LA Times Comes Out for High-Speed Rail
Roy Reynolds
EDITORIALS
Believe in the bullet train
Even though it's a gamble, high-speed rail would help California cope
with its transportation problems.
May 2, 2007
IT'S TEMPTING to write off California's bullet-train enthusiasts as
overgrown kids begging Mom and Dad for cash to build the world's
coolest train set; only in this case, Mom and Dad are the taxpayers,
and the set would cost at least $40 billion. And yet what looks today
like an overpriced toy might someday become one of the state's best
weapons for fighting gridlock and pollution.
Rail boosters and transit realists have been butting heads for more
than a decade over plans for a bullet train from Sacramento to San
Diego, a 200-mph electric-powered rocket that could go from Los
Angeles to San Francisco in 2 1/2 hours. Plans to put the train
project before voters have been put off twice, and if Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger gets his way, a ballot measure planned for November
2008 might once again be deferred. The governor also wants to slash
funding to $1 million for the California High-Speed Rail Authority,
which says it needs $103 million next fiscal year to keep the project
on track.
The project would represent a huge gamble for state taxpayers. Even
assuming that planners are right about the total price tag - a big
assumption given variables such as the price of land - there are no
guarantees that all the money can be raised or that rosy projections
about the line's ridership and revenue would be met.
The rail authority wants to ask voters to approve $9.95 billion in
bonds next year. Backers say the rest of the money would come from
private investors, the federal government and other local sources. But
it's possible that investors would shun such a risky project or that
the federal money wouldn't materialize. California could conceivably
be stuck with a partly built train to nowhere for years or decades.
And there are serious questions about whether a high-speed train is
such a high priority at a time when the state is already groaning
under a perilous debt load and still has many infrastructure needs
unfunded.
Yet critics who reject the train as a boondoggle base their arguments
on the past, not the future. It's true that long-distance rail systems
in this country attract anemic ridership and usually require
bottomless taxpayer subsidies. But the unattractive economics of train
travel won't necessarily remain that way forever.
By 2020, the projected completion date for the bullet train, gas will
likely be a lot more expensive. State and federal governments by that
time should be well underway in cutting back sharply on greenhouse gas
emissions, probably translated into increased costs for flying or
driving. (The bullet train would be emissions-free.) Train service,
particularly the kind that could compete with airline travel on
convenience, could be far more economically competitive than it is
now.
The rail authority is in the midst of preliminary engineering and
environmental work that may need to be started over from scratch if
funding is pulled next year. It may not need all of the requested $103
million, but that doesn't justify cutting the project off at the
ankles. Voters should get the chance to decide once and for all
whether they want their tax dollars tied to the tracks.
Posted by Roy Reynolds
www.prtstrategies.com
Kirston Henderson
>> From
>> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-train2may02,0,1456753.story?coll=la
>> -opinion-leftrail
>
> EDITORIALS
>
> Believe in the bullet train
>
> Even though it's a gamble, high-speed rail would help California cope
> with its transportation problems.
>
> May 2, 2007
>
> IT'S TEMPTING to write off California's bullet-train enthusiasts as
> overgrown kids begging Mom and Dad for cash to build the world's
> coolest train set; only in this case, Mom and Dad are the taxpayers,
> and the set would cost at least $40 billion. And yet what looks today
> like an overpriced toy might someday become one of the state's best
> weapons for fighting gridlock and pollution.
When you consider the general trend that the consulting engineering
companies that typically generate such estimates tend to be low by close to
100%, the real price might be more like $80 billion. When you consider the
likely cost of obtaining the right of way through all of those big cities,
the bill would likely be even higher. They also have another problem and
that is some of the people that live near the line are going to discover the
noise measurement data obtained by the U.S. FRA for the TransRapid maglev
train and the two types of high-speed steel wheel on steel rail trains show
that the maglev train is almost as noisy as the steel wheel on steel rail
trains. Those people are going to shot those numbers to the roof tops to
stop any such train operations near their homes. You would likely have a
first class citizen revolt on your hands. It's true that the levitation
doesn't make any noise, but the pulsing of the linear motors to power the
trains are far from silent!
Kirston Henderson
MegaRail®