(Edited) Podcast Transcript 449: Getting High Speed Rail Sooner

This week we’re sharing a panel discussion on how California High Speed Rail could be sped up. Hosted by Rodger Rudick of Streetsblog SF, Climate Advocate Carter Lavin, Eric Eidlin, Station Planning Manager for the City of San Jose, and Boris Lipkin of the California High Speed Rail Authority discuss what it would take to get the project done faster and all the potential benefits.

You can watch a video of the panel here on YouTube.

You can listen to this episode as a podcast at Streetsblog USA or find it in our archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the discussion:

Roger Rudick (1m 11s):
You have successfully arrived at our conversation. This is about getting high-speed rail in California finished in five years. Now that may sound a little crazy. Can we really do it in five years? But let’s just go over a little history here. So in 1962, President Kennedy said, we will go to the moon before the decade is out. Six years later, humans traveled to the moon, and a year after that they walked on the moon. The Transcontinental Railroad was built in six years, and they started construction during the Civil War. I would say that’s a pretty big socioeconomic challenge for starting a big project. And then in our lifetimes, in just the last 15 years, China has built, and I still look at this number and I’m like, how is this even possible?

Roger Rudick (1m 54s):
25,000 miles of high-speed rail. So when we talk about what’s possible, what’s impossible, clearly we could finish California’s high-speed rail system in five years. It can be done. It’s within the, the realm of physical possibilities. The United States could pull this off. We’ve pulled off greater challenges than this. So let’s start this conversation with Boris Lipkin, who basically is in charge of construction for Northern California with the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Boris, if I wrote you a check for – and I think the estimate is something like a hundred billion dollars right now – I’m gonna get my checkbook out, start writing, how long would it take? What are the challenges? How are we gonna get this project done faster? And I guess you can start out by saying where are we right now for people who need to know that?

Boris Lipkin (2m 38s):
Thanks Roger. I’m happy to jump in and help sort of maybe set the stage a little bit for this conversation. So, as you mentioned, my role is the Northern California Regional Director for the High-Speed Rail Authority is, I oversee the project from basically San Francisco out to Merced County. And just to give a sense of where things stand today: right now, the Authority has 119 miles under construction in Central Valley. So you can see the, the bridge behind me. That’s one of the structures, and that one’s actually completed at this point. And we anticipate the first construction package out of that 119 miles to actually finish in the coming weeks. Contributors towards the electrification of the Caltrain corridor. And that 50 miles is well on its way.

Boris Lipkin (3m 19s):
We will be largely ready for high-speed rail by next year. At the same time, between San Francisco and Los Angeles – So the rest of the system, as we go out from the [Central] Valley into the Bay Area and down to the Los Angeles basin, we have over 400 miles of that environmentally cleared at this point. We have one section left between Palmdale and Burbank, and we anticipate finishing that environmental clearance by the end of this year, basically. So how we’re doing this is, and with the support of the current administration, we’re advancing the program in building blocks with the available funds that we have right now. The focus is on getting trains running in the Central Valley as soon as we can, where the construction’s ongoing, and then continue to advance the work to expand out and be ready for the funding that we might need.

Boris Lipkin (4m 2s):
And, and to your question about the, the big check, that certainly funding is needed to get out of the Valley and to the Bay Area and to Southern California. So that’s sort of where we’re at. That’s what’s on our plate. The way we’re doing this is in building blocks as as I mentioned. But you know, I guess maybe to kick off a little bit of the conversation around some of the, the hurdles, if you will, and I can start there and we can talk about some of them in more detail. You know, some of the big things – and of course, funding is the first one. Because if you don’t have full funding, you know, not only can you just simply not do the work, but you also end up dealing with a lot of complexity around prioritizing work. So what should we do now? What should we do next, you know? And those are discussions that can take a long time and obviously involve more than just us as the Authority.

Boris Lipkin (4m 45s):
It involves a broader constituency that has views on those kinds of prioritization and, and setting of those priorities. Other challenges, you know, are when we build even the portions that are already in construction, when we are dealing with hundreds and sometimes thousands of different veto points essentially, or at least hurdles from third parties, you know – requirements and things that create either blackout windows in construction because an irrigation district might be needing to use their facility that we intersect in some way in a very specific timing tied to the growing season, for example. Or BNSF [Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a Class I railroad] might have a moratorium on the last couple months of the year, because that’s when all the holiday shopping and shipping happens.

Boris Lipkin (5m 28s):
There’s permitting and other things that all kind of add up to the narrowing of construction windows of when you can actually do work. And now all of those are based on important values that we have, you know, prior rights, endangered species and other things. But those are all the things that are the push and pull on how quickly you can do something. And then the last, kind of, couple things I’ll mention of course is you know, just the construction industry scale. If you talk about $100 billion over five years, that’s roughly $20 billion a year. That’s not insignificant to the scale of California’s construction industry, which is about $900 billion a year or so in terms of its total. So we’re talking about some pretty big, big numbers. It’s a question of, can that level of construction happen in that kind of timeframe?

Roger Rudick (6m 8s):
So even if we had the money, we wouldn’t necessarily have the labor force to do it.

Carter Lavin (6m 11s):
Well, and I’m, I’m gonna hop in on this side. Carter Lavin, I’m a transportation advocate. I’ve brought statewide efforts across California on a lot of fronts. Most recently, [I] was heavily involved with the effort to save kind of traditional regional transit, BART Uni, things like that. You know, labor shortages are a very common thing that happen across the board in every sector. And when we talk about, like, the money thing or things like that – there are people in other parts of the United States who would absolutely love to come to California and do the work. When we talk about, you know, the Transcontinental Railroad coming out, yeah, there was a labor shortage in Promontory Point, Utah. People move with this and I think it’s important when we talk about the context within California of, you know, $20 billion a year – that’s the highway budget.

Carter Lavin (6m 55s):
You know, California, on a regular basis, without blinking an eye, spends $20 billion on that. And you know, yes, there are things, but this is one of those parts that Boris is saying when we prioritize it more, it can happen a lot faster. Because we say, okay, well now we have some people who maybe were working on, they were pouring concrete on construction highway projects and now they’re doing on the high-speed rail. Maybe there were people who were finishing up in Florida on Brightline and now they’re coming out to California. Like there’s plenty of people out there.

