California high speed rail

[AmericanSteam]

The FRA has pulled funding per an article in Trains Magazine.
http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/20 ... rail-grant

[philmoberg]

Can anyone from out there help the rest of us to understand if the high speed rail project is off or on or just back to going from nowhere to nowhere or what's happening with it? ...

Having had my head in the numbers and the attendant policies for nearly a quarter century, I'll offer you the following comments:

1.) The article is long on ideological drivel and short on even the most basic homework. The best guess is that it's still on, but the Feds have pulled out. This is probably a good thing, but I will comment on that separately. I just want to offer the most likely reality in order to answer your question up front.

2.) In his 1963 book, Soviet Railways Today, J. N. Westwood notes that in any discussion of this sort, it is important to remember that there are three realities: what's planned to happen, what's said to happen, and what actually happens. I generally deal in the third, an to the extent it's possible to know it - assuming it's happened to begin with - the first. The article in question pretty accurately reflects the second reality, which is increasingly becoming a prison of two ideas. There's better fiction out there if you're interested in fiction. I prefer Babylon 5 myself.

3.) What is happening in California is symptomatic of what happens in the handful of states that walk away with the vast bulk of Federal transportation funding: they have no incentive to control costs, with the result that projects tend to be over-designed and over-built, this happening on top of a Federal system in which costs are structurally over inflated. California HSR would be a classic case study, but there are even better case studies in other modes.

4.) I will confess that I'm surprised to see the Feds pull out, no matter how badly run the California program is. The Feds are typically reticent to do this because it makes it look like somebody ... well, let's just say that there's an expression for it that, in the bureaucracy, means something a bit more specific than it does in common parlance ... which means somebody ends up looking bad. The second-last thing you want to do in the bureaucracy is make somebody look bad, particularly if this person is higher than you. In nearly thirty-five years of service, I think I saw it happen twice.

5.) It is emphatically not the case that the private sector is running away from California HSR, and the WSJ should have more journalists integrity than to print something like that. You'll recall that Brightline bought the company with the LA-Vegas franchise within the last year, and that Brandon's Virgin group has since bought Brightline. This is where it gets interesting. Even though the PRIIA made a great deal of noise about private investment in US passenger rail, it didn't make things as easy as we've been led to believe. Branson isn't about to drop that much Sterling unless he's sure he's beaten all the hoops, especially after his experience with the British authorities.

6.) On a related note, Bill Gates is putting his money into GenIV nuclear, which can't melt down by design, and in many cases consumes nuclear waste from earlier generation reactors. This will upend the economics of rail electrification. The implications for private sector investment are intriguing.

Footnote: the foregoing is not, nor was it intended to be a partisan commentary. The basic problem with rail passenger service in the US is that Congress regards it as a part of the spoils system, rather than as a service. The consequence is a situation in which the passenger trains are overpriced and inadequate. When the pain exceeds the fear, things will change. Perhaps we're seeing the beginning of this. If so, the WSJ missed a truly interesting story.