How do you remember—and reconnect—a neighborhood destroyed by highway construction over a half-century ago?

Since 1983, this has been the mission of Saint Paul, Minnesota’s annual Rondo Days festival. “[You see] everyone you grew up with and everybody you’ve ever known, your childhood and everything,” said former Rondo resident Brian White, Sr. in 2015. “You might see people you haven’t seen since you were five, six years old out here.”

It may mix historical exhibits, field day tournaments, 5K runs, picnics, dances, and religious services, but the festival is no ordinary reunion. Rather, it is an effort to memorialize a riven historically Black community, while also giving living reminder to the persistence of the Rondo diaspora.

Since the early twentieth century, Pullman porters, factory and packinghouse workers, and accountants all populated Rondo, making it “a hub, a place where military, professional, and streetwise Black people gathered, talked, and exchanged ideas,” Marvin Roger Anderson, a co-founder of Rondo Days told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1990. By the 1950s, bounded by Rice Street to the east, Lexington Parkway to the west, and University and Selby Avenues to the north and south, Rondo’s roughly 1.25 square miles  were home to about 80% of St. Paul’s Black population.

It was a place of “beautiful and gracious homes,” remembered former resident Joyce Williams in a 2016 oral history interview, with “hardwood floors, beautiful woodwork, hutches, [and] stained glass windows.”

In 2021, while testifying to the Minnesota House transportation committee, Representative Ruth Richardson called Rondo “the heartbeat of the Black community” of St. Paul.

Nonetheless, between 1956 and 1968, the state of Minnesota and the city of St. Paul razed the neighborhood in order to make way for I-94, the east-west interstate that runs from Michigan to Montana. Richardson pointed out that, far from an accident, the decision to route the highway through Rondo was intentional: Officials had dismissed an alternative, less destructive plan through an “underutilized industrial area.”

The highway construction devastated St. Paul’s Black middle class. Over 600 Black families lost their homes, alongside longstanding businesses and institutions. Rondo residents also lost the ladder to generational wealth: a 2020 study suggested that, compounded over time, the lost home equity added up to nearly $160 million.

The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act—at the time, the single biggest federal infrastructural investment in the nation’s history—reshaped the nation in countless ways. And it came at great cost. Between 1957 and 1977, nearly 1 million Americans lost their homes to highway construction, most of them people of color. Since the early 1990s, some 6,300 additional families have been displaced by highway expansion projects.

Planners knew that the interstates threatened urban communities. In 1958, the Sagamore Conference—convened by the Highway Research Board and attended by top federal, state, and municipal officials, academics, and civic leaders—issued a report clearly noting the perils of highway construction. It warned of widespread displacement, with low-income, non-white, and elderly residents facing the “greatest potential injury.” (Nevertheless, to this day, literature from the Department of Transportation that is used frequently in planning and engineering graduate programs self-servingly casts this history as a series of minor, unexpected, and unintended consequences.)

In some cities, “freeway revolts” did halt construction, but this advocacy failed to include non-white homeowners. In Memphis, the white, middle-class-led Citizens to Preserve Overton Park successfully challenged the construction of a highway corridor for I-40 in the Supreme Court. But Black activists in Nashville who organized a similar group to challenge I-40 construction through their community failed in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court denied the case a hearing. Nashville’s Black community could only stand by as the highway ripped through its businesses, homes, and institutions.

In June 2021, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg initiated new efforts at the Department of Transportation (DOT) to address this problematic legacy, dedicating $1 billion to “reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.”

But money doesn’t do anything on its own. To repair the damage that the planners of the 1950s wrought on communities of color, we have to address both the physical infrastructure itself, and the stories we tell about it. That means first, acknowledging and reckoning with the interstates’ history and, second, community-based efforts to restore the physical fabric of the divided neighborhoods.

To change the cultural narrative of the highways, urban planners Sarah Jo Peterson and Steven Higashide advocate for “truth and reconciliation” carried out, in part, by existing institutions such as the Transportation Research Board and university researchers, or perhaps even a Congressional commission.  “If we have any hope of avoiding future injustices, we have to fully understand the past,” notes Higashide.

These efforts feed physical solutions like ReConnect Rondo, which received a $2 million grant from Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program in February 2023. ReConnect Rondo is aligned with but independent from Rondo Days: an initiative “to create Minnesota’s first African American cultural enterprise district connected by a community land bridge” that will “repair, restore, and revitalize Rondo.”

Nearly 25 years ago, St. Paul journalist Joe Soucheray wrote that the Rondo Days festival “comes in softly and touches in a healing way the fading scar of Rondo Ave.” Over the years, this soft touch has had an impact, including by efforts to make the community more visibile through signage, a tribute at the local library, and Rondo’s inclusion in a permanent exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. More recently, a small pocket park called the Rondo Commemorative Plaza opened with the intention to honor the community and welcome new members, such as Somali, Karen, Hmong, and Oromo residents. ReConnect Rondo’s dream of physically and psychologically suturing the old community through a land bridge serves as an extension of this decades-long project.

The eventual Rondo land bridge will be the physical culmination of the efforts catalyzed by Rondo Days. But it is only possible today thanks to the labor of locals, former residents, and activists to make the community’s narrative known. Now it’s up to the rest of us to build it.

The post A Black Neighborhood, Upended by a Highway, Looks to Reconnect appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I come to bury California’s parking lots, not to praise them.

The evil that abundant parking spaces do lives long after the ground is paved over.

So say the honorable officials and wise engineers of California. They tell us that parking consumes huge amounts of property that might be used more productively for business, housing, or transit infrastructure like bus or bike lanes. In L.A. County alone, parking covers 200 square miles. Most parking spaces are empty most of the time—people don’t park at home when they are at work, or park at work when they are at home.

Abundant and cheap parking encourages people to drive when they might walk or bike, which would improve their health. More driving means more accidents, and more injuries and death for car passengers and pedestrians. All that driving also creates pollution and greenhouse gases.

So, I understand why our cities are ganging up and sticking their knives into the Caesar of municipal parking requirements, the minimum number of spaces that must accompany new development. These requirements encourage sprawl, since parking requires more money and land, and property is cheaper and more plentiful far from our city centers. These rules also effectively block the construction of smaller, denser, more affordable housing, and the repurposing of old buildings for new purposes.