Roger Rudick (7m 24s):
Or even internationally. I mean the Transcontinental Railroad obviously was constructed by laborers who came from overseas. Obviously not always treated very well, but it was done. And they didn’t have the benefit of any machinery that we have today.

Eric Eidlin actually is a instructor at San Jose State University at the Mineta Transportation Institute. He also does station planning for the city of San Jose. Eric, what do they do differently – I know you have a lot of experience with the high-speed rail in Europe – that they managed to get these projects done, I think a lot quicker than we do. Can you touch on that a little bit?

Eric Eidlin (7m 55s):
Yeah, thank you for the intro. And I’ll mention my class is actually happening right now and they, they’ve joined us, so thanks to all of them. So a couple of things. So these places worldwide with high-speed rail, generally not in every case, but in many cases in, in Europe, certainly there is a deep tradition of passenger rail ridership. I mean, I guess you could say going back, we used to have that. But there wasn’t quite the, the break, you know, in places like Germany, Switzerland, France from that, that we saw in in the US where, you know, certainly in those places in Europe, you know, auto ownership is pretty widespread, has been, you know, since the seventies at least. But there was always this sense that riding the train is a really important way to connect places and to get around.

Eric Eidlin (8m 41s):
So maybe more political support. And also related to that, there’s always been a need for station design, making sure that the systems that support a station, whether it’s the local transit that feeds into it, that that all works well. It’s not some theoretical thing that in the future, maybe this would be great to have a rail system that I can depend on to get from Budapest to Vienna or whatever. But it’s actually something that people in their daily lives, they have used and so they see the urgency and there’s yeah, perhaps more political support, which then feeds into, you know, real work and then there’s real work. So there are real people trained and experienced in doing these projects.

Carter Lavin (9m 24s):
Yeah. Well and I think to that point, just to hop in, you know, and this is why I think the Central Valley segment is such a crucial part. And it’s so great that it’s happening because, you know, you travel on 99 now, pretty crowded, a lot of people are gonna be riding on that. And as Boris, you were saying, okay, we have, you know, electrifying Caltrain – which high-speed rail is paying for a large part of – now all of a sudden we have a lot of people on that. And now that goes out to San Jose, like that becomes kind of glaringly obvious. It becomes a very easy thing for a, you know, an assembly member of San Jose, you know, an Ash Kalra or, you know, someone like this to say, okay, let’s, like, connect these two points. And I think you’re right about this political will issue of saying, you know, to the BNSF, okay, great, the holidays are important, we still get another week to do construction work or what have you. Or, okay, well we’ll double down on some mountainside drilling. But yeah, like it’s kind of building that political support, I think is a great question.

Roger Rudick (10m 20s):
Is that the key? I mean, I feel like most Californians at this point, at some point in their lives have gotten a chance to travel at least to the East Coast of the United States and taken some decent, at least semi high-speed rail services, if not, you know, they’ve gone to China or Japan or Europe. But is that the biggest challenge here that we just gotta get people into the right mindset that they say, Hey, you know, we spend $20 billion a year in California on highways, maybe we can spend half of that on rebuilding our rail system?

Carter Lavin (10m 48s):
I think most Californians can barely afford rent. [Rudick: Yeah.] I think most Californians are worried about putting food on the table. Most Californians are struggling, and I think 4N Party’s like, yeah, and the high-speed rail is going to help them. You know, when we talk about job access, when you say, okay, you’re having a hard time affording rent. Like, you know, frankly speaking, the high-speed rail project is in a sense one of California’s biggest bit of affordable housing infrastructures going on. Personally, as an activist who lives in Oakland, I think we should have a lot more people living in Oakland as well. But, like, the high-speed rail is a housing tool. It’s a jobs tool, it’s a thing like that. And you know, I think there needs to be stronger voices helping people kind of put two and two together that way.

Carter Lavin (11m 29s):
Because you know, folks are busy so you gotta talk to ’em and you know, talk to ’em and say, okay, this is important, and isn’t this ridiculous that they have to stop constructing at this hour, at this time of year because of this thing. Can we tell your county supervisor to pass a, you know, an exemption or something like that?

Roger Rudick (11m 47s):
Yeah, actually when we talked before we actually did the session, Carter, you brought up the idea of working in 24-hour shifts and having multiple shifts rather than working overnight. I mean, Boris, is that something we could do? I mean, I mean, look, if this were an existential threat, if it were World War II or something, people just built stuff as fast as they could and all the stops were taken out. What would you say are sort of the first stops that we, as political activists, should be looking at taking out? So this can get built faster?

Boris Lipkin (12m 15s):
I guess to your question about, you know, are we doing night-time construction for example? The basic answer is, most construction happens from basically one hour after sunrise and then until one hour before sunset. That’s the typical window. There’s often restrictions on night-time construction based on habitat and other things that might be around, or the context within which you’re building, whether you’re in a community, or other folks you might disturb with light or noise during the night-time. Of course there’s some things like you might, you know, be drilling a pot that will take 36 hours and there’s nothing you could do, you’re gonna work, work through the night on those kinds of things. [Rudick: Yeah, yeah.] So I, I mean, I think the, the number one thing is, and it seems like the basic answer, but having certainty of funding lets you set up a schedule that you can then work to deliver.

Boris Lipkin (12m 59s):
And that’s by far the, the hardest thing on this project is, this project has never been fully funded. So when the voters approved it in 2008, they gave us basically onefifth of the money and said, Hey, we want this big high-speed rail system, but go find matching funds somewhere else. Now we’ve been, you know, very fortunate, you know, that in the intervening years we have been able to meet the matching requirements out of that original bond and advance the program, you know, with strong support throughout the years. But the question of, well how much do we do now, and how much should we advance each piece, really gets to the schedule, right? [Rudick: Yeah.] It gets to, how soon can we see trains? How soon can we extend to the Bay Area or to Los Angeles out of the Valley? And so those are the kind of practical realities. Of course there’s lots of things about, you know, how do we design tunnels?

