Governor Brown on high-speed rail in Rolling Stone

Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune

Governor Brown's interview with Rolling Stone is not impressive to those concerned about what's left of his candle power:

Pushing 80, Brown has a bit more than a year left in a political career that saw him mount three presidential bids---the first in 1976. Across the decades, there are through lines, including an abiding commitment to fiscal discipline, renewable energy and thinking big.

One of Brown's Biggest Thoughts is dumb: the high-speed rail project. The interview is peppered with pseudo-intellectual references that apparently impress semi-literates like his interviewer: Daoism, German Marxists, the Book of Revelation, Gary Snyder---the interviewer never heard of him!---Wittgenstein, Camus, and John Kenneth Galbraith are all cited by Brown.

None of that mitigates Brown's stupidity on high-speed rail, the largest infrastructure project in American history, which the interviewer doesn't get around to asking about until late in the interview:

Shiny objects can be tough too---your high-speed rail.

They [Republicans]don't like that either. Anything big is bad. "The market is good, government is bad. And don't ask me to pay for anything that can't be done in a year. And, by the way, we are going to be the global leader. We're the indispensable nation---and we're going to cut our taxes." Now you tell me how that works? That is a formula for total failure.

High-speed rail is moving forward with a lot of difficulty.

I'm being sued at every step of the way. We're winning all the lawsuits.

Why is that so much harder here than it is in other countries in Europe or Asia that have been doing this for decades?

Because there's no vision. It's kind of a mystery. The Republicans were for it. [House Majority] Leader [Kevin] McCarthy [of Bakersfield] was for it---until Obama gave us money. Then it became bad. As part of the [GOP] belief system: "Democrats bad. Democrats party of government. We're the party of free enterprise, we're the good guys. We believe in God. We believe in the free market. And these other barbarians are going to ruin everything. So: Bad!" We got caught up in that belief system.

I don't get it. The congestion is real. We should be doing far more. I lived in Japan for six months. Take that train from Tokyo to Kamakura, where I was living? One hour exactly. Set your watch. That would be very good to have. Can we do that? It's very challenging.

The interviewer clearly doesn't know anything about this project, and Brown adds his ignorance to the interviewer's. Every high-speed rail project in the world is built with government money and then subsidized by those governments after construction, which has been pointed out by those in a position to know:

“High-speed rail is good for society and it’s good for the environment, but it’s not a profitable business,” said Mr. Barrón of the International Union of Railways. He reckons that only two routes in the world — between Tokyo and Osaka, and between Paris and Lyon, France — have broken even.

In fact the legislation authorizing the project forbids any public subsidy to operate the system if/when it's ever built (see pages 8 and 9 of this document). The project was sold to the state's voters based on the promise that the cost to operate the system would be paid by those using it.

It's also not at all clear that this project is "good for the environment." From the California Policy Center:

With respect to global warming, we have provided evidence that the HSR Authority has overestimated the greenhouse gas emissions savings and underestimated net emission increases associated with construction. So, from an environmentalist standpoint, the project is not a good use of public funds. Other initiatives could produce much greater net greenhouse gas reductions at much lower cost.

It's not good for any government to undertake large projects it can't pay for. The folks at the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail warned against what is now happening with this project---that it would be a crippling long-term financial drain on the State of California, since the cost of the project keeps going up, as the LA Times recently reported.

Wonder why the High-Speed Rail Authority changed the planned route from Southern California to Northern California? Because the Southern route to Los Angeles involves digging more than 20 miles of tunnels, which would be "the most ambitious tunneling project in the nation's history"!

And Brown is not "winning all the lawsuits" against the project, since the California State Supreme Court recently ruled that, yes, the high-speed rail project is subject to CEQA's environmental process that the project tried to avoid. Later: That decision has been appealed to the US Supreme Court.