I & I Editorial BoardFeasibility studies for a high-speed rail project began in 2006. By 2018, the first section was completed and opened, seven years after construction was started. Where is this bullet train? Not in California. It’s in Morocco.
California voters approved in 2008 a ballot measure for a “safe, convenient, affordable, and reliable alternative to driving and high gas prices” by a 53%-47% margin. Golden Staters were sold a train that would require a $10 billion bond and cost $33 billion to complete. Within a dozen years it would be ripping up and down the state at 220 mph, ferrying passengers between San Diego and Sacramento.
But California’s high-speed rail has not been safe nor convenient nor affordable nor a reliable alternative — because it doesn’t exist. It is probably a couple of decades behind schedule, the first usable track has yet to be laid. The cost has risen sharply since voters fell for the lies and might reach as high as an inconceivable $231 billion.
If it’s ever completed, speeds will never match the promises. In some sections, it will have to share existing track rather than run on dedicated high-speed rails, which will mean slower speeds. Much slower.
Ridership will be hardly a thin sliver of the California High Speed Rail Authority’s projection of 65.5 million to 96.5 million year. Even the recent estimate of 4.8 million to 6.9 million riders a year seems overly optimistic. And whoever climbs aboard won’t be moving between San Diego and Sacramento anyway — a truncated version connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles-Anaheim is likely to be as far as it will ever go.
Meanwhile, the Al Boraq, Arabic for “the lightning,” is moving passengers across Morocco at nearly 200 mph in a real bullet train. Not only is Morocco’s high-speed rail in service, it is the “the first and only high-speed railway in Africa.” It offers free Wi-Fi, features a Starbucks, a McDonald’s, and “glowing arrivals screens” at its stations.
How can a nation with the 96th richest economy per capita in the world beat an economy that would be the fourth or fifth largest in the world if it were its own country?
Well, this is California that we’re talking about, and it’s been trapped for decades in a can’t-build, won’t-build maelstrom. More specifically, the rail project was “poorly planned,” says “Antiplanner” Randal O’Toole, by schemers who “optimistically believed it could be built in the U.S. for the same costs that high-speed rail had been built in Europe.”
“They failed to account for political pressures that forced the agency to choose longer and sometimes more expensive routes and more-or-less ignored the fact that building through the mountains would be a lot more expensive than building on flat farmlands. Most if not all of the early high-speed rail lines in Asia and Europe were built across flat areas.”
California was once a golden state of possibilities. Now it’s a blue state of impossibilities. Unions, green activists and the crusaders who fuel the politics of envy dictate policy in Sacramento, city halls and county offices across the state. As long as they’re in power, the state will be as dysfunctional as a Venice Beach junkie.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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It will probably take less time for me to learn how to spell Morocco than for California to lay its first usable track. One wonders why California is so slow?
Californians, I guess, are going at “Newsome” Speed (one wonders when his first track will be laid).
I hope this article is in Gavin’s In-Box today, not that the grifter would give a chit.
If only we had a dictatorship to say, “Just do it!”
The multiple obstacles in CA against building their high speed line remind me of the multiple obstacles we had in the East trying to dredge the Delaware River Ship Channel to 45 feet deep to compete against other East coast ports already at 50 feet deep.
Obstructionists by the boat load held it up for 25 years with millions of dollars in legal and court costs squandered, and billions of dollars of local revenue lost to competitive ports. Yes, the channel was finally dredged, but now it has started over again as the port operators are now seeking to dredge the channel to 50 feet, as they ought to have done before.
Same obstructionists are barking at the door again. “River Keepers,” Save the Sturgeons, Save the Planet and all manner of well funded, and Yes, well meaning obstructionist non-profits, who had honed their sand and gravel in the gears skills the last time around.
Do not expect this new channel project to even begin dredging for the next 25 years. If only we had a dictatorship!