A California judge has refused to allow the California High-Speed Rail Authority to sell $8 billion worth of bonds to begin construction of the project. The judge said the authority had failed to meet legal requirements necessary to begin construction.
Not everyone was thrilled about the high-speed train.
The authority had filed a “validation” lawsuit last March, challenging anyone in the state to argue that it didn’t have the right to build. A variety of groups, including Kings County Board of Supervisors and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, rose to the challenge. As a result, Judge Michael Kenny ruled that the authority had failed to show that it was “necessary and desirable” to sell bonds and begin construction.
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The ballot measure that voters approved in 2008 required the authority to have an adequate financial plan and environmental clearances before it began construction. Kenny concluded that it hadn’t satisfied either requirement.
This is good news for fiscal conservatives who don’t see the point in building a train that will be more expensive yet only half the speed of flying. The authority still may have an opportunity to complete the paperwork necessary to satisfy the judge. But so far, it has spent $600 million without turning a spade of dirt, and finishing all the environmental work for the rest of the project may cost more than the authority can find.
The real question is how do I get a 6 figure job working for them. 🙂
Good news for now.
Eventually, the argument that goes: “Hey, we already “invested” (wasted) 600 million, so we have to build it” will prevail unless you give them another project to work on.
While generally criticized, a dedicated bus highway may work here. For the $8 billion in “startup” construction costs for the high speed rail, a 4 lane (2 in each direction) highway dedicated to bus traffic could be built the entire distance. (estimate cost of $20 million per mile-as most of the land is located in the middle of nowhere)
And it could be priced so that user fees cover the costs of maintenance. Bus companies would compete for the right to use the road.
Buses running on natural gas, electricity etc could all be tried out on a highway without congestion and under optimum conditions. Double decker luxury buses would attract many more riders than the ultra expensive (and very limited capacity) high speed rail could ever handle.
As long as the regulators don’t regulate the project to death, it would work, and work well.
The language of law always confounds me. I understand stopping the project on the grounds that the authority did not have “an adequate financial plan and environmental clearances” but I’m not sure how that is tantamount to showing that the project is not “necessary and desirable”. I can’t think of a single public expenditure that couldn’t be challenged on “necessary and desirable.”
Proponents of various anti rail lawsuits already cite 6 major violations of Proposition 1-A. Forget law, focus on physical realities. This train has to make it from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2 hours & 40 minutes. That just cant be done unless the train went non-stop so they’re lying to people when they say this is gonna be a 220 mile per hour train especially when the train has to stop in Fresno, Bakersfield, San Jose, Stockton, Merced and other discussed towns and cities. When Governor Brown came into office he realized the price tag was going to cost in excess of 100 billion dollars, he knew it was in trouble and this thing was losing credibility. So they compromised, they turned it from a high speed rail system to what’s called a blended system where they used rail used by Amtrak and Metro and freight companies and maybe some dedicated rail of it’s own so you only get high speed going through the middle of the state. Everywhere else it’s probably going 70-100 miles per hour.
JOHN1000 wrote:
Eventually, the argument that goes: “Hey, we already “invested” (wasted) 600 million, so we have to build it” will prevail unless you give them another project to work on.
That was the reason for wanting to start with the “train line to nowhere” in the Central Valley – relatively cheap to build a fairly long section of track, then use the argument you cite above on a segmental basis to get the entire thing built, regardless of cost overruns and regardless of operating losses.
While generally criticized, a dedicated bus highway may work here. For the $8 billion in “startup” construction costs for the high speed rail, a 4 lane (2 in each direction) highway dedicated to bus traffic could be built the entire distance. (estimate cost of $20 million per mile-as most of the land is located in the middle of nowhere)
Would there be much demand for a busway? I think most travel is going to be by airliner, in spite of the inconvenience associated with same, or by private automobile (for those not going to or from one of the downtowns. But I am also confident that the railfans and consultants promoting this never considered a busway.
The huge problem is that California “high” speed rail is going to be very close to the time and cost of flying. So how does that help the public welfare? A huge public investment just to get the same as already exists?
The great thing about inter-city bus service at this distance is that is different. It is much longer in time and much cheaper in price. Do I want to spend 8 hours on a bus just because it is $20 fare? No, not now. But when I was a student and wanted to visit family or a gf and would just do homework on the bus, sure I would.
Economic systems end up finding different niches that work, as a mix between different demands and different cost structures. High speed rail is often so close to airlines in cost and time that it is just a redundancy.
