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#1 How station design at California High-Speed Rail is creating a sustainable future with Meg Cederoth.
204 Plays2 years ago
What is the future of transport for the USA’s most populous state? California High-Speed Rail (HSR) has big plans to reshape not just how the state’s projected 50 million residents will get around but also how their cities, agriculture and state overall will look.
In this episode, ‘Voices of the Industry’ interviews Meg Cederoth, the Director of Planning and Sustainability at HSR. Join us as Meg explains how HSR’s approach to station design and planning will build both California’s communities and its sustainability agenda.
Key takeaways:
- HSR is part of California’s plan to decarbonize.
- Station design can increase not just numbers of rail passengers but active travel.
- Placemaking is a key component of station planning for HSR.
- Station design can improve wider town planning, prevent urban sprawl and protect agriculture.
Guests
- Margaret Cederoth, California High-Speed Rail Authority's director of planning and sustainability, is an urban planner with over 20 years of experience in sustainable infrastructure, land use, and transportation planning in the United States and across the world.
Host
- Tim Gallagher, Steer Journalist.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Voices of the Industry, a podcast series bringing you leading industry voices who challenge thinking across transportation, infrastructure and cities.
California's Economic and Environmental Goals
00:00:26
Speaker
California is the most popular state in the US and boasts a GDP which is projected to soon overtake Germany as the fourth largest in the world. At the same time, the Golden State has big goals of achieving carbon neutrality by 2045, aiming to capitalise on its abundant renewable resources. The latest targets for California from the California Air Resources Board offer a drop in air pollution of 71%, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 85%,
00:00:52
Speaker
and lowering of fossil fuel consumption by 94% over the next two decades.
Rail Electrification and Infrastructure Transformation
00:00:57
Speaker
The project, which is now planned to extend further north to Sacramento and south to San Diego, will be completely electrified and powered by renewables and is projected to reduce carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2 million metric tons annually.
00:01:11
Speaker
HSR will revolutionize travel along the Pacific West of the US and will reshape life for Californians whose infrastructure and urban planning has for so long been private vehicle-centric. Cities and localities along HSR like Bakersfield, Fresno and Kings County will soon be transformed by unique rail stations which are green, architecturally distinct and which will facilitate both a new way of living and multimodal sustainable transport.
Meet Meg Cedarroth: Perspectives on Planning and Sustainability
00:01:35
Speaker
So with me today to discuss this exciting development for California is Meg Cedarroth, Director of Planning and Sustainability at the California High Speed Rail Authority. Meg has worked in urban planning for two decades and has experience in sustainable infrastructure, land use and transportation planning throughout the United States and around the world. Meg, welcome. How are you? Thank you. I'm well, thank you. And I heard that you cycled into work today.
00:02:03
Speaker
Yes, I did cycle and torque today. I cycle to work every day that I'm working in Sacramento. And is that a new cycle lane or is there an established cycle lane network in Sacramento?
00:02:15
Speaker
Do you know what's wonderful about Sacramento is there is a pretty, there's a very good network of established cycle lanes, but recently the city has taken efforts to upgrade many of them. Sadly, not on my route yet, but from time to time, I get to use the very nice green painted, separated through bollard kind of bike lanes that are protected from the travel lanes for automobiles. They are excellent. I think Sacramento has a great focus on multimodal active transportation.
Meet Alastair Dawson: Cycling and Station Planning
00:02:45
Speaker
Excellent. Also joining us is Alastair Dawson, who heads up Steers Operations in North America. Alastair, you're based in Sacramento and may soon be riding HSI yourself. What do you think of the bike lanes in Sacramento? I love them, Tim. Hi, Meg. Good to see you. I also cycle to work today. I do every day when I'm here in Sacramento. I don't either have one of those new cycle lanes, but I do love them.
00:03:09
Speaker
And I like to think that my personal taxpayer dollars are going to pay for my cycle lane. So I feel a great sense of ownership, but they're great. Good to see you both. Excellent stuff. So for those of us not based in Sacramento, is it always sunny in Sacramento?
