LOS ANGELES – Metro’s Doug Failing, the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s Jeff Morales, and XpressWest’s Andrew Mack discuss the High Desert Corridor – along with the possibility of a high-speed rail line from Victorville to Las Vegas, and a connection from the High Desert to the LA Basin – at the VerdeXchange VX2014 Conference in Downtown Los Angeles. Moderated by former Treasurer for the State of California Kathleen Brown, TPR (The Planning Report) has printed a transcription of their comments with an intro below.
Predicting paralyzing traffic in LA, in 1933 the High Desert Corridor (HDC) was originally conceived by the Auto Club as “The LA Bypass” – an east-west highway connecting the I-5, and the I-15, and population centers between Palmdale and Victorville.
Fast forward to 2005. With the State’s worst jobs-housing balance forcing their constituents into the longest commutes in the state, LA and San Bernardino County Supervisors Michael D. Antonovich and Brad Mitzelfelt formed a JPA (Joint Powers Authority) to finally plan and build the HDC to stimulate manufacturing and logistics jobs, as the State’s first P3 (Public-Private Partnerships). In 2008 the JPA enlarged the HDC concept to include rail – and connect up the Downtown Metrolink-to-Palmdale line to Las Vegas, via the HDC to Victorville – and entered into a formal agreement with Andrew Mack to collaborate with DesertXpress.
At about the same time, Measure R passed with money for the environmental process, but progress stalled until Doug Failing with his expertise in highways and support of P3s came to take charge at Metro late in 2009 and hit the ground running. By then the JPA P3 corridor highway-rail concept was expanding to include a Green Energy Corridor, to make the HDC a net zero facility—designed to support new net-zero, jobs-producing land uses adjacent to the right-of-way.
The VerdeXchange VX2014 panel was moderated by Kathleen Brown, who has longstanding ties to the project, and in 2008 was instrumental in successfully advocating CA P3 legislation using the HDC as a model, and in assisting in SCAG’s inclusion of the HDC as the first P3 in an RTP.
Doug Failing: Some time ago, I was reading about how a group of private developers was planning to create a high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Victorville. It is now called XpressWest.
The first thing I said is, “I know where Victorville is!” Because Metro’s working on the High Desert Corridor connecting Palmdale to Victorville. The second thought I had, “Palmdale—isn’t that where Jeff Morales is building California High Speed Rail?”
So, we’ve got these two high-speed rail lines that are being developed in the State of California that go from Las Vegas down past Barstow to Victorville. I said, “We are enabling that critical link between the two of them, and we’re in the process of developing a transportation corridor right between two high-speed rail lines. I wonder if anyone would be interested in taking a high-speed rail line from Vegas to Victorville, and maybe getting it to the Los Angeles basin—via the High Desert Corridor?”
About the time I was realizing the JPA’s multipurpose motives, all of a sudden a group of guys from Western Wintangers came to see me. They had heard that we were doing a project that included an undefined green energy corridor up in the High Desert, and they wanted to know if I needed any clean electricity for our project. It’s one of the last places left in California to do really good wind farming. It’s also one of the last places left untapped to do some solar energy projects.
Full discussion is available at planningreport.com.
