A high-speed derailment in California 

Why the state's proposed new rail system is little more than a foolish boondoggle

The Los Angeles Times editorial board almost got the big picture on the state's high-speed rail plan this week. The editors decried the sadly predictable results of sinking vast amounts of money into government boondoggles, with consequences including political decisions on routing and location, spiraling costs, and bad management. 

The conclusion reached by the editors? Let's have a different government agency try running it instead.

So close — and yet so far.

California's high-speed rail project has lots of problems, but its most basic is purpose. The project proposes to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with an express train that will take two hours and 40 minutes from beginning to end. That sounds good in comparison to the drive, which is approximately six-and-a-half hours, when there is no traffic, or the existing Amtrak service, which takes almost 10 hours to go from Union Station to Moscone Center — and uses two buses.

In contrast, passengers have plenty of choices for direct transportation between the two major metropolitan areas via commercial airlines. Not only does the airline ticket price on Travelocity come in at only a little more than subsidized Amtrak fares for a round trip ($138 as compared to $112), it takes less than half of the time to travel that the proposed "high-speed" rail project does — 75 minutes as opposed to 160 minutes. Consumers can save an average of $20 on fares by booking a flight from less-used Long Beach Airport (adding only 5 minutes to the length of the flight), and still have a choice between three different airlines for nonstop service.

With these choices and convenience, why bother going ground at all?

Purpose isn't the only problem with high-speed rail. Thanks to rules attached to federal subsidies in President Obama's stimulus package, California has to break ground on the project by next year. That has forced the state to focus much of its $3.5 billion on an effort to connect the bustling metropolises of… Borden and Corcoran. The latter is a town of fewer than 25,000 people located 174 miles north of Los Angeles, while Borden, 167 miles south of San Francisco, is an unincorporated area that doesn’t even have a population listing. Its county, Madera, boasts a population of 148,000, making it 33rd out of 58 counties in California in population. 

Taxpayers throughout the country therefore paid more than $3 billion to connect fewer than 175,000 people by rail. That may not be a "train to nowhere," as the Times' editors put it, but it's pretty darned close. Moreover, thanks to California's own budget meltdowns, the state won’t allow any bond issues for rail projects that don't generate enough revenue to pay for themselves — and with the fabulous destinations of Borden and Corcoran as end points, the state won’t sell enough tickets to have the engines pulling out of the station.