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We're a long way from the transcontinental railroad.
We built the iconic American infrastructure project in the 1860s in about
six years, putting down 1,776 miles of
track and blasting 15 tunnels through
the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Granted, working conditions back
then didn't exactly meet OSHA standards. Yet, if today's rules and practices applied, the project would have
been stalled for years somewhere outside Sacramento, California, caught up
in endless environmental lawsuits.
The Golden State's emblematic,
modern infrastructure project was supposed to be a high-speed rail link
between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Don't expect, though, to see the
equivalent of the Golden Spike any
time soon, or perhaps ever.
The high-speed rail project has been
agonizingly slow. After about 15 years
of grinding delay and cost overruns,
not one piece of track has been laid, a
record of futility hard to match. California high-speed rail is the West
Coast's answer to Boston's notorious
Big Dig that took about a decade longer to build than anticipated at a much
greater cost, although it was eventually
completed.
Now, the Trump administration is
cutting off $4 billion in federal funds
for the project, arguing that it doesn't
want to pour any more money into a
boondoggle.
The imagined bullet train was always
a misfire. The idea of high-speed rail
has a nearly erotic appeal to progressives, who love communal trains over
individualized autos and think cars are
destroying the planet whereas trains
can save it. High-speed rail is to transit
what windmills are to energy — an
environmentally correct, futuristic
technology that will always underdeliver.
California voters passed Proposition
1A getting the ball — if not any actual
trains — rolling in 2008. The project
was supposed to cost $33 billion and
connect L.A. and San Francisco.
What could go wrong? Well, everything. Bad decisions about where to
build the tracks, complacent contractors, environmental and union rules
— you name it.
The initial, scaled-back line is now
supposed to be completed by 2033, and
even that is optimistic. Elon Musk
might put a man on Mars before California Gov. Gavin Newsom or one of
his successors manages to get even a
much less ambitious high-speed rail
system underway.
The current focus is a line between
Merced (pop. 93,000) and Bakersfield
(413,000). No offense to the good people of either of these places, but these
aren't major metropolises. In Northeast terms, this is less a rail connection
between New York City and Washington, D.C., and more a connection
between Newark, New Jersey, and
Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Passenger estimates for the California system have always been absurd.
The fantasy is that ridership will be
double what it is now is in the Northeast corridor. But as Marc Joffe of the
California Policy Center points out,
population is much denser near Northeast stations, it's easier to get around
cities in the Northeast on the way to or
from the train, and a rail culture is
much more embedded in the Northeast
than car-centric California.
As for reducing greenhouse emissions, the long-running project is itself
a significant source of emissions, and
the benefit of fewer drivers in cars will
be vitiated by the fact that more and
more people in California will be driving electric vehicles.
The original estimated $33 billion
cost is now $35 billion for just the
scaled-back line and more than $100
billion and counting for the whole shebang. There is no reason that the feds
should pour good money after bad
supporting a preposterous project that
doesn't have any national significance.
Newsom — too embarrassed to admit
failure or too drunk on visions of
European-style rail — remains fully
committed.
In a statement, he said Trump's
defunding decision is a "gift to China,"
as if Beijing cares whether people get
to Bakersfield by car, plane or highspeed rail.
The project has already been a distressing object lesson in California's
inability to build anything of consequence, and there's more where that
came from.
(COMMENT, BELOW)