California is spending billions to house its increasing population of unhoused people. But it hasn’t come close to building enough to meet its ambitious goal of ending homelessness. And many Californians have lost hope that it ever will.

California is spending billions to construct a high-speed rail system. But it hasn’t come close to completing what would be the first such line in the nation. And many Californians have lost hope that it ever will.

In the face of these crises, what is to be done? One option would be to sit around and lament two massive failures of government, and conclude that mega-projects are just too challenging for our state.

Or we could steel ourselves and embrace the wisdom of Dwight Eisenhower—who famously said: “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”

In that spirit, I suggest we solve the big problems of homeless housing and high-speed rail by combining them into something even larger.

So, I hereby propose—very modestly—Homeless High-Speed Rail.

You read that right. Finding permanent lodging for unhoused people, already declared the state’s top priority by Gov. Gavin Newsom, would become the new, urgent mission of our flagging high-speed rail authority.

Under Homeless High-Speed Rail, the state’s unhoused people would no longer have to live in cars or temporary shelters or controversial encampments. Instead, everyone would have the option to take a sleeping-car berth on a brand-new bullet train.

Sure, this fusion of housing and high-speed rail might create some new challenges. But it would solve even more problems.

To pick just one example: advocates and media have long criticized our state government for its confusing mix of competing homelessness initiatives. The state splits up housing funding among different local governments, who complain that the flow of money is not consistent enough to solve the crisis. The state’s official auditor, along with other experts, has called for consolidating state and local programs on homelessness.

My proposal does just that—by consolidating every single state and local program to house homeless people under one single state agency: the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Now, some cynics might look at that combination and call it crazy—a mere merger of two giant dysfunctional money pits. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

The state has spent more than $20 billion on housing and homelessness since 2019—but the number of unhoused Californians has grown by one-third. Meanwhile, the high-speed rail project has secured $25 billion—but is still as much as $10 billion short of the $35 billion required to complete its first segment, in the Central Valley. Both projects will require tens of billions of dollars in additional funding to achieve their goals.

But what cynics are missing, amid all the red ink, is how these two failing programs, in combination, could save each other money.

Building homeless housing is incredibly expensive—Los Angeles is paying more than $800,000 for some one-bedroom units. But much of the cost is in expensive California land, high-cost California labor, and time-wasting California permitting processes. None of which are factors when people are housed on rail cars.

Instead, using housing money to buy rail cars—with private bathrooms—means that the high-speed rail authority could devote more of its funding to building rail and stations (which might also be used for housing).

Talk about a win-win!

Indeed, combining homeless housing and high-speed rail could answer objections that dog both programs.

For example, cities often can’t build homeless housing because of aggressive opposition from neighborhood NIMBYs. But NIMBYs would lose their developer targets, and their backyard objections, when housing is simply zooming past, at 200 miles per hour.

And on the high-speed rail side, hosting homeless Californians answers persistent questions about whether there would be enough riders to support the project. Surveys show little public interest in using high-speed trains, especially because the first segment will run between the smaller cities of Merced and Bakersfield.

But in a Homeless High-Speed Rail project, unhoused individuals would provide a large and steady ridership base.

Strange as my proposal may seem, almost nothing about it is new.

Keeping homeless people constantly on the move sounds cruel, but it is already an established and popular policy across California. After all, cities and police are always tearing down homeless encampments, and forcing unhoused people to keep moving.

In addition, the idea of converting spaces intended for other purposes into housing isn’t new. The state, cities, and counties have already converted dozens of hotels to serve as housing for the unhoused, under Projects Roomkey and Homekey. A Bay Area housing activist even offered a plan to house homeless people in old railcars.

If you board L.A. Metro or the San Diego trolley or other local transit systems in the state, you’ll see that individuals without homes are California’s most dedicated train riders. Thousands of unhoused Californians all but live on these local trains now, because of the low-cost shelter they provide. Indeed, homelessness is so much a part of transit that, earlier this year, BART adopted its first Homeless Action Plan, which includes promises to develop housing itself.

Of course, there will be some Californians, perhaps millions, who object to the whole concept, finding it perverse. These misguided moralists, a few of whom write columns, will say that California is a very rich place that surely can afford to house all its people and to build the same high-speed rail system that two dozen other countries have. And they will claim that California must learn to build and manage giant new housing and infrastructure projects if it’s going to survive the adaptation challenges of climate change.

In theory, these skeptical Californians will probably be right. But California doesn’t operate on theory. It operates on an unmanageable budget process, a volatile tax code, and a broken governing system that both parties refuse to fix. It has a state government that can’t adopt modern technology or manage a payroll, much less translate its people’s democratic preferences into major action. The way California operates now, the state will never have enough housing for the homeless, or a real high-speed spine for its transportation networks.