A number of cities are assassinating these requirements to make it easier to build new housing, without the extra costs and land necessary for parking. This year, Berkeley, following the example of a 2018 San Francisco ordinance, eliminated off-street parking requirements for new developments. Sacramento abolished its parking minimums as part of a broader zoning reform. San Diego and Oakland have eliminated parking requirements near transit, and San Jose may follow suit.

Now, higher levels of government are trying to finish off the parking lot. A bill from Assemblymember Laura Friedman of Glendale would eliminate parking requirements statewide for new buildings within half a mile of a transit corridor or major stop. President Biden’s infrastructure package includes provisions that would make it easier to eliminate parking requirements nationwide, in service of making construction more affordable.

I know such anti-parking policies are well-intentioned and honorable. And yet, I stare into the bleak future of the California parking lot, and my heart feels a strange sadness.

So, I speak now not to disprove what our honorable policymakers and editorial writers say, but here I am to speak what I have seen and known. Parking lots have been, for all their faults, good and true friends to me and our communities too.

Public lots often provide revenues to cash-starved cities. And local parking requirements also provide communities precious leverage with developers. Cities often offer exemptions from parking requirements in return for the developers providing more affordable units, or community benefits like parks, bus shuttles, or libraries to accompany their projects. Anti-eviction activists have used parking requirements to fight new developments that might displace existing residents.

But our state’s leaders say parking is a plague upon our communities. And they are wise and honorable people.

But have not parking lots provided great utility, even life-saving service, during the COVID-19 plague? Think how many more people might have died if our state didn’t have so many large parking lots—from Petco Park-adjacent lots in San Diego, to the Disneyland Resort parking garage in Anaheim, to the Cal Expo and State Fair lots in Sacramento—that could be turned into mass testing sites. Many of these same lots became centers for mass vaccination that finally allowed the state to control the coronavirus. No wonder Gov. Gavin Newsom gave his state-of-the-state speech at Dodger Stadium, surrounded by its ocean of heroic parking lots.

But the powers-that-be say parking lots prioritize cars over humans.

Sure, I did see hospitals use their lots to set up tents and house patients during COVID-19 surges. Communities turned parking lots into tent cities to shelter the homeless safely, and temporarily, with the virus spreading.

But those who would eliminate parking are right honorable public servants. Abundant parking, they remind us, robs our children of better futures. And they speak true.

Yet, with the state closing its schools and failing to provide reliable broadband, parking lots were all many young Californians had left.

Across the state, I encountered students without reliable Internet at home camped out in the parking lots of closed libraries and coffee shops so they could connect to the Wi-Fi they needed to continue their lessons. School districts routinely distributed laptops and books, and collected homework, in drive-through lines in their parking lots. And might our parking lots have saved in-person education itself, had they been allowed to become outdoor classrooms for our children?

Parking lots are bad for business, those honorable parking killers say. But weren’t parking lots also a godsend for business during the pandemic? Cities were aggressive in using their parking lots to allow restaurants and retailers to remain open and serve customers safely outside. Large parking lots became storage facilities for dormant rental cars, and for shipping containers that overflowed from ports whose workers couldn’t keep up with incoming traffic.

When our greatest gathering points closed, did not parking lots step in to provide solace and communal experience? In my hometown of Pasadena and so many other places, large parking lots became drive-in movie theaters. Churches, unable to safely use their sanctuaries, held services in parking lots; I took some comfort from a “drive-in Mass” I attended at the parking lot of Santa Rosa Catholic Church in Cambria.

You could even say parking lots saved democratic politics, as election rallies and events moved to drive-in. Might our fair state still be slurred daily by President Trump, without the dedicated service of so many parking lots to Joe Biden’s campaign?

I know that, after the traumas and loss of the last year, I am weak-minded and prone to cling to the familiar. I know that our honorable policymakers are right, and that we should rejoice, not cry, at the demise of the California parking lot. But my eyes, clouded by tears, see the progressive movement to reduce parking as both comedy and tragedy, of the kind Shakespeare might have written.

The post A Funeral Oration for the California Parking Lot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know I should call you Mr. President, but there’s no time for formalities. You must move fast if you’re going to save California’s high-speed rail project.

No malarkey: It has to be you. California has shown itself incapable of funding, managing, or building deep popular support for this $80 billion train, which would be the first truly high-speed rail system in the United States. You—”Amtrak Joe,” with your personal devotion to riding the rail and your multitrillion dollar infrastructure proposal, now before Congress—are the last, best hope for making it a reality.

Is it worth the political risk of associating yourself with an epic failure? You and your advisors are cautious people who don’t want to give Republicans who oppose infrastructure spending a tempting target. Saving high-speed rail would enrage the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, whose hostility to progress runs so deep that he has spent years opposing the project even though it would run through his own Bakersfield district.

But should you succeed, the potential rewards extend far beyond California. If you can fix this problematic and high-profile project, you will show the world just how committed you are to remaking this country’s infrastructure, and fulfilling your campaign promise to “build back better.”

Taking on this California headache won’t be easy. To have any chance of success, you’ll have to change the mindset around the project. Most of the attention paid to high-speed rail focuses on its lack of money—it’s short tens of billions of the $80 billion-plus needed for completion. But the fundamental problem with high-speed rail, as with other mega-projects in wealthy California, is not money, but a lack of management.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is a failed agency. Thirteen years after California voters approved the railway, this agency still hasn’t managed the fundamental task of assembling the land it needs to build the first stretch in the San Joaquin Valley. It lacks the size, engineering expertise, and management chops to handle a construction project of this scale. Contractors have run amok, adding extra charges while failing to meet deadlines. And the authority’s board of directors is weak and part-time.

Leading state politicians, instead of supporting the project, are taking it apart. In early 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom abruptly and foolishly abandoned the plan to connect the first piece of the project, from the Bay Area to the Central Valley, leaving behind a diminished rail line running from Bakersfield to Merced. By making high-speed rail a Central Valley-only regional project, Newsom hurt support for rail in other regions. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon of Los Angeles has started pushing to redirect high-speed rail’s limited funds to Southern California.

Joe, this unwinding of the project will end in high-speed rail’s eventual demise—unless you intervene, and soon. The good news is that California’s vast mismanagement of the project offers your administration multiple leverage points to jump in and start calling the shots.

Two big leverage points involve money. The first is $929 million in rail funding that the Trump administration pulled back in 2019 after Newsom abandoned the Bay-Area-to-San-Joaquin plan (and made intemperate remarks about the federal government in the process). The second involves $2.6 billion the state received for high-speed rail from the 2009 federal stimulus bill that it still hasn’t spent. California is almost certain to miss a 2022 deadline for using the money, which means you have the power to take it back.

