Bullet train construction could mean 150,000 jobs.

Central Valley Business Times

Bullet train czar says construction could mean 150,000 jobs


SACRAMENTO
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May 6, 2009 1:45pm

• Quentin Kopp says 800-mile system will be built in stages

• Trains will travel at 220 miles per hour in Valley

State Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura was another keynote speaker. He told the meeting that farmers and ranchers need to shake stereotypes. "We're not the Midwest," he said, adding that too many people not in the food industry cling to old myths about it.

Construction of the California bullet train system could generate as many as 150,000 jobs, says Quentin Kopp, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority in remarks to the annual meeting of the Great Valley Center today in Sacramento.

“Its construction phase, over the period between now and the year 2025 when the entire 800 miles will be operating for revenue service, will create about 150,000 construction-related jobs,” says Mr. Kopp, who was one of the keynote speakers of the two-day meeting of the think tank and its supporters.

But that would be the tip of a major boom in jobs, if his predictions pan out. Mr. Kopp says once the full project is operating it will mean “450,000 plus or minus permanent new jobs.”

He says the system is likely to build its maintenance facility in Merced. It also plans to build one of the first segments of track between Merced and Bakersfield and use it as a test track.

“High speed rail is not a new technology,” he says, pointing to Japan’s bullet trains which began operating 44 years ago. He says 11 countries have high-speed train service.

“And now in China. China anticipates and brags that it will have in two years 3,000 miles of high-speed rail,” Mr. Kopp says.

California’s would be the first in the United States.

Mr. Kopp says the speedy trains could remake much of the Central Valley, which has been isolated by distance from the state’s major commercial centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“You’ll be able to travel from Fresno to San Jose, for example, in 65 minutes,” he says. “Obviously it will enable commuting between the Central Valley and the Bay Area, the Silicon Valley and Southern California … in a way that’s comfortable and also practical,” he says.

The bullet trains, he says, will offset the Valley’s paucity of economical air travel and avoid having to build more freeways.

“In so many ways, the Central Valley is the most important part of this project,” Mr. Kopp says.