That’s the question I asked myself in Larkspur, in Marin County, after arriving on the ferry from San Francisco one morning earlier this summer.

I was on my way up to Petaluma to do some reporting, and had been looking forward to experiencing what promises to be California’s newest and most spectacular ferry-to-train connection: the Golden Gate Ferry to the SMART train, the light rail line running for 49 miles through Marin and Sonoma counties.

SMART may be little known statewide, but it offers big inspiration, as an example of Californians finding ways to build infrastructure that connects us, even in this era of division and polarization. It’s also a window on where California, even with its population falling, is still growing—on the increasingly urban edges of our larger metropolitan areas, in places like Fairfield, Riverside, and Escondido.

SMART opened in 2017, offering 43 miles of service from Marin’s San Rafael up to Santa Rosa’s Charles M. Schulz airport. It was built for peanuts—just $400 million. (For comparison, the estimate for a 12-mile light-rail extension from Glendora to Montclair in Southern California is $2.1 billion). An extension south from San Rafael to Larkspur and its ferry opened just before the pandemic hit, crushing demand for trains and ferries.

But ridership has been rebounding. And SMART is still doggedly working to expand. It’s adding a second Petaluma station, on the north side of town; further developing its successful #BikeTrainSynergy (20 percent of riders bring bicycles on board); and creating a micro-transit service to carry passengers the mile from its airport station to the actual airport.

It’s also working on becoming bigger, in ways that might better accommodate a post-pandemic future.

SMART has begun construction on an extension up the 101 freeway corridor to Windsor, though it’s paused that work while awaiting a state Supreme Court decision on the validity of the bridge toll increase funding the project. Eventually, SMART plans to take the train farther—to Cloverdale, on Mendocino County’s doorstep, 80 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

SMART also has studied a new line east from its Novato-Hamilton station across the North Bay to reach the Interstate 80 corridor at Suisun City, which is slightly closer to Sacramento than San Francisco. There, SMART would share a station with Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service, which connects the state capital and San Jose.

A feasibility study suggests such a line could be constructed quickly—in six years or less—and perhaps for just $1 billion. That’s good news, because climate change makes establishing new North Bay links important. The state has said that California State Route 37, the area’s main east-west thoroughfare, could be “permanently submerged” by 2040 because of storms and rising sea levels. The highway is already seeing closures because of flooding.

With all these projects, SMART is seeking to serve both visitors to California, and Californians who may be less likely to live in the middle of our biggest cities, but still want to be connected to them. Indeed, transit projects like SMART and the ACE train, which runs through the Altamont corridor and is being extended south and east through Modesto to Merced, are helping to knit Northern California into what some wonks call “The Mega-Region.” That conception imagines the “Bay Area” reaching as far as Lake Tahoe or Fresno.

Of course, serving such a large area requires making smart links accessible to real people. I couldn’t find such a thing at the Larkspur ferry.

The experience was mortifying because I had been bragging about SMART to my companion that day, a Swiss-Swedish journalist-colleague. After decades of traveling the world by rail, he is a train snob, and he began making little jokes as soon as I turned left off the ferry, wandered to the edge of its parking lot—and couldn’t find the train. Unable to locate the platform using the navigation app on my balky smartphone, I started moving toward a tunnel used by bicyclists and pedestrians. Still no train.

Eventually we wandered to the right side of the parking lot, crossed busy Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and meandered around a curve in a smaller street, through two office parking lots, and up a narrow driveway to reach the train station. On board, the ride was fine, though my European friend pressed a conductor on why the train runs on diesel, not electricity (the answer to the wisenheimer: to save money in an America that doesn’t invest much in trains).

The good news is that, if my colleague ever comes back to the North Bay, the problem should be solved. After making some calls, I learned that SMART has repeatedly put up sandwich boards and posted signs to show the path from ferry to train and back—but these keep getting stolen or blown away by winds. As I write this, they’re enacting a more permanent solution: Vinyl decals will be applied to the pavement to mark the safest route.

These decals are called breadcrumbs, and you can follow them, slowly and carefully, to California’s future.

The post Will California Get SMART About Mass Transit? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We spent a lot of time learning about each other’s favorite places around Los Angeles. Our conversations motivated us to actually investigate the places we had long been curious about. Since workdays were intended for one destination and never allowed the opportunity to explore the stops we passed along the way, we replaced the monotony of going to work with trips to places across the city, learning about the history of our communities, and having fun. Transit stopped being a line from point A to point B. If we wanted to get to point B, we could—and did—make stops along the way.

Transit became not just our means of getting around, but also our way of feeling connected with the outside world. Taking the train to work each morning offered wonderful views of the mountains, the gleaming downtown skyline, and the neighborhoods we passed through. Our fellow riders gave us a sense of the lives we shared the city with, its vitality and diversity. Major events—like protests or strikes or championship celebrations—have a way of spilling out into the transit system and bringing out a sense of shared identity and community.

