It
has been 10 years since passage of California Proposition 1A the High-Speed
Rail Act that
approved the $9.95 billion bond, a down payment on a high-speed rail project that
was optimistically estimated by proponents at that time to cost $40
billion. Today, the California high-speed rail cost may
approach $100 billion.
Public enthusiasm is obviously dwindling.
Supporters
of the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail line hope that erecting
part of the line now will make future governors less likely to abandon the
project. The entire 800-mile line is scheduled for
completion by 2033.
There is no shortage of obstacles to what even the project’s biggest boosters
call an ambitious timetable, including the engineering challenge of tunneling
through the Tehachapi Mountains, a seismically active barrier between the
Central Valley and Los Angeles.
In
addition to the continuous cost overruns and schedule delays, by law, the State will not operate the
train, nor subsidize its operation.
Once built, the State will seek an operator of the completed project, through
competitive bidding.
State
law says that the system MUST OPERATE WITHOUT A TAXPAYER SUBSIDY, but according
to a Reason Foundation study, there are more than 100 bullet trains
worldwide and except for the one or two that operate profitably, all require
subsidies, thus the end results for California’s high speed rail is that it
will most likely necessitate taxpayer subsidies or higher fares per mile, or
both.
Beginning
construction without all of the financing in place represents a strategic
gamble by the rail authority, and by Governor Brown, that once enough work is
completed, future leaders may be intimidated to abandon the project and leave a
landscape of unfinished pillars, viaducts, bridges and track beds. Faced with
reduced resources, the authority has altered its plans, and is now focused on
finishing a 119-mile stretch of track from Bakersfield to Madera by 2022.
The continued delays and rising costs have fueled criticism that
California, perhaps the most prosperous state in the nation, is squandering
money on a transportation project that critics describe as a prime example of
big government waste in a state controlled by Democrats.
For
all the construction, the project faces the ever-present threat that a future
governor may decide that state resources would be better used dealing with, to
name one example, the housing, homeless and poverty crisis. Governor Jerry Brown,
a big proponent, is leaving office at the end of the year.
The
coastal elites who support “going to green electricity” at all costs just don’t
care that the working poor and struggling middle class living away from
California’s coast are bearing the brunt of higher energy costs. “Clean
electricity” doesn’t run the military, airports, cruise liners, supertankers, ports, and transportation
industries, nor does electricity produce 6,000
products from petroleum that are used by
every infrastructure, that are made from the chemicals and by-products that are
manufactured from crude oil. The inconvenient truth about AB 32 the Global
warming initiative, as well as Cap and Trade and its extension to 2030, is that we now have higher gasoline
prices and higher electricity costs.
Since
our state has the worst poverty rate in the nation where 1 out of 5 California
families are barely hanging on, it’s hard to understand the time and effort
being extended on the subject of the emissions crusade that is obviously
negatively impacting our poverty and homeless populations.
Driving
or flying from a multitude of airports can be done at virtually any time of
day, but the inflexibility of how many train departure times would be available
from a limited number of trains would impact the convenience factor offered by
cars and planes and thus also adversely affect train ridership.
The
snowballing effect of lower ridership would be higher fares for those that do
use the train as there would be no state subsidies available. Lower
ridership would further impact the ROI risks for invested capital.
Just
like the land line phones that have become obsolete as a result of cell phone
technologies, future travel needs may be impacted in the coming decades as a
result of the ever growing virtual world for office workers and online classes for students. There is also a rise of
alternatives to both private automobiles and public transit, such as Uber and
bicycling, and the coming evolution of driverless vehicles.
The
latest business plan of completing a high speed rail between San Francisco and
Los Angeles that cannot be subsidized by law is essentially a
going-out-of-business plan that is discussed in a Reason Foundation Due Diligence Report.
However,
once the high speed rail is ever operating, and the realization that
subsidizing funds may be required to augment ridership income, future leaders
will be loath to walk away from the $100 billion project and you can bet on it
that Californians will be further burdened with subsidizing costs, or some form
of greenhouse gas offsets paid for by businesses to pay for the trains
operation!
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment