Get That Political Headline You Wanted

I was doing some research for a podcast and came across an article from 2017 when the Trump administration tried to take money away from Caltrain for its electrification project. Republican legislators were mad that the project would share tracks with high speed rail. Then Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao wouldn’t sign the previously approved funding agreement and tried to take the money back.

Eventually Senator Feinstein and others stepped in to save the funding for electrification which has been very successful in terms of travel times, ridership, and emissions reduction, just like (de)congestion pricing, which they are also trying to kill but failing miserably.

So instead of trying to help California build the line those legislators have been trying to destroy it for over a decade and starve it of funding. Now they are at it again, trying to pull $4B that again has already been agreed to.

The feds have only funded 18% of the project thus far with 82% coming from California. It’s always been frustrating that the Feds have outsized say on some projects even if they contribute smaller amounts of money. This is especially true of transit where the match has been less than 50% for a long time. Of course in this instance even though they want to, they won’t likely kill it. But they’ve already got the political headlines in the papers that they wanted.

As usual, I know there are lots of opinions on this project and I’m mad it’s gone so slowly too. There have been a lot of bumps in the road and differing opinions on decisions. But I can’t help but think that if this project is completed it will be just as beneficial and revolutionary as pricing.

And as we’re talking about ways to kill transportation projects, this Civil Grand Jury thing in Bakersfield is really weird. Someone really didn’t like bike lanes and believes that Alta Planning + Design shouldn’t be allowed to do bike planning because they are biased towards bikes. So they asked a Civil Grand Jury to look into it, something that’s usually reserved for fraud or mismanagement. Fortunately the latest state preemption bill in Texas failed but I see this Bakersfield example as another blueprint for culture warriors to kill active transportation projects they don’t like.

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