The train has been derailed.

Great Debates
1

Five years ago, there was a movement to establish high-speed rail corridors in the USA. Whitehouse.gov is still touting the “historic $8 billion investment” and ambitious plans in this area. But most of the projects never even left the station. States such as Wisconsin ended up with more lawsuits than functional trains. For years, California has seemed like the only state that was actually going to build a true high-speed rail line.

Now things aren’t going so well there either. Construction hasn’t actually begun, though it was originally scheduled to start long ago. Federal bureaucrats have gotten in the way. A new ballot initiative will give the state’s voters a chance to save their own money by canceling the project. A court ruling has put financing for the project in limbo. Strictly speaking, none of these things actually mean that the project is cancelled yet, but realistically it’s tough to imagine any way that the State of California can overcome all these obstacles and others that haven’t emerged yet. All the money spent on high-speed rail will likely amount to nothing.

Most people don’t seem to understand why big infrastructure projects like this can’t succeed. MSNBC recently gave us Rachel Maddow talking about how big Hoover Dam is and remarking that big government projects are “on the menu” today. But who is she kidding? If the government were trying to build Hoover Dam today:

[ul]
[li]Years would be spent preparing an Environmental Impact Statement documenting exactly how much carbon dioxide would emitted during construction and how the habitat of the ground squirrel would be affected.[/li][li]The government would issue a press release declaring that the project would create 180,000 jobs, then be embarrassed when the actual number of workers on the project turned out to be only 5,000.[/li][li]Labor unions would complain about the fact that blades on the hydroelectric turbines were being manufactured in Spain rather than in the United States.[/li][li]Feminist groups would complain that too many of the contracts were going to companies owned by men.[/li][li]Gay rights groups would complain that one of the contractors building the outflow valves had once donated $500 to a group opposed to gay marriage.[/li][li]Environmentalist groups would complain that the dam was blocking fathead minnows from reaching their natural spawning area.[/li][li]A manager would make an offhand comment about how the project would affect the amount of water available to Mexican immigrants, setting of a firestorm as everyone accused him of racism, leading to the government requiring that everyone working on the dam go through sensitivity training.[/li][li]And sooner or later, someone would find a judge willing to block the project, or some other sort of legal obstacle. Hoover Dam would never be built.[/li][/ul]

The bottom line is that the government just can’t do the sort of big infrastructure projects that it did in the middle of the last century, because there are too many interest groups, too many bureaucrats, too many obscure laws, and generally too much of everything. Denver International Airport was finished in 1995. Sources tell me that internet crazies have all kinds of conspiracy theories about the airport, but the really sinister fact is this. No big hub airport has been built in the USA since then, and no one expects a big airport to be built anytime soon. The government just can’t do it anymore.

2

This looks more like a failure of project management by the rail authority. There are, really, no large hurdles to over come, outside of potential lawsuits, for most construction projects. The time frame for most impact studies is 3-12 months (though I could see this one being longer, simply because it crosses so many environments. But if they did due diligence for a few months before submittal, probably done most of the leg work, and reduced the overall time frame needed.

The project management team assumed a completion date for the environmental impact study and negotiated construction rates based on that date instead of negotiating for a sliding construction rate that automatically increases as time passes on some percentage scale. With similar contracts I’ve been involved with, the rates generally increase by 10-13% per year the project is left unstarted and sometimes a “retainer” of sorts is paid each year to keep the contract on the books of the construction firm.

As for the “Federal Bureaucrats” they didn’t get in the way, they were asked to complete their job faster than normal because the project managers’ made plans that didn’t pan out.

I’m by no means an apologist for overbearing regulation, but this was mishandled. Claiming “zomg bad feds!” now is trying to shift blame.

3

Nvm

4

I’m pretty sure that you forgot to mention that if the project actually benefited most Americans, there would be people constantly concern-trolling the nation’s message boards, hoping against hope that they could discover ways that the project might fail.

5

Are we debating high-speed rail specifically or the federal government’s alleged inability to produce large-scale projects in general?

6

So politics can be a roadblock to major projects? This isn’t news. This is the way of life.

In the “good ol’ days” a project might just happen when the developer wanted it, impacts be damned. It may be that the impacts were negligible or were significantly outweighed by the benefits, but they never had to disclose those impacts beforehand. Now, the EIR process makes the developer evaluate those impacts publicly, and that’s a good thing.

I think the EIR process needs some reformation, but they’re good regulations at their core. Their essence is that projects require that their environmental impacts are disclosed. If those impacts are significant, they must be mitigated or the agencies must override the concerns. They can drag out, but this is generally a result of changing the project.

Major projects have a lot of moving parts in the planning stages, from engineering, to purchasing the land, to environmental considerations. These lead to changes in the project. The change can be caused by almost anything, including discovered environmental impacts from the EIR process. Sometimes, the financing is delayed; sometimes an interest group makes enough noise to change a route; sometimes the group doing the biology section discovers that the developer proposed putting the route through the habitat of an endangered species.