So, before you dismiss my modest proposal, just ask yourself: In the face of massive failures, when doing big and essential things is nearly impossible, is there any plan too awful to take off the table?

The post A Modest Proposal<span class="colon">:</span> Give High-Speed Rail to Unhoused Californians appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The northern terminus of SMART, the new light rail system officially opening this weekend in the North Bay, is the Sonoma County Airport Station in Santa Rosa. But after my 8-year-old son and I disembarked from an Alaska Airlines flight, we learned that the airport is more than a mile away from the train.

We didn’t know how to bridge this transportation gap. My son wasn’t up for a long walk. There is as yet no shuttle from plane to train. The public bus that would take us in the train’s direction didn’t show up on time. Uber wasn’t picking up at the airport. My Lyft app kept crashing. And the four cabbies parked outside the airport all refused to take us, saying they didn’t want to give up their place in line for such a short, cheap trip.

The Bay Area is the richest large metropolitan region on the planet because of the ability of its people and institutions to connect with each other and the larger world. But if you need to make transit connections in the Bay Area, good luck.

Inspired by the soft launch of SMART—the 43-mile Sonoma and Marin County light rail has offered preview rides for months—I recently spent three days navigating the Bay Area without a car. And so I experienced beautiful rides on trains, ferries, subways, and buses. But I was also bewildered by the utter failure of a place that’s famous for integrating culture and technology to integrate its own infrastructure and transportation.

For all its global clout, the Bay Area remains, at the local level, a fragmented mess of nine counties, 101 municipalities, and hundreds of government districts.

“The counties grew up separately, and so we’re stuck with a mishmash of agencies and of transportation,” says Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council. “I don’t think this is sustainable anymore.”

After waiting 40 minutes at Sonoma County Airport, we called a new cab, which took us the 1.2 miles to the train station for $10. The new SMART trains might have been comfortable if they weren’t so jammed. My skinny son squeezed into a tiny spot between a seat and a bike rack. I stood in a mass of people near the front of the car. The first 43-mile segment of what promises to be a 70-mile train runs from the not-quite-airport station to downtown San Rafael. Given the distance and the length of the rides—more than an hour—the trains offer bathrooms and a café that sells wine. This is Sonoma after all.

The ride south took 90 minutes and offered a grittier view of Sonoma and Marin Counties—mobile home parks, big empty parking lots, old industrial properties (all of which could be used to build housing, but that’s another story)—as well as views of the Petaluma River, Mt. Tamalpais, and even Mt. Diablo.

The SMART train is eventually supposed to reach the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, from where it’s a 35-minute boat ride to San Francisco. But the first segment ends two miles short of the ferry. There’s a bike path to the terminal that’s walkable, and a bus station in San Rafael that can get you to the ferry, but that bus ride takes between 14 and 26 minutes. We wanted to get there faster and opted for an Uber.

The ferry, which left 10 minutes late, entered the bay next to San Quentin Prison; inmates waved at the boat. It was a clear day and so we enjoyed views of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Once at the Ferry Building, I kept my son happy with soft serve ice cream from Gott’s.

After two hours of interviews for other stories, we found ourselves at the BART Embarcadero Station in San Francisco, eager to get to the Oakland Airport and fly home. But the first six trains were too full to board. This wasn’t a surprise. BART is a system built for 60,000 riders that moves more than 400,000 daily. The system badly needs more and newer cars, better maintenance, governance that isn’t dominated by unions, and a second tunnel under the bay.

When the seventh train arrived, we couldn’t wait any longer, and pushed our way in. “That’s rude,” said one rider.

“We’re from L.A.,” I replied.

We made the flight, but with significant sticker shock. The six-station ride from San Francisco to Oakland’s Coliseum Station, from which a tram takes you into the airport, cost $10.20 each. Add that to my $11.50 ferry ticket (my son’s was $5.75), the $9 Uber ride to the ferry, the $11.50 one-way fare on SMART, and $10 for the airport cab ride, our journey was pushing $70.

In Los Angeles, I pay just $1.75 to board a Metro train, and all transfers are free for two hours. In the Bay Area, even public transit is pricey.

A couple of days later, I flew back to Oakland for another expensive and overcrowded BART ride, this one into San Francisco. After switching to the local Muni system, I arrived late to an appointment because of a train breakdown.

Later, I found myself at BART’s Powell Street station, needing to get to San Jose, a city that BART doesn’t quite reach (though an extension should be complete next year). I needed to take the Caltrain, but how to get there? BART and Caltrain share a station in Millbrae, but the schedules aren’t synchronized, meaning I could wait for 45 minutes. So, carrying luggage, I did a 25-minute walk to the Caltrain station at 4th and King, where I purchased a one-way $9.75 ticket to San Jose.

