| Title California High Speed Rail Coverage Area | |||||||||||||||||
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Author Mark Cismowski American River College, Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS; Spring 2009 | |||||||||||||||||
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Abstract This paper is an analysis of the area of coverage of the proposed high speed rail for California. It is also a comparison of the area of coverage of Amtrak rail in California. The high speed rail project is one with many hurdles, and customer convenience is just one of the factors. The data of importance for this paper is the station location which is to be used as the center of the areas of coverage at different distance intervals. The analysis shows that the high speed rail offers very little change in coverage compared to existing Amtrak lines. Further research would be required to determine how many people fall into the covered areas compared to how many are excluded. | |||||||||||||||||
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Introduction The proposed high speed rail for California has been of interest to me for awhile so I decided that I'd take a GIS approach to learning more about it and trying to understand what it would mean for our state. My two main goals were to first of all get the features into ArcMap in a usable format, and secondly to figure out how much area would be affected by the high speed rail line just in terms of proximity. I also plan to compare the coverage area of the proposed high speed line to the areas already covered by Amtrak trains. The method for me determining the area of coverage is to create buffer zones around the train stations and calculating the area of the buffers minus the area that falls outside of the state, such as buffers that reach into the Pacific Ocean. I’ll do the same for Amtrak train stops for comparison. Then I’ll combine the two to see how much effect the new high speed rail will have on overall coverage. | |||||||||||||||||
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Background On November 4, 2008 voters passed Proposition 1A to approve $9.95 billion in bonds to fund the California High Speed Rail Authority’s plan to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles with a high speed rail line, with further expansion to Sacramento and San Diego planned in the future. The proposition passed with 53% of the vote. With almost half of the population opposing funding the project there are bound to be critics. The most notable one is the Reason Foundation. In a “Due Diligence Report” published by Reason, they claim that the CHSRA’s claims about the cost and capabilities of a high speed train have been exaggerated. According to Reason, the “international” standard for the distance a person will walk to and from local transit stops is about one-quarter mile. As a result the majority of people still rely on automobiles, taxis, and other forms of transportation even if they’re using public transportation on a regular basis. This illustrates the problem with trying to provide both fast and convenient transportation for the public. Too many stops mean too much time spent traveling. Too few stops means that train service is only convenient for people whose destination happens to be at or near one of the stops. | |||||||||||||||||
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Methods Because all of this is based on a proposed route for the high speed rail I wasn’t concerned much with the precision of the data. I had to assume that the route information I could gather was good enough because the rail doesn’t exist yet and there’s no way for me to record my own waypoints. Initially I thought that I would have to create a collage of Google Map images from the CHSRA’s website because it was the only place I could find that had the spatial information. I thought I’d then have to georeference the map collage. But I stumbled on a much easier and more reliable method when I looked at the source code for the website:  It turns out that all the stations were marked clearly in the code with coordinates in decimal degrees. From there, I simply copied the text from the source, and turned it into a comma delineated file so that I could add the data to ArcMap.  And as simple as that I had a point feature that had all of the proposed stations in the right place. I could have left it there since the route line isn’t really used for my purposes, but in the source code I also noticed a KML file called CHSR_Choosen_Alignment_Weeded_06d.kml and when I downloaded I noticed that it had a lot of coordinates in it so I thought that it must be the coordinates of the line segments that make up the route on the map. I couldn’t get ArcMap to make any sense of the KML file, but I’ve heard that ExpertGPS can import KML files and then export them to a shape file so I downloaded the trial version and it worked perfectly.  The final result:  Going back to the original map on CHSRA’s website you might notice that the lines are color coded.  This information is also not useful to my purposes, but because I got the line feature from the KML file directly all the different rail type information is still saved. The colors got lost, but it wouldn’t be hard to recolor them by selecting by type. All of this information would have been lost if I hadn’t found all of the coordinate information in the source code for the website. I wanted to include the current Amtrak train lines and stations but this is where I ran into some trouble. I couldn’t find the station data anywhere freely available, but I did find a shape file at Cal-Atlas that had all of rail lines throughout California, but none of the ones in use by Amtrak were labeled as such. I decided to skip including it in my ArcMap document because it was just a lot of clutter without any purpose other than as a reference. I found a map of the routes on Wikipedia that works just as well.  