Key Priorities and Strategies for HSR Station Planning
00:03:29
Speaker
It is always sunny in Sacramento between, I think March and November. And then occasionally,
00:03:39
Speaker
Clouds roll in. Last winter, a lot of clouds rolled in for an extensive period of time, and we received, I think, more rain last year than we'd received in the entire decade prior to that. But usually, you can rely on it being fairly sunny, and particularly this time of year, fairly warm, which makes it nice to cycle as early as possible in the morning.
00:04:03
Speaker
Well, I live in the UK, so that sounds fantastic. But we're not here to talk about the weather, unfortunately. Meg, we are here to talk about the station planning process in California and with California high speed rail. I know that the station planning process is very important for the HSR authority. I wonder if you could tell us some more of your key priorities for station planning and how these feed into the sustainability objectives overall.
00:04:31
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So I think first and foremost, our key priorities for the stations is that they are beautifully designed world class stations that are an exciting addition to the cities in which we're locating high speed rail stations.
00:04:46
Speaker
That's kind of an aspiration to make sure that they express the excitement and the uniqueness of high-speed rail as a new transportation tool for California and as a transformative transportation investment for California. But then when we think about the planning around the station, we want to make sure that they are destinations, even if you're not taking the train, and in fact also become multimodal hubs where
00:05:11
Speaker
transportation options across all modes are seamlessly integrated together in a wonderful public space. So we have a multimodal access hierarchy that we rely on when we're doing station planning. We focus very much on how
00:05:29
Speaker
The pedestrian is accessing the station in a comfortable, conflict-free manner. After that, we're focused on getting other active transportation modes, so cycling, as we were talking about earlier, making sure there's great, well-configured bike lanes to the station. We have really sensible, well-located, safe parking facilities, storage facilities for cyclists.
00:05:50
Speaker
And then also looking at other active transportation modes, be it the kind of one wheel or a skateboard or name your active transportation mode of choice. I feel like every other week there's some sort of new scooters. There's a new mode that's happening, which is great. I think that speaks to the interest we all have as human beings in movement and activity and
00:06:14
Speaker
you know, enjoying getting places on our own two feet. But we also respect that transit is a critical mode serving a wide range of communities. And so transit is sort of the next in the hierarchy of access to the stations. And then, of course, you know, we can't deny the fact that for the past 80 years, the United States has been planned around the automobile. And we are on the cusp of evolving that planning work to focus more on
00:06:41
Speaker
us as individual human users and not just on cars and cars mobility. So we do need to plan for really sensible, well-located parking facilities, but that is kind of lower in terms of making sure that access to the station is simple and intuitive and safe and comfortable.
Community Engagement and Station Design
00:07:01
Speaker
All modes are respected equally, but we don't want to be sacrificing access to the station by pedestrians and cyclists.
00:07:09
Speaker
We don't want to sacrifice that access by interrupting it with automobile flows. So we try to sensibly organize the station planning overall so that automobiles can go in one direction.
00:07:22
Speaker
ADA compliance parking for Americans with disabilities is located much more closely to the station entrance, but the bulk of people who are going to come and drive and park, we're trying to have that located a little bit farther away and make sure it's not disrupting the flow of pedestrians and cyclists and transit to the station facility.
00:07:42
Speaker
Fascinating make i mean that's a really commendable that the authority yourself for doing all this planning really quite early in the systems life you know when you when you go down into the central valley you know i know a lot of people don't but there is an enormous amount of construction going on down the central valley for the,
00:08:01
Speaker
for the right of way, where the train will be in the future. But we're quite a long way off actually building the stations, actually getting trains on the tracks, actually getting people riding the trains. But as a planner in the business for 20 years, this is what you do. And I was wondering
00:08:21
Speaker
How easy is it when you're talking to the station communities, when you're engaging with the station communities, in terms of painting that picture, which is quite a way off, are people, organizations coalescing around the idea of a new high-speed rail station and the opportunities it may bring to their communities?
00:08:39
Speaker
They are, which we're really grateful to see because to your point, the Central Valley itself hasn't necessarily been organized around active transportation or very compact land use. Although, interestingly, historically, the Central Valley communities formed a round railroad and a railroad line.