Sandy Teal:
The huge problem is that California “high” speed rail is going to be very close to the time and cost of flying. So how does that help the public welfare? A huge public investment just to get the same as already exists?
The concept, if you recall, was to do a couple of things.
(1) Replace 50% or more of airline traffic between Bay Area and LA Airports. This would free landing slots and gates at these airports to increase long haul service to others points in the US and to South America, Asia and Australia without requiring expensive airport expansions into the SF Bay or LA neighborhoods.
(2) Provide timely service from the large Valley communities to LA and San Francisco which currently have minimal or no air service (especially Bakersfield and Fresno but also several smaller communities).
(3) Improvements needed for HSR between SF and San Jose and between Palmdale and Anaheim and Riverside will (or should) also benefit daily local commuters by speeding their rides, just as Amtrak improvements to the NEC have benefitted commuters on MBTA, SLE, MNCR, NJT, SEPTA, and MARC.
People are put off by the price tag, but they need to realize that infrastructure programs and projects that pre-2003 would have cost X are now going to cost multiples of X because of the price of oil, iron, cement, copper, engineering labor, and construction labor. Regardless of what the government says inflation figures are, the costs of construction are much higher than they used to be just 10-15 years ago. Working in the industry, I would say the factor is on the order of 3 or more times as high, which matches the rise in wages of senior project managers and the price of gasoline. This means that a reasonable sounding $15-30 billion project under discussion using 2003 dollars becomes a $45 to $100 billion project.
LazyReader:
So they compromised, they turned it from a high speed rail system to what’s called a blended system where they used rail used by Amtrak and Metro and freight companies and maybe some dedicated rail of it’s own so you only get high speed going through the middle of the state
Its not a compromise. Its how HSR works in France, Germany, Italy, England, etc. And the Amtrak NEC for that matter. You don’t build new lines for the short distances into the major cities to avoid major disturbances to homes and businesses and construction and land acquisition costs. You use existing lines that are upgraded as much as possible, and you forgo spending tens of billions to save a couple of minutes, and spend a fraction of the money to save the minutes elsewhere in the system.
People who look at Japan and Spain which have built systems that way fail to realize that the regular Japanese and Spanish railways have different track gauges than standard gauge of 4′-8-1/2″. Their only choice was the expensive solution because the new system was built to international standards instead of a local oddity
Correct me if I’m overlooking something but the HSR plan approved by the voters didnt’ cover #3, the commuter befits, because the plan they voted for was 100% HSR. #3 only came into play when they realized they’d have to spend over $100 billion to build all-HSR and downgraded large portions of the project to use existing rail.
As for blended systems, they are a compromise. As you pointed out they using existing lines to lower costs + avoid lengthy land battles,etc. Compromise is not a bad thing. .
Andrew wrote:
The concept, if you recall, was to do a couple of things.
(1) Replace 50% or more of airline traffic between Bay Area and LA Airports. This would free landing slots and gates at these airports to increase long haul service to others points in the US and to South America, Asia and Australia without requiring expensive airport expansions into the SF Bay or LA neighborhoods.
(A) Wishful thinking – those estimates were based at least in part on stated-preference surveys performced by supporters of the projects. Stated-preference surveys are to transportation planning as push polls are to election campaigns – dishonest.
(B) As for long-haul airline service, there is plenty of capacity (if and when needed) at LA/Ontario International Airport a relatively short distance east on I-10 in San Bernardino County
(2) Provide timely service from the large Valley communities to LA and San Francisco which currently have minimal or no air service (especially Bakersfield and Fresno but also several smaller communities).
(C) Maybe because the demand is not there? In any case, I would much rather subsidize (with taxes) a few airline flights per day to LAX and SFO rather than the hundreds of billions of tax dollars that California HSR will consume to provide the service that its boosters have promised.
(3) Improvements needed for HSR between SF and San Jose and between Palmdale and Anaheim and Riverside will (or should) also benefit daily local commuters by speeding their rides, just as Amtrak improvements to the NEC have benefitted commuters on MBTA, SLE, MNCR, NJT, SEPTA, and MARC.
(D) The patronage on MARC (and I mean all three Maryland commuter rail lines, not just the Penn Line that runs on the Northeast Corridor) is so small as to be (almost) statistical noise. Hey, come to think of it, rather like Amtrak’s patronage on a national scale!
