(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 490: Electrify the Rails

This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Adriana Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail. We chat about freight and warehousing growth in California’s Inland Empire, the benefits of train electrification and a new California CEQA exemption push for overhead wires, and why hydrogen trains are getting more attention.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of this episode:

Jeff Wood: Adriana Rizzo, welcome to the talking headways podcast.

Adriana Rizzo: Great. Thanks so much for having me on.

Jeff Wood: Well, thanks for being here before we get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah. So my day job, I’m a PhD student in earth science. Study life and evolution and how they all intersects with climate.

But I live in Riverside, California, which is in the region of the England empire, it’s, you know, sort of working class suburb of Los Angeles, which consistently has the worst air quality in the country, violating EPA standards for ozone for, I think, over half the year. And it’s basically a transit desert.

We don’t have very high quality public transportation. And, you know, I grew up in. San Francisco, I’ve lived in [00:02:00] Chicago, live in places with much better public transit. And so it’s sort of, you know, the connection between all those things has always bothered me and seemed really obvious. And, you know, as somebody who’s kind of engaged with local politics, you know, where the impacts of the logistics industry of warehouses on communities is really at the forefront, and seeing all of these things was connected.

But I felt like there was a kind of missing piece. To a lot of this advocacy in terms of interesting how transit and free and all of these things all fit together. And so that’s kind of what motivated me together with like a coalition of sort of housing transit. Environmental activists that I already knew from other things, we all sort of got together to start Californians for electric rail, which is a advocacy organization, basically advocating for converting all of the rail lines in the state to using overhead electric wires as a power source.

Jeff Wood: Were you interested in this stuff when you were younger? Like when you’re a little kid? Not really necessarily, you’re not gonna be obviously reading laws or anything like [00:03:00] that, but like little things like, Hey, I like to look that train or something like that.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, I’ve always been like a transit nerd.

Like my parents said that I, you know, I, when I was like three or four years old, I had all the bus lines and the city memorized and could always tell you how to get. To whatever place based on what bus you would have to take to get there. I also remember, um, I had a friend in the suburbs and we used to ride Caltrain down there and he used to love taking Caltrain, you know, special treat as a kid.

So yeah, I’ve always been kind of a train buff, I guess, before getting really serious with this policy.

Jeff Wood: We’ll get to Caltrain in a second, but let’s chat a little bit about the Inland Empire though. I kind of want to hear more about that area because I think there’s a lot of folks outside of California and perhaps outside of LA who maybe never heard of it.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, so, I mean, we’re one of the most rapidly growing regions in California, actually, particularly since the the pandemic when, you know, a lot of people were leaving the city, wanted a bigger house or what have you. Yeah, I think we’re sort of at the forefront of two big national trends. One, which is sort of [00:04:00] the suburbanization of poverty due to a lot of different factors, you know, lack of growth in urban centers has priced a lot of people out, displaced people from Los Angeles and Orange County, they’ve moved to inland areas.

where housing’s traditionally been more affordable. And then we’ve also seen kind of the suburbanization of industry as well. You know, in the last decade, really, with the growth of online shopping and international trade as with, you know, a lot of imports from China, the way that industry has gone is goods are increasingly coming at the Port of Long Beach and they travel, you know, 60 miles inlands to where there’s you know, more cheap land to these massive warehouses where that stuff is then sorted and processed to get shipped out to fulfill everybody’s Amazon orders and delivered to people’s homes.

Both of those trends have seen a lot of growth. If you’re listening nationally, I think, you know, the kind of collar counties in Chicago are very similar, similar type place, you know, sort of working class parts of Long Island, [00:05:00] Queens, I think in New York City, kind of a similar deal in terms of the way these patterns are going.

It’s a national trend, but I think In Southern California, because we’re near the largest port in the country and also the severity of the housing crisis in Los Angeles have really made these trends really clear. And development plans are also directly responsible for the bad air quality. You know, we have lots and lots of heavy trucks on the highways, sometimes two, three lanes that are like solid, just trucks on a bad day, trucks produce.

A lot more ozone and other pollutants per mile than than the cars, but then also, you know, it’s a very car dependent area, you know, we’ve seen a lot of population growth in the past decades and the transit infrastructure has really not grown to the same degree. I think, you know, the Riverside, Ontario, San Bernardino metropolitan area is.

Actually, larger than San Francisco, we have a combined area of over a million people. We have like, I think the lowest transit mode share of any major city. Like the VATs, like [00:06:00] over, I want to say it’s like 97 percent of people drive alone to work or something like that. And, you know, this combination of this, all of these, this kind of polluting GMT inducing industry and, you know, very car dependent development pattern is really bad news for the air quality.

And of course we also get, you know, air pollution that’s blown in from the coastal areas as well because of the geography. You’re kind of in this like triangle shaped basin and, you know, all of the smog generated by people driving on the coast, kind of, we get these ocean breezes that push all the smog eastward where it gets concentrated in these areas.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I have family members in Bakersfield and I think, you know, some of that happens there too, where stuff gets pushed into the valley. And there’s a lot of agricultural stuff that gets kicked up as well there. But the warehousing and stuff in the Inland Empire has been really growing like weeds. It’s just been popping up and there’s been so many news items and articles about it that have been really interesting to see how like things are changing and how the farmland is turning into warehouses and that type of thing, which is really fascinating.

