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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE

April 1999: Focus on High-Speed Rail

Q & A with Mehdi Morshed, Executive Director of the California High-Speed Rail Authority

Mehdi Morshed

TA: One of the first questions any resident of the Bay Area would probably ask about high-speed rail in California is what its path would be within our region. A number of different gateways have been proposed -- what are the pros and cons of each?

Morshed: Each one has its own merits; it's a question of cost and it's a question of ridership. Also, it becomes a question of which part of the area is served directly. For example, if you come through the Altamont Pass, then people from other parts of the area can't get on the train, and if you come through the Pacheco Pass, then other area travelers won't have that kind of service available to them.

TA: Who will ultimately decide the specific alignment for California's high-speed rail and when will the decision be made?

Morshed: That decision will be made by the California High-Speed Rail Authority. However, the Authority's desire is to work as closely as we can with MTC in terms of considering MTC's and the region's plans for transportation investments in the future, and how well they coordinate with the intercity system, and make sure that the combined system functions in as complementary a fashion as possible.

The decision on the alignment will probably be made in June or July. Before the decision is made, however, the Authority is going to have a few things to consider: First and foremost, is, obviously, that the system has to be a coordinated one that serves the customers the best. The high-speed rail line has to go where the riders are, and where it's affordable and environmentally sound.

TA: Is the distance between Los Angeles and the Bay Area an ideal distance for high-speed rail?

Morshed: I don't know if there is an ideal distance, but the distance between L.A. and the Bay Area is the outer limit or the point where the high-speed train and a plane can reasonably compete with each other. The longer the distance you have, the harder it is for a train to compete with an airplane -- an airplane is about twice as fast as high-speed rail, but the airplane also has terminal time, wait time, takeoff time, delay time, and so on, so that when you add them all up, compared with the high-speed train, they come pretty close. When you go over longer distances, those wait times -- divided over a longer distance -- become more negligible, and therefore, it's not that competitive. Put it this way -- the distance is comparable to current systems in France, Germany and Japan.

TA: Where will the stations be built and how many of them would there between Los Angeles and the Bay Area?

Morshed: The stations are going to be built where, first of all, there is room for them to be built, and secondly, where the passengers are most likely to want them to be.

There will probably be between 15 and 20 stations, but the exact number hasn't been determined yet. There will be a staggered kind of schedule and stops, where all the stations would get service, but not every station will have every train stopping.

TA: Has the decision been made on which technology will be used, magnetic levitation (maglev) or steel wheel on steel rail, and if not, when will the decision be made?

Morshed: We're going to keep the technology question open as long as we can, primarily because maglev has never been in revenue service, so selecting it as the technology involves a much higher level of risk than the steel wheel. The longer we wait on the technology -- in case somebody starts implementing it -- the more the level of risk is reduced. And obviously that makes it easier to make a decision. But right now, if we were to make a decision on maglev, we don't have any assurance that it would really work.

TA: Will the California high-speed rail line use all new tracks or upgrade old ones, the way they are in the Northeast corridor?

Morshed: All the track for the high-speed train will be brand new, and it will be separated from the rest of the track. Amtrak's Acela, on the East Coast, has a different system. Actually, their system has a top speed of, I think, 150 miles per hour -- we're planning a system that travels at more than 200 miles per hour. And in the Northeast the corridor is already built up so much that there were no opportunities for having separate tracks.

When you share tracks, it slows you down, and also exposes you to a higher degree of safety risks. The exclusive track, such as the one used by Japan's bullet trains and France's TGV system, has a tremendous safety record. The Japanese system has been operational over 30 years and the French one since 1982, and both of them have had a perfect safety record -- they haven't had a single fatal accident in their operations. You can't say that with a system that has shared tracks.

TA: How much do you expect California's high-speed rail project to cost, and has the decision been made on whether the financing will be via a statewide sales tax or a gas tax?

Morshed: Our estimate is the cost will be 20-plus billion dollars, but we don't know exactly because we're still going through the process of deciding which route and so forth. And each of them has a cost implication. The Authority at its March meeting decided that they will not pursue a gas tax, that their financing -- if you need to have a tax -- would utilize a sales tax.