00:08:58
Speaker
So you do actually have a great kind of downtown core and network around the station that you can build on. But what I found most gratifying is, you know, to your point, we're seven years out from having customer service on the first rail line.
00:09:13
Speaker
Our goal is to get customers on trains in kind of early 2030, that kind of 2030-33 range. And that is not a lot of time. So anyone who works in the infrastructure space respects that that is not a lot of time. And then I've also found when you are working with communities
00:09:31
Speaker
who are focused on active transportation, the cycling advocacy, pedestrian advocacy groups, they are in it for the long haul, right? They recognize that their voices are important to bring to the table early and often. And I think what I've noticed is a recognition that the more people who are walking and cycling around the streets adjacent to the stations and into the station, the
00:09:55
Speaker
greater that is feeding economic development and the vitality and the community vitality of these areas. So I think there's a great confluence of several trends where people want to keep building community around their stations. They also want active transportation options. They don't want to have to drive to
00:10:13
Speaker
every single destination. They recognize that getting more activity around the station means attracting more range of land uses around the station, which means maybe I have to drive to my job, but then if I live in an area that has medical facilities, a shop,
00:10:32
Speaker
entertainment facilities, a nice coffee shop, and a school. It means maybe you can walk your child to school, do some calls at the coffee shop, and then commute to your job three days a week. You're commuting to your job. But I think it's interesting watching this trend play out in the Central Valley. And I would say that there is a real strong commitment
00:10:56
Speaker
every single Central Valley community around pedestrian safety, traffic safety, and really using the tools of transportation facility design in the service of safety and community building and economic development. So that's actually incredibly gratifying to see because that does work really strongly with the station design and station area planning.
00:11:18
Speaker
We certainly see that in some of the other work that we're doing with stations. When you've got a mature system like the UK has, which has been going for years, people can see that, and there's a realization that the value of station investment, which is what we do quite a bit of work with with others, and actually mobility hubs now on this side of the pond,
00:11:41
Speaker
that a train is quite interesting. It's sort of unlocked this idea of a train traditionally coming to a community. But then if you see it from the other perspective, which is the community coming to the train or the community using the train, you talked a bit about users and non-users. There's gonna be people using these.
00:11:58
Speaker
station facilities, both to connect to high-speed rail, but probably to connect to other modes. If we get it right, which we will, you're going to get people using that facility for high-speed rail and non-high-speed rail use because it should be integrated into the urban fabric in a way that responds to that local community.
00:12:15
Speaker
Yes, precisely. And we expect to have the station contain areas like plazas and other places that people would come to even if you're not taking high-speed rail or even taking transit, but you're coming there because this is the place you can gather in your community or this is a place you can take your kids to play in the community. These investments are both about making a really good, well-organized, highly functional high-speed rail station, but they're also
00:12:43
Speaker
places within these cities that are incredibly important. I think that you're both kind of talking about links between placemaking and active travel and economic activity. Meg, I wonder if you could tease those links out a little bit more for me.
Early Site Activation and Placemaking
00:12:58
Speaker
I would be happy to tease those links out. One of the things we've focused on in high speed rail is how we can organize the construction of the station sites so that there's portions of them that we can get done as early as possible. And we refer to it as early site
00:13:17
Speaker
Activation, because that is incredibly clear to communicate to people early, well before, and in advance of customer service. Site, talking about a physical place, and activation, as the name implies, means getting people to come to a place. We could also use the term placemaking, but I have found that sometimes that phrase falls on deaf ears, depending on who the audience is. But early site activation, you can see yourself in any of those three phrases.
00:13:47
Speaker
And in Fresno in particular, and starting soon in Bakersfield and soon in Merced, we'll be identifying places. But one or two years ago in Fresno, we recognized we had an asset in the station site on the station complex. And that asset was a historic rail station, the historic rail depot. And it had been transformed into office use in the 80s.
00:14:17
Speaker
not necessarily been well maintained by other owners over time. We bought it about five years ago. We've had people in it for a while, but now we are poised to do seismic and make it universally accessible and also do seismic retrofits to it so that it can be used for a variety of uses in advance of high-speed rail service.