And from the perspective of the stuff that we’re talking about in this [00:07:00] podcast, I mean, there’s a connection there because of the, Needs of shipping all the stuff from Long Beach or the port of LA to those warehouses inland. And they could go up to Bakersfield or they could go up to the Inland Empire.

And so there’s a need for, you know, electrification of transportation from that too. And they’ve, they’ve tried all kinds of different things like overhead wire trucks. They’ve had some tests and things like that, but it’s really interesting to connect those two dots.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, and I think, you know, the passenger side and the freight side are very much linked because, well, I’m sure we’ll get into this more, but because of the outsized power that freight railroads have over passenger rail in this country, you can’t really separate the two.

But in terms of what you’re talking about for zero emissions freight, there’s been a lot of different attempts to implement solutions. California recently passed The advanced clean fleet rule. And I think the EPA recently came out with its own version. They basically sort of mandates this gradual transmission to zero emission trucks by 2048, I believe.

I don’t really want to get into details, but there’s a lot of different types of trucks. And basically right now they’re [00:08:00] mostly talking about battery trucks or hydrogen trucks. But these are both pretty new technologies, right? There’s some prototype battery trucks out there, prototype hydrogen fuel cell trucks, but you know, many people have concerns about the range of all these things.

Another problem also is that, you know, switching to battery trucks doesn’t necessarily take away all of the impacts of trucking. In some cases it could be worse. Like the air quality is a huge problem, but there’s also, you know, Millions of dollars of public health damages every year from people who get killed by trucks, killed in, you know, crashes, you know, damage on roads, the trucks are really heavy and really wear down the roads.

And that’s a problem here as well. A lot of our roads, particularly in industrial areas are in really bad condition because there’s got this heavy trucks and, you know, battery trucks. are much heavier, that problem is going to get worse, not better. Uh, it also doesn’t solve like traffic congestion, right?

You know, again, just the problem of having all these trucks on the road. So we’ve got this mandate for [00:09:00] zero emission trucks, but I think it remains to be seen, you know, is this going to solve the problem? Is this going to be effective? However, there is a tried and true zero emissions freight solution that’s been around for at least a hundred years.

And I’m talking about electric trains. You can power a train with overhead wires. It turns out it’s a lot more efficient to do so. These trains also have, you know, a lot more power, particularly for steep grades and curves. So these have been used in the United States for over a hundred years. It used to be much more widespread.

The Milwaukee railroad, which was a now extinct freight carrier in the Pacific Northwest, used these extensively and sort of like remote going over like Mountain passes in Montana because they just have more powerful traction and, you know, they’ve also been used in some sort of more niche cases in the U.

S. for. Like, a lot of mining trains, like, there’s a desert railways is a coal train that’s still operating remote part of Utah using overhead wires. Many other countries rely entirely on overhead [00:10:00] wires, like Switzerland has, you know, going over these steep mountains has 100 percent electric network. They actually have these trains where they can like drive a truck onto a freight car and then the trucks get carried out of the train and then they, you know, can take the trucks off once they’ve unloaded at the end.

It’s kind of a cool solution for mixed distances. India has a goal of 100 percent electric rail by the end of the year. They’ve currently electrified 94 percent of their network, which is over 36, 000 miles. So, you know, there are a lot, this is a very well developed, very effective alternative for both trucks and for our existing diesel trains, which are also quite polluting.

The Class 1 railroads, a lot of them are still running Tier 0, Tier 1 trains. These are different EPA designations for how polluting the engines are that are decades old. And that’s still a huge percentage of the freight fleet as well. So these diesel freight trains are also contributing to the air quality as well.[00:11:00]

Jeff Wood: Yeah, the India point is really interesting. I mean, they did like 45 percent of the network in just five years. And so it’s not like it’s something that can’t be done. And they have a lot of railway lines, right? The British empire built a lot of railways when they were there and they’re connected a lot of places and there’s a lot of trackage.

And so, you know, 45 percent is not a small number in that context. Right. And so, you know, like you said, they’re at 94 percent electrification. They’ll get to a hundred percent soon. And this is compared to like the U S which has 1%, right? 1 percent of the trackage. Yeah. And even in the EU, they’re, they’re behind India.

They’re that 56%. Obviously there’s probably a lot of Eastern European countries and others who haven’t gone that direction yet, but they’ll likely get there. So I think that’s interesting from that international perspective, but also the history, like you said, the Milwaukee road, I remember being at the old station, which is now a hotel in Minneapolis.

Yeah. And they have this whole exhibit for the Milwaukee road, I guess is where it kicked off from. And so it was really fascinating to see like, Oh, they, you know, they only had to use two engines versus six to get over the hills and the numbers of packages they could deliver and, you know, freight they could haul and that type of stuff.

And so there, there is examples in the [00:12:00] United States, but you mentioned the freight railroads. Why, why are the freight railroads so against this proposal or idea to electrify?

Adriana Rizzo: You know, they’ll throw out these supposed technical reasons why they can’t do it. Sort of scare Monger about putting double stack intermodal containers under wires, even though they run that in India, they do it in the East Coast.

