Posted on 04/30/2018 10:06:18 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Mounting problems may end high-speed-rail projects in California and Texas. A decade ago, high-speed rail was the new, new thing. In 2008, California voters narrowly approved initial bonds for a train that was supposed to go 220 miles an hour and deliver passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. The next year, the Obama administration’s stimulus bill allocated money for it and several other high-speed lines. But soon the push for trains slowed to a crawl, and now it appears to be on life support.
In 2011, the new GOP governors of Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin turned down federal money for trains. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker told me: “Washington may help pay for building it, but we’d be stuck paying the operating costs of a boondoggle.”
But California’s transportation planners, who never encountered a boondoggle they couldn’t embrace, pressed on despite mounting costs and construction delays. In 2015, desperate to beat a deadline that would have meant the end of federal funding, they began construction on a 119-mile segment of track in the state’s sparsely settled Central Valley. Fewer than 3 percent of the train’s potential riders live along that portion of the route, but backers believed that if they built the Central Valley segment, the sunken costs would convince state legislators to find money for the remaining segments.
That is increasingly unlikely. In January, the California High Speed Rail Authority released its new business plan. Assemblyman Jim Patterson, a train critic who represents Fresno, promptly labeled it a “going-out-of-business plan.”
According to the Authority’s own numbers, the train’s costs have soared to a likely $77 billion — more than double the original cost estimate of $32 billion. If anything goes wrong, the tab for the project could hit $98 billion, or 50 times the current annual appropriation for the nationwide Amtrak system. As for delays, the Authority conceded that rail service on the portion of the route from Bakersfield to San Jose probably won’t begin until 2029, a full nine years after the entire system was supposed to be complete.
As for the “high speed” aspect of the train, the Authority now admits that the two-hour-and-40-minute travel time that helped sell the initial bonding of the train in 2008 will now slip to, at best, three hours and 30 minutes. Travel time on some runs will be up to five hours.
Release of the Authority’s depressing business plan has finally sobered up some experts. Earlier this month, Louis Thompson, one of the nation’s top rail experts (he chairs the project’s official peer-review committee), told legislators that the project is “at a critical point when difficult decisions need to be made.” After years of stonewalling, the California legislature finally approved an audit of the entire project. The legislature has also weighed in to criticize “significant uncertainties” about the train and its lack of a “complete funding plan.” Just this month, the U.S. Transportation Department announced that it will review the use of the $3.5 billion in federal grants that have flowed into the project.
The latest statewide poll on the high-speed railway was conducted in March by the Public Policy Institute. It found that only 46 percent of likely voters still support the rail project. I’ve little doubt that number will tumble as it becomes clear how key public services will be squeezed as the train gobbles up more cash.
Let’s hope that California’s sad experience informs residents of another mega state before they run off the rails building their own high-speed railway. Private investors in Texas have created a Texas Central Railway (TCR) project that they promise will deliver a $10 billion bullet train. They pledge that the train will speed passengers along the 240-mile corridor between Houston and Dallas in under 90 minutes. The project would use the same equipment made famous by Japan’s Shinkansen bullet-train line. The train’s boosters claim that it will have the economic impact equivalent to “hosting 180 Super Bowls.”
Learning from California’s cost overruns, Texas’s Train Trippers have vowed not to use any federal, state, or local tax money for construction. If they can’t strike deals with property owners along the route, they will ask for eminent-domain powers to seize the land. It’s a virtual certainty they would need those powers, since nine of the eleven counties the train would run through have gone on record opposing it.
Also opposed are taxpayer groups who believe that the TCR investors will seek out opportunities for backdoor public financing. Indeed, Ron Kirk, a former mayor of Dallas who is now employed by TCR, has let slip that the group, despite its public promise to steer clear of federal money, will “aggressively pursue” federal loans for the project. Government loans are often forgiven or forgotten, with taxpayers left holding the bag.
Beyond cost, there are other reasons to be skeptical of the Texas train. Current plans for it will not have it connect the city centers of Dallas and Houston, with the stations on either end stopping only at the outskirts of each city. The proposed Japanese Shinkansen technology isn’t compatible with standards used in the U.S., Europe, or the United Kingdom, so using it in Texas would limit the future ability to adopt other train systems to expand the network.
I have traveled on high-speed trains in China, Germany, France, and Sweden. In densely populated countries with crowded air corridors, they are a pleasant, safe, and justifiable way to travel. But we should recognize that a continental nation like the U.S. isn’t as suited for them and that our environmental laws make construction very difficult and time-consuming.
We would be far better off to follow the example of most industrialized countries by transferring our nation’s air-traffic-control system to a public-private partnership that could more quickly introduce new technology and reduce airport delays. A bill to do just that was endorsed last year by both airlines and the union of air-traffic-control operators, but it got bogged down in Congress. Let’s work on improving what we know makes sense — reliable inter-city air transportation — before chasing the costly delusion of high-speed rail.
hey Moonbeam - shut it down and use the money for something the people want.
