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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it comes to fast trains, a California consensus has hardened: High-speed rail is beyond our capabilities.

We may be the world’s high-tech capital, but we say that high-speed rail is just too technically challenging for us. We may have one of the planet’s richest economies, but nevertheless maintain that high-speed rail is too expensive. We are a giant, sprawling state of 40 million people, but believe we’re too small to construct even one high-speed rail line.

If we’re right about our own powerlessness to deliver high-speed rail, then how do we explain Taiwan?

My recent visits to that beautiful island, where I was running a public democracy conference, put the lie to all the excuses Californians are using to justify abandoning high-speed rail.

Taiwan is a far poorer place than California—with median household income and a gross domestic product just one-fourth of ours—but it managed to afford high-speed rail. It’s far less populous, with only 23 million people, but it still attracts a huge ridership for its fast trains. Indeed, Taiwan’s high-speed rail resembles what might have been possible in California, if we hadn’t lost our nerve.

Taiwan, like California, has most of its population in cities along its west coast. So at the turn of the century, Taiwan started construction on a high-speed rail line to link Taipei City, in the north, down to Kaohsiung, a harbor city in the south. That’s a distance of 225 miles, about the same as the planned first phase of California’s high-speed rail construction, from San Jose to Bakersfield.

Here is where the differences began. Taiwan built and began operating its line in less than seven years, at a cost of $18 billion. California’s first phase is now under construction after a decade of delays, and it’s unclear whether it will ever be finished, or what the costs, estimated most recently at $68 billion, will end up being.

What explains this? Paradoxically, Taiwan’s project was completed less expensively because it didn’t try to do high-speed rail on the cheap.

While California established an understaffed and underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses and banks came together to create a private corporation. The deal to establish the corporation gave the government a minority stake in the corporation and created a concession: the company would build and then operate high-speed rail for 35 years, after which it would have to give the system back to the government.

Construction difficulties that have been used as excuses in California were surmounted in Taiwan. The corporation struggled but acquired enough new land to create a new right of way, without using existing train lines. The corporation persevered despite cost overruns, which were related to political pressure that saw the project switch its main supplier from a European consortium to a Japanese one. The Taiwan project, like the California one, also struggled to find workers—but it managed to import 2,000 professional engineers from 20 other countries. And Taiwan’s project also met strict environmental requirements, including establishing its own protection program for a beautiful-but-endangered bird: the Pheasant-tailed Jacana.

California’s earthquake faults, and the difficulty of tunneling through them, have long been excuses for delays and costs here. Taiwan, though, is as seismically active as California, and the consortium managed to build safely to incorporate risks from earthquakes—as well as from hurricanes, landslides, and subsidence.

While California’s high-speed rail authority has complained about costly viaducts and tunneling, Taiwan created a system with even more tunneling—especially under Taipei and Taoyuan—and with far longer viaducts, including the world’s second-longest bridge, the 97-mile Changhua-Kaohsiung Viaduct.

Taiwan’s project was not without problems. The corporation, relying on loans, built up a high debt. In 2009, with Taiwan’s economy in free fall, the government effectively provided a bailout by refinancing the loans, taking a larger ownership stake in the corporation, and extending the concession from 35 to 70 years. Service was also reduced.

Taiwan’s high-speed rail connects cities along the nation’s west coast. Image courtesy of Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation/flickr.

At the time, the relentless critics of California’s high-speed rail used media reports about the Taiwan bailout in their successful campaign to turn the public against the whole concept.

But Californians never got the rest of the story. The bailout worked. And as the global economy recovered, Taiwan’s high-speed rail system proved reliably profitable—and popular, with 64 million riders last year.

Indeed, high-speed rail has done nothing less than transform the country, linking its once-disconnected regions together. Bus and airline service fell as Taiwanese embraced high-speed rail; driving also declined.

Getting from Taipei to Kaohsiung once required an airplane ride or a difficult five-hour drive. Now it can be done by 300-kilometer-per-hour high-speed rail in 90 minutes. While California cities are trying to steal away state high-speed rail money for their own commuter lines, Taiwan cities like Tainan and Hsinchu have instead built their own robust transit links off of the high-speed line.