But I think the real reason is just that these companies have kind of this Wall Street short termist mindset. You know, I think there could be a lot of benefits from a business perspective for freight carriers where they electrify like you were talking about, you know, you can use fewer engines.

Maintenance costs are also lower on electric engines compared to diesel engines, because there’s fewer moving parts, you know, they could potentially even move trains faster, haul more goods that way, but I think that a lot of these companies have this very short term Wall Street mindset where they would rather, you know, Whatever profits they have, they’d rather pay those out to shareholders and to reinvest it in the business.

And they really, I think [00:13:00] the overhead capital costs for all of these electrifying the entire rail network is really what, what scares them. But I think that can be overcome. Like I think. Realistically, they’re probably not going to have to pay for all of it themselves. There’s already existing, you know, federal money for zero emissions locomotives.

And I think if we were able to subsidize some of the cost of putting up wires, then I think that’s both politically feasible and probably necessary. Because there really is a lot of, you know, public health benefits from this and benefits for passenger rail as well, were they to do this. So I think, I think those kinds of objections about the cost can be overcome, but I think it’s really this like kind of Wall Street mindset of not, of wanting to invest as little as possible, which I’ve seen in other areas as well.

After, you know, some high profile train derailments, there’ve been a lot of discussion about. safety and are the railroads the best thing enough? I think we see across the board, they’re just sort of, it’s a capital intensive industry and they’re going to do the minimum that they can. [00:14:00]

Jeff Wood: How much does it cost to do like a mile of electrification on a, on like a single track freight line?

Adriana Rizzo: Single track? Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a complicated question. Depends who you ask. I don’t have as much numbers on how it would be for private freight. I do know estimates for public, you know, if we were able to implement various cost saving reforms, which maybe we can get into in a bit. Were we able to implement that, you know, based on studies from Denmark and some European countries that have done recent studies, we could get down to, I think about two to 4 million per mile.

I think, you know, given that these are private companies, you know, who can have in some ways, fewer restrictions, fewer obligations than public entities, I think they could easily do that, meet those costs, or maybe even a little less.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I feel like there would be some sort of, you know, purchasing power that, you know, if you’re going to build a ton of these lines, you can get some economies of scale and try to, you know, get it even down to 1 million a mile.

Maybe.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, that’s exactly it.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. And I know it sounds like a lot of money, but, you know, from an investment standpoint over a long term, it [00:15:00] might not actually be that much.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah.

Jeff Wood: So let’s hop over kind of like what’s happening in California. You know, at the state you have two different kind of discussions going on.

You have the CEQA exemption and the other is this push for hydrogen trains. I’m curious what that CEQA exemption means and what that means for maybe like electrifying commuter railroads.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, so California Electric Rail, together with Streets for All and RailPack, two of our partner organizations, are sponsoring a bill this year, AB2503, which is working its way through the state legislature that would provide a sort of limited, targeted exemption from, for environmental reveal for overhead wires and, you know, infrastructure associated with electrification and increasing passenger service.

So this would be basically saying that if you are a public agency who wants to electrify your passenger rail, and if you’re trying to do this on railroad tracks that exist already, or a highway, a highway also works. Basically, if you have existing right of way, if you do, you know, a little bit of public outreach, don’t totally [00:16:00] blindside the community, you do not have to go through the whole CEQA process.

And this was kind of developed in response to some, some issues that happened with Caltrain. So, first of all, for those not familiar with CEQA, that’s the California Environmental Protection Agency. Quality Act mandates that more or less whenever you build something, the scope of the law has really expanded a lot since it was initially passed.

You need to write a report analyzing the potential environmental impacts of it and recommend alternatives. But CEQA doesn’t actually stop bad projects from going through. What it does is it basically provides community groups. People in the area, anybody to sue if they think the report was not done well enough.

So we’ve seen some issues where the environmental review process itself doesn’t actually stop projects going through, but it does open things up to lawsuits. And so that happened with Caltrain about 10 years ago. So Caltrain, which is the commuter rail goes from San Francisco to San Jose, or I guess I should say regional rail.

They have been undergoing [00:17:00] electrification for the last about 10 years. They actually just finished all of the infrastructure for it this week, which is a really exciting milestone. They’re set to open up this fall, start running service on it. And this was, you know, this is a long term plan they had. It does a lot to improve passenger service, but it was also being done to facilitate California high speed rail, which runs on overhead wires and is going to.

You know, eventually run from San Jose to San Francisco on Caltrain right of way. So this is a really great project for a lot of reasons. So we’ve got the new schedules available now, and they’re going to have 15 minute service, and they’re going to have 15 minute peak service, 30 minute weekend service that cuts the travel time from San Jose to San Francisco by 25%.

It shaves 25 minutes off it. It’s now going to be a local trip, not an express trip. It’s basically going to be time competitive with driving. So there’s the environmental benefits of this are huge. It has the potential to not only are you getting rid of the emissions from the diesel locomotives that used to run on Caltrain, [00:18:00] you also have this potential for mode shift, where you’re moving travel from cars onto the train, because it’s now more convenient to take the train.