Boris Lipkin (13m 43s):
We have several long tunnels that we need to build. Those are some of the long lead time items. Do we have multiple entrance points where tunnel boring machines basically, you know, tunnel towards each other. That’s kind of a common technique that gets used on longer grade tunnel construction, but there’s kinds of new things that also would need to bring to the construction industry. There’s no rail tunnel in the US that’s over 10 miles. And so, talking about some of the longest rail tunnels in North America, that would be part of the system. And so we need the innovation that exists elsewhere to be able to be applied here. And you know, we’re certainly very cognizant of that and working to bring that over.

Roger Rudick (14m 17s):
I know tunnels are a big part of it. Eric, do you wanna comment on some of the tunnels in Europe? I know there’s the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the English Channel Tunnel; the Japanese have massive train tunnels as well. I mean, it seems to me this is not really an unknown. We just have to figure out, you know, who does it best? Who would you say does it best in Europe and why?

Eric Eidlin (14m 35s):
Well, certainly the, the Swiss and the Austrians have a, a bit of an advantage there. You know, I, I just, I was in Europe last month and traveled through the Simplon tunnel, which was the longest for most of last century. That one’s 12 [miles long], but so it was completed around 1900. So yeah, this, the expertise does exist globally, and I think that’s stuff that we can learn from fairly easily. There are, of course, as Boris will appreciate very well, you know, these rules about hiring, you know, American workers, American content, and those are all well-intentioned, but we obviously should try to find the, the best balance. But to go back to your earlier point, Roger, I mean, you, you brought up the sense of urgency, you know, like if this were the Second World War.

Eric Eidlin (15m 22s):
Well, I, I think a lot of people would say, you know, this last month, July was the warmest on record, right? And, you know, we heard about temperatures off the coast of Florida above 100 Fahrenheit; temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea, you know, five degrees Celsius above normal. So some people would say, you know, there is a climate apocalypse in Europe. Many people are, and you might’ve read about this, are refusing to fly because of the climate implications. They are, you know, traveling by train. So obviously this project will take a long time to build, so the payoff will be in the long term. But I, I do think we do need to be thinking on that time horizon. You know, it’s not just about the greenhouse gas emissions in five, 10 years, but in 30 years. And, you know, how are we setting ourselves up for the future long-term?

Roger Rudick (16m 15s):
Along those lines, California’s high-speed rail project should be, in my view, seen as sort of a first step. I mean, we’re, we’re gonna build a world class 220 mile-per-hour rail line between the states’ two biggest cities, and its most populous cities in the Central Valley. I wonder though, I mean, if maybe the approach isn’t, at least from a political perspective – and Carter, this is something you can touch on, I think – is it a little misguided because we’ve allowed the reporting, and maybe this is my fault too, to focus a little too much on this one line? I mean, it should be viewed as just the beginning, and eventually there’d be a lot of connections built into it. I, I mean, Brightline West to Las Vegas comes to mind, which would eventually join the high-speed rail project. But I wonder, you know, with the growing climate emergency, should we be maybe selling this to the public as you know, a, a real sea change in how we get around?

Carter Lavin (17m 4s):
Yeah, I think – so, to be clear, the number one source of carbon emissions in California is cars. [Rudick: Yeah.] People driving their cars. And so when we are connecting tens of millions of people with high-speed rail, when we’re connecting the 6.5 million people who live in the Central Valley with a high-speed rail, this will offset so much. This will get so many cars off the road, which is, hey, for the truckers of the world, great boon to them. But like this is one of the biggest shifts in carbon emissions. This is a massive – you know, it’s not the equivalent of planting a rainforest, but this is planting a huge flipping forest equivalent of carbon emission, this. And also, fun fact that a lot of people don’t know – like, the High-Speed Rail Authority has been doing a lot of mitigation for their construction work.

Carter Lavin (17m 47s):
Like there’s a lot of, this is a giant tiptoeing very, very gently through communities, and all this stuff. It was just wonderful. But you know, I think, you know, we’re at a point where people are protesting autonomous vehicles that are driving in San Francisco because it’s more cars on the road. We have people protesting in Oakland yesterday. Oakland is about to unleash a new carbon bomb by expanding the Oakland airport drastically, right? For a ton more flights. And yeah, as Eric’s saying, like, flying is cooking the planet, and there’s so many flights from the Bay Area to LA or Bay Area to southern California, there’s gobs of them. And just displacing those flights with rail is gonna be one of the massive things.

Carter Lavin (18m 27s):
But when we as rail advocates, when we as justice advocates, when we as climate advocates are talking about this and talking with our, you know, friends in other parts of the environmental movement, like, you know, I think people have lost the plot about kind of what the Rail is and why it’s done. And so now that, and we have a clean energy goal in California, have made a ton of progress on clean energy and we keep needing to do that, but we haven’t moved the needle at all on transportation.

Roger Rudick (18m 53s):
Well I wonder, do people in general realize and that a high-speed train doesn’t actually have a tailpipe? Like, I wonder, do they, do they under, does the average person understand that when we say it’s zero emissions, it really is zero emissions and it really is potential – you know, we, we already have the technology that the Europeans are doing this. I mean the French high-speed rail system, I mean I don’t wanna get into nuclear power, but it’s essentially run on nukes, no CO2 coming out of it at all. So most people are moving around France without generating greenhouse gases. And I wonder, like, maybe Eric or Boris could address that a little bit. Like, is that something we just have to get across to people in the United States and in California?

Boris Lipkin (19m 33s):
I mean, I think that this project and both kind of what it is and how we’re doing it has sort of been at least part of California’s ambition towards, and leadership in trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, we made the commitment in 2008 that we would run the system on renewable energy. At that time, that was sort of this, you know, lofty goal. Not a ton had been sort of studied about what’s feasible in that regard. I think BART is on their way to running on a hundred percent renewable energy by 2025. So I mean, what was a lofty goal at one point is now sort of, it’s not mundane yet, but it’s certainly within reach. And so, you know, I think that California has always positioned itself as a leader on these issues and continues to take that role. So I think that’s still very much part of the bones of, you know, what we’re doing and, and and how it fits into the overall big picture of what we’re trying to do in terms of, you know, as I think Carter was trying to explain, taking cars off the road, taking planes, you know, the air industry is much [more] decarbonized even than cars are. And so this is sort of part of meeting our greenhouse gas goals is certainly one of the things that we’re trying to achieve, along with all the connectivity [and] economic benefits that a system like this offers.