I learned first-hand what a difference this can make. With high-speed rail, it took me just 45 minutes to travel between the two cities where my democracy conference was taking place—Taichung and Taipei—even though they are as far apart as San Diego and L.A.

The ticket price, regulated by the government, was $22, which is how much it costs me to go round-trip between the Oakland airport and San Francisco on BART. (In Taiwan, there are 50 percent discounts for children, seniors, and the disabled). Since the train is elevated for much of the ride, the views are excellent.

Taiwan’s high-speed rail serves commuters and tourists, who use it to get to attractions like Yu Shan National Park and Kenting National Park. I love the train for all the time it saves.

During our conference, the national government provided the hundreds of attendees with our own regular train—similar to an Amtrak—which stopped at eight different cities for democracy-related meetings on a two-day tour from Taipei to Kaohsiung.

At 6 p.m. on the second day, with the tour complete, my colleagues got on the regular train in Kaohsiung for a three-hour journey back to our hotel in Taichung. But my son and I stayed in Kaohsiung to have dinner with the grandfather of one of his school buddies back in Southern California. After a lovely meal, we got on the high-speed rail at 8 p.m. for a 43-minute ride back to Taichung, 120 miles north. We were in our hotel beds by 9 p.m., just as the regular train with my colleagues was pulling into the Taichung station.

As a Californian, it was nice to experience the long-promised benefits from high-speed rail. It’s maddening that I had to do so in a smaller and poorer country in East Asia, rather than in California itself.

The post How Taiwan’s High-Speed Trains Expose California’s Lack of Nerve 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.

______________

A pickup in the distance drags a cloud of dust
down the road, its motion slowed by our shared direction.
Alongside us run the freight lines—all the trains
shaped like their toys, except the graffiti covering
the red and silver siding. The Santa Fe logo in a font
I recognize like familiar handwriting.

Out here, each creosote thinks it’s a crown.

Our train’s approach sends
sand hill cranes into the sky
where they wheel like lazy kites
as another desert sunset burns
on the horizon like a Catholic heart.

______________

In the gorge that ran down from Picacho Peak,
the cattle bones scared me
to the marrow: a cow crumpled
as if fallen from the sky. I kicked
the ribcage and it rolled onto its back,
I walked home warily
tracing the bumps
that make up my elbow.

Clouds smoldered like embers in the fading sky
behind Mom watering the fruit trees.
I let her tell me stories about distant cousins, thinking
of death all along, how it meant the earth
would rearrange my body any way it pleased.

______________

As the train rocks on the curves,
I look back to the yellow lights
of the windows behind me.

We probably move through
night like a gold wand.

______________

When I was six, a lizard
I grabbed left its tail
squirming in my pinched fingers.
With a timid guilt I told Mom, and she said,
It’ll grow back, Hon. So I punched holes
in the lid of a mason jar, placed
the tail inside and waited,
but the lizard never reappeared.

______________

After 14 hours sitting upright I’m
half crazed that these cabin seats
don’t recline. The battery in my cheap
reading light fades, along with every
word in my precious journal.

______________

Running down an arroyo I fell
and scraped open my left palm—
grey dust smeared
into the red of blood—
I felt another desert
inside me, an aching
dryness and a panic
for water from our green garden hose.

Mom, I think of telling you
a hundred things I never have
in every voice I’ve ever owned,
everything I’ve kept from you
for little or no reason,
and in my chest
an orchard is flooding.

______________

Outside the window’s cold glass, darkness
soaks the creosotes, but in my head
I’m blinking under the bright green
of your fruit trees’ shaggy leaves.

The cabin fills with warm air
and long breaths exhaled in sleep.
The wheels click louder on the curves
as we move, motionless
inside this tremendous speed.

The post Train From New Mexico appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When railroads emerged in the U.S. in the 1830s and 1840s, cargo-carrying trains were exceedingly short, handling only a few cars. By the 1850s, locomotives had become more powerful, track structures stronger, traffic increased, and individual railroads longer. Something more was needed to keep the trains on track. The engineer, fireman, and brakeman remained in the locomotive. But what about the conductor, “the captain,” who had legal authority over the train? And the one or two additional brakemen who helped to manage the primitive hand-braking system and throw switches as cars were picked up and set out? The caboose provided a shelter for the conductor and brakemen along with a heating/cooking stove, seats, and make-shift beds. It also included a desk and chair for the conductor. The caboose or caboose car was also a place to store shovels, brooms, wrenches, chains, couplers, lanterns, and other paraphernalia. It was basically a utilitarian add-on to a freight train.

