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By Paul Dyson RailPAC President
California Senate Bill 477 (Canella)
The Transportation Agency of Monterey County (“TAMC”) has sponsored
legislation, SB 477, to enable the Capitol Corridor service to be extended to
Salinas. The legislation setting up the state corridor JPAs sets geographic
limits to their operations so this bill is required to run trains between San
Jose and Salinas. This bill will also enable the operation of a Coast Daylight
service by bridging the legislative gap between the LOSSAN limit, San Luis
Obispo, and San Jose. RailPAC strongly supports this. I’ll be testifying at
the LOSSAN Board on Monday 17th April and at the Senate transportation
Committee hearing in Sacramento April 25th.
For your information, below is my testimony to the LOSSAN Board,
followed by the LOSSAN staff report and the legislative bill summary.
Chairman Krantz and Board members, Paul Dyson, President of RailPAC.
One of the many negatives of the JPA form of governance, especially
governance of what is at least nominally a commercial enterprise, is that the
enabling legislation places the Authority in a straightjacket. While Megabus
and Greyhound can add routes and introduce new equipment the JPA takes
months or years to make changes, and is in most cases prohibited from
acting outside its jurisdiction. If you add to that the fact that member
agencies of the JPA tend to be intensely parochial and send representatives
whose first concern is to protect the interest of that agency and certainly to
avoid committing any of its resources, you have a recipe for failure, or at
best limited success.
It need not be this way, and SB 477 could provide a framework which would
enable passenger rail to expand, and for existing services to be far more
successful. The evidence for this goes back to the late 1980s when RailPAC
and others successfully pushed for the extension of the San Diegan trains to
Santa Barbara. Adding new destinations and doubling the number of
stations served quadrupled the number of origin/destination pairs, and the
additional route mileage enabled longer journeys at higher average fares.
For a time farebox recovery of operating costs exceeded 100% until Amtrak
woke up and increased their charges, a salutary lesson and one that you
should be wary of today.
The lesson of this is that expanding a network is not a burden but a benefit.
Adding routes and stations provides greater mobility for our citizens, and
adds to the revenue base. Furthermore the benefits are not just commercial.
Consider that the original Santa Barbara extension added two more counties
and numerous cities, each with their own Congressional and State
representatives, and you will realize that the political gains are at least as
important as the monetary. Without the support of the politicians in Ventura
and Santa Barbara Counties, and later San Luis Obispo, not to mention those
politicians on the routes of the other state corridors, it is doubtful whether
we would have received the capital infusions from the federal and state
governments had the Los Angeles – San Diego not grown to the north.
It seems to me that the LOSSAN Board, and the other state rail boards,
should seize the opportunity presented by SB 477 to establish a more
flexible commercial framework. Indeed I would be looking to offer
amendments to this bill that changed the boundaries of the LOSSAN JPA.
Extending the northern boundary to San Jose, and adding a route to Calexico
via the Coachella Valley, enables you to add service at a future date without
requiring you to do so. The Thruway buses already serve these routes and an
alternative approach would be to enable LOSSAN and the other boards to
convert bus routes to rail where physically possible. This should not be
controversial.
Finally, we live in a climate of political uncertainty at the national level, and
once again the Amtrak national network has come under attack. While
attempts to kill off these routes have failed in the past we cannot be
complacent, not with Executive and Legislative power in the hands of a
single party. SB 477, especially with the amendments that RailPAC
proposes, gives the state corridor agencies the authority to step in and
preserve intercity passenger service over key routes.
RailPAC recommends and requests that the LOSSAN, San Joaquin and
Capitol Boards formally support SB 477 as the next step in expanding
mobility for the people of California.
LOSSAN Staff Report:
Senate Bill (SB)477(Canella, R Ceres):
Intercity Rail Corridors: Extensions
SB 477 (Canella, RCeres) seeks to provide flexibility to intercity rail
corridors to allow for future expansion beyond existing statutorily defined
ntbraymer 
I’d like to see an overnight train leave LA at night and arrive at San Jose early the next morning. I believe the old Spirit of California did so. I’d also like this service going from San Jose to San Francisco via the Caltrains track as opposed to Sacramento. The California Zephyr can’t cross the bay and it’s a waste for the Coast Starlight to go into San Fran and then come out to continue north to Sacramento. Have this train go from San Fran to Los Angeles (maybe even to Orange County/San Diego?) and bring Amtrak to San Fran.
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That’s not going to happen. There isn’t the track capacity between Caltrain assuming they get their electrification and High Speed Rail service. There is room for 4 tracks on the right of way. But the local battles on the Peninsula are over getting full grade separation before any more trains are run through these towns.
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Still, a Los Angeles-San Jose/Oakland overnighter is a step above a Thruway Bus+train (and last time I did it, we had to wait in Santa Barbara at 5am for about an hour).
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There’s isn’t track capacity during rush hour. However, there is capacity outside 6am – 9am and 4pm – 7pm. Trip takes about 12 hours (based on starlight schedule), so a 9am departure from SF means 9pm arrival.
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That may be so, but the only trains running between San Jose and San Francisco will be electrified and either Caltrain or High Speed Rail after 2025.
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I strongly agree with integrating LOSSAN and Capitol Corridor into a California Coastal Rail Commission. I believe a Pacific Surfliner type train that leaves LA in the early morning and one at noon to reach San Jose at least would be a great step forward. The PS train could run faster than the Coast Starlight especially with some upgraded tracking.
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We had this already: it was under the Caltrans auspices of Amtrak California. It was so much easier for the Division of Rail to create new routes. Now these JPA’s are nothing but fragmented corridors who only look through the rose colored glasses of where the train line passes through their endpoints. They don’t care about connections to the other areas of the state where Caltrans did. The San Joaquin JPA isn’t going to listen to the Siskiyou County reps about a potential of extending the Thruway Bus up to Dunsmuir, but Caltrans and Amtrak bus personnel did. The LOSSAN group would have never consulted with the Morongo’s, but Caltrans and Amtrak bus personnel did.
IMO, the JPA’s are a self-serving, damn joke. No wonder the San Joaquin is losing ridership ever since the ITA occurred. They are nothing but commuter rail (i.e. transit) folks who don’t know one damn thing about intercity travel. This is why IMO though government should never be in the operational business of transportation like this. I wish the Class I’s would fully get back into the ballgame and tell these governments to take a flying hike and get off their railroads!
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JPA’s a joke? Have you bothered to look at the ridership on the Pacific Surfliners lately? Or for that matter The Cost recovery for the Surfliners? Some of this is from Amtrak going after the holiday weekend travel surge. But it happened under LOSSAN JPA in charge. Metrolink ridership still hasn’t rebounded yet and continues to decline on the LOSSAN corridor. More cooperation and connections between the Surfliners and Metrolink would improve ridership for both services.
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I object to having the entire state pay for their service that only serves them in their little corridor. If they want to have an intercity train between SAN-SLO, then only those cities and counties should pay for the entire thing. The poor slob in Humboldt, Siskyou, Shasta, Alpine counties etc., don’t have a representative voice for their state tax dollars that go towards farebox recovery of those trains. At least with Metrolink those subsidy costs are bore full by the taxpayers of those regions and people who answer back to them. There is no accountability otherwise to anyone in the state outside of their little fiefdoms.
Otherwise its a whole case of “Don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain” way of “governance”.
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Also, I don’t look at total passengers, I look at passenger miles. I used to work in operations for a major airline. That’s the most important metric and how much yield is made off of each passenger. All I see is this be a “look at what I did” for the appointeds on these JPA boards.
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