(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 528: The California State Rail Plan

This week we’re listening in on a conversation hosted by Seamless Bay Area about the 2024 update to the California State Rail Plan. Adina Levin of Seamless Bay Area hosts Shannon Simonds Chief, Office of Rail Planning & Implementation at Caltrans, Eric Goldwyn of the Marron Institute of Urban Management, and Adriana Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail in discussion.

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You can also watch the original video on YouTube.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

In order to achieve this, it’s important for the service to be well coordinated and fast and frequent and be implemented in a way that delivers public value for the public funding that we put into the system. So the California State Rail Plan. Is a major blueprint for the state to help achieve this goal.

For the last several years, seamless has organized events and activities for the public as well as for professionals and political leaders to learn about international good practices for achieving that sort of well coordinated and effective network. And we’re gonna learn today about how the California State Rail Plan utilizes.

Some of these practices as well as some opportunities to improve in order to be able to achieve those goals in a more fast and cost effective and timely manner. We’re here to learn from experts, including Shannon Simonds, who’s the Chief Officer of Rail Planning and implementation for California. And she’s gonna talk about the state rail plan and its goals and how it is in fact implementing these international good practices.

We’re gonna hear from Eric Goldwin, who is the program director of the NYU Marin School of Urban Management, and is leading the transit cost project, which is providing really important information about how to improve the cost and cost effectiveness. Of rail and transit around the country and the world.

And we’re gonna hear from Adriana Rizzo, who is a co-founder of Californians for Electric Rail nonprofit advocacy organization. And we’re gonna learn from her about some case studies and reforms that have been done and need to be done in order to be able to achieve the goals of the state rail plan.

And with that, I’m gonna turn this over to Shannon Simons. If you have some questions please do put them into the q and a section and we will get to them at the end.

So first rail plan overview. The rail plan establishes a strategic vision for prioritizing state investment in the passenger and freight rail network statewide. Really, we’re looking to provide a framework for that coordination between planning partners, rail operators, rail owners, and the state to develop a rail network with a strategic vision in mind.

This is very important because. In California, there’s a lot of different ownership and responsibility from managing to planning to ownership of the equipment, to ownership of the rights of way in the airspace. And pretty much for any decision that gets made, there’s at least four different public and private entities that need to be involved to make that decision.

So having a coordinated framework and a coordinated process through service led planning is extremely important to helping us be able to make decisions and move forward on project development and ultimately delivery. So what’s new since 2018? So this 2024 update really looked to enhance the rail service in the public interest and serve as a basis for both federal and state rail investments and passenger and freight rail projects.

So first, we revised the state vision. This included incorporating outputs from various network integration activities and other local and regional studies from across the state Since our last update. Then we look to advise priorities for state investments. So we’re updating the operating and capital investments and looking towards delivering a phased implementation of the network.

And then lastly, devising implementation strategies. So we’re working to coordinate across funding and operating agencies to structure a service implementation that is phased to deliver interim benefits sooner while we, can get the capital for some of the larger investments. This is really what the rail plan is all about.

This is the vision for the passenger network strategy. So it’s based on these three main components. First is that it’s oriented around an integrated statewide network. So high speed rail is serving those longer distance trips, really the backbone of the network. But that’s really not the whole of it.

The inner city and the regional services provide that additional mobility for local and regional travel in and of itself, but also by making really high quality connections to each other and to the high-speed rail network to maximize the benefits and the mobility of the network. And then the integrated express bus services fill in those lower ridership times in the schedule that provide connections to rural communities and provide for rail network connections using the highway system.

The second point here is coordinated schedules, and I will talk about this briefly in the service led planning section, but the entire network is designed around regular pulse service, which means that we are strategically targeting schedules to pulse into and out of key transfer hubs at the same time, on the hour every hour.

So the inner city train is coming at the five after the hour. It will always come at the five after the hour, and we can build our schedules to ramp that up or ramp that down as needed to meet market demand, but it’s pulsing into and out of key transfer hubs, which then facilitates seamless transfer between services.

If we know that the inner city service will always be there at five after the hour, then as the local transit provider or the regional rail service provider, you can make. Strategic and coordinated schedule changes to make sure that your buses and your light rail services are feeding into that network before the five and circulating people out to their final destinations after the train arrives at the five after the hour.