A variety of cabooses appeared across the United States. Early on they were mostly modified boxcars and then custom four-wheel contraptions, many of which remained in service for decades. Later trunk carriers led the movement for eight-wheel or double-truck cabooses. A most distinctive change occurred in the 1860s, when the Chicago & North Western Railway introduced the cupola caboose, a feature that gave crew an excellent way to watch a moving train for any operational difficulties and gave it a most distinctive design. And in the early 1920s the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad became the first to adopt the bay window caboose. It easily cleared overpasses and tunnels while still providing good crew visibility of the train. The penultimate design came with the extended-vision caboose, where the cupola was pushed out on both sides. Over time, too, largely wooden construction gave way to all-metal fabrication; tens of thousands of cabooses of all styles were built.

It did not take long before the word “caboose” entered the popular American vocabulary. It’s a totally unique name. While its origins may be Dutch or French, its etymology is obscure. There is a consensus that the word dates from the 18th century and probably refers to the cookhouse on the deck of a ship. Yet not every domestic railroad called this employee carriage a caboose. The Pennsylvania Railroad used the term “cabin car,” and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad called it a “way car.” Railroaders, though, had a variety of distinctive nicknames for the caboose, including “buggy,” “chariot,” “crummy,” “shack,” and “shanty.”

While red became the common caboose color because of its widespread usage on rolling stock and station structures, a railroad might select brown, yellow, or something else. In the 20th century, it was not unheard of to see multi-colored cabooses in combinations including red and white or some other paint combination. Never the less, red stands out as the color most associated with the caboose, being long remembered even after this equipment faded away.

Since World War II, railroads have made monumental changes in their operations. The most obvious has been the diesel locomotive revolution. By the late 1950s, the iron horse had virtually disappeared. Companies also greatly increased the size of their freight equipment and added new types of rolling stock, such as the “Big John” hopper cars for grain haulage that appeared in the 1960s and specially designed flatcars for shipping containers first introduced in the 1980s. In the course of these transformations, state and federal regulatory changes and replacement technologies have spelled doom for the once ubiquitous caboose.

In the 1980s legal requirements for having a “full” freight crew of five to six employees changed rapidly. Railroads began to negotiate successfully with their operating brotherhoods for work rules that allowed them to dispatch three and then two crew members, all of whom could comfortably ride in the locomotive. Equipment, too, became more dependable and did not demand the watchful eyes of “hind-end” crew members.

A viable alternative to the caboose also appeared. This was the end-of-train device (EOT or EOTD). Placed on the rear coupler, it monitored air pressure in the brake system and reported any problems by radio signal to the locomotive cab. This portable electronic telemetry device also provided information about the slack between cars, and its blinking red light warned a following train that another one was is in front. Admittedly, this EOT’s light is somewhat less distinctive than the historic red and green caboose marker lights that evolved from kerosene to electric.

The last cabooses would be built in the 1980s; the premier manufacturer, International Car Company, ended its production in 1981. Soon railroads began to scrap, sell to rail enthusiasts, or donate to museums and communities these mostly obsolete pieces of equipment. Some carriers, however, continued to use cabooses, assigning them usually to switching or work-train chores.

The demise of the caboose no longer allows train watchers the opportunity to anticipate the last car of a passing freight train. Children (and adults, too) once took joy in waving to crew members, and these usually friendly trainmen returned the gesture. There might be a trackside shout or two of “hello” or “goodbye.” Still, cabooses can be seen in both public and private places and ridden on at some operating railroad museums.

In the 1930s, an Iowa farm wife may have explained why the now-retired cars aren’t completely obsolete:

“Whenever I see the caboose at the end of a freight train, I think what a cozy nook it is for railroaders. When I see smoke coming out of the little stove stack in cold weather, I like to imagine what it’s like inside for these men who are traveling down the track. I always wish I could be with them.”

