California Voters Taken For A Ride

In November, 2008, California voters approved Proposition 1A, the so-called "Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act." 1A was supposed to be a $9.95 billion bond measure, that would pay for an "800-mile High-Speed Train Network."

Voters were promised "Travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 2½ hours for about $50 a person." Environmentally sensitive Californians were promised "Electric-powered High-Speed Trains [that] will remove... greenhouse gases equal to the pollution of nearly 1 million cars."

All this, "without raising taxes."

I wonder how they will manage that, given that the most conservative current cost estimates for the project are sixty-eight billion dollars. Did they go back to the voters and ask for the rest of the money? No. But the federal government did step in with $3.2 billion in grants.

The federal government also, through the Surface Transportation Board, ruled that "construction did not have to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act." I admire the way the Obama administration always finds the money and environmental waivers for their boondoggles, whether it's Solyndra, wind farm subsidies, or the solar plant at Ivanpah that incinerates birds and costs three times more per kilowatt than nuclear, coal or natural gas.

That still leaves more than a fifty-five billion dollar shortfall. So the state is going to take money from the carbon dioxide permitting scheme known as AB32 and divert it to the train project. Neither the Governor nor the legislature thought it necessary to ask the taxpayer's permission.

Construction has begun, on a puny 29-mile segment from Fresno to Madera. At 220 miles per hour, it will take less than eight minutes for a farmer to get from the Madera turnip fields to the market in Fresno. That's fresh turnip! Unfortunately, of the 526 parcels in the right-of-way, only 101 of them had been acquired.

There will always be true believers in high-speed rail. I might even be one of them, if there were a line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It's mostly unused federal land between the two cities, so rights of way would be much easier to acquire.

Wikipedia is apparently a true believer in high-speed rail. Their page titled California High Speed Rail reads like a sales brochure. One item that leapt from the page was #7 - Alternatives To High-Speed Rail. The California High Speed Rail Authority commissioned a study that estimated how much it would cost to build equivalent capacity using other forms of transportation. It estimated that new freeway lane-miles, airport gates and runways offering equivalent capacity would cost $158 billion. This estimate was prepared by Parsons Brinckerhoff, who are a major contractor to the Rail Authority. Cynical observers might note the conflict of interest and bias, and wonder why an impartial analyst wasn't chosen for the estimate.

When a liberal progressive tries to sell you something that sounds too good to be true, it's just another lie.