The bullet train pipe dream must end

The Biden administration just rejected the California High-Speed Rail Authority's request for $1.2 billion in federal funds for its line in the central San Joaquin Valley.

“We were disappointed not to receive a grant in this particular round,” Brian Annis, the HSR’s chief financial officer, told The Fresno Bee.

Despite that, he said, “We’re continuing full steam ahead for the Merced-to-Bakersfield project.”

The next grant review will be in April.

It’s now nearly 15 years since voters passed Proposition 1A in 2008.

The ballot summary promised a “bond issue of $9.95 billion to establish high-speed train service linking” Northern and Southern California. Except for the possible completion of the Merced-to-Bakersfield project, none of that will happen.

The project originally was promised to cost $33 billion. But the latest estimate from the High-Speed Rail Authority pegs it at $113 billion.

“The HSR project’s unfunded costs are so enormous that any meaningful federal support would take away huge sums otherwise going to Amtrak and other projects in many other states,” Bob Poole told us; he is the director of transportation policy at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation. “Also, it appears significant numbers of California Democratic legislators would rather see transportation money spent on local projects than on HSR.”

Voters also were promised the HSR would remove over 12 billion pounds of

CO2 and greenhouse gases from the air. But Poole cites a UC Berkeley study, “LifeCycle Assessment of HighSpeed Rail: The Case of California,” which found the break-even point for the high-speed rail project to reduce greenhouse gases was 71 years.

Poole suggested other projects to actually improve the environment: Dedicated truck lanes on I-710 and SR 60, taking trucks between the ports and the Inland Empire out of congested regular lanes and into higher-speed lanes. He also suggests express toll lanes on the I-5 up the Central Valley from Los Angeles, encouraging the increasing number of electric cars to use that route.

One could also imagine other issues for such a massive amount of money as demanded by the high-speed rail project.

In a recent commentary published by CalMatters, Dana Goldman, dean of the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, and Alain Enthoven, an economics professor emeritus at Stanford University, suggested the money could be better spent on water projects.

“Los Angeles could meet 70% of its water needs locally by 2035 if enough investment is made in recycling and cleaning up its groundwater basins,” they note. “Repairing and replacing leaky pipes, conservation, desalination and replumbing the state project are other pieces of a resilient, drought-resistant water system for California.”

These are all matters worthy of consideration. It doesn’t take much reflection to conclude there are better uses of California’s finite financial resources than a much-delayed, perpetually more expensive train project without much utility.