And the caboose’s iconic status endures in popular culture. Certainly “The Little Red Caboose Behind the Train” is still sung and enjoyed by present-day school children. Yet the reference to the caboose probably needs to be clarified by the teacher just as the one-room school must be explained.

The post Whatever Happened to the Little Red Caboose? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now, San Franciscans are, on average, younger and more prosperous, and when they ride the bus they are looking at their phones, where they can track the 22 Fillmore in real time. They can also probably see a digital readout of arriving buses at a stop, or receive texts and social media updates from San Francisco’s municipal transit agency. Any traveler can also open up all sorts of other smartphone and desktop apps to navigate the system, like Google Maps, Moovit, Rover, and Routesy. These days, when you ride the bus, you ride with Big Data.

The world of apps for transit started with a great deal of promise. Evidence from Seattle suggested that merely letting riders know when the next bus would arrive could actually make people happier with their bus and more likely to take another trip. Fully integrated apps now let people plan trips that move from trains to buses and private cars or bicycles at the ends. Eventually, this data-rich universe may encourage city dwellers to give up their cars, reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and greenhouse-gas emissions. So on a recent trip back to San Francisco, I tried using some of the local apps to see how they changed my experience.

I was taking part in a big civic—and economic—experiment. Though there aren’t yet any studies showing whether apps increase transit ridership, apps themselves are much cheaper than buses and trains and tracks and drivers. When apps are used to pay for fares (as they are in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, among other cities) they shift the cost of fare machines from the transit company to the riders. These complex changes in investment, risk, and time will continue as 10 percent of the world moves into cities in the next 15 years, and as self-driving cars start to prowl the streets. Uber has raised $15 billion in venture capital to move into the space between public and private transit around the world. And in the long run, these changes could create a richer transit universe for everyone, or a poorer one accessible mainly to the rich.

Munimobile’s ‘Rate My Ride’ feature.

I first pulled out my $29 Android smartphone along the T line on Third Street. The app produced by MUNI, the local transit system, required that I give it my email and create a password. Even though I’d given up my anonymity, the app didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. So I walked towards where I thought the stop was, only to find a digital readout saying that the next trains were coming in 12 and 14 minutes. Aha! Poorly spaced trains are a problem no app can fix.

That problem is important. As nice as information is, what riders really want is service. Candace Brakewood, assistant professor of engineering at CUNY, did research across three boroughs of New York from 2011 through 2013 and found that lines giving riders accurate information on arrival times increased ridership by as much as 2 percent on an average day. “When you aggregate that across NYC it’s very significant,” she told me. But she also looked at the impact of the weather, the economy, service changes, and multiple other factors and found what really increased ridership was more frequent buses and shorter trip times. This is hardly a Moneyball-type revelation from the crunching of Big Data. “Yeah. Commonsense,” Breakwood said.

Once the T arrived it was pleasantly crowded, with a mix of ages and ethnicities, and the ride on the tracks was mostly smooth. Some older black folks in suits were still enjoying Juneteenth, singing a song from another era. A younger woman with pink hair was drinking from a can. And a guy with long arms was waving them exuberantly as he talked on the phone. As we rolled past the ballpark it occurred to me that the city had spent a lot of money establishing itself as a party town, and the crowd of us here on the train was a truer reflection of that happy civic spirit—the 22 Fellini of it all—than many of the recent expensive infrastructure investments. An Asian grandmother with two little children boarded. The train lurched, they all nearly fell over, and then started giggling. The arm-waving man shot out of his seat and offered it to them. Our civic project rolled along.

What does this all have to do with apps? SF MUNI plans to release a new app component this summer that allows passengers to comment on the etiquette of fellow riders, along with train cleanliness, trip time, crowding, and comfort. Rate My Ride encourages readers to swipe right or left—in homage to Tinder, I guess. MUNI employees will monitor these swipes and “target specific train routes and bus lines” for improvements, according to Paul Rose, spokesperson for MUNI. “It’s one way to make it easier for riders to let us know how we can improve their transportation experience and further engage our riders,” he explained.

