California’s High-Speed Rail, a pet project of Gov. Jerry Brown, is a mess. For a full account, read this analysis by Lawrence McQuillen and Hayeon Carl Park of the Independence Institute in Joel Kotkin’s newgeography.com.
A hidden nugget: California’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, has now come out against the project. He’s probably a good bet to be elected in 2018 to succeed Brown — he passed up this year’s race for the open Senate seat being vacated by Barbara Boxer — and if so, that could put an end to it.
As McQuillen and Park make clear, the High-Speed Rail project today is nothing like what was sold to voters and approved by a 53-47 percent vote in a 2008 referendum. What’s proposed now is to first build a line from San Jose to Shafter in the Central Valley, north of Bakersfield.
The fact that no airline currently offers nonstop service from either Bakersfield or Fresno, its larger neighbor to the north, to San Jose suggests that the demand for high-speed service over this stretch is severely limited.
In any case, Interstate 5, which would parallel this line almost all the way, is an excellent candidate for self-driving cars and trucks. It’s straight, goes through lightly populated farmlands and could probably accommodate vehicles going 100 miles per hour if self-driving technology can reliably prevent collisions.
Another point: As McQuillen and Park point out, the High-Speed Rail folks have abandoned the original plans for dedicated track from San Jose to San Francisco and from Los Angeles to Anaheim.
Genuine high-speed rail, like Japan’s Shinkansen (which was opened in 1964) and France’s TGV, requires dedicated track. Otherwise, the trains have to slow down so they won’t run into commuter or freight trains on the same track.
So instead of the promised two hours and 50 minutes to get from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco, the “high-speed” train is going to take about four hours.
That pretty much eliminates the train for one-day in-and-out trips for business travelers, and it means planes will continue to be the superior choice, especially because they can land at whichever of the five major airports in metro L.A. or the three major airports in the Bay Area that is closest to their home base and destination.
A broader point: Some intelligent liberals, notably the Brookings Institution’s William Galston, who writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal, are big fans of a federal infrastructure bank. They make a strong argument when they say that U.S. infrastructure could stand major improvement.
They make a much weaker argument, in my view, when they suggest that government is going to do a good job of selecting projects and seeing that they’re constructed. The private sector does a much better job.
Rail is a prime example. The United States has the world’s best freight rail, run by the private sector (thanks to the 1980 Staggers Act, named after a Democratic House committee chairman and signed, to his great credit, by Jimmy Carter). The United States has crappy passenger rail, run by the public sector.
California’s “High-Speed” Rail fits increasingly into the latter pattern. Gov. Brown imagines that it’s the technology of the future, even though the Shinkansen went into service in 1964, the year the 78-year-old Brown graduated from Yale Law School
High-speed rail makes good sense as a mode connecting densely populated destinations over distances under 300 miles, and perhaps some day Amtrak — government in inaction again — will build a genuine high-speed line there. But it’s had nearly 50 years to do so, and hasn’t done so yet.
