High-speed rail lessons

From CCHSRA

Randal O'Toole on high-speed rail lessons:

* High-speed rail will likely cost three times as much as planners say;

* It will take many years longer to build than planners estimate;

* If it is ever finished, it won’t go as fast as planners promised;

* It almost certainly won’t carry as many riders as planners claim;

* Even if you don’t think high-speed trains haven’t already been rendered obsolete by jets and automobiles, new technologies such as driverless cars and autonomous planes will render it even more obsolete by the time it is finished.

Not to be outdone, [British Columbia]Premiere Horgan mentioned Japan as a place the Northwest could learn from. 

The lessons Horgan should have learned from Japan:

* High-speed rail can be successful provided you build it in a corridor with 50 million people in which 70 percent of the travel is by conventional train and only about 10 percent is by either auto or air, which does not describe the Northwest corridor in any way;

* After the government builds a successful line, it will succumb to political pressure to build more expensive lines to places with even fewer people, such as Nagano, Japan or Spokane, Washington;

* Far from stimulating the economy, going deeply into debt to build high-speed rail lines to every corner of the country drags the economy down.

Of course, those aren’t the lessons [Governor]Inslee and Horgan learned. Instead, the most important lesson they seem to have learned is, “California conned the feds into giving the state $3 billion for a $77-billion high-speed rail project. Where’s ours?”