Not many people noticed, but in its waning days one part of the Obama administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, administered what may turn out to be a fatal blow to the most ill-advised infrastructure project in the nation: California’s so-called high-speed rail. The Los Angeles Times has some of the details. The FRA estimates that the portion of the railbed currently being constructed, in the relatively lightly populated flatlands of the Central Valley between Merced and Shafter, will cost not $6.4 billion as California’s rail agency has projected, but $9.5 to $10 billion. The project stands to be completed not this year, as California projected, but, the FRA says, in 2024, seven years behind schedule. The California rail agency said that it would start construction in Fresno in June but, the FRA reports, it hasn’t purchased much land. Environmental review that was supposed to be completed this year won’t be completed until 2020.
California’s legislature, with supermajorities of liberal Democrats, isn’t ponying up any more money for this project. A Wall Street Journal editorial, noting that the Central Valley portion of the 500-mile rail project that will supposedly connect Anaheim and San Francisco was supposed to be the easy part, recommends that “one of [Transportation Secretary-designate Elaine] Chao’s first orders of business should be to cut the choo choo off federal life support.”
That will be a bitter pill for Governor Jerry Brown, who believes that high-speed rail is cutting-edge technology, even though Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail went into service in 1964, the year that the 78-year-old Brown graduated from Yale Law School.
California high-speed rail’s problems are not atypical. As the Los Angeles Times notes, “About 80 percent of all bullet train systems incur massive overruns in their construction, according to Bent Flyvbjerg, an infrastructure risk expert at the University of Oxford who has studied such rail projects all over the world.” But California’s experience provides some interesting lessons for an incoming president who has promised to spend large sums on infrastructure. Among them, in my opinion:
(1) High-speed rail lines longer than 300 miles make no sense. Beyond that distance, they can’t get business travelers — the only folks likely to pay high fares — to their destinations faster than planes. Bargain travelers who value money more than time will never be able to afford high-speed fares; instead they’ll use Chinatown buses, as they currently do in the Acela corridor.
(2) Big infrastructure projects’ costs are habitually underestimated. So it makes sense to use public-private financing: If private sector companies, which have considerable experience around the world, are unwilling to put up money — as they have been in California, but as they might be on a proposed high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth — the project is almost certainly unfeasible.
(3) The requirements for environmental review are enormously lengthy and therefore expensive — and don’t do much if anything for the environment. So get rid of them. Set a time limit on any review, and have the project go ahead if it is not met. Philip Howard of Common Good has been especially eloquent on this subject. The incompetence of public sector bureaucracies, so visible on the California high-speed rail, means that alternative arrangements need to be found.
(4) Infrastructure construction costs are enormously higher in the United States than in other countries, even those with high wages and powerful unions like France and Japan. The Donald Trump who fixed Central Park’s Wollman Rink under-budget and ahead of time should have some good ideas on how to fix this.
(5) Much infrastructure spending should be devoted to maintenance and renovation of existing structure. Scrimping on maintenance has seriously damaged Washington’s 40-year-old Metro system, for example, resulting in fatal accidents and sharp decreases in ridership. Spotlighting this, as a President Trump could, would help the public understand the need for upkeep. Similarly, the failure of California high-speed rail can help the public understand that there’s no need for new projects which provide a service already readily available, in that case through competitive airlines and airports.