I tried to imagine myself swiping my fellow passengers on my phone, but to me the beauty of the bus is enjoying the way everyone gets along and ignoring the ways that we don’t. The singing was nice. I had no problem with a quiet drink. The seat hog at 23rd Street was an angel by Fourth and King.

So how do people rate other passengers’ etiquette, and how should the transit agency react to them? “There’s an idea that because apps are software they’re non-discriminatory and egalitarian. And if you put them in the hands of people they’ll naturally lead to good,” said David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Arizona State University. But, King worries, it’s likely that the app will be hijacked by racist, sexist, or anti-poor opinions—just like platforms including Nextdoor.com, AirBnB, and Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, which became a raving fountain of hate-talk within hours.

What’s more, in the world of public services, some voices—particularly those perceived as white and middle class—are more powerful than others, attracting more sympathetic policing, more funding for potholes, more municipal love. MUNI’s app will be available only in English to start, even though bus announcements are often in English, Spanish, and Chinese. The agency says they expect to release the app in other languages. It could be harmful to only collect complaints from English speakers, but wouldn’t the very idea of the city itself be challenged if we all secretly complain about each other in multiple languages?

Perhaps more important, if the core issue with increasing transit ridership is train frequency and travel time, should MUNI spend its precious resources tracking and responding to passenger etiquette? Transit needs to be more rider-focused, but the meaningful difference comes when public transit is more plentiful and convenient. And citizens change that through engagement in the budgeting and planning process, not by writing bad Yelp reviews. At the moment, apps offer riders an illusion of control. In the long push-pull over transit service, though, the apps aren’t automatically a force for good.

On a trip back from the East Bay, I used Moovit to calculate my route. Taking BART and bus, the app said, would take 86 minutes, while an ad offered a button to call an Uber that would cost $21 and take 56 minutes. As it turned out, the app was wrong, and between BART and the 5 Fulton bus I got back home in 72 minutes for about $6. And of course, I got the whole Fellini too.

The post When You Ride the Bus, You Ride With Big Data appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That question is not a joke, as I learned last month while riding Germany’s popular high-speed rail. In fact, it’s a more important question than the ones Californians have been myopically asking for years about the costs, funding, and construction deadlines of the state’s controversial project.

The value of high-speed rail does not lie in the cost or speed of trains, but rather in the ability of such projects to anchor deep connections—between transportation hubs, between cultural attractions, between cities, between job sites. And German high-speed rail, while far from perfect, excels at creating fast and efficient connections.

The secret is in German stations, which serve not only as hubs for various types of transportation, but also as vital public spaces that connect a variety of institutions and provide space for people to gather, shop, and be entertained. (The Leipzig Main Station even has a pet store and a supermarket). Many stations are built as bridges—over railroad tracks, highways, or other barriers—so they literally connect different parts of cities.

If California high-speed rail can reproduce the German style and create a system that deeply binds the state together—and that’s a big if—then even a $100 billion project might be a bargain. But if high-speed rail can’t connect different modes of transportation, if it can’t create stations that are destinations in themselves, then the worst predictions of high-speed rail critics—that this is an epic waste of time and money—could well prove true.

Eric Eidlin, a community planner with the Federal Transit Administration office in San Francisco, explains the importance of connections in a must-read report for the German Marshall Fund that compares California’s plans with high-speed rail systems he’s studied around the world, particularly in France and Germany.

That’s useful because one way to understand California transportation today is that we are too French. We have split up transportation between a motley mix of competing agencies that don’t cooperate well or integrate different modes of transit. One result: France has built a high-speed rail system that runs faster than Germany’s, but isn’t as good at connections because too many stations are too far from people and attractions.

Many German cities have integrated rail station planning with the planning of their city centers, and Eidlin’s report praises Fresno for doing the same, by considering its high-speed rail station as part of a remake of Fulton Mall. By the same token, the report warns Bakersfield about putting its station outside downtown and away from its existing bus and rail station; this would be a lost opportunity for connection.

Eidlin’s report argues for a comprehensive approach to link as many things to high-speed rail as possible—both for the sake of the trains and the communities they will serve. This means making it possible to buy tickets for high-speed rail and other modes of transportation in a single reservation, as one can do in Germany. It also argues for “blending” high-speed rail tracks with other kinds of trains—an aspect of the California proposal that has been criticized for slowing trains down—so they can use the same station platforms and make transfers faster. (This would work well at L.A. Union Station and San Jose’s Diridon station, he writes).

