Earlier this week over a thousand residents of Santa Clarita and nearby communities held a rally to demand that some other neighborhood be stuck with the HSR tracks that they don’t want.

Their message rang loud and clear: Get the bullet train out of our communities and put it underground. More than 1,300 vocal residents of communities along the Palmdale-to-Burbank section of the high-speed rail project recited a litany of issues and concerns with the controversial project on Monday, including vibration, noise, the possibility of depressed home values and potential risks to water supplies or increased seismic activity…. In the mind of Santa Clarita Mayor Marsha McLean, the high-speed train should go underground in Burbank and stay that way until it reaches Palmdale. “We are saying we want a seat at the table, but they must listen to us,” McLean said. “We are speaking with one voice.” Adding their voices to Santa Clarita’s Monday were representatives from Acton, Agua Dulce and the city of San Fernando, which recently joined with the city to create the North L.A. County Communities Protection Coalition — with the goal of presenting a unified regional front to urge the High-Speed Rail Authority to put the train underground wherever it runs.

Of course, there are people in Burbank, Glendale, and Los Angeles who want the tracks to go underground all the way to LA Union Station. Proposals have been floated by Peninsula NIMBYs for a tunnel all the way from SF’s Transbay Terminal to San José.

It’s not practical to build half the HSR route in a tunnel. Even if it were, it wouldn’t be cheap – and yet many of the critics at this rally cited the rising cost of building HSR as a reason to not move ahead with the project. Which is it? HSR is too expensive, or it’s not expensive enough (because the state won’t spend billions more to build a tunnel under the mountains)?

The ultimate goal of these NIMBYs is to dump tracks they don’t want into the laps of residents of Sunland, Lake View Terrace, and maybe even Pacoima – who aren’t exactly wild about having these tracks in their own backyard.

The California High Speed Rail Authority is doing the right thing in conducting a study of the so-called “east corridor” that would include the tunnel through the San Gabriel Mountains. But it’s a longshot, even before the costs are considered. Santa Clarita shouldn’t be putting all its hopes on that concept. Instead they would do well to examine the current route through their neighborhoods, look for ways to mitigate the impacts, and if the Highway 14 alignment is chosen, work to get the project funded and built quickly so that residents aren’t spending years or even decades in limbo.