By Mark Guanchao Huang, USC Viterbi MSCE Transportation, 2016

On April 1st, Arup Senior Engineer Genaro Mejia shared both his experience and his project, The California High Speed Rail, with students on USC main campus as the final guest of the Lunch with Practitioner Series for the 2015 spring semester.

Mejia’s firm, Arup, has partnered with Hatch Mott Macdonald (HMM) and URS to develop design drawings to certify the Environment Impact Report/ Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) and to provide a basis for contractors to submit bids for construction of California’s proposed high speed rail.

“The California High Speed Rail project is an 800 mile long high speed rail network that will ultimately connect the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego,” Mejia shared.  “Phase I of the project will connect Los Angeles to San Francisco through the Central Valley; Phase II will add connections to Sacramento and San Diego completing the overall system.”

Palmdale to Los Angeles has two distinct sections including Palmdale to Sylmar, which passes through rural and suburban cities with terrain ranging from flat lands to mountainous, and Sylmar to Los Angeles Union Station (LAUS), which passes through a densely populated mixture of urban and suburban cities in the San Fernando Valley adjacent to the Los Angeles River.

The project has encountered tremendous challenges. Genaro mentioned that California High-Speed Rail system has been criticized on budgetary, feasibility, legal, environmental, political and public opinion grounds, just to name a few categories. Individuals, public officials, private institutions, government agencies, and civil society organizations have all had significant concerns.

“Particular challenges are faced when designing a high speed rail corridor with design speeds reaching 220 miles per hour (mph) through a dense urban suburban core such as in the Sylmar to LAUS section of the project.” Genaro explained. He also shared some details that he encountered when designing the California High-Speed Rail systems, like the curvature calculation and expected user experience.

At the end of the seminar, Genaro answered  questions from the attending engineering and planning USC students regarding his presentation and he also offered valuable advice for students who are about to get a job or internship in the near future.  

Genaro Mejia, PE is a Senior Engineer with Arup. He has 13 years of experience working on transportation projects throughout California. Genaro received his MS degree from USC in 2008 in Transportation and his BS degree in Civil Engineering from UCI in 2001. He is also President Elect of the local Metropolitan Los Angeles Branch (MLAB) of ASCE and a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Intercity Passenger Rail Committee.