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Why the United States will never have high-speed rail [View all]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/13/why-united-states-will-never-have-high-speed-rail/?utm_term=.25a2d4a47a77
California likes to think of itself as the state where the future happens, and in 2008, its voters decided the future was high-speed rail. In November of that year, they approved a $9 billion bond issue to begin one of the most ambitious government infrastructure projects in U.S. history: a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, at a cost of $33 billion.
For years, the optimists have spun starry visions of millions of Californians traveling quickly, comfortably and environmentally consciously between the state’s two major population centers. The pessimists, meanwhile, have grimly watched the projected costs mount. At last count, the estimates had traveled northward of $75 billion, and for all anyone could tell, were still climbing.
On Tuesday, during his first State of the State speech, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called for the state to scale back the project to a less costly leg that would run through the Central Valley — much simpler to build in large part because there are relatively few people there who might want to raise objections to the project, or, say, ride a high-speed train. California voters can stop clutching their wallets. But voters elsewhere should pay close attention, because what happened in California illustrates the perils that face any U.S. rail project, or for that matter, any project at all that tries to meaningfully reshape U.S. infrastructure.
Almost anyone who travels abroad comes back wondering why every other country in the world seems to have cheap, speedy rail travel while Americans can barely go out for a cup of coffee without enduring either the tedium of an endless road-trip or the indignities of the TSA. Sadly, there is no one reason; rather, there are many reasons, all of them hard-to-impossible to fix, all of them conspiring to deprive us of the (gee-whiz!) trains that many of us would like to ride.
California likes to think of itself as the state where the future happens, and in 2008, its voters decided the future was high-speed rail. In November of that year, they approved a $9 billion bond issue to begin one of the most ambitious government infrastructure projects in U.S. history: a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, at a cost of $33 billion.
For years, the optimists have spun starry visions of millions of Californians traveling quickly, comfortably and environmentally consciously between the state’s two major population centers. The pessimists, meanwhile, have grimly watched the projected costs mount. At last count, the estimates had traveled northward of $75 billion, and for all anyone could tell, were still climbing.
On Tuesday, during his first State of the State speech, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called for the state to scale back the project to a less costly leg that would run through the Central Valley — much simpler to build in large part because there are relatively few people there who might want to raise objections to the project, or, say, ride a high-speed train. California voters can stop clutching their wallets. But voters elsewhere should pay close attention, because what happened in California illustrates the perils that face any U.S. rail project, or for that matter, any project at all that tries to meaningfully reshape U.S. infrastructure.
Almost anyone who travels abroad comes back wondering why every other country in the world seems to have cheap, speedy rail travel while Americans can barely go out for a cup of coffee without enduring either the tedium of an endless road-trip or the indignities of the TSA. Sadly, there is no one reason; rather, there are many reasons, all of them hard-to-impossible to fix, all of them conspiring to deprive us of the (gee-whiz!) trains that many of us would like to ride.
This is a very sobering opinion piece for those of us who like to dream of high speed rail. The uniquely American cost and legal environment is pretty shitty.
High speed rail might be better used in metro areas to start, from an airport to downtown, for example. Shanghai has maglev from their airport to downtown.
We'll see. Elon Musk has made a career of doing things that people have said he can't do.
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