And these, you know, these improvements are made possible by electrification because electric motors can accelerate faster, so you have less time going in and out of stops. There also, this hasn’t happened yet, but with some track upgrades that will eventually happen, trains also will be able to go faster too.

And so all of those benefits have this really strong potential for mode shift and reducing emissions from cars that way. So this is a project that was like obviously beneficial for the environment, right? But despite that, the city of Atherton, as well as city of San Mateo, filed a CEQA lawsuit on, I think, pretty bogus grounds that ended up delaying the project for about three years.

What were they suing over? What were their actual objections? So one of the objections from San Mateo is they wanted Caltrain to pay for grade separations and do all of that for the city. In general, grade [00:19:00] separations, you know, that’s like basically putting a tunnel or bridge or something so that the traffic doesn’t have to stop when the train goes by.

Cities are responsible for this, not transit agencies. Generally, they can do this whenever they want, but they were just kind of trying to extort these concessions from Caltrain. I think it’s Complaints were about the visual impact of having to look at wires and the removal of like a small number of trees along the side of the rail line.

You know, Atherton is extremely affluent community. I think the average income is like 200, 000 or something like that. You know, it’s a very wealthy enclave who are concerned about having to look at wires. And so they filed this lawsuit, which CEQA empowers them to do. As you can imagine, these, the grounds they’re filing on this are pretty dubious, and so the case was thrown out, but all of the uncertainty over the lawsuit basically emboldened Republicans in Congress to try to withhold, withhold the federal funding for the project.

This pushed the project into the Trump [00:20:00] administration. Which is now emboldened to withhold these funds. This is a massive lobbying campaign to, you know, get the Republican secretary of transportation to release these funds and to allow construction to begin. So led to a sort of cascade of delays that pushed the timeline back three years, which increased with inflation and all of that increased the balloon, the project costs, so, you know, that’s three extra years of more cars on the road, slower train service, and also, you know, millions of extra dollars for taxpayers.

because of this lawsuit. So the idea behind this legislation would be to remove that lawsuit risk for other projects and make it faster and cheaper for public agencies to move forward with electrification.

Jeff Wood: So who would be targeted to then use this legislation? I mean, now it’s opened up, you know, it can build electric.

Trains on railroads, rights of way that exist, highways, streets, et cetera. I’m curious, like who would be a target for the first implementation of this or the first use of this?

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah. So our top target would be Metro Lake, which is the [00:21:00] regional rail agency in Southern California. It’s the main transit connection between the Inland Empire and Los Angeles.

In Orange County, Southern California mega region has this sort of massive commute shed. Where I live in the Inland Empire, there’s a lot of people who are like teachers, or construction workers, or cops, or whatever, who, in LA, who live out here and have like a 60 mile car commute. And, you know, having better transit options would be really helpful.

We’re helpful for that from an air quality perspective, quality of life perspective, but Metrolink right now is really slow. It doesn’t have as frequent service as we would like. It’s not a great option for many people. And the Metrolink San Bernardino line, which goes from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, is entirely owned by public agencies.

It’s existing right of way. Would they wish to electrify it? They could use this exemption and cut back on a lot of the lawsuit risk paperwork. Similarly, the Antelope Valley line, which goes from LA to Palmdale via Burbank and Santa [00:22:00] Clarita. It’s also another target. So that is also publicly owned. Both of these are very high frequency lines, so the fiscal case for doing this and increasing the frequency is very high.

San Bernardino line is Metrolink’s highest ridership line, and it together with the Antelope Valley line have like kind of the best, most frequent service in the whole Metrolink system. So both of these we think would definitely be able to use this exemption and sort of top targets for it.

Jeff Wood: How much would this speed up the travel times too?

I’m curious about that because like you said, Caltrain is looking to, you know, increase the travel times. 25%. Is it 25 minutes or 25%? It’s

Adriana Rizzo: both. It was formerly a hundred minutes. Now it’ll be 75.

Jeff Wood: Okay. Gotcha. So basically an hour, 40 minutes and it’s cut down 25 minutes. There’s a fair amount of time. So I’m wondering if like the Antelope Valley line, the San Bernardino line, like those are pretty distant places from LA and the destinations that people would want to go.

So there’s probably some benefits to that travel time decreasing.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, definitely. So, the San Bernardino Lion is I think it’s about five miles longer than [00:23:00] Caltrain, but you know, it’s pretty comparable and it has fewer stops than Caltrain does even on a, you know, full service, all stops trip. But nevertheless, I think the San Bernardino line is about an hour and 40 minutes, hour and 50 minutes end to end.

So it’s substantially slower than Caltrain on the new schedules, despite having fewer stops. So I think if we, we could probably see similar improvements on that, which would be. Put it in, you know, ballpark, same time as Caltrans. If we had like a 75, 80 minute trip for that, you know, hour and 20 minutes, now we’re competitive with driving, right?

So that would be huge. The Antelope Valley line is a bit more complicated on the speeds because it has a lot of curves. I would need to look into exactly what are the capabilities on those in more detail, but you know, San Bernardino line is a straight shot, pretty comparable to Caltrans. I think we could see similar improvements there.