Union Station took on a deep personal significance. Under its high-vaulted ceilings, we would meet up on our way to work or before venturing out to explore the city. We would pause to grab a coffee and admire the station’s golden hues and tranquil courtyards, or watch the trains rumble out of the yard. Then we would get swept up in the throngs of passengers rushing to their next train as we set out to find something we hadn’t seen before. For one of us—a transplant to LA—changing trains in Union Station was literally their first experience of Los Angeles, making it the natural starting point to take in as much of this new, unfamiliar, and exciting place as possible. As a Los Angeles native, the other was rooted in local tradition and culture, with limited experience beyond East L.A. Exploring the city together led to conversations about the urban changes and development of each neighborhood. And we would trade historical knowledge for the memories and nostalgia for what L.A once had been. We experienced the city through each other’s eyes and witnessed the lives of all the amazing people who contribute to L.A.’s essence.

A city this vast is too much to take in all at once; you can only wrap your mind around it by breaking it down into smaller pieces. For us, we broke it down along the transit lines, learning Los Angeles one route at a time.

We explored the different communities along the Gold Line, starting with Chinatown and Boyle Heights. It’s easy to recommend the beautiful and enchanting neighborhood in Chinatown, where the neon lights dance on reflective surfaces as you walk down the street. Or strolling through Boyle Heights on a weekend night, when the aroma of carne asada wafts from every corner taco stand. The more we explored, the further out we traveled, eventually finding hiking trails that offered an escape from the city, with tall shady trees stretching above your head and parakeets loudly chattering as they soar from one tree to the next.

Along the Blue Line through South Los Angeles, we found beautiful places and wonderful people. In Watts, while disappointed with the scaffolding covering Watts Towers, we found friends willing to talk to us about art in the community. A little further north we found the Alameda Swap Meet and El Faro Plaza, two large warehouse spaces bustling with Latino entrepreneurs and delicious scents from tacos to raspados. In these spaces we found people who showed us the true meaning of community and togetherness. If you have a creative spark in you, the friendly faces in Watts will take you in. And if you are looking for a lively space to watch a game and eat tasty food, the people in El Faro Plaza are there for a good time.

With the Red Line, we ventured past the Walk of Fame and through the Hollywood Hills. While known for impeccable homes, we found secluded streets with wide-open vantage points of the city and a neighborhood intended for pedestrians, with small walkways and staircases. It felt like stepping away from the city; our senses were tuned to the fragrant smells of flowers and fresh air, birds chirping, and dogs barking as we walked past. And even while we were standing in the center of the city, the sounds of cars and trucks were faint and barely noticeable.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

Riding the train at dawn is possibly the most peaceful way to encounter L.A. When the sun is rising over the east, you hear the city waking up. But even before that, you will find Latina women bundled up in scarves and sweaters already boarding buses and trains to move across town. They traverse the city as they travel from the Eastside to their housekeeping jobs on the Westside. Bundled all the way to the top of their heads, lugging large thermoses filled with coffee to drink and wake up as they move. These women would share stories about the large mansions they worked in. These large glamorous homes were meant to look untouched and pristine, and while they maintained these homes, these women would also have to keep an eye on the curious children who needed to be cared for. They would then take the transit system back home, where their work continued as mothers.

The pandemic has limited our movement and put a hold on our adventures. We can’t see new places or stumble upon old friends on our regular commute. The pandemic robbed us of the connection with the outside world that transit offered. We miss the community of people who used transit on a regular basis and were happy to share stories and chat. Now people limit their movement and faces sit behind masks as people protect themselves from the virus. Right now, the trains don’t feel like they have that love and energy we used to encounter, but we look forward to the day that everything begins to buzz with excitement again.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We’ve long wanted to illustrate how transit can be an excellent means of seeing the city. As the pandemic dragged on, we finally conceived Transiting Los Angeles as a way to share the places that we’ve fallen in love with to inspire others to explore them as well. We think of our blog like a series of postcards: “Wish You Were Here.” Despite our different perspectives, transit has shaped a common understanding of our home. While we try to pick up the pieces of our lives amid all this uncertainty, it’s nice to remember that there are still wonderful places within reach. Los Angeles will be forever changed by the pandemic, but whatever comes next, transit will always take us where we need to go.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Transiting Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As the ACE Train pulls into the Santa Clara station, the conductor pops out—and begins apologizing for his train.

“I’m sorry, but this is not the Amtrak!” he bellows, loud enough to be heard by all boarding passengers on the long platform

“And this is not Caltrain! If you want the Caltrain to San Francisco, do not board this train!” he yells.

This warning is useful: The ACE Train uses some of the same tracks but doesn’t go the same places as Amtrak and Caltrain. It’s also fitting: The ACE Train is important to California because of what it is not.

It’s not a service that operates around the clock, like L.A.’s Metro. It’s not charming and tourist-friendly, like San Diego’s trolley, and it doesn’t connect our fanciest precincts and companies like BART. It’s not expensive to construct, like the high-speed rail project. And it’s not losing riders, like so much transit these days.