To put it in your earthy style, Joe, since you control $3.5 billion that this project badly needs to stay afloat, you have California by the balls.

You can force Californians to confront the question: Are we serious about completing this train or not?

Your demands should not be bashful. As a condition of California getting the money it needs to keep the project alive—not to mention the tens of billions of additional federal dollars that will eventually be necessary to complete it—you can demand major changes in the management and operations of high-speed rail. First, you should require the resignation of all authority board members—and insist that the governor and legislature appoint a board, and a new chief executive, of your administration’s choice. Second, you need to insist that the new CEO replace the current, ineffective contractors with a real corporate engineering and management heavyweight—I’m thinking Kiewit, or that California giant, Bechtel—that can handle a project of this scale.

And most of all, you must insist that the project plan take the high-speed rail from the Bay Area all the way to L.A. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Some California politicians will balk at such a severe intervention. But don’t give them an inch. When they object, go right after their pretensions of national leadership and say: “Well, if California is no longer interested in building the American future like the governor says, I’d be happy to send California’s money to high-speed rail projects in Texas or Florida, where they still have ambitions.” They should fall in line. After all, you’ll be stepping up to ensure proper management of a project they never bothered to oversee.

One cautionary note: You may be tempted to throw in tens of billions in federal money right now, when the pandemic has opened the door for big federal spending. But slow down. Only once your preferred team is in place should you offer a schedule of future federal payments. And that support must be tied to measurable progress in the construction and testing. Joe, we Californians need to be kept on a short leash.

You’ll have to shrug off criticism, including from Californians who say that the state, having put bond money and cap-and-trade dollars into the project, deserves to hold the reins. The hard truth about California is that we’ve never built much of anything big without federal assistance—our aqueducts, our highways, and our internet all required help from Washington.

But the biggest thing you’ll need is the resolve to walk away. If California won’t meet your demands, or if our leaders undermine the project, you should pull back the money and leave the state to clean up its own unfinished mess.

Your love must be tough, but high-speed rail is worth the trouble. The project also isn’t quite as big a loser as it looks right now. Already, thousands of people are building it in the Central Valley, starting with the replacement of dozens of at-grade crossings that will prevent deadly rail accidents, and free up capacity for freight rail. And high-speed rail, with a proven record of success in other countries, could one day provide a more convenient, climate-friendlier alternative to flying or driving around our state, and country.

But none of that will happen, Joe, unless you kick California in the butt right now.

The post Dear Mr. President, Please Save California’s High-Speed Rail  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While California reached its 2020 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels with ease, it is lagging badly in meeting its next target—of slashing emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030—and that has made California’s climate change regime a target. Environmental scientists and climate-focused policymakers criticize the state’s lack of progress in meeting such targets; conservatives and climate denialists say this failure demonstrates the folly of our one-state fight against climate change.

But to judge California’s climate change policies by metrics like greenhouse gas emissions is to get things backward. The Golden State’s fight against climate change is about far more than just climate change. It’s about creating opportunities for California to change itself.

Countering global warming has become the only reliable rationale for doing anything transformational in California, and the primary justification for what little long-term planning takes place here. If you have an idea that requires cutting through our governmental dysfunction, crippling legal system, and sprawling political fractiousness, invoking climate change is your last, best hope.

In fact, climate is so central to California’s ability to change itself that, if the threat of climate change didn’t exist, Californians would have had to invent it.

I realize conspiracy theorists will feast on that line, but climate change isn’t a con. It’s a real and existential threat, which make it a catalyst for making much broader changes in society. This method of change isn’t new. The 1960s-era War on Poverty, for example, didn’t end poverty, but it helped create a suite of supports for people that made life a little less brutal, and produced new government jobs that gave many working-class people of color a foothold in the middle class.

When you stop judging California’s fight by emissions metrics, and evaluate it instead on what it’s actually accomplished, the picture is extraordinary. Over the past generation, climate change has been the most compelling reason for reducing pollution, starting new industries, re-engineering products, seeding social movements, investing in infrastructure, and revamping regional government.

The state’s pathbreaking cap-and-trade program forced polluting industries to better measure and focus on their emissions and became the basis for novel collaborations between California and provincial governments, from Quebec to Guangdong. The program has produced billions in revenues for projects, from changing farming and ranching practices to funding California’s high-speed rail project.

Climate concerns have forced California’s once-untouchable electric utilities to reorganize, deal with neglected maintenance, impose pre-emptive shutoffs, and embrace renewables. California has become an international leader in solar power, which today provides one-fifth of our electricity. You can’t miss the arrays of panels on more than a million home roofs, on once-vacant lots and formerly agricultural land, and as shade in school parking lots. An estimated 100,000 Californians work in some part of the solar industry.

While other places debate whether to adopt renewables at all, California is way ahead in arguing about the mix. How much can we reduce the “carbon intensity” of fuels and thus reduce greenhouse gases when fuels are burned? Should we really decommission Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County in 2025, and lose its reliable supply of non-carbon power? Should the geothermal sources of Lake and Imperial Counties count as renewables?

Critics of California’s climate change fight rightfully point to increasing emissions from transportation. But the transformation of that sector in response to global warming is nevertheless remarkable. California companies have led in ride-sharing and self-driving technologies—new models that have been sold, in part, as responsive to climate change (thought they also provide greater convenience and mobility for people). The state has created regulations and incentives to encourage more electric cars, the electrification of bus lines, and more efficient vehicles of all kinds. Planning strategies are reducing the number of miles people drive. And gas stations are now under pressure, too; Petaluma recently voted to prohibit new ones in its city limits.

Progress extends from the local to the global. California has altered the auto industry worldwide. In 2015, it was our state’s regulators who first learned that Volkswagen had designed software to cheat emissions testing on 11 million cars. Last year, it was California that negotiated agreements with five global carmakers, including Ford, Honda and Volvo, to cut greenhouse gas emissions more than they were required to by the U.S. government—which should seed a new generation of automobiles.

Beyond cars, the fight against climate change has helped planners turn transportation upside down. These days, Los Angeles—of all places—is a national leader in transit, with a fully funded, 50-year program for expanding its already robust Metro system of rail and busways. Bay Area leaders are knitting together existing systems, and promising expansions, including ACE train service connecting San Jose to Modesto and Merced. San Diego County is considering a “5 Big Moves Plan” to create a transportation system as fast and convenient as driving. Fresno is embracing bus rapid transit—light rail on wheels—and the Coachella Valley has launched CV Link, a dedicated transportation system for pedestrians, bicyclists, and golf cart drivers connecting eight cities and two tribal lands.

