The revolving door at the High Speed Rail Authority continues to spin. As a member of the Community Working Group (courtesy of the city of B'game), I got an update from the Northern California HSR Authority team last night. There were a lot of new faces from a year ago including a new Regional Director (Boris Lipkin) and a new Project Manager (James Tung). But the working group attendance was sparse to say the least. I am using the term "update" loosely, since there is not a lot of news and very little of it is good for the Peninsula, taxpayers or people looking to go somewhere at high speed. There were some other attendees who appeared interested in handouts for of all things, "affordable housing" from the HSR money train.
Decisions that are still pending include whether to have passing tracks from 9th Ave in San Mateo south to Whipple with all that implies for taking property and whether to build a viaduct in the South Bay to get to Diridon Station more easily. The big kicker was an apparent lack of progress on how to get through Pacheco Pass via tunnel. It's estimated to cost from $6-9 billion, but the engineering studies have yet to start. And the extension to the Transbay Terminal is totally in limbo as SF Supe Aaron Peskin considers withholding funds until project management improves. And anything south of the metropolis of Bakersfield just doesn't get mentioned. But the gravy train continues to ladle out money at least until the election in two weeks. Even if Newsome wins the governor ship as expected, he may have to flip-flip a third (or is it fourth?) time and kill HSR in hopes of paying for even 10% of what else he says he wants to do. Here is the new team for Norcal.
And here is the timeline that still shows "Valley to Valley", i.e. Silicon Valley to the Central Valley up and running by 2029.
The only good news of late is that the Western U.S. earthquake warning system is plodding along so that by 2029 when a high-speed train goes off the tracks it will do so at a slower speed.
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