By Dominic
Pino
Sunday,
October 09, 2022
An
article in today’s New York Times gives people on the left
permission to say something people on the right have been saying for years:
California’s high-speed rail project is an epic boondoggle.
The
complete failure of the project should have been obvious to anyone. Originally
projected to cost $33 billion when it was approved in 2008, it is now estimated
to cost $113 billion and may never be completed. The goal was to connect San
Francisco and Los Angeles by rail in under two hours and 40 minutes, but the
only segment currently under construction is in the Central Valley, nowhere
near either city.
Ralph
Vartabedian wrote the piece, which you should read in full. As
conservatives frequently warn about government planning, political
considerations have outweighed financial or engineering considerations
throughout the project. Here’s one example from the piece:
The most direct route would have taken the train straight north out of
Los Angeles along the Interstate 5 corridor through the Tejon Pass, a route
known as “the Grapevine.” Engineers had determined in a “final report” in 1999
that it was the preferred option for the corridor.
But political concerns were lurking in the background. Mike Antonovich,
a powerful member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was among
those who argued that the train could get more riders if it diverted through
the growing desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale in his district, north
of Los Angeles.
The extra 41 miles to go through Palmdale would increase costs by 16
percent, according to the 1999 report, a difference in today’s costs of as much
as $8 billion.
According to interviews with those working on the project at the time,
the decision was a result of political horse-trading in which Mr. Antonovich
delivered a multi-billion-dollar plum to his constituents.
Another
example:
The idea of beginning construction not on either end, but in the middle
— in the Central Valley, a place few in Los Angeles would want to go — was a
political deal from the start. . . .
State senators were under pressure to endorse the Central Valley plan,
not only from Gov. Jerry Brown but also from President Barack Obama’s
transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, who came to the state Capitol to lobby
the vote.
The Central Valley quickly became a quagmire. The need for land has
quadrupled to more than 2,000 parcels, the largest land take in modern state
history, and is still not complete. In many cases, the seizures have involved
bitter litigation against well-resourced farmers, whose fields were being split diagonally.
Federal grants of $3.5 billion for what was supposed to be a
shovel-ready project pushed the state to prematurely
issue the first construction contracts when it lacked any land to build on. It resulted in hundreds of
millions of dollars in contractor delay claims.
“The consequence of starting in the Central Valley is not having a
system,” said Rich Tolmach, who headed the nonprofit California Rail Foundation
that promotes public rail transit and was deeply involved in the early days of
the project. “It will never be operable.”
And
another:
More political debate ensued over what route the train would take into
the San Francisco Bay Area. The existing rail corridor through Altamont Pass,
near Livermore, was a logical alternative. The French engineering company Setec
Ferroviaire reported that the Altamont route would generate more ridership and
have fewer environmental impacts.
But as with so many decisions on the project, other considerations won
the day. There was heavy lobbying by Silicon Valley business interests and the
city of San Jose, which saw the line as an economic boon and a link to lower
cost housing in the Central Valley for tech employees. They argued for routing
the train over the much higher Pacheco Pass — which would require 15 miles of
expensive tunnels.
French
rail operator SNCF was at one point interested in helping with the project.
That didn’t go well:
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and
a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside,
said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.
The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF
was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which
was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build
a rail system.”
Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
Vartabedian
writes, “The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for
years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political
choices have been.”
That
should not have become apparent “only now.” This project’s failure is not a
case of hindsight’s being 20/20. It’s a case of hubristic planners and
self-serving politicians doing exactly what conservatives warned they would do:
waste taxpayer dollars on a politically motivated project that was doomed to
fail from the very start.
Republican
governors Scott Walker (Wis.), John Kasich (Ohio), and Rick Scott (Fla.) declined federal
passenger-rail funding from the Obama administration’s stimulus program after
the Great Recession. They were mocked by progressives (including those on the editorial board of the New
York Times) for
those decisions, who gleefully told them that other states, including
California, would get the federal money instead. In 2011, after the money was
reallocated to other states, transportation secretary Ray La Hood said, “Americans will soon begin seeing
significant travel time, frequency, and reliability improvements, in addition
to upgraded stations and equipment.”
Eleven
years later, those improvements remain to be seen, and California continues to
burn money on a project that has yet to carry a single passenger. Wise
Republican governors saw passenger-rail boondoggles for what they were and
saved their states from the trouble the projects would inevitably bring.
Democrats pressed on, and they are only now realizing that those Republicans
might have had a point all along.
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