In San Jose, I disembarked at Diridon Station, which may have a bright future as northern terminus of high-speed rail. But for now, it is just another setting for connection frustration, as I waited a half-hour for a light rail train on Santa Clara County’s VTA system. I contemplated getting on ACE, a railway connecting San Jose with Stockton, but the limited schedule meant there was no return train until morning.

The next day, I needed to get to San Jose Airport, and so I took Caltrain to the Santa Clara Station, which is close to the airport and offers a VTA bus shuttle. But the bus driver refused to open the bus door for passengers for 15 minutes, even during a brief squall of rain. The station is only five minutes from the airport, but the shuttle took us on a meandering route that included a stop at San Jose’s pro soccer stadium.

Here’s what gets forgotten in this crazy quilt of disconnected systems: the people riding them. No wonder that for all the different transit offered in the Bay Area, a relatively small share of residents (less than one-third) actually use it.

If the Bay Area is ever going to resemble the design-savvy ecotopia it purports to be, it will need to get majorities of its people on its trains and buses. And that will require combining operations and linking schedules of these different systems. As any good Silicon Valley company knows, any service—from public transit to email—requires that the user have faith that the system will work, that it will be affordable, and that it won’t drop you off a mile from the next station, or be a half-hour late, or offer trains so full you can’t get on them.

Right now, using Bay Area transit makes you feel powerless. And that should be unacceptable in California’s most powerful region.

The post Connect the World? The Bay Area Can’t Even Connect Its Trains appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Because Amish do not buy health insurance nor take Medicare or Social Security, he rode The Southwest Chief from Chicago to California and went to Mexico to see a doctor. He paid cash for the leg in Tijuana.

“A van picked us up at border and took us to a clinic,” he told me. “They have everything down there.”

Now he was eastbound, crossing the treeless high plains of eastern Colorado. Amos stared out at the sagebrush and sighed, “I just want to be back on the farm. I don’t suppose you know anything about feeder calves, do you?”

I knew enough to make conversation, and by the time dessert arrived, I had learned how to finish, or fatten, a calf with corn.

I’ve ridden Amtrak since college, and, in recent years, logged nearly 100,000 miles researching and promoting a book on rail policy. Dinner with Amos was one of my more remarkable encounters. But it wasn’t entirely unusual. During meals in the diner, where Amtrak practices community seating, Americans who might never otherwise encounter one another sit face to face at tables and break bread.

All mass transit brings Americans together, of course. When we travel, the self-segregation we otherwise practice—by race, income, education, politics, culture, religion, class, or political tribe—evaporates. But a train is special. Unlike a 20-minute commute on a city bus or subway, or an airline flight in the cramped seat of a fuselage, a train requires the commitment of time and space. Passengers ride together for hours, even days, and during the journey have the liberty to move about, eat and drink, and socialize.

Trains also have an intimacy with landscape. Incapable of negotiating steep topography, they follow valleys, hug rivers and oceanfronts, and strike out across plains and desert basins. Train travel induces a sort of reverie—a hypnotic feeling of being adrift on the geography of America. Passengers, many of whom are seeing the country for the first time, marvel at its beauty, diversity, and exoticness. And those feelings carry over to an inclination to engage one another and embrace the same diversity within the rolling coaches.

So while I still fly on airplanes, if I can work a long-distance train into my travels, I get aboard. When I want to feel and hear the zeitgeist of America, I get on a train.

Early in the Great Recession, on The Empire Builder—running from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest—I encountered jobless men converging on North Dakota with just a few dollars in their pockets and the hope of work. In Williston, men who had arrived months earlier in the oil patch boarded the train to go home for a few days and see family before heading back to sprawling “man camps” erected by Halliburton.

A roughneck having a beer in the observation car told me a woman was arrested for prostitution the day before at his man camp.

“The cops called it a crime. It was a public service. Those man camps are tense.”

Observing America through train windows. Photo courtesy of James McCommons.

The train rolled past campers with no running water parked out on the frozen prairie and rigs flaring off natural gas-like colossal candles. The snow and sky shone red and apocalyptic.

He had not been home for weeks.

“There’s no place out here for a family. And my wife, she’s sick. She got the cancer.”

On The Sunset Limited in New Mexico, I chatted with a Texan returning home from Los Angeles after being checked over at Kaiser Permanente. He tapped his chest.

“A weird virus took out my heart muscle. Two years ago, I had a heart-lung transplant.”

We watched pronghorn antelope sprint away from the train and mule deer standing in dry washes.

