It's hard to find articles critical of the California high speed rail
project. Here's an editorial from Wednesday's Long
Beach-Press-Telegram.

M
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Published Wednesday, April 11, 2007, by the Long Beach Press-Telegram

Editorial

A TGV in our future

$40 billion, Californians would be better off riding the high-speed
train in France.

Those who've ridden the smooth, quiet, luxurious high-speed train
from Paris to Tours in the Loire Valley will tell you it is the only
way to travel. By car, you'd be saddle-sore after at least half a day
on the road. By plane, it would take more time than train or car --
just not worth the expense or the hassle.

Why, then, should the great, wealthy state of California be having
such a hard time getting such a train going? Wouldn't you rather
travel by high-speed train?

No, you probably wouldn't. The reason is that the trip from Paris to
Tours is less than 200 miles, which is the ideal range of the TGV
(train a grande vitesse, or very high speed train). If you are in
Paris, it's a short cab ride to the station, climb aboard, and you'll
be in downtown Tours in an hour and a half.

The California corollary would be taking a TGV from Union Station in
downtown L.A. to, say, downtown Bakersfield. You could do it in an
hour, but who'd want to?

For 95 percent of Southern Californians who live farther than five
minutes away from Union Station, getting to a TGV and taking it
someplace they really want to go, say, San Francisco, would be an
all-day ordeal. Much better to hop a plane at LAX, Orange County,
Ontario or San Diego and be there in a couple of hours total.

This is the logical reason the respected [BATN: rabidly anti-rail]
transportation expert Robert Poole of the [BATN: libertarian]
Reason Foundation has no use for the high-speed train proposed for
California. It would cost as much as $40 billion, which is beyond
even the Golden State's borrowing capacity, and it wouldn't cover
its operating expenses, much less pay off that kind of debt. Some
train lovers would want to ride it, but not likely you or us.

That's why it was smart to leave the proposed high-speed train out
of the infrastructure bond issue, which voters approved last year,
and to postpone putting it on the ballot until at least 2008. If
taxpayers are lucky, they won't have to deal with it then, either.

It won't completely go away, though, because the idea is just too
appealing to anybody weary of packed freeways and long airport lines,
which is a lot of us. Especially when the French put on a glorious
show like they did the other day with a juiced-up version of their
TGV.

With a few celebrities and journalists aboard and the whole world
watching on TV and the Internet, the French in an hour or so, on
specially prepared supersmooth rails, got their TGV up to a new high
of 357.2 miles an hour (574.8 kph). It went so fast it would have
made your ears hurt. Exciting. At that speed, San Francisco starts
seeming closer.

But with a clearer look, you'll see it wasn't quite for real. The
TGV normally runs at about 180 miles an hour. For the record trial,
the two engines got their horsepower raised to 25,000, the rails got
extra banking, and the power lines got popped up by 6,000 volts to
31,000.

But the former head of the French national railway, Pierre-Louis
Rochet, told CNN the high-speed train service was never going to run
faster than 220 miles an hour. It would be too expensive, he said.

That point probably got lost on a delegation from California, who
will return to lobby their legislators for what should be a lost
cause. They want a TGV to go from San Diego to Sacramento, with stops
all along the way chosen for reasons of politics, not marketability.
That's more than twice too far, and billions too expensive, in a
state that already is pressed to keep its existing bridges, roads
and rails in decent order.

Personally, we can hardly wait to ride a high-speed train. But the
most appealing and cost-effective way to do it is the TGV from Paris
to Tours. From L.A. to San Francisco, flying, or even driving, are
the only ways to go.

-- 
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Martin Engel
1621 Stone Pine Lane
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650:323-1670
martinengel@earthlink.net
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