority. Although this handout was given to the Authority it was 500 words which were never spoken. My words had little to do with the text due to the fact that we citizens at these public hearings are only allowed three minutes to speak.

Honorable Chair, Authority Board Members and Staff

The Governing Body of California has challenged this Authority with inventing a future mobility for the projected 45 million residents who will live and work in California by 2020. A new secure, reliable regional and intercity transportation system should act as the foundation of a strong economy. It should serve the future knowledge-based communities for a diverse set industries over the next hundred years.

Californians need to maximize the exchange of goods and services, culture, friendship, ideas, and knowledge. The transportation technology of choice should collapse distance by shortening time periods between San Francisco and Los Angeles and places in between.

Today we wish to share a brief design solution for the City of Bakersfield and it’s Metropolitan area.

The approach path from the south and/or east converges into the Bakersfield metro area at approximately Hwy 58 and Mount Vernon Avenue. It is here that we suggest a two-path divergence of lines. One path should be directed northward towards the Union Pacific corridor. The second path westward toward the Burlington Northern & Sante Fe alignment. The Center City station should be located on the north side of the BNSF as pedestrian close to the existing Amtrak Station as possible.

This solution therefore locates two potential rail alignments for the Bakersfield Metropolitan Central City location.

The first path allows for high-speed non-stop line along the Union Pacific corridor. This will thereafter allow convergence northward toward either of the Burlington Northern and Southern Pacific corridors to the Bay area.

The second path suggests a local service line. This runs along the Burlington Northern Sante Fe alignment westwards and then northwards to serve Bakersfield passengers. The required deceleration and acceleration geometries would allow local access to the main high-speed line in both northerly and southerly directions.

This solution also proposes to take opportunity of adjacent industrially zoned land areas for both local and state high speed transportation service, namely: -

For cleaning, re-stocking and switching of the high-speed transportation trains in a close-by maintenance area

For an area given to high-speed transportation system guide way maintenance.

For a high-speed transportation system construction yard.

Geographically Bakersfield is California’s strategic center of two major north and south metropolitan areas. So situated it has land available to promote construction assembly, maintenance and service of trains.

We ask the Authority to give serious consideration of these available land parcels on this local line and this solution to a central city station location. The fact that Bakersfield also has quite a record of skillful manufacturing is significant. We have a great desire to boost the oil/agricultural economic base, with this venture.

We hope the Authority achieves this project from concept to completion for all Californians. It will be the most significant accomplishment since the California Aqueduct.

As citizens of this Bakersfield metropolitan area, we believe that we deserve a central city station.

The above was delivered to a struggling underpaid political body doing their best in the world of urban transportation futures. Assemblman Florez and Senator Acosta were particularly active during this meeting. They have been the two leaders who have honestly attempted to move this effort forward. We all commend them for this effort.

It was at this meeting that the Board Members of the Authority finally found an appropriate excuse to dismiss Maglev as a technology for application in this California High Speed Rail Authorities mandate. This was expected some time ago. This most prejudiced decision against a transportation technology advance for Californians should be overturned.

As a 1967 immigrant to America and having consulted for almost 25 years it is hard to think that my "Futures" expectations in this country for advancing urban transportation technology can drop to such a low level.

Imagine as a seven year old the excitement of going from Johannesburg to East London on the train for a summer holiday. Naturally I got some soot in my eye when leaning out to watch the steam engine puffing steam and smoke ahead of our second class coaches. When our last annual family summer holiday trip was taken I was a 17 year old. The two-way track electric line was in service. That was in 1965.

So here we are in the year 2001, 36 years later, and California decides to catch-up to a third world countries transportation technology. This is not the best gift for our next generations mobility needs.

Please read the articles that have been placed on this web site about transportation futures. You will clearly see that my interest in building better communities endorses Magplane -- a magnetically levitated technology.

Some day Califonians will wake up to the fact that we should rather lead the world in transportation invention and technology applications. Being a doubting Thomas and suggesting that there is no Maglev system revenue production in the world and that there is no guaranteed performance of this technology, is the Boards excuse for not taking any measure of risk to make a positive decision. This is quite astounding.

California has created some of the best technological advances in the world to transport objects into space exploration and yet cannot seem to advance urban transportation beyond steel-wheel-steel-rail! This is a most disappointing result.

To quote a recent excellent MIT report on future transportation www.wbcsdmobility.org -- "This “grand challenge” .........of a high speed technology choice for the HSRA........... is formidable in its own right............. there is another challenge, perhaps the most formidable of all, that must be overcome .............. This is the challenge of creating the institutional capacity to address complex, long-term issues like these; the ability to develop consensus about significant changes in the structure and deployment of mobility systems across....... (California) ..............the world; and successfully designing, implementing, and monitoring such ...... mobility .........changes.

If they (Californians) rely on current institutional capabilities, both the developed and developing worlds will find it nearly impossible to develop consensus around how such issues ought to be addressed, develop the plans to implement the consensus solutions, and carry these plans through to fruition. Though technology almost certainly will play a major role in addressing each of the “grand challenges,” it is likely that limits on institutional capacity, not limits on technology, will determine the speed with which the challenges will be addressed — or whether they get addressed at all."

To put it bluntly this California High Speed Rail Athority Board and Staff, with it's body of "the worlds best transportation consultants" is rapidly showing us their inability to create a really new and better way of serving the future of transportation for Californians.

TODAY IN HISTORY

On this day in 1908, Albert Einstein presents quantum theory of light

High-speed rail officials stop in to talk local link

To travel via GET Bus transit from downtown to the Meadows Field Airport takes 45 minutes --- about the same time it would take to commute from Central City Station Balkersfield to Union Station Los Angeles on the proposed High Speed Rail