TA: Will the tax measure be on the ballot in November 2000 for sure or could that schedule change?

Morshed: November 2000 is the deadline by which there either has to be a form of financing established, or the Authority is out of business. We're operating on that timetable, but again, the decision is really up to the Legislature and the governor.

Our charge is to make a recommendation as to what the tax should be; the question of how and when, and how it coordinates with other transportation ballot measures are beyond the scope of our responsibility.

TA: Are you exploring any public-private partnerships to fund high-speed rail?

Morshed: We are searching for any new source of funding we can find, including private sources, with the objective of reducing the public dollars to an absolute minimum. We know that the system will generate some surplus revenues and the question is going to be how best to utilize those surplus revenues.

TA: Why haven't any of the proposed high-speed rail systems elsewhere in the U.S. been built?

Morshed: I don't want to speculate on why other projects didn't succeed, but I can tell you one of the elements that we noticed is that in many of the high-speed rail projects (for example in Texas and a similar start in California), the people making the proposals would come in and say, "Give us the authority, and we can build a high-speed train at no cost to the taxpayers: it can be totally privately financed and the revenues will more than pay the cost." When the reality hits, they find out that that's not possible. We have already acknowledged that, saying we just don't see any way that in California -- and perhaps in the rest of the U.S. -- you can build a high-speed train system exclusively with private funds. The economics of it doesn't work, and the experience throughout the country says that that is the case. So we've taken the more realistic approach of saying that, if you really want high-speed rail, you're going to have to put public funds into it -- a substantial amount of public funds.

TA: How do you answer those who say high-speed rail will encourage sprawl?

Morshed: The same way that I would answer the same question about highways -- we don't know what encourages sprawl and what doesn't. However, we do know that we're planning a high-speed train based on a population projection that suggests that there will be 45 million to 50 million people in California in 20 years. A large portion of them will be located in the Central Valley for the simple reason that that's where the land is and that's where the housing is going to be.

Now, those assumptions are based on the fact that, with or without high-speed rail, that's where they're going to go. If you don't build it, will the state's population not reach 45 million or 50 million people? No one is suggesting that. And if you build it, will there be more? No one is suggesting that either. My own personal view is that the location of housing is more dependent on the housing and the land-use policies of individual cities and counties, and far less dependent on what transportation you have. My experience is that transportation has always chased housing and land use: People build housing, then they find out there's a problem, then transportation plans are made to fix it.

TA: Is noise an issue with high-speed rail, and if so, will some portion of the rail line have to be undergrounded?

Morshed: Trains do generate some noise and you have to address that: you have to be a good neighbor. We're confident we can mitigate that. You're going to have to do the same thing as airports do, although trains are not nearly as noisy as airplanes. Or highways, for that matter.

There will be some undergrounding, but we don't know exactly what part of it -- that decision will be made during the environmental process, when you have to actually select the location of the line and whether you go under ground or above ground and so forth.

TA: What impact will high-speed rail have on the commuter airlines?

Morshed: Our estimates show that in 2020 high-speed rail would have about 50 percent of the high-speed travel market between the Bay Area and L.A., but the 50 percent that will remain for air service would require more airplanes than are currently available for that corridor, because the high-speed travel demand will more than double. So there won't be any fewer Southwest or United or other planes flying between L.A. and San Francisco -- but if you didn't build the high-speed trains, there would be more than twice that many and that's the impact. And whether or not your airport and your airspace and your ground system will be able to accommodate the more than doubling of that air travel is a question.

There was an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about a year ago, written by the San Francisco International Airport's general manager, that said that SFO would welcome high-speed rail, because the runways and the facilities are going to be so scarce that they would rather dedicate those to the longer flights and let high-speed rail (rather than commuter planes) bring the passengers to them. The general manager of LAX told me that 40 percent of the operations at LAX are from flights for the commuter airlines that are coming from Orange County, San Diego, Ventura, Bakersfield and places like that, and that they'd much rather not have those airplanes at their airport.

-- Réka Goode

 

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