Despite 14 years of work and about $5bn spent, the 2008 promise of quick transport between Los Angeles and San Francisco has not materialized
The more pessimistic view is that the project has turned into a boondoggle, the proverbial “train to nowhere”, and no good can come of continuing to throw money at it. The Merced to Bakersfield stretch is projected to cost more than $20bn – several billion dollars more than a previous projection made in 2019 and likely to grow only more expensive.
It is also far from clear who would ride on it since it largely duplicates an existing Amtrak rail route. “It’s dreamland. It’s unrealistic. It will never cover its own expenses from the farebox,” said Quentin Kopp, a retired former legislator and judge whofor an LA-San Francisco high speed line for two decades, starting in the 1990s, but has now lost hope that it will ever see the light of day. “Who cares about going from Merced to Bakersfield? I am appalled and angry over the bastardization of the promise to taxpayers … It’s a stupid waste of money. All this is doing is making contractors and engineers and bureaucrats fat and happy.” The high speed rail authority said it was “simply untrue” to suggest that its timeline and budget projections were unrealistic. Authority spokeswoman Annie Parker stopped short of predicting that the Merced-Bakersfield leg would break even, however, saying only: “We see a robust demand and a profitable system in our future.”Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images Newsom is making his second attempt in two years to jump-start construction by persuading the legislature to release the remaining $4.2bn left in the 2008 bond fund and combine it with federal money to jump-start construction. “This is the future of transportation in California,” he said in areleased when he first launched his funding campaign in March 2021. When completed, he promised, the high-speed line through the Central Valley would take 400,000 cars off the roads, clean up the air, and create new jobs. Even if Newsom gets his money, though, it is far from clear what it will buy. The state’s legislative analystearlier this year about a lack of up-to-date budgetary information, making it “very difficult for the legislature to make informed decisions”. The legislature, for its part, has shown a particular reluctance to electrify the line from Merced to Bakersfield up front, and if that decision sticks it would reduce the line, at least temporarily, to a conventional track unable to meet the promise of 220-mph speeds. The rail authority, meanwhile, has developed its own plan to start with just 119 out of the 172 miles – a plan that among other things, would leave riders 19 miles short of Bakersfield and oblige them to complete the journey by bus. Authority chief executive Brian Kelly acknowledged in theApproximately 98% percent of the American public has never set foot on a city-to-city trainAs legislative leaders haggle with Newsom over high-speed rail and the rest of California’s latest budget, they are not tipping their hands about possible outcomes. But a number of them went into the talks skeptical if not downright hostile. “The idea that you would spend all your money on a train that doesn’t connect to anything and just hope you’re going to get more money, I find a really frightening business proposition,” the chair of the California Assembly’s transportation committee, Laura Friedman, told the policy news siteMany of the skeptics, including Friedman, are big-city Democrats, legislators one would usually expect to embrace public investment in high-speed rail. So their skepticism – and the failures, delays, cost overruns and broken promises that lie behind it – is a particularly heavy blow to those Americans who love the idea of reviving rail travel in a country that was largely built on it. These are people who have ridden the Eurostar, or darted through the Tuscan countryside en route from Rome to Milan, and want nothing more than to see similar systems in place at home. “When people experience this in the United States,” industry consultant and unabashed train lover Eric C Peterson said, “they’re going to say: why couldn’t we have had this earlier?”High-speed rail in California was always going to be a moon shot. Many transportation experts point out that high-speed rail systems are tricky to deliver because of high start-up costs and long construction schedules, and the costs are often compounded by the complications of purchasing land, building stations, blasting through mountains and bridging rivers. Countries that have moved fastest on such systems tend to have a highly centralized governmental system, like France’s, if not an out-and-out authoritarian one, like China’s. The United States, by contrast, has a highly decentralized system of government, with multiple competing jurisdictions jostling over land, water, electricity and other vital resources, and a political tradition, especially in the west, that celebrates personal freedom and private property over collective enterprises in the public interest.Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP In the decades after the second world war, inter-city train travel faded fast because of the boom in car ownership, cheap gasoline and the interstate highway system. Today, it has a meaningful presence only on the northeastern seaboard, where Amtrak trains remain a popular, traffic-beating option between Boston, New York and Washington. In most places, Tom Zoellner writes in his 2014 book, the American railroad “is still regarded as a charming antique, an object of art for eccentrics and a last resort for the poor. Approximately 98% of the American public has never set foot on a city-to-city train.” While European countries have developed high-speed systems with a lot of accumulated expertise and a pre-existing base of regular riders, the US flew almost completely blind in the years after 2008. California’s leaders didn’t want to finance a high-speed rail line without voter approval, and when Quentin Kopp chaired the effort to craft a successful ballot initiative he found himself boxed in by requirements deemed politically necessary that arguably doomed the project from the outset. The initiative promised a journey time between LA and San Francisco of two hours and forty minutes – a timeframe that demanded exceptionally high speeds if the train was to stop anywhere along the way and greatly . The initiative also promised that the service would pay for itself, with no operating subsidy, a promise that now seems near-impossible to keep.
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