My last submission to AT was about what happens if California High Speed Rail isn’t completed.  Today I’m asking, what if it is?

“Build it, and they will come” has pretty much been the American way from the get go.

It doesn’t just work here either—China built a subway to nowhere more than a decade ago, and a city of over a million sprang up around it.

What happens if the only part of California High Speed Rail ever built is between Merced and Bakersfield… and it’s successful?  And I mean landscape-changing, growth-driving successful?

Stranger things have happened—Las Vegas comes to mind.  If you had told someone in the 1920’s that Las Vegas was going to be a city of two million people and one of the most visited places on earth…you’d have been laughed at and dismissed as crazy.

Same thing with Vail in the 1960’s. Most folks had doubts that people would make the journey along U.S. 6, from Denver, and doubted I-70 could even be built.  And Vail utterly failed at planning for success, and now they have a perpetual housing crisis for workers as a result.

What happens if HSR paves the way for Merced to explode to a city with a high density urban core of 400,000 people?

What happens if Fresno undergoes some tech gentrification and balloons to a city of gleaming skyscrapers and a population of 4 million?

What happens if Bakersfield does the same?

What happens if these become safe alternatives to LA and San Francisco? Granted, there’s a whole mess of redevelopment and gentrification that would have to happen before Fresno is “safe” for the techies.

Does California have a plan for this possible outcome?

It would be the perfect test bed for building their carbon free utopia. Problem is, they will need to completely destroy everything that exists in those towns to do it.  It won’t really work if all those people are car dependent when they get off the electric train.

The other thing is water.  People need water, and California has a Noahesque abundance or a biblical drought relationship with water.  It’s hard to plan a new megalopolis with inconsistent water supply.

It’s fair to ask California what happens if their train to nowhere turns into a big somewhere?

Are they planning low density construction like they always have?  Or would this growth happen in a manner that reduces car dependency?

When Las Vegas (actually Paradise and Winchester, Nevada) were laid out, they didn’t even build sidewalks between the casinos, because the space between the hotels was considered unwalkable.

Now there’s an entire pedestrian infrastructure dedicated to completely separating the millions of visiting pedestrians from auto traffic; plus three trams and a monorail.

Then there’s the question, “Is it wise to manufacture conditions that would turn some of America’s best farmland into an urban center?”  They did it everywhere else in California.  Now they sit in traffic.  Will it happen that way again? Only with 8 lanes of Teslas sitting still?

Most people would assume that if the Central Valley line is a “success” then it means completion of the system with expansion to LA and San Francisco.  

But success comes in many guises, and sometimes things succeed far outside the parameters of the original plan.

So California, do you have a plan in place for massive development in the Central Valley should you succeed in a different way than you originally envisioned?

If not, you might want to.  After all, failure to plan, is a plan for failure.

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