00:14:39
Speaker
In front of it is a place that used to be a park. It used to be the Chamber of Commerce that was removed in the 50s. The Greyhound bus station went in. Then we bought the Greyhound bus station. It's now gone. We have a blank slate of two acres in front of a historic depot. That place
00:14:59
Speaker
is part of a link within the city of Fresno, kind of linking the downtown to the Chinatown community and where we received a grant from the federal government, the Rebuilding America's Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant, the RAISE grant. We just received $20 million to invest in this place
00:15:21
Speaker
get that done well in advance of high-speed rail service. So we're aiming for construction to start in 2025 and that will create a plaza. It will create a place where we can program with a variety of activities. It will be available for electric vehicle charging and it will also serve as the sort of
00:15:41
Speaker
forecourt or the vestibule for the historic depot. So that instead of the historic depot kind of hidden behind a cinder block wall, it's now reopened to the community and use that maybe as a place to have tours or build an observation tower for the testing and commissioning of the trains and the completion of the station.
Connecting Communities: Station Design as Bridges
00:16:05
Speaker
People love watching construction and they love watching trains.
00:16:09
Speaker
So we are leaning into that natural instinct people have and creating these places where people can gather on our site and start observing construction, but then also make it a place that is interconnected with the surrounding community.
00:16:25
Speaker
I mean, that's fascinating. There's a bunch of projects out there where actually they've realised that people are just fascinated with construction and so giving people the opportunity to watch is quite important because you get some good kind of community engagement when you do that. Thinking lessons from elsewhere in the world, and there are so many, and there's a station in Italy where the railroad had cut off two communities, they rebuilt the station, connected the two communities with a massive walkway.
00:16:55
Speaker
and then you're getting more permeability over the once dividing asset. There's plenty of examples like that. Can you think of any other examples that perhaps may be applied to other stations in the high-speed rail system?
00:17:09
Speaker
Do you know, I think the station serving as a bridge, and I'm glad you touched on that. I think there's many examples where you look at a rail line and you realize it has done, there's a reason there's the cliche, the wrong side of the tracks, because it's a piece of infrastructure that historically has divided communities. And we have recognized how important it is for the station itself and the station complex to serve as a bridge across the railroad tracks for communities.
00:17:40
Speaker
In places like Fresno, we are putting in a pedestrian overcrossing bridge that's available to the public so that you are reconnecting downtown and the Chinatown community there in Fresno. But by the same token, there's other opportunities in Merced and Bakersfield, as well as the other stations along the entire alignment
00:18:01
Speaker
to continue to use the station as a piece of infrastructure that connects communities across both sides of the track.
Urban Investment and Sustainability
00:18:09
Speaker
And I think that, you know, that investment that re-knitting together of the urban fabric across this rail line just continues to reinforce
00:18:20
Speaker
these places as areas of investment. And, you know, a lot of local land use planning has focused on these places as areas and investment. This is the place where you could build taller, you can build more complex buildings by right, or by default, because the city has recognized they want to be concentrating development around the stations. So that in turn helps with
00:18:50
Speaker
long-term sustainability for the state of California. Placemaking might sound like, oh, it's nice to do for the community, but really, at its heart, it is nice to do for the community. It does have a really strong equity motivation behind it, making sure we're investing in historically under-investigated
00:19:09
Speaker
under-invested communities, but also there's a longer term or a broader picture of sustainability motivation behind it because the more we're focusing on these existing downtown cores with existing infrastructure, the less pressure there is on kind of further flung areas and the reduction of pressure on
00:19:31
Speaker
natural and working lands so that you actually are allowing those to remain as functional farms or functional rivers, lakes, streams, forests, and providing us with ecosystem services. Yeah, that's really interesting. And Alistair, I just wonder, with economic activity, placemaking, active travel, how does that figure for steer?
00:19:55
Speaker
Over here, we talked a little bit about the social value of stations and station investment in the UK, which is all about taking a legacy estate, well, legacy estate, developing estate, and bringing it up to scratch with local or with current thinking. Over here, that translates, I think, probably best into the mobility hub work that we've been doing with Orange County that we're soon to be starting with.