Here’s what the ACE Train is: a real, live, and unappreciated story of successful transportation in California. And while its story is modest and narrow for now, it is planning expansion in ways that—if Californians can move past the brain-dead populist politics of the gas tax—should point the way to a future in which Californians can move around more easily.

The ACE—for Altamont Corridor Express—is modest. Its service consists of just four round trips each weekday—limits that reflect the fact that it shares tracks with Union Pacific. ACE sends four trains from Stockton to San Jose, via the East Bay in the morning, and sends four trains back from San Jose to Stockton at the end of the day.

The ACE Train works because it is pure commuter rail, addressing the mismatch between where the jobs are in the Bay Area and where people can afford to buy homes. Every morning ACE takes residents of places like Livermore, Lathrop, Tracy, and Manteca to their jobs in the East Bay and Santa Clara County, and returns them home in time for prime time television. In the process, it keeps them off the madness-inducing parking lot that is the 580 freeway.

ACE started 20 years ago with just two daily round trips, backed by a joint powers authority and funded by a sales tax increase in San Joaquin County, whose residents suffer from some of America’s longest commutes.

The last six years have seen the ACE Train double its ridership to more than 5,000 people per day and more than 1.3 million people annually. At a time when transit use has been flat in major metros, ACE is one of the fastest growing train lines in the country.

ACE’s success suggests that California needs a conversation about inter-regional transit that is more thoughtful than our current one, which focuses almost exclusively on the costs of the high-speed rail project. What we should be talking about is whether high-speed rail will offer smart and seamless connections to other modes of transportation, making it easier for Californians to get where we need to go. The example of ACE suggests that by smartly expanding our lesser-known commuter rail lines—like the Metrolink in Southern California, the Coaster in San Diego, the SMART Train in the North Bay, and the aforementioned Caltrain on the Peninsula—we could build an integrated web of transit that would make our daily lives easier.

One of Joe Mathews’s sons savors the view, and his dining experience, aboard the ACE train. Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The ACE train is an example because it has improved thoughtfully and incrementally, keeping the needs of its riders in mind. Right now, ACE is expanding service on its existing route by buying cleaner-burning locomotives that allow it to expand from trains that are currently seven cars to 10-car ones. It could add Saturday service in 2019.

In the next few years, the service is scheduled to expand its geographic reach. Under the mantle of creating “Valley Rail,” ACE will push in two different directions at once. In the 2020s, one new branch of the service will head up to the state capital, with new stations in Lodi, Elk Grove, Sacramento, and Natomas, ending with a shuttle to Sacramento International Airport. The other branch will extend south to the cities of Modesto and Ceres before eventually connecting to Merced. In that way, ACE, in combination with expanded service on Amtrak’s San Joaquin line, would form a triangle between three regions—the Bay Area, the Capital Region, and the San Joaquin Valley.

This will also put ACE at two of the most important new transportation hubs of 21st-century California.

The first is San Jose’s Diridon Station, which already links together Caltrain, Amtrak, and Santa Clara’s VTA light-rail system. High-speed rail’s first phase would end there, and the station is also next door to the site where Google wants to build a massive new “village.”

The second hub is downtown Merced, which would be both an ACE terminus and a stop on high-speed rail. That old downtown is already transforming, as the University of California’s newest campus, which was built in the fields outside Merced, expands into its downtown.

Unfortunately, this second extension—to Merced and Modesto—is endangered because it is funded by the controversial gas tax increase that Proposition 6, on this November’s ballot, would repeal.

The gas tax is a statewide political battle, but the geographic center of the fight is the ACE corridor. Two lawmakers from there—State Senator Anthony Canella, a Republican from Ceres, and Assemblyman Adam Gray, a Democrat from Merced—provided their votes in favor of the gas tax in exchange for $400 million for the ACE expansion to serve their communities.

If Prop 6, which is popular among Republicans, passes, the ACE expansion will be threatened. Democratic congressional candidate Josh Harder has cynically come out in favor of Prop 6, even though it would hurt his hometown of Modesto, to create political problems for the area’s incumbent Republican congressman, Jeff Denham, who is heavily funded by transportation lobbies. Denham was previously such a champion of ACE that he held a town hall on the moving train. Now Denham is trying to play the issue both ways: He has quietly endorsed Prop 6 to appease his tax-hating GOP base, while also refusing to give the measure money or vocal public support.

Fortunately, riding the ACE is less complicated than voting on it. One recent afternoon, I boarded the train at its origin, Diridon in San Jose, and then marveled at the big crowds that embarked at the next two stations. The first, Santa Clara, has a shuttle bus to San Jose’s airport, while the second, Great America, is next to the 49ers’ new stadium. The platform there was mobbed with employees of Cisco and other tech firms that run company buses between their offices and ACE.

