High-speed rail too challenging for California but not for Taiwan
When it comes to fast trains, a California consensus has hardened: High-speed rail is beyond us.
We may be the world’s hightech capital, but high-speed rail is too technically challenging for us. We may have one of the planet’s richest economies, but high-speed rail is too expensive. We are a giant state of 40 million, but too small to construct even one high-speed rail line.
If we’re right about powerlessness to deliver high-speed rail, then how do we explain Taiwan?
My recent visits to that beautiful island, where I was running a public democracy conference, put the lie to all the excuses Californians use to justify abandoning high-speed rail.
Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours — but still it managed to afford high-speed rail. It’s far less populous, with only 23 million people, but its fast trains attract a huge ridership.
Taiwan’s high-speed rail resembles what California’s might have been if we hadn’t lost our nerve.
Taiwan’s population, like California’s, is mostly along its west coast. So at the century’s turn, Taiwan started building a highspeed rail line between Taipei City and Kaohsiung, 225 miles south, which is the same distance as California’s planned first phase from San Jose to Bakersfield.
But Taiwan began operating its line in less than seven years, at a cost of $18 billion. It’s unclear whether California’s will ever be finished, or what the costs will be.
Paradoxically, Taiwan’s project was completed less expensively because it didn’t do highspeed rail on the cheap.
While California established an underfinanced government authority for high-speed rail, Taiwan’s biggest businesses jointly created a private corporation. The deal gave the government a minority stake and created a concession: The company would operate high-speed rail for 35 years after which it would have to return the system to the government.
Taiwan faced but surmounted the same difficulties that California used as excuses: Strict environmental requirements, the costs of building in earthquake country (Taiwan is more seismically active than California), and the challenges of bridges and tunnels (Taiwan’s system includes the 97mile Changhua-kaohsiung Viaduct).
Taiwan’s project had problems. The corporation relied too much on debt. In 2009, with Taiwan’s economy faltering, the government effectively provided a bailout by refinancing loans, taking a larger ownership stake in the corporation and extending the concession from 35 to 70 years.
At the time, relentless critics of California’s high-speed rail used the Taiwan bailout to help turn the public against the whole concept.
But Californians never got the rest of the story. The bailout worked and Taiwan’s highspeed rail proved reliably profitable — and popular, with 64 million riders last year.
Indeed, high-speed rail has done nothing less than transform the country, linking once disconnected regions together. Bus and airline service fell as Taiwanese embraced highspeed rail. While California cities try to steal away state highspeed rail money for their commuter lines, Taiwan cities like Tainan and Hsinchu have instead built their own robust transit links off of high-speed rail.
On high-speed rail, it took me just 40 minutes to travel between the two cities where my conference took place — Taichung and Taipei — even though they are as far apart as San Diego and L.A. The ticket price, regulated by the government, was just $22.
At 6 p.m., at the conclusion of my conference’s “democracy tour” of Taiwan, our attendees took a regular train for a three-hour journey back to Taichung. But I stayed in Kaohsiung for dinner with a family friend. Then I took the high-speed train at 8 p.m. for a 43-minute ride to Taichung, 120 miles north. I was in bed by 9 p.m., just as the regular train with my colleagues pulled into the Taichung station.
As a Californian, it was nice to experience the long-promised benefits of high-speed rail. It’s maddening that I couldn’t do so in California itself.