Sunday, May 19, 2019

High-Speed Surrender

I give up.
The Trump Administration has canceled $929 million in federal funds for California to complete a high-speed rail line that would have connected San Francisco to Los Angeles but had been scaled back in February by California's new governor, Gavin Newsom.  Newsom cited cost overruns and interminable delays for his decision, and he decided to build a truncated line connecting two bush-league towns in the Central Valley instead.  Ironically, cost overruns and interminable delays are the reasons the White House cited as the rationale for canceling the funds.  House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, whose House district is in the Central Valley and who never supported this or any other high-speed rail proposal, couldn't be more pleased to see the plug get pulled.  
Governor Newsom has called the cancellation of funds as illegal and promises to fight the rescinding of funds in court, but he also has to deal with the possibility of having to pay the government back the $2.5 billion the state has already received, which this Republican administration, the most anti-passenger-train Republican administration since the previous Republican administration, is seriously considering.
It's time to admit that this country will never, ever have modern bullet trains.  The American people can't even be bothered to discuss the issue when health care keeps taking up all of the oxygen.  Besides, this country isn't suited for high-speed rail.  Writing in Motor Trend - yes, that's an automobile magazine, but bear with me here - Mark Rechtin, a self-described high-speed rail lover who has traveled on the great bullet trains in Europe and Asia, understands that high-speed rail has a smaller carbon foot print than cars or planes, and it's competitive in terms of cost-and-time with airlines for up to six hundred miles, even winning out over planes most of the time in that distance metric.
"However," Rechtin wrote, "America is a country with a different transportation layout, logistics, cost structures, legal impediments, and population psychographics than Europe, Japan, or increasingly train-loving China. Even if we can corral the costs, high-speed rail will still be competing against the North American airport network, which accounts for half of worldwide air traffic - serviced by low-cost carriers who undoubtedly would apply pricing pressure to any rail competition."
Leaving aside that last point - most airlines want high-speed rail, so it can free up the congestion in the skies - it's hard to argue with Rechtin's conclusions.  Even if the logistics and legal issues weren't a problem, you have to deal with the fact that public transport works only when enough people live close enough to each other to utilize it and allow it to pay for itself.  Americans, however, mostly live in low-density sprawl and in places as far apart from each other as this continent-sized nation allows.  Trains can't reach every place where Americans live.  This is why so many optimistic visions of California's high-speed rail ambitions have turned out to be dead wrong.  In his 1991 book "Supertrains," which advocated for development of high-speed rail in America, ended with a fantasy prediction of California's first high-speed passenger rail line opening in 2005 - fourteen years into the future - to great acclaim and success.  Fourteen years after 2005, California and the U.S. in general are no closer to having bullet trains than they were in 1991.  We may be even farther behind.  We can't even get conventional passenger rail to run right.
There's no way our autocentric suburban living pattern - even many American cities, like Phoenix and Atlanta (and, yes, Los Angeles), are sprawled out like suburban developments - can support modern intercity rail like the living patterns of countries like Germany - 82 million people in an area the size of Montana - can.  And if that doesn't finish off the debate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's apparent insinuation that we can give up planes and have an undersea rail line to Hawaii (hey, whatever happened to ninety minutes from New York to Paris?) certainly will.
So that's it.  I surrender.  The only way I can ever live in a country with high-speed rail is if I become an expatriate - and don't think I haven't considered that!  So, take a good look at this artist's rendering of a bullet train in California . . .
. . . because you're never going to see it for real! >:-(    

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