A Monument to Optimism

“When you build a high-speed rail line,” says Washington governor Jay Inslee, “you are building a monument to optimism.” He is 100 percent correct except that he thinks that’s a reason to build it when in fact it is a reason not to build.

Inslee made the statement at a joint press conference with British Columbia premier John Horgan announcing that B.C. would contribute to the costs of a study of building a line from Seattle to Vancouver. Governor Inslee no doubt meant that spending money on high-speed rail represented optimism for the future of the Northwest. But what his statement really meant is that he is clueless about the extensive planning literature associating optimism bias with strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.

The other half of Inslee’s phrase — monument — accurately describes the real purpose of high-speed rail. It’s not meant to be a mode of transport. Instead, it is a monument to the egos of politicians who get it built.

Inslee went on to say that he thinks the Northwest can learn from California. Yet he hasn’t learned anything at all from California. Lessons that he should have learned from California include:

• High-speed rail will likely cost three times as much as planners say;
• It will take many years longer to build than planners estimate;
• If it is ever finished, it won’t go as fast as planners promised;
• It almost certainly won’t carry as many riders as planners claim;
• Even if you don’t think high-speed trains haven’t already been rendered obsolete by jets and automobiles, new technologies such as driverless cars and autonomous planes will render it even more obsolete by the time it is finished.

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Not to be outdone, Premiere Horgan mentioned Japan as a place the Northwest could learn from. The lessons Horgan should have learned from Japan include:

• High-speed rail can be successful provided you build it in a corridor with 50 million people in which 70 percent of the travel is by conventional train and only about 10 percent is by either auto or air, which does not describe the Northwest corridor in any way;
• After the government builds a successful line, it will succumb to political pressure to build more expensive lines to places with even fewer people, such as Nagano, Japan or Spokane, Washington;
• Far from stimulating the economy, going deeply into debt to build high-speed rail lines to every corner of the country drags the economy down.

Of course, those aren’t the lessons Inslee and Horgan learned. Instead, the most important lesson they seem to have learned is, “California conned the feds into giving the state $3 billion for a $77-billion high-speed rail project. Where’s ours?”