Biden, Streetsblog, and high-speed rail

Amtrak's magazine in 2010

Whenever the LA Times publishes a high-speed rail story, Roger Rudick at SF Streetsblog is pissed.

Rudick last week:

...the paper's reporter on the HSR beat, Ralph Vartabedian, will always find a way to focus on something negative about the project no matter how positive the news. How else does one explain Tuesday’s headline: “Will ‘Amtrak Joe’ Biden bail out California’s troubled bullet train? Don’t bet on it.” Don’t bet on it? Seriously? Earth to Vartabedian: as shown in the lead image, the train station in Wilmington, Delaware is freakin’ named after Joe Biden. Biden and Barack Obama took Amtrak to their first inauguration in 2009.

Naming a station after Biden doesn't make the trains that stop there high-speed rail. No Amtrak line is a high-speed rail line, including the one Biden and Obama rode to their inauguration.

Rudick hates Vartabedian's reporting on the project because it's realistic about its fatal problems:

California’s high-speed rail endeavor, launched in 2008 when voters approved $9 billion in bonds, faces daunting challenges. It has a funding shortfall of $80 billion. It may run out of money even to complete a 171-mile starter system between Bakersfield and Merced by 2028, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed. The project still lags in acquiring needed land and has encountered problems building bridges.

Even under a friendly Biden White House, California would need to signal a stronger commitment to fund the project and resolve many thorny issues it has avoided, such as a plan to subsidize the service in violation of state law, experts say.

The project was sold to state voters in 2008 based on the promise that the system's users would pay for it, that it would get no government subsidy (see pages 8 and 9).

How could the system survive with no taxpayer subsidy? It would have to make fares high enough to pay for both operating and maintenance costs---after state and federal taxes pay to build the system. No high-speed rail system in the world operates without government subsidy:

“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 short, it would be impossible. The reality that every Vartabedian story verifies: the project was poorly conceived from the  start with no funding source.

Vartabedian:

If Republicans retain control of the Senate, a possibility that will not be settled until January, any direct help to the California project is doubtful. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is married to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who helped lead the Trump battle against the California project.

...Indeed, many Democratic legislators in California have already called to slow spending on the Central Valley bullet train and redirect funding to Southern California and the Bay Area, where there is greater public need for transit.

As he also points out, there are many existing transportation needs in the country that need the money that would be wasted on high-speed rail:

The American Society of Civil Engineers — founded in 1862 — wants the federal government to focus on decay in existing highways, bridges, rail systems, tunnels, dams, sewers, airports and other essential civil works. The organization notes that more than 40% of buses and 25% of rail transit hardware are in marginal or poor condition.

Rudick and Streetsblog are pro-bike and anti-car. They like even dumb rail projects because trains aren't cars, which makes them almost as good as bikes. 

Rudick, by the way, wouldn't have been hired by Streetsblog if he opposed the project.

The early warnings we had about this ruinous project: Reports On Aspects Of The California High Speed Rail's Finances.

For the best analysis of other high-speed rail projects, see Randal O'Toole's 10 Reasons Not to Build High-Speed Rail.

See also HIgh-speed rail: The shame of the Democratic Party and Democrats are dumb on high-speed rail.