The ideal, from the report, are center city stations where connections are “as simple, short, seamless, intuitive, and pleasant as possible.”

I got my first taste of German-style rail connections last month after landing at Frankfurt Airport. I needed to get to Cologne, which is exactly the same distance as the trip from Los Angeles to San Diego, which I often make on Amtrak.

As it turns out, the Frankfurt to Cologne section of Germany’s ICE high-speed rail service is considered a good model for what California wants to do, since it is a relatively recent construction and has some steeper gradients.

But there is no station in California quite like the one at Terminal 1 of the Frankfurt Airport. Indeed, there were so many options and signs that I got confused. I walked into a station for long-distance buses, one for regional changes, and—finally the one I wanted—a station for long-distance trains.

A one-way second-class ticket cost me 62 Euros, or $68 (more than the usual walk-up fare of $37 on Amtrak to San Diego). The ticket agent advised me it would have been much cheaper if I had booked in advance at the same time I made my airplane reservation.

My Amtrak trips to San Diego take just under three hours. The equidistant ride from Frankfurt to Cologne takes 56 minutes. The train was on time, and, on a weekday afternoon, nearly full, with people of all ages, mostly in business clothes. The train, which had originated in Munich, was also a little dirty with trash in the seatbacks—just like on Amtrak back home. And the café car was just like Amtrak—bad food at bad prices. On the good side: a woman rolled a cart through the train to sell coffee, water, and pastries, and there were more and cleaner bathrooms than you find on Amtrak.

The real difference was the speed, and—confession—I was a little spooked. The ride was smooth, but there was just enough of a rattle to produce anxiety; it was unnerving how much faster we were going than the speeding cars on the Autobahn, which was visible for most of the trip. And on turns, it felt—at least to this high-speed rail rookie—like the train was going to take off like a plane.

The train itself also psyched me out. At the end of each car were screens showing our speed. I freaked a little when we reached 300 kilometers per hour—or 180 miles per hour. (I’ll need training to handle the California version’s top speed of more than 200 mph).

The first stop was Siegburg/Bonn, a station that was the product of a political compromise, serving the two cities of its name. It was a bustling place with connections to multiple local trains and buses, as well as restaurants and a movie theater. Cologne’s station was much bigger—with the size, feel, and retail offerings of a small Los Angeles mall—and right on the Rhine. The station was located just a few steps from the Cologne Cathedral, a Gothic masterpiece from 1248. The many hotels, museums, restaurants, and office buildings of central Cologne were all within walking distance. The station pulsed with big crowds of people.

High-speed rail doesn’t require saintly public officials; Cologne is famous for its corruption and political intrigue (while I was in town, a woman was elected mayor from her hospital bed after being stabbed in the neck by an anti-refugee lunatic). But high-speed rail does require smart governance, coordination and collaboration between different agencies and cities, and a comprehensive vision for transportation hubs as public spaces.

The bad news: Governance, collaboration, and public vision are hardly strengths of today’s California, and our current debate over high-speed rail focuses too much on making things cheap and unobstrusive. This is a recipe for failure.

The good news: High-speed rail offers us a chance to develop our capacities, and create new visions for connecting our state. And if we struggle with those tasks, we can always import Germans to show us how it’s done.

The post California’s High Speed Rail Should Look Like Germany’s appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the focused message of Phillip Washington, the new CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), before a standing-room-only audience a Zócalo/Metro event at the Plaza on Olvera Street.

Washington, who came to Los Angeles three and a half months ago after years of heading Denver’s Regional Transportation District, spoke passionately about the need for Los Angeles to finish the build-out of its transportation infrastructure under Measure R—and for the country as a whole to devote far more attention and money to infrastructure.

To that end, he said Metro needed to leverage its assets and existing funding, and use more tools to complete projects faster. He mentioned in particular public-private partnerships, sometimes called P3s, in which private companies invest money upfront, assume the risks of the project, and are paid back over time. He noted that this approach could accelerate projects in L.A., and had been crucial to a rail project to connect Denver’s downtown and airport.

