High-Speed Hijinks - 2019 Edition

When the Green New Deal championed by U.S. House member and hot Democratic property Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned high-speed rail as part of a more environmentally friendly future, I was ecstatic, as it meant that Washington was abuzz with talk of fast trains for the first time in nearly a decade.  Then, on cue, the roof caved in.  Or so it appeared.

A sub-moronic congressional staffer apparently let out a first draft of the Green New Deal that advocates building enough high-speed rail to make air travel in the United States unnecessary, overlooking not just the fact that airliners would still be a preferred transport mode for transcontinental travel but also overlooking the fact that Hawaii - which, last time I checked, is a state - is out in the middle of the Pacific, suggesting the desire to build an ambitious undersea rail line that is the realm of science fiction.  Needless to say, Republicans, who hate passenger trains because it eats into the profitable business of selling cars, pounced and said that this demonstrates what a bunch of twerps high-speed rail advocates are.

But then California's new governor, Gavin Newsom, seemed to have dealt the biggest blow to the hope for high-speed rail in America when he announced that he was scaling back his predecessor Jerry Brown's plan to build a high-speed train line to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles because millions of dollars were spent to get it going and the state isn't one millimeter closer to finishing it than when it started.

California politicians who never wanted a bullet train in the Golden State in the first place - such as U.S. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy - applauded Newsom's announcement.  The project had been wrongheaded from the start. The route chosen bypassed too many cities and towns in between San Francisco and Los Angeles and took a meandering, indirect path so that it would go through the Central Valley and gain gain political support in that region of the state, and the contractors went ahead and started building without securing the entire route, studying the terrain, or making sure the funding was in place.  

It turns out, though, that Newsom's decision does not mean the end of high-speed rail in California.  Newsom still wants to build it, and he first wants to concentrate on connecting Kevin McCarthy's hometown of Bakersfield with Merced - two cow towns in the Central Valley - by way of Fresno, an agricultural center known for its little 5,000-watt radio stations and not much else.  The distance between Bakersfield and Merced is 164 miles - an easily manageable two-hour drive on California State Route 99.  As ludicrous as building such a line sounds, there's a method to Newsom's madness - he wants to get the easiest part of the project done while rethinking and re-configuring the San Francisco-Los Angeles connection by completing an environmental review and seeking new sources of funding.

A Newsom spokesman told a San Francisco news site that the governor hopes to move forward on the link between San Francisco and Los Angeles as "the Central Valley section demonstrates the viability of the broader project" and added that Newsom's comments about the lack of a path for the overall line was meant  merely to convey that "there isn't the funding to do the project from SF to LA under the current funding stream."

I was ready to throw up my hands when Newsom first declared his intention to scale back this rail project and the media made it sound like he was giving up on it completely, and had Newsom not clarified his comments, this blog entry would have turned out differently.  But I can't help but feel the deepest skepticism that high-speed rail will ever take root in These States, just as I've since become skeptical about the Green New Deal and the folks behind it, given the PR disaster that resulted from the aforementioned first-draft statement about getting rid of all air travel (more on my skepticism later).  I've said this once, and I'll say it again: My initial reaction to a policy proposal I'd be inclined to support, like high-speed rail, used to be, "Sounds good, I'm in!"  Now I'm more likely to say in response, "I've heard it all before."