By the time the train had passed a beautiful stretch along the southeast edge of the bay and stopped in Fremont, there was no longer a seat to be had. A group of Cisco engineers held a business meeting around one table on the second floor of the rail car. At the Pleasanton stop, new riders, who use a shuttle bus connecting with the BART system there, squeezed on.

The train slowly emptied out over the next four stops—at Livermore, Vasco Road, Tracy, and Lathrop/Manteca—as people poured into jammed parking lots to retrieve their vehicles. Some had brought bicycles and rode off on them. ACE riders told me that the traffic jams getting into these station lots is the most difficult part of their whole trip. The crowding might get worse: New construction of housing and retail was visible near most stops. The other complaints I heard were about the strength of ACE’s Wi-Fi, and the cost of the train (monthly passes can run more than $300, and round-trip tickets can exceed $20). But the trip is still cheaper and easier than driving.

My train was mostly empty on the last leg to the lovely Cabral Station, on the edge of Stockton’s downtown. From there, I would walk to a dinner interview at Angelina’s Spaghetti House, a great and unfussy old Italian restaurant. And I didn’t have to hurry—the ACE had arrived five minutes early.

Let’s hope California’s rail future has similar timing.

The post Take the ACE Train appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m a regular rider of “The Brain Train,” officially known as the Gold Line on the L.A. Metro system. The Gold Line is a light rail running from the eastern San Gabriel Valley into downtown L.A. and then back out again to East L.A. Along the way, it connects enough smart institutions—from innovative community colleges, to a leading cancer center, to the world’s greatest scientific university—to explode stereotypes about public transportation and Southern California itself.

Yes, other parts of California may claim brainier trains: The Caltrain commuter rail runs the Silicon Valley from San Francisco to Stanford to San Jose; San Diego is in the process of extending its trolley to UCSD; and Sonoma and Marin Counties are about to inaugurate the SMART train (although that’s an acronym, not a judgment of the intelligence of a delay-plagued project).

But for Los Angeles County—where we’re known for our good looks but not for our brains or public transportation—the Gold Line is a revelation. And over the next several years, the line will be extended at both ends in ways that could make it a candidate for the title (with apologies to the Red Line connecting Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.) of “the best educated rail line in the country.”

Even today, you can reach a startling diversity of intellectual institutions on the line. Starting at the Brain Train’s current eastern terminus on Atlantic Avenue, you’ll be within walking distance of East Los Angeles College. Get on the train there, and you can stop for a drink at Eastside Luv (a Boyle Heights hotspot offering art, music, and poetry) and then take the line downtown, where you’ll pass by the Japanese American National Museum and SCI-Arc, one of the world’s leading architectural schools. North of downtown, the Southwest Museum, a library and archive devoted to Native American history and artifacts, is at the Mount Washington Station. And if you disembark at Highland Park, you can ride your bike to Occidental, the elite private college that is one of President Obama’s alma maters.

When the train enters Pasadena, it goes right through the south campus of ArtCenter College of Design, a globally distinguished school, and later stops at Memorial Park, a block from the headquarters of Parsons, the leading engineering firm. Then the Gold Line turns east, with stops that are a walk to innovative Pasadena City College (among the best in the state at transferring students to four-year institutions) and a short bike ride to that wonder of science, Caltech, where planets are discovered and Nobels are won.

The Gold Line also connects the neighborhood where the Caltech-affiliated characters in the longstanding CBS sitcom hit, Big Bang Theory, live. (I have a question for the screenwriters: Why doesn’t Jim Parsons’ character, Sheldon, ever take the Brain Train?)

Further east, the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte has its own stop on the Brain Train. And for now, the Gold Line ends at two higher education institutions: Citrus College, which the Brookings Institution has called one of the top 10 community colleges in the United States, and Azusa Pacific, a major Christian university. But plans are already underway to take the Gold Line further east, with a stop near the University of La Verne before eventually reaching the Claremont Colleges, the seven-school consortium.

The Brain Train’s educational resume runs beyond universities. The line runs right through two of the state’s top school districts—Arcadia and South Pasadena—and connects easily through bus transfers to two others, San Marino and La Cañada. The Gold Line also offers thought-provoking views of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains and of Mt. Wilson Observatory, once essential to the study of astronomy.

But do all the nerds along the line ride the train? No, but many cost-conscious ones do. The 31-mile-long Brain Train costs just $1.75 per boarding, and transfers to other lines are free. While ridership is flat overall on Metro, ridership has been growing on the Brain Train, which registered an all-time high for weekday boardings (more than 53,000) in June.

I’m often struck by the nerdiness of my fellow passengers. The Brain Train offers a smooth, quiet, and comfortable ride, and so it’s one of the rare public spaces where you’ll see people reading actual books. On recent rides, I encountered Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846-1873, two volumes of the late Richard Feynman’s legendary lectures on physics, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and Salvador Dali’s cookbook, Les diners de Gala.