When he got up, he clapped me on the shoulder, “Every day is a good one … remember that.”

Over the years, I’ve dined with school teachers, a deputy sheriff, a distraught widower, an apprentice mortician, a veterinarian recruiting for slaughterhouses, a priest who discovered the call in Vietnam, an aging movie star, and a wheezy 98-year-old who was a door gunner on a Flying Fortress. A woman at our table whose own father had been a POW in Germany said, “Thank you for your service.”

He seemed bemused: “It wasn’t my idea. I got drafted.”

In Everett, Washington, my train picked up a cocky young man who told us he had piloted gunships in Iraq and was taking the train to Wenatchee for the funeral of a comrade who had committed suicide. Someone bought him a beer. Years later in Kansas, I ate a steak with a huge man in his late 30s, straw-colored hair flaring out beneath an oily baseball cap. He was like a sheep dog gone feral. He’d been in the “special forces.”

Inwardly, I groaned. Is anyone just a grunt, a cook, or a clerk anymore?

“I got fragged over in the sandbox and had to get out. I’m six foot five and used to be 215. I could run forever,” he said. “After my wife left me, I let myself go.”

He laid natural gas pipeline in Oklahoma, lived in motels, ate Chinese and take-out pizza each night, and guzzled gallons of beer. Flush with money, he apparently lived a lonely, haunted life.

Always, I take late meal reservations so if my companion(s) are compelling, we can linger over coffee or a glass of wine. The dining car stewards are in no hurry to bus the tables and throw us out.

Not all meals are a pleasure. Teenagers remove their retainers at the table, young lovers speak only to one another, people text on their Smartphones, passengers come to the diner still wiping sleep from their eyes, and others have no filter for what passes as dinner conversation.

Leaving St. Louis, I met two sisters heading west to visit a son. The mom said, “He’s such a good boy, called me every day when my husband passed.” The boy had testicular cancer when he was 16 but had still impregnated his wife on two occasions. Unfortunately, the poor dear miscarried both times.

She prattled on and on. As my father used to quip, some people never come up for air. I gobbled my food and fled the car.

On The Coast Starlight outside Salinas, the owner of a restaurant in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles told me she was worried. There were Muslims on the train. “Are they in Michigan, too?”

Yes, I say. Muslims are urban homesteading blighted neighborhoods in Detroit. “They’re making a go of it there.”

“Michigan wants Muslims?”

I listen, nod, and try not to be judgmental or revealing. If the conversation grows intense or tedious, there is always the window and a “Hey look at that” as a way to change the subject.

We could be looking at a hillside of wind turbines in Iowa, iceboats racing on the Hudson River, dapper worshipers exiting a corrugated tin church in Mississippi, delinquent kids in New Jersey heaving rocks at the train, kudzu vines strangling telephone poles in Georgia, or homeless men huddled in cardboard shacks beneath I-5 in Seattle.

A train trip unspools in an endless stream of images and words. And if you listen well, you hear America.

The post What Riding Trains Taught Me About Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Bay Area,

Welcome to Wasco.

You may never have heard of this small city of 25,000 in the San Joaquin Valley. You probably can’t pronounce it (it’s WAW-skoh).

But you and Wasco share a future.

You could be connected—at least temporarily—by the most expensive infrastructure project in state history.

Your Wasco connection is a byproduct of problems with high-speed rail’s plan for a San Francisco to Los Angeles train. The financial and engineering challenges of tunneling the Tehachapi Mountains have delayed construction to L.A. And the project is short $2 billion to get the train to Bakersfield, which happens to be the hometown of U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a fierce opponent of high-speed rail.

So, unless the money materializes, the high-speed rail could start by connecting the Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, starting in San Jose and concluding with a temporary station in Wasco, 24 miles northwest of Bakersfield.

A confession: When this plan became public last year, I said Wasco was an unworthy southern terminus for such an ambitious project. But after recent visits, I’ve changed my mind. I now believe that a fast train from America’s wealthiest metropolitan area to the best darn town in northern Kern County is kismet. Wasco offers much of what Bay Area residents might be yearning for.

And don’t worry about showing up in large numbers. Wasco is expert at processing heavy volumes of visitors; after all, the Wasco State Prison, which accounts for about 5,000 of the town’s people and a good chunk of its employment, is also a “reception center” that processes people into California’s prison system and, within months, gets them to the right state corrections facility. Of course, you don’t have to go there—unless you want to be part of the prison’s successful community volunteer program. Wasco offers so much more.

The Wasco water tower. Courtesy of the city of Wasco.

