Taking the train in a hot climate

Like many towns and cities in California, Fresno developed along the rail routes that brought hopeful farmers and carried their crops and livestock up and down the state. Today its beautifully restored station is one of the busiest in the Central Valley, a crossroads for passengers bound to north to Sacramento, west to the Bay Area, and south to Bakersfield, the last major stop in the valley on the way to Los Angeles. Historic buildings and air conditioned offices float on a sea of parking in the downtown, seemingly commanded by a giant silver spaceship of a City Hall, the country cousin to Los Angeles’ Disney concert hall. The city is a stone’s throw from Sequoia National Park, a glacially formed valley that rivals the more famous Yosemite to the north.

Fresno’s arresting summer heat and mix of oak and palm trees would be familiar to native Sacramentans, but agricultural life seems much more entwined in the daily life of the larger southern city. The state university has a heavy emphasis on agriculture, training the next generation of ag scientists and large animal vets. On some of the most fertile land in the country and at the foot of the Sierras, Fresno’s fields and vineyards bring almonds, raisins, and citrus fruit to the world. Fresno has long been a focal point in the struggle for air quality and carbon emission controls in California, with local politicians often resisting regulation of pollution from agriculture like any other industry. There is a growing recognition that the benefits of concessions won by local politicians in the statehouse and in Congress often benefit large ag producers without bringing jobs for Fresno’s low-income population.

The homes of Fresno’s half a million citizens and those of residents in neighboring towns in Fresno County are a familiar mix of California bungalows on gridded streets, 50s ranch houses on winding streets, 80s tract homes, and the McMansions and ranchettes of recent decades. The farther out you go into rural Fresno county, the more the walled (or tastefully stable-fenced) neighborhoods and mega strip malls are interspersed with the Hockney-esque orchards and turn of the century farm houses, Mexican restaurants, and rusty gas stations of another era that are the stuff of nostalgic ‘Americana’ photography. Like other parts of the Central Valley that experienced rapid suburban development in agricultural areas, including south Sacramento, Fresno has been hit hard by foreclosures.

While water and transport infrastructure are topics of policy debates in Sacramento, they are kitchen table conversation in Fresno County. In rural-suburban Clovis, the groundwater wells that residents depend on are drying up. In an area that is mostly off the urban grid (septic and propane tanks complement wells) a debate rages between neighbors who want to see a more stable water supply provided by the county and a group who would rather not see an assessment on their properties and what they view as an additional entanglement with government. Opinions divide roughly between those who have deeper wells and those with more shallow, now defunct, wells.

Rail is also on the minds of Fresnans today. Even though the city’s architecture long turned its best face from the rail lines toward the freeways, people in Fresno are weighing the impact and awaiting the outcomes of California’s high speed rail plans. Fresno is in the middle of the first phase of construction, which stretches from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The city is also at the center of the portion of the route selected to receive federal high speed rail funds.

High speed rail has the potential to spawn infill/re-fill of downtown Fresno’s parking lots and reduce emissions from long-distance trips that would otherwise be taken in cars (although cars may still be necessary at journey’s beginning and end). But the region is the perfect illustration of a particularly American spreading out of development in the presence of abundant land and Jeffersonian ideals of pastoral self-sufficiency, or at least Kenneth Jackson’s home in a garden. The greater part of existing development will still be standing in another 100 years, and most of those who live there are not likely to up sticks for central town houses.

For those concerned about the contribution of personal transit-related emissions to climate change, Fresno’s existing landscape is a reason to think hard about electric cars- and renewable sources of electricity for them. New Urbanist style retrofits for walkable/bikeable roads and destinations in the exurbs may be part of the equation, but will certainly be slow in coming, and to be accepted they will need to be framed as a natural part of Californian, not European, culture, a mistake of many high-speed rail proponents. Oh, and you’ll want people to try out all that walking and biking to their schools and supermarkets when it’s not 100 degrees outside.

In the mean time, not too many years down the line, HSR could cause Fresno to turn, at least in part, back to rail as a main artery for commerce and city pride.

E. Mattiuzzi