Study Urges Putting Passenger Trains on Fast Track

Commuter rail service along the Ventura County coast and points north could get a huge boost in ridership under an ambitious plan to bring high-speed passenger cars to the existing but aging train tracks.

A newly released road map for providing “bullet train” rail service has transportation planners from Ventura to Santa Cruz counties savoring the prospect of fast passenger trains slicing up the California coast.

“There’s something here that’s doable,” said Christopher Stephens, a planner for the Ventura County Transportation Commission. “The study bears that out.”

Compiled for five coastal counties between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the report suggests investing millions of dollars in new tracks, signals and crossings.

It does not say where to find money for the project, which could cost anywhere from $172 million to $647 million and could compete for public money with a high-speed rail line proposed for Central California.

The thick document, now under review by the Ventura County Transportation Commission, recommends upgrading hundreds of miles of railway lines between Ventura and Santa Cruz to trim commute times and lure new riders.

“Running time at this point is the biggest problem,” said Ken Gault, a Caltrans engineer in charge of rail projects who contributed to the Coast Rail Line Infrastructure Report.

“The Coast Starlight takes 11 hours to get from the Bay Area to Los Angeles,” he said. “We want to provide some reasonable alternatives.”

Transportation officials from Santa Cruz to Ventura counties--the Coast Rail Coordinating Council--spent the past two years studying how to decrease travel time and promote ridership along the existing coastal railway corridor.

Conclusions are that by spending $647 million on new track and equipment between Gilroy and Oxnard, travel time on the Bay Area-to-Los Angeles route could be cut by almost three hours.

The idea is to improve the existing track enough so that tilt-type trains can cruise the coast corridor as fast as 110 mph.

Those forecasts represent the high end of suggested renovations. For as little as $172 million, the report concludes, commute times could be cut by 78 minutes.

Under that plan, railway lines could be improved to accommodate tilt trains that move as fast as 79 mph--much quicker that the 50 mph or so the Coast Starlight now travels.

A series of other alternatives, with corresponding price tags between $172 million and $647 million, also are detailed in the proposal.

“We’re going to make this study widely available,” said Stephens, who said he would present the report to state and federal lawmakers. “We need to let them know that there’s a project and that this is not just an idea.”

Improving the tracks between the Monterey Peninsula and Ventura would stimulate tourism and mass transportation as well as decrease congestion on U.S. 101, supporters say.

“It’s at the forefront of what our agency felt was real appropriate for mitigating all of the congestion we’re seeing,” said Dave Potter, a Monterey City Council member who sits on the Coast Rail panel.

“I’m very excited about it,” Potter said. “Rail service is very implementable. It’s not as if we’re reinventing the wheel here. We’ve got an existing corridor, so we just need to get a little more organized.”

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To make the railway improvement plan work, each of the five county transit panels must make commuter train service a priority, said Peter Rodgers, a San Luis Obispo County transportation planner who helped compile the study.

“We’re hoping each of the counties that participated will take it to their policy boards and adopt this plan as the playbook for moving forward with the capital improvements,” he said.

“Then we have to look at funding sources and what kind of commitment the state and federal governments are going to be able to make,” said Rodgers, who will host an organizational meeting on the issue next month.

Not all coastal transportation officials are sold on the idea of upgrading the tracks and running trains full of tourists through their districts, however.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Jan Beautz said she would take a hard look at the impacts of the proposal on her constituents, many of whom live in beachfront homes south of Santa Cruz.

“It’s been a freight track for a long time, and it’s not used a whole lot,” she said. “Part of the concern I have is how we’re going to deal with the effects of so many new trains on people’s lives.

“It’s one thing to have a freight train go by real slowly once in a while,” she said, “and quite another to have high-speed trains whizzing past your backyard.”

Beautz also doubts that money can be found to do the renovations.

For example, when the state spent $57 million to upgrade Amtrak lines between Fullerton and San Diego in 1988, county officials from Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties had trouble raising their share.

“It’s a very expensive proposal and it’s not clear to me where any of this money will come from,” Beautz said. “There’s only so much money, so are we going to sacrifice other types of mass transit for this?”

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Also competing for the limited transportation dollars available from the state and federal governments is a super-speed rail system being plotted elsewhere in California, which would be even faster than the high-speed rail system proposed for the coast.

The most costly super-speed route--somewhere between $10 billion and $15 billion--would be the Sacramento-to-San Diego corridor, said Dan Leavitt, executive director of the California Intercity High Speed Rail Commission.

Draft reports conclude that the commute from Northern to Southern California could be completed inside three hours, with super-speed tilt trains averaging more than 200 mph, Leavitt said.

Because twists and turns along the coastal corridor would not allow trains to travel that fast, the separate projects would not compete against one another, Leavitt said.

“You can see them as being complementary projects that are looking to serve very different markets,” he said. “The only way that they would be competing is in seeking public funds.”

A draft study on the Central Valley super-speed rail project is due out in September.

Even so, the huge price tag of the 200-mph commuter train system in the Central Valley could scare away many taxpayers and create political pressure to delay spending the money, supporters of the coast corridor improvements say.

Monterey County transportation planner Patrice Goodchild said one of the biggest advantages to the Ventura-to-Santa Cruz proposal is that it can be done in bits and pieces.

“Improvements are done incrementally,” Goodchild said. “That’s how they were built in Europe and Asia.

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“We need to take a lesson from the rest of the world and do it incrementally, instead of coming up with a grand design that people may or may not be able to afford,” she said.

Plans to upgrade the train tracks running along the California coast are not new.

In 1992, the Southern Pacific Transportation Co., which owns the railroad tracks, commissioned a study that concluded that the corridor could accommodate high-speed trains with an investment of about $500 million.

The railroad offered the corridor to an amalgam of local and regional transportation agencies, said Southern Pacific spokesman Mike Furtney.

But there were no takers.

“We were very public about our interest in offering an option to the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission,” he said. “Nothing much happened for several reasons.”

In particular, the federal government elected to back the Central Valley as the most logical California test site for high-speed rail.