And then lastly, the vision is all about being customer focused. So again, those seamless first and last mile connections with local transit, but also working with our partners on the land use and complete street side to make sure that there is high quality connectivity to the stations for pedestrians and bicyclists and other modes.

We’re also working with our partners on the California Integrated Travel Project, which is focused on improving integrated ticketing and trip planning, as well as contactless and simplified payments to make the entire user experience of how to plan and pay for a trip, much easier to navigate. And then lastly, all of this is strategically designed to be both competitive to auto and air travel in terms of cost, ease of travel, and also the comfort.

These are just some real quick real plan by the numbers. So the plan identifies $307 billion in total capital investments across the near, mid, and long-term time horizon, which is a lot. But in turn we will see $537 billion in economic return on those investments by 2050. This is around 200 million daily passenger miles, shifting from highways to the statewide network.

Mostly by capturing some of the longer distance trips in terms of zero emission. We will be converting our current 51 miles in the state represented by the Caltrain corridor of overhead electrification, expanding that to 1500 miles by 2050. We have nine corridors already identified for coordinated project development, federal funding, and then I’d just like to put this image on the side to show how efficient spatially efficient rail is and that one high speed train can accommodate 918 people, which is equivalent to all of these things.

Five medium hall aircraft, 15 long distance coach buses, and 612 autos at a 1.5 average occupancy. So we all know it, but I like to show and see how efficient rail is. So service led planning, this is what underpins all of the work that goes into the rail plan, service led planning. These are the design principles behind that.

The first is service led design, so designing a network to support service goals first, which can be something like hourly service, half hourly service, and then we’re only identifying the infrastructure or even the equipment that’s needed to support the network. So we’re not just going out and saying we need to double, triple, quadruple track the entire state.

Being really strategic about where do we need to identify infrastructure to support our service goals. The second principle is that we’re designing an intuitive network, so we wanna simplify and standardize service patterns, like I was saying, have that arrive at the five after the hour. The schedules as well, the connections and the operations and the ticketing.

All of this is meant to make it, more intuitive as a traveler so that you’re not beholden to a schedule that is different every single time you’re trying to get on a train. You can predictably navigate how to get on your train and then make the connections once you get to your destination.

The third principle is that we’re targeting direct connections. This does not mean one seat rides to everywhere from everywhere, but it means being, again, strategic and intentional about minimizing physical and temporal distance between services so that passengers can easily transfer across a platform or over to a bus bay.

So this picture I like to show because I think it’s also important to note that direct connections can happen without a ton of infrastructure. So our stations. Don’t have to be grand central to facilitate good timed connections. It can be as simple as, again, a small bit of infrastructure targeting specific times on the clock so that you can easily transfer from that bus to that train, or vice versa.

And then lastly, all of this is designed. To organize the meets at stations at regular intervals at hub stations. So again, that pulsed scheduling where you’re again pulsing into and out of a station on a predictable clock face time allows us to be intentional with those time transfers and make it really easy for people to navigate the system.

This is the process for service led planning. It’s not that complicated. We wanna start first with developing planning parameters and from a methodological standpoint, we like to start by developing the long-term vision. This really helps us to understand and articulate how the ideal end state. Looks like and then allows us to develop a phased implementation back while scaling up our current and planned investments so that we’re being strategic about, protecting against redundant or stranded investments in the near and midterm, making sure that we’re building towards that idealized end state.

So the first thing we do is we develop planning parameters. So things like connections, frequency, trip times, identify those from all the partners involved in developing a service. We put in some of the operating and infrastructure. Considerations where there may be harder parameters that we need to account for.

Then we come up with an initial design. We take all of the feedback from all of the partners, and we have a first take at a service concept, and then we have a trade offs analysis. We really talk about, do we need this much service out of, a certain station to another, or can we maybe serve that with an hourly service and making better connections downstream From that, we refine the concept.

Based on the feedback and other statewide priorities, maybe there’s, some mandate on zero emission that we need to, or other policy that we need to consider. And then once we agree on a concept for the service, then we look at the phasing strategy again, looking at what can we actually implement first to deliver those interim benefits while building towards the larger capital project.

So why do we do it? And that’s a lot of words, but stick with me. So the reason that we do this is because we have a lot of complex questions to answer, right? So these decisions that we’re trying to make, they’re very complex. And there’s this, large group of stakeholders. We have. Consequential social equity considerations, and all of this is very time and resource intensive, and we also have to navigate, a range of technical questions, supporting service planning and environmental impacts, engineering, project development, all of that.

