SB 51: the California politics thread

! Dem hold on CA grows, with potentially big policy effects. GOP ended Dem supermajority in June by recalling a senator over a gas tax hike. But in Nov., voters refused to repeal that hike, and Dems regained all-important supermajority.

It now looks like a 29-11 (+3 Dem) Senate. https://t.co/Y9XrBKBYTt

— Taniel (@Taniel) November 20, 2018

And Dems' majority will likely be even larger in CA's Assembly; it stands at 60-20 (+5 Dem) based on the current leads in each district. (In fact, Dems already picked-up a seat in June when the GOP was shut out of the Top 2 in a GOP-held district.)

— Taniel (@Taniel) November 20, 2018

cautiously excited about this with newsom as gov tbqh

those supermajorities are not even thaaat close, which hopefully minimizes the amount of bullshit/pork/timewasting necessary

we'll see how well Newsom navigates the legislature. Jerry Brown he is not.

That’s what makes me optimistic: he seems like a blank slate. Although admittedly I don’t know whether Sacramento’s equivalent of Chuck Schumer is worth much.

Also one of the reasons the supermajority is a big deal is because the leg can now overrule the gov’s veto. They didn’t do that for brown but newsom just gives off this “overrule me” vibe.

he also gives off this "i will feed a cat into an ATM and stab someone over a business card with superior minimalist design" vibe

heh

Nobody will remember this but Umberg lost to Nguyen about 10 years ago for the OC BoS special election that turned really nasty & toxic. Nice little bit of karma.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/california-gov-elect-gavin-newsom-faces-pressure-to-cut-77b-rail-plan.html

"There's no way there's going to be a profit on this thing, so there's not going to be private interest in it," said Baruch Feigenbaum, an assistant director of transportation Policy at Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. He believes the project was designed to go through the Central Valley for political reasons and won't be competitive with air travel.

What are the "political reasons" this dude is referring to?

I really want to like this project, but all the fiscal conservatives in my life have left me feeling fairly terrified about it. Should a Californian feel terrified about it?

i mean why would you need to go from SF to LA in one jag in the first place? i feel like HSR from SD->LA or SAC->SF would be more useful? Hell, even Vegas->LA

...and I loves me a train

xp
The "political reason" is that Central Valley people would be pissed if their tax money went to a system that more or less ignores them.

My take: the Central Valley (up until the most recent elections) has leaned right for decades. Part of the reason for high speed rail is to repopulate the Central Valley with silicon valley employees who have been priced out of the Bay Area. By incenting non-aggie voters to recolate to Fresno/Modesto/Bakersfield this could be seen as a gerrymander-ish move by the CA GOP.

(The problem with that take is that silicon valley workers have priced everyone else out of the Bay Area).

trying to picture what silicon valley types would want to live in fresno or a dying town like bakersfield

i mean i understand it takes investment to improve these cities but they have a long way to go before they can attract any of these guys

I am 100% for this project and hate having to travel from SF to LA (and further down to SD) on the regular, like several times a year. The GHG emissions from flying really don't sit well with me, so that means driving is the only option and driving that stretch is just fucking lame, even if you take the 101 over the fairly apocalyptic 5.

certainly there are *tons* of businesses that have offices in both the Bay Area and LA, simple and more efficient travel options are def warranted

my company has people flying back and forth all the time

yeah i feel like the companies with multiple offices would just fly people out back and forth (i know a few companies and people, myself included, where this is the case), and not just sf<>la but all along the west coast

definitely a thing ime

shakey what are the GHG numbers on driving vs flying? i do this from burbank to san jose maybe every 2 months.

depends what kind of car you have obviously but generally flying is many times worse than driving a regular old gasoline-powered car

i have a 2010 civic. it is blue.

is that just raw output or are you taking into account mobilizing hundreds/thousands of people at a time vs hundreds/thousands of (at times stalled) cars on the road

rough calc based on some general assumptions I've seen elsewhere is that the emissions/miles travelled ratio is about twice for airplanes (0.61333) vs what it is for cars (0.646667). Going by that, 330 miles from San Jose to Burbank is 114.4 kg of CO2 in a car, and 202.4 kg in a plane.

and of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation

unlike with cars, idk how you build an all-electric airplane, or one that runs on, say, hydrogen

most of the current prototypes are built around batteries:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-startup-is-building-an-electric-airplane

huh interesting. no idea how that works from an engineering perspective, but hey go get em guys

a blue civic is far worse for the environment than any other color. who the fuck buys a blue car?

one of my old drummers once said about someone, derisively: "he drives a car like an Australian drives a blue car". I have no idea what that meant and it's still funny to me. Said drummer now lives in Australia.

Am with Shakey: I'm really excited about California High Speed Rail.

Also connecting communities that have been left behind in other ways (eg Stockton / Fresno / Bakersfield) is a "political reason" I can get behind.

Real question is whether we can find a way to do these types of projects with appropriate environmental/local checks without letting NIMBY's and the like obstruct them. Getting this line through Atherton, for example, is going to be a battle.

emissions/miles travelled ratio is about twice for airplanes (0.61333) vs what it is for cars (0.646667)

dunno what I did here but I obviously misentered a digit, the ratio should've been 0.346667 for cars

just for you math nerds out there

Isn’t part of the problem with air travel that emissions/mile is not linear because of the relative expense of take off? Like a 1000 mile flight does not release twice the emissions of a 500 mile flight.

that would make sense, tbh I haven't dug into it too much

There is the same factor in cars, in that starting and running a cold engine pollutes much more than cruising with a hot engine.

right but energy per person to get to "cruising" (e.g. 30 mph or 30,000ft) is much larger for the plane than the car because of gravity. i guess i should look into this.

I'm not sure on the precise models, but search "carbon travel calculator" is one resource.

And I don't think there's any non-hydrocarbon aircraft that can plausibly fly this route at scale on any roadmap today.

Trains are pretty efficient. That's why they're still in use.

Central Valley is flat as can be. That is exactly what works best for trains.

the other thing that works best for trains is direct routes to densely populated areas

another thing that works best for railroads is constructing them in sparsely populated areas, because the costs of construction and easements in densely populated ones could sink the project

bunch a amateur caltrans engineers on here

I would like to be able to take the train from Seattle to LA in less than two entire days so please do build that train

based on this week's charter school discussion, threads where everyone is an amateur are more "fun" than when there are posters that actually know shit

NB I'm not saying how to do it I'm just asking

i want this train to have a smoking car, like, if they don't have a smoking car, I kinda don't care as much

relevant:

https://medium.com/@parismarx/high-speed-rail-from-los-angeles-to-vancouver-f67c81ef9afd

I understand and agree with banning smoking on planes because you can't really isolate the smoke, but on a train, you totally can.

a train that starts operating in 2050-california will probably not have a smoking car

...but it might have a vaping car ;)

xpost It seems that some people hold the view that this project, or public-works projects in general, need to be economical in a closed-system sense. That is, when you open it up and set up a fare gate you should get your money back.

But that's not how a whole lot of public-works projects we rely on and consider successful work. I don't think this needs to meet that criteria.

It's not dumb to run the train through the route they're building on. It was a conscious decision. It may not meet goals a person agrees with, but that doesn't mean those goals are the only ones that matter.