The Brain Train is likely to get brainier, particularly if the transit connection ends up encouraging more cross-enrollment in classes for students or research collaboration between faculty at Gold Line-adjacent institutions. Schools along the line are already encouraging their students and staff to use it. At a public event late last year, a Citrus College administrator argued that the Gold Line is making it easier for students to reach the campus and complete their degrees, and the CEO of the Claremont Colleges said it would make field research by students and faculty much easier.

There also are efforts by educational institutions to enhance the Gold Line corridor. Most notably, ArtCenter, in Pasadena, is preparing a 15-year master plan that would launch a new bikeway near the Gold Line and build new student housing with green public spaces—Quads—that would be directly over the rail line, linking buildings on either side.

The Gold Line is “our extended classroom,” said Art Center’s associate vice president Rollin Homer at the 2016 public event. “We’re embracing it—we’re going to live and create alongside it.”

The Brain Train is still an urban rail line with typical problems. (I encountered a pile of human excrement on a seat on one morning, and recently assisted a half dozen fellow passengers in subduing an intoxicated rider.) But as someone who grew up in Pasadena before the line arrived in 2003, and now lives four blocks from a stop, I love the way the Gold Line connects me to familiar places in new ways.

The Brain Train, in other words, can really make you think.

The post L.A.’s Revelatory Light Rail for Nerds 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.

Yet there was the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, the national legislature’s leader, and the country’s interim president all at the metro’s inauguration—a half-year late, way over budget, and only a week before the opening ceremony for the 2016 Games.

Michel Temer, the interim president standing in while elected president Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment, had flown in just to make the landmark ride. He stood among smiling faces as the sleek subway glided over 10 miles of fresh track from the line’s previous terminus at Rio’s famed Ipanema beach to the western suburb of Barra da Tijuca, which houses the main Olympic Park and Athletes’ Village—though those facilities are a full eight miles away from the last stop.

As his train screeched into the station, a youth orchestra struck up “The Girl From Ipanema,” perhaps in reference to how that tall and tan and young and lovely girl no longer has to go on walking, but can hop on the metro instead. In the press scrum, I asked a reporter why we hadn’t been allowed to ride the metro, too. She suggested it was because of the risk of lefty journalists chanting “Fora Temer!” (“Out Temer!). Most Brazilians want new elections, and the political instability continues to be a preoccupation for Brazil and Olympic organizers.

Inside the airy Jardim Oceânico station, Temer, who Brazilians are quick to note bears a striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, took to a podium and promised that Rio would show “what it’s capable of.” In turn, the mayor, in his trademark jeans and untucked work shirt, and the governor, still weak from a recent cancer treatment but seemingly determined to be part of the hoopla, also heaped praise on the project. Their common message: the $3 billion transit project will unify disparate parts of Rio, just as the Olympics would unify a divided Brazil.

You don’t have to have been a Brazil correspondent for three years to recognize that overstatement. Moreso than forging unity, the rail project seems like yet another marker of Rio’s controversial, overhyped, and ultimately underwhelming haul toward hosting the first ever Olympics in South America.

Sure, it’s easy to hate on the Olympics. Predicting the myriad of things that will go wrong is an established tradition of the Games, as much of a ritual as the torch-lighting ceremony. In much of the media, the competition is fierce for the most dire prediction, the most alarming headline, the most damning criticism of “the disaster that is Rio.” The Athlete’s Village is not up to spec (it wasn’t in Sochi or London either). The military has taken over airport screening (again, as happened in London). The environmental pollution is alarming (as it was in Beijing, which was called the most polluted games ever). The doomsayers came out in force before the 2014 World Cup too, but were proven wrong when the tournament went off largely without a hitch.

Amid all the finger-wagging, it’s no wonder 60 percent of Brazilians believe the Olympics will do more harm than good—a far cry from 2009, when the bid was supported by 89 percent of the population.

But it’s still hard not to be cynical over the self-congratulatory glad-handing on full display during the inauguration of the new metro line. And perhaps the troubles surrounding this heralded project help explain the downbeat mood in Brazil right now. It’s just another of the scores of big promises made that have failed to come to fruition.

Built over six years by as many as 10,000 workers at any given time, Rio’s new Linha 4 line claims to be the largest modern urban infrastructure project in Latin America—a dubious claim, given it’s just 10 miles of track with five stations. It was originally targeted to open in January 2016, but construction repeatedly threatened to halt amid funding shortages from the cash-strapped state government, whose economic woes reflect the recession that rattled Brazil in recent years. Costs ran over. The federal government was forced to step in with an emergency aid package. The length of the line was halved. An investigation into contracts-related bribery was opened. And after all that, the line will only be open to Olympic ticket holders until September—so much for connecting the people.

