FRESNO, Calif. — Over concerns of a pair of Bay Area cities, the California High-Speed Rail Authority board finalized its choice of a route alternative for about 49 miles of tracks between San Francisco and San Jose.
Thursday’s actions included certification of thousands of pages of environmental analysis for the stretch, in which high-speed trains will eventually share an upgraded and electrified rail corridor with the Caltrain passenger train service on the San Francisco Peninsula.
The 8-0 vote (with one board member absent) took place in a meeting held by teleconference among rail authority board members scattered across the state.
It represents the latest step in providing the environmental clearance for a statewide system that is ultimately planned to link San Francisco with Los Angeles and Anaheim by way of the San Joaquin Valley, with electric-powered trains carrying passengers at speeds up to 220 mph.
“Today is really a momentous event, with a tremendous amount of work behind it to get where we are today with an environmentally cleared project from the Bay Area through the Central Valley,” Tom Richards, a Fresno developer and the authority board chairperson, said after the vote. “If nothing else, what it does is prepare and move this entire project forward toward construction.”
Brian Kelly, the rail agency’s chief executive officer, said certification of the San Francisco-San Jose corridor means the agency has now completed and certified its environmental analyses for all but two sections of the 500-mile San Francisco-Los Angeles/Anaheim system.
The only gaps in clearance are a 38-mile segment between the Mojave Desert city of Palmdale and the San Fernando Valley community of Burbank, and a stretch from downtown Los Angeles to Anaheim.
“A lot of people have lost sight that this project is about San Francisco to Los Angeles,” Kelly told The Fresno Bee after the vote. “With today’s environmental document being certified by our board, we have now cleared San Francisco into Los Angeles County.”
“It really reflects what we’re trying to do: get service started in the (San Joaquin Valley) where construction is under way, and we’re trying to advance that full Phase 1 system from San Francisco to Los Angeles,” Kelly added. “By getting this done, we can now start designing those other segments as we bring operations forward in the Valley. We can advance the design, start talking about acquiring right of way, and figuring out the rest of the San Francisco-LA project.”
Concerns raised during meeting
On Wednesday, during public comments on the environmental analysis, representatives of the city of Millbrae, which is south of San Francisco, expressed concern with some aspects of the plans.
They asserted that the documents did not fully consider the effects that the bullet-train project and potential station locations could have on the city’s development plans near its transportation station that is shared by both the Caltrain commuter trains and BART trains that connect communities throughout the Bay Area.
In response, staff for the high-speed rail authority noted that the environmental documents don’t represent a final design for stations. They pledged to collaborate with local city officials in Millbrae on future plans for expanding and sharing the BART/Caltrain station.
They also said they will work with officials in nearby Brisbane on plans for a maintenance facility near a former landfill along the east side of the Caltrain corridor.
Improvements to the Caltrain line to accommodate high-speed trains will include some grade-separated crossings, while other roads will have enhanced crossing gates to bar drivers from going around barriers when trains are approaching.
Gary Kennerley, director of Northern California projects for the rail agency, said those features, along with installing overhead electric systems to replace Caltrain’s current fleet of diesel-powered trains, are expected to allow the high-speed trains to operate at speeds up to 110 mph, an increase of about 30 mph compared to current speeds on the peninsula corridor.
Earlier this year, the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s board approved a route from San Jose to Merced; a segment from Burbank to downtown Los Angeles was approved last year.
In the San Joaquin Valley, the rail agency currently has three construction sections under way between the northern end of Madera and the community of Shafter in Kern County – a 119-mile stretch that will include a station in downtown Fresno but stops short of future station sites in downtown Merced and north-central Bakersfield.
The rail agency certified environmental reports about a decade ago for its Merced-Fresno and Fresno-Bakersfield section. But it took years for the authority to settle disputes with cities including Chowchilla and Bakersfield over specific route options to reach north to Merced and south to Bakersfield.
That prompted supplemental environmental reviews for new alternatives to circle the route around the city of Chowchilla, and to create a route from Shafter that enters Bakersfield from the north instead of from the west.
Top priorities moving forward
On Wednesday, the rail agency’s board approved two contracts totaling about $86 million to begin preliminary design work for extensions of the Valley route into Merced and Bakersfield, planned as a 171-mile interim operating system where bullet-trains are proposed to be running by 2030.
“The highest priority is to get Merced-to-Bakersfield done,” Kelly told The Bee. “But at the same time I would say, because the overall project is still about San Francisco to L.A., getting these environmental documents done will help us advance the work everywhere.”
The latest estimates of construction costs for the 171-mile Merced-Bakersfield stretch range from $22.5 billion to $23.9 billion.
Additional construction to extend the system beyond the San Joaquin Valley – north and west to Gilroy, San Jose and San Francisco, and south and east to Palmdale, Los Angeles and Anaheim – will likely cost billions more dollars that California doesn’t have.
For a full San Francisco-Los Angeles/Anaheim system, the rail agency estimated earlier this year that the costs could range from a low of $72.3 billion to as much as $105.1 billion. Much of that wide variation stems from the uncertainty of how much it would cost to tunnel through mountain ranges, as well as the price of property that would be needed before construction could begin.
Kelly said more money in the short term could accelerate work along the Merced-Fresno-Bakersfield route, and provide a springboard for extending the system statewide.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority has applications pending with federal transportation officials for about $1.3 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That money would not only help pay for extending the current 119 miles of construction into Merced and Bakersfield, Kelly said, but also enable construction of two sets of dedicated high-speed rail tracks through the Valley instead of one.
But achieving one more environmentally cleared segment of the statewide system may help the agency leverage more money to do more work beyond the Valley, he added.
“It is much better to have a conversation about funding and money when you can show that you’ve advanced a lot of work,” Kelly said. “I can start talking about the need to design and get the right of way in these other places. It’s so much easier to have that dialogue when you’ve cleared the environmental work already.”
Kelly added that a draft environmental analysis for the Palmdale-Burbank route segment is expected to be released in September. A contract for putting in tracks, electrical and safety/signal systems on the Merced-Bakersfield section is expected to come to the authority’s board for award later this year.
The plans call for awarding a contract by October for designing high-speed rail stations in Fresno, Merced, Hanford and Bakersfield. “And next year, in 2023, we’re going to talk about ordering trains,” Kelly said.
Process fraught with hurdles
The work has not been without its hiccups. The first construction contracts for the route in the Valley were awarded in 2013.
The agency has struggled to purchase or obtain all of the real estate it needs for construction and right of way through the region, and hundreds of utility systems still need to be relocated up and down the route. Schedule delays and cost increases have also plagued the project.
Still, Kelly said he believes that work in the Valley will be “substantially completed” between 2023 and 2025. He and Richards were optimistic that Thursday’s vote on the San Francisco-San Jose segment represents momentum for the overall rail project.
“It really is about showing the ability to deliver,” Kelly told The Bee. “My belief is that as we demonstrate that (with the environmental clearances), future conversations about funding will be easier. … People will start to see, feel, touch and taste this a little more.”
“This day is massively important to the project,” Richards said following the vote. “From those of us in the Central Valley and up in the Bay Area, we would only say to Southern California, ‘We’re coming.’”
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