Jeff Wood: It would probably also benefit the connection between Sacramento and the bay area for one, you know, the smart line that goes up north to Santa Rosa. Those are definitely [00:24:00] benefit from electrification as well, especially if you build for the Sacramento line, especially if you build the second transbay tube and allow it to, you know, have access to the high speed rail or, or the Caltrain extension.

So that would be a possible use of that as well.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. So, Capital Carder, which runs from San Jose to Sacramento, actually stops right next to the electric trains and Giridon Station. It’s another really promising target for this. That’s a bit longer segment, but Yeah, and as you’re alluding to, there’s this link 21 process that’s trying to plan for transit improvements for the Northern California mega region, who are currently studying options for a second transfer to, and the 2 options they’re considering are basically Bart cage, like, putting more Bart lines in the tunnel.

And a standard gauge rail, which would be something like Caltrain. So if we’re going to go with the standard gauge rail option, you could have Caltrain continuing from San Francisco up into the East Bay, where it’s then going to be connecting up with [00:25:00] Capitol Corridor. Right? So, it really makes sense to have all of these lines, which are already connected using the same type of infrastructure, the same tracks, the same infrastructure.

Cabo Carter is going to be a little bit more challenging because most of the tracks are owned by Union Pacific, which of all the Class one railroads is the most hostile, the passenger rail increases, but I mean, I think it’s a fight worth doing. I think we need more leadership from our leftists to tell them to, uh, you know, eat rocks or kick rocks or whatever.

Jeff Wood: Kick rocks. Yeah. I mean, you know, we discussed a little bit of this earlier, but I think the BNSF and UP are, you know, those are two class one railroads that tend to have a hard time letting passenger rail on their tracks. Is there a specific reason why they’re so hostile?

Adriana Rizzo: Uh, so it depends. I mean, so I think BNSF is generally much less hostile than Union Pacific is.

So actually, one thing that’s really exciting, which just is that, so California high speed rail, there’s plans for that, you know, a lot of the planning, environmental work [00:26:00] in, for the Southern California portion is, is still ongoing. Sort of actively happening right now. And so for the, uh, between Burbank and Anaheim, the California high speed rail is going to be sharing tracks with Metrolinx, which is another reason why we really want to electrify Metrolinx, we could make that process happen so much faster and, you know, the transit agencies are not going to have to pay for the environmental review for that because it’s already being done.

But, um, anyway, a lot between LA and Anaheim, those tracks are owned by BNSF. So BNSF has agreed in the planning documents that I’m seeing coming out, they have agreed to allow overhead wires on the right of way that they own, which is, you know, kind of the first time they’ve done that in California. And this is a really exciting precedent for future transit projects on their right of way.

Why are they so hostile to passengers? I think it’s just, it’s just competition for space, right? They want to run as many freight trains as possible. They don’t want to have to give up time slots to passengers because it’s competition, basically. And that’s been a real [00:27:00] plaguing rail in the United States since the 60s.

You know, when Amtrak was created and basically split off passenger and freight rail, basically the freight rail gets the most profitable part and they have no incentive to do anything for passenger rail since it’s, they’re now their competitors. So that’s one of the underlying structural reasons why, like, Amtrak service sucks in a lot of places, you know, why we don’t have better inner city rail, just as a whole.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We had Ken Prendergast on a couple of weeks ago to talk about that and what’s going on in Ohio with inner city rail and the, the kind of the competition between Amtrak and Brightline that’s going on up there. And the interesting part of that is that, you know, Amtrak basically pays for the impact of the individual train on that individual track versus like market rates, which would be.

Much higher if they paid market rates, I’m sure up or whoever else would love to host them, but they’re not going to do that. So that’s one of the things that’s the issue. I also saw recently some pushback from the railroads complaining about carb to EPA, which carb is requiring the [00:28:00] diesel locomotive phase out.

And so there’s a lot of kind of, uh, saber rattling around that as well.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah. So California is, you know, last year passed this. Regulation of the in use locomotive rule, which basically mandates that all new locomotives, newly purchased locomotives operating in the state by 2045, be operated in zero emissions mode and also has this timeline where you basically can’t run engines that are older than 20 years.

Which basically is this mandated phase out of diesel locomotives by 2045 or so. So that’s kind of the basic aspect of the legislation. A lot of environmental groups have been champing on it. A lot of energy on zero emissions rail right now in the environmental world. But yeah, the class ones have been lobbying really hard against it.

They don’t want to invest in new technology. They want to keep running the same. Ancient diesel trains until they fall apart, basically. So they’ve, you [00:29:00] know, been lobbying against this very heavily. They’ve also filed a lawsuit. The American Association of Railroads did challenging the California’s legal authority to do this, basically saying it’s violating the commerce clause because.

You know, rail lines, cross state lines. So currently the EPA is considering granting California a waiver that would allow them to continue to make this rule. And I believe they’re also in the early stages of considering their own ruling, which would presumably be somewhat laxer. That’s the way Usually how things go, but yeah, I think this, this role has been kind of divisive sort of in the rail community because I think it’s like, it is essential.

