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High-Speed Rail Hearings

By | | News commentary
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You know that Congress is serious about getting the facts about high-speed rail when it holds a hearing on high-speed rail in Grand Central Station. Rail advocates proposed to extend the Northeast Corridor rail system to Springfield. Videotaping is often discouraged at Congressional hearings, but fortunately the Antiplanner was able to obtain the video of this hearing shown below.


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As noted in this advertisement for a rail system in North Carolina, the arguments for high-speed rail and urban rail transit are much the same: the costs are really, really high (“jobs!”), the transportation is convenient (if you happen to be going to one of the few places it goes and are willing to walk when you get there), and it is very affordable (provided you have billions in “stimulus” money).

More on China’s High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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An American blogger in China makes some interesting points about China’s rail system. The country’s existing rail network is currently being used to capacity by freight (mainly coal) and conventional passenger trains. In fact, the number of passenger trains has pushed a lot of coal traffic onto trucks and highways.

The high-speed rail network was supposed to get passengers off the conventional rails, in turn allowing freight trains to get coal and other freight off the highways. But the high-speed rail fares are so high that ridership is low and the vast majority of rail riders are sticking to the conventional trains. The result is a surplus of passenger capacity without alleviating the shortage of freight capacity.

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One More Nail

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Post editorialized against spending any more tax dollars on California’s high-speed rail project, saying “California should have to fill in its project’s economic and logistical blanks” before more federal or even state dollars are spent. While no one is surprised to see fiscally conservative papers such as the Washington Examiner come out against high-speed rail, the fact that the traditionally liberal Post is against it suggests that the end is near.

Naturally, rail advocates accuse the Post of being “unfair,” but they miss the Post‘s point, which is that the California High-Speed Rail Authority only has a tiny fraction of the money it needs, no private investors have offered to contribute (despite the Authority’s predictions that they would provide at least $6 billion in funding), and the Authority has been accused of mismanagement and optimism bias by, among others, the California State Auditor, a peer committee of transportation engineers, and experts at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Cox: Make Builders Responsible

By | | Transportation
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The builders of any Florida high-speed rail project should be responsible for cost overruns and all operating losses, suggests a new report from the Reason Foundation. Written by the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, the report suggests that rail construction is likely to go at least 40 percent over projected costs and that rail fares are not likely to cover operating costs.

The report notes that California has decided to build the first segment of its high-speed rail line in the flat Central Valley, where costs should be not significantly greater than those in Florida. Yet California is projecting costs of $64 million per mile, while Florida’s costs are projected to be only $32 million per mile.

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Welcome to the Blogosphere

By | | Housekeeping
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Martin Engel is a typical northern Californian who says he is “not a Libertarian or absolute free market idealist.” But he has become skeptical of high-speed rail, and through his email list has kept people up-to-date on the various shenanigans at the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Now he has started a blog, High-Speed Train Talk, which he claims is the “only blog that totally opposes high-speed rail in California.” While some might take exception to that, his may be the only blog that is solely dedicated to stopping high-speed rail in California.
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But he also covers other regions, including Britain and China, all with reference, of course, to California. Engel’s new blog is the antidote for the fawning California High-Speed Rail Blog, and the Antiplanner looks forward to Engel’s future newsgathering and essays.

High-Speed Rail = Low-Quality Planning

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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High-speed rail advocates are psychotic, says the Boyd Group, an aviation planning firm. Psychotics, notes the company blog, suffer from “confusion, disorganized thought and speech, mania, delusions, and a loss of touch with reality”–all of which describe rail nuts.

“If you really want to see psychosis,” adds the Boyd Group, “log on to the DOT’s website. Instead of providing hard, accurate information, it’s now a shoddy trumpet for politically-correct schemes pushed by the hobby-lobby that’s running the Department.” Displaying the DOT’s 2009 map of proposed high-speed rail lines, the blog says “high-speed rail isn’t infrastructure; it’s political correctness” and the administration’s plan isn’t a “vision,” it’s “corruption.”

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LaHood Redistributes High-Speed Rail Funds

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Rather than fight the plans of governors-elect Kasich and Walker to cancel high-speed trains in Ohio and Wisconsin, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has preempted them by redistributing the $1.2 billion in federal rail grants to those states. Not surprisingly, most of the money is going to to California ($624 million) and Florida ($342 million). Washington state will get $162 million, Illinois $42 million, with smaller amounts to other states.

That brings the total of federal grants to California’s project to $3.2 billion. With state matching funds, it now has about $5.5 billion, or slightly more than 10 percent of what it says it needs to build the proposed San Francisco-Los Angeles line. Of course, the actual cost is likely to be much greater.

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CHSRA Chair: “Our Engineers Are Incompetent”

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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The California High-Speed Rail Authority approved the Train to Nowhere, a plan to build the first leg of the high-speed rail line from a small town to no town. I suppose you have to start somewhere, but given the likelihood that the state won’t get any more federal funds, this seems like an exercise in folly.

Meanwhile, emails revealed that Curt Pringle, the chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority (and mayor of Anaheim), thinks that the authority’s engineers are incompetent. “I do not think that the engineers working on the Anaheim to LA segment are capable of doing the work,” wrote Pringle last January. They “don’t live in the real world.” Continue reading →

Gold-Plated High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Recently, someone asked the Antiplanner why Amtrak’s high-speed rail plan is so expensive. They were referring to a proposal published in late October to increase speeds in Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor to 220 mph.

The plan calls for spending $117 billion in the 427-mile corridor, for an average cost of nearly $275 million per mile. That’s almost ten times Florida’s projected cost of $30 million per mile and close to three times California’s projected cost of about $95 million per mile. Wikipedia reports that France kept the cost of one line down to $25 million per mile, but only by making compromises with grades and curvature. Continue reading →

Fast Train to Nowhere

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The federal government’s most recent $900 million grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority came with a string attached: most of the money had to be spent, not in Los Angeles or San Francisco where most potential rail patrons are located, but in the central valley. Handed out just before the election, the grant was a blatant attempt to help the re-election effort of U.S. Representative Jim Costa. It might have made a difference, for despite the fact that Costa’s district leans heavily Democrat, he won over an unknown Republican candidate by a mere 3,000 votes.

But now California has to deal with the fact that it only has enough funds to build a high-speed train to nowhere. The authority expects to vote tomorrow on whether to start construction from Borden to Corcoran. To be fair, the route would go through Fresno, but it wouldn’t take anyone in Fresno to anywhere they might want to go at a high speed: Borden is barely a dot on the map, while Corcoran is the home of Charles Manson and his fellow prisoners.


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