And so we need a better plan to be able to do that or planning process to be able to do that. The second thing is we all know costs and timelines are insufficient to meet our goals. We know that the state has ambitious equity, environmental and economic goals, and our current delivery timelines and costs are insufficient, and so the planning phase is an opportunity to reduce some of that complexity and drive better outcomes.

And then lastly, strategic service planning is a tool to make decisions so transparent, reproducible analysis that’s scaled to the appropriate level of detail to answer the decision in question, the documentation and coordination of the process, the parameters, the recommendations. It’s also critical to working across multiple stakeholder groups, jurisdictions, and planning horizons.

And this is increasingly important as we work with host railroads. We run passenger rail service. Mostly in California on privately owned freight railroad corridors, and so we want to have a more standardized process that is documenting decisions and including engagement early and often so that we can work with them to consider their needs as well as we’re developing projects which will help us to implement things more efficiently.

So this is basically the toolkit. There’s service operations, equipment and infrastructure are the different types of levers we have to make improvements. We can either look at operational improvements, things like decreasing dwell time through things like level boarding, improved transfers. We can look to the equipment side.

So maybe there’s an opportunity if we’re gonna buy new fleet in a corridor anyway, to look at equipment that can accelerate or decelerate more quickly, get to top speeds faster, or have different top speeds. And that allows us to utilize our existing infrastructure differently and more efficiently.

In many cases. On the infrastructure side, we can do things like straightening curves, upgrading old tracks or outdated signal systems. All things that allow us to better use the railroad that we have. And then service again, this is where we like to start. We wanna design a service to maximize the utilization of our existing infrastructure first, and then look to make these more expensive decisions later.

And then lastly, I wanna talk a little bit about how we move from planning to project development. And one of the big opportunities is through the new Federal Railroad Administration Corridor Identification and development program or corridor id. So the corridor ID program is a new federal program that’s intended to develop a sustained comprehensive inner city passenger rail planning and development program.

The idea is that it will set forth a capital project pipeline that then is ready for federal funding. So this quarter ID program, one of the requirements is that you develop a service development plan or an SDP, and those are meant to establish the service concepts and the necessary capital projects to actually operate the service in a corridor.

So the SDPs will identify, again, phase infrastructure investments to accomplish the service goals identified in the rail plan. So if it’s really nicely with the system that we’re already trying to establish here in California. So these are the corridors across the country. 69 corridors were selected and nine of those were in California.

The ones highlighted in the teal text are the ones that Caltrans is actually the sponsor for, and you can see the map on the right side. It’s pretty much the entire California state rail network. So this is a big opportunity to get this all into a federal planning and project development pipeline that will allow us to more efficiently deliver on service led planning and develop capital projects that are strategic and competitive for funding.

So this is what the Quarter ID program looks like in a snapshot. Systems planning era, we think of that as the rail plan. That’s the initial input guiding the service development plans rather for each of the corridors. And then corridor ID itself is the project planning and project development phase where we will get through, again, all of those service concepts and then through preliminary engineering and environmental.

And then that sets us up for competitive funding in the implementation stages of final design, construction, and ultimately operations. I won’t get into it too much, but I wanted to show everyone what the Quarter ID program really is and why this is such a big opportunity. It’s a three step program. Step one, the FRA gave each corridor money to just develop the scope, schedule, and budget.

They wanted to show their commitment to, giving money to support this program, even through the scoping phases. Step two is 90% federal match to develop those service development plans that I was mentioning. So the final service development plan will include that capital project inventory as part of your phased implementation plan.

And then those projects. May advance into step three of project development at the FRAs discretion based on readiness, which gets you into the environmental review or NEPA and the preliminary engineering stage. So once you’re in step three, then you’re coordinating again with the Federal Railroad Administration to complete the preliminary engineering.

An environmental review for all of your projects. And then when graduate out of quarter id, your projects go into a pipeline that may be prioritized for federal funding under Fed State Partnership, which is, the big capital program right now at the federal level. So we’re really excited about being able to implement the vision and the process that we’ve already established in the rail plan with direct coordination with the Federal Railroad Administration to more efficiently move through planning and project development and hopefully get, more projects out the door for construction funding and ultimately built.