I don’t know enough about patronage on the others to make meaningful comparisons.
People are put off by the price tag, but they need to realize that infrastructure programs and projects that pre-2003 would have cost X are now going to cost multiples of X because of the price of oil, iron, cement, copper, engineering labor, and construction labor. Regardless of what the government says inflation figures are, the costs of construction are much higher than they used to be just 10-15 years ago. Working in the industry, I would say the factor is on the order of 3 or more times as high, which matches the rise in wages of senior project managers and the price of gasoline. This means that a reasonable sounding $15-30 billion project under discussion using 2003 dollars becomes a $45 to $100 billion project.
(E) There are some expensive projects out there that need to be built. Mostly highway improvements and highway network additions that can be entirely or partially funded by tolls. Almost none of them involve legacy passenger rail technology (though I don’t object to fixing-up the Northeast Corridor, since it is already there and does have relatively decent patronage, though it still loses plenty of money for its owners, the U.S. taxpayers). It would be nice to have an entity other than Amtrak providing service on the NEC, for that would almost certainly result in less tax money being needed.
Andrew, while I can speak to the original plans, the current California HSR plans do not include stations at any airports. Without direct stops at SFO, LAX, or other airports the argument that the California HSR system will provide enhanced service for supposedly undeserved markets like Bakersfield or Fresno is false.
People in those markets like Fresno or Bakersfield looking to fly will not be using HSR in numbers large enough to make a meaningful difference in airport usage. Worse, if they were willing to jump through the hoops the multiple transfers the current plan would necessitate, they would offset possible usage reductions at LAX or SFO. If the line reduces the number of people at those airports using them to fly to the other, they would see gains in people originating in valley cities who would be flying out of those airports instead of their local airport.
Compromise might be a good thing much of the time, but if you are trying to do “high speed rail” and compromise to the “high speed” to share the rail tracks, you are compromising the whole point of the thing.
Sure, you could run a few trains a day and make the other trains wait. But is that what sells the plan — just a couple trains per day? A train that runs 3 times faster than every other train on the track is not going to able to nicely share tracks. Just ride the Amtrak along the NE corridor and spend 20-30 minutes in dead stop because another train is on the tracks.
(3) Improvements needed for HSR between SF and San Jose and between Palmdale and Anaheim and Riverside will (or should) also benefit daily local commuters by speeding their rides, just as Amtrak improvements to the NEC have benefitted commuters on MBTA, SLE, MNCR, NJT, SEPTA, and MARC.
If this is true, then California can fund these projects on its own without dragging federal taxpayers into this morass.
People are put off by the price tag, but they need to realize that infrastructure programs and projects that pre-2003 would have cost X are now going to cost multiples of X because of the price of oil, iron, cement, copper, engineering labor, and construction labor.
This means that a reasonable sounding $15-30 billion project under discussion using 2003 dollars becomes a $45 to $100 billion project.
People are rightly put off by the price tag. They should also be put off by the fact that they were lied to.
This project was not reasonable even when its proponents were lying and claiming that it would only cost $10-20 billion. It most certainly is not reasonable now.
Andrew:
(1) Replace 50% or more of airline traffic between Bay Area and LA Airports. This would free landing slots and gates at these airports to increase long haul service to others points in the US and to South America, Asia and Australia without requiring expensive airport expansions into the SF Bay or LA neighborhoods.
It would never replace 50% of the airline traffic because more than 50% of the traffic is connecting and the only airport HSR was going to get close to was SFO. Second, none of the airports that would benefit have “slots”. Further, due to industry consolidation, enhanced revenue management, incremental capacity increases through the use of larger aircraft and capacity discipline with the carriers, many of the projected capacity shortfalls that were projected will never materialize.
(2) Provide timely service from the large Valley communities to LA and San Francisco which currently have minimal or no air service (especially Bakersfield and Fresno but also several smaller communities).
The demand for such service just isn’t there and it never was. Air service is demand based, if there was such high demand for such flights there would be more flights. Medium speed rail would be more that sufficient to support timely service in the Central Valley for considerably less money.
(3) Improvements needed for HSR between SF and San Jose and between Palmdale and Anaheim and Riverside will (or should) also benefit daily local commuters by speeding their rides, just as Amtrak improvements to the NEC have benefitted commuters on MBTA, SLE, MNCR, NJT, SEPTA, and MARC.
No one was going to use HSR for a daily commute. The fare premium was much too high.