Imagine yourself boarding the high-speed train in San Jose and arriving, less than two hours later, in Wasco. On the way down, to prepare yourself for crossing cultural borders, you’ll listen first to some Korn (a band with Kern County roots) followed by country songs, from the late Merle Haggard’s classic “Radiator Man from Wasco” to the rising L.A.-based country star Jaime Wyatt’s “Wasco,” about picking up her boyfriend the day he gets out of prison.

If the weather is good, you’ll be greeted in Wasco by a spectacular view, from the coastal mountains to the west to the Sierras in the east. This time of year, you’ll be treated to the glory of blossoming almond trees.

If you arrive hungry, you’re in luck. Wasco offers the kind of stick-to-the-ribs vittles that have gotten harder to find in health-conscious Bay Area eateries. Head first to Hoyett’s Sandwich Shop, a centerpiece of Wasco life since 1948, with terrific char burgers and chili (the local gossip is free). On Friday nights, the place stays open late—until 7 p.m.—for fish dinner. And if Hoyett’s is closed, it’s a short stroll to Teresa’s for chile verde or to La Canasta for shrimp cocktail.

Bay Area types should feel comfortable getting around Wasco. Bring your bike: The city has been adding lanes. Or walk: Wasco is building new green spaces and meandering sidewalks to make the city more pedestrian-friendly. And while your Uber or Lyft app won’t work here, the city’s Dial-A-Ride service will take you anywhere within Wasco’s 9.4-square-mile city limits for $1.75, and outside town—paved roads only, please—for $2. (Kids, seniors, and people with disabilities pay $1, and a 13-ride pass is available for $15.)

No stop in Wasco is complete without a visit to the Wasco Union High School auditorium. No joke. The Renaissance Revival auditorium, constructed in 1928, is one of the most colorful and beautiful buildings in California, and deserves its spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

From there, you can walk back toward downtown to do some window shopping. And anything you can’t find downtown, you can pick up at a retailer that Wasco has but San Francisco lacks: Wal-Mart, up on Highway 46.

Wasco is great at putting on special events. There’s the spectacular Festival of Roses in September, the local bands at the Wasco Music Festival in October, and Día de Los Muertos in November. Locals will tell you nothing beats the spectacle of the November rallies before the annual high school football game between the Wasco Tigers and the Shafter Generals, from the town just down the road. (Plus, there’s a good chance you’ll see Wasco win, as they have 10 years in a row).

But the best thing about Wasco may be the slower pace and all the ways to stay chill. The local parks are large and leafy. During hot Valley summers, you can pay $1 and swim all day in the public pool. There’s a skate park, and you can bring your pets along without worry. The local vet, Thomas Edick, is so good that people come from all over the southern San Joaquin Valley to have him look after their animals.

Visitors from the Bay Area who enjoy people watching will not be disappointed. One great spot is a downtown alley where the city sometimes sets up a piano and invites anyone to play; and those who appreciate the weird can search for the Wasco Clown, a scary figure who started appearing four years ago and became an internet sensation.

All the fun Wasco offers may leave you ready for a good night’s sleep. Don’t worry: When it’s time for bed, you’ll have options. If you want a hotel, the best bet is the new Best Western on Highway 46. If you decide to settle in for a while, for just $189,000, you can get a terrific four-bedroom, two-bath home with a two-car garage and, according to the listing, a driveway large enough for an RV. You could rent it out via Airbnb, which could have a big future here, since well-to-do locals leave their homes empty on weekends and sneak away to their cabins near Glennville (up in the Greenhorn Mountains).

Indeed, one thing you’ll love about Wasco, once high-speed rail takes you there, is that its central location makes it a great starting point for trips around the region. In the Wasco vicinity, you can watch drag strip racing in Famoso, raft the Kern River, hike in The Wildland Conservancy’s Wind Wolves Preserve, or rent a houseboat on Lake Success near Porterville on the Tule River. You can even hire a limo to take you on a tour to Paso Robles wine country, or rent a car nearby and head up to Sequoia.

Wasco, given its dependence on prisons and agriculture, has an economy very different from technological and sustainable San Francisco, but you have enough in common to compare notes. There’s a solar array near the elementary school offices. A local start-up, Sweetwater Technology Resources, is developing ways to clean up water from the oil industry. And if you want to commiserate about economic disruption, Wasco will hear you. Just as Bank of America abandoned its San Francisco headquarters for Charlotte, Bank of America recently shut down its Wasco branch. Wasco folks will tell you about how their area has had to pivot from being the world’s potato capital to a producer of first cotton, then roses, and, lately, almonds and pistachios.

If you’re one of those stalwarts of Bay Area politics, drop by the Wasco City Hall, where the quiet diversity of the city council is instructive. With one white woman and four Latino men, the council boasts a higher percentage of ethnic minorities than the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It’s also close to the community; when I spent a morning with Mayor Tilo Cortez recently, constituents greeted him with hugs.