And then lastly, this is looking ahead for the rail plan. So next steps, again, quarter id, and we’re excited about that. We wanna continue to lay the framework for growth, so service-led planning will continue to increase efficiencies and inform our fleet decisions, our capital investments, and how we’re designing phased implementation.

The CALTRAN zero emission strategy sets the course to develop and deploy zero emission trains in California beyond the electrified caltran and California high-speed rail networks. And then lastly, personally exciting to me in my office is just increasing the utilization of the rail plan. So we want to develop a more web-based components of the rail plan to, increase transparency and tracking projects.

Both their progress and their funding commitments, but also provide more digestible fact sheets and information of the progress of these projects and everything that’s going on from the rail plan. So you don’t have to wait four to six more years for an update. Everyone can go and access that on more of an annual update.

So we’re pretty excited to get that implemented for everyone. And with that, I will stop and pass it over to.

So can you explain what it was that you thought that was the best, and then what additionally can be done and would be helpful to be done to enable the delivery of this plan in a more cost effective and timely manner?

I recommend any of you go click on those links. Most of them don’t link to anything. But then if you start searching for them, you can see that some of ’em have been updated, and I think the New York one was last updated in 2009, for instance. But then when you start to read them, they’re just not very ambitious in scope.

I think if I’m remembering from one, it was we hope to basically keep going really slowly on this corridor. We’re not electrifying. Maybe we’ll get some new rolling stock. It, it’s on that level. And when you read this one, you wanna go from 50 electrified miles to 1500 electrified miles and.

Electrification is so important. If you wanna be competitive with other modes of transport, I think as long as the train is lagging behind automobiles, it’s just gonna be very hard to get real modal shift. And I think what we’re seeing with Caltrain is that, hey, electric trains really do I. Get people to switch.

You filled me on some of the data the other day and I really love that about this plan. The other thing in here that to me is really interesting is that it sounds like Caltran wants to be this sort of like nerve center at the middle of all of this and help some of these other agencies.

Do the planning. There’s language in there about, inventories and databases to share. And I think one of the things that if you talk to operators, they’re always looking to answer some question that they come up with come up against. And so having a state DOT that is saying, we’re gonna be a central repository and we’re gonna be diffusing knowledge and information and helping you, if they can execute on that, like I think that is just.

A massive benefit. So that’s where I was going in terms of why I think this is, I think there’s actual ambition in this vision, which is often lacking when it comes to trains. So in terms of, cost effectiveness and things like that. I think a lot of it comes down to, building that capacity in Caltrans, like how helpful they can be.

How they can parachute in. And move projects along and, collect learnings along the way. I was recently talking to a former official who was saying, we keep doing these projects over and over again, but there’s no mechanism for learning and there’s no mechanism for sharing knowledge.

And so again, when I. Read the plan. I was like, oh, maybe there’s something here. In having a more centralized approach. Again, I think electrification with Caltrain is a great example of how you get modal shift. I think there are some things we could do to, reduce those costs and I.

Now that we’ve done the one project and obviously we have California high speed rail going, hopefully there are lessons learned and ways to move this forward really faster I think is most important, more cost effectively. And then, I’ve looked at some of the questions in here, the open question about federal funding.

I obviously have no idea, but there’s also, transportation reauthorization in a year or two that also will be super important to keep mind of and to track. So those are my initial thoughts.

When the Caltrain electric service went fully live in September. Since then, the weekday ridership has gone up by 40 to 50% and the weekend ridership has doubled. And that is an outcome of faster service, more frequent service, where off peak it’s 30 minutes, which is still world class, but still much better than the previous hourly.

And the Bay Area has instituted a twice a year schedule coordination, so it’s now better coordinated with other services. As well. So you had mentioned having increased state capacity as something that could help lower costs. This is something that in the US is, for a few decades seems maybe counterintuitive.

There was a, a concept of, maybe having a more lean state infrastructure would be better. But it sounds like you’re saying something different. Can you say a little bit more about that?

But, this is a long, far reaching plan with near term midterm and long-term goals. Shannon’s gonna be busy for a really long time, and what that means is, she needs resources to come up with the best plan she can. She needs. Bodies, knowledge, tools to diffuse that knowledge.

Southern California, Northern California, whatever, are able to tap into all the stuff that her office is doing. Again I don’t remember the number. I think there were like 13 people in the office. I don’t know why that number’s in my mind, maybe I made that up. But, $300 billion worth of projects is, that’s a big number.