We’re going to need some sort of regulatory action to force the class 1 railroads to electrify since they seem very reluctant to do so on their own. At the same time, this rule does not actually mandate electrification. It just mandates zero emissions, which could also include battery trains, could also include hydrogen trains, which really are not [00:30:00] a serious technology.

And a lot of us are concerned that this is going to increase the push for hydrogen trains in California and also just lead to failed implementation of this rule. You know, the class one railroads, when they talk about this, they like to pretend that catenary doesn’t exist, that they don’t even mention it or to say it’s impossible because I think they know that it’s the only viable option for freight, you know, all of the battery and hydrogen trains are really only in the prototype stage.

They’re not used widely for freight anywhere in the world. And so I think. There’s a concern that with this ruling as well, they’re just going to, you know, invest in some hiding pilots. They’re going to test it and say, Oh no, it doesn’t work. Sorry. We can’t comply with the rule. Give us a 10 year extension, you know, and that’s 10 years wasted.

We’re frontline communities are continuing to breathe dirty air. And that’s sort of a critical window for action on climate change. We need to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 25%. By 2030, we need to. You know, radically wind down emissions [00:31:00] in the next decade as well, if we’re going to meet climate goals.

And so, so that’s kind of a concern, you know, I and other people in the real world have about this, this role.

Jeff Wood: It’s an interesting fork in the road because, you know, the freight railroads and others could go down this hydrogen track instead of the electrification track. And I, I still don’t understand.

I’ve said this many times. And as, um, you know, my namesake, the overhead wire suggests I’m, I’m in the tank. Kind of for overhead wires, but at the same time, like, why would you want to carry around all your power with you? And you don’t have to, that’s a lot of weight. That’s a lot of energies just on, you know, transporting the energy to transport the energy kind of thing.

Right. So that’s frustrating too, but I feel like this fork in the road is interesting to me because you can go towards electrification with catenaries and overhead wires, or you could go down this battery slash hydrogen road. And it seems like the hydrogen discussion is getting some traction, at least at the state level.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah. There’s a lot of. Energy going into hydrogen right now, that’s coming larger from the governor’s office and from executive offices in California. [00:32:00] I think the underlying reason for this is the inflation reduction act has created. Massive subsidies for hydrogen, and there’s this whole sort of hydrogen hub program with these.

Federally funded public private partnerships. That is applying for these IRA funds to basically massively scale up hydrogen production. The one in California is called Arches. And so there’s a lot of money in lobbying going into this right now. And a lot of, I think, really misguided policy coming from the governor’s office.

So there’s, there’s, there’s all of this federal funding, right? There’s also a lot of lobbying from fossil fuel interests right now. So the idea behind this is there’s two main ways to make hydrogen. One is that you, you split water, take the hydrogen atoms off of water molecule using electricity. That’s usually called green hydrogen, although people disagree about those definitions.

The other way is, uh, there’s a process called steam methane reformation, where you basically take [00:33:00] the hydrogen off of natural gas. Okay. And that’s where the overwhelming majority of natural gas comes from today. And so there’s been a lot of lobbying by fossil fuel interests. They’ve been investing a lot in hydrogen, doing a lot of active lobbying in order to promote hydrogen because they see hydrogen as basically their salvation as You know, we wind down the use of fossil fuels.

So like, for example, Sempra, which is the umbrella organization that owns SoCal gas donated 250, 000 in 20, last year to California politicians. They’re one of the top donors in the state Chevron spent 1. 2 million lobbying. These companies are consistently the top donors and some of the top corporate money going into our state house, mostly targeting like moderate Democrats.

Basically back to the statewide policy that’s promoting hydrogen. So we’ve seen this in a lot of different offices. We’ve seen it actually in CARB, which passed this in use locomotive rule, which is technology neutral. But a lot of their messaging is just [00:34:00] completely ignorant about electric trains. They put out this public facing zero emissions rail dashboard that has like, maybe like only 50 zero emissions rail projects in total.

A third of them are hydrogen. All of the electric rail projects are brand new makes it making it look like overhead wires or this new experimental technology. That’s like, basically the same as hydrogen when in fact, they’re, you know, probably tens of thousands of electric locomotives. Use all around the world, you know, it’s the backbone of these many countries, rail systems.

Whereas all the hydrogen rail is in fact new pilots and this is a public facing document and you know, a lot of their internal documents are similarly biased against overhead wires in terms of other offices. The California office of business has been actively lobbying for weaker regulations on what counts as green hydrogen and another concern with hydrogen is even if you’re not making from natural gas directly if you’re using electricity.

If that [00:35:00] electricity isn’t new renewables, if it’s not carefully matched in kind of time and space to the hydrogen production, then you’re just kind of potentially sucking. Renewable energy out of the grid and just increasing demand for electricity and creating more demand for natural gas. So, you know, the governor’s office has been actively lobbying against those restrictions, which is kind of the same thing that fossil fuel companies have been lobbying for the last thing, which is maybe the most egregious is Caltrans has ordered a bunch of hydrogen trains to be used on.

