I just received a large file of information that clearly illustrates the disaster that is the Orangeline Maglev Train, which Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido and his minions are promoting at Monday night’s Santa Ana City Council meeting. I wrote about this yesterday, but this new information is amazing and as such the subject is worth revisiting today, in advance of the Council meeting.
The data I received included a copy of a memo from OCTA Section Manager Michael A. Litschi to OCTA Executive Director Art Leahy. In that memo, Litschi makes it clear that the OCTA is NOT getting on board the Orangeline. See the recommendations below.
The memo also clearly slams the Orangeline’s ridiculous “Financial Plan,” See the graphic below.
The memo also makes it 100% clear that the Orangeline Maglev is REDUNDANT. See the graphic below.
Thanks to the pajarito who stepped up with this great information! Read on for more of his findings:
- It competes with the CHSRA, which is trying to run high-speed rail between SD and Sacramento (and locally between Anaheim and LA). Schwarzenegger’s not allocating any budget money for this either, and I expect the program to be drastically cut back — not that, at $40 billion, it had any chance either.
- Using the PE Right-of-Way for noisy, high-speed transit is a ludicrous idea. The Orangeline has only one OC member city in the JPA — Los Alamitos, which isn’t even that close to the ROW. Other cities have shown interest, probably via Resolutions, but they haven’t ponied up any money and they don’t seem to attend meetings.
- The OL won’t even stop in all its member cities as the nature of line-haul linear transportation means stopping at all or most stations reduces throughput and lowers average speed. Most cities along this ROW object to any elevated transit. Orangeline wants to connect to the ANAHEIM “ARTIC” station, NOT Santa Ana.
- The MTA in LA County’s shown no interest in any of this, and have told me they have no interest in the PE RoW (meaning there’s no money in those neighborhoods and they’ve already done their light rail thing in the area).
- Santa Ana might have used their Go Local funds for this, but chose to give it to Parsons instead.
- SCAG, which has always had an interest in Maglev, doesn’t seem to want anything to do with Orangeline.
- Worldwide, since the German accident, Maglev’s being questioned and re-evaluated, especially due to its extraordinary costs. The Shanghai system was mostly funded by Transrapid, the German vendor, and probably won’t be extended as was once anticipated — it’s also far more expensive than surface transit. Transrapid’s also involved with the VegasAnaheim connection — this won’t succeed either as there’s no money for it and the Indian casinos will lobby against it.
- The notion (first I’d heard of it) of under grounding this through the neighborhoods is LUDICROUS (using my best Wally George voice). They’d have to trench and fill, as it’s doubtful they could tunnel) — in any fashion, the cost would be astronomical and a lot of people would lost their homes. Eminent Domain is an issue here, and even Pulido couldn’t sell that.
- Orangeline just hasn’t ginned up enough support to be taken seriously. Litschi’s memo touches on the lack of financial interest in it — and let’s all remember that transit NEVER makes money, so this mess would have the same fate at the Las Vegas Monorail — a private operation which is about to default on its bonds.
- Why should the OCTA pony up ANY money for a system that competes with the already money losing Metrolink system? Only 25% of M2 is transit-dedicated, and Larry’s right — it’s a smaller pot. All the allocations have been planned already and Metrolink gets its share — a competitive system would not.
- In order to maintain a “90mph” average speed in urban areas, it can’t really stop anywhere. And if this was such a good idea, why hasn’t Anaheim bought in? They need a high-speed rail connection to justify building ARTIC (since the CHSRA won’t happen) and won’t want SA in the mix.
- Maglev, like Monorail, is notoriously hard to switch — i.e. simply allow a train to take Path A or B — that’s why the alignments are point-to-point and linear. This dramatically limits flexibility.
- Palmdale is a reasonable place to go for its new airport, but the airport we REALLY need to get to is Ontario. Neither Orangeline or CHSRA plan a direct OCOntario connection. John Wayne is pushing its passenger caps and can’t handle widebody aircraft on its short runway — and of course, NB won’t allow it to be expanded. With the loss of El Toro as a new airport, Ontario’s our best next bet as it’s bigger, has more non-stops to more locations and is only 45 mins away from SA in reasonable traffic.
Any Santa Ana Council Member who votes for this outrageous waste of money ought to be recalled!
Who is pushing this — which elected officials in other cities or in higher office?
First off I have to say that magnetic levitation is a really cool technology. Second, the German accident does not mean anything – every form of transportation has accidents. Accidents on a maglev line are a lot more preventable the accidents on a freeway.
The questions revolve around economics, not technology. Trains are good at moving large numbers of people (and freight) from one point to another point. Maglev trains are the same thing, only faster. Trains – especially maglev trains – require a lot of capital to build, and must be heavily utilized to make economic sense.
For Orange County and the greater Los Angeles area, this is where things start to break down – for most any form of mass-transit. We do not have large concentrated population centers. The number of places we start from, and the number of places we want to end up, is too spread out. This might all make more sense in older cities with larger population centers, but not so much here.
So why does the topic come up, again and again?
To make this all make economic sense, you would have to force the creation of large centers of population or business. Left to themselves, most folk would rather have a backyard, and rather not live in a forty-story high-rise. So the motivation cannot be coming from individual citizens, and it cannot be coming from any present economic need.
The clue may be in the “$24 billion for real estate development”. With that much money moving around, some folk are going to collect a lot of money. As a guess, the individual folk with homes and small businesses in the path of the “Orangeline” (or any similar development) are not going to see an benefit.
Sure is a lot of money.
Large developers, especially those with political leverage, are going to be interested. That $19 billion in costs sounds like a lot, but … odds are you could find ways to shift most of those costs onto the public sector (which means taxpayers get to pay).
From the point of view of the individual homeowner or taxpayer, none of this really makes any sense. From the point of view of large politically connected developers (or the like), the picture is a little different.
Private enterprise wants to compete in the transpotation market?
I can see why the government people would yell foul.
Poster 1,
I don’t know. You can go to the Orangeline website to see which cities have signed up.
I do know that Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle is opposed to it. Which puts him at odds with his little buddy, Pulido.
I am also told that the OCTA board is opposed to this Maglev concept. Apparently Pulido begged them to hold off until he could bring this to a vote at the Santa Ana City Council.
Personally I believe that Pulido bit it on this one. It is my understanding that our articles about this have already encouraged a lot of people to go the Council meeting on Monday to complain about this proposal.
Pulido used to get away with this sort of thing in the past – but we don’t let him get away with ANYTHING anymore…
As we are still in Florida and I lack access to my transportation files, let me join this thread for those attending the Santa Ana city council meeting.
As a co-author of the opposition to OCTA’s Measure M extension I seem to recall that we were guaranteed that ALL of the $12 plus billion anticipated revenue would be spent in Orange County.
2. No where in the multiple documents used to promote the extension was ther any reference to public participation in a MagLev system.
3. While I do not question the safety of MagLev there are other considerations such as our lack of density to justify the system cost.
Any public participation transportation proposal should first be disucssed in countywide public forums before any voting is to take place. While I took issue with OCTA’s PR, one thing that they did provide were these forums where any resident could see large charts of data, pick up brochures of the proposal, and discuss any aspect of the Plan with members of the OCTA Board at these gatherings. That must be the process to be used if public funds are to be dedicated to any high speed transportation system.
The city of La Palma came out against the Orangeline earlier this year per this Register article: http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/news/local/article_1616171.php.
Any elected official that votes to waste Measure M monies on this project instead of of on roads needs to be voted out of office immediately.
I will be attending the council meeting and will post as to which council members supported this huge waste of your measure M tax money.