And it sounds like looking at sort of the CID template during those service plans. It’s just, it’s a big job identifying all the infrastructure, just doing all that stuff. The other thing I’ll say as a non-sequitur that I like about the plan is things tend to be very corridor based. In the US the way that we do our planning for transportation and Caltrans is the right entity to say, Hey, let’s look at the state.

Let’s look at the state network. Whereas there’s no incentive for. Smaller regional agencies to do that. So yes, in terms of the capacity, I think, having people in Caltrans who can do some of that planning, who can do the scoping, not being completely reliant on consultants, I think bring them in to learn stuff and to build that capacity.

I don’t know who wrote what in this plan. It does have a very strong, what I know of Deutsche Bon of sort of their fingerprint on it. There is also a picture somewhere of. A German operation center, but I think over time we could have that expertise within Caltrans and, then they can diffuse that knowledge rather than, calling on for more and more consultants.

’cause consultants come in and come out, they forget things that they’re not perfect in that regard. Whereas people that work at these agencies hopefully will be there for years and decades to keep things moving in the same direction.

And that’s certainly true. I think like one example of this would be the Roseville third track project on capital. Corridor, which is supposed to bring 10 trains an hour up to Roseville. It’s a very simple capacity project, involves building a layover facility. Union Pacific was negotiating with Capital Corridor for 12 years about using one of their yards as a layover facility before pulling out, just walking out of negotiations for Capital Corridor to design and build a completely different site for this.

That involved demolitions. And as a result, this project still hasn’t started construction, even though it’s been in. Planning and the discussion for 18 years. So the uncooperative freights certainly are going to be an issue with implementing the state rail plan. However, the state has a lot more leverage than local agencies to force concessions.

I think the state just brings a lot more power to the table compared to, local jpa. Which is important of course, for electrification. ’cause as somebody asked, and Shannon alluded to, some of these corridors that are planned to be electrified in 2050 are owned by Class one railroads. I’ve highlighted them in blue here, and we know that the state can win on this issue.

For instance, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has been able to come to an agreement with BNSF to allow electrification on tracks that BNSF owns between LA and Fullerton. And so we know that when we get the state involved, we have a lot more power than these local agencies. And the State Rail Open also includes pathing study, which I think is important, is another tool for leverage to show actually, yeah, this thing we wanna do is feasible and will benefit both parties.

And I think this is relevant for electrification of freight rail. For example, the Department of Energy recently identified the Southern transcon, which is highlighted over here in Southern California as like a priority corridor for freight electrification. This is something where partnership between the state and freight railroads could be really fruitful.

Freight s have certainly objected to rail electrification and the past. I think there certainly an issue, but I think, bringing more leverage to the table as well as being willing to share costs. And not place all costs on the class ones, I think is part of the solution as well. This does lead me to, something I think is missing from the state rail plan, is there’s not much discussion of freight electrification or zero emission strategy for freight, which is a little bit confusing given if freight has a lot more emissions than passenger rail does.

But maybe I’ll just pause here and add for comments. I do have some other case studies as well, but.

I think one of the challenges is that we have inherently different goals, right? Like even though we all want to improve the reliability and kind of the throughput of service on these corridors, they have shareholders and are private companies and have a different set of drivers than we do at, potentially looking to move passengers.

So I think one of the things we are trying to do now is alongside this strategy is to. Figure out, like I mentioned with the quarter ID process and service led planning in general, how to better engage the railroads earlier and more often in this process and through a standardized process. I think in talking with the host railroads in California, they’re frankly pretty excited about quarter id, cautiously excited about quarter ID, as well as a framework and a process to have the request for engagement come to them through a more standardized process.

You. You can imagine from their perspective that they’re getting questions all the time from locals, from people that they don’t know. Is this part of the Caltrans priority list? Is this part of the Rail plan? And everyone says it is whether or not they’ve talked to me and to Caltrans. And so Core already helps us to at least streamline that and come to them with a set of priorities.

But I think one thing we’re also trying to be better at is. How can we identify what their actual needs are earlier in the process so that we can build that into our projects? I think we have a tendency to just think that they are unwilling to work with us because they don’t really care about passenger operations, but that’s not really true.