Then there are questions about who this new metro will really serve when it opens later this fall. In contrast to public transportation projects in U.S. cities that are attacked for skirting wealthier neighborhoods exercising their NIMBY vetoes, the expensive metro expansion in Rio is being criticized for routing into more affluent neighborhoods at the expense of poorer ones. And it’s not even clear that the wealthy residents will take the metro. One transportation expert involved in the planning of Linha 4, Marcus Quintella at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, explained to me that changes to the original design, including the scratching of planned parking near the line’s final stop, mean that these more affluent residents may opt to stay in their cars.

Officials tend to sweep aside such criticisms. At an earlier metro station unveiling, I spoke with Rio’s state secretary of transportation Rodrigo Vieira, who was in charge of finishing the $3 billion legacy project. He said costs were on par with transportation projects elsewhere in the world. He also countered that the line connects people of all classes, including a new stop just outside the city’s largest favela and service that better connects poorer residents to the wealthy neighborhoods where many take service jobs. The upgrades will cut a commuter’s ride by up to two hours, meaning people “will have more time to be with their families, to work, to have pleasure, to live.”

“Of course it’s not cheap,” he added, “But it’s a way to change the lives and change the city.”

As we spoke, trains rumbled through the station conducting test rides, seats still covered in plastic wrap. The station itself was still unfinished: equipment needed to be installed at the ticketing counter, an emergency closet lacked its fire hose, and the ceiling-mounted security camera boxes had yet to be equipped with actual cameras. Vieira brushed off these concerns too.

“We will operate with all the security and safety that the Rio de Janeiro subway is known for all over the world,” he said, though it isn’t clear that the small metro system has any reputation outside Brazil, and the city’s not exactly known for safety.

The statement stands in contrast to a feeling of insecurity that seems to be permeating Rio right now. After the inauguration ceremony, I rode the newly inaugurated metro back to Ipanema with Mateus Araujo, the conductor of the youth orchestra that had played “The Girl From Ipanema.” He said they would likely use the new line during the Olympics to perform at venues around the city, but he was concerned about safety. He’s been robbed at gunpoint twice over the past two years, and kids in his orchestra sometimes miss practice because it’s not safe to leave their homes in favelas riven by gang violence and police reprisals.

It’s not limited to poorer neighborhoods either. To maintain security during the Olympics, some 85,000 military and police personnel have descended upon the city. Helmet-wearing commandos patrol the beaches and streets with their fingers ready on the trigger. Despite this, a gang was filmed last week pulling a man from his car and emptying his pockets within blocks of the governor’s palace. Tellingly, the government of France has issued an advisory to tourists suggesting they have a banknote ready to appease potential attackers, suggesting that in Brazil security is not a matter of avoiding robbery, but coping with it. The arrest of 12 suspects in an ISIS-pledged terrorist cell also did nothing to quell a city already on edge.

For residents and tourists alike, the first concern isn’t even about where the metro goes, but about getting there safely in the first place.

In this way, the Linha 4 line seems to underscore Brazil’s tendency to put the cart before the horse. Looking back, it’s clear that the 2009 host bid was made amid the hype of the country’s future prospects, but with no real plans for how to accomplish everything the investment promised to bring.

The city’s crime is down, but serious safety concerns remain because thousands of extra security units aren’t enough to combat deep-rooted violence. The bay remains horribly polluted with raw sewage because pledged water treatment infrastructure never appeared. Foreign capital is coming in, but won’t necessarily turn the tide of an economic crisis.

The new metro tracks were laid, but the city will remain disjointed.

Perhaps the best one can say is that at least the train runs. Given the country’s unexpected downturn and political upheaval, it is arguably a feat that Rio accomplished what it did. Sure, it’s disappointing—but maybe it was doomed to be.

The train will run, the Games will go on, and the country will likely get a boost. But will Brazilians be more united after their Olympic moment?

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Long-distance pipelines were developed in the late 19th century to compete with railroads for the conveyance of crude oil. The problem in the 1870s was not that railroads lacked sufficient capacity to carry oil or that they spilled unacceptable amounts (though they did, to be sure, leak considerably). Rather, the problem had a name: John D. Rockefeller. He’d built his Standard Oil empire by using bulk shipments to negotiate better rates on his oil deliveries than any of his competitors. By controlling railroad shipments, Rockefeller controlled the industry. Pipeline pioneers hoped that creating an alternative transport system would turn the tide in their favor. As a result, these pioneers cared primarily about two things: cost and competition. As long as small spills did not dramatically reduce profitability, environmental safety wasn’t high on their list of priorities, to put it mildly.

19th-century pipeline workers

Long-distance pipeline dreams first became reality in 1879 in Pennsylvania. Led by Byron Benson and a group of colleagues unaffiliated with Standard Oil, the Tide-Water Pipeline represented a remarkable technological achievement that can be compared to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge a few years later. The project was so audacious that skeptical observers dubbed it “Benson’s Folly.” From January to May of 1879, scores of men and horses hauled thousands of tons of pipes through the wilderness of the Allegheny Mountains to complete the 106-mile route. Engineers designed new pumps capable of pushing the oil over an 1,100-foot elevation gain without exceeding the pressure limits of the cast-iron pipes. Most significantly, Benson and his team overcame intense competitive threats such as armed teams ripping up pipes and fraudulent land claims organized by Rockefeller and his railroad allies.