Basically, what are formally known as Amtrak California routes. So that’s the, uh, surf liner, that’s Capitol Corridor, that’s San Joaquin’s. They spent 127 million for eight of these that they bought from Stadler. This is a significantly higher cost. For a train, then, you know, battery or cut nail alternatives and have made these purchases without having these ever operate anywhere in real world use in United States, so they’re, they’re pouring a lot of money [00:36:00] into this completely untested hydrogen technology, which could be run on, you know, really important rail lines, like the surf liner, which connects the two biggest cities in the state, right?

The surf liner goes from LA to San Diego. Capital corridor connects Oakland to Sacramento. So these are really important rail lines.

Jeff Wood: So what is the biggest issue with hydrogen trains?

Adriana Rizzo: So there’s issues from kind of environmental perspective, and then there’s also issues from, I think, a performance, reliability, and cost aspect, which I think are really overlooked, but really quite vital.

Most of the hydrogen on the market today comes from fossil fuels. The CO2 emissions are almost the same as diesel. They are cleaner from an air quality perspective, but it’s certainly not zero emissions like many people claim. Even if you’re using green hydrogen made from electricity, it’s at least three times less efficient than just powering it with overhead wires.

You’re using three times more energy for the same thing, which is going to be more expensive. And you know, it’s just, it’s just wasteful, right? [00:37:00] Especially when we’re concerned about grid reliability and, you know, do we have the grid capacity to electrify things? You want to be as efficient as possible.

Now, from the transit rider perspective, hiking trains are a very new They’ve never been used in North America in an operational sense outside of a testing facility. There’s been some fairly widespread adoption of hydrogen trains in Germany, primarily for these real low frequency rail lines, which is what they’re generally considered to be best for.

It’s like if you have a rail line that it’s like so low frequency that it’s not cost effective to put up the wires and you have like a long distance so you can’t use battery. That’s when when they’re looking at hydrogen, right? That is incidentally not the application that they’re being proposed for in California.

Those type of trains don’t really exist that much because we have just so much less rail. These are being proposed for like high frequency, you know, main line, regional rail, intercity rail rights. That’s not what they’re hiring is appropriate for. But even [00:38:00] in these kind of niche uses where they’ve been used in Germany, they’ve seen a lot of problems.

Some of this can be blamed on Alstom, which has been, had a lot of reliability issues with many of their trains. But the state of Baden Württemberg in Germany, a bunch of studies found that hydrogen trains are 80 percent more expensive than battery electric trains. To operate in the Frankfurt area there, they had sort of widespread service.

Disruptions after there was issues with the electrolyzer and another location in Germany as well, where they just tried hydrogen trains, found they were too expensive and are discontinuing them after only a few years in operation. So the track record for these hydrogen chains are not good. Another thing that hydrogen chains is they don’t have any of the technical benefits of electrification, at least as far as we know, right.

It’s possible, you know, with the technology improves over time, maybe they could get there, but that’s currently unknown. You know, electric trains can accelerate faster, they can also do up to 125 [00:39:00] miles per hour on sort of conventional inner city rail trains, right? Hydrogen trains have not really been approved in the United States for speeds higher than 79 miles an hour.

We don’t really know what their top speeds are, but they’re probably going to be worse because as you said, they have to carry around all their fuel, right? And in general, hydrogen trains are most cost effective at low service frequencies, less than one train per hour, whereas electric trains are most cost effective at every 50 minutes.

If you’re running hydrogen trains, there is an incentive to not run more trains, not run more service because it’s going to increase costs. With electric trains, it’s actually most cost effective to run a lot of trains because then you get more revenue to pay off the cost of the infrastructure. So the real concern we have is that by investing in hydrogen trains on these really vital routes, like capital corridor, like surf liner, we’re locking in low service for potentially decades.

And part of the reason for that also is like hydrogen trains are being chosen to avoid a political fight. With, [00:40:00] um, the class ones over allowing more passenger service, which is, I think, the fight we need to have if we want to improve transit, reduce driving, meet our climate goals.

Jeff Wood: So what kind of traction are you getting at the state level from the organization and kind of pushing against some of this, um, this silliness?

Adriana Rizzo: Well, I think there’s a lot more work to do in terms of the governor’s office. I think Caltrans, you know, pretty intransigent for a lot of reasons. Beyond the hydrogen stuff, they’re also still really very devoted to widening highways. You know, a lot of transit advocates are not happy with them for a number of reasons.

In terms of other stuff, like for our CEQA exemption bill is doing very well. It passed the assembly, uh, 73 to 0, no opposition. It has already passed its first committee in the Senate, or we still have one more committee to go as of this recording. And so I’m feeling pretty good about that legislation. I think we have a lot more work to do in terms of nice to have like a real caucus within the state legislature.

That is going [00:41:00] to push for good real policy. You know, we do have some relationships with a few, few elected officials, but I think there’s still got a lot more work to do as far as the governor goes.

Jeff Wood: I know you’re focused on railroad electrification and transit and trains on freight right of ways and things like that.

But I’m wondering if there’s like any lessons for other types of electrification. Like you know, we’ve, we’ve seen this move towards battery electric buses when we know that there’s, you know, trolleybuses are a thing and they’ve existed for decades and a hundred years almost, um, or more actually, I should say, but are there any lessons from your advocacy for the zero emissions transit movement?

