High-Speed Rail Still Has Place in California

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The high-speed rail project (Prop. 1A) was passed by 6.6 million California voters in 2008, who agreed to the expense of $9 billion in state bond money. The project has also collected around $3.5 billion in federal funds, even as President Obama has announced a six-year, $53 million plan to expand high-speed rail, including $8 billion in next year's budget.

According to Weintraub, the LAO report finds that there aren't enough guarantees in the landmark transportation project and comes up with suggestions seemingly designed to sink the project.

• LAO wants the state to tell the federal government it has to change the rules and deadlines set for the project.

• Then, the Legislature needs to slash Gov. Brown's request for $185 million for the project, which the feds say has to break ground by September 2012, down to $7 million, which maybe keeps the doors open.

• The state also should dump plans to build the first 140 miles of track from Bakersfield through Fresno to Chowchilla and instead start the system in either L.A. or the Bay Area (where the cost per mile skyrockets).

• Finally, the whole project should be supervised by a new and not-yet-existing department of Caltrans, both because of its record of accomplishment and because leaving the current board, appointed by the governor and the Legislature, in charge "creates a risk that the board will pursue its primary mission - construction of the statewide high-speed rail system -- without sufficient regard to other state considerations, such as state fiscal concerns."

To Weintraub, the report's suggestions indicate the LAO's negative position on the project.

Weintraub agrees that there's plenty of room for concern about the future of high-speed rail. As the LAO points out, without something like the guaranteed funding the gas tax provides for highway construction, the project is going to depend on annual appropriations, both in Sacramento and D.C.

The report makes other good points about improving the way decisions are made, putting together better information for the Legislature and taking a closer look at all the numbers for the proposed system.

Almost from the opening section, however, the report assumes the rail project will be a failure and that the only question is how to make it less of a disaster.

Let's move the first segment of track out of the Central Valley, the report pleads, and put it where people actually live so there's something useful built before the money runs out. Let's cut funding now and build in delays so we miss the federal deadlines and can kill this thing quietly. Let's put the entire project under state control so we can get people in charge that aren't actually committed to high-speed rail.

But there's only a passing mention of what high-speed rail can bring to California, as though that vision of a state knit closer together by a transit system that looks beyond the coastal megalopolises doesn't really count for anything.

The 500,000 people living in Fresno, the 250,000 residents of Bakersfield, and the hundreds of thousands of other folks who find themselves cut off from California's urban, cultural and financial centers by time and distance, voted for the rail system because they believed fast trains would tie them closer to the coast and the coast closer to them, spreading California's wealth more evenly through the state. And voters in the rest of the state agreed.

Weintraub thinks that "Californians have always been risk takers and people more interested in hearing how something new can get done than in being told why it's impossible. Japan, France and other countries have shown high-speed rail isn't impossible. It shouldn't be impossible in California, either."