Ridership, for instance, is projected between (cough-cough) 25 and 95 million peeps per year. If ever built (it won't) ridership could never, ever reach 1/100th of the lower estimate. Consider the following realities...
1. Few people live/work near both stations, meaning taxi or car rental at one or both ends of the trip. High speed? Ha!
2. It is reasonable to anticipate TSA or similar security, meaning arrive early at the station. Hi speed? Ha!
3. Since the choo choo could never, ever be remotely self-sustaining, ticket prices will cost more than airline tickets, unless the state underwrites most of the fair. Pay for itself? Never!
4. I used to live in the once-golden-state, and I have many friends and acquaintances of the liberal persuasion. None of them, zero, has ever said that they were looking forward to riding the train. (Who would pay more to spend more time in travel to likely inconvenient locations?)
This train is really intended to fleece the astonishingly gullible voters who don't seem to mind that the only stops it will make are in Graftville and Frauduland; and, the project should actually be re-named...
The FAST SHUFFLE.
Wonder if the Central Valley segment under construction is adjacent to land owned by Mr. Diane Feinstein?
Bakersfield to San Jose starting work in 2029! Isn’t that most of the route?
You see bits and pieces of construction of this high speed rail alongside the freeway, nothing connected, farmland cut in half, and millions and millions more in costs than predicted, etc. What an EXPENSIVE disaster. However, we vote in a new Governor in November. Maybe we’ll get relief from this boondoggle, but not hopeful, as Gov. Brown is one of a long line of miserable Governors in California.
They should take half the money and give it to me.
I will do nothing with it—promise—and they will have saved half their money!
The empty trains could become new toilets for the homeless—winning!
HSR works well in highly populated Europe, China and Japan where ridership and moderate distances between cities makes it work.
We don’t have that kind of configuration in the US and HSR is a huge waste of money. Long distance travel needs are better served by air.
Any distance more than two hours travel time by car, you’ll be taking a plane anyway to get there. The train is old-fashioned Nineteenth Century technology and even liberals can’t make it go faster.
Yep, in Europe, I’d much rather take a train, even if taking a plane is cheaper and quicker.
At least with a train, the security is less demanding, a quick scan of luggage before you get on your train, you can relax, and generally you arrive in the city center, where it’s only a quick cab ride to your hotel.
In their sycophantic desire to ape Western Europe in all things, US Leftists never did acknowledge that American cities are simply built differently than European cities. American cities have open space and are designed with the car in mind. With very few exceptions, public transport sucks. The climate in the US is also far more extreme both being far hotter/more humid than Europe as well as far colder in places. You really don’t want to be outside walking around and carrying bags in the South in July or in Minneapolis from January til May for example.
So what the hell are you going to do when you reach the outskirts of Dallas on high speed rail? Walk? LOL, no. Take the bus which is infrequent, inconvenient and often full of riff raff? People will fly in and rent a car or drive instead of that every time. That goes for just about every other city in America too.
“The FAST SHUFFLE.”
Very good. I will now use that to describe the Central Florida Boondoggle called “SUNRAIL.” When presented to the folks of FL, most asked “why?” But the politicians told us that “the money has already been allocated and you have to take it. That’s $750,000,000 or 750 million! The cars are made elsewhere, the locomotives, elsewhere. Very little of the money was spent in Florida. It uses existing tracks and runs Mon. thru Fri. Ridership was questioned and the old “build it and they will come,” was the answer. When asked about the discount fares for juniors and seniors and how could the system make money, the answer was, “this is the government, we are not in business to make money.” Translation: You are in it by yourself and you, the taxpayer, will make up the shortfall.
California will soon ask for a bailout...time for them to be cut loose and floated toward Hawaii. I hope that Florida won’t get lopped off and sent toward Cuba or Venezuela.
What, discontinue the Brown Streak?
Unless of course you find yourself on the 1517 to Paris . . .
What can we do so it will die faster??? Hire a Kennedy to transport it? Have the train work for a Clinton?
did the math elsewhere....if you ditched the rail project and the State of California gave a 100% subsidy on round-trip airfare from SAN Fran to LAX it would STILL be cheaper.
“New York to Chicago”
Why would anyone take a “high speed” train that would take 3-6 times longer than flying, and cost more (unless heavily subsidized)? It would certainly never be enough people to make a profit.
No, but our congressman Jim Costa promised Obama his vote for Obama care in return for federal stimulus money.
Per this webpage,, there are about 3.7 million passengers annually between SFO and LAX. Assuming these are all round-trip passengers, and based on Kayak etc prices of such tickets running around $150 all-in, that is $555 million in direct revenue generated from this traffic. If this rail bondoggle costs $77 billion (and I'm sure that's a lowball estimate) and assuming ALL 3.7 million passengers use the rail vs air, it would take 139 years for this thing to break even....and that is excluding interest costs.
To use a Yiddish/New York phrase, oy vey!
Excellent stat. I love it. Thanks.
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