Santa Cruz Sentinel
In the international race to build bullet trains, California is not only getting crushed by the likes of France and Japan, but also Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.
Dozens of powerful nations and even far-flung countries on every continent except Antarctica are asking the Golden State what’s taking so long to join the bullet train club. The answer could come as soon as this week, when the state Legislature votes whether to start building the $69 billion rail line.
But don’t start booking your tickets just yet: California must overcome more obstacles than the countries that have built the world’s 10,000 miles of high-speed rail.
Europe has a train culture where gas is two to three times more expensive than
it is in California. China uses dirt-cheap labor to build tracks at an alarming rate. South Africa needed fast trains to serve the World Cup, and the Middle East wants a faster pilgrimage to holy cities during Hajj and Ramadan.
California, meanwhile, has high labor costs and strict environmental laws, an awful formula for building a gigantic infrastructure project. We’ve built dozens of airports and freeways, generating the kind of sprawl and travel options that make a bullet train system harder to justify.
“For every person who says, ‘Oh, I just got back from riding the TGV (bullet train) in France,’ there is somebody else saying, ‘Wait a minute, California is not like Spain or these other places,’ ” said Dan Richard, who Gov.
Jerry Brown appointed to lead the project. “Having said that, I don’t think we can or should be blind to what’s happened in these other countries because there are a lot of things to be learned.”
Like what?
Japan: Built to last
The Japanese are the Wright brothers of bullet trains, opening the first high-speed railroad in 1964. The main route on the Shinkansen system is still the world’s most popular, while the entire network has over its history carried nearly the equivalent of the world’s population.
California is borrowing its business model from Japan, where the national government funds two-thirds of construction costs, with states paying the rest. The private sector runs the trains, as California intends to do with its railroad.
But a train ride is generally more attractive to Japanese than it is to Californians. In Japan, a 20-mile car ride can take two hours through gridlock and cost $20 in freeway tolls, while a drive of that distance down Interstate 5 in California can take 15 minutes and is toll-free. And while California packs in 240 people per every square mile, Japan squeezes 875 people per square mile, with more people near stations.
Project opponent William Grindley, a retired World Bank official, said that California is planning “bass-ackwards” by building high-speed rail before packing in dense development and enough connecting transit systems near stations.
“If you get off at Los Angeles, what do you do? You rent a car,” he said.
Indeed, Richard said he learned a key fact when meeting with the Japanese delegation: Nearly one-third of the system’s revenue comes from leasing out property near stations, where shops, businesses and residential complexes are prevalent.
Europe: Transforming
France, Spain, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and others have taken advantage of a longtime rail culture to upgrade older rail lines to wildly popular high-speed railroads that crisscross Europe. Officials in California are stealing that strategy, beefing up existing tracks such as Caltrain instead of building an entirely new railroad.
However, they’ve been unable thus far to replicate the European funding formula, which dictates that the federal governments pay big upfront costs for construction. Congress has funded only a fraction of what’s needed to build California’s train line.
The funding question comes down to a philosophical difference among nations. Car-crazy Americans are more reluctant to invest in rail than European countries where trains are so pivotal, said Armin Kick, who leads Siemens’ high-speed rail business.
“We have a real heavy lift ahead of us,” Kick said.
There’s also the issue here of what’s in the way of our train: valuable property in the Bay Area and mountainous terrain north of Los Angeles, driving up the price to build.
“The costs are just orders of magnitude tougher here,” said project opponent Bill Warren, a retired Silicon Valley financial guru.
However, Richard notes that the population centers served by the trains in Europe match up to California, even in the Central Valley, where Fresno has as many people as Lyon, France, which connects to Paris on a TGV train line cited as an international model.
China: Fast and furious
China has about one-third of the world’s high-speed rail lines and may be on pace to have more bullet train tracks than the rest of the world combined.
Last year, however, a train crash killed 40 people just months after the head of the nation’s railway ministry was removed in a corruption scandal. This year, a large section of elevated track collapsed before it opened.
China’s inexpensive labor and materials enabled it to build tracks at about $25 million per mile. Contrast that to union-dominated California, where the plan is to spend $132 million per mile.
Differences abound beyond the cost: The car travel options, political structure, public input levels, laws and culture in China all are vastly different from what’s experienced in California.
“We don’t spend a lot of time focusing on what’s happening in China,” Richard said.
The rest: Catch up
The International Union of Railways and California High-Speed Rail Authority point to existing, under-construction and planned high-speed rail lines in India, Iran, Turkey, South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina and other nations.
Some are designed for a specific purpose, such as the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Others are built to cut down the time of long bus and train trips, like in Uzbekistan. Most are far less expensive than California’s project, including Morocco’s $4 billion plan to link Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier.
“It is bizarre and strange that countries that are close to Third World in some cases are building high-speed rail now and we’re still having this big huge debate over” it, said Daniel Krause, executive director of Californians for High-Speed Rail. “If we don’t (build it), we’re going to be at a major competitive disadvantage.”
Contact Mike Rosenberg at 408-920-5705. Follow him atTwitter.com/rosenberg17.
.
