[M II A II R II K]

Time to change the map on high speed rail?


06/29/2010

By Thomas D. Elias



Read More: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_154062...nclick_check=1

Here's a question for the California High-Speed Rail Authority: How about cutting out the most expensive parts of your current plan — which also happen to be the most controversial — while leaving its essence intact? That's a question no one on the board making the plans for this putative system has answered, or even been asked. As it now stands, the estimated cost of this project is $43 billion, but state voters have approved "only" $9.95 billion in bonds, while the federal government has committed $2.25 billion. It's anybody's guess where the rest of the money might come from (the project's board hopes for more federal money and plenty of private financing, but has yet to arrange any). Plus, anyone who thinks building a 238-mph rail system stretching from San Diego through Los Angeles to Sacramento and San Francisco will come in at or under budget is probably hallucinating.

That, at least, is implied in a springtime report by state Auditor Elaine M. Howle, who told the governor and the Legislature that "The High-Speed Rail Authority has not adequately planned for the future development of the program & the program risks significant delays without more well-developed plans for obtaining funds." This, of course, didn't keep the authority from hiring a French/South African executive with experience running high-speed systems in Europe as its chief executive at $375,000 per year, plus a housing allowance. The auditor's report, scathing as it was, did not even take up the question of local opposition to the current plan, currently strongest on the Peninsula but rising in the Anaheim-Los Angeles corridor and other metropolitan areas.

So why not do a little reassessing, especially in light of the High-Speed Rail Authority's own report of last winter, which amounted to a bait-and-switch on the voters who approved the state bonds for this project by a 52-48 percent margin two years ago? That report raised the estimated year-2035 fare for the San Francisco-Los Angeles run from the $55 projected in ballot materials two years ago to $105. Nearly doubling the fare would cut the pool of likely riders by about one-third. And yet those eliminated riders, plus taxpayers in parts of the state far from the high-speed trains, are still on the hook for repaying the bonds, if and when they are sold.