Category: Transportation Planning

Santa Cruz County produces biased report prior to June ballot measure calling for removing the rail line

A small group of homeowners, bankrolled by a former Apple executive, has qualified their Greenway Initiative for the June ballot in Santa Cruz County. This group, whose motivation appears to be preventing trains from running near their homes, are seeking the public’s support for a measure that would eliminate the County’s policies calling for building a commuter rail system on the Santa Cruz Branch Line. It would instead tear out the tracks to build an extra-wide multi-use pathway they call the Greenway. TRANSDEF is committed to rail as the low-carbon approach to organizing transportation and land use in the era…

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TRANSDEF offers National Transit Database statistics

TRANSDEF is pleased to offer the work of economist Mike Arnold, who has created visualizations of relevant national and regional data. This data is especially important to the transit industry as passengers start returning from a year of avoiding transit in response to the pandemic. We plan to update this information monthly. There are 15 pages of slides and text. Please click the Zoom (+) button at the bottom for an optimal viewing.  

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TRAC files STB response, challenging transfer of freight rights to SMART

In response to the threats to the Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP, which spans over 300 miles from Larkspur Landing in Marin County to Samoa in Humboldt County), the Train Riders Association of California (TRAC) took action today based on its letter to Senator McGuire about his Great Redwood Trail Bill, SB 69.  TRAC filed comments with the Surface Transportation Board (STB), the federal regulatory agency that governs railroad legal matters. (The bookmarked comments are a 20 Mb. download.) Today’s action opposes the request of the current freight operator on the NWP, which is named NWPCO, to have the transfer of…

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NCRA’s Lame Response

The North Coast Railroad Authority (NCRA) finally responded to TRANSDEF’s demand letter, but its response was lame. Descending into belittlement and disparagement, NCRA’s lawyer huffed and puffed, to dance around the fact that he was unable to offer a valid citation to legal authority for NCRA’s Board action to railbank the line north of Willits. TRANSDEF sent a further demand, after receiving this letter.

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Stopping NCRA from tearing up its RR tracks

A Bay Area environmental group is seeking to save the rail tracks in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties from being torn out. The Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund, TRANSDEF, sent a letter to the North Coast Railroad Authority demanding that the NCRA Board rescind the action it took last month. TRANSDEF asserted that the Board had no legal authority to direct its staff to begin the process of abandoning the railroad and turning it into a trail, in a process called railbanking. Railbanking means tearing out the tracks while claiming that the railroad can be restored in the future. North…

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Comments to Caltrans on SB 743 implementation

With the new SB 743 requirement to use VMT as the metric for evaluating transportation impacts under CEQA, Caltrans has reached out for comments on its draft documents. Those documents imply that Caltrans pretty much expects life after SB 743 to be similar to life before it. Caltrans expects to keep on widening highways, which will increase VMT due, in part, to the phenomenon of induced demand. TRANSDEF’s comments stress a broader perspective: the entire mission of Caltrans must change in response to the recognition that the State’s largest obstacle to achieving its climate change targets is the ever-increasing amount…

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Lawsuit charges CCTA with misrepresenting Measure J benefits

After its role in drafting the ballot arguments opposed to Contra Costa Transportation Authority’s (CCTA’s) Measure J on the March 2020 ballot, TRANSDEF became concerned about the misleading language of the question on the ballot. Working with our attorney, we sent multiple letters to the County Registrar of Voters, the Board of Supervisors, and Contra Costa County Counsel. The second set of letters was sent after we discovered that County Counsel had modified her Impartial Analysis of the measure, taking out the first paragraph reference to the proposed sales tax being an additional tax. We decided that this was an…

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