Adriana Rizzo: I mean, I think a lot of the energy going into hydrogen is also affecting buses, right? There’s going to be a lot of money for hydrogen and a lot of push to adopt hydrogen buses, uh, and I think there’s potential issues with there as well. For example, Sunline Transit, which is in like Palm Springs area, is running hydrogen buses.

They had A lot of issues with the, um, hygiene fueling that actually led [00:42:00] to them having to run 20 percent less service last year because so many other buses couldn’t be filled properly and they’re having to like, loan out. Process from other agencies, and there’s also a hydrogen bus that exploded and refueling and Bakersfield.

So I think, you know, there’s similar potential reliability issues as far as that goes. I definitely support trolleybuses. I think they’re a no brainer. It’s really heartening to see that. San Francisco has kind of changed course on they’re trying to get rid of some of their trolley buses. And now they’ve changed for us on that, which is really good.

Yeah. And I think there’s some similar issues with trolley buses. There’s electric rail. So, it’s my understanding that SB 922, which was a bill passed a few years ago that streamlines a lot of transit infrastructure, although notably not heavy rail that that provides an exemption for trolley bus infrastructure already.

But I think a lot of policymakers just are like, allergic to infrastructure investment. They’re allergic to putting up the wires. [00:43:00] Worried about political blowback or up high up front costs or something and I think they need to sort of get over that and we need pushing them on that, you know, with electric rail could also similar can be applicable for trolleybuses as well.

Jeff Wood: That nimbyism is a big issue. I mean, that was a thing when I was trying to get. The electric transit in, in Austin, uh, in Austin, you have the Capitol view corridors, which are quote unquote, sacrosanct, you’re not supposed to put anything visually that might, uh, interrupt the view of the, of the Capitol in, in Austin, Texas, for example, in DC, they have some similar rules where that you can’t have, you know, any wires or anything overhead that might mess up the visual aesthetic of the city.

And so, you know, for the eight street line, they could build wires outside of this segment of the city, but you couldn’t build it inside. And so a lot of that comes from nimbyism and opposition. And. You know, one of my favorite sayings is my lungs don’t care about your visual aesthetic, but it tends to be something that people glom onto.

If there’s something that people can grab onto that they can oppose, you know, the wires tend to be one of those things.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. So some of this [00:44:00] like secret streamlining stuff that we’ve done does kind of help with that in a narrow sense, but I think there’s, It at least takes away people’s ability to sue and cause lots of rack up costs, but there’s still, you know, the sort of just general project opposition is still going to be a problem.

I mean, transit agencies, they’re often very kind of deferential to these very small and privileged groups of people that get really up in arms about visual impacts. I think, you know, part of it, I think there’s just, we need to change the culture. And I think, you know, younger environmentalists kind of get this where it’s, you know, it’s not about how stuff looks, it’s about.

You know, the underlying processes and how that affects people. I think also, you know, 1 thing that can help is governance reform. That’s kind of a problem in Southern California, particularly where our rail agencies are all run by these kind of local DOTs, local department of transit who, um. To begin with, their focus is mostly highways.

They mostly see [00:45:00] themselves as their job is to build highways and transit is kind of side thing that they’re not very willing to. Put a lot of money or time or political capital into and just because of their organization, they’re also very beholden to local interests. Like, for example, Metrolink put this new rail line, the Redlands arrow rose from San Bernardino to Redlands.

We’re considering overhead wires early in the process, but, you know, there’s opposition from Redlands. Which is much smaller, much whiter, much more affluent than San Bernardino or much of the surrounding area, but people sort of raised distinct. And so the agency just kind of, you know, Abandoned wires and preservation, I think just changing the political structure so that, you know, these very small groups of people are not, you know, this deciding factor in these decisions is also important.

So that’s why California Electric Rail has advocated for consolidation of all of these rail agencies in Southern California under a single [00:46:00] operator that manages the capital and runs these projects. And that also creates the opportunity for economies of scale and, you know, just better management of these projects, which is also another issue that we’ve seen as well.

It’s just like these agencies not being able to work with each other across county lines, even though the train crosses county lines.

Jeff Wood: What’s been the most interesting thing about this overall discussion about electrification in California?

Adriana Rizzo: I’m surprised how much it’s taken off. Like it feels like a very nerdy kind of niche thing in some ways, but I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of, a lot of engagement on social media, a lot of people offline who like see this stuff on social media and are really excited about it and there’s just like a lot of momentum I think people want, there’s a lot of appetite for better transit or appetite for clean air, how do we get there is just really unclear.

And people are excited to see solutions.

Jeff Wood: Well, where can folks find out more about what you’re doing and help out if they can?

Adriana Rizzo: So you can go to our website at CalElectricRail. [00:47:00] org or follow us on Twitter at BlueSky at CalElectricRail. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of great information there, educational information, and our website also has a link.

You can sign up for our list house if you want to get emails about actions we’re doing. In addition to our statewide stuff, we also engage with different You know, transit agencies, regulatory agencies, trying to send people out to give public comment or different meetings and things like that. And so if you are excited about this and want to volunteer, you know, sign up for email us and we can have opportunities for you.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, Adriana, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Adriana Rizzo: Yeah, thank you so much. Great talking with you, Jeff.