Maybe one thing, to go back to an earlier question that you were talking about: some of the differences between US and Europe. And the thing that comes to mind for me, or Asia in this regard at least, is that in many ways high-speed rail projects are sort of the largest projects that governments usually undertake, in terms of transportation, certainly. In other parts of the world, that becomes sort of these national priorities in a way that I don’t think we’ve penetrated yet. Now I think we’re certainly the largest rail construction project anywhere in the country, I can tell you that right now, and probably one of the largest, you know, transportation projects total. But that hasn’t, at least to this point fully reflected sort of the national prioritization of these things. What I think about is sort of in the, you know, if you go back 50 or you know, a hundred years we’ve invested, you know, trillions into cars. We’ve invested hundreds of billions into airports. We’ve invested probably tens of billions into rail. And so what we have in our project is that the state so far has been about 85% of the funding and the project has received has been state funds with only about 15% from the federal government. When we did the highway system, that was basically the reverse, it was 80 to 90% federal funding for the highway projects.

Carter Lavin (21m 51s):
And I wanna step in on this, particularly about the federal question. Because one thing that’s been frustrating for me as a person who’s traveled throughout California a lot and loves California deeply, is, frankly, there’s a lot of people who just throw way too much shade on the Central Valley. The Central Valley is larger than 32 other states. Like, the Central Valley alone, what’s happening at 6.5 million –check the population thing – like that, alone, is a massive gigantic project. And alone is great. We obviously want to do the whole thing, obviously we will and we can do it in five years. But when people talk about federal funding? You know, just because California isn’t balkanized like, you know, all these East Coast states where if you – you know, I’ve gone on runs in the East Coast where you like cross state boundaries, like I’m, it’s hard to do that in California.

Carter Lavin (22m 40s):
We are still paying the federal government, California has given the federal government billions of dollars in the time period of this project. And so this should be a federal priority. And I think one thing in terms of advocating for that money, of saying, Hey Senator Padilla, hey you know, Bar– you know, we have a senate race going on right now. Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff are going across this country trying, or across the state, trying to tell everyone, vote for me! And a big part is, we say, okay, what are you gonna do to get the high-speed rail done faster, because this is a national priority? And they might say, well, it’s like okay, well this is one of the biggest things, you know, it was just the one year anniversary of the IRA, the big federal funding, and it’s like, you know, this is a cleaner investment.

Carter Lavin (23m 23s):
This is going to do more to lower emissions than a lot of other projects, and it can be done in five years. And I think a big part that people don’t understand is, people think that – just my conversations and seeing the comments on the post when I announced this part – people think construction’s happening 24/7. Like people think, you know, the High-Speed Rail [Authority] has all the money and it’s just getting frittered away, and they don’t realize that, like, you have to sprint to a construction site, do a bunch of things and then get out of there for BNSF to do whatever they’re gonna do. Or that, like, various people are able to say, oh no, you can’t do this construction work now, and you have to do it elsewhere. Like they don’t realize that what 20% of the work has just been fighting to do the work, and that is a huge delay.

Roger Rudick (24m 7s):
Yeah, I think they also don’t realize that the federal government has, you know, sort of given billions in matching funds, and then cut it off, and then tried to claw it back, depending on the change in administration. And I wonder, Eric, you know, we’ve got high-speed rail in all these other countries with different political systems. China’s political system is pretty different from France, is maybe not as different from Spain’s between France and Spain, but how come all these other countries can figure out how to get behind what is to them a basic transportation system and their federal government will continue to support it and ours, it’s become this highly politicized left-versus-right battle. Like that’s something I sincerely have never understood. Do you have any sense of it?

Eric Eidlin (24m 46s):
Yeah, well it goes back a little bit to what I was saying. I mean you, you mentioned a range of countries, so yeah, China, obviously a very strong central government. In Europe it would be, you know, France also has a very strong central government. For them, high-speed rail was a bit of a space race, you know, like it was an issue of national pride, being the first in Europe. Certainly it isn’t that for us. And then these federal countries like Switzerland or Germany typically, you know, they’re governed by, you know, more coalitions. But generally whether it’s right or left, there is a sense that passenger rail is a real necessity. So maybe that goes back to your earlier question about like, you know, you said, you speculated most people have ridden passenger rail, been to the Northeast or something.

Eric Eidlin (25m 31s):
So there’s the climate crisis, you know, perhaps that’s more a priority for some people than others. You know, another big focus of of this project is building communities around the stations. So there’s been a lot of work in Fresno, and we can’t underscore enough the importance of doing that correctly and making sure those areas right around the stations, they are not just these vast park and ride lots, you know. We’re really making the most of them in terms of economic development. We’re making these walkable places, you know, certainly in San Jose that’s what we’re trying to do. And you know, really making for seamless connections by sustainable modes: transit, you know, walk, bike, emerging modes as well.

Eric Eidlin (26m 15s):
That’s really a priority. So I mean, I don’t know how many people have really – like, if you’ve been to Europe and maybe if you’re there on a work trip, you really understand like, wow, how much I can get done when I’m traveling from Paris to Marseilles on the train. You know, going straight from Gare de Lyon in the center of Paris to Gare Central in the center of Marseilles, and how much time you save by not having to go to this airport that’s way out, you know, in the boonies. I think those things and that experience is maybe a little bit harder to convey, but I think the more we can do that, maybe, you know, the more political support we will get. And then all of this, the implementation of the project, I think, gets easier with more public and political support

Carter Lavin (26m 60s):
To that point. Like I think one thing that’s important to keep in mind when we talk about California and building things like – the California housing crisis is deeply connected to our ability or inability to allow things to be built. And when we talk about what’s gonna happen in Fresno and the, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who live there, like that’s a huge draw. That’s a huge thing to build around. It’s a huge cluster like what they’ve done in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, like that’s a great station. All the buses, like the bus goes near my house, across the Bay Bridge, right in there. And then you, you know, take an elevator down or staircase and head off to LA, head out to Fresno. And I think a big thing that is important is, it’s not about Gare de Lyon or all these places. It’s saying, Hey, you’re in Fresno, you know people in Merced, like you go to Merced, that’s not the edge of the world.