At the council, of course, you’ll discover one giant irony about the potential Bay-to-Wasco connection: The city officially opposes high-speed rail, because of concerns about the effect on local businesses in its path. In particular, the SunnyGem almond processing plant may be condemned and relocated.

Here’s hoping things work out, and, before long, you Bay Area folks will be dancing the night away at Mr. and Mrs. Nightclub near the train station. When you step outside for some air, you’ll appreciate Wasco’s beautiful water tower.

It has lights that change color with the seasons. There’s also the city logo, featuring a rose and Wasco’s welcoming motto, one the rest of California should get behind: “Grow With Us.”

All aboard,

Joe Mathews

The post All Aboard, Bay Area, on Your Fast Train to Wasco appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the question Henry George sought to answer for California in his famous 1868 essay, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” on the eve of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The renowned political economist’s vision—that the railroad would help make California a global giant of business and trade—was so prescient, it was taught in California schools well into the 20th century.

Now the question is timely again for Californians, as Metro in Los Angeles County opens two new light rail connections—one through the San Gabriel Valley this Saturday, the other connecting downtown L.A. to a station four blocks from the beach in Santa Monica on May 20.

That Southern California, of all places, is leading the way in building new rail links (and there will be many more new lines, funded by local sales taxes, opening in the years ahead) suggests we have entered a new era of California transit. It also raises questions about the rest of the state

Will the Bay Area further develop its expensive and union-plagued BART system, including adding a second tunnel under the bay? Will San Francisco ever revamp its embarrassingly slow and dirty MUNI system? How can San Diego best expand its trolleys, and Sacramento its light rail? Can the Inland Empire, the 13th largest metropolitan area in America, raise its transit game? And when will greater Fresno, more than one million people and growing, realize it’s a major American city in need of a real urban transit system?

For now, progress outside L.A. is slow. Maybe that’s because as we consider the possibilities, Californians are asking questions the wrong way. Journalists, environmentalists, and other boring people obsess over the math—what new rail lines might cost us in dollars or what they might save us in traffic or car trips. That’s a losing game—traffic is driven by large, hard-to-predict trends—in the nature of work and technology, in telecommuting patterns, in immigration levels, in the aging of the population, and in the price of gas.

The smarter, more inspiring question about transit projects is George’s old one: What new things do these new rail lines bring us? Do they connect us to places and events in powerful new ways? Do the trains provide comfort and reliability? Is riding the rail a compelling experience in itself that it changes us?

For me, these questions are urgent and personal. I spend as many as four hours a day commuting by car. But the new rail lines could change my life. I live five blocks from the Metro Gold Line, which is opening its 11-mile extension through the San Gabriel Valley to Azusa this weekend. And my office is in Santa Monica, seven blocks from the terminus of the Expo line extension that opens in May.

What might the light-rail bring me? The promise of a healthier, more productive, and more fun routine.

Riding the trains to work could take 90 minutes, with two changes between lines, but that’s no different than driving takes me many days. If the trains are on time, the commute will be more predictable than it is now. And so I’ll start riding the trains with the following hopes. I hope I’ll get more exercise from the extra walking to get to the stations. I hope I’ll be able to read and get work done in transit. And I hope that, as I don’t have to spend as much time in the evening working, I can sleep more and spend more time with my family.

On weekends, I want to ride the new Gold Line to the east with my three train-crazy boys, and explore places near the new stations. Tops on my list are playtime at the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area and Friday nights at the Family Festival on Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia. I could even see an old-school date night for surf-and-turf at the Derby (the horse players restaurant once owned by Seabiscuit jockey George Woolf) if the owners were to grant me and other rail riders a special exemption from the dress code.

This is what the light rail could bring us. The Gold Line extension could make Azusa Pacific, an ambitious Christian university at the end of the new line, a bigger factor in civic life here. It should allow more people to discover, or re-discover, the enchiladas at La Tolteca in Azusa, the Justice Brothers Racing Museum in Duarte, the old movie theater (now a 12-plex) in Monrovia, and the Santa Anita Park race track, and the 626 Night Market in Arcadia.

The Expo Line could be even more transformational. It’ll get you to the beach or the Santa Monica Pier without a car. The delicious Japantown along Sawtelle Boulevard, a spot to be avoided if you drive, should see a surge in customers with the nearby Pico/Sepulveda stop. And more people will find their ways to art shows and studies at the Bergamot Station arts complex, which has its own stop on the new line.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed. Metro needs to make sure the trains are safe, reliable—and, most of all, fun. The new Gold Line cars looked great in a recent preview, with big windows and comfortable seating. And on the Expo Line, those trains better have strong Wi-Fi and maybe tables for us working commuters.

