For those of you who live in the higher reaches of Tibet, The Sacramento Bee is the newspaper of choice in Sacramento, the State Capital of California. Dan Walters is arguably the most senior and most respected journalist of that paper and in the State.
Here are his comments about the recent Legislative Analyst's Office Report on the California High-Speed Rail Project. The report is damning, and so is Dan Walters' viewpoint. It should also be said that all the high-speed rail search engines that pump out hundreds of article citations daily are now filled with this news about the severe criticism levelled against the rail authority. By all rights, this should be the beginning of the end for HSR in California.
The rail authority list of shortcomings is enormous. They are arrogant. They are untruthful. They are incompetent. They are procrastinators. They are dishonest. They are politically corrupt. The are financially corrupt. There are other failings that will crop up, but this list is a good start.
This is not my personal opinion only. There is a documented track record substantiated by a number of government agencies, the most recent being the Legislative Analyst's Office, which had issued a prior, equally damning report some time ago. The State Legislature itself has been putting out critical reports since before the 2008 elections. The State Auditor, the State Inspector General and the CHSRA peer review committee have all issued critical reports on the rail authority. And, I'm not citing non-government sources of criticism, only the state government ones.
As it happens, the Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation is also fully aware of this situation and is maintaining a case book and number for this problem, which continues to be under their observation.
There will be considerable further examination of the meaning of the LAO report. Which criticisms are actionable? What possible actions can the Legislature take that are also politically acceptable? At what point will even the most ardent Democratic politicians realize that this project is much more an anchor and much less a sail? There is an embarrassment factor that can easily surface at election time in 2012; will enough candidates understand that and act decisively now, or wait for the facts to hit the fan at the later and more importune time?
Let me say here that I'm not a fan of the current batch of legislation going through the pipeline, or some of the recommendations made by the LAO Report. I'm talking about taking the responsibility for the HSR project out of the hands of the CHSRA Board and turning it over to the CALTRANS/ Department of Transportation. This appears to have great appeal for many of us who have objected to the rail project, mostly based on the inadequacy of the rail authority. That's not good enough.
For me the reason for rejecting this bureaucratic change is the larger question of building inter-city high-speed rail; should California be doing this at all?
No, is my answer, for a number of reasons.
A. The required development funds will be so staggeringly high that there can be no justification for this project on any cost/benefit basis. The costs to taxpayers will be vast and endless.
B. The state does not need supplementary inter-city passenger transit modalities, especially if they are of the premium, luxury, first-class kind that characterizes high-speed rail. The state should be fixing what's broken, and there's no shortage of infrastructure, including transit, that requires repair or replacement.
C. There are other, far more pressing and worth-while investments that should be made with any available funds, particularly in a state in the present fiscal crisis. Slashing education while funding this project is outrageous. It's also stupid.
D. Even with a competent administrative bureaucracy, this is a government project that will serve far too few people for far too much cost, both development costs and operating costs.
E. It is not, in any way, imaginative, strategic, creative, innovative, and in every other regard anything like what America is capable of; see Silicon Valley as an example of that. It will be bought off the shelves of other countries. By the time of its completion, it will be as obsolete as Amtrak is now. Break-through transit technologies will emerge from other countries, not our own. Hence, it's a lousy investment for us, unless we seize the leadership in the transportation technology equivalent of computers.
F. Since it is not a private sector for-profit business like the air carriers, it will require enormous and permanent subsidies even as it serves too few people, and those are the members of the social/economic class that requires the least amount of government support.
Let's stop here and let Dan Walters make our case for us.
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This story is taken from Sacbee / Capitol and California / Dan Walters
Dan Walters: High-speed train trip going nowhere
dwalters@sacbee.com
PUBLISHED WEDNESDAY, MAY. 11, 2011
California's chronic inability to govern itself has made it an international laughingstock with a blistering article in the Economist, a highbrow British magazine, only the latest manifestation of that unfortunate status.
The state now has another opportunity to either cement its image as a civic buffoon or begin acting like an adult. It is the disaster-in-waiting known as the high-speed rail project.
On a whim, politicians and voters decided a few years ago that a bullet train connecting the northern and southern halves of the state would be a jim-dandy thing to have, even though nobody knew how much it would cost, whether it would generate enough riders to justify whatever the cost might be, or whether the money could be obtained.
The state High-Speed Rail Authority, made up of politicians and political appointees with side agendas, has supposedly been working on the details. But we still don't know how much it would cost, what the ridership would likely be or what would be the sources of construction money.
Even so, the rail authority authorized construction of a $5 billion initial line from nowhere to nowhere in the San Joaquin Valley because the federal government gave it some money and dictated that it be spent there.
Why? Probably to boost the 2010 re-election chances of a Fresno congressman, Democrat Jim Costa, who faced a tough challenge.
Meanwhile, the rail authority faces entrenched opposition to running bullet trains down the bucolic San Francisco Peninsula (a route chosen to please one member of the authority's board). Official reviews of the project's ridership estimates, costs and "business plan" have been uniformly negative, and the Legislature has become very skeptical.
The latest criticism was issued Tuesday by the Legislature's budget analyst, Mac Taylor, in a report fittingly called "High-Speed Rail Is at a Critical Juncture."
If the project is to have a chance of success, Taylor's staff concluded, it needs a thorough re-evaluation, a shift from the rail authority to the Department of Transportation, and a business plan that fully identifies costs, ridership and how it could operate without subsidies as state law dictates.
The report is especially scornful of the proposed track to nowhere in the San Joaquin Valley.
In other words, Taylor implies, it's time to either shape up the project or dump it, although the words that his report uses are much more diplomatic, such as "challenging choices."
There's probably no way for California to gather the untold tens of billions of dollars in construction money the system would require and operate bullet trains without subsidies or "revenue guarantees" to private investors.
However, before the rail authority moves dirt and pushes us into a bottomless money pit, we'd best find out for certain – and have the guts to call it quits if the project doesn't add up.
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