Business Day Energy & Environment

Who Will Ride an Alternative to 'Market-Driven Sprawl'?

Second in a three-part series. Click here for the first part.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Where Highway 99 meets the state capital here, a motorist has choices. He can pivot toward the San Francisco Bay, veer inland to the Nevada border, or ride the flatlands south toward Los Angeles.

It's an important junction for any California driver -- and, in a sense, a symbol of California's climate choices.

The state already has plans to widen Highway 99 to deal with increased traffic in the coming decades. But boosters of high-speed rail for the state say no amount of road expansion will be able to serve a larger population.

Build the train, supporters say, and the state will cause far less greenhouse gas emissions than if Californians took all their trips by car and plane instead.

Skip it, they say, and get ready for highway and airport paralysis.

Dan Leavitt is deputy director for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the state agency in charge of the project. He said the train's strongest argument on climate is that it keeps the sprawl-driven past from becoming the future.

"What is California going to look like in our future, with or without high-speed rail?" he said. "We believe that the argument of 'with high-speed rail,' in terms of not just climate change but sustainability as a whole, is far greater with high-speed rail."

Roughly 38 million people live in California today; by 2050, that's projected to reach 60 million. Leavitt believes that the state can't continue its development pattern of recent decades: what he called "market-driven sprawl."

If it does, he said, the state will sink deeper into a world of emissions and traffic, with jobs and land getting constantly scarcer.

The planners' solution to sprawl and emissions

What's the alternative? To the authority and its supporters, it's a 200-plus-mph train whose backbone would run along much of Highway 99.

Its major endpoints would be San Francisco and Los Angeles, but cities like Sacramento and San Diego would eventually be included, even though they're not in the middle.

The idea is to link the city's biggest population centers so when Californians want to travel, they have options other than plane and car.

The authority estimates that by 2030, the system would annually save nearly 6 million gallons of oil and 7 billion pounds of carbon dioxide. If the system reaches its goal of getting all its power from renewable energy, those figures would be roughly double.

From a basic engineering standpoint, it's easy to see why. Electric trains, which run on motors, are more energy-efficient than cars and planes, whose engines use fossil fuels.

But from a policy standpoint, things get more tricky. It's not always clear what mode saves the most energy.

An empty train, after all, expends great energy moving nothing but seats; even a single-occupancy car, or low-occupancy plane, comes close. A packed train, on the other hand, moves its riders more efficiently than a car or plane can.

And the authority is counting on its trains to be packed.

By 2030, it projects, 88 million to 117 million passengers will ride the system each year. If a high-speed train didn't exist, Californians would take 33 million flights that year; with the train available, they would take 21 million.

Critics assailed these numbers, calling them rosy estimates of Californians' interest. As the public protest rose, the authority put together an independent panel to review them.

Gregg Albright, a vice president at Parsons Brinckerhoff who is consulting on the project, said the authority has received input from the panel and is "enhancing" its studies appropriately.

But for the study's current purpose -- getting a broad sense of how many people can be diverted to trains from other modes -- he said it's workable.

Whatever number they arrive at, Leavitt is standing by this conclusion: that millions of Californians want an alternative to sprawl.

State lawmakers have begun the process with bills like S.B. 375, which requires metropolitan areas to consider their future development in terms of greenhouse gases.

Can Californians reorient themselves?

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