California has always prided itself on pointing to the future. Its latest bullet-train plan points to somewhere in the 20th century, with the 19th not far behind.
Gov. Jerry Brown is doing all he can to save his state’s ill-conceived high-speed rail project, but he’s no magician. He’s finding that there’s no way to cut the project’s cost other than to make it smaller and less speedy — in short, even less like the scheme that voters approved in 2008.
He has just endorsed a new business plan that lowers the system’s projected price tag from $98 billion to $68 billion. This is still well above the $40 billion estimate of 2008, and the project is scaled back.
The most striking retreat is in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas. There, instead of building new high-speed train lines right into the urban core, the new plan would just upgrade existing commuter rail lines.
Riders will have to wait until 2028 for completion of the full run from San Francisco to Los Angeles (and on to Anaheim in Orange County). Even then, it won’t be all that fast.
The original promise was for a train that would get you from L.A. to San Francisco in 2 hours and 40 minutes. Already, there was a problem with competition from the one-hour airline flights. Now, with much slower commuter lines carrying passengers for a sizable stretch at the entire end, the train ride is bound to be even longer.
So where is this all leading? To put it another way, where is California leading? In terms of transportation technology, it is pointing the way back to a 20th century model, commuter trains. These aren’t a bad idea in the right context. But they have no place in the high-speed rail vision that captivated (or just fooled) voters four years ago.
Does anyone take trains now? From Tampa to Lakeland Florida you get off the train and you’re 4 miles from downtown Lakeland. You either walk, take a cab or try to find a bus schedule. Not many people would do that if they own a car.
California has not had a rail line that performed as advertised since the Red Car line was shut down back in the 40′s or 50′s.
If all the money that has been spent on *studies* had instead been spent on development, high-speed rail transit in California would be a fait accompli.
California has non-rail friendly topography. There are mountains and serious hills, forcing curves and grades into any rail design. The route through the Central Valley was selected because of the miles of flat ground. But then the line has to contend with the Tehachapi mountains (and the famous “grapevine” grade) to get into the Los Angeles basin — an enormously expensive and difficult obstacle to surmount.
While the Coast Range at the northern end of the run isn’t nearly as tall, it is still another significant problem. Trains already run through the Altamont pass on a curvy line that must be tunneled and straightened to accommodate a high-speed train.
The net result is that this was a stupid and ill-starred project from its inception. Over the years, there have been countless queries “why can’t we have high-speed trains like Europe or Japan?” What is forgotten is that the high speed trains elsewhere generally serve end points half as far apart as SF and LA … and cross over relatively flat landscape that does not require major curves or significant tunnels to cross. It may never be economically practical to build a high-speed train between SF and LA. What’s sad is that the politicians want to build monuments. After all, it was Jerry Brown and his counterpart WIllie Brown (as Mayors of Oakland and San Francisco) that delayed rebuilding the east span of the SF-Oak Bay Bridge so the taxpayers could pay twice as much for a “signature” span. Admittedly the CalTrans original design was not very imaginative, but it was effective and relatively cheap. The Loma Prieta earthquake was in 1989. We’re still waiting for the new bridge span to be completed.