Streamlining the California State Rail Plan
At this past week’s online forum, Eric Goldwyn, leader of the NYU Transit Costs project, called the California State Rail Plan “the best I’ve seen”, because it is ambitious in scope - “California plans to go from 50 electrified miles to 1500 electrified miles. Electrification is so important to be competitive with driving to achieve modal shift. As you see with Caltrain, electrification is critical to getting people to shift.” Goldwyn noted electrified Caltrain, with more frequent and regular service, is being used as the backbone to coordinate with other rail and transit service. In just a few months of operation, this has led to nearly 50% weekday ridership increase and double on weekends.
Goldwyn talked about the importance of the state providing a central repository for information about rail and transit connections, and building up the state capacity and rely relatively less heavily on consultants to be able to have public sector staff continue to learn and share knowledge from project to project.
Shannon Simonds, Chief of the Caltrans Office of Rail Planning & Implementation, gave an overview of the plan, explaining the “Service Led Planning” approach to build just the right amount of improvements to deliver faster service that is seamlessly coordinated with long-distance and local transit and active transportation, and to work better with freight railroads in order to improve passenger service.
Adriana Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail reviewed the plan, with case studies of the need for Service Led Planning and the importance of coordinating with freight railroads in order to overcome barriers to extending and improving passenger rail. Rizzo talked about the bill that CER successfully led last year, AB2503, which will help streamlining rail electrification projects, and two more bills this year, SB 71 which will make permanent an existing California Environmental Quality Act exemption for environmentally beneficial transit and active transportation projects, and SB445, which helps reduce permitting delays that often add cost and time to rail and transit projects. Rizzo also talked about the upcoming opportunity with the reauthorization of the state’s Cap and Trade program to provide critical funding to continue to build out the plan.
If you missed it or want to share, you can find video for the webinar here.