California Needs High Speed Rail ASAP

Reporting by Bay City News

A top transportation official said today that the United States must remain dedicated to building high-speed rail systems to confront pollution, population increases and competition from rest of the world.

Ron Diridon, chairman of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association's advisory board in Washington, D.C., said that California in particular is faced with a population that will hit 65 million in 2060 and so has to develop new, clean mass transit systems.

"We can't expand our freeways anymore," Diridon told a meeting of the San Jose Rotary Club in downtown San Jose. "We can't double deck them. We can't expand our feeder streets."

"We just can't do it on single-passenger vehicles," he said. "If we don't have mass transportation, we don't have a Silicon Valley."

Construction on California's planned $68.5 billion high-speed rail system starts this summer with a $990 million phase stretching from Merced in the Central Valley to Fresno, Diridon said.

He described the state's planned 790-mile rail route, with 26 stations, as "the largest construction project in the nation's history."

Future phases will go north from San Diego to Irvine, Los Angeles and Palmdale and eventually Gilroy, San Jose, San Francisco and then Sacramento by 2029 without crossing any roadways, he said.

The high-speed line, reaching speeds of about 200 mph, would be integrated so that passengers could use existing mass transit venues such as Caltrain, BART and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority's light rail trains and buses, Diridon said.

The combination of transit systems would make it possible for someone in Fresno on their way to Paris to check their bags on the high speed train, reach San Jose in 51 minutes, take a shuttle to Mineta San Jose International Airport and later pick up their bags at customs in France, he said.

"That's the international or national trip of the future, that our airport, because we plan carefully for it, will be able to accommodate," Diridon said.