Excitement in western Pennsylvania ran high on May 28, 1879, when the pipeline operators started the great pumps and inserted oil into the lines. The oil moved at a slow pace of about a half-a-mile per hour and several people began walking along with the oil. But within two days, the pressure in the pipes rose rapidly and the pumps had to be stopped. A crew opened the pipeline and discovered some pieces of wood and rope stuck inside the line. Company officials suspected sabotage, but could not rule out careless workers. Though company reports do not mention the amount of oil lost, there is no doubt that significant quantities of oil flowed onto the ground when the pipes were opened. Even before the first oil reached the end of the pipeline, therefore, a spill had occurred.

With the obstacles removed, the pumps turned back on and the oil began moving again. On the evening of June 4, a large crowd gathered in Williamsport. At around 7:20 p.m., the pipes released a strange whooshing noise and oil soon began to flow into the collecting tanks below. People filled souvenir bottles with the oil and newspapers report that a “spirited celebration” followed. The era of pipelines had begun.

Map of the Tide-Water Pipeline, the first long-distance oil pipeline, 1879

Once pipeline technology had been proven, Rockefeller quickly moved to build his own extensive network. Within five years, he had reasserted his dominance of oil transport, though now more than three-quarters of oil traveled through pipes rather than on rails. Like the Tide-Water, Rockefeller’s early pipelines exhibited a pattern of slow and steady leaks punctuated by dramatic bursts. Small leaks caused by poorly sealed joints or defects in the cast-iron pipes were so common that they rarely appear in the historical record. More consequential leaks obtained brief newspaper mention but little call for change in industry practice. In March 1885, for example, one of Standard Oil’s pipelines burst on a farmer’s property. Sparks from a locomotive ignited the oil leading newspapers to describe “a terrific conflagration [that] raged for 20 hours.” Just over one year later, the same pipeline ruptured resulting in “farms deluged with oil and huge bonfires of crude petroleum burning for three days.”

Why did early pipelines fail so often? In part, because oil spills were endemic to all aspects of the industry. At the time the Tide-Water Pipeline was under construction, oil producers in western Pennsylvania were spilling an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 barrels of oil every day as gushing wells spewed petroleum before they could be capped and hastily erected storage tanks leaked steadily. To put this into context, the equivalent amount of oil lost in the 1986 Exxon Valdez disaster was spilled every month in western Pennsylvania. At oil refineries, residual traces of petroleum that could not be sold as products were frequently dumped into nearby rivers. For most in the loosely regulated early days of the oil industry, spilling some oil here and there was far more profitable than investing in the expensive technology necessary to control a finicky liquid.

Over time, pipelines have become more reliable, featuring better welding of their joints along with extensive monitoring systems. However, the development and implementation of these technologies has rarely happened on its own; in most cases, regulations and public pressure have been necessary to spur change. Without strong penalties, it is cheaper for companies to allow small leaks than to build better pipelines.

Illustration of a pipeline break

Yet despite improvement, pipelines remain imperfect. In the United States, a pipeline spill occurs nearly every day, with over 1,400 accidents in America between 2010 and 2013. Historian Sean Kheraj has recently demonstrated that even a pipeline that has operated with a 99.999 percent success rate in Canada has averaged a spill-and-a-half a year and discharged about 5.8 million liters of oil over the past 40 years. A very low failure rate (one likely to be understated as it relies so heavily on self-reporting by leakers), therefore, can still produce heavy environmental damage.

How, then, should we think about pipeline spills? One option is to consider reverting to shipping oil by railroad. As it turns out, such an experiment is underway. The shale oil boom in places such as North Dakota has recently generated large increases in petroleum production at sites with little pipeline infrastructure. Much of this oil is traveling by railroad, and the environmental consequences have been mixed. Several high-profile derailments and explosions have demonstrated that railroads—particularly those operating on old tracks—create similar risks as pipelines. Accidents are more common on railroads than pipelines, though the average quantity of oil lost is much higher in pipeline incidents than on railroads. Neither system is perfect.

Regardless of whether shipped by pipeline or railroad, a clear historical lesson is that greater public scrutiny and regulation of oil transporters reduces the frequency and severity of spills. Citizens are well within their rights to insist that government agencies require pipeline companies to do better.

But this is not all. Simply demonizing pipeline operators for their spills is a convenient way for citizens to ignore their complicity in environmental degradation. Oil is transported in such massive quantities because the vast majority of Americans demand to use it regularly. Our everyday actions, including driving cars and surrounding ourselves with plastics, undergird a world in which pipelines appear as a ubiquitous feature of our landscapes.

