Last week, the Antiplanner participated in a conference on the future of transportation in southern California. The conference consisted of four panels: high-speed rail, congestion, finance, and experiences in other countries. Since they invited me, I assumed the conference would offer a balance of pros and cons on the various issues. It turned out I was the only skeptic of passenger rail and giant subsidies to transit.
The high-speed rail panel opened with a statement by the moderator that the state has to build high-speed rail because there is no way that the airlines could handle the projected growth in travel between the Bay Area and southern California. Really? Most of the planes in that corridor today are 737s or smaller; a switch to 757s or similar-sized planes would instantly increase capacity by 50 percent or more.
The first formal presentation was by Dan Richard, who chaired California’s High-Speed Rail Authority from 2012 until being replaced by Governor Gavin Newsom last month. Richard noted that, as of 2008, the year California voters approved selling $9 billion worth of bonds for high-speed rail, China only had one high-speed rail line that was about 250 miles long. Since then, in the time it has taken California to complete no lines, China has opened nearly 18,000 miles of lines. Continue reading
