One might expect, with a disastrous oil spill just behind us and gas prices predicted to soar to $5 a gallon by 2012, that the Washington Post would address the Obama administration’s alternative to oil-based transportation with nuanced understanding.
Sad to say the paper has instead served up an editorial full of misinformation about the administration’s high-speed rail project in California. The proposed 200-mph train system between southern California and the Bay Area has been in the crosshairs of House Republicans led by Jerry Lewis (R-Cal.), who has introduced a bill to force the return of $2 billion in federal stimulus funds awarded to the project.
The Post has placed its prestige behind Lewis (without saying so) by calling for a halt to the project until its costs, route alignment, potential ridership, and other details are studied to some unspecified level that meets the paper’s approval.
To justify such a draconian proposal, much at odds with the prevailing bipartisan support for rail in the state, the Post characterizes the project as a flakey California “experiment” – a suggestion that’s pretty far removed from reality.
The railway is based on technology that’s been in operation for 46 years in Japan (where it has carried three billion riders without a single fatality) and has spread throughout Europe and southeast Asia. China is committed to opening a dozen HSR lines equal in size and complexity to the California project.
The editorial says that “a series of skeptical blue-ribbon documents” have called into question the financial viability of the system. “Most damning” of these documents is a report by the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group calling official estimates of potential ridership so unreliable that they “offer little basis for proceeding.”
Those words would be damning if they weren’t yanked out of context. They come from a discussion of the methodology of the ridership study and the assertion by one consultant that, due to large “error bounds,” the projections might or might not be accurate. Either outcome was equally possible.
The Review Group called on the California High Speed Rail Authority to reexamine and refine the methodology, if needed. That’s it. There was no implication that the estimates were cooked to favor the project, as the Post implies. In fact, the Review Group went out of its way to say that no forecasting model can predict 100 percent accuracy.
The editorial continues by describing the first segment of the route, going from Bakersfield north to the small village of Borden, as the “train to nowhere.” This is plain nonsense. As explained at public hearings and on an internet posting by project CEO Roelof van Ark, the railway is not designed to terminate at Borden anymore than the Interstate Highway system planned to end in Missouri, where the first miles were laid.
Stopping temporarily at Borden was decided because the environmental review was nearly complete and the line could connect to existing rail track, allowing the new line to have “independent utility” (as required by the California legislature) before construction resumed north to Sacramento and northwest to San Francisco.
The editorial is similarly disingenuous when it says that the system “has attracted zero private capital” and has been “unable to guarantee any source – governmental or private – for almost half of the cost of completion.”
Rail consortiums in France, Germany, Japan, and Korea, as well as the U.S., have expressed interest in the project. China has told outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that it might underwrite California’s construction costs. But the project hasn’t yet reached the stage when companies have been invited to make bids.
If the Post read the Review Group report carefully, it would better understand why private capital has been reluctant to openly commit to the project. “The demonstration of firm public sector financial commitments will be an absolute necessity prior to approaching sources of private capital,” it stressed. In other words, investors won’t sink money into a project that’s under the threat of rescission by the likes of Rep. Lewis.
There’s more to suggest a willful ignorance of the facts pertaining to high-speed rail by the newspaper. For example, its statement that “in much of the country passenger rail can’t compete with car travel by interstate highways.” That’s only true because Amtrak trains run at 50 mph averages. As Robert Cruickshank points out, trains that zip passengers between LA and San Francisco in under three hours – or less than half the time it takes to drive between the cities on a good day – are going to change the way people travel.
The base projection of 65 million annual riders when the system is completed in 2030 may prove too low considering that California is expected to add 8-10 million more residents over the next 20 years. The Peer Review report says that the railway could “achieve high profits” once it’s finished.
That’s a bonny prospect for Californians, even if it doesn’t fit the prejudices of the Post, which ends its editorial with the revealing comment that it’s probably only in its own backyard, the Northeast Corridor, where federal rail investment “makes sense at all.”