It’s just how do we build in more of the shared goals so that we’re developing projects that can actually truly meet both the needs of passenger and freight. Because we also, part of the rail plan is improving freight operations. We see a lot of benefits. Both to goods movement, economic development, but also to just greenhouse gas emissions reductions by being able to move especially long haul freight onto rail from trucks and, alleviate capacity at our ports and other intermodal terminals.

I don’t think there’s an easy one answer to that, unfortunately, if anyone has it or we’re open to it. But I think improvement. In just the upfront coordination and building in predictable timelines for communication. When we expect to review operations analysis with the railroads, when we expect them to engage in environmental clearance, when we need them to review design plans and preliminary engineering concepts and being as transparent on our end as possible so that it’s really predictable, so that.

Hopefully then we can hold them to that same type of accountability on returning deliverables in a timely fashion so we can actually move projects along to get them implemented and that everything doesn’t end up taking 20 years plus hundreds of millions of dollars more than when we originally scoped a project.

But yeah, it’s definitely the collaborative process that is just going to take some time. But I am cautiously optimistic that through implementing some of these more predictable processes, it all makes it a little bit easier to engage on a shared framework moving forward.

We can go to them and then take more of the questions.

The state rail plan has this area as a high speed rail hub with multiple electrified rail connections all out of the Ontario Airport. However. The local transportation authorities instead, pursuing this basically car tunnel project involving autonomous pod vehicles, which, is not a proven technology and it’s extremely low capacity.

And this is an opportunity cost in terms of the money would take to fund this, as well as all of the planning resources going into this versus going into a real alternative. And they’ve similarly dismissed a real alternative with not very good reasoning. California electric Rail has been pushing San Bernardino County to properly study a rail connection instead.

And this is a case where service led planning really comes in. Like in this situation, we may need the state to tap in and do a lot more of the planning for these rail connections since this local agency is clearly uninterested in doing so. And then if we’re talking about service led planning, we should be funding projects that conform with regional plans.

We should not be giving state funding to projects like this one that have really. Wimpy service goals and are in conflict with larger regional plans If anybody’s interested, there will be a vote on this. But I think, moving forward, I think these are the direction we need to go to deal with projects like this.

And then another thing that’s very important is the corridor ID program. To talk a little bit about the los san corridor between, LA and San Diego. This is the highest ridership rail corridor at outside of the Northeast. It’s been really important, but it was closed for over a year in total.

A few years ago due to coastal erosion, basically the tracks are falling into the ocean in Southern Orange County, and there’s a lot of governance challenges that are causing these infrastructure issues. There’s still no real definitive plan for an inland route in, San Clemente area, which is really urgently needed.

But fortunately Caltrans is taking over that study, which I think is helpful for its step because it’s clear that Orange County doesn’t have the resources or interest to actually properly plan this big investment in a timely manner. But I think we still have ongoing governance issues in this area just ’cause there’s so many entities involved.

SB 10 98 was a bill last year that increased Caltrans. Oversight over the corridor and there’s a task force associated with this. It is a question for Shannon, maybe curious about what is the status of this and how does Cal Tan’s role in planning this corridor compare to these local agencies?

And to address Brian’s question in the chat about how do we stop local agencies from refusing to build the investments in the state rail plan, I think part of the answer is Caltrans actually taking over a lot of those projects and ensuring they get delivered. Actually, I’ll get back to Brian’s question a little bit.

First, I’ll pose my question to Shannon about the governance and then I have another question related to that is, I think this is an area where there’s a big hole in the state rail plan is, the state rail plan calls for more than four trains per hour between Anaheim and San Diego, which definitely has a business case for electrification.

Yet electrification is not in the plan. I think this is a big oversight and wondering if there’s any insights about why that is.

So I don’t think there’s a single answer we haven’t done quarter ID yet in this way, but I think that it’s a real opportunity to act as the framework to also help. Catch and include some of the work that gets scoped or gets started outside of that process. So I think a lot of the resiliency work, while there is an environmental review component of the service development plans as part of quarter ID in certain cases, we have more immediate needs.

We have larger needs, we have things that are gonna take more time to spend dedicated resources focusing on, but we wanna make sure that as much of that is brought in under the coordinated. Corridor id planning is possible. So I think having Caltrans be the sponsor of that, and then 10 98 being led by the California State Transportation Agency oversight, who you know is our umbrella agency.

It will just help us continue to make sure that we’re using the same time horizons, we’re using the same methodologies, the same again, tools and planning processes so that all of the outputs. From, in either direction become inputs into the other studies and we’re iterating from that work and really just bringing as much into the scope of quarter ID as possible and then really only doing what we need to do on these projects outside truly when they’re outside of the scope of quarter id.