00:20:19
Speaker
SACOG up here, who are the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. That I find really interesting. We've got a couple of experts who are dealing with that, and I am definitely no expert on this. But I think what's fascinating about that is that the idea is you've got stations and non-stations. Stations are naturally, natural mobility hubs, but a mobility hub will bring together traditional forms of transport, but also shared services and other ideas that come into that hub.
00:20:48
Speaker
to create options, choices for people to
00:20:53
Speaker
travel in different ways. The idea being is if you create a network of mobility hubs, then you increase the amount of non-auto travel that is going around with chain trips and things like that. Hopefully, the idea being is that then benefits fixed route guideways, more ridership for transit, more ridership then going into high speed rail in the future.
00:21:19
Speaker
We're doing a lot of work on that. There's a lot of industry activity going on in the moment, which is just incredibly interesting. Meg, you must be seeing that as well from your involvement in the planning discourse around the state and your bigger role as one of the organizations with some of the most money there.
00:21:38
Speaker
Well, I love that you touch on mobility hubs and the idea of bringing all many different modes together in an organized
Private Sector Involvement in Station Development
00:21:46
Speaker
way. And I would say that I've seen communities across the state of California at all different scales and sizes focus on that idea and focus on that concept and recognizing that, you know, we have precious resources in terms of public sector investment in places. So using those in an
00:22:05
Speaker
organized way in a mobility hub or in sort of a streetscape landscape improvement alongside that, you know, they recognize that that is a great catalyst for economic development and private sector investment as well.
00:22:21
Speaker
I wanted to get onto that because I think that's probably one of the most interesting things for me, certainly, is the private sector investment. You've got the mechanisms of state, local governance, community interest groups coming together, and you've got your $20 million raised grant for Fresno, which is fantastic to know about.
00:22:44
Speaker
and a bunch of industry professionals who are really working to improve these public spaces to relink communities. So all of that is working. Where you see the most successful stations is where you're getting private investment as well. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean private investment in the station, but it's the idea of sort of California High Speed Rail as a catalyst. You're making this quite big investment, dollars, the station building, the urban realm,
00:23:14
Speaker
creating a catalyst for other investment to come in from the public side. Around that, are you seeing the developer community activate? We are seeing that at a variety of scales. I think you're very familiar with this phenomenon called the global pandemic that significantly disrupted a number of core areas and that significantly disrupted all of our lives.
00:23:41
Speaker
But in particular, it's disrupted your sort of classic real estate markets and how people were choosing to make investments. It disrupted the transportation sector and how people are using different modes of transit. I think we're now moving past that we're starting to re-coalesce. But even with that disruption, you still see that, to your point, when the public sector is investing in a place,
00:24:08
Speaker
and more people are coming to our place. The private sector puts up their antenna and says, oh, with my scarce dollars, where do I want to put them? Oh, I want to put them in the place where there's a brand new multi hundreds of millions of dollars public sector investment of high street rail, bringing
00:24:25
Speaker
many new riders, much more foot traffic, which is incredibly attractive to retail, to commercial. We are seeing that it slowed. I guess my point about the pandemic is it slowed everything, but you still are seeing a lot of interest in these places. I think they want
00:24:48
Speaker
proof that we are going to get there. And I think the station design work, as the private sector starts to see these design concepts and really understands the physical limits of the station, I think you'll start to see even more investment and even more interest in the station areas specifically, because people recognize, oh, this is the
Reflecting Local Character in Station Design
00:25:09
Speaker
place I want to be. If I'm doing a new investment, this is where I want it to go.
00:25:13
Speaker
Speaking of station design, I know that it's important for you that those stations be reflective of local character. And I wonder if you could give us a really nice example of that and also tell us a bit about the stakeholder engagement process.
00:25:28
Speaker
In terms of fitting the station designs into the local context, we have a dual mission to fulfill. One is to create stations that are iconic and really
00:25:43
Speaker
legible in the urban landscape that that is the place where I go get on high speed rail. So we've focused that around a canopy that is consistent across all four of the new stations that are going to be designed in the Central Valley.
