Infrastructure Partnership Success in Southern California
The Alameda Corridor rail project became a tale of two cities: Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. It started as a story including each of the six cities in between. The Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority transformed a tangled web of rail lines, each owned and operated by three competing railroads, into one line. The new corridor created public value in eliminating grade rail crossing that backed up truck and car traffic in six mid-corridor cities, and through the reduction of air pollution emissions and groundwater contamination. The line moved the harbours from reliance on nineteenth-century rail technology to a twenty-first-century system aligned with the technology needed to compete in a globalized goods movement world. Public expense was significantly reduced as the line was built primarily with private sector debt financing, which was paid off by fees on private sector container cargo. The move to governance by only the cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles contained costs and kept the project on time to reduce the financial uncertainty that would have adversely affected the costs of borrowing. This efficient decision-making structure based on those with a financial stake in cost containment came at the expense of participation in decision-making by mid-corridor cities.