High-Speed Rail in California?

We Should Have Let France Do It

Greetings from Lake Garda. Oh, OK - if you insist. Here’s one.

On this vacation, we’ll take two trips on Italy’s best high-speed passenger trains, the Frecciarossa 1000, pictured above.

So what better time for this, originally posted on 13 August 2021?

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This might come as a surprise, but most times when I travel, I am disappointed.  Now, no sane person would be disappointed by the travel year I've had since 2020, or before, for that matter.  Rather, I am disappointed at the dearth of options for going.  It's fly or drive.  Why aren't high-speed trains another option?

I'm afraid that we know the answer.  One party, which begins with an "R" and displays an unusual fealty to Trump, refuses to acknowledge high-speed rail works great on all other continents. 

Many cite my beloved California and its escapade in building a real, live bullet train from SF to LA as an example of total government dysfunction and a general inability to get big things done.   That is true - it has been a mess from its start through now.  People should be held accountable and fired.  As a professional program manager, I am ashamed, despite having zero involvement in any of it.

But did you know that the French national passenger railway company, SNCF - a company that built and operates profitably arguably the best high-speed rail network on Earth - offered to build California's system for a fixed price of $40 billion in 2010?  We'd be dining in LA tonight if we had gotten started then with real experts - like SNCF.  But our national hubris (and corruption) stopped it.  

Worse, did you know that, with our nutty regulations, nutty work rules and nutty activists, that it costs something like TEN TIMES the amount to build a mile of high-speed rail in the US as it does . . . wait for it . . .  in FRANCE! 

So maybe it's time to re-think France as overly-unionized, with pampered workers that lay around, sip Bordeaux, and get nothing done between Gauloises breaks?  Because if that were the case, wouldn't it cost 10 times more to build high-speed rail there than here?

But my friends, instead, the French (and nearly all other European nations) have beautiful high-speed trains that are a pleasure to ride. 

We have Amtrak. 
 
There's more.  As I wrote on Wednesday, we need to get serious about climate change, now.  We must get people out of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles and into electric ones ASAP.  High-speed rail - which uses electric power exclusively - could replace a heck of a lot of short-haul plane flights, and thus eliminate the carbon those flights put into the atmosphere.  The airlines are shooting for 2050 for carbon neutrality; high-speed rail is there today.

My plan is massive and simple.  First, let's identify city pairs 500 miles or less apart, where the populations are the greatest.  I chose that number because a train traveling at an average speed of 150 mph could carry people about that far in 3 hours.

Here are some:

• SF - LA

• Seattle - Portland

• Miami - Orlando (completed since I wrote this, but not true HSR)

• NYC - Boston

• NYC - Washington DC

• Dallas - Houston

• Houston - Austin

• New Orleans - Houston

• LA - Las Vegas (in progress by a private company)

• Chicago to about a jillion places (jeez, shouldn't it be the Silicon Valley of bullet trains?

And there are others.

Next, the cost.  I have two comments on that.  One, reality-based, is that if we could ever get our financial house in order, we'd have the money.  The second, snark-based, is that there's never an issue coming up with trillions for wars and the Department of Defense in general.  OMFG to have those trillions back that we dropped in Iraq for no good reason!

(Actually, I have 3 comments.  There are services governments provide that don't necessarily turn a profit, even beyond the military.  Nobody questions the ROI on a firehouse, public school, airport, or especially, a highway.  How we've let ourselves be sold that high-speed rail is different is beyond me - the manifold intangible benefits have been studied and documented.  It works when done correctly.)

I would then re-visit partnering with SNCF, and/or Deutsche Bahn (Germany), Thayls (Belgium), Trenitalia (Italy), or JR East (Japan), for help building out our system in America.  I love this quote from the article above, in regard to California's approach:

 "It's like California is trying to design and build a Boeing 747 instead of (just) going out and buying one."

Why in the world we think we can't learn from other countries and their experiences is beyond me (and not just this - think about health care and labor unions for starters).  Let's do what America does best:  throw massive amounts of  money around and get it done.  Let's have folks that have already successfully built THOUSANDS OF MILES of high-speed rail already, over several decades, take the lead, we'll pay for it, and share in the revenues. 

One can dream, no?

Or can't we ever nice things again in America?