High Speed Rail lines began popping up in Europe and Asia in the early ‘80s.
And passengers were exhilarated.
Trains are, for lack of a better word, sexy.
Going at two hundred miles per hour on land sounds very exciting, very futuristic.
Politicians see opportunity for a legacy for themselves.
With high-profile rollouts in France and Japan, bullet train mania was underway.
And then reality set in.
Unfortunately, the cost of building such projects usually vastly outweighed the benefits.
Supporters, who claim that most high speed rail systems operate at a profit,
use accounting tricks like leaving out construction costs and indirect subsidies.
If you tabulate real costs,
Two high speed rail lines in the world operate at a profit.
Rail is more of a 19th century technology.
We don't have to go through these headaches and cost overruns
to build a future transportation system.
What we're talking about is a vision for high speed rail in America.
But politicians can’t resist the ribbon cutting ceremonies
and imagery of sleek trains hurtling through the lush countryside.
So the projects keep coming.
Don't be afraid of the future.
California’s high speed rail line was sold to voters on the bold promise
that it will someday whisk passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles
in under 3 hours.
Nine years later, the project has turned into such a disaster
that its biggest political champion is now suing to stop it from happening.
I say we cannot afford not to pass Proposition 1A
and build high speed rail in California.
It is foolish and it is almost a crime to sell bonds and encumber the taxpayers of California
at a time when this is no longer high speed rail.
An icon of California politics known as the “Great Dissenter,”
Quentin Kopp introduced the legislation that established the rail line,
and became chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority.
The litigation which is pending will result, I am confident,
in the termination of the High Speed Rail Authority's deceiving plan.
Voters supported the bond measure to pay for construction
on the condition that the train would be self-sustaining.
According to one recent estimate, the project’s latest iteration
would suck up at least $100 million in annual subsidies.
The ballot measure prohibits taxpayer subsidy
and that was an important part of convincing voters in 2008 to approve the bond measure.
In the meantime, lawsuits have multiplied, private investors have fled,
and even the official price tag has nearly doubled, from $33 billion to $64 billion.
When the legislature cleared the way for the Rail Authority
to begin selling the voter-approved bonds in early 2017,
the agency declared it a “milestone.”
Kopp was livid.
It's deceit, that's not a milestone, it's desperation.
Because High Speed Rail Authority is out of money.
You've got to do what you promised the voters.
You can't change that without going back to the voters.
Attorney Stuart Flashman has represented environmental and transportation groups
in several lawsuits against the Rail Authority.
He now aims to stop the project on the grounds
that the agency broke numerous promises to voters.
They're going the wrong way.
They're basically doing this in a way that is very inefficient and will not work.
Baruch Feigenbaum says that starting construction
even though there isn’t enough money allocated to finish the project
is part of a deliberate plan to extract further taxpayer subsidies.
Their strategy is to get enough of it built
so that basically there's going to be so much money sunk in the project
that they're gonna argue it's gonna be cheaper to complete it
than it's going to be to abandon it.
Kopp and Flashman, however, still believe in high speed rail.
It’s just that this particular train has been hijacked by special interests.
Right now it's a boondoggle, I have to agree with that, and it's sad.
And why couldn't they do it right?
Because they made a bunch of political promises to people along the way
'we'll go through your city' 'oh and we'll go through your city'
It's winding it's way around, adding something like 70 miles beyond the most direct route.
Since rail projects are driven more by politics than consumer demand,
nonsensical design decisions are typical.
That’s true even in France and Japan,
where a couple of the first high speed rail lines were actually profitable.
After building those lines, both of those countries built a bunch of other lines
that have no hope of ever being profitable.
Not because the rail folks necessarily wanted to build them,
but because the politicians said 'hey city A has rail, I want it in my city.'
Flashman says the California project has also become a land grab.
This was going to go right through the middle of Kings Country,
right across people's farmland.
And we had a farmer whose land it was going to cross, fellow named John Tos,
and his name is on the lawsuit.
By design, high-speed rail lines require wide swaths of land,
which often means seizing property.
Even getting rural land can be a problem,
there's a project in Texas that is proposing to build a high speed rail line
between Dallas and Houston,
and one of the reasons why it may not be viable
is the large amount of rural land they have to seize from ranchers.
Ranchers have had this land in their family for generations,
they might be growing crops on it and they're not real interested in selling that land.
As for the often-promised environmental benefits of high-speed rail,
Flashman acknowledges they won’t materialize in California.
Ironically doing this high speed rail construction with huge amounts of concrete and steel involved,
is actually increasing greenhouse gas production.
It would probably take 50 to 80 years
in order to negate all of the greenhouse gasses emitted during the building of the line.
California’s project is extraordinary in some ways.
As envisioned, it will be both the slowest bullet train in the world, and the most expensive.
They're using a blended track, so it won't get to the speed they promised,
because it's going through the central valley
it won't meet the timetable that was laid out in the ballot initiative.
It will be conventional rail, which in a way is parallel to existing Amtrak service.
It’ll also be competing with air travel
at a time when a new generation of quiet supersonic planes is about to take to the skies.
Autonomous vehicles will soon give passengers the same freedom
to sleep, work, or read as train travelers.
And then there’s Elon Musk’s plans for hyperloop pod transport
in a near-vacuum tube at speeds up to 800mph.
I say let Elon Musk develop it.
'Cause I'm not advocating using taxpayer money for an unproven, untested concept.
I think if government gets out of the way
of deciding which transportation modes we need in the future,
the private sector will do a much better job of innovating
and creating profitable transportation modes that people will want to use
instead of locking in a sub-optimal choice from the 19th century.