There’s a parallel here to another liquid Southern Californians—and many of us throughout the Southwest—have to import to ensure survival and economic prosperity: water. Most of us are aware that our choices as water consumers—to move to arid lands, water lawns, and support a massive agricultural industry in formerly dry areas.—aggravates the tightness of water supplies and contributes to our recurring droughts. It would be good to think similarly about all that oil coursing into our region’s veins, and become more serious about cutting back on our consumption.

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That’s why Californians find themselves dreaming of trains. Their attraction isn’t to quotidian trains–light-rail or urban commuter trains. It’s certainly not to freight trains. All these are too stodgy, too utilitarian, and too available. They are not objects of desire.

Ah, but high-speed rail–that’s what makes the heart beat faster. In the pictures, high speed is to conventional rail what iMac is to an old mainframe. Yes, it’s expensive. But what is tens of billions of dollars when Californians will look so good, save the planet, and zip through the Central Valley as if it were the French countryside?

Californians have loved trains before–back when both the state and the trains were young. Surely, they can rekindle that old flame. High-speed rail will be like the transcontinental railroads, the experts tell us. High-speed trains will shrink space, develop the country, and speed us into the future.

But here is where I get off the train.

I’m a historian. I’ve written a book on the transcontinentals (Railroaded). I know that the first thirty years of the old relationship between train and California were more than bad. They were horrid.

The transcontinentals promised us everything, and they lied. Much of the growth they promoted was dumb growth that came with high social costs. They corrupted our politics and our press and ruined our economy more than once. We fought the railroads for the rest of the nineteenth century.

California should have learned something from this. Do not build large railroads ahead of demand. Do not quickly fund those things that we might be able to do at less cost, more efficiently, and with improved technology later when we really need it. Do not funnel huge amounts of public money into private hands on the basis of only promises of benefits. Remember to calculate capital costs accurately.

But because I am an American historian, I also know what California’s answer will be: it will be different this time. It is a new day. That was then; this is now. California and the railroads were both young and foolish in those days. We have seen high-speed rail in France, Japan, and now China. It works. And if the French, Japanese, and Chinese can make it work, certainly Californians can make it work.

This is a tough job for an historian. I need help. I may need my brother, the therapist. Because California is not France, Japan, or China.

Look, I have no desire to save California’s love affair with the internal combustion engine. That is doomed. But I also don’t want California squandering the money needed for schools, universities, infrastructure, hospitals, and the most basic kinds of assistance to the poor on fantasies of a better life on the Silver Streak.

California does not listen. Californians have already voted $9 billion in bonds toward their new life with high-speed rail. It is only a small part of the cost of the system. The federal government supposedly was going to pay most of the rest–but now, apparently not. And once the system is up and going it will pay its own operating costs. We can live happily ever after.

Promises, promises, promises. Sometimes it is better to consult an accountant rather than one’s heart. Listen to the promises, go to the California High-Speed Rail website, but then talk to the accountants. In this case the accountants have a webpage. It is at the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail.

This is serious. California has its children and their future to think about. The accountants say that the California High-Speed Rail Commission has underestimated the cost of the project, overestimated the willingness of investors to put private capital at risk, overestimated the ridership, and miscalculated the cost of servicing the immense debt that will be accrued to build it. They have the system meeting its operating costs, when it most likely will not do so for years and perhaps forever. Servicing the debt alone will put an immense burden on state and local governments when the money is desperately needed elsewhere.

Still, say enthusiasts, love is not about the bottom line. If Californians follow their heart, they will save the planet. But wait. How green is the train really? A group at Global Metropolitan Studies at U.C. Berkeley has tried to calculate the net carbon benefits of the high-speed rail lines proposed for the United States. They have created two models, and in both the benefits of reducing CO2 emissions are quite modest. They assume a reduction of about one percent. And that’s assuming that riders are totally out of their cars and not driving to and from the trains–as they certainly will. Nor do the modelers count the environmental effects of actually building the thing.

Is somewhere between zero and one percent CO2 reduction the best we can do after spending tens of billions on the California system alone and hundreds of billions nationally? This is dumb growth. We need infrastructure spending and we need it badly, but that does not make all infrastructure spending equal.

But no, California, plug your ears! Where would we be if we listened to accountants or academics with their unreliable models? China has not hesitated, and are we going to let them race into the future ahead of us?

Well, maybe we should. As a recent Washington Post examination of Chinese high-speed rail discovered, the system is so far an expensive failure. It is far over cost; it has overestimated the number of riders; it is rife with fraud; it is poorly built. The trains cannot travel at the promised speed. The present Chinese relationship with high-speed rail looks much like our past relationship with transcontinentals. It may very well look like our future relationship with high-speed rail.

High-speed rail can be happy without us. It still has Paris and Tokyo. It may very well find a future between Boston and Washington DC. But it is too rich for our Californian blood and not suited to our conditions. We have plenty of other challenges.

Richard White, a professor of American history at Stanford University, is author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.

*Photo courtesy of ‘x0r.

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