I found the coordinates of the Amtrak stations on GeoHack from a link on Wikipedia and used comma delineation to get the feature as I did with the high speed rail stations. The base map I used was the county_poly.shp file from the “lupodata” folder available in class. In order to analyze the area of coverage I created 4 buffers around each station, one at 5 miles, one at 10, one at 20, and the last at 50. The basis for these numbers was the mode of transportation for a person who would be going to a train station. I figure 5 miles is reasonable for a person on foot, 10 is fine for cyclists, 20 is fine for drivers or people who take public transportation to get to the station, and 50 sounds plausible but most people would avoid having to travel that far just to then take a train and very few would bother to travel more than 50 miles in order to take a train. | |||||||||||||||||
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Results  The percentage of California covered by Amtrak trains was: 2.91% at 0-5 miles, 6.28% at 5-10 miles, 14.94% at 10-20 miles, and 38.01% at 20-50 miles.  The percentage that would be covered by the high speed rail: 1.25% at 0-5 miles, 3.00% at 5-10 miles, 7.60% at 10-20 miles, and 21.92% at 20-50 miles.  The combined coverage of both rail systems would be: 3.51% at 0-5 miles, 6.93% at 5-10 miles, 15.65% at 10-20 miles, and 36.47% at 20-50 miles. These figures aren’t inclusive of smaller buffers because the coverage areas are being divided into groups based on distance instead of overall coverage. The inclusive figures would be:
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Analysis The result was mostly as expected but slightly surprising as well. I assumed that because the high speed rail covers much less distance than Amtrak lines its area of coverage would be much smaller. I also assumed that it wouldn’t help improve coverage much because it seemed like many of the train stops were in the same places that already had Amtrak stations. These stops are marked with a white circle in the map below:  Looking at the results it’s clear that the area of coverage for the high speed rail is significantly less than Amtrak trains. Amtrak covers over 50% more area in every case except at a 50 mile buffer. This suggests that the high speed train isn’t going to provide service to any people that don’t already have access to Amtrak. But that’s not entirely true. The combined coverage map shows that there are a few train stations that do increase the overall coverage area and also increase the coverage of the smaller buffers. This is most noticeable around Gilroy, Palmdale, and Murrieta.  You can also notice the effect of this in the data. With the Amtrak trains alone the coverage at 50 miles was about 38%, but with the combined coverage it drops to around 36%. That’s because the smaller buffers are now taking up space that was otherwise covered by the 50 mile buffer. | |||||||||||||||||
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Conclusions It appears that the high speed rail line is mostly redundant from a spatial point of view. The main improvement on the existing Amtrak lines is that it would connect Bakersfield to Los Angeles, which currently is only connected by Amtrak by bus. There is little improvement to the area of coverage, but one possible result of having a high speed rail is that the older Amtrak lines become discontinued or are offered less frequently. This would mean a decrease in the overall train coverage area. If the only Amtrak lines that suffer are the ones that connect San Francisco to Sacramento and Sacramento to Bakersfield it wouldn’t change much since the high speed line is practically the same route. What would be unfortunate is if the train that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego because that would leave the entire area between Salinas and Oxnard without train service. It might solve that problem if a second high speed line would be constructed along the coast. It might also help to expand a high speed rail across state lines. It would be very costly, but the more area that is covered means more people have access, and the more destination options are available from one starting point, the more convenient. Very recently there have been talks about California joining with Oregon and Washington in order to get a high speed rail line running all the way up to Vancouver. I don’t think there’s enough evidence here to say whether or not high speed rail will offer enough coverage. The amount of population that falls into the coverage areas would have to be compared to the amount that's excluded to determine if the majority of Californians will directly benefit from the high speed rail. | |||||||||||||||||
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References Cox, Wendell and Vranich,Joseph, 2008. The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report, (http://www.reason.org/files/1b544eba6f1d5f9e8012a8c36676ea7e.pdf) Page 76. Blumenthal, Les, 2009. The State. Washington state, California ponder high-speed rail line, (http://www.thestate.com/166/story/792956.html) | |||||||||||||||||