In California, climate change touches every issue. It has shaken up a California water system that seemed locked in litigation and time, helping to push the state to regulate its groundwater, and to adopt recycling and stormwater capture systems. Climate change fuels our debates over housing. Many zoning changes supported by the YIMBY, or Yes in My Backyard, movement grow out of climate concerns—housing that is closer to job centers can reduce commutes and pollution.

California’s schools and universities have modernized curricula as a by-product of efforts to make the state a leader in climate education. While the pandemic has inspired emergency investments in public health, telemedicine, and homelessness programs, it will be climate change, and the emergencies it produces, that will justify making those investments permanent.

The bad news is that climate change has contributed to our political polarization. The stakes are now higher—we are fighting for the survival of humanity, and who can compromise on that? The better news is that climate concerns also have ushered in a new era of activism. The movement to ban hydraulic fracking is a statewide force. Environmental organizations, civil rights groups, and even Black Lives Matter have refocused on how poorer people bear the brunt of both pollution and the higher cost of living related to climate change.

There are more examples—too many for one column. Almost nothing has gone untouched. The bags we use, the straws through which we drink, the mowers we use on our lawns, the native plants with which we’ve replaced those lawns, the crops we grow, the materials with which we repair our homes, the trucks that move those materials—all have been altered by the climate fight.

And we should acknowledge that more. The saving grace of our desperate struggle to save the world from climate change is the opportunity it provides to change ourselves.

The post California’s Climate Change Fight Is Enabling the State to Change Itself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the turn of the century with reports of innumerable mineral resources and a limitless agricultural potential surfacing, this little-known U.S. possession suddenly grabbed the world’s attention. As pioneers and settlers rushed into the frontier and returned during this period, Alaskans founded many of today’s cities (including the two largest, Anchorage and Fairbanks), birthed a structure of highway and railroad transportation, and established a judicial system and a rudimentary form of self-government, which led to statehood a half-century later.

All this activity took place during the Progressive Age in American politics. It was a time of social and economic reform, when Congress and federal agencies recognized the need to regulate large corporate trusts, manage extraction of natural resources, ensure some level of fairness for consumers and workers, and build much-needed infrastructure projects. At the heart of the Progressive movement was the conviction that a strong federal government could be the agent of change, because government was the only entity with power sufficient to produce broad reforms.

The swelling Alaska population benefited from the Progressive movement in a number of ways. By 1900, Congress had enacted criminal and civil codes and appointed judges to serve each of the Alaska territory’s three newly established judicial districts. In 1906, a new federal law allowed Alaska residents to elect a delegate to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in 1912, Congress responded to Alaskans’ demands for self-government by creating an elected territorial legislature.

But the greatest of all Progressive Age accomplishments for Alaska was passage of the Alaska Railroad Act in 1914.

The act provided $35 million to build and operate a railroad from an unspecified tidewater port into the Alaskan interior. President Woodrow Wilson viewed Alaska as a storehouse that should be unlocked, and a railroad was, in his words, the means of “thrusting in the key to the storehouse and throwing back the lock and opening the door.”

It was significant that it was the federal government, and not private sector enterprise, that did this job. At the time Railroad Act passed, Progressives nationwide were at war with the monopolizing power of corporate trusts.

In Alaska, two of the biggest business entities in the world had combined to form an enterprise that controlled nearly every sector of the economy. The Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, owned by New York financier J. P. Morgan along with the international Guggenheim mining company, dominated the mineral extraction and transportation infrastructure in most of the territory. The syndicate sent teams of lobbyists to Washington to block efforts to build a government railroad, which would interfere with its monopoly on transportation. The syndicate was—as James Wickersham, Alaska’s non-voting delegate to Congress, described it—the “overshadowing evil” that darkened the prospects of every struggling pioneer in the new and developing territory.

“Which shall it be?” Wickersham thundered from the floor of the US House of Representatives in arguing for the Alaska Railroad Act. “Shall the government or the Guggenheims control Alaska?”

The answer from a Progressive-minded Congress and White House was clear: it would not be the Guggenheims.

Never before in the history of the westward movement of Americans had Congress stepped in to build a transportation system where private enterprise could likely have provided comparable service. Moreover, the railroad was quite explicitly an expression of the country’s anti-trust, anti-monopoly mood.

Progressives saw Alaska as a wide-open place where their ideals could be put into practice, a model of the democracy they wanted. It would open vast areas of mineral and agricultural wealth, creating jobs and opportunities for the working public; it would demonstrate the Progressive conviction that government at its best was an agent for progress and improvement in people’s lives; and it would make a statement of the strength of federal regulatory control in the era of popular reaction against the workings of corporate trusts. It would operate in a place where the giant Alaska Syndicate threatened to monopolize every sector of the economy.

Of course, Progressive-age politics was not the singular reason why Alaska was developed. The opportunities to be had in this northern frontier were exciting enough on their own to attract multitudes of pioneers, settlers, and entrepreneurs. Infrastructure would surely have been built even without the benefits of Progressivism’s considerable influence.

Alaskans were not always happy about the federal government’s investment—or lack thereof. During the Progressive Era they complained endlessly about what they perceived as neglect and ill-treatment at the hands of the federal government. “Think of it!” a Skagway newspaper cried in 1906. “Here we are a people denied the right of self-government, taxed without representation.” The editor concluded that Alaska lived under “a system compared with which the government of the American colonies under George III was broad and liberal.”

Alaskans in that moment had good reasons for their outrage: The territory’s vast coal deposits remained off-limits to mining, and hundreds of workers sat idle for eight years starting in 1906 as Congress failed to pass legislation providing for a fair leasing system on federal coal lands. This was only one example of government delays and red tape that infuriated residents of the North.

Such treatment led Alaskans to feelings of abuse and what amounted to a split personality in regard to their relationship with the federal government. They decried the lack of assistance where they saw a need while at the same time they wanted the government off their backs, leaving them free to develop the resources without interference.

Federal help did come to Alaska, but it arrived piecemeal over the course of decades. Over time, the government responded with many projects and benefits that enriched Alaska. These included highways, national parks, systems of public education and health care, and military bases, to name just a few. From today’s point of view, we can see that Alaska as a territory and a state has been enriched far more than neglected or abused by the federal government.

