by The trolley’s Blue Line extension up to University City, San Diego’s largest public transportation investment, was scheduled to open in 2021, one year after high-speed rail, the state’s largest transit project, was expected to begin transporting passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours.
However, the two initiatives ultimately took somewhat distinct routes. Only San Diego’s extended trolley has opened after billions of dollars, while the California High-Speed Rail project is still plagued by years of delays and soaring expenses with no end date in sight.
According to a recent research by local transportation group Circulate San Diego, experts now think that the state’s high-speed rail problem may be resolved by San Diego’s ambitious Blue Line extension.
According to the assessment, which was made public on Monday, public transit projects cannot be completed under California’s construction laws even though both projects received billions of dollars in funding, support from voters, and environmental approval.
Rather, the analysis identifies the primary determinant of the success or failure of public transportation initiatives as arbitrary, unnecessary, and preventable bureaucratic red tape.
Before beginning construction, public transit contractors must get licenses from state and local governments as well as the communities their projects will impact. These bureaucratic obstacles take the shape of permits.
According to the research, because these authorities have the authority to provide permits, they can demand irrelevant revisions, raise prices, and delay projects for years while builders are helpless to stop them.
According to the report’s author and CEO of Circulate, Colin Parent, “We need to take a hard look at our policies in blue states to make sure that we are not standing in our own way to get the good public goods and services that we need.”
With the current arrangements, we cannot have an excess of public transportation.
The power of coordination
Coordination with other public-transit agencies in the area is one of the few tools available to architects in the face of these challenges.
Although this is challenging in locations where public transportation authority is divided among numerous agencies and authorities, experts say San Diego stands apart.
While San Diego has a simplified public transportation system run by only two organizations—the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System and the North County Transit District—the Los Angeles and Bay Area regions each have 27 transit agencies.
Additionally, the San Diego Association of Governments, the city’s public-transit planner, is only able to coordinate its projects with one county. In comparison, the Bay Area public-transit planner has nine obstacles to overcome.
This simplified system has an impact. The success of San Diego’s Blue Line extension was attributed in large part to simple collaboration, according to Circulate’s assessment.
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According to the report, it made it possible for public transportation officials to quickly and reliably secure approval from the city and University of California, San Diego, as well as other locations where the extension will travel.
San Diego trolley among rays of hope for high-speed rail
California’s high-speed rail project is the perfect example of how the permitting process can undermine public transportation, even though the Blue Line extension is a case study in coordination. However, experts think San Diego can teach us a lot about high-speed rail.
Despite the fact that no elements of the rail project have been finished, it is decades behind schedule and around $100 billion over budget. The supervisory body for the high-speed rail system discovered that permits are a major offender.
Throughout the approval process, officials from a number of local governments, notably Wasco and Madera County, where the rail system will traverse, have caused delays and millions of dollars in unanticipated expenses for the project.
In a 2018 settlement over the project, for instance, the city of Shafter mandated that the California High-Speed Rail Authority construct costly infrastructure for the city before we could have done it on our own, according to City Manager Scott Hurlbert.
One important aspect that significantly influences the approval process is the obvious scale contrast between the expansive, statewide rail project and San Diego’s trolley extension. More permissions and coordination are needed for larger and more ambitious public transportation projects, which increases the likelihood of delays, cost increases, and uncertainty.
We have repeatedly witnessed local governments and special districts holding the high-speed rail project hostage in order to obtain additional funding or infrastructure, Parent added.
However, by streamlining coordination and granting SANDAG the authority to override local permit denials, San Diego’s consolidated public transportation system aids builders in the permitting process.
According to Parent, this demonstrates how giving these transportation bodies more authority can result in better outcomes.
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Lessons from San Diego
Circulate’s study cited the Blue Line extension as a notable achievement that resulted from this system, even though these powers haven’t always protected SANDAG from the exorbitant expenses and hold-ups that often arise from the permitting process.
Due to legislation supported by community activists in the 1970s who aimed to give the public a bigger say in public infrastructure projects, transportation authority is more decentralized in many jurisdictions outside of San Diego.
These changes came after decades of unrestrained expansion, during which time these projects uprooted villages and displaced mostly underprivileged citizens.
Circulate does not advocate going back to those times. However, Parent warned that even as California invests billions of dollars in public transportation to accomplish its climate goals, the regulatory procedures of today have created a new set of obstacles.
A more equitable system, according to Circulate’s research, would authorize transit builders to issue their own permits in the event that municipalities fail to make decisions by a certain date.
State legislation might adopt a similar strategy. In an effort to expedite the high-speed rail project, Democratic state senator Scott Wiener presented a law this year that establishes due dates for community representatives to interact with public-transit builders during the permit process.
