Editorial: High-speed rail bill due

(The following editorial, "It's payback time for high-speed rail in San Jose," appeared in the San Jose, Calif., Mercury News Sept. 20, 2010.) A bill is coming due for the California High-Speed Rail Authority -- separate from the $43 billion price tag for the bullet trains that, if all goes as planned, will zoom between San Diego and San Francisco. This bill is payable to San Jose.

While other Bay Area cities
are fighting the project, San Jose city officials and community activists have
been working constructively to bring the line through town in a way that’s
sensitive to residents’ concerns. They’ve done this despite the authority’s
clumsy style of public outreach through the spring. Now the authority needs to
reward that cooperation with two actions.

It should meet the city’s
Oct. 1 deadline to reach agreement on a guarantee of good design for the
stretch through downtown, including an iconic station. San Jose needs assurance
that this project, which easily could be an eyesore, instead will be a
landmark. Ideally, this pact would give the city veto power over the design.

Then the authority needs to
postpone consideration of this design issue, now scheduled in October.
Otherwise, the agreement would have to be rushed through San Jose City Council
approval without complying with the city’s sunshine laws on advance notice. If
ever an issue needed time for public scrutiny, this is it. By comparison, the
rushed plan for a Grand Prix street race that energized the sunshine reform
movement in 2006 was a minor annoyance.

Postponing design decisions
should be easy for the authority. Reaching a design agreement is the hard part,
given difficulties of defining good design and the peril of setting precedents
for other cities. But San Jose’s cooperation in other ways, including agreeing
to make room for the line along the Monterey Highway corridor, merits special
consideration.

The San Jose City Council
last week held out the threat of pushing for a downtown tunnel to motivate the board
to reach agreement on aboveground design. But the city has missed that train.
Both staff and some elected officials have said they don’t think a tunnel is
feasible or even desirable.

Downtown businesses and
neighborhood groups would prefer it. Instinctively, so do we, but the cost
probably is prohibitive. Other cities with underground plans, including San
Francisco, can work within public rights of way using cut-and-cover — digging
a trench and then putting a top on it. In San Jose, boring machines would have
to go through the high water table and well under creeks, freeway pylons and
the BART line, which would be in a cut-and-cover tunnel. Right-of-way under
some 80 properties would have to be purchased, according to Hans Larsen, the
city’s acting transportation director. He says nowhere will the rail authority
build a tunnel as costly as the one San Jose would require.

San Jose has scored an
important victory with high-speed rail already: moving the preferred route out
of the Gardner neighborhood to an alignment over freeways that Larsen’s team
suggested. But the real credit for that victory goes to community leaders in
Greater Gardner, who rooted out facts, raised excellent questions and presented
it all so reasonably but persistently that they could not be ignored.

Maybe the city should call
on them to go to bat for the design agreement.