By 1916, Progressivism had run its course, though in its 20 years of life it had accomplished much in the way of social, political, and economic reform. Its legacy includes antitrust legislation, regulation of interstate commerce, child labor laws, direct election of U.S. senators, conservation of natural resources, and a movement toward women’s suffrage. The forces underlying all these advances were a commitment to the rights of the masses and a belief in the power of the federal government to effect change.

The post How a Public Railroad Saved Alaska appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That crisis could be our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the state—if we can ignore the conventional wisdom that this is a time to shelter our ambitions in place.

For Californians, COVID-19 is a crisis of crises. It merges together a collection of failures that most of us consider separately—housing, energy, poverty, prisons, courts, schools, climate, health care, immigration, pensions, taxes and budgets, and governance. COVID has exposed how these disparate crises, for all their complicated pieces, share the same fatal flaw: California’s longstanding inability to invest in the future.

The Golden State loves making big progressive promises, but resists the hard work of delivering on them. So the state has provided health insurance to millions via Obamacare and MediCal, but, as COVID should remind us, has not produced enough medical personnel and facilities to provide effective and timely health care for all. The same California leaders who now urge us to stay at home have presided over massive shortages of homes, and our ubiquitous homelessness.

Our elected officials frequently pose as champions of the poor and of children, even though this state has one of the nation’s highest childhood poverty rates. COVID-19’s economic shutdown will only deepen that. Our schools, which are supposed to close the gap between rich and poor kids, are closed indefinitely by the virus, and the state’s hastily planned shift to online learning is cutting off poor students who don’t have access to technology. The cliché is that kids who are failed by schools end up in prisons or jails, but in California, it’s hard to find space in those places. Correctional facilities are so overcrowded that the state must release prisoners to limit COVID transmission.

California’s crises involve not just facilities but people. COVID exposes our failure to develop our workforce—from the lack of highly trained workers for lab and health jobs to the lack of farmworkers to keep up the food supply, to the lack of utility personnel to keep our electric grid from starting wildfires. If warmer temperatures bring wildfires during the pandemic, it could trigger crippling power shut-offs and crush our overtaxed emergency services. COVID also threatens a deal PG&E made with previous wildfire victims (because the deal was based on PG&E’s now faltering stock). The failure of that deal could damage California’s climate change response, which depends heavily on utility investments in alternative energies.

All of the above crises have been nearly impossible to solve because of the state’s weak systems for budgeting, taxation, and pensions. Now COVID-19 puts those systems under almost unbearable pressures. As COVID creates the need for more government outlays, the byzantine formulas of our dysfunctional budget system will produce spending cuts. Economic collapse is creating massive drops in tax revenues. And the stock market plunge puts our already badly underfunded pension systems at risk of collapse—which could require a bailout we couldn’t afford even before the COVID crisis.

As bad as all this sounds, there is another thing that is even worse: the timid response that California is now planning to this mega-crisis. Look for state and local officials to crawl into a shell and try to weather the storm by spending less.

I am not overstating this. Gov. Gavin Newsom already has junked his ambitious January budget proposal and now plans a “shelter-in-place” budget that could include cuts to schools and health care. Such an approach reflects the tired conventional wisdom in Sacramento: that a crisis is not a good time for big solutions to big problems, and that the wise path in a California crisis is to scale back and limit the damage.

That conventional wisdom is—to use a highly technocratic term—totally nutso.

Cutbacks and frugality now will worsen all our existing problems and crises, and make recovery from COVID that much harder. Indeed, cutting the major California sectors of education and health care will be doubly destructive, weakening the state’s economy in the near-term, while diminishing crucial services for the long term.

How do we know that this frugality will fail us? Because that’s what happened the last two times the conventional wisdom held sway—in the early 2000s tech collapse and energy crisis, and in the Great Recession. In both cases, the state’s conservative response to crisis did lasting damage to the economy, budgets, and vital programs—and to a generation of California children.

In fact, cuts from those last two recessions are responsible in part for the crises we faced even before COVID. Some cuts—notably Gov. Brown’s slashing of mobile hospitals and medical equipment stockpiles—are now making pandemic response harder.

Previous failures of the cower-and-cut strategy, and the massively snowballing COVID crisis, argue powerfully for a new approach: This is the time for California to ramp up spending and services like never before. It’s not enough to address just the current emergency. Instead, let’s seize the moment to tackle all the crises that COVID has turned into one big crisis.

The timing is right. The current state of emergency gives Gov. Newsom extraordinary legal and political flexibility to ignore the state’s myriad rules and regulations and act forcefully. And economic collapse has made public investment much cheaper. Things that seem impossibly expensive in boom times—like building housing and infrastructure, or adding school instruction time—are more affordable now.

So let’s do it all. Make the temporary COVID expansion of health care capacity permanent. Do the same for all the temporary housing we’re now finding for the homeless. Sweep away the California environmental and licensing regulations that limit housing construction and stall business growth. Build previously stalled infrastructure projects. And increase school budgets by 50 percent, as multiple studies have suggested California should do, to close achievement gaps and properly support special education.

If California did all this, we’d actually be the national progressive model we’ve long pretended to be. We’d also demonstrate that we’re too smart and too rich to pursue yet another stupid and miserly response to yet another crisis.

How do you pay for such transformations? In every way possible. Reform the outdated tax system to produce higher revenues and less volatility. Loosen budget formulas to make it easier to move money around. And, yes, cancel our unsustainable pension promises and unfunded retiree health benefits for public workers.

Even higher taxes and retirement clawbacks won’t be enough, of course. Californians will need more from the federal government. And we should get over our debt hang-ups and borrow big sums at today’s low rates. Yes, those bills will eventually come due. But when they do, California—if it uses this moment to advance rather than retreat—should be much stronger in economy and infrastructure and services, and thus much better able to reckon with those debts.

What I’m proposing is a big bet on California’s future. But it’s hardly reckless. Buying low is a proven investment strategy. It’s also the right response to the extraordinary moment we’re living in. Californians have put their lives on hold; millions of us are losing jobs and income, and thousands are dying. Our crises, having converged with corona, are inescapable. Do we really think the lesson of this moment is to further shrink the state’s capacity, fail to reckon with crises, and diminish our future?

Instead, let’s honor today’s sacrifices by advancing, rather than retreating. Let’s put the state on a higher plane. Let’s push all our chips to the table’s center, California, and go all in. Right now.

