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Obama Plays Hardball with California

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Obama administration is threatening to take back the $3.3 billion high-speed rail grant to California if the state legislature fails to approve the state’s high-speed rail plan by the end of June. Legislators had planned to hold some hearings this summer so they could base their decisions on actual facts rather than politics. Ironically, when California Republicans in Congress proposed to rescind the money, they were told there was no legal way to do it.

The High-Speed Rail Authority’s latest plan cuts Anaheim and Orange County out of the picture, alienating another group of voters and officials. Despite these cuts, the agency still expects to spend $68 billion building from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This is far more than it told voters it would cost when it asked them to approve the plan in 2008, and even if the legislature allows the authority to sell bonds to match the federal grant, the agency has less than 10 percent in hand.

A reporter at the Los Angeles Times did a little arithmetic and calculated that, to complete the first 130-mile segment in the Central Valley by 2017 as planned, the authority will have to spend $3.5 million per day. With the possible exception of war time, this is probably more than any one entity has ever spent on one project before. The implication is that the authority, which hasn’t been able to adequately manage anything yet, doesn’t have the capability of effectively spending that much money.

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You Lose Some, You Lose Some

By | | Transportation
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In February, Amtrak proudly opened what it claimed was the first high-speed rail line outside of the Northeast Corridor. An investment of $32 million in train control and signaling systems now allow it to run trains the 80 miles between Kalamazoo, Michigan and Porter, Indiana, at 110 mph. Since trains were previously operating at 95 mph, this improvement saves travelers 7 minutes.

Barely a month later, Norfolk Southern, which owns the tracks east of Kalamazoo, issued orders slowing Amtrak trains from 79 to 25-30 mph. This will add 45 to 90 minutes to the trip time between Chicago and Detroit.

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Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me. Taxpayers lose a lot of money making trivial improvements to a transportation system that hardly anyone uses. The few people who use it are subjected to delays and lengthy trip times in spite of the spending.

The Post: Not Even Loans for High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Post, the newspaper of record from our nation’s capital, is somewhat of a bellwether of public opinion on high-speed rail. Back in 2009, when Obama first proposed to build a high-speed rail network, Post editorial writers were all for it as a way of reducing congestion. In 2010, the paper published an op ed by a National Geographic travel writer who argued that the “benefits of high-speed rail have long been apparent to anyone who has ridden Japan’s Shinkansen trains or France’s TGV.”

By 2011, though, the Post was having second thoughts. In January of that year, the paper argued that the nation should “hit the brakes” on the California high-speed trains, the only true high-speed rail in Obama’s plan (since Florida dropped out). (This editorial led to a letter expressing the opposite view from Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood.)

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Breaking Promises

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The high-speed rail ballot measure that California voters approved in 2008 made two promises: first, that fares would cover operating costs; and second, that trains would carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just two hours and forty minutes. The first promise will be hard to keep but no one will know for certain until and unless a rail line is actually built.

But the state seems ready to break the second promise right now. The High-Speed Rail Authority has proposed to save $30 billion by using existing tracks, at conventional speeds, in the LA and Bay areas, leaving the trains to operate at high speeds only between the metro areas. This means the fastest trains will still take far longer than two hours and forty minutes.

Of course, saving $30 billion means the rail line would still cost at least $25 billion more than the estimates published when voters cast their ballots.

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To the Moon, Alice

By | | News commentary
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When We Don’t Build It, We Won’t Build It Here Instead of There

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Once the envy of much of the rest of the United States, the California high-speed rail project is increasingly viewed as being run by a bunch of buffoons who can’t see the handwriting on the wall. Actually, a few of them may see it: last week the authority’s executive director and board chair both resigned. The former said he wanted to “spend more time with his family,” code for “I no longer want my name associated with these crackpots.”

The board chair remains on the board, and the board as a whole still can’t read the handwriting. Last week they decided that, when they fail to find the money to build the portion of the line from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, they won’t build it through Lancaster and Palmdale instead of not building it over the Grapevine, which had previously been given serious consideration. To even bother to make the decision shows they haven’t realized the project is hopeless.

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One More Nail in the Coffin

By | | Transportation
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The California high-speed rail funding plan is “not financially feasible” says a peer-review committee created by the state legislature to review that plan. Various media reports suggest that this finding significantly reduces the likelihood that the legislature will approve the plan.

This is after the rail authority admitted that it inflated job estimates, claiming that the line would create a million jobs when in fact it meant a million job-years. No more than 60,000 jobs would be created by construction at one time, which is still a lot but a lot less than a million. This admission cost the authority the editorial support of the San Jose Mercury News, a paper normally eager to support any wacky rail plan that comes its way.

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When the Facts Change, Some Minds Don’t

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” For many politicians including President Obama, the answer is, “I ignore the facts and stick to my preconceived notions.”

Back in 2008, California voters approved high-speed rail based on the promises that, at a cost of $43 billion, California would have trains by 2020 that would go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and forty minutes. Attracting 60 million riders a year, the trains would earn such great operational profits that private investors would provide $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion worth of capital funds.

Now the California High-Speed Rail Authority admits that cost will be more than double that amount, it will carry fewer passengers than expected, it won’t be done until 2030 at the earliest, and no private investors are interested in supporting a project based on phony premises. Moreover, the latest word is that the trains will take longer than two hours and forty minutes, which means they will be far less competitive with air travel than promised. So it is not surprising that most California voters want to reconsider the project.

But not the Obama administration. Even though Congress has not authorized or appropriated more than a tiny fraction of the funds needed to complete the California boondoggle, the Obama administration says it “is not going to flinch” on its support for the project. “The worst thing we could do is make obligations to folks and start to renege on our word.”

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Moving in for the Kill–or to Be Fleeced?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Voice of Orange County reports that opponents of California’s high-speed rail boondoggle are “moving in for the kill.” But the article presents no clear path for killing the train to nowhere. While there are lawsuits, opponents in Congress, and critics in the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, the final decision will be made by the Democrat-dominated state legislature, which takes its cue from Governor Jerry Brown, who has endorsed the spending of $7 billion on a rail line that few will ever use.

The latest objective poll shows that 37 percent of the people who voted for high-speed rail in 2008 have changed their minds and would vote against it today now that the cost has doubled and the admitted benefits declined. (Only 3 percent of people who voted no say they would vote yes today.)

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If You Don’t Like the Data, Attack the Messenger

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office announced this week that the state is about to waste $6 billion or more starting construction on a high-speed rail line that will never be completed. “The availability of funding to complete a usable segment is highly uncertain,” said the report, to which the Antiplanner responds, “Duh!”

Yet some people aren’t ready to hear the truth. Assemblyperson Cathleen Galgiani, who claims to have authored the law that is now expected to cost taxpayers more than $100 billion, “decries” the new report as “misleading and biased.” Her complaint seems to be that there must be some sinister conspiracy against high-speed rail, but the Legislative Analyst’s Office won’t tell her who is behind this conspiracy.

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