Best plan for California’s bullet train is to get it built and end the partisan whining | Opinion

Cost overruns. Projections of fewer passengers. Construction challenges caused by stormy weather.

It has been a tough couple of months for California’s High-Speed Rail project. Detractors, such as Republicans in the state Legislature and even U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, have had ample opportunity to mock the project anew and question why it ever was started in the first place.

“The broken promises on this project are breaking the bank for Californians,” said Senate Republican Minority Leader Brian W. Jones of El Cajon. “It’s time to pump the brakes on the hot mess express and defund the High-Speed Rail.”

“In no way, shape, or form should the federal government allocate another dollar to California’s inept high speed rail,” said McCarthy in a statement to the news website CalMatters.

There is no doubt that high-speed rail is taking longer to build and costing more than anyone expected. But Jones and McCarthy ignore the fact that the first 119 miles of the rail route from Madera to northern Kern County are well under way. Along with rail line, huge structures around Fresno known as viaducts have been built or are under construction; they are to carry the trains over highways and the San Joaquin River. If the project is stopped dead in its tracks (pun intended), it would be an epic failure that future generations would just shake their heads over.

It would be possible to scrap the electrified high-speed rail, as Jones has suggested. But that would miss the chance to remove the air pollution of 400,000 vehicles — which is the equivalent of what high-speed rail will do when the full system gets built.

Walking away from HSR without seeing it through would be a leadership failure of gigantic proportions. Democrats would not only be to blame; Republicans would be guilty of failing, too.

Imagine if the international airports in Los Angeles or San Francisco were being built today, and they were costing more and taking longer. Would lawmakers say the projects should cease? Of course not. But that is simply because Californians already know the value of international airports in Southern California and the Bay Area.

High-speed rail must not become a train to nowhere.

Higher costs

There is no doubt the project’s challenges remain daunting. Fresno Bee staff writer Tim Sheehan recently wrote about how cost overruns keep pushing the price of the project higher. Much of that is due to the use of “change orders,” which are necessary adjustments in the designing and building whenever unexpected challenges arise.

Change orders, plus the impact of inflation, would have shrunk a $4 billion contingency fund to less than $200 million this month, Sheehan reported. The California High-Speed Rail Authority board voted in March to add another $2 billion to the fund.

The impacts have also ballooned the cost of the first segment to more than $30 billion. Total cost to build the 520-mile, San Francisco-to-Los Angeles system stands over $100 billion; one report put it at $128 billion.

Then there is the realization that fewer passengers than expected might ride the trains. The authority now projects a nearly 25% decline in riders using the Bakersfield to Merced segment per year — a drop from 8.8 million to 6.6 million passengers. Slower statewide population growth, plus changing work habits due to the pandemic (more people working remotely) are key reasons for the decline.

Winter’s storms and the runoff from the historic rains have put part of the Valley segment underwater. Of bigger concern to authority officials are the many irrigation-canal crossings they will have to work around if those channels still have water late into the year.

Job stimulus

GOP detractors like Gallagher point out what else could be done if the billions in funding were diverted. “Think how many students we could educate, how much water we could capture, how many acres of forest we could restore,” Gallagher said in a statement, “if we had pulled the plug on this debacle years ago.”

But that is true whenever a major public works project is undertaken. There will always be other ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

Besides, the authority estimates 9,000 jobs have been created by the Valley segment. That is worth celebrating, no matter the politics.

Republicans in the Legislature should end their posturing and instead demand the best project possible. Stop using high-speed rail as a sound bite and get on with supporting it for the greater good of clean transportation in the future.

Democrats in Los Angeles, meanwhile, should quit their selfish desires to pull money from the project to spend on rail transit in their region, an that idea has been floated in the recent past. The Valley segment must be completed — period.

High-speed rail needs a champion promoting it. Gov. Newsom loves big ideas. Governor, here is one already under way.

Someday, our children and grandchildren will be zooming north and south in electrified trains, oblivious to the political battles that had occurred, all because California leaders stayed the course.