The State of the Solano Rail Alternate Plan
I haven't really updated this site much in a long time. Probably earlier this year, I updated the sidebar and changed the template (the look of the site) while cleaning up a bunch of my sites.
Many years ago, I asked professional planners on Cyburbia to read my presentation and give me feedback. I think two did so. I no longer recall what they told me.
More recenly, I started a reddit that never attracted attention. I used it for a time to try to gather current information in hopes of updating this project, then eventually removed all that and used that reddit as a space to rant about stuff.
I no longer participate on Reddit.
I originally tried to figure out how to start a grass roots movement while still living there. It went nowhere. One local resident told me bluntly he had friends who owned property who expected to make money off the existing rail plan as their land was expected to go up in value because of it, so there was no way he and his buddies would support changing the plan.
Much later, I tried to figure out how to promote it online after moving away. It went nowhere. I posted something from this site to Hacker News and r/UrbanPlanning. That piece currently has 6299 views.
In comparison -- about eighteen months earlier when Hacker News was likely a little smaller -- a parenting piece I wrote got about 60,000 page views in 48 hours from hitting the front page of Hacker News. So, no, not a big success if you ask me, but enough traffic that odds are good people in Solano County are aware my rail plan exists because Hacker News is a California-centric forum.
The top comment on Hacker News starts like this:
The Bay Area used to be dotted with military bases...In fact Silicon Valley used to be defense industry before it was silicon. Vallejo is finally recovering from Mare Island closing and losing that tax base...Losing Travis would cost jobs but CA would eventually recover.
California might recover or it might not. Solano County probably wouldn't.
Vallejo is in Solano County. So "CalChris" is basically saying "No big to lose a second large military base in this relatively rural county full of bedroom communities that already mostly commute to other San Francisco Bay area counties for work. California will get over it."
(I think at the time I did my research, about forty percent of Solano County people commuted to jobs in other counties.)
And that probably got the most up votes from Hacker News based on its position in the comments. Other comments that are relatively high on the page are similarly dismissive of the importance of this analysis.
One comment does give me feedback on the quality of the presentation. That individual is correct that the website at that time was pretty bad. It sucks less these days.
I've never argued that California is going to just die economically if they move Travis AFB elsewhere. But Solano County would be gutted economically.
When I did the research, Travis AFB was the largest employer in the county. The school system was the second largest.
School systems are paid for with taxes. They don't generate money. Without Travis AFB, the school system most likely takes a big hit financially.
Maybe people in tech jobs in San Francisco are fine with that because it may mean more cheap housing for losers not making obscene salaries in the San Francisco tech industry.
Sucks to be you people in Solano County. Moving on.
I don't really think it's like BRILLIANT insight on my part that the penny ante $18 million rail station they already built should be shuttered. I have no idea why it was built.
1. Travis AFB is by far the biggest source of income for the county. The next largest employer was the local school system when I did the paper, not exactly a money maker.
So I would think anyone who lives there would want to know what Travis AFB wants.
2. Encroachment is a top reason bases get shut down or moved because it's a security issue. The more development you have up near your fencing, the easier it is to quietly break in and the harder it is to adequately patrol and secure the facility.
When it gets to the point where you have movie plot opportunities to leap over the fence from a nearby building, bases tend to start looking for a new place to locate.
3. The federal government has made noises for DECADES about moving Travis AFB someplace else. It can do its mission from anywhere on the West Coast and the San Francisco Bay area is stupidly expensive.
Cost-wise, they could probably do better by throwing a dart at a map blind folded after spinning someone around three times like for a pinata at a party.
So I would think anyone with two functioning brain cells would ask Travis AFB "What do you need from us to keep you in our county? What makes it more enticing to not go through the hassle and expense of moving?'
But, no. No one in the county seems to HAVE two functioning brain cells.
Because with or without my PowerPoint presentation and this little neglected website about the Solano Rail plan, Travis AFB is on track to eventually be shut down and its functions moved elsewhere. This fact isn't actually news to anyone.
Another comment from Hacker News has the ironic objection to my presentation that you should Remember to read "protecting the environment" as "protecting our segregation" when anyone opposes constructing housing or transportation of any kind. And then goes on to note "Rio Vista and Benicia are the two most segregated, and heavily white cities of Solano County."
The proposed station in Benicia is one of the two stations to which I'm objecting for environmental reasons. Rio Vista has no relevance as it's nowhere near this rail route.