The post Now Is the Time for California to Think Big, Again appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How is California ever going to finish its high-speed rail project when it still can’t finish San Francisco’s Downtown Rail Extension?

I can’t read Gavin Newsom’s mind, much less understand what he meant, or meant to mean, when he gave his State of the State speech and said something about a diminished high-speed rail line that would run only from Merced to Bakersfield.

But I can tell you that 23 years ago, a restauranteur named Gavin Newsom was appointed by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to his first real gig in politics, as a local parking and traffic commissioner. Back then, a top priority of San Francisco transportation officials was a proposal for a 1.3-mile rail line called the Downtown Rail Extension, or DTX, which would connect the city’s commuter rail station with downtown.

All these years later, the DTX is still little more than a proposal—vital but unrealized. As such, it embodies the massive failure of transportation execution that Newsom now confronts in California.

The history of the DTX demonstrates that, for all the struggles of this state to build big infrastructure projects like high-speed rail or the Delta water tunnels, we Californians are even worse at the little stuff. Ours is a state that has constructed two rail lines that reach the edge of LAX but don’t go into the airport. Disneyland has its own railroad and monorail but no rail link to the park itself. San Diego’s signature trolley doesn’t go to its world-famous zoo.

The DTX is the latest attempt to bridge one of the smallest but most troublesome gaps in California’s infrastructure: the mile or so between where commuter trains stop and the city’s downtown job center around Market Street.

The gap has roots in decisions made during the Civil War, and San Francisco has blown more than a century’s worth of opportunities to bridge it. The best chance to build a downtown rail station came after the 1906 earthquake, but it was dropped in the rush to prepare for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. After the Second World War, a BART line to San Mateo County would have bridged the gap, but San Mateo pulled out of BART, and no line was built.

By the mid-1990s, when Newsom was appointed to that San Francisco commission, it appeared that the DTX’s time had finally come. In 1999, San Francisco voters approved a ballot measure which mandated the extension finally be built to connect Caltrain commuter service to a newly planned Transbay Transit Center in downtown. During the campaign, the rail extension’s cost was estimated at $600 million.

Over the next decade, new plans were made for the extension, and in 2010, ground broke on the Transbay Transit Center. But the transit center ran so over budget that it ended up grabbing the $600 million intended for the DTX.

Newsom’s successor as mayor, Ed Lee, stalled the project by proposing a different path for the extension that would reach new housing in the neighborhood of Mission Bay and a recently built basketball arena. A study of possible paths was supposed to take eight months, but it took 5 years. It wasn’t until fall 2018 that an alignment for the extension, along Pennsylvania Avenue, was finally approved.

Meanwhile, the Transbay Transit Center, finally completed in 2018, had to be closed temporarily to correct construction defects. It is now the world’s most expensive bus station, since construction still hasn’t started on the DTX.

During the last 23 years—a period in which Newsom launched his political career, got married, was elected mayor, got divorced, got remarried, was elected lieutenant governor, had four kids, and got elected governor—a rail project of just 1.3 miles has gone exactly nowhere. The best-case scenario is that the DTX would open in 2027—a year after Newsom would leave office if he serves two terms.

This may tell us something about Newsom’s deep skepticism about high-speed rail and other transportation projects. For all the governor’s lion-like roars about the need for transformational projects in health care, education, and housing, he has squeaked like a mouse when it comes to infrastructure.

Since he first encountered the DTX as a rookie public official, Newsom has seen some projects progress with struggle (like the Central Subway in San Francisco) while others failed. He’s also seen newly elected officials intervene to impose their own vision on major construction projects. Governors Wilson and Schwarzenegger both stalled the new east span of the Bay Bridge to reconsider it—and added to delays and the project’s scandalously high costs. The east span was such a disaster that Gov. Jerry Brown and other top officials wouldn’t attend its 2013 opening, leaving it to Newsom, then lieutenant governor, to handle the ceremony.

There are huge lessons to be drawn from California’s transportation failures, large and small. Every project needs a clear and accountable champion. Successful projects require dedicated staffs with technical expertise and real power; too many projects rely on too many expensive and unaccountable outside consultants. And transportation plans need realistic budgets, more financial commitment from taxpayers, and far greater urgency. The DTX has none of these things.

Neither does high-speed rail. And if the bullet train ends up diminished or dead, Newsom can console himself with this: It won’t be nearly as bad a failure as the DTX. The latest estimates for that 1.3-mile project, which includes a couple new stations, have ballooned to $6.1 billion. High-speed rail may be an $80 billion project, but if it were as expensive per-mile as the DTX, connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would cost over $2 trillion.

The post Build a Bullet Train? California Can’t Even Build a One-Mile Rail Tunnel in San Francisco appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How do you learn from a really big mistake?

Walk across it.

Which is why I recently found myself putting on a windbreaker and beginning a long, slow walk across the east span of the Bay Bridge, from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. This piece of the bridge, completed in 2013, is probably the biggest California mistake of the last generation. The east span was completed a decade late, cost seven times more than official projections, and remains dogged by serious safety concerns.

However, the bridge does have one virtue: It holds lessons for the future, as California faces massive challenges that will necessitate big projects. Indeed, after eight years of the cautious, small-bore governorship of Jerry Brown, new state leaders are preparing to take on big initiatives on infrastructure, taxation, and early childhood.

Before they do, they should read a recently published book I brought on my bridge walk: A Tale of Two Bridges, by Stephen D. Mikesell, a Davis-based historian who previously served as deputy historic preservation officer for the state. Mikesell compares the original 1936 Bay Bridge with the troubled 2013 east span, but his book is really about the special challenges of megaprojects—that is, complex and controversial initiatives costing more than $1 billion.

Today’s cynical conventional wisdom is that big projects are nearly impossible to carry off, and that those that do go forward are destined to fail. But Mikesell argues otherwise. He explains that the original 1936 Bay Bridge met conditions for successful megaprojects.

First, local and state leaders built broad consensus about the purpose and need for the project: constructing a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland was clearly a game-changer for the region in that era. Second, political people made the political decisions about the bridge, and technical people made the technical decisions. While a politically appointed commission approved the bridge and its budget, the details of design and construction were left to technical experts brought in from all over the country. Third, costs were estimated accurately and the bridge came in under budget. And finally, the bridge builders used proven methods for construction and materials, emphasizing functionality rather than trying to make an artistic statement.

