Happy New Year. Sorry I've been off-line. Had a terrible hard-drive crash. Nobody was hurt but it took time to haul the wreckage away. Back in business now, more or less.
OK. Diridon is gone. But our high-speed rail problem isn't. What Piotr Brzezinski has to say about HSR in the British paper The Telegraph, below, is good and you've read much of this previously in these blogs and prior emails.
The key words in this article are “unnecessary” and “expensive.” That is the central message. If you prefer, "not cost/effective" is more definitive, but it's the same either way; costs too much; does too little.
The issues are simple. Once they start construction in the Central Valley, they will be harder to stop. We can only hope that the new Republicans in Washington will terminate future stimulus funding for HSR. (And, we should write them to do so.) Without such further funding, the Central Valley segment will certainly be nothing more than a train-track from one modest Central Valley town to another. . . . and it won't be anything like high-speed, it will be Amtrak.
And, by the way, if they are going to lay track that is to be used by a 220mph train someday, it can't be used by other heavy-rail equipment since the precision requirements for HSR are very demanding. So, what they intend to spend money on in the Central Valley may not be used at all for many years. And if it is used, all that track will have to be repaired or replaced to make it suitable for HSR.
The going price the rail authorty budgeted right now is around $5 billion and when that's gone, there isn't any more. That $5 billion will not buy electrification or any of the other requirements, including rolling stock, that would have a high-speed rail business in operation. All it will be is $45 million-per-mile track with several expensive elevated overpasses.
We also know that our new Governor, Jerry Brown, faces some Draconian decisions about the state budget deficit and the state debt. Even as a long time HSR supporter, he should understand that whatever gets built will cost the state valuable resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Further, HSR will be a debt burden on the state forever. For Brown, the short-term trade-offs are so-called “free” money from Washington to provide some quick-fix help with the state economy, vs. the long-term costs of those dollars to an extremely debt-burdened state.
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/piotrbrzezinski/100070380/america's-high-speed-rail-shambles-where-has-all-the-money-gone/
Piotr Brzezinski
Piotr Brzezinski is a freelance writer and was formerly a Conservative Party policy analyst. Born and educated in the US, he writes about US and UK politics from a transatlantic perspective.
America's high-speed rail shambles: Where has all the money gone?
By Piotr Brzezinski World Last updated: January 5th, 2011
This time last year, President Obama promised a brave new world for America's train spotters, committing $8 billion to fund 13 high-speed rail projects around the US.
But 12 months later, where has all the money gone?
The comically inept projects range from Ohio's (now abandoned) plan for a $400 million “high speed” train averaging just 39 mph, to Florida's 84 mile, $2.7 billion plan to link two cities that are only 90 minutes apart by road. Not to be outdone, Iowa managed to receive $1 billion for a line to Chicago that will be slower than the current bus service. But, even in such illustrious company, California's high speed shambles stands out: a “train to nowhere” costing $4.15 billion to connect the “unincorporated community” of Borden to the tiny town of Corcoran (combined pop. ~25,000).
While some of these daft plans have been revised-California will now spend another billion dollars (that's $45 million per mile) to extend the line to two medium-sized cities-this madness reflects the logic of pork-barrel federal spending. Simply put, free money is hard to turn down. The Tampa-Orlando line costs nearly $3 billion and, as Orlando's Mayor admits, “I can't say it makes sense”. But with the federal government covering 90 per cent of the cost, he won't say no.
There is, however, some method behind these “slightly faster” rail projects: if states spend a bit of “free” federal funding now, they won't be able to stop spending their own money later. Obama has an ideological commitment to HSR - it's cool, European and seems green (although it's not really) - but normally states would reject such projects as unaffordable boondoggles. Since the fed's paying for the upfront costs, however, most state politicians have opted for the “free” shiny ribbon-cutting ceremony (with the notable exception of Ohio and Wisconsin, whose Republican governors rejected HSR funding).
And once a project gets started, it will always be hard to kill, even if it is unnecessary and expensive. Vested interests spring up to defend existing spending and sunk cost fallacies justify additional investment - e.g., California's “if we don't spend another $38 billion to reach San Francisco, our $5.5 billion train to nowhere will be useless” plan. As with healthcare reform, Obama is playing a long-term game, cleverly exploiting the logic of path dependency.
As usual, of course, taxpayers lose out. While the up-front costs may be covered, ongoing costs will need to be subsidised by the lucky state taxpayers. There's a reason why private investors are mysteriously absent from HSR projects: Only two high speed segments in the world break even (Paris-Lyons and Tokyo-Osaka).
Elsewhere ordinary taxpayers subsidise cushy rail travel for the relatively well-to-do (as HSR lines are almost always premium services).
There's no reason to expect that America's next generation HSR lines will be any different. In California, for example, the rail authority's “plan” (if it can be dignified with such a name) to break even first projected 117 million annual riders but now only 39 million (a still-ludicrous figure; the entire nation-wide ridership of Amtrak amounts to 29 million people). If ridership doesn't reach these unrealistic levels, California's hard-pressed taxpayers will pick up the tab.
Coming back from travel in Europe, it's easy to wish that all US train journeys were as a simple, quick and elegant as France's TGV. HSR is sexy and Americans suffer from train envy. But the economics simply don't make sense given America's sprawling landscape and heavy investment in road transport. America will spend the next few years dealing with a deficit crisis - and, probably, state bankruptcies - and the last thing we need is to get aboard HSR.
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