By Katie Lauer
The Mercury News
(The Mercury News) Whether it’s for planes, trains or automobiles, transportation projects in California have built a reputation for being slow and expensive.
That’s why it was big news when Golden State railroads were injected with nearly $280 million in federal grant funding last month — just a sliver of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s multibillion-dollar, multiyear effort to spur transit construction projects after decades of underinvestment.
On Oct. 29, the Federal Railroad Administration announced that a nationwide $2.4 billion grant package would fund 122 projects in more than 40 states — including 12 in California — to update tracks and bridges, improve safety operations, expand worker protections and explore cleaner fuel for locomotives.
Roughly $45 million of that money was set aside for two rail projects anchored in the Bay Area: California High-Speed Rail and Capitol Corridor.
But Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race exactly one week after the announcement could pump the brakes on any momentum for these transportation projects.
In an interview days before the Nov. 5 election, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that if congressional Republicans were to go down a path of budget cuts mere months after the Biden Administration made the most significant investment in American rail in over 50 years, “so many of the best projects that we’re doing in America right now wouldn’t be happening.”
The competitive federal dollars released in October are funded by the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program — one of many financial resources intended to help the rail industry recover from years of underinvestment and lax regulations that have snowballed into an uptick in disruptive and hazardous derailments.
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Among the Bay Area projects that received funding is the Capitol Corridor Right-of-Way Safety Improvement Program. The $20 million grant was earmarked for the installation of security fencing along tracks from Oakland to Fremont, Richmond to Emeryville, and Fairfield to Suisun City.
The project is expected to propel a 20% reduction in traffic collisions, railroad delays, fatalities and other incidents that occur when people enter the path of oncoming trains.
John Bauters, a former Emeryville mayor and current leading candidate in the Alameda County Board of Supervisors race, said that’s a big issue that has started gaining traction in recent years.
In 2022, Alameda County was awarded $25 million — the then-largest CRISI grant in the state — to improve 144 dangerous crossings across the county, which reported the fourth-highest number of trespassing fatalities in the nation between 2012 and 2017.
Security fences and infrastructure also mitigate significant economic costs associated with hours-long delays to Union Pacific rails doing business at the Port of Oakland and Amtrak trains carrying commuters up and down the Bay Area’s shoreline.
“It’s actually a huge safety investment because we’re trying to pull ourselves from being on the annual list of places people get killed by trains,” Bauters said, explaining that this was the same rationale that helped propel the city of Emeryville’s railroad crossing “Quiet Zones” project, which was completed in August. “We were ahead of everyone else in the county because this is a huge problem.”
In 2021, the Biden administration made the largest federal investment in public transportation in the nation’s history — including $5 billion available to fund CRISI grants through fall 2026.
There’s no guarantee that this promised funding will still be delivered after Trump is sworn into office.
According to the Urban Institute, Trump cut the Department of Transportation’s budget by 13% in 2017, negatively impacting both Amtrak routes and inter-city transportation corridors.
The mobility and equity nonprofit research organization’s October research also reported that the Trump administration is more likely to prioritize projects in rural, lower-income communities that often have a larger white population — echoing 2016 policies that awarded 40% of discretionary grant funding to roadway expansion projects over other public transit improvements.
Moreover, proposals within Project 2025, a far-right policy playbook from the Heritage Foundation that closely aligns with Trump’s campaign vision, could wipe out all discretionary grants from the DOT. In a recent interview with Hasan Minhaj, Buttigieg said the outcome of Trump’s future transportation policies will ripple for generations.
“People now are living with decisions that were made 40, 60, 80 years ago,” Buttigieg said. “Doing infrastructure work compels you to understand that public policy is a long game because the stuff you’re building — the things you get right and the things you don’t get right — will play out in a way that people will be able to look back on and physically see.”
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