I’m most excited about the surprises that these new rail lines—and other lines under construction—will bring us in the future. What new communities, new downtowns (the city of Duarte sure needs one), new businesses, and new friendships might emerge of which we can’t conceive? What new ideas might come from, say, a doctor riding to her job at the City of Hope meeting a Caltech computer scientist on a Gold Line train?

Re-reading “What The Railroad Will Bring Us,” I was struck by how George, even in making grand predictions about California’s future, underestimated the cultural and economic impact of the railroad. Yes, he correctly saw San Diego becoming a vital second city of California. And he was right that the Bay Area would become a future global capital of commerce.

But he never once mentioned Los Angeles. It was unimaginable then that such a small town could become our greatest city, now featuring the best public transit in the state.

The post How Riding the Rails Can Change Cities and Lives appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The explosion that forever changed the course of Metro Rail had its roots in a turn-of-the-century dairy farm. In 1901, Arthur Fremont Gilmore owned a 256-acre farm near West 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue, at a time when the Fairfax district in Los Angeles consisted mostly of bean fields and cattle pens. He set out to dig a water well on his property, but in true Beverly Hillbillies fashion, Gilmore accidentally struck oil. His discovery prompted an oil exploration boom, and his property later became part of the Salt Lake Oil Field with over four hundred oil wells. This field, located on land that would eventually become part of the Wilshire corridor and the most desired route for the Los Angeles subway, was suddenly the most valuable land in California.

By the 1920s, clever capitalists had largely drained the fields and then abandoned them. But the state had no laws governing cleanup operations and the proper capping of wells. Deep pockets of methane gas, a byproduct of oil, were now rising to the surface from improperly capped wells, joining methane formed from decaying plant and animal matter.

As Angelenos covered the abandoned oil fields with streets, houses, and businesses, the cement formed a cap that prevented the gas from percolating through the soil and evaporating. Meanwhile, locals drained the underground aquifers for drinking water, which gave the gas room to expand. In 1976, when scientists determined the water was unhealthy, the city stopped using the wells. Unusually wet winters over the next decade replenished the aquifers and pushed the methane to the surface.

One methane pocket was located approximately 40 feet below a Ross Dress-for-Less department store on Fairfax Avenue. The gas seeped between the floor slab and foundation walls of the store into a basement room that lacked ventilation. Annexed to the room was the store’s employee lounge, and at 4:47 p.m. on March 24, 1985, a worker punched the time clock there. Then all hell broke loose.

Sixty-two-year-old Rose Sanchez was buying a robe for her mother at the Ross cash register when suddenly the earth began to shake. “For a moment we thought it was an earthquake,” she said. Then the explosion hit, and it sent the walls flying. Flaming clothes hangers swirled overhead. Chris Moore, a security guard who lived a block from the store, felt the blast in his apartment. “Windows and everything was shaking. I looked outside and I could see debris two or three hundred feet up in the air.”

Smaller explosions quickly followed the initial blast, and inside the store Sanchez and several other customers huddled together on the floor. “Suddenly we could see the sky through a large hole in the roof and air came rushing in, creating something like a tornado,” Sanchez said. “It looked like it was raining fire. It was like a cyclone. Gusting air, screams, ashes, black objects flying around. It was horrible. Everything was on fire.”

The explosion had blown the ceiling up into the air, but now it began to fall back to the ground. Fortunately, a gust of wind caught the roof before it could land on the customers. With fire raining down, they decided to escape to the street. They grabbed pieces of clothing and placed them over their heads to protect themselves from the rain of fire. As they ran to the parking lot, another explosion knocked them to the ground. “We saw the earth crack and flames shooting out,” Sanchez said.

Outside, the explosion had ruined the automobiles in the parking lot, cracking the car windows and blistering the paint. The shock wave smashed windows as far as three blocks away and damaged a nearby beauty shop, bank, cafeteria, fish market, variety store, and paint store. Twenty-one people were ultimately sent to the hospital, including some with severe burns.

Th e disaster shocked Los Angeles. The front page photo of the Los Angeles Times the next day resembled a scene of biblical destruction worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Fairfax residents asked themselves which buildings in the area would be next.

Although businesses in the area reopened four days later, the effects of the explosion on Los Angeles rail transit would last for decades. Henry Waxman, the area’s powerful congressman, would use the threat of another explosion to stop a subway he never much cared for in order to protect neighborhoods in his district from gentrification and disruption caused by rail.

