The Loma Prietan - November/December 2009

Dear Editor:

The Sierra Club should look longer at the $30 billion high-speed rail project. The cheapest route for the rail line is down the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. But the line is to run instead through the eastern Valley, via Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Palmdale. This is because developers want to buy farm land and create hundreds of square miles of sprawl. Who will buy the houses? The jobs are on the coast.

That's where the train comes in. Its 69,000 commuters a day will live in Fresno and work in San Jose or San Francisco; or live in Bakersfield and work in Los Angeles. The Sierra Club is, therefore, supporting a huge increase in sprawl.

Moreover, why subsidize people to live far away from their place of employment?

Michael Mahoney
Bay Chapter member
San Francisco

John Carpenter of the Chapter's Sustainable Land Use and Transportation Committees, replies:

Michael is right: the Sierra Club is opposed to any activity that induces sprawl. However, the California high-speed rail service is designed mainly to reduce the huge amount of occasional intrastate travel that now goes between major centers using automobiles and airlines. Thus:

1) The rail service would not have the capacity for promoting commuting and offering it reliably.

2) Real estate costs around stations plus cost of train fare would make living in the Central Valley and commuting to the coast prohibitively expensive.

3) The service would increase vitality around Central Valley rail stations, thus producing significant urban cores and jobs there.