TRANSPORTATION POLITICS-The planned California bullet train could offer passengers an impressive 2 1/2-hour travel time between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the $68 billion project has faced wide opposition from community members and farmers in the Central Valley.
The Los Angeles Times covered a protest this week outside a meeting of the state board overseeing construction of the system in downtown Los Angeles. According to the Times:
During more than six hours of public comment by about 150 people, one speaker after another attacked the project as the eight-member California High-Speed Rail Authority board listened quietly.
The testimony came from residents and leaders in small towns and growing suburbs along proposed routes through the mountains north of the Los Angeles basin. Many speakers said the project would devastate their quality of life or their local economy.
Residents of several low-income and predominantly minority communities, including San Fernando, Pacoima and Sylmar, complained that their neighborhoods would be divided by 20-foot-high sound walls along the high-speed train corridor. Some said their areas had already been chopped up by three major freeways and a dozen dumps.
The meeting followed the release of a report detailing the effects of the proposed routes.
The 62-page analysis shows that within half a mile of the track from Palmdale to Burbank, there could be noise and vibration affecting about 20,000 residences, 25 parks, 47 schools, 48 churches and nine hotels, as well as archaeological sites and wetlands. At least one route would require trains to travel at 160 mph in a long curved section of track, despite past projections that trains could travel 220 mph after leaving LA‘s Union Station, the report says.
Tuesday’s protesters voiced opposition to all four of the proposed routes.
“When you get close to an environmental document and a decision point, that’s where concern grows,” Mark Watts, interim executive director of Transportation California, a Sacramento advocacy group for transportation projects, told the L.A. Times. Regarding emerging opposition in L.A. County, he said, “I can’t even fathom what their response is going to be.”
(Jenn Stanley is a freelance journalist, essayist and independent producer living in Chicago. She has an M.S. from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Stanley writes for Next City … where this piece was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 48
Pub: Jun 12, 2015
