sbX Contracts Approved

Sneaky San Bernardino... while I was away, they approved the construction contracts for the new sbX bus rapid transit project. According to the PE, construction is slated to begin this year. Congratulations to Omnitrans for starting work on the inland area's first rapid transit project!

Oh, yeah. The contract bid was also nearly 20% below budget.

The Gearheads are Coming Around

Car and Driver, one of the oldest and most-respected automobile magazines in the country, is on our side:

It is an axiom of traffic planners that increased speed due to capacity building is temporary; as traffic flows more smoothly, word gets out, and that attracts more traffic, eventually causing the same traffic-flow issues as before. The inevitable conclusion is that we cannot possibly build enough roads to satisfy demand, so we must consider alternative transportation systems.

This country has not had a comprehensive transportation strategy in decades, but now is an excellent time to consider one. And that means we need to take a hard look at what role highways should play and how they fit into the broader transportation network. Sprawling car-centric cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Dallas are rushing to build new mass-transit systems—they have to; the roads they have cannot satisfy demand. So they must harmonize with other modes of transportation to reduce the stress on existing roadways as much as possible.

Remember- public transit makes life better for everyone. Nobody likes being stuck in traffic. Everyone wants a little more time in their day. Everyone wants cleaner air, better water, and stronger communities-- even people who love their cars. Along with Wired, I previously argued that recreational driving is not the problem, and that even auto addicts ought to be able to reap the benefits of a more diverse transportation system. It seems that the auto addicts agree with me.

PV Line Approved!

Inland News Today reports that RCTC approved the final environmental impact report for the Perris Valley Line Metrolink extension. They expect federal approval "within weeks" and construction starting by the end of the year.

Of course, the PVL will do very little to shift mobility patterns out here in Riverside County. Commuter rail is really a tool to reduce inner-city traffic, and to provide for a smoother commute for suburb-CBD trips. Still, more transit is more transit, and I will look forward to riding the rails to the Orange Empire Railway Museum- the Perris depot has been designed to provide a cross-platform transfer to their excursion trains.

Blog-cation

As you read this, my wife and I are on our way to Los Angeles Union Station for the start of what we're calling Epic Train Trip. We're touring the United States and Canada for the next month via Amtrak, with a smattering of Greyhounds and ferries in between. Accordingly, this blog will be a bit quieter. I do plan on posting interesting observations about transit in the cities we travel to, but I won't commit to a regular posting schedule.

Don't despair, however! Although I'll cut back on the blogging here, the wife and I will be chronicling our adventures on our travel blog, Backpack Amtrak. If you're interested, you can enjoy our adventures around the country on a train (and a shoestring budget) over there.

This Week in Transit

As usual, local events in red, HSRA events in orange.



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New Metrolink Fares

As I covered earlier, new Metrolink fares are coming. The new 7-day and weekend passes will become available on July 1st. The Family & Friends 4-Pack will be discontinued on the same day, while the 10 Trip tickets will be phased out by this fall.

You want to put my train station... where?

Mead Valley, that's where. Don't know where Mead Valley is? That's okay, you're not alone. Happily, I've provided a map:

View HSR in Riverside in a larger map

When we last left the HSR saga, the Riverside station was proposed for the Orangecrest neighbourhood of Riverside, at Alessandro and the I-215. The site was, shall we say, sub-optimal-- surrounded in every direction by single-family housing, much of it literally walled-off from the nearby streets. Also nearby is a large, typically suburban shopping centre, anchored by a K-Mart, and a trailhead for the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Park. Not exactly a thriving, mixed-use urban paradise well-suited for an HSR station, which is why I opposed the site.

Bad enough, but it gets worse. You see, I went out to an open house put on by the Authority a few weeks ago, at the Orange Terrace Community Centre. The engineers have refined their station locations a bit more, and the old location was unsuitable for the station. Turns out that you can't built a station- or even track- off the end of a runway, so the train has to go below grade at Alessandro. So the engineers decided to move it down the track a bit... to here:


Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is the proposed site of the new "Riverside" high-speed rail station. As you can see on the map above, it's not in Riverside, nor even Moreno Valley. It's in the unincorporated community of Mead Valley, just across the freeway from Perris. There is no transit nearby, no houses nearby, no meaningful commerce nearby- unless, of course, you'd like to buy surplus building materials or ship a few tons of air freight. Here's another view:



I even caught a few panoramic shots of the location, so you could see the abject nothingness of it all:



And, by the way, the site eschews the most populous and vibrant city in the Inland Empire for a community that looks like this:





Now, I mean no disrespect to those who live in rural communities, but this is not a place for a high-speed rail station. If you want to bring infrastructure here, try bringing sewers and gas lines- most residents are on septic tanks and have to purchase propane from the local general store. Oh, yeah, there's a local general store:



This is not the sort of downtown-to-downtown service that the Authority promised us.

There is an alternative. While the authority never considered a downtown Riverside station (and for good engineering reasons- turns out they need to build the system so that trains can pass through all but the termini at speed), they did consider two others in Riverside proper: one at Watkins and Blaine St. and one at I-215 and MLK. The one at Watkins and Blaine was removed from consideration due to expected community opposition- the University Neighbourhood Association killed a rather-minimal Metrolink station at the site, so an HSR station would probably be unthinkable- but the I-215/MLK station was removed for much shoddier reasons.

You see, both the Mayor and UCR's Executive Vice-Chancellor wrote letters to the Authority specifically requesting that the station be put at March Field. I don't know about the Mayor's reasoning, but UCR asked that the station be put at March Field instead because the UCR 20-year plan calls for PARKING STRUCTURES, not a high-speed rail station, around the overpass where the station would be.

Now, if I'm a student at UCR in 2031, when gas prices are so high that only the well-off can afford to drive, I wonder what would be more useful to me: a bunch of parking structures, or a high-speed rail link to the rest of the state? Also, while UCR has literally acres of land on which to build more parking, the HSR station can only go in a few places. If it's a choice between right on campus (full disclosure: literally steps from my office) and Mead Valley, I say we convince the campus to move their parking structures.

UPDATE: I should probably mention that the photos that weren't taken at the station site were taken on the bike ride to the site, as it is 1.5 miles from the nearest transit line (the 22).