I also think SB 10 98 is. Because it, it’s obviously being led by Senator Blake Spear and I think that political attention to this is also really needed it. And I think that is something that we can’t necessarily get through Quarter id. It really is a planning and kind of technical process, and this brings in some of the politics and the policy that we’re also going to need to help dedicate.

More resources, financial resources, but also potential streamlining resources on regulation and approvals and things as we get into really sensitive environmental areas that we need to make decisions, whether it’s continuing to improve the rail lines or relocate the rail lines inland, or any of the decisions that will get made.

So I’d say still a little bit TBD, but yeah, the idea is that it’ll all be brought in with the same partners iterating on this so that we’re not. Doing these isolated planning efforts that aren’t coordinated. And I will get to your other question, but I see that there’s a lot of questions about federal funding related to corridor id, and so I wanted to just jump in to answer those as well, if that’s okay.

Yeah. Thank you for taking on the elephant in the room. Yeah. Yeah. What’s happening at the federal government? I think we all know that we don’t know, but I think couple of things. So what we do know right now is that the Federal Railroad Administration is still telling us. To move along. And so they’re all still mostly in their positions, which is great news and moving ahead with quarter id.

And so until we hear otherwise, that is our plan and that is our process. That said, I think we are obviously anticipating that could change, but from the perspective of Calta and Caltrans. We are really committed to standing up this planning process in the way that court ID has established it.

And so what that means is that, we’re looking at ways that we could fill a resource gap, should one exist to be able to stand up this program. That may mean that we have to change the scope of some of our corridors. It may mean we might have to change some of the timelines that we’re looking at, but we don’t wanna let this program go because of all of the things I explained.

This is a good organizing tool. We think this is the correct way to do planning to move us along in coordination with the host railroads and get into quicker environmental review times, which ultimately get us to final design and construction sooner. And. If and when a new administration brings this program back, we also don’t wanna be, caught on our back heels that now we have to start over and we’re four years behind where we could have been already funding projects and getting things ready for implementation.

So of course, none of us know exactly what that looks like, but we are trying to come up with some backup plans and set things up. Again, having a good process. And to Eric’s point, building out our team and having the internal resources at this. State that we are able to keep things going, whether it’s a scaled back version or to the same magnitude that we have now to continue to advance the priority projects through a coordinated planning and project development phase.

Certainly, I think the bigger question is what happens if, let’s say quarter ID remains, but then we get to the end and Fed State partnership doesn’t exist. That could certainly happen or we get to the end and California is no longer competitive for Fed State Partnership. That could certainly happen, but I still think that this is the right way to do planning and will help us design more efficient and targeted and strategic projects that will also help these projects compete better at a state level for better or worse.

Rail was not really funded through. We didn’t get a lot of funding through the federal government until the infrastructure bill was passed a few years ago. We were obviously looking forward to a big influx of support that we could leverage with our state dollars, but ultimately, we do still have decently strong support through our federal funding programs, both through the SB one programs like Solutions for Congested Corridors, as well as some of the cap and trade programs like the Transit and Inner City Rail Capital Program and the State Rail Assistance Program.

So there is still money at the state level. Is it enough? No. Is it as much as if we had the federal support? No. But there are ways to still be strategic in leveraging that to use the outputs of a coordinated planning process to prioritize how we award those funds and projects that are aligned with. And in quarter ID we’re eligible are going to compete better for state projects as well.

They’re going to inherently get that support from the state and I think that will still help us make good decisions on implementation. I saw a couple questions on. Why SMART wasn’t listed, why Santa Cruz wasn’t listed. A thing I forgot to mention with quarter ID or underscore is that this is explicitly for intercity passenger rail in California we think of, and we design the network agnostically to the operator and to their federal regulatory agency.

Unfortunately, the federal government does not do that, and so they’re technically commuter rail designation for some of the corridors like smart. Like Caltrain, like Metrolink and others that are not eligible to be in the quarter ID program because they are not inner city passenger rail services. Where there is overlap, where we share corridors like we do in many cases, like in Metrolink and the surf liner example.