Carter Lavin (27m 49s):
You’ll just take the train, the train’s just gonna be the easiest thing. ’cause you’re gonna look at traffic and be like, ugh, 99! Gross; I’ll just go to Merced. Like helping people understand that. And I think, like, one thing that’s been really interesting is seeing how the High-Speed Rail kind of tells its story? I think there’s a lot of other folks who need to be telling this story as well of, like, helping people imagine, yeah, you’re gonna be on the train and you might not go from SF to LA but there’s a lot of people who go from SF to San Jose and a lot of people go from Gilroy and, like, that’s big. You know, like that’s a story and helping people understand that this isn’t for their children, this is for them and this is, you know, people have five-year plans as like individuals and yeah, this is part of it.

Eric Eidlin (28m 27s):
Yeah, and if I could just piggyback on that quickly. So I, I think that’s one other dimension of high-speed rail, and rail generally, that is commonly understood, I think, in other places, but not here, is the, you know, it’s something that really allows you to tie together multiple cities and often, you know, not necessarily the very largest cities. Like if you’re taking a plane, obviously you’re taking off in one city and you’re landing in another, you don’t have the opportunity to connect all those cities you’re flying over. And a train, a high-speed train, you can do it with relatively little travel time penalty. So you know, Fresno, Bakersfield, that’s a real advantage.

Roger Rudick (29m 5s):
I think this might be back to Carter a little bit, but how do we sell people in the state, let’s say in coastal California, who are not gonna have access to a high-speed train unless they really go out of their way even after the initial segments are built.

Boris Lipkin (29m 18s):
Sorry, Roger, I just wanted just jump in on this, ’cause I think – I just wanna give a little bit of perspective on where the state is broadly on the project, because I do think it’s sort of helpful for table setting and answering the question that you just asked. A couple different data points, just for folks to be aware of: when the project was first approved by the voters, it got 53% of the vote. So 47% of people voted against it. And in the most recent polling done by UC Berkeley, the support had risen by a few points. The total support was about 20 points net positive. So support was in the fifties, opposition was in the thirties at this point. But the other thing that’s sort of a useful data point for this question is, again, it comes back a little bit to the federal funding, but in the bipartisan infrastructure law, it actually did create a new pot of inner-city rail funds for the first time since the Recovery Act in 2009 at the federal level.

Boris Lipkin (30m 7s):
And so we currently have a pretty large $3 billion application in to that funding program and we’ve had tremendous support with it. So we’ve had, you know, obviously, support from this administration, but also the previous two governors, [a] Democrat and a Republican, we’ve had support from 36 members of Congress, both senators. And so to say that there isn’t a push behind this from California, I just – we see it every day. There’s still always gonna be more to do, but I think California is pretty united in wanting to see this project happen. There’s all the questions of, you know, how much can we do, how fast and, and I’m glad we’re having this conversation about that topic, but I do want to, you know, make sure that we at least at the table of – the support is there. And we we’re very lucky to have that because there’s no way to move something like this forward without very, very strong support. And, and we’ve certainly had that across the board.

Carter Lavin (30m 55s):
And that’s I think such a key part. Like there is support there and it’s about mobilizing it, you know, so for the folks listening in, when was the last time you called the governor and said, Hey, I want the high-speed rail done in five years. Like you can google Gavin Newsom’s phone number, you get his office number, you call him and do that. Like that’s what looks like there’s currently, and I’ve checked around, like, there isn’t a petition right now where people could say, Hey, I want the high-speed rail done now. Like there’s a petition to get a crosswalk on the street near my house. And there is not a petition in support of one of the largest pieces of infrastructure going on in America and definitely the one in California. Like, there is a grassroots mobilization, which does make it easier for folks to say, like as you’re saying, like you know, Monterey County, like all these places, you know, helping out. There’s this great effort in Santa Cruz to get a rail line there, and because you know, going over 17 to San Jose is really hard and they’re gonna link up to Gilroy and guess what, when you link up to Gilroy, you link up – Gilroy’s a gateway to the world for a lot of these folks and it’s gonna be, and I think when you talk about mobilizing this, you know, whether it’s from a climate perspective, which is hey, you know, you would like emissions to go down, this is the largest single thing that California could do to lower emissions in a pretty massive way and move the needle. If it’s from a, just a pure physics perspective, like we’re not gonna double the width of 101.

Carter Lavin (32m 13s):
[Rudick: Yeah.] That is just not happening. That is a lot – that! When you’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, that’s hundreds of billions of dollars. And I think helping people recognize that they win when this happens is a key part, because as Boris is saying like, you know, this isn’t a technical issue. Like yes, there are mountains, they need hells drilling as Eric’s saying, there are boring machines. And as Boris is saying, it’s like, okay, should we do a double side bore, like they did in the [English] Channel, like the Chunnel? You know, in Sierra Nevada, like, you can walk into the old rail tunnel there where they did a four-side – they did two, and then they dropped a shaft and they did it this way. That’s probably outdated, and fancy machinery wouldn’t allow that. But like, we have technical things to do this, and we are a lot closer to being meaningfully done than I think people think about.
And so I think the part it’s important to know is that, like, you know, the folks who are listening in want this quick, we gotta fight for it.

Roger Rudick (33m 5s):
Yeah. Feeding into what we were just talking about, what can average people do to get the feds to sort of get on track with this? I mean, I remember in 2008 I remember the – there was a grassroots push; people were out gathering signatures to get the high-speed rail project started. Now what do we do, especially when it comes to the federal government to get it built faster, get it finished and carry on from there?

Carter Lavin (33m 28s):
So for the next couple of months, and I’ll, I’ll take this as just Carter Laff and transportation activists. So I don’t work for the High-Speed Rail, I don’t work for the City of San Jose. I, I could say all sorts of things. Right now, California has a unique situation politically going on, in which we have three people who are in Congress who are running for Senate, and they are all saying, Hey, vote for me. If you are a person who is a registered voter in California and registered to vote, and if you’re registered as a Democrat, you have probably gotten a text from Katie Porter’s campaign, from Adam Schiff, from Barbara Lee. You’re probably going to get calls soon, you’ll be getting mailers, you’ll be getting everything. And if you want the High-Speed Rail, saying to them, what are you going to do to get the high-speed rail done sooner? What have you done to support this project?

