VEGAS INC Magazine - Latest Las Vegas business news, features and commentaries about gaming, tourism, real estate and more
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BIG STORY ALL ABOARD: Sen. Harry Reid speaks to the media about progress on the DesertXpress high-speed rail projectin March at the UNLV Science and Engineering building. With him, from leſt, is Nevada Department of Transportation Director Susan Martinovich, US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and UNLV President Neal Smatresk. I 26 magine the potential for Southern Nevada’s resort community if it has have access to millions of customers within a relatively easy two- hour trip on a fast train. Southern California residents could make a last-minute decision to spend a weekend in Las Vegas and get here and back quickly and safely. And the other direction? How cool would it be for us to take off from work in the late afternoon and catch a Dodgers or Lakers game, snooze on the trip home and easily be back at work the next day? Establishing a high-speed line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas has been an elusive dream for decades. Amtrak service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which took about seven hours per trip because passenger trains shared tracks with slower freight trains, ended in May 1997. Magnetic levitation proposals sputtered for nearly 30 years. And now, developments in the Golden State are threatening to put another obstacle in the way of plans for DesertXpress, which although the proposal has proved controversial, it is the one closest to breaking ground. The snag is with the proposed California High- Speed Rail Authority project linking San Francisco and Sacramento with San Diego: It appears to be coming off the tracks. First, some background on DesertXpress. It was the first credible proposal for high-speed rail between Nevada and California. But it had—and still has—a serious flaw: It wouldn’t go anywhere near Hollywood. The line would end at Victorville, just south of which is Cajon Pass, a steep grade from the Los Angeles Basin to the high desert. The high-speed rail technology can’t climb the Cajon Pass grade. True, there are freight train tracks between San Bernardino and Victorville, but curves would be too tight for a high-speed train to maintain speed. The whole idea of having a high-speed system from LA to Vegas is to make the trip competitive with airlines. A slowdown at Cajon Pass would defeat the purpose. Critics have publicly flogged the DesertXpress proposal from Day 1. Who in their right mind would drive from Los Angeles to Victorville, park their car in a lot, climb aboard a train for an hour and 20 minutes and then rely on public transportation once in Las Vegas? Forget about Las Vegans wanting to go to Southern California. Victorville as an end point has always been a nonstarter for us. We would have even less desire to find our way into the vast California megalopolis on public transportation after getting off “the train to nowhere.” Yeah, you could rent a car at the Victorville station, but what’s the point? It would be easier and less expensive to simply drive the three hours through Victorville and then on to Los Angeles. Through all the criticism, DesertXpress officials have put forth its best little-engine-that-could impression, slogged through environmental impact reports and kept trying to convince a disbelieving public that people would actually drive to Victorville and hop a train to come here. The saving grace of the DesertXpress plan was that the company was looking to use the same technology the California High-Speed Rail Authority planned to use on its project. Victorville is 50 miles east of Palmdale, one of the proposed stops on the California line between the City of Angels and San Francisco. It would be relatively simple to build a track between Victorville and Palmdale and extend the trip by an extra 15 minutes to get passengers all the way into LA by way of the California line. But recent developments in California have put that idea in jeopardy. Last month, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, California’s version of the Government Accountability Office, issued a report stating that a number of problems threaten the successful development of high-speed rail in California. Proposition 1A, a referendum approved by the state’s voters in 2008, authorized California to sell $9 billion in general obligation bonds to partially fund the rail system. The state was counting on receiving federal funding and investment from the private sector to build a system estimated to cost $43 billion. Since those estimates were published, | 13 JUNE 2011 | PAUL TAKAHASHI