A meeting was held last December 5, 2016, for the California High-Speed Rail project and was attended by about three dozen people. The venue was at Little Tokyo's Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. The public meeting was for the Burbank-to-Downtown part of the big project which stretches 12 miles.
As reported by LA Downtown News, stakeholders got a chance to get a glimpse of the intended path, with the first phase of the project (which stretches 800 miles) connecting San Francisco and Anaheim and then Sacramento to San Diego. The project is proposed at $68 billion.
The said meeting was part of the many community meetings by the Authority to further explain and give a full understanding of the impacts the project will have on specific neighborhoods and project elements such as grading, planned station and altering. For the ones who were not able to attend previous sessions for the project's meetings, a presentation is available at cahighspeedrail.ca.gov
"We look at this as an urban corridor renewal program," Michelle Boehm, the Authority's Southern California regional director, said. "By bringing features that high-speed rail requires to this corridor we have the opportunity to actually make this corridor a better neighbor to the communities it travels through."
The project was supposed to go through the Central City's underground, however, that seems to have changed for certain reasons explained by the section's project manager, Melissa De La Pena. "It was proposed to go underground into Union Station," she explained. "But we wouldn't be able to separate any of the at-grade crossings. We wouldn't be able to incorporate signalization improvements or work with the L.A. River. So for those elements, the at-grade alignment has been proposed."
According to VV Daily Press, the $3.2 billion fund approved by the high-speed rail board would be divided accordingly: $600 million is budgeted to electrify the Caltrain tracks in San Jose Peninsula which is already existing and stretches 55 miles which would connect with the rail. The $2.6 billion would be for the connector leg for Madera from Fresno, which stretches for 119 miles. Funding was crucial as it will fulfill the state's obligations to "match" the federal funding.
© 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