Carter Lavin (34m 9s):
And it’s great that they’ve signed onto letters and you know, Barbara Lee’s people has done a lot of stuff and they’ll probably say, oh, you know, Congresswoman Lee has done X, Y, and Z. And you say, great, I’d like to hear more of this. And injecting this into that election is such a huge way to say, okay, when we go for this vote, there’s all these horse tradings that go on in DC, there’s all this stuff going on. You know, maybe it gets tacked onto a Ukrainian aid package. Which by the way, the federal government came up with $80 billion for Ukraine aid, which is great and we should, and helping reduce oil consumption in California is a good way of helping hit Putin where it hurts. But we need to ask a lot louder for this stuff. And that’s a great like wedge point just in the next couple of months.

Roger Rudick (34m 49s):
Or just put rail transportation on the same financial footing as highways and airports. Yeah, that would be enough that we could, you know, yeah,

Carter Lavin (34m 56s):
I’m looking at Boris’s background, which, you know, when people are listening to the podcast, maybe they won’t see it, but this is a beautiful structure of the high-speed rail going over the freeway. And the question is, oh well is that a piece of high-speed rail infrastructure, or is that a piece of freeway infrastructure? And it’s like, well, who paid for it? The Highway Authority could have paid for it. I don’t know if they chipped in, but you made their lives a lot better – Boris is shaking his head, for those of you who are just on audio. And like, one thing that I’ve learned in just prepping for this that’s been shocking is the amount of money the high-speed rail folks have had to pay PG & E, because they’re having PG & E move wires that PG & E was gonna probably do anyway, and just saying, Hey, PG & E, no – split that cost, go 50/50, whatever, 70/30 – cuts tens of billions – like, tons of this off of it.

Roger Rudick (35m 40s):
So I, I wanted to get some of the audience questions in here. I think this is a Boris question, but since Carter talked about PG & E – how much of the electrical infrastructure is gonna be controlled and operated by the High-Speed Rail Authority and how much of it is outsourced?

Boris Lipkin (35m 52s):
Well, looking to have our facilities, for example, our stations be net zero energy. So basically that they can generate the energy on site for their use. [Rudick: Oh!] We also have a pretty extensive plan for solar and battery use for the actual train itself. And then, and this is sort of our work with how we tie into the rest of the grid and everything else, is that combination of having renewable energy from the grid as well as what we actually can generate ourselves and store ourselves, so that, you know – as we’ve all kinda experienced the last few years, and that’s reality for parts of the year – and so we wanna make sure that our system is resilient to those kinds of disruptions. And so that’s where battery storage and other things come in, ensuring that reliability even when something might be going wrong.

Roger Rudick (36m 35s):
I wanna be clear, you’re talking about battery banks on land, not on the train.

Boris Lipkin (36m 40s):
Yes, not on the trains. The trains will be powered by Overhead system, but the power for that Overhead Cary system has to be brought from somewhere and in the times it might need to be stored somewhere for a period of time before used basically. And so that’s where that interconnectivity to the grid comes in. That’s where those battery storage facilits come in.

Carter Lavin (36m 55s):
Yeah, I mean in a sense this project is also a major massive transmission line that’s being built throughout California, not just the High-Speed Rail, it is the longest tunnels in North America for trains. And it’s also this gigantic power line. And I think like there’s all sorts of other benefits to that

Roger Rudick (37m 12s):
Of course. I mean a side effect, a positive side effect of the project is it’s making a stronger electrical grid for the state of California. Isn’t that right? I mean the overhead wires are part of the grid.

Boris Lipkin (37m 20s):
Yeah, I mean I, I think the bottom line of having a long linear core has various potential uses and benefits – you know, electrical, fiber, other things. And this is the first new major right of way created in the state probably since the aqueducts and the highway system were built. I mean, those are the last couple that I can think of. And so every time you do one of these, you have opportunities to leverage that investment that’s being made. But that’s, you know, part of what’s new and different here is just the scale of creating a new guideway, creating a new right of way, is massive. And that’s I think what sometimes gets lost. I mean, 119 miles? The last time we did 119 miles of a new rail line, the Ford Model T was the number one selling car. I mean, yeah, this, these are not things that we do every day.

Roger Rudick (38m 8s):
I have an audience question that fits right into that, but for us, I know the answer to this, but the audience, I certainly like to know, is there someplace they can go and see a drone flyover of the right of way that you’ve built thus far? And I know the answer is yes, but do you have that information? We can, we can put it in the –

Boris Lipkin (38m 22s):
Yeah, the, the simple answer is there’s a website, buildhsr.com and it has, I mean I, I don’t know how many hours of drone video and how many thousands of photos at this point, of all the various construction. I mean, we have lots of information there. We also have lots of videos on our YouTube channel. So if you search California High-Speed Rail Authority on YouTube, you’ll find, again, you know, hundreds of construction videos and other information about the project.

Carter Lavin (38m 45s):
Yeah, I also gonna put a plug for the Instagram account, I’ve started following the Instagram account ’cause it’s like the drone footage, but they have Levi five beats. So you know, for Zoomers and your low five feet videos, it’s kinda nice.

Roger Rudick (38m 56s):
Yeah, and I think this is Boris and Eric, but it’s my understanding – and you really see this from the drone footage – when you’ve got those hundred miles of prepared right away and, and most of the bridges and flyovers finished, the actual laying of the track doesn’t take that long. Like, you know, it’s mostly automated. I’ve seen films of these machines that work in Europe and in Asia and they basically – it’s just, it’s itself a long train that basically just kind of hurls the next layer of, of tracks and rails in front of it. And you just sort of feed raw materials into one end and you, you get tracks coming out the other. Is that [heh] – am I oversimplifying a bit?

Boris Lipkin (39m 29s):
Well you’re not, it’s a little bit simplified because you know, there’s other things that can go with it. But the basic point – and again, I think we’ve done a lot of reforms about how we stage our delivery and how we actually manage the project. and that’s been kind of one of the key things over the years and certainly under this administration that we’ve been implementing. But once you’re essentially outta the ground – so once you’ve built the civil works, the, the structures, the guideway itself – you have much more control of your own destiny. So when I talked about, in the beginning, those veto points and all the, you know, prior rights issues and all those interactions with the kind of external world that might stop you from doing things – you might still have requirements, you might still have, you know, no night-time work in sensitive habitat or, or community areas or something like that – but you have, you know, much more of that universal access of doing the work when you need it, and being able to go sequentially, you know, down the line. We’re gonna lay track at however many, you know, hundreds of feet per day and we’re just gonna keep doing that until we get to the end. And so it’s a much more straightforward construction work that needs to happen.

Carter Lavin (40m 30s):
To the point about the kind of original prompting question of like, five years – could this still happen? And I think a big part’s like, look, there’s three-ish complicated tunnels to be done, which can all be done at the same time, but that would be a big thing. But like the High-Speed Rail has done the vast majority of the hard work of like lining up the shot, you know, this is a little bit of, to make a cake from scratch, first you have to create the universe. Like, there wasn’t a train there that we just had to upgrade, except for in the case of, you know, San Francisco down to San Jose and then to Gilroy, in which yeah, that is an easy, I mean, I’m not doing the work, but like that’s easy work because it’s an existing track, it’s an existing thing. Let’s do that. One of the things I’m very impressed by is the Los Angeles Union Station, like LA’s getting a new station and Eric could talk about this a lot, but like LA’s getting a new station basically entirely because of this project. And like, you know, I used to live in downtown San Jose where you’re doing over there, Eric, is pretty massive.

Roger Rudick (41m 24s):
Well, San Francisco got a new station too. It’s just not connected, but…

Carter Lavin (41m 27s):
[It’s] connected with a bunch of bus lines. It’s great.

Boris Lipkin (41m 29s):
We’re, we’re working on it. It’s, it’s moving forward.

Roger Rudick (41m 33s):
I think this is Boris and Eric. You know, we’ve seen kind of a new model of, of higher-speed trains and potentially a high-speed train with Brightline West between Vegas and the Los Angeles area; Rancho Cucamonga, I think, is where it’s gonna go to. But is this kind of new model of privatization with passenger rail, does it have the potential to change how the California project gets done, or to speed it up, or to give it any advantages?

Boris Lipkin (41m 56s):
I think it’s an interesting question for high-speed rail projects, and this is what we’ve seen internationally, is that the major barrier to a private entity developing these things is the upfront capital cost. The costs are just very big. And so while lots of systems operate on a commercial basis, so basically they can pay for their own operations, they can even generate, you know, revenue and profit out of the fare box – the upfront investment almost always has to come from the public sector. And so, you know, how much is Brightline still talking about a fully private project in Southern California? I mean they’ve applied for the same federal funding that we’ve applied for. So they’re looking for about, you know, $3.75 billion out of that program. The right of way for them has been through an agreement with the state of California to use the median of I-15. I mean, could you have any, any better luck than that in terms of right of way acquisition and needs?

So I guess the bottom line is, if Brightline West is to happen, it sounds like even they’ve kind of come around to the view that, [while] it might be led by a private entity, but we’ll have to have substantial necessity of dependence on the public sector. And from our vantage point, we think that the public sector has to play a lead role on these things. It’s just too big of a piece of public infrastructure to happen without [Rudick: yeah] the public sector. It doesn’t mean that we, you know, don’t want to tap into private innovation. For example, for us, we’ve, you know, had Deutsche Bahn, which is the German rail operator, as a potential early operator for our system.

Boris Lipkin (43m 24s):
And so we certainly see the operations side, you know, lots of roles for the private sector and some of that. So I think it’s finding the right balance in the right areas: where the public sector can do something better, that we should do it on the public side; and where the private sector might have some advantages, we should find ways to leverage that.

Roger Rudick (43m 41s):
Eric, did you have anything to add to that?

Eric Eidlin (43m 43s):
I, I pretty much agree with what Boris said. I I will say though, it, it is encouraging that there is an entity like Brightline proposing on these projects like LA to Las Vegas, which is by, you know, common wisdom that is a good high-speed rail corridor, the distances. And you know, they, they obviously pulled off this project in, in Florida, you know, it’s got some challenges with grade crossings and so on, but they’re a real credible private sector entity. So, we’ll see.

Carter Lavin (44m 9s):
Well, and to that point I’ll say, you know, fundamentally it’s good that Brightline’s stepping in and doing one of the easiest projects that could be an easy higher-speed rail project in a place that’s connecting two cities along an existing right of way. And that’s great! And the federal government should give the California High-Speed Rail and these – and also Bright line some money, because guess what? An aircraft carrier is $14 billion. Like, the idea of scarcity around funding is a total myth. Total myth. The United States is the richest country in the world. We have more than enough money to say, Hey, Brightline, hey California High-Speed Rail, let’s do it. You know, I think for some people who, you know, are watching the projects and maybe get confused about what’s going on. You know, the California high-speed rail is doing – you know, they’re not demolishing Fresno to build the, the rail line, which in the fifties is what happened.

Carter Lavin (44m 57s):
Like I live in Oakland. My city is a city scarred by freeway construction where the city just came – like when the federal government and state entity said, yeah, let’s just demolish this. Thousands and thousands of people were displaced. That’s not happening here. And I think that’s really important for that to be acknowledged. And so I think in terms of federal funding, the answer is yeah! And it’s saying to Barbara Lee and Katie Porter and Adam Schiff, like, yeah, this should not be the [California] High-Speed Rail and Brightline competing for this. It should be [Lipkin: collaborate] the government should be able to, yeah.

Eric Eidlin (45m 29s):
Yeah. And to Boris’ bigger point about, you know, the, the important public sector role. So one thing that is worrisome about this Bright Line proposal right, is their terminus in Rancho Cucamonga, which, you know, by what it seems like, is gonna be this huge park and ride lot and it’s very expensive to extend it deeper into LA. But ultimately to deliver the benefits of high-speed rail, like I talked about that trip earlier from Paris to Marse – you’re not gonna get that with a station in Rancho Cucamonga. It’s just too far east for most people in the LA Basin. So, so yeah, you know, it’s, it’s not enough.

