Lisa Schweitzer is a little bit more cynical about HSR in California than I am — I recently had a pin-up with her to talk about my project and the real sorts of impact the proposed rail line is going to have on the urban fabric. She doesn't oppose the project as much as worry about how it could negatively affect existing transit funds - especially since the ridership is likely to be on the upper end of the scale, at least at first. (This post at Yonah Freemark's blog smartly addresses the issue of ticket prices, comparing prices on Acela, ICE, AVE, TGV, &c.) Her editorial in the Sacramento Bee addresses this, as well as offering what I think are some smart alternatives for CAHSR to "help ensure that the state's support for everyday transit does not disappear in the stampede to build high-speed rail." I'm not such a big fan of the first ones (should airlines really be the model for anything?), but she has, like, a PhD and stuff.

At any rate, the comments are GOLDEN:

California today is nothing like Europe and Japan decades ago. We are spread out. We prefer our cars. Rail service would only help a small portion of the populace. The environmental challenges would be expensive and drawn out.

This is so wrong-headed it makes my head spin.

Umm, but the trains lose money and the people want their cars. To pay for that trip between SF and LA you would need to charge 3 times what plane fare would be.

You mean that subsidized plane fare? See also here.

Since when has high-density development boosted surrounding property values? An instant ghetto never does anything but drive people out of the neighborhood.

Density = ghetto, apparently.

Photo from zIDEAz

Every time I start to get discouraged with this project – thinking, perhaps, it's too obvious, self-evident, or unoriginal – I find things like this transit... center... thing proposed for San Bernardino. There's an (I think) unintentionally hilarious sales pitch in the comments at California HSR Blog:

San Bernardino recently unveiled plans for the best-designed high-speed rail station in California that has the capability of becoming a high-speed train hub for service to Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Anaheim-Long Beach, in addition to Los Angeles and San Diego.

Passengers will enter the terminal though the Great Hall, a multi-story concourse with ticketing facilities, escalators, and a green roof on the fourth level that will serve as a park offering dramatic views of the city’s mountains and skyline.

A Central Garden runs along the edges of all the at-grade tracks. Mixed-use development is seamlessly-integrated throughout the terminal with a residential emphasis South of the tracks and an employment emphasis North of the tracks. A generous amount of meeting and convention space is also included in the design. But, the complex does a remarkable job of amassing these facilities without creating a superblock since a network of interconnected streets are interwoven throughout the site.

And pictures on Flickr! (Add this to the growing list of hideous proposed HSR stations.)

Beyond the lolz, it's nice to look at projects like these because they're perfect examples of precisely the sort of thing I'm trying to critique with this project, that is, overscaled transit-oriented development, normative mixed-use planning, and, quite frankly, bad urban design. If I suspected California developers would pounce all over HSR before, turning every station into another excuse for generic, lifestyle-center developments (see: Michael Sorkin and "Starbucks Urbanism"), this certainly confirms it. The last thing the Inland Empire needs is another stucco wannabe Rick Caruso project.

Of course these projects aren't all bad – clearly a step or two above the big box developments of the 1990s and the shopping malls of the 1980s – and their intentions toward sustainability and walkability are good things, even if their implementation is a little silly ("a dramatic open-air pavilion formed by giant ribbons of solar-energy collectors suggesting the prehistoric geological forces that shaped the valley"). Like the New Urbanism in general, is isn't the ambition that's bad (besides that whole weird selective nostalgia thing), but the methodology. Dropping clusters of condos and office buildings into the middle of the suburbs isn't the 'solution' to sprawl.

The comments recently brought this project by Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran to my attention. I like its provocative nature and the way it frames the argument with data on air travel, but I don't like the way it assumes there needs to be some kind of tabula rasa development at the intersection. Their precedent, the Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam, is sort of silly: there won't be any layovers on HSR, and there isn't a major city nearby to serve. From Los Angeles, one either goes to Las Vegas or Phoenix, not somewhere in between with an undetermined wait. The centroid scheme, borrowed from the Texas T-Bone, I presume, saves track, but doesn't require a hub. I have a certain distaste for ex nihilo projects like this, and it doesn't really help when they're in the middle of the Mojave desert. Can we please work on fixing the places we already have before we decide to mess new ones up? Is this too much to ask?

This is a fantastic conference; see especially Betty Deakin's presentation on TOD design for high speed rail in the Central Valley, which starts at about the 2/3rd point. She smartly points out that California, unlike France and Spain and especially Japan, is growing very rapidly; in addition, many of the cities in the Central Valley (and Sylmar, for that matter) have enormous amounts of empty space: empty parcels and large right-of-ways, all of which have a lot of potential, particularly in terms of dense infill development. But she also looks at the space between the buildings, including the much-too-wide streets and easements, as an opportunity, even an advantage, for urban design. This is a large part of my own design strategy, which I ought to be posting soon.

