What an engaged government looks like: Case study - Rail in California and Nevada

With the lack of participation by Idaho’s state level elected officials in many of the conversations that the community is having about transportation, planning, growth, sustainability, transit, etc., an article and a few photos from the western press really drove home the importance of an engaged legislature.

Last month, the Urban Land Institute and Boise State University convened a half-day conference on transit in the Boise Valley. One legislator attended.

The issue being discussed was how to get the rail line, which runs from the City of Nampa to the Micron plant in East Boise, operational for regional passenger service. We’re talking about one tiny little move toward rail transit - and we can’t seem to assemble any political leadership in the room.

There was no representation there from the Governor’s office. Neither the legislature nor the Governor have shown any interest in local option or other funding mechanisms to help the region get some kind of rail transit happening. Meanwhile, our federal officials are heading in the opposite direction and trying to get Amtrak to restore service to the Boise Depot. Our political leaders are all over the map.

So what’s going on in other parts of the country? Everyone else is experiencing the same confusion/apathy, right? Not exactly. Here, in images is what is happening in California:

The proposed high-speed rail network in California

Proposed high-speed rail line from Anaheim to Las Vegas

In case that is unclear, what is happening in California is that the state - through a combination of federal, state, local, and private money - is building a $45 billion, high speed rail network to connect the state. Because California is so organized, they are likely to get the lion’s share of the $8 billion that President Obama made available for regional rail projects.

This in turn spawned the proposal by Nevada to build a high-speed rail connection from Las Vegas to Anaheim. So while the all these grand plans are going on, we’re still sitting around here asking questions like “who’s gonna ride the thing?” Well, they asked that in Nevada too, and the poll below shows that 69% of people said they would ride the Vegas high-speed line if it were built.

A recent poll from the Las Vegas Sun-Times

The California system would link San Francisco with Los Angeles with train service in under three hours. How is it that a project spanning 800 miles and dozens of local governments and special districts, can get off the ground but Idaho can’t even get train service happening from Boise to Micron? Vice President Joe Biden sums it up:

“The reason why California is looked at so closely — it’s been a priority of your governor, it’s been a priority of your Legislature, they’ve talked about it, a lot of planning has been done,” Biden said.

Where Harvard grads fear to tread

Few Harvard grads are moving west

Saw this report a week or so ago and thought it interesting. As you can very nearly see from the infographic above, only California really got a significant number of grads from the last Harvard class. 13% of Harvard 2009 grads moved to California for work or grad school. Another 2.3% moved to other places in the West. The largest share of grads stayed right there in the Northeast Megaregion. What’s up with the Brahmins? They don’t imbue a sense of adventure among Harvard students anymore?