Great. Then that’s a benefit. We can deliver benefits to more than one service. Smart. Unfortunately, though. In the eyes of the federal government is a commuter rail operator, and so while there’s an extension to Novato in, in our Capitol corridor that we will be planning for the mainline services, there are currently excluded from inner city passenger rail planning.

So that’s the answer on that front. And Santa Cruz is included. So I think I answered a lot of those questions that I caught.

And so the timeline and the. Scope for doing the service development plans may seem larger than people are used to or comfortable with, but that is intentional so that we are doing a lot of the good iterative planning that we need to do in engaging the host railroads and doing that operations analysis in that process.

So by the time we move on to preliminary engineering and environmental review, we have, as much buy-in as we’re gonna get from the host railroads as defined of a project as we can before getting into an environmental review process, and are really ready to just focus on environmental review.

And I think it’s, it’s 18 months you can get through it if you really are pushing rather than looking at everything. And I think that’s what’s so beautiful about CIT is really incentivizing and paying for us to do that planning homework upfront rather than trying to get. A full funding grant agreement.

I’m speaking from the transit side, and then doing all your planning, which doesn’t ever work out well.

That will also, help speed some of this up. An additional thing is building state capacity to do self-certification under nepa. So the California HighSpeed Rail Authority currently has that authority, and the vision would be that rather than hiring, expensive consultants to do these environmental view documents, local agencies can get the state to do it a lot more cheaply and quickly in a standardized way that’s going to also speed up timelines and, particularly protect from lawsuits.

It has a much longer range than battery electric trains, and it provides a balance of the environmental and economic viability benefits. But we’re looking at everything. Things can be convertible. We wanna do the things that, again, much like the planning, where can we derive interim benefits now and really start providing as much service as we can and looking to the places where we can electrify sooner.

Maybe we just do that in the places where we think hydrogen or other options can fill more of a long-term need. We’re open to that as well. But I think, the discussion, it’s new and it’s changing all the time and we do appreciate, the experts and the advocates continuing to push us for the best solutions.

And, we wanna continue to work on all that.

Still, I don’t have time to get into it, but you can check out our website, cal electric rail.org for resources on some of the issues with hydrogen trains. But let’s move on to how do we make this happen, which is really important. Before we get, there’s some very specific deliverables, but just to answer Brian’s question a little bit about what if agencies don’t want to cooperate with the state rail plant?

So we’ve got a few things. I think part of that is, Caltrans is already taking on more of the role on project planning, which is good. I would like to see in the long term. I’m also take on design and engineering capacity so that local governments who don’t have the capacity or interest to do it can just.

Get Caltrans to do it much more cost effectively than hiring consultants. Then if projects are at 60% design, which is important and conform with the state rail plan, there should be formula funds that are awarded automatically. Again, this is going to require reforms to make that happen, that’s the goal.

And then the state rail plan. Projects get built on time and under budget if you have one and two, that’s the idea. So how do we actually implement that? So I already mentioned on the project delivery reform, I already mentioned the SB 71, expanding the SQL exemption, and I’ve seen a few comments in the chat about this.

But another important issue that also addresses Brian’s question is third party permitting reform, which puts, enforceable timelines on third parties, like local governments or utilities to provide construction permits. That’s really important for moving Project Forward. That is up for Vote this year.

We’d also like to see future legislation to make sure that funding actually conforms with the state rail plan and that we’re not awarding projects to things that aren’t using service led planning. There’s been a lot of questions about what do we do with the federal government, and I think that is kind the elephant of the room.

The state Real plan does have over $300 billion in investments that we need. And ideally this would be funded through formula funding. The Olive Board Act is an example, not discretionary, not a complicated grant program. The all Board Act is like a federal level version of this that’s probably not gonna pass anytime soon.

But we could implement something similar at the state level. And then that cap and trade re authorization, which is happening this year, is really what we need to do to fund these rail projects in the short term. And making sure that, there is all the money we need to make these investments.

That’s something we can all engage with later this year. I also say we need to find a staff capacity for planning as well as ideally design and engineering to make sure all this stuff gets built. I.

All by themselves and having constituents that are, ready and willing to speak to their legislators is really important. We will send out information with the slides and with the information about the legislation and funding afterward as well. Wanted to very much thank the panelist for a very informative hour.

And look forward to the opportunities that, we in the audience who are civically active residents, can do to help move things forward. And those of us who are professionals in the audience can put this into practice in, people’s jobs to also help make this good vision happen. So thank you very much and have a good afternoon.