“Ready, fire, aim”: CA’n HSR full steam ahead despite financial unviability
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA) has campaigned against California’s HSR fiasco since 2008, when their co-authored nonpartisan report found the project “highly risky for state taxpayers.” HJTA president Jon Coupal spoke with Opp Now to rebut pro-HSR’s elusive affordability arguments.
Opportunity Now: Is it true that California’s HSR project is cheaper than expanding our roadways and existing transit solutions?
Jon Coupal: Not by a long shot. Before Proposition 1A was on the ballot in 2008, one of the things we did was commission a study with the Reason Foundation. This “Due Diligence” study examined the viability of the Californian HSR project. Everything we predicted about this project being not viable, too expensive, and overly optimistic on cost projections has proved true. It’s already on track to blow through $100 billion in the next few years.
ON: Is an SF–LA high-speed rail even helpful in the first place?
JC: In support of HSR, you hear, “The commute traffic is getting so bad.” I scratch my head over that statement because the HSR proponents can’t even decide whether this is a commuter rail line or an inter-city line. It was originally intended as the latter, to connect major metropolitan areas. Even at the most optimistic projections of ticket prices, it’s not going to make sense for anyone to pay $30 each way to go work.
I’ve ridden HSR in Europe. If you’ve got the demographic density, it can make sense. But there’s only one place in America right now where HSR makes sense for inter-city travel, and that’s the Acela Amtrak line from Washington to Baltimore to New York to Boston because they’re fairly close and you’ve got a lot of traffic. It may also make sense if you’ve got private money to run a high-speed rail from Miami to Disneyland in Florida.
One of the things this HSR project promised is that a third of the funding would come through the private sector. No private money has stepped up. Private investors know that this project is simply not viable.
ON: In a 2012 article, you posit that this project would have been better managed—and, inevitably, axed—by the private sector. Tell us more about this.
JC: If it was one person in charge of the SF–LA project, not government bureaucracies and special interests, the first thing they would’ve done is select a route that’s not governed by politics. And I’m not saying this HSR would even be viable, but they would have built it down the median of Interstate 5.
However, this wasn’t how the public sector approached the project. With the current route, even by the best projections, you’d have to take a bus from LA over the Grapevine to Bakersfield, hop on high-speed rail to Tracy, hop on a bus to get over Altamont Pass, and I’m not sure about after that. Maybe once you get to Livermore, they put you on a donkey to get to SF.
Regrettably, this project has devolved into a joke, and I think people are coming around to that realization.
ON: A major selling point HSR proponents cite is reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If true, is this still worth ever-increasing project expenses?
JC: The amount of environmental damage being inflicted on California because of this project is immeasurable, so this statement is untrue.
First, they’re ripping up a lot of valuable farmland for this construction project.
Second, all the transportation and materials associated with construction—steel trucks, cement trucks, everything—are run by diesel.
Third, related to GHG emissions specifically, the hundreds of thousands if not millions of metric tons of concrete being poured are a huge contributor to GHG. Concrete is made from two things: aggregate and cement. Cement is manufactured by taking limestone, putting it in a big kiln, and subjecting it to massive amounts of heat. Coming out of the other side, it only weighs two-thirds of what it originally did. Emitted carbon dioxide is the third that’s lost.
Even assuming the best case scenario, that the HSR is built as designed, the environmental damage and fiscal benefits won’t balance out for the foreseeable future.
On another note, the source of Californian HSR funding is the cap-and-trade program. Under this program, industries must go out and buy credits in order to emit GHGs. Now, the whole point of the GHG efforts is to reduce them, not increase them. So you have the extremely ironic situation of a project that is spewing tons of greenhouse gases into the air being financed by a revenue source that was supposed to reduce GHGs. That is the ultimate irony of this whole thing.
ON: Could jobs created offset HSR’s steep costs?
JC: California’s HSR project has been all about paying off construction unions and giving them jobs. But as for the job-creation argument, California has a lot of infrastructure needs. We could be undergrounding utilities to lessen the risk of forest fires, rehabilitating bridges, or expanding our highways and building double-decker highways. These are legitimate projects that would actually be used by people. But a construction project like HSR that is only designed to make work is not one of them.
ON: Is California an outlier in its out-of-control HSR project?
JC: Absolutely. It’s the classic case of “ready, fire, aim.” It sounded great in theory. Everyone was just enamored with the idea of a speeding train, but there was never the due diligence as to whether this specific project could be viable for the state of California. No one ever conducted that study.
Meanwhile, they’re going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this—money that many have argued would be better spent on metropolitan light rails and natural gas buses. These projects would make a lot more sense than HSR.
ON: What do you see as the future of this calamitous construction project?
JC: The federal government (excepting the Trump administration) has provided a lot of money to California’s high-speed rail project. If Republicans take control of the House of Representatives in November, there’ll be no more money for the HSR project. They’ll shut off that spigot.
Pretty soon, anyways, we’ll have electric autonomous vehicles that’ll get you from LA to SF in very short amounts of time.
Even pro-rail people have indicated that the best thing to do now is to stop this project and build other kinds of intermodal transportation. Even the former chairman of HSR Authority, Quentin Kopp, has turned on it.
This has been a sore spot for us at the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association for more than sixteen years. The news just gets worse and worse. I doubt this project will ever be completed, and they’ll probably pull the plug within the next twenty years.
Read more from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association here.
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This article is part of an exclusive Opp Now series.
First, TRANSDEF president David Schonbrunn rebuts the HSR Authority CEO’s “bargain” rhetoric surrounding California’s high-speed rail ambitions.
In the second article, environmental group SAFE Coalition’s Kelly Decker and Cindy Bloom respond to Brian Kelly’s claims of financial affordability.
Then, the third article spotlights Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association president Jon Coupal’s take on Brian Kelly’s argument.
For the final installment, the Opp Now team analyzes outdated logic in the State’s informational page on the HSR project.