The other station to which I'm objecting for environmental reasons is the one they already built up against the backside of Travis AFB because in addition to being the largest employer in the county, Travis AFB was one of only two Superfund sites in the county at the time the research was done decades ago.
It's a Superfund site due to jet fuel spills. People are unlikely to be eager to snap up the land and redevelop it if Travis AFB decides to pull up stakes and go elsewhere.
There are substantial challenges in cleaning up and repurposing something like that. I don't foresee San Francisco leaping on the opportunity to turn it into a civilian airport or something like that.
They want to build a rail station in Benicia in a protected wetlands that is critical habitat for the Pacific Flyway.
But I must be a White Supremacist objecting to that as code for denying the heavily White and highly segregated population of Benicia economic development because I'm racist against...um, sorry, White people? Is that your point?
That's quite funny for multiple reasons, including the fact that I wanted the station in Dixon built first in part because its got a substantial Hispanic population.
Which has nothing to do with racism or politics or social justice. It's simply a population more likely to actually use the rail station than your typical upper class White two car family and my plan is based on the single most important metric for rail success:
Ridership.
The history of the rail line in Solano County is that it was placed where it was to support bird hunting in the wetlands like a hundred years or so ago and that section of the rail line has a long, long history of having to be fixed routinely due to sinking into the marsh and ending up under water.
And now they want to add to this existing problem by building an entire train station in that area because Vallejo is one of the largest cities in the county and lost its military base and Benicia is the closest you can get. This rail line doesn't really directly serve Vallejo.
There were plans to further develop other existing rail access to Vallejo further west. I don't recall the details. Those plans made more sense than this.
So the planned Benicia station is going to essentially be the Venice of California. And my understanding is Venice was built in the swamps to protect the people from their enemies -- because their buildings sinking steadily into the marsh was the lesser evil -- not because seven or so lunkheads had a meeting and divided up the political pie for probably stupid reasons.
Once you have a train station in your protected wetlands, you can bet money there will be a zillion applications requesting "exceptions" to the prohibition on development in that area "because the train station already exists." And a lot of them will be approved on economic development grounds.
The critical habitat for the Pacific Flyway means other countries will be substantially impacted by the damage to this wetlands.
It's critical habitat for birds that travel from South America to Canada. This won't be a local problem. It's likely to be a global environmental disaster while people the world over act MYSTIFIED and like we have no idea why or how things got so bad all of a sudden.
As noted above, the first station I wanted built was in the substantially Hispanic town of Dixon. That station is also in the existing rail plan for the county but a lower priority. And it's the cheapest of the three planned stations. I have no idea why they felt it should be delayed.
The demographics for Dixon -- a town where it was challenging to find your way back to the interstate if you got off there the last time I was through there -- were the most promising for high ridership, in part because it had a high percentage of Hispanic people and old fashioned stay-at-home moms and families with one car, not two.
I spent some time trying to update my understanding of where things stand currently in Solano County. I don't know how much value I got out of that.
I am a medically handicapped, dirt poor blogger trying to figure out how to adequately support myself. My dreams of becoming a professional urban planner died a long time ago.
So this project isn't really a high priority for me.
I have absolutely no reason to believe anyone in decision-making positions relevant to rail development will care in the slightest about my opinions. Even if they adopted my rail plan, I see no means to make any money off of it.
I don't think this was really a class project. I think pieces of the presentation were developed in a few of my college classes that required me to use a real world example and I kept using stuff pertinent to the rail plan and I attended various public meetings while I lived there where I learned about things like the redevelopment of Suisun City and the existing plans for Solano County and I probably imagined my presentation would be part of a portfolio for trying to get a job or something like that.
It's been a lot of years. I've forgotten a lot of the whys and wherefores and what I imagined I was doing with this project. I know I spent a little bit of time imagining selling T-shirts and the like as a means to pay me for my work while getting the word out grass roots style.
Hey, Trump sells hats and crap for his MAGA cult and he's a billionaire and currently President of the US. But I guess if you NEED the money to like make rent, it's a conflict of interest. Not so if you are starting wars for your psych job children to profiteer from.
Anyway, this is still online basically due to inertia. I posted it ages ago and the magic of the Internet means my very old work is still available and it costs me nothing to keep it continuously publicly available online.
If it required money to keep this available this many years, it likely would have disappeared entirely a long time ago while my health problems threw my finances under a bus for decades.
So don't hold your breath waiting excitedly for MORE news and updates! There may never be another one.