The 2013 eastern span didn’t pass all these tests, Mikesell writes. The bridge was a divisive political issue for years. Cost estimates were way off. Technical decisions about bridge design and engineering were made through political processes. And the crucial political decision—to build an expensive new span instead of a less costly retrofit of the old span—was made inside Caltrans. Who were these decisionmaker? Shockingly, Mikesell, a seasoned expert on bridges, writes that the process was so messy it’s impossible to identify exactly who was responsible.

Ultimately, warnings from leading bridge engineers were ignored as Bay Area political leaders chose what they saw as the most visually attractive bridge—a self-anchored suspension bridge—even though this less common design created all sorts of problems.

To walk the span today is to get a firsthand sense of a bridge gone wrong. The walkway itself offers the first clue: It’s on the wrong side of the bridge, the south side, which means that you get a view of the port of Oakland. If the walkway had been on the north-facing side, better views of the north bay, and even the Golden Gate, might have been possible. The walk is also polluted from the passing cars. I was often startled by loud noises from trucks hitting seams on the bridge; the eastbound traffic is so close it feels like it might run you over.

It took me nearly an hour to walk from a small parking lot at the Bay Bridge Trail entry point on Burma Road to the bridge’s signature tower and curve. There is nothing particularly beautiful or interesting about this tower and the cables attached to it. That’s a shame, since this is the section of the bridge that created most of the cost overruns. The tower is also the site of many structural problems, including saltwater intrusion into the foundation, damage to anchor rods, and substandard welds.

The bridge is also a failure because of what it didn’t do. Big projects should be transformational. But this span isn’t. It didn’t increase the bridge capacity or improve traffic flows. It is no artistic masterpiece. Paying for it actually raised bridge tolls. And prominent engineers argue that the new span may be more prone to fail in an earthquake that the old bridge it replaced.

“The 2013 East Bay is notable for how little it actually changed things in the Bay Area,” Mikesell writes.

The bridge was such a fiasco that prominent officials skipped its opening in 2013. It was left to the lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, to handle the ceremonial chain-cutting. In brief remarks, he expressed hope that the bridge would inspire “a generation to dream big dreams and do big things.”

Now that Newsom is becoming governor—and promising big things—perhaps he can turn the bridge into a perverse inspiration by following its essential lessons. Any big project must be truly transformational, providing a service or a connection that truly changes people’s lives. Paradoxically, the execution of such transformations must be intensely practical and risk-averse, emphasizing function over form.

In other words, when you are pursuing a transformational project, achieving the transformation itself must be the sole focus.

How might such lessons be applied? If Newsom wants to build a single-payer health care system, it shouldn’t be the gold-plated model that progressive groups have been advocating for, but rather something simple, cheap and sturdy, covering everyone. He’ll need to resist efforts to make his promised new systems for taxation, homebuilding, and early childhood highly complex with loads of new formulas; the simplest systems are more likely to be durably transformational.

After reaching Yerba Buena Island, I walked around and enjoyed views of Newsom’s city of San Francisco for a few minutes. Tired and sweaty, I called for a Lyft to take me back to Oakland. But no driver would come. So I trudged all the way back, on sore feet, repeating my earlier mistake.

The post Can a Troubled Bridge Show California How to Avoid Big Errors? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Further north, welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, Placerville, and Yuba City. And, to the south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and Salinas. And while you’re almost in another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City, because the Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re in a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the advanced grandeur of the Bay Area, why not join forces with the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit, too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area heading up into the mountains, the northern San Joaquin Valley, and the north Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people, 21 counties, and 164 incorporated cities. It extends from the Wine Country to the Lettuce Lands of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

These places, while different, are already linked, by infrastructure and flows of capital and commodities that date back to the Gold Rush. Today, the Megaregion has grown more integrated as people search a wider geography for jobs and schools, while businesses expand by serving more of Northern California.

The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to the mega-rich San Francisco and Marin and three of California’s poorest cities: Stockton, Vallejo, and Salinas.

The 21-county, 12 million person Northern California Megaregion, a concept developed by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Courtesy of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The imbalance of high-paying jobs created in the Bay Area, coupled with scant and expensive housing, results in a sky-high cost of living that blunts the benefits of high salaries. It also has produced an out-migration of younger people and companies. Some of these Bay Area refugees head to East Bay exurbs, the Sacramento area, and even to the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where housing prices are one-third of those in the Bay Area proper and still haven’t recovered to their pre-recession highs. But once there, they often find themselves too far away from their jobs and preferred educational institutions. The result is brutal traffic that slows the movement of goods, produces more greenhouse gases, and creates long, unhealthy commutes for workers.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily—perhaps too heavily—on the growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area, which accounts for one-third of the California economy.

Nationally, too, the future of megaregions matters. Defined as sets of neighboring metropolitan centers that share infrastructure, environmental concerns, and economic connections, Megaregions are projected to be home to 70 percent of the national population growth between now and 2050. During that period, just 11 American megaregions will be home to 80 percent of the country’s job growth.

For all these reasons, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s 2016 report, “The Northern California Megaregion,” deserves more consideration because it offers a vision for how the Golden State might spread out prosperity beyond its richest centers, creating a more distributed version of the California dream.

This is not about letting the Bay Area colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s a mega-rethinking so that planning and development enable the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area tech, Sacramento government, Northern San Joaquin Valley trade and logistics, and the Monterey Bay Area’s farming dominance—to magnify each other.

To pick one example, if new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry much less polluting in terms of greenhouse gases as it moves the vegetables of the Salinas Valley to market, perhaps through expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

The think tank report and its co-author, Jeff Bellisario, a man whose colleagues call him “Mr. Megaregion,” offer dozens of similarly transformative ideas. The Northern California Megaregion could create a “more distributed high tech sector,” with more companies, and more jobs inland, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Imagine, if the center of gravity in Northern California shifted southeast, landing in the fast-growing Tri-Valley, which includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and San Ramon. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better linked with entrepreneurs and investment, could be a jobs hub that turns into something of a megaregional capital.

Such planning should be performed by new economic development entities that extend across the entire Megaregion; companies that now leave the Bay Area for Austin in search of cost savings might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such an effort would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to improve education outside the Bay Area. Only half of the people in the Monterey and Northern San Joaquin areas have had some type of post-high school education, as opposed to 70 percent in the Bay Area proper.