As if any of these arguments haven't been made a hundred times, a few bloggers have been debating sprawl and zoning. It's worth a look:

Matthew Yglesias: Centrally Planned Suburbia

Randal O'Toole: A Libertarian View of Sprawl

Matthew Yglesias: "Libertarians", Sprawl, and Land Use

Kevin Drum: Zoning and Sprawl

Ryan Avent: Zoning and Sprawl

Kevin Drum: Sprawl Revisited

Ryan Avent: Zoning and Sprawl, cont.

Money quote, from Drum:

And now for a second point, even though I said I wouldn't make one: walkability is very difficult to create. It's not enough to build a bunch of houses with shopping nearby. It's not enough to have a few big apartment buildings. And there's no practical way to convert an existing suburb into a high-density area.

Well, yeah. Bringing density to the urban fringe is difficult (though still worth trying: see Retrofitting Suburbia and the recent Reburbia competition), not only because of zoning regulations, but also because of the social logic that underpins them: suburbia is a landscape of privatism and exclusion. Although it's true that the suburbs have become more and more diverse (including increasing poverty), they remain balkanized, as it were, and homogeneous on the neighborhood level. Suburbia is not merely the function of (artificially) cheap land and oil, and zoning is only a manifestation of deeper cultural issues: thus Fishman's thesis of suburbia as a cultural invention, which he traces back to the 18th century English bourgeoisie, who left the city specifically to circumvent public space. In my view, this is what begins to distinguish the suburban condition from genuine urbanity. And, as my thesis argues, before we try to address issues of walkability and density, architects and planners must examine urbanity and offer new solutions for public space in the suburbs.

More on sprawl and high-speed rail: Jason Kambitsis in Wired cautions that increased mobility and shorter travel times between the core and the fringe might encourage sprawl; Yonah Freemark smartly responds (short version: ticket prices will make HSR commuting unrealistic to all but the wealthiest). HSR is obviously not aimed at daily commuters, but rather travelers. For my project, the layering of bus networks, commuter rail, and long-distance high speed rail is the crux of the argument.

This is quite odd: a (rather hideous) design proposal for a high speed rail station in Sylmar from 1995? I hadn't realized Los Angeles was planning any HSR as far back as then. No wonder the eyes of all the urban planners I've talked to glaze over as soon as they hear anything about high speed rail.

California, quite deservedly, received the lion's share of federal HSR funding, as announced by Obama following his (truly marvelous) State of the Union address last night. In addition to the $10 billion from Prop 1A, Washington awarded another $2.25 billion to lines between San Francisco and San Jose, Merced and Bakersfield via Fresno, and Los Angeles to Anaheim. These are the major urban segments of the whole line; presumably, more rural segments (such as my site, Los Angeles to Bakersfield via Palmdale and through the Tehachapi Pass), will come quickly after, since I would think that the line would hardly be able to perform until all the major cities are connected.

While architects in general are quite good at lamenting the insignificance of their role in any design project (see all that 75 percent anxiety), it's good to see someone else thinking of HSR as an architectural opportunity.

Last month, [Joseph] Bellomo sent a letter to the rail authority, the state agency charged with building the $45 billion rail line, proposing a two-tiered international competition in which architects and designers from around the world would send in proposed designs for the entire line. The proposals would be narrowed to three finalists whose ideas would be further developed.

"The only way to get good design, holistic design, is through competition," Bellomo said.

I'm not entirely sold, however, on his idea to tackle the whole 800 mile route at once, as a single project. How does one even begin to design a cohesive plan for that kind of a site? Or would you just have a very general scheme for different types of corridors? Over 800 miles, the exceptions and specifics would add up very fast. Still, the idea of a consistent design idea is an admirable enough goal. Read the whole competition proposal here.

First diagram! CAHSR mapped over population density – future stations classified as urban, suburban, exurban – rings scaled to projected ridership.

If we are ever to come to terms with the current proliferation of the megalopolis in both a socio-cultural and ecological sense, then we shall only be able to do so in a post-facto compensatory way, that is to say by adopting denser patterns of land settlement and by providing adequate infrastructure for public transport, operating at differentiated speeds – from fast inter-city trains to slower intra-city light rail transit systems, augmented by buses. As far as the first is concerned I have in mind the high-speed train that has been an ongoing development project in Europe and Japan for the last 35 years, with the result that today for inter-city journeys of up to 500 kilometres, rail has become preferable to air travel in terms of trip time, reliability, energy consumption and environmental pollution.

Kenneth Frampton: "On the Predicament of Architecture at the Turn of the Century"

Thanks for summarizing the first three-quarters of my thesis project!