If the EIR process discovers that the route would block the fathead minnows from spawning, the developer needs to decide how to mitigate that impact or whether they want to push for an override. The fathead minnow isn’t an endangered species, so the impact may not even be “significant” in the terms of the regulation and the project may proceed, minnows be damned (or dammed). If the species is something that’s endangered or in danger of being wiped out in a region, like some salmon species, the developer will have a much harder sell without mitigation. They might be able to bridge the creek. In which case, the EIR has served its purpose, but there will be delays because engineering a bridge isn’t trivial.

(As an aside, the fathead minnow is frequently used as a proxy for toxic or other impacts on aquatic species in general. If a project impact on fathead minnows is being discussed, it’s probably not the minnows that are the real concern. It’s either fish in general or a species that eats the minnows. Fathead minnows are bait fish; I doubt a project would be held up for only a fathead minnow without impacts on other species.)

The OP trots out the usual left leaning groups as project opponents, but it’s overlooking a major opponent of many projects: the neighbors. The neighborhoods that don’t want the rail stop in their backyard or the shipping center where it will increase traffic on “their” street. I’ve seen several projects challenged by neighborhood coalitions that band together to oppose projects in their backyard.

In the end, it’s all politics. Does the board listen to the neighborhood coalition, the local chapter of the Sierra Club, or other special interests, or do they listen to the developer? Anybody who thinks the challenges to a project are technical or bureaucratic is either fooling themselves or fooling you. The challenges are political. At least now, the process is at least partially public.

7

Somebody needs to tell that to Obamacare. In any event, I suspect it’s Republicans that are the biggest opponents of high-speed rail, not Democrats.

8

My intent was to discuss the fate of big infrastructure projects generally. The fact that the Administration set out with an ambitious plan to bring high-speed rail all over the country and hasn’t been able to actually build an inch of it was offered as an example.

9

Yeah, those pesky regulations would have grounded the construction of the Hoover Dam back in the day. They would have had to worry about the 100+ deaths of construction workers, prohibition on hiring Asian workers, and limiting the number of blacks that could be hired. The contractors would have had to concern themselves with sub-human living conditions in the desert for the workers and their families, and would not have been able to cut wages as punishment for trying to organize labor. The good ‘ol days were not always good.

The California high speed rail project has had the word “boondoggle” tattooed on its forehead from the beginning. The failure of project management is dwarfed by the failure of marketing fantasies to survive contact with reality. They promised a trip from SF to LA in under 3 hours, a high number of travelers, low ticket costs, and small impacts to communities along the way. Once people started taking a look at these claims, it all started falling apart; impossible to cover that distance in that time on the route they chose, less expected passenger volume, higher ticket prices, and worse impacts for local communities along the route. Not to even mention the skyrocketing estimated cost. This is hardly the failure of big government, and more of a failure to communicate, along with poor expectation management by those in charge.

LinusK, you are probably correct on the political leanings of the constituents here: California is largely divided east-west, with the Democrats mostly in the coastal areas and cities, with the Republicans in the inland areas, especially the Central Valley. I am a lefty for the most part, but I am against this project on the grounds that it truly is a bad idea. City dwellers in the Bay Area are all for this thing, because its impacts are far away from where they live.

Right now you can fly from any NorCal airport to any SoCal airport for less than $100 and be there in an hour. Granted you may have to wait a few minutes for security screening, and have to rent a car on the other end (just like the train). To ride this high speed train it would likely take longer and cost more – it is a solution looking for a problem – the project should be cancelled in its current form.

10

It seems to be an unholy alliance. Liberals don’t like it because of environmental impact, and also because it would appear to be of benefit mostly to rich or upper-middle-class people. They’d rather spend the money in urban transit.

Conservatives don’t like it because it’s a major governmental expense, and (wonderful irony here) because they think it would be of benefit mostly to poor people. (Rich people fly.)

11

I’d love to see anything close to a cite for the bolded part.
Light rails /high speed trains in the US will normally benefit the richer side of the socio-economic divide. They’re bad because none of the project can survive on its own without massive subsidies for the non-poor people riding them.

Portalnd’s ligh trail costs (subsidises) 32 dollar per round trip.

12

There is no one, major obstacle that blocks every large infrastructure project. My point was that there are a huge number of minor potential obstacles. It’s highly likely that any large project will be derailed by one of those potential obstacles at some point, and hence few, if any, major projects will ever actually get built. Moreover, when the folks in charge swerve one way to avoid one obstacle, that may well lead to them ramming into a different obstacle. It’s the kludgeocracy theory, in other words.

To give just one example, back in ye olden days, the federal government would build something like the Hoover Dam and pay for it entirely. Nowadays a big project is likely to mix together money from federal, state, and private sources. If someone manages to stop up only one of those sources of money, then the project comes to a halt.

13

So? If they even slightly reduce the aggregate number of miles-driven-by-car annually in America, that benefits everybody. In the whole world, that is.

