California's debacle is more proof high-speed rail is a progressive fantasy

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://nypost.com/2022/10/10/californias-debacle-is-more-proof-high-
speed-rail-is-a-progressive-fantasy/

California progressives tried to build a European-style high-speed-rail
network and alienated the French in the process.

A big New York Times piece on the rail project reports that the French,
who wanted to work with California, decided the state was simply too
dysfunctional and departed to help complete a high-speed line in Morocco
instead.

The ongoing unraveling of California’s rail plan is an object lesson in
how infrastructure as eschatology is a bad idea. If transportation is
conceived as a way to save the planet and fulfill a deep-seated, quasi-
religious fixation rather than a means to move people around more
efficiently, it is bound to fail. Throw on top California’s politicized
decision-making and regulatory and legal obstacles to building, and it’s a
formula for a boondoggle for the ages.

No matter how high California has estimated the cost of the project, it
hasn’t been high enough, even as almost nothing has been built. It started
out at $33 billion in 2008. Now it’s $113 billion, with no one knowing
where the funding is going to come from.

Not that the California experience will diminish the progressive ardor for
high-speed rail. As far as its enthusiasts are concerned, it is like
socialism — never failed, just never truly tried.

President Barack Obama proposed an 8,600-mile high-speed-rail system, and
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wants the United States to be the
“global leader” in high-speed rail. Progressives think of bullet trains
like windmills on rails, a symbol of enlightenment and modernity, a way to
free ourselves from the selfish, small-minded tyranny of the automobile
and adopt a sleeker, greener, more virtuous future.

Then the wheel meets the rail. In California, it might have sounded
appealing to build a high-speed-rail link between Los Angeles and San
Francisco — if you abstracted the project from all the topographical and
other difficulties. For political reasons, a less direct, less economical
route between the cities was selected. And the decision was made to start
building between the two megalopolises, in the Central Valley, creating
the possibility that California may end up with a bullet train to and from
nowhere.

Of course, we already have cheap, high-speed transport between population
centers. It is called air travel.

As Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute points out, planes cruise at
roughly 500 miles per hour. The Amtrak Acela, on the other hand, has a top
speed of 150 miles per hour. Yes, airplanes need infrastructure, but not
expensive, complex new infrastructure all along their routes.

O’Toole notes that Japan’s high-speed trains seemed like the future in the
1960s, when air travel was more expensive than rail. Also, Japan’s high-
speed trains had a ready-made customer base in the substantial proportion
of the country’s population that already traveled by train.

In the United States today, in contrast, the average cost per mile of
traveling by air is cheaper than traveling by rail, and a minuscule 0.1%
of all passenger travel is via Amtrak.

If we built the Interstate Highway System, why can’t we build a comparable
high-speed network? As O’Toole observes, the highway system basically paid
for itself and accounts for a substantial 20% of the country’s passenger-
miles and a roughly comparable proportion of freight ton-miles.

High-speed rail could never be a match. Even if you put aside the endemic
cost overruns, the inevitable construction delays and the considerable
maintenance costs, it can only carry passengers, not freight.

While progressives swoon over high-speed rail as the shiny future, some
other genuinely futuristic technology is likely to emerge. If the age of
self-driving cars ever arrives, people will be able to experience a car
more like a personal train, except unlimited by rails.

California hasn’t created a railroad to the future but a warning to the
rest of the country to avoid its delusion and folly.

Twitter: @RichLowry


--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: sf.n...@mail.house.gov

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.