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The Mojave Desert is a fittingly apocalyptic place to end an overland journey, a savage expanse of aridity at the hind end of the continent dotted with Joshua trees and creosote, and I awoke to it somewhere west of Needles with a gradual awareness that there was a faint smell of rain. This was unusual on any Amtrak Superliner, where any trace of the outside air is usually smothered in a vague chemical scent. I glanced at my cell phone: 4 a.m.

I lay there in a restless haze until the lights of the station at Barstow invaded the curtains, and I knew I ought to give up. I spread the curtains and looked at the giant sharp-edged Spanish Mission station and the chemical tank cars and the boxcars filled with God-knows-what in the BNSF yard and it hurt my eyes.

I took my coffee back in the compartment and watched the far margins of the urbanized territory of greater Los Angeles emerge, “this baby Italy, more straw than stone,” as the poet Karl Shapiro once put it, and the city and its civic satellites have since grown to contain a population exceeding that of Italy. The Chief went through corridors of shabby houses outside Victorville colored so dull they that appeared to have sprung like plants from the desert caliche. We passed tire emporiums, a Hostess bread outlet, an estate liquidator with boarded-up windows, broken telephone poles with their wires drooping, men stabbing at Russian thistles with long pikes, a cinderblock building with graffiti that said once I was in love/then I decided to live in my own private hell, the early light on the young slopes of the San Gabriels.

I walked with squinted eyes and bed-tousled hair to the dining car and waited to be seated for breakfast, annoyed at the jolts beneath my feet. Though I loved trains, I wanted to be home and knowing Los Angeles was so close made it seem that much further away.

“Good morning,” I muttered to my table companion, an elegant looking woman in her 50s. “Where ya coming from?”

“I’m coming back from the Santa Fe Opera. We saw Verdi.” She spoke carefully, though with a trace of an incipient joke behind her eyes.

“Taking the train to the opera. Very 1890s of you.”

Her name was equally of a different era: Florence Horton. She worked for Sacramento County in an agency that dispensed emergency aid to the homeless and sought to find them transitional housing. Other social workers I’ve known have told me that repeated contact with the down-and-out—especially the accomplished liars—had turned them cynical over time, and I asked if that had happened to her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Some were very beautiful and kind. Do you know what I saw one day? It was raining and this older man came in, not doing very well. He was staggering, but there was a blonde woman with him. She was very tall and elegant, very Italian looking. They were leaning on each other’s shoulders as they walked. His prescription had run out and he was badly in need of his medication. They had to wait there for a few hours while we took care of it, and they just leaned on each other the whole time. That was humanity right there.”

She told me this story as we wound through the Cajon Pass, one of the best keyholes to the Los Angeles basin in existence. Lt. A.W. Whipple, posted out from Fort Smith, Arkansas, had surveyed this narrow earth-gate for a transcontinental railroad in 1853 and he wrote in his journal: “Proceeding through groves of yuccas beautiful as coconut and palms of southern climates, and dense thickets of cedars, by a gradual ascent, averaging probably 60 feet to the mile, we reached the summit of Cajon Pass.” It would probably not be as expensive to build tracks through here as he feared, though, he noted, he wished it led to a more attractive place than the village of Los Angeles, which was then a flyspecked ranchero prone to seasonal flooding.

I was fully awake now and attuned to the kimono glimpses of greater Los Angeles, which is far more of a blue-collar town than its coruscating image suggests— “The Know-How City,” as Jan Morris puts it. The tracks wound through the trellis that made it all work: fabrication plants, poured-concrete slopes for trucks leading into numbered bays, the hidden assemblies. Outside one dusty shed, a few Jet-Skis poked their rumps out, a taste of the nearby ocean. Sun winked off new pickups in a lot with colored pennants that looked like Tibetan prayer flags. A business advertising “BBQ Islands and Hot Tubs.” A Del Taco advertising crispy shrimp tacos. Behind a wall of condominiums, in a place invisible to the occupants (but visible to us), a few homeless people had arranged a hospitable square of couches. The horn sounded more frequently after we passed the earthen dam that stopped up the Santa Ana River, and then we were into a carpet of Orange County affluence: hillside homes with blooms of bougainvilleas, swimming pools, the lovely diffuse light prized so much by filmmakers. The Chief, late of Chicago, moved through it all like a disinterested party guest shouldering through a crowd.

We called at Fullerton for 10 minutes, our next-to-last stop, which had a café with the Santa Fe’s old cross logo out front and some outdoor tables with umbrellas. I stood on the upper level of the observation car with my hands in my pockets, looking out the window through a few date palms and over the walls of a condominium, but in the flat L.A. Basin there was no view of the fake Alpine peak I knew was just five miles to the south: a marker of the stupendous monument—and secret tombstone—to the American passenger train.

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