When it comes to High-Speed Rail, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem

Recent media articles and blog postings discuss the "resignation" of Jeff Barker as communications head of the California High-Speed Rail Authority. 

He was a Schwarzenegger flak in his prior life and became the typical fish out of water when dropped into the CHSRA, which is an empty fish-tank for floundering politicians. 

Their knowledge of railroading and high-speed rail comes from having been a guest passenger in places like Japan and Europe, with all the other hospitality thrown in as a bonus. How do you spell J-U-N-K-E-T?

The rail authority, as we all know, has been governed by the "Keystone Cops" if anyone is old enough to remember those comedies. One of their achievements - thank you Jeff Barker - was the suppression of unfavorable information about their peer review of their ridership studies.

Actually, Barker's departure is an underwhelming story. What is of far greater concern to me now, and that's why it's on this blog, is what's going on on the Peninsula, and it ain't good.

After Simitian, Eshoo and Gordon, let's call them S.E.G., decided and promoted the concept of two track sharing for both Caltrain and HSR on the Caltrain Peninsula as an interim solution ("phased implementation"), many of my so-called colleagues really went for that idea. 

So, we now have the Peninsula Coalition of Cities (PCC), made up of locally elected people and other Peninsula rail-related groups, signing on to various permutations of HSR on the Caltrain corridor.  These all have certain conditions which, predictably, the rail authority will ignore.

All I can say about these groups and the S.E.G., is that with friends like that, who needs enemies? And speaking of friends, another distinguished group calls themselves "Friends of Caltrain." Caltrain, the organization - not the commuter train operation (they are distinct) - doesn't need friends. It needs to be terminated as an organization.

We've discussed all this in on Patch.

It's one damn thing after another! Some of us have said that the rail authority is an authoritarian autocracy intent on - as Rod Diridon put it - "over-ride us."

Was anybody listening to him?

Some of us have been saying this was their intention since well before the bond issue ballot in 2008, when Palo Alto City Council voted unanimously to support the bond issue. Palo Alto apparently hasn't moved very far from that original position.

Furthermore, local organizations, like the PCC and it's kitchen cabinet, CARRD, promoted the use of Context Sensitive Solutions as a negotiating tool with the rail authority based on the presumption that the rail authority was interested in negotiating a solution acceptable to Palo Alto and the rest of us. Of course, the rail authority wasn't then, and they are not now. Some of us advised that negotiating was a foolish strategy. So, how did CSS work out?

While CARRD continues to perform masterful work in information extraction and disclosure, thereby countering the persistent falsehoods emanating from the rail authority, the Peninsula-wide push continues to seek accommodation and further negotiation and compromises with an agency that has no such intentions.

Calling the Peninsula groups NIMBYs is incorrect. There is a willingness, even a desire, for high-speed rail on the Caltrain corridor (i.e. their back yard), of course only on their terms. We see such inclinations in many of our neighboring towns, as well as in ours.

It is safe to say that there is not yet an outright, absolute rejection of high-speed rail on the Caltrain corridor or in California, even though the evidence is overwhelming to support such a position. It is considered too radical. I think not. To the contrary. A groundswell of public uprising against this pointless project and its stunning costs to all taxpayers is highly appropriate and the American way for voicing our outrage against our government.

What's my point here? At some point, perhaps when the backhoes show up on the corridor and construction notices show up in our mailboxes, everyone on the Peninsula will come to the startling discovery that the rail authority has been faithful to a single agenda; that is, to build a four track elevated viaduct. Not this year. Probably, not in the next five years.

But, unless the CHSRA is terminated and the project shut down, that Caltrain corridor agenda remains on the table. And if and when further funding materializes from Washington - unlikely now but not impossible in 2012 - we will see notions like the S.E.G. two track "phased implementation" process quickly accelerated to a full elevated four track build-out on the corridor.

If we all had the determination, we could and should stop this project in its tracks. Now.

So, "Friends of Caltrain" and PCC, is this the desired end-state, with electrified Caltrain, sustained by its current management, leading to HSR on two tracks as the next phase, then eventually four?

Because that is exactly what is being enabled by you, even as we speak.