The report shows such investments could spin off literally hundreds of new ideas. My favorite: The Megaregion could have its own…well, I’ll call it a Nerd Army of overeducated consultants, or, in the report’s words, “a megaregional corps of consulting post-docs and advanced graduate students” that could be dispatched to solve regional problems and prepare local talent for higher-skill jobs.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections from one end of the Megaregion to the other. The goal would be to get trucks and commuters off the hellish 80, 580, and 101 corridors, making it easier for the state to hit its targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

Suggested changes include more service on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Placer County, an extension of rail service to Salinas, and support of planned expansions of the ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) train down to Modesto and Merced and up to Sacramento. (Political note: The gas tax increase, on the November ballot for repeal, produces $900 million for these ACE expansions.) And all these changes, in turn, would make the actual completion of high-speed rail more urgent, since the first segment, extended from Bakersfield to San Jose, would connect with this expanded Megaregional transit system.

It is easy to mock such mega-visions. For years, real estate interests have broadcast silly promotions, like touting a major housing development in San Joaquin County as being in the “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if the Megaregion could harness its joint economic and lobbying power, much of this seems possible. It could even inspire imitators. Could Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? And might they throw Tijuana and Mexicali into their planning mix as well?

If it built a record of success, the Northern California Megaregion could expand, connecting to planning efforts in the troubled Northstate, and even extending down the San Joaquin Valley to California’s fifth-largest city.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.

The post If You Can’t Beat the Bay Area, Join It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s the fastest way to change California?

Assuming you don’t have the power to set off a major earthquake, your best bet would be to connect the two small desert cities of Palmdale and Victorville.

These two working-class places aren’t often associated with political power; but building world-class infrastructure to bridge the 50 miles between the two cities might be the most powerful current idea in California. Strong Palmdale-Victorville connections could transform Southern California’s traffic and economy, boost the West’s energy markets, and reconfigure the path of American trade with Asia and the rest of North America. It might even save the California high-speed rail project.

Why is connecting these two small cities potentially so valuable? Because California, for all its glorious north-south highways, has long lacked fast, efficient and safe east-west connections across its mountains and deserts. So to bridge Palmdale and Victorville is to connect the Antelope and Victor Valleys, two fast-growing exurban regions that host two of the continent’s most important highways. The result would be a dynamic High Desert Corridor.

Palmdale’s home region, the Antelope Valley, in Los Angeles County, now has more than 500,000 people (more than the city of Sacramento); its highways make it part of the Interstate 5 corridor, which goes from Tijuana, Mexico to British Columbia. Fifty miles east, the Victor Valley, where Victorville is the anchor town, has some 400,000 people (as many as Oakland), and sits right on Interstate 15, which not only moves Southern Californians to Vegas every weekend but also transports goods from San Diego County all the way to Alberta, Canada.

Current connections between Interstates 5 and 15 are problematic and primitive. Truckers either have to navigate through the awful traffic of the Southern California basin, or must find a way across the High Desert. Look at a map, and the natural place to do that—those 50 miles between Palmdale and Victorville—requires driving on surface streets, or the 138, known officially as Pearblossom Highway but unofficially as Blood Alley, since it’s one of America’s most dangerous roads. It’s also traffic-clogged; the Palmdale-Victorville drive took me nearly two hours recently.

Good news: This infrastructure gap creates an enormous opportunity. Which brings me to the High Desert Corridor, a decade-old proposal that is one of the most underrated ideas in California. Backed by a joint powers authority of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, the High Desert Corridor would build not one connection between Palmdale and Victorville, but four.

First would come a 56-mile freeway connecting the two cities, with some of the stretch tolled to help finance the public-private partnership running the project. Second, the High Desert Corridor would establish a high-speed rail right of way, with the goal of connecting the California High-Speed Rail’s proposed station at Palmdale with the planned, private Xpress West high-speed rail project between Las Vegas and Victorville.

The third piece of the connection involves energy: Underground alongside the freeway and rail would run electric transmission lines. The corridor would also devote space to green energy production, as well as charging stations and alternative fuel stations for cars and trucks. And finally, in a nod to politics and younger generations, the High Desert Corridor would have a nearly 40-mile bikeway constructed between Palmdale and U.S. 395, connecting to existing paths near Adelanto.

The impact would be continental, and would go beyond the convenience of connecting the 5 and the 15. Today, international trade is slowed in the L.A. Basin, where the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are overburdened and dense traffic makes things even slower. There is also little land left for the additional warehouses and logistics infrastructure to support the ports.

Advocates of the corridor say it could become a new “inland international port,” if land for logistics is closely connected to rail and airports in the corridor, allowing cargo to be moved between transportation modes. Such a port would support trade, spawn more businesses and allow the logistics industry to expand beyond the basin, and thus bring more jobs to the desert for local residents, shortening their commutes.

At the same time, the project could address air and energy concerns in Los Angeles by taking trucks off of Los Angeles’ roads, while providing infrastructure to hasten electric and alternatively fueled trucks. The transmission line could make it easier to manage the Western grid, better connecting California energy with neighboring states.

The high-speed rail piece of the High Desert Corridor would connect San Francisco, Burbank, Los Angeles Union Station, and Anaheim to Las Vegas. In the near term, that would take many Californian Vegas-goers off the roads. In the long term, it might inspire the development of high-speed rail in the West (Phoenix and Salt Lake City would be natural next steps) and better integrate the Western states into a regional economy worthy of the 21st century.

The corridor is definitely green—the energy piece could stimulate more green energy in the desert—but it is also a dodge. Air quality rules in the Los Angeles basin limit heavy manufacturing; supporters of the High Desert Corridor are betting that manufacturers will flock to the desert, since it is outside the basin and its air regulation.

Be skeptical of all this if you wish. The history of the California desert is filled with grand plans that went nowhere. But the High Desert Corridor isn’t a grand plan—it’s a tightly focused connection. The environmental reviews are complete, and the next steps are figuring out the exact route, and the costs of acquiring the right of ways.

Current estimates of the project’s overall cost are $8 billion. That’s a lot—but high-speed rail is projected to cost at least nine times that. Supporters had hoped to fund much of the expense with federal earmarks, but Congress has eliminated them. So the project will require a mix of private and public money, and be built in phases (rail first). Los Angeles County’s transportation tax, Measure M, will provide some dough.

But the state should step up. California politics is dominated by the coasts, and especially the Bay Area, which is why big funds were lavished on the new Bay Bridge. It’s now time to look south and east, and build the next great California bridge in the High Desert.

The post The Next Great California Bridge Should Span the High Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.