The Problem with Solano County's Rail Plan
Solano County, California has a really big problem brewing and I think most people have no idea. It's a problem that could be both an economic and environmental catastrophe, not just locally, but regionally. The environmental implications potentially have global impact.
While I lived there many years ago, I was a part-time college student and I wanted to be an urban planner. In hopes of preparing for a career in planning, I used the existing county rail plan as a focus of my studies.
Every time a class asked me to pick a real world issue to analyze or write a paper about or do some kind of work on it, I would pick some element of the county rail plan to examine. Over the course of several classes, this eventually was developed into a presentation.
At the time that I began my research, there was only one Amtrak station in Solano County. It was part of the Capitol Corridor Route. This route connects the state capital, Sacramento, to San Francisco and Solano County had the largest stretch of rail on that route with no stations.
There were existing plans to build three more rail stations to fill in the gaps in Solano County. Unfortunately, the process used to pick the intended sites for new stations was not a sound process.
Instead of having some organization analyze the county as a whole for where those stations should go, the local cities got together at a meeting and divied up the pie politically. Only after that was done did they hire a consultatnt to pick specific sites to serve each city in question.
The consultant did what they were paid to do. They weren't paid to analyze the county as a whole and pick which cities should get a site and they no doubt knew which side their bread was buttered on. The resulting plan has serious flaws.
For starters, Travis Air Force Base (AFB) had no representation at the meeting where the pie was divided politically. It had no representation because it is not a city, so it likely was not invited at all.
The problem is that it is the single largest employer in the county to the tune of more than a billion dollars annually and the resulting rail plan could encourage the federal government to move Travis elsewhere. The federal government toys with the idea of relocating it periodically anyway simply because its function could be served from almost anywhere on the West Coast and almost anywhere else would be cheaper than the San Francisco Bay Area.
The issue with the rail plan is encroachment on the base. This is a security issue for military facilities and is a factor in deciding which bases to close and which bases to keep.
The primary environmental concern is the decision to give one of the stations to Benicia even though there is no good place to put a station. The station would be located in a protected wetland that is an important bird sanctuary and a critical part of the Pacific Flyway. So it impacts bird migrations over a very long distance in both North and South America. This is not just a local issue.
There are some other issues with the plan as well. For example, the site chosen for Benicia will not ever have much development around it because it is protected wetlands and the station is likely to slowly sink into the marsh, like Venice. The chosen sites do a generally poor job of serving the existing population centers, so are unlikely to have good ridership.
In the years since I did the research, one of the three planned stations had its grand opening in April 2018. Although millions of dollars were spent, this station is a threat to Travis AFB, so it is a threat to more than a billion dollars annually in local revenue. So I think it would make sense to shut it down and go with the sites my analysis suggest are generally superior to the existing plan.
I am not politically savvy, I no longer live in California and I have no idea how to go about promoting the idea that there is an alternate plan and this alternate plan is based on better metrics, like ridership, protecting Travis AFB and protecting critical habitat. Yet I remain convinced the plan I developed is a better plan and I remain concerned about the consequences of implementing the existing rail plan for the county.
Writing words on the internet is something I know a little about. So here I am, returning to my old habits, as it were.
HN Discussion
r/UrbanPlanning Discussion
While I lived there many years ago, I was a part-time college student and I wanted to be an urban planner. In hopes of preparing for a career in planning, I used the existing county rail plan as a focus of my studies.
Every time a class asked me to pick a real world issue to analyze or write a paper about or do some kind of work on it, I would pick some element of the county rail plan to examine. Over the course of several classes, this eventually was developed into a presentation.
At the time that I began my research, there was only one Amtrak station in Solano County. It was part of the Capitol Corridor Route. This route connects the state capital, Sacramento, to San Francisco and Solano County had the largest stretch of rail on that route with no stations.
There were existing plans to build three more rail stations to fill in the gaps in Solano County. Unfortunately, the process used to pick the intended sites for new stations was not a sound process.
Instead of having some organization analyze the county as a whole for where those stations should go, the local cities got together at a meeting and divied up the pie politically. Only after that was done did they hire a consultatnt to pick specific sites to serve each city in question.
The consultant did what they were paid to do. They weren't paid to analyze the county as a whole and pick which cities should get a site and they no doubt knew which side their bread was buttered on. The resulting plan has serious flaws.
For starters, Travis Air Force Base (AFB) had no representation at the meeting where the pie was divided politically. It had no representation because it is not a city, so it likely was not invited at all.
The problem is that it is the single largest employer in the county to the tune of more than a billion dollars annually and the resulting rail plan could encourage the federal government to move Travis elsewhere. The federal government toys with the idea of relocating it periodically anyway simply because its function could be served from almost anywhere on the West Coast and almost anywhere else would be cheaper than the San Francisco Bay Area.
The issue with the rail plan is encroachment on the base. This is a security issue for military facilities and is a factor in deciding which bases to close and which bases to keep.
The primary environmental concern is the decision to give one of the stations to Benicia even though there is no good place to put a station. The station would be located in a protected wetland that is an important bird sanctuary and a critical part of the Pacific Flyway. So it impacts bird migrations over a very long distance in both North and South America. This is not just a local issue.
There are some other issues with the plan as well. For example, the site chosen for Benicia will not ever have much development around it because it is protected wetlands and the station is likely to slowly sink into the marsh, like Venice. The chosen sites do a generally poor job of serving the existing population centers, so are unlikely to have good ridership.
In the years since I did the research, one of the three planned stations had its grand opening in April 2018. Although millions of dollars were spent, this station is a threat to Travis AFB, so it is a threat to more than a billion dollars annually in local revenue. So I think it would make sense to shut it down and go with the sites my analysis suggest are generally superior to the existing plan.
I am not politically savvy, I no longer live in California and I have no idea how to go about promoting the idea that there is an alternate plan and this alternate plan is based on better metrics, like ridership, protecting Travis AFB and protecting critical habitat. Yet I remain convinced the plan I developed is a better plan and I remain concerned about the consequences of implementing the existing rail plan for the county.
Writing words on the internet is something I know a little about. So here I am, returning to my old habits, as it were.
HN Discussion
r/UrbanPlanning Discussion