Today, Explained - Train takes a bullet

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

Californians were promised high-speed rail. Eleven years and billions of dollars later, all they have is a fight with President Trump. Vox’s Matthew Yglesias laments a train in vain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to Germany and after 25 years of planning, 29 bridges built, 22 tunnels bored, you can take high-speed rail between Berlin and Munich. Almost 400 miles in under 4 hours. Go to California and you can... You can drive between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It'll take anywhere between 6 and 10 hours depending on traffic and whether you choose to take the 5 through the Central Valley and smell all the cow manure or inch up the gridlock

on the 101 for eternity. California's high-speed rail just got a lot closer to never happening. The Trump administration is planning to cancel $929 million slated for California's high-speed rail project. And the U.S. Transportation Department said it's also considering legal options to recoup $2.5 billion it already gave to the project. But the governor said in a statement, this is California's money and we are going to fight for

it. With all due respect, I have no interest in sending back three and a half billion dollars of federal funding that was allocated to this project to President Donald Trump. And Governor Newsom says, quote, it's no coincidence that the administration's threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the president's farcical national emergency. The president even tied the two issues together in a tweet this morning. The president's having a tantrum. Dan Brekke covers transportation for KQED, public radio in San Francisco. He's not getting his way with the wall.

He declared a national emergency. And the president has found California to be a convenient punching bag whenever his policies are being questioned or he's personally being questioned. So in this case, yes, the federal government has granted California $3.5 billion to build a bullet train. The president has no power to pull that money back at this point.

But California being the object of his derision and anger, I mean, we're just the target of the day. Dan, how did all this get started? So last week, Governor Newsom gave a speech that surprised a lot of people. He seemed to at least put on hold for the indefinite future this big, ambitious high-speed rail project that Governor Brown and others had promoted to run a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. You know, I have nothing but respect for Governor Brown and Governor Schwarzenegger's vision. I share it. But let's be real. The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. Instead, the governor, citing financial realities,

said we're going to focus on building a short stretch of this very modernistic train down in the Central Valley. Right now, there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were. However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield.

So it's over, but it's still happening, but only where no one will really use it? Listen, I think everybody is still trying to figure out exactly what he means. This is the thing. It was very ambiguous. He's straddling something here. It started out as a $33 billion project with $10 billion from state bonds that would sort of get the thing jump-started, and then maybe private investors would come in. The estimate now for that entire project from Southern California to Northern California is now $77 billion. And the way things have gone, I don't think you'll find anybody who believes that that is where it will end. in 2008, people were thinking, well, by 2020 or the early 2020s at the latest, we would have a bullet train here in California. Now the estimate is 2033. Before this whole thing flew off the rails, what was the original vision here? The plan was to put it from San Francisco and run it down to Los Angeles. So we're going to go down the bay here through some very wealthy and heavily populated suburbs through Silicon Valley,

cross the mountains to the Central Valley, and then zip down through all that flat land to the mountains outside of Los Angeles and either go through the mountains, tunnel through, or find a way over. And this went up for a vote in 2008. L.A. to San Francisco at more than 200 miles an hour. No planes, no cars, no fuss. A lot of the countries around the world are developing high-speed rail, and I think that it is important for us to recognize that our infrastructure here in this country is like a developing country rather than a developed country. And even though we had a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, he was somebody who was really pushing for climate change friendly projects.

I mean, we don't need to fly with the plane 200 miles. A lot of people in California do that, or 400 miles. You can have high-speed rail, and there's very little pollution. There's very little greenhouse gas emissions. So one has to think on all of those levels. And so with the governor and the legislature on the same page, it made it to the ballot in 2008. Passing a $10 billion bond measure for a train that was projected to eventually cost $34 billion. And it's also putting California at the forefront of adopting and building a new technology for United States transportation.

And who is backing it? Lots of big business groups in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, groups like the Chambers of Commerce, labor unions, construction companies, all of whom contribute pretty heavily to members of the legislature who were voting on this. So they all got behind it. And this project was also controversial from the jump, right? Who was against it? You know, there was an overwhelming negative response to this on the part of Republicans in the legislature and people with libertarian stance. You know, this is big government and by taxpayers groups. And their main argument was that they're telling you this is going to cost X billion of dollars. It will be much, much, much more expensive than that.

And the state cannot afford to do this. Despite that opposition, you get billions of dollars in state and federal funding. How does this plan start to fall apart? As soon as the project got off the ground, people all along the route started to file lawsuits saying, wait a minute, the way you're spending the money doesn't match what the language in the ballot said. So actually one of the lawsuits was actually based on the claim. It's actually more than a claim. It's a law. This train will get to Los Angeles no more than two hours and 40 minutes after it leaves San Francisco. Well, okay, that's the law. One of the lawsuits

was, you know what? Your train isn't going to be able to do that. So we're challenging it on that basis. So the lawsuits slow the whole thing down. Yes, exactly, because the high-speed rail authority would be ready to go ahead in one place, and they couldn't do it because they had to wait for a court to decide whether it was legal for them to proceed. And so far, the state has won every single lawsuit, but the lawsuits haven't stopped. Does any work actually get done in the intervening 10 years? Oh, yeah. There's billions of dollars worth of construction going on in the San Joaquin Valley.

So there's a 119-mile route, major construction contracts that companies are out there working on. And the question is, will that middle piece that the state is building, will that ever connect on the north end up to the Bay Area or will it connect on the south end to Los Angeles? I mean, I don't think you could find anybody who could tell you for sure what the hell is going to happen here. Abandoning the high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises, partially fulfilled commitments,

and lawsuits to show for it. And in the meantime, there's just going to be a sort of chunk of train between two cities that no one was really trying to link up in the first place? Listen, if you'd gone to the voters 11 years ago and said, hey, we've got an idea. Let's build a train between this town called Merced, who most of you have never heard of and never been to, and another place called Bakersfield, which if you're a country music fan, you do know about, we want to build a train there.

