California's Traindoggle To Nowhere
I last wrote about California's "high-speed" Traindoggle, as I call it, here. A bit from that post -- referencing a family of four -- and quoting the Community Coalition on High Speed Rail:
Four rail tickets are twice as much as the total cost of driving and four times the gasoline costs....Setting aside for a moment the fact that all but two of the world's high-speed rail routes are subsidized, and assuming they at least break even, the analyzed per mile rate would make a one-way SF to LA ticket cost about $190.5 Therefore, if the CHSRA's assumed private operator must charge enough to break even, four tickets for a LA/SF round trip would cost at least $1,520.
Conclusions: California's 2009 median household income was $42,548.6. For a middle class household to ride the train LA-SF once would cost them about 4% of their annual pre-tax income. CHSRA's 2009 ticket prices probably exclude middle- income households. But a more realistic ticket price definitely excludes them.
There's an interesting long read on this in The Weekly Standard by Charlotte Allen. An excerpt:
What I was to see consisted of a 1,600-foot viaduct spanning the Fresno River on the rural outskirts of Madera, a rundown city of 63,000 in the heart of the state's agriculturally rich but economically parched San Joaquin Valley--a landscape that is geographically, topographically, demographically, and culturally far away from the bustle of the two coastal metropolises that the train was supposed to be designed to serve. The Fresno River viaduct is part of an initial 130-mile stretch of track through the valley that would allow passengers to travel from Madera, 164 miles -southeast of San Francisco, to Bakersfield, 110 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Well, actually not quite all the way to Bakersfield, California's ninth-largest city, with a population of 364,000, but to the edge of an almond orchard on the fringes of Shafter, a sleepy farm town of 17,000 some 19 miles to the north. That was because the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), the autonomous state agency in charge of planning and building the train, didn't have quite the money in its budget to take the train to downtown Bakersfield, and passengers bound for that city would presumably have to board a low-speed connector bus to actually arrive there. The estimated date for completing this initial stretch was September 2017, the deadline for spending $3.5 billion in "stimulus" money from the Obama administration. Actually linking San Francisco and Los Angeles with a southerly terminus in Anaheim on a total of 520 miles of track had been pushed out to the year 2022. Critics have dubbed the high-speed rail project the "train to nowhere," and it was easy to see why.There's "near-universal hostility" to the train, in Charlotte's words, so
...The CHSRA has so far succeeded in acquiring only 60 percent of the 1,300 parcels of land that it needs just to run those 130 miles of track from Madera to Shafter. Meanwhile, polls conducted from 2013 to 2016 have consistently shown that at least 52 percent of Californians want the state to ditch the high-speed rail project entirely and use the 2008 bond funds for something else, possibly for water storage or for beefing up conventional rail and public-transportation systems in the traffic-clogged Los Angeles and Bay Area "bookends" of the projected bullet-train system.
It is undoubtedly unfair to perceive as metaphors the rain, the mud, the never-used equipment, and the solo unfinished viaduct over an isolated rural river in an agricultural valley more than a hundred miles from the heavily trafficked coastal corridor that connects Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the metaphors are irresistible because they point to reality. The out-of-the way location of this first segment of construction was, by all accounts, the product of a political decision while the train was on the drawing board during the 1990s, one that weighed the flat terrain plus a much-touted economic boon to the jobs-starved valley, along with the fact that the valley is one of California's less-populated areas, with relatively few NIMBY-minded residents expected to complain about blocked-off streets and superfast trains whooshing through their neighborhoods at all hours of the day and night. The valley's total population is only about 4 million, compared with 7 million for the San Francisco Bay Area and 19 million for greater Los Angeles. Many coastal Californians have never set foot in the valley, partly because its basin shape makes it the air-pollution capital of the state during the smoggy summer.
Yes, once again:
...The solo unfinished viaduct over an isolated rural river in an agricultural valley more than a hundred miles from the heavily trafficked coastal corridor that connects Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Corruption as usual! Oops, I mean...politics...
Guess the Democratic politicians that promote this are preferred to evil Repubs or the voters would make a change in the power structure.
(Crickets chirping in the background)
Bob in Texas at September 24, 2016 8:13 AM
The train route parallels I-5, which is much more practical for travel between Madera and Shafter, or Stockton and Bakersfield, or even San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Traveling by I-5, one can take one's own car (no need for an expensive rental car at the destination), pay roughly $50 for gasoline (less than the cost of one ticket on the train), and, unless one's destination is downtown, avoid the downtown traffic upon arrival. Plus, going by car, one avoids the TSA check and any luggage limits or charges.
Not to mention, that the old-fashioned train (the Coast Starlight) will get one from Oakland to Los Angeles in reasonable comfort, in about 6 hours, and for about $50-$100 per person. Of course the number of trains running this route is limited. However, adding new trains to the route would cost less than the $65 billion being spent on a "high speed" train that will use the same tracks.
Of course, being able to say there is a high-speed rail alternative means one can continue to legislate people out of their cars, even it the high-speed part of that alternative is a joke.
Conan the Grammarian at September 24, 2016 1:17 PM
Conan, you're an optimist. The price tag, if it's ever built, will be over $100 billion. (No Hollywood accounting methods allowed) And then ticket revenues come nowhere covering maintenance and operation costs
Plus as you mentioned it won't be a high-speed rail. It's a hybrid hi/lo speed rail. They haven't yet figured out how to bore through the Tehachapis, but when they do the rail speed limit will be under 60 mph.
And who is the target market for this train? Tourists and busybody bureautrash. Maybe a few salespeople. Families can't afford it. And with this new thingie called "the internet" fewer professional people need to commute between the cities.
Canvasback at September 24, 2016 1:45 PM
Passenger trains should be paid for by subscription. The incremental cost of a passenger is effectively nil. Almost all of their costs are fixed. The only sane way to pay for such a service is by a membership fee. The same is true for buses. One person or one hundred the bus still has to drive it's route and it costs the same in fuel, maintenance, and wages.
Ben at September 25, 2016 7:11 PM
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