Roger Rudick (46m 5s):
Just so listeners understand, California High-Speed Rail, Amtrak, the commuter rail in Los Angeles and San Francisco – they are on the same gauge of track. So there are opportunities either for people to transfer between different systems, or for the trains themselves to continue on each other’s tracking. So as systems are built out, there’s gonna be more flexibility. But you know, there, there aren’t, you know, basically barrier–

Carter Lavin (46m 27s):
Gauge wars.

Roger Rudick (46m 28s):
Yeah, there are no gauge wars. It’s not like BART, where you can’t run an Amtrak on BART’s tracks and vice versa. It actually is, fortunately, all these systems are being built in a standard way.

Carter Lavin (46m 36s):
And I’m glad you bring up BART because you know, one of the things that keeps coming up is this concept of, like, stable funding and, you know, Bart and other just basic existing transit systems across California were under threat this summer. Gavin Newsom proposed a $4 billion cut to transit funding. And you know, there’s a huge statewide effort to push back. Some of you may have seen the protest around this, but we generated 10,000 calls and letters into Sacramento, into the capital, to demand that and reverse those costs. And one, we

Roger Rudick (47m 7s):
Need to do that with high-speed rail and keep it up.

Carter Lavin (47m 9s):
Yeah, it was 10,000 calls and letters and that got a billion dollars. And it’s like, so when we talk about how much money, like how many calls and letters do we need to do to get more than a billion, it’s more calls and letters. And I think one of the things, so like Bart to the ridership and parking ride, like Bart is in the process of converting all these parking lots into housing developments and solve this crisis. And they are making money off that, that is helping them fiscally do that. You know, frankly, I don’t know if the, the High-Speed Rail Authority has that legal authority to do that soon, but like giving you all the ability to do that would be a huge boon economically.

Roger Rudick (47m 44s):
Yeah, and I mean, you know, famously the high-speed rail systems in Japan are actually supported by the real estate. They’re basically real estate enterprises. And it sounds like Brightline in Florida, actually, that’s their model as well, is they’ve built a lot of real estate in Miami and other cities that’ll, you know, really support the whole system. So any last thoughts from Eric, Boris and Carter?

Eric Eidlin (48m 6s):
Well, I’ll just quickly echo, you know, we need a greater sense of urgency and public and political purpose around this project. And I do think we do need more money also in the, what we used to call the bookend. So, you know, this perception that all the money’s going to the Central Valley, given how long it’s gonna take to build out the system, I think other parts of the state are gonna need to feel of the benefits and yeah, we need to get better at how we’re delivering this. So, and I’ll just give a shout-out to the Oxford Scholar, Ben Fluer, who has been in the media a lot recently, but he has a recipe for how we could do better and is getting attention. He was just in a webinar with the secretary of USDOT, so some of his ideas are getting some traction, and I think, you know, some of them would apply to this project.

Boris Lipkin (48m 54s):
And I would just say that, you know, I know that there’s this sort of Christmas-morning view of the project sometimes of, I voted for this thing in 2008, why isn’t it here already? And I think this, you know, I’m glad we’re having this conversation about being able to lift the, the veil a little bit on sort of, why is it so hard to do these big things and, you know, what are the, the trade-offs and values that we have? But I think it’s always useful to look at, you know, that lots has been done, and from my perspective, given how much has already been built, the main question at this point is, you know, how much of a high-speed rail system we can have. But it’s no longer the question of are we gonna have a high-speed rail system in California? And maybe that’s not as satisfactory to others as it is to me. But sort of crossing the viability threshold in, in this particular context, I think is a huge thing. And so we can still debate, you know, what should we do next and how fast should we do it in all those things. But being past the point where you can just say, we’re not gonna do this anymore, I, I think is a huge game changer. And I, I, I wanna keep that perspective out for folks of just where the program is at, at this point is sort of past the point of no return.

Roger Rudick (49m 52s):
Yeah, we’re well beyond that now. Yeah. And Carter, what’s the political takeaway here?

Carter Lavin (49m 57s):
I think if you’re listening to this and you’re a California High-Speed Rail hater, you know, hopefully this opened your eyes. Hopefully you have a little bit of faith and you know, honestly, for the person listening in who might not like the project or has hard feelings, I think the question to ask yourself is, do you want the project done now or do you want it done later? And if you say, look, I just want done great, make the call, call Governor Newsom. It’s a 916 number, you can google it and you got it. Yeah. And say, I just want the flipping thing done. And you can do that. And if you’re someone who says, okay, no, I like the project and I want it done sooner, it’s like, great. You can also call the governor. You can also call your Assembly member and your state senator and your county supervisor, and you are going to start getting a lot more contact from all these people running for Senate for your vote.

Carter Lavin (50m 42s):
Tell them! Say, I want this, and I want this now. I don’t want this in 20 years. I don’t want this in – stop telling me, my kids and my kids’ kids. I want this now, because the project is at this point where we can make the federal government and the state government – can step in and buy the boring machines, like, buy – step in and do a lot of this stuff and get it done quickly. And it’s something that it’s on us as the people who want it to write the petition, make the petition, fill it out, make the call, do that stuff, talk to a friend about it. Because I think as, like Boris and Roger and Eric and you know, people who’ve, you know, been tracking the project really closely for a long time, like one thing I, I want to flag: since 2008, there’s a lot of new Californians, a lot of people are alive today who weren’t alive during that vote.

Carter Lavin (51m 30s):
A lot of people have migrated to California. A lot of people have left California. The project – and we all, as people who care about this, have to continuously reintroduce people to it, and explain that this is the largest piece of climate progress that California is working on right now. That it is ready to go, and can be done a lot faster if it was given more permission and money to do so. And that us, as individuals or people in your church groups or business groups or what have you, can tell elected officials, Hey, we need this thing ASAP. And that’s what it takes. And we can do that.

Roger Rudick (52m 2s):
Yep. Okay. Thanks everyone. And we’ll be having many more meetings like this over the next five years, six years, maybe more.

Carter Lavin (52m 10s):
There we go. Thank you everyone so much for your time. Appreciate it.

Boris Lipkin:
Thanks everybody.

Roger Rudick (52m 14s):
Thanks a lot.

Eric Eidlin:
Thank you.