And why shouldn’t rail transportation be subsidized by government? After all, automotive transportation is subsidized pretty heavily – taxes pay for road construction and maintenance, traffic control signs and signals, police patrols, specialized traffic courts, etc., etc., not to mention whatever share of the defense budget might be allocable to keeping the sea-lanes open for petroleum shipments. Without all that, your car is a useless toy.

14

Funny you mentioned only some of the left leaning ones, as if conservatives LOVE government infrastructure projects :dubious:

Like a crippling Supreme Court decision, or multiple legislative failures in congress… like what the Hoover Dam faced.

Wrong. The Hoover Dam has only (relatively) recently been paid for, and it was largely paid by residents of the nearby states. You are greatly overestimating the ease of doing things like this in the past, and underestimating how often such projects are completed these days. Just off the top of my head, I can think a a number of them that were completed fairly recently, or are happening now like the Dulles Transit extension in VA, the Big Dig in Boston, Otay Mesa East in San Diego, and the modernization of several airports (O’hare for example).

15

Mention of airports is kind of interesting, anyway.

Most of our large cities have already built (or replaced) airports to bring them to a more modern standard.

IAH in Houston is undergoing a billion (with a B) dollar renovation/expansion. Hobby in Houston is getting expanded (much of it paid for by Southwest Airlines) to allow international flights and recently had a multimillion dollar renovation. Likewise, Love Field in Dallas had a massive amount of renovation work completed recently.

Why should we build new ones if we have existing facilities that can be updated or maintained? Yes, sometimes we need new airports, but that’s usually because the original structures dated from before widespread jet travel. Jets themselves haven’t changed too much over the last couple decades - though newer liners like the 787 do require many airports to upgrade.

Also, lots of smaller regional hubs are no longer hubs. The example that comes to my mind in particular is Memphis, which used to be a Northwest hub before the Delta merger. It survives off being the FedEx hub.

Why do we need new hub airports if we’re closing some smaller ones down and the bigger extant ones are getting tons of extra spending when they need it anyway?

16

I know! Whenever I think of opponents of major federal spending on large scale infrastructure improvements, especially such federal spending under Obama, my first thoughts are the gays, feminists, environmentalists and unions too!

Why, I can’t even think of any other group that might even belong on the list.

17

One of the complaints against Denver was that it was not needed. There has been no voiced need for a new oversized hub airport since the late 1980s. Pointing to the lack of construction for projects that have never been requested is silly.

The failure of high speed rail has at least as much to do with the utter apathy of the population for such a system as anything else. You may be correct regarding large government projects, but nothing you have posted supports the claim.

18

The OP is well written and that must have taken some effort. Thanks, ITR Champion.

According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center that I just participated in, I am a “Solid Liberal”.
I think, in principle, that large public projects are a better use of public funds than are subsidies to corporations. But any large public project will be effectuated by the corporations unless we reestablish a huge Civilian Construction Corps and employ all of the people who don’t have jobs throughout the country.

Somehow, this doesn’t seem politically tenable in the current climate. The citizenry would reject that, just as it has every other time a large government driven program has been proposed in the last 20 years. That is, of course, unless if it involves killing a lot of Other People. Then, it is remarkably easy to sell.

Our defense budget drives a significant portion of the economy. If that were partially repurposed into creating infrastructure using the existing defense contractors, that might be a workable solution to this apparent conundrum. Yes, I am aware that a lot of the folks who work for the defense industry are very focused on making armaments and armor, but command and control of any project seems to be translatable from one domain to another. Information technology is also quite portable and could be used to handle logistics in a similar manner.

But, this is just a pipe dream. It would take too much change to make this kind of thing happen. The Conservative Ideal is that change is dangerous. So, until something seriously changes, we are stuck with fear, uncertainty and doubt.

19

No, to “slightly reduce the aggregate number of miles-driven-by-car annually in America” isn’t a worthy ultimate goal to shoot for especially in this case. The ultimate goal should be reducing cost or time of travel, mitigate environmental impact per passenger travel mile or to be a pilot project for something greater (hopefully a combination of all of those things). This rail line project does none of those well especially in relation to the money it would ultimately cost. Current U.S. governments may have a bad track record with launching large projects today but, in this case, that turns out to be a feature and not a bug.

Focusing on one simplistic metric like you just gave is a great example of why so many of them get so far astray in the first place and have to be cancelled. There isn’t a good vision for what the ultimate goals should be so that makes it easy for the project to drift and the costs to spiral out of control well above and beyond any practical value the original idea may have promised.

High speed rail lines in the U.S. sound nice until you look at what they actually cost per passenger mile and the true totality of the environmental impact. Combined that with the inevitable low demand on that route and it is a good thing to kill albatross as soon as possible before it shits all over everything else.

20

Aside from what Shagnasty said.
Subsidise 90%, for the benefit of upper-middle class people, affecting buses that serve the poor? A basically empty train isn’t reducing pollution; it’s creating.
Number of miles is irrelevant, pollution isn’t.

Roads bring you food and all sorts of amenities of the 21st century.