Washington also said he was starting up an Office of Extraordinary Innovation at Metro that would be “tasked with taking on and attacking the toughest transportation challenges in the region and implementing solutions.” He suggested the office could look at everything from automated or sensor-controlled cars to pods that could move individuals.

In response to a question from the evening’s moderator, NBC 4 reporter and News Conference host Conan Nolan (who declared himself a proud rider of public transit), Washington mentioned the half-century-long battle over what to do about the final extension of the 710 Freeway as one thorny challenge that could benefit from innovative thinking.

Innovation and flexibility in financing are more than goals—they are necessities, he argued, given the lack of financial commitment to infrastructure in the U.S. “We have to be innovative in the transportation industry now, because we’re not getting all the money we need,” he said.

Washington added that while Los Angeles County taxpayers had shown their commitment to infrastructure by voting for Measure R’s taxes and projects in 2008 (he pointed to Measure R when asked why he’d taken the job), Congress has repeatedly failed to pass legislation to maintain and rebuild the country’s aging roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. “Our infrastructure forefathers are turning over in our graves right now,” he said. “Because we have not taken care of the assets they have left us.”

He said that a commitment to infrastructure had to go beyond transportation to community building. He said that Metro had begun a pilot to look at property it owns within one-and-a-half miles of train stations or bus lines, with the goal of connecting those spaces to those communities. He also expressed concern about changes in cities that are pushing poorer people out of city centers, which can add to transportation costs as service must be built further and further out.

Pressed by Nolan on whether Metro fares should rise, Washington said, “our fares are some of the cheapest in this country” and quickly added that Metro also has “a very high percentage of low-income riders—I think it’s about 75 percent.”

Washington touched on dozens of topics in responses to Nolan and audience questions. Among other things, he indicated he supports the state’s high-speed rail project.

Asked by Nolan which of the five Metro rail projects currently under construction was a “game changer,” he mentioned the Regional Connector because it can connect existing lines and “open up economic development”; he suggested he was looking for ways to accelerate its scheduled completion.

In response to two audience members who complained about how security and sheriff’s deputies treat riders on the Blue Line, Washington said he had hired a new security chief at Metro and asked him to assess security throughout the entire system. He described security as one of several ways— including cleaner buses and rail cars, on-time buses, and technology—of “enhancing the customer experience” and convincing more people to use Metro.

In response to an audience question about the balance of bus and rail projects in a successor measure to Measure R on the 2016 ballot, he said Metro had asked local governments to prioritize projects by September 1. He said Metro has 2,300 projects it’s currently evaluating, worth a total of $250 billion.

Washington also praised the city of Los Angeles’ new Mobility Plan because it calls for more “balance” between different modes of transportation. Washington said that “we’re not going to get everybody out of their cars” but “we can hope for less driving.”

“This is an auto-centric country,” he added. “When you go to some places here in America, it’s like the Wild West. You pulled up on your horse, strapped your horse to the pole.” But in the long term, we should “wean ourselves” off the automobile.

When Nolan asked how he should be evaluated, Washington said he should be judged on whether Metro is completing projects on time and on budget, on the safety of the Metro system, and whether he is developing the workforce so there are more people properly trained and qualified to build infrastructure for the country’s needs.

Said Washington, “Years from now, I hope that our grandchildren will say of us, ‘That generation left us some great infrastructure that we need to take care of.’”

The post Where the Buses are Clean and Safe and the Trains are On-Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some Angelenos walk or bike to work, but most of us are getting where we need to go via bus, train, or car. Every day, 2,000 Metro buses crisscross L.A.’s streets, trains traverse 87 miles of light rail and subway tracks, and—well, then there’s the 405 at rush hour.

On the heels of new city plans to add bus and bike lanes, it’s a good time to take stock of the big picture in this big city. What should L.A. look like for pedestrians, bikers, drivers, and transit commuters? And what do we need to be thinking about as we look ahead? In advance of the Zócalo/Metro event “What is the Future of L.A.’s Transit?” we asked a variety of transit experts: What is missing from the current vision of L.A. transit future?

The post Trains Are Great! But What L.A. Needs Are Bus Lanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.