00:26:00
Speaker
From a very practical standpoint, from a constructability standpoint, it's fantastic for the high street rail system as an operator to have a canopy that is consistent. It has the same bolts across all four stations. The lamps are the same across all four stations. You know, that just helps us from an operational standpoint.
00:26:17
Speaker
It also helps the public from a legibility standpoint. All of these stations are designed to be consistent. So when you come to use the station, all of the facilities are in the same place. Ticket vending will be in one place. How you get to the platforms will be consistent.
00:26:35
Speaker
the look and feel will be consistent in the station or just adjacent to the tracks. But they are in very different locations across the Central Valley and those are communities with a particular sense of their community and identity as expressed in their local architecture vocabulary and
00:26:56
Speaker
one of the efforts we'll be moving to really at beginning next year will be a series of conversations with the local community surrounding an adjacent neighborhoods as well as very importantly the jurisdictions to understand what we change about the site layout and the site furniture so that it is expressing the context of the local community. And so it's what we hope to
00:27:23
Speaker
achieve is this clarity and kind of distinctness of identity on the station site that I'm clearly in Bakersfield, I'm clearly in Merced, I'm clearly in Fresno. There are things that evoke the local context, be it certainly landscaping, you know, even in the Central Valley, there's still some subtleties around the microclimates in each of these locations. So native adaptive planting will be slightly different, slightly different color palette in each location.
00:27:53
Speaker
the site furniture, so things like benches and lights and trash bins, should be more or less consistent but may have a different color or a different feel to really evoke the space. And then as you move toward the station facility itself, that is far more consistent.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, because you've got, you know, at its heart, a train station does a thing, you know, it sells, sells tickets and it gets people onto the train and it does that safely. And that is, you know, there are some things that the station must do operationally, but that's actually relatively straightforward. I think it's this integration into the urban fabric.
00:28:33
Speaker
which is much more complex and much more sort of co-creative with the community. I know you've done some early work that's been done on that and this is the recent work with Arup and Foster's is taking advancing that to something that's much more serious, right?
00:28:51
Speaker
Yes, exactly. And I think the reason we have a RAISE grant in Fresno is that we did a lot of coordination and collaborative design work with the surrounding communities to understand what did they want to see on a plaza, what makes a plaza of interest to them. And first and foremost, they said shade, shade, shade, shade. And
00:29:12
Speaker
if possible, some sort of water feature which, you know, water evaporative cooling can be really nice in terms of making a public space more inviting. But in addition to shade, shade, shade, there could be an impulse just to have space for a farmer's market. But what we heard was actually we need a space where we can come with our families and we'd like a space to play. We'd like there to be a place that is inviting to families and kids. We don't just want
00:29:40
Speaker
a beer garden, for example. So I think that the community involvement process, and as much as we can actually do some co-creation of those plazas and public spaces with the community, the more it will fit into the more it is a beloved part of the community and used by the community, which then has an attractive effect relative to economic development because people want to bring retail to where there are people already coming.
Community Input and Economic Benefits of HSR
00:30:10
Speaker
And something that I'm interested in, in terms of reflecting local character and building beautiful stations, is there can often be a tension between communities and big infrastructure projects. Is that something that you are consciously trying to avoid or something where you're trying to bring local communities along? That is a fantastic question, Tim.
00:30:31
Speaker
I do recognize what you're saying, that a program of megaprojects, it can be incredibly hard for your average citizen to understand how they enter into the process, how they get engaged in the process.