Would you give us $10 or $15 or $20 billion to do it? That idea would have been laughed out of town, ambitious infrastructure projects like this one are all doomed. Okay, so Hootie and the Blowfish are coming through town, and you really can't wait to go to the show. You get your tickets online. It's the night of the show, and you're heading out the door, and you remember that you never printed the tickets, and you go to your printer and you're out of ink and you're like why can't this just work out i just want to see hootie sing let her

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And, you know, the reason I say that is that Governor Gavin Newsom's decision to largely pull the plug on this is probably not wrong. At the same time, the basic idea that you should be able to connect San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, on a network of high-speed passenger rail trains is also not wrong. This is a technology that is used in many other countries. These cities are the right distance apart for trains. But California could not get it done in a reasonable way. And in general, the country has not been able to implement this kind of technology and is quite bad at passenger rail projects of all kinds. Yeah, I mean, if California had the ambition, got the money from the federal government,

had a bunch of state resources to dedicate to this, and still couldn't pull it off, does that mean the rest of the country's never really going to make this happen? It's not that it's impossible, but you would really need to see governments somewhere take the question of trying to design projects that serve passengers seriously. We do a lot of road building in the United States. I mean, you take any two American cities, there's a relatively direct highway route between them. And, you know, when we do that, we treat drivers seriously.

We're trying to make it easier to get from point A to point B. For a lot of elected officials, both mass transit and intercity rail is really about creating jobs and creating money for contractors rather than about delivering a transportation service. What's the difference between places like Western Europe and Japan and the United States when it comes to high-speed rail, other than the fact that we're covering a lot more ground here. One of the big differences is the level of political consensus. When France built out the original Tejaveh network, they really wanted to do it.

Like, as a whole country, it wasn't a narrowly partisan initiative that then went sort of back and forth. Another big difference is that in the countries that have done this more successfully, the central state takes a stronger guiding hand in things. In California, it proved very important to sort of try to get buy-in from lots of different local stakeholders. And so that meant the route took a kind of detour to one place where the L.A. County government thought there was promising economic development opportunity. And it served San Jose on the main line rather than with a spur. And these are the

kinds of things that each one decision, it seems a little bit small. It's like, okay, this powerful local politician wants this, this one wants that. But each of them sort of brought up the cost of the project and also increased the ultimate runtime of this sort of core L.A. to San Francisco run. And so when you're doing stuff like that, it becomes challenging to build a railroad in an efficient way. America has a very decentralized political system, and it works pretty well for air transportation, right? Because you just kind of skip from one place to another. And you don't need like the senators from Nebraska to say you're allowed to fly over the state. But with trains, it's harder. It's harder to skip anything. It's harder to not detour to serve each little piece there.

And it doesn't work very well for that mode of transportation. Are big American infrastructure projects coming to an end? I mean, it seems like really ambitious things are just super hard to execute now because you need buy-in from so many people. It's a lot easier in America to say no to things than to say yes. And if you want to talk about a Green New Deal, right, like that's a very big, hazy, aspirational thing. But a lot of specific elements need to go into that, right? I mean, creating huge quantities of new renewable power, totally redoing the electrical grid,

like, yes, building some high-speed passenger rail, right? And we don't have a lot of good recent examples of getting big things done in a really cost-effective way. If you look at the Second Avenue subway that opened fairly recently in New York, that was a big project, big infrastructure project, extremely valuable. Also, at a cost of about $2 billion per kilometer, it's like by far the most expensive subway that anyone's ever built in the world. That doesn't serve that many people, it turns out. And it's short. It's not in that case even that it was too much money to be worth spending. But in Paris, they're constructing subways for about a fifth of that cost. So by spending $2 billion,

if you could get Parisian levels of productivity, you could have built a much longer subway line, right? You could have helped way, way, way more people. And we need as a country to develop more cost-effective ways of building these things if we want to get them done or else you're going to have to settle for a politics where each side sort of blocks the other side's worst ideas but we don't move anything forward. How is it going to change? We got to build stuff if we're going to survive, Matthew. I think it probably has to start from state governments.

Los Angeles has built a lot of new metro stuff, local sort of mass transit there. Seattle has expanded their offerings. They are paying high costs by European standards, but a lot better than New York as they've sort of consistently gone at it. And it's better to go slower, but get one big thing done really, really well. And then you'll have a model for how can other people do it for no, this is actually a good idea.

Trump wants to do a lot of infrastructure spending, or at least he ran on that. He sometimes says he does. Yeah. Yeah. Does this bode poorly for him? I mean, he's the one blasting California right now asking for all of his money back. Yeah, I mean, I think— Which was money that Obama gave them. It's a problem, you know,

for anybody who wants to get infrastructure done. What the U.S. is good at doing right now is sending money from the federal government to state departments of transportation who spend the money on sort of marginal highway widening projects. So we can do that. We can flush more money into building the kind of infrastructure we already have, but just more of it.

The question is, if you want anything different, if you want passenger trains, if you want mass transit, even if you want an upgraded air traffic control system, can we execute on projects like that? And the country just does not have at the moment a great track record of project management or technical execution, and we don't have anyone really working on improving it either. Matthew Iglesias is one of the hosts of The Weeds. It's a podcast from Vox all about the granular details of policy. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm.

This one's called Today Explained. to brother before we go, the printer company you know and love has come up with the Inkvestment Tank printer situation to help you change the way you ink. It gives you the choice of one or two years of ink included in box when you buy a printer. Learn more at changethewayyouink.com.