“Only now,” asserts author Ralph Vartabedian, “is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.”
At the risk of nitpicking an otherwise useful autopsy, there never has been, at any stage of this living monument to political unseriousness and hubris, even a “little chance” that the S.F.-L.A. line would zip passengers between the cities in just 160 minutes, let alone deliver on the whole ragbag of laugh-out-loud promises that the state and federal political establishment delivered with a straight face.
“The Rail Authority claims it will hit average speeds that are not being achieved by any other high-speed rail system in the world,” Reason Foundation Vice President of Policy Adrian Moore once observed. “A trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles would allegedly take 2 hours and 40 minutes, averaging 197 mph. France’s TGV-Est train averages 174 mph, the TGV Paris-Avignon averages 159 mph, Japan’s bullet train averages 159 mph, and Taiwan’s high-speed rail averages 152 mph….Those are the fastest ones out there. And they can use light, fast trains, because they run on their own tracks. California will have to use heavier, slower trains because the plan is run on the same tracks as freight trains, and federal safety rules require heavier passenger trains in the event of a collision.”
Those words, heavy on incontrovertible fact, were published in September 2008.
ED ADDS: Heck, we’ve been writing about this folly for almost as long as Reason has. My first critical post about this plan was in December 2009, and the first detailed look at the fiscal disaster to come came in May 2011. By August 2011 I was already writing “I told you so pieces,” as was Reason all along.
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