ABSTRACT
California’s transportation institutions are under legislative mandate to improve their environmental performance while providing the transport infrastructure and services needed to support the state’s growing population and its dynamic and expanding economy. In an era of tight budgets and scepticism about government, moving toward greater sustainability is stressing the governmental structures set up to deliver transportation systems, which for over a century have primarily served a car-centric development model. Today that model is increasingly questioned (e.g., Hickman and Banister 2014). However, restructuring transportation institutions and establishing a financing system to deliver a more diversified, well-integrated, inter-modal transport system has proven to be a significant challenge for the state. Adding high-speed rail (HSR) into the mix increases the challenge. While HSR is no longer a new mode by world standards, it is new for California and except for the ‘near’-high speed stretches of Acela service in the Northeast Corridor, there is no experience with HSR in the United States on which to draw. Thus HSR is an innovation in the California context.