00:30:47
Speaker
we rely on is a fantastically dedicated team of public information officers who do a lot of great engagement with local universities, local school groups, local community organizations, and just helping them understand the project through at large and the process. That team does a fantastic job of going to farmers market and going to school events, going to a number of different facilities or a number of different events in
00:31:16
Speaker
Fresno, I want to call it the clothing swap, or it was this event that we thought, wait, why are we going to this? And the answer was because that's where all the students are going to find vintage clothing or to barter. And they found that. That was a great place to making sure
00:31:34
Speaker
People had good information about the delivery of the system and how they could participate in its delivery. And then to your point, as we're delivering station design, we are also cognizant of those opportunities to break
00:31:50
Speaker
this massive project down into something discreet and meaningful and allow the community help enable the community to participate in co-creating some space or understand where they can actually
00:32:05
Speaker
have an influence and put their fingerprints on the space because otherwise, you're right, it can just seem really big. To Al's point, when you go now in the Central Valley, you'd go past these massive arches and massive kilometer long viaducts. You look at those as a human being, you're like, ugh, that's
00:32:25
Speaker
That's really large. I don't really understand how I would influence that. But when it comes to the station, it's both quite significant and sizable. I mean, 1400 foot long platforms are a quarter of a mile. That's it's a very large station, but it's the rest of the station facility gets feathered into and integrated into the urban context. And we look for opportunities to make sure the communities can be involved in that.
00:32:52
Speaker
It's also about the process of engagement. There's a process of bringing people along with you and getting people involved, those who want to be involved. But then there's a permissibility, isn't there, of people who are really unhappy about having high-speed rail in their backyard. Some of the work that we've done with you over the years has been about
00:33:14
Speaker
economic impact analysis because your brilliant communications people use some of the analysis that we produce about job years and employment, labour income. I think I'm just looking at it here.
00:33:28
Speaker
34,530 job years of employment in the Central Valley from the investment that California High Speed Rail is making today. Labour income, $2 billion. Economic output, $6.5 billion.
00:33:44
Speaker
That's all from the dollars that are invested today and trying to communicate that out. As you maintain, you might not get the engagement, but you might get the permissibility in the wider community beyond those who are in love with high-speed rail and really want to see it come to the central
Future Impact of HSR on California Communities
00:34:01
Speaker
valley. That's as important a message as the one about engaging in the specific station locations.
00:34:08
Speaker
OK, great. So, Meg, it obviously seems like California high speed rail is going to reshape the state in some ways. I wonder if you could paint me a picture of in 15 to 20 years what you imagine the surrounding areas will look like and what you want them to look like as a result. That is a great exercise, Tim.
00:34:31
Speaker
So let's say let's give it 20 years because that's a great development cycle. So we are actively designing stations now. So you're the development community. You're Al Dawson, developer at large, and you are focused on where you're going to make investments.
00:34:47
Speaker
in places. And, you know, historically, you may have been thinking, oh, I've got this greenfield development. I can put housing out there. Oh, wait, I could take those funds and put them into a building adjacent to the high street rail system. So right now, as we lay out the station areas and lay out the station locations, we're sending these signals to the developer market as to where to focus development. So in 20 years, the vision is to have
00:35:16
Speaker
stations that have been in operation for about 10 years, around them and adjacent to them are great new developments that reflect the priorities, the scale, and the vision of the local communities.
00:35:30
Speaker
In Bakersfield, they want to take the lid off of their downtown and have a station site that doesn't just have a high-speed rail station, but also has much taller buildings as a new node of development in Bakersfield, which means less pressure on the working lands adjacent to and the natural lands adjacent to
00:35:51
Speaker
and in the area of Bakersfield. In Fresno, we have a vision and I think the city would love to see economic development, hotels, entertainment facilities, maybe new medical facilities, new educational universities or laboratories.
00:36:10
Speaker
in the area surrounding the station and you see thousands of people walking in the station area accessing the station and then walking to other new jobs and new housing in that station area. Great. Any final thoughts, Alastair?
00:36:30
Speaker
I think it's a fabulous vision. I think with the volume of investment going into it, that's the appropriate level of ambition to be having for that kind of investment is absolutely essential that we get there and we bring the communities along, both the local communities, but also the developer community, and hopefully we'll see the response in that. But the planning you're going through would indicate, certainly the work we've done elsewhere, the planning you're going through. I know you said it's not much time, but the signals you're sending now
00:36:59
Speaker
the investments that you will make should trigger that response in that private sector to build appropriately around the station area to then make the whole thing a success. I think it's fabulous work.
00:37:32
Speaker
Click!