Ridership
Challenge
Three environmental organizations and two
cities filed a legal action on May 6, 2010, seeking to
reopen the Court’s decision on their 2008 challenge to the
Environmental Impact Report issued by the California
High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA). The CHSRA recently
disclosed details of its ridership analysis that it had not
previously made public. The ridership projections that the
Authority used as the foundation for its Business Plan and
its selection of the Pacheco Pass route did not come from
the ridership and revenue model that had been peer-reviewed
and fully documented.
Instead, the final model was significantly different from
the published one. A memo from the model developer,
Cambridge Systematics, announced that the Metropolitan
Transportation Commission, under contract to the CHSRA to
manage the development of the model, had “elected not
update the Task 5a report nor to include the final
coefficients and constants in the final report.”
The three groups, the California Rail Foundation, the
Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund, and
the Planning and Conservation League, working with the Town
of Atherton and the City of Menlo Park, contend that the
failure to disclose the actual numbers used in the
ridership model deprived the public of the right to comment
on the reasonableness of the model and its resulting
projections. They are asking the Court to order CHSRA to
respond to comments about the flawed ridership modeling.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental studies
are now underway whose justification depends on the
validity of the ridership projections. Yet these
projections show bizarre patterns of significantly higher
ridership to Merced, Gilroy and Anaheim than to downtown
Los Angeles. The groups hired a transportation modeling
expert, who reviewed the documentation and concluded that
the final coefficients and constants were different from
the published numbers in the model documentation and were
invalid. In his report, Norman Marshall wrote that “These
numbers make absolutely no sense and cannot be justified by
the model development process.”
Petition of Writ of Error
Coram Nobis
Memorandum of Points and
Authorities
Declaration of Stuart
Flashman
Declaration of Elizabeth Goldstein
Alexis
Declaration of Norman
Marshall
We highly recommend the website of CARRD, the organization formed by the
Peninsula women whose work revealed the flaw in
the ridership model.
In the Final Decision on our petition, the judge essentially
said that because plaintiffs have an alternative remedy
(challenging the revised FEIR), that he could not grant
a writ of error Coram Nobis.