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Sac Bee Columnist Dan Walters questions support for HSR
Posted by: "8/2 KALW Radio" batn@yahoogroups.com batn_control
Wed Aug 4, 2010 1:08 am (PDT)
Published Monday, August 2, 2010, by KALW Radio
Sacramento Bee Columnist Dan Walters Questions Support For California High Speed Rail
By Ben Trefny
(Download MP3: http://kalwnews.org/audio/download/504398/WEB%20Walter.mp3)
Earlier this summer, the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley released a report finding the High Speed Rail Authority's ridership projections to be "unreliable." Yet when it comes to "public need," a study released last week showed more than three-quarters of surveyed Californians support high speed rail. And a couple of Novembers ago, voters did approve a nearly $10 billion bond to help get the $43 billion train project rolling.
To help sort through this conflicting information, KALW's Ben Trefny called Dan Walters, a longtime Sacramento Bee columnist who's been following this issue closely and asked him, 'What exactly are we on the hook for?"
* * *
DAN WALTERS: That money cannot be spent, under the terms of the bond measure itself passed by voters, unless there is a full commitment of financing for the system. You can't just go spend ten billion and hope that you get something else down the road, it doesn't work that way. And so you have to have a complete system plan that's viable before the thing.
So everything is tied to something else. The idea of getting private financing or even federal money is contingent on ridership data, which then generates fare data, because the fares are supposed to cover all the operating costs of the system. And the ridership numbers that have been put out have been excoriated by no less than the University of California's own Institute of Transportation Studies. They just say they're totally unreliable, totally unrealistic.
So you have a whole bunch of moving parts here, but you can't. You've got to at some point stop them from moving, and you have to have something that's cogent. Something that hangs together in terms of ridership, in terms of financing, in terms of operating costs, in terms of route -- the route is still in dispute -- before you can start. If you start building a system without all this in place, first of all you're violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the ballot measure that was passed, and secondly, you're committing the state to kind of a bottomless pit of money without any idea as to what lies on the other end.
BEN TREFNY: Do you think that High Speed Rail is necessary for the transportation future of California with the state's population growing as it is?
WALTERS: Not necessarily. High speed rail, first of all we don't know what we're really talking about here. Are you really talking about high speed rail? Are you talking about bullet trains that will zip people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours, the way they kind of imply? Well, you can't do that and also serve Fresno, Merced, Modesto, and so forth, which they're also promising to the Valley. So then they're talking about, `Well, we'll have some bullet trains, we'll have some slower trains that stop along the way.' But they seem to be counting the whole thing as bullet train stuff even though really they're not talking about bullet trains. They're really talking about creating two train systems, and how they would actually fit together.
In my most recent column <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BATN/message/4592> on this, I pointed out that they're claiming, `Well look, we did this survey, and 70 percent of people say they would use it. People who travel between Northern California and Southern say they'd use it.' But the question wasn't asked, `Would you use a bullet train?' The question was asked, `Would you use a bullet train if it was cheaper than flying or driving?' Well, OK, why wouldn't you say that? Why wouldn't you respond positively? But, in fact, they cannot prove that it would be cheaper than flying or driving. They just make this, they put an assumption in there that is basically unsupported by the reality of it.
What if you tell people the [fare of the] train ticket -- they're projecting a fare, for example, between San Francisco and Los Angeles of about $105 in current dollars. Rather than saying that would be cheaper than driving or flying, why don't you say what it costs to drive or fly? It costs about $60 in gas, if you count it that way. It costs about $200 in auto mile travel if you do it at 50 cents a mile, if you take in the full account of insurance and everything else. But people don't make decisions based on all that. They make [it on], `How much gas is it going to take me?' And it only counts if there's only one person in the car. If you get two or three people in the car, then the scale decreases.
They talk about [a train ticket] being cheaper than an airline fare, but they're using the maximum possible airline fare to make that calculation, rather than the real fares. You can buy a ticket right now between San Francisco and LA on Southwest Airlines for about $80. They use $150, because that's the highest possible fare that Southwest will charge as a basis of comparison. But in fact you don't pay $150 for that Southwest Airlines. Most people don't. They pay the $80 because they buy it seven days in advance or something like that. So those are the kinds of micro sorts of things that create a scenario -- `would you take the train if it was cheaper than driving or flying' --and based on that assumption most people would say yes, and that's exactly what happened. That's propaganda, that's not information.
What the High Speed Rail Authority has done is they've paid $9 million to a high-powered public relations firm, Ogilvy, to sell this project to the media and to the public, and this poll was part of that. They're using our money to propagandize us, and I do not think that is appropriate at all.
TREFNY: Do you think it'll end up happening?
WALTERS: I don't think it'll ever happen because I do not think they can ever get the money together from private investors. Because the private investors are going to want what the Authority itself says in its own business plan: revenue guarantees. And revenue guarantees mean you have to be willing to give them money out of the public purse to guarantee a certain level of revenue so they will justify their investment, and that's exactly what's prohibited by the bond measure that voters passed. In other words, they would want something that is illegal to give them.
I think what they'll try to do is this: I think there are two scenarios that are more realistic. One of them, they'll spend the other $950 million that's not high speed rail on commuter rail improvements on the San Francisco peninsula and in Southern California and let it go at that. That's one possibility.
The other possibility is they'll actually try to put a piece of track in place because the federal money that they've so far committed--and it's only a couple of billion dollars -- is contingent on having something actually going by 2012. And that they'll try to get some dirt moved and some track laid for a so-called demonstration project, because that would then psychologically commit us to doing whatever is necessary to finish it, just like the Bay Bridge. Once you start building it's hard to stop it. Or the Big Dig in Boston, the same sort of way. And then we would say, `Well, we've got to pass another bond issue, we've got to do this, we've got to put on a special tax, we've got to do this because we're committed to it now, we've started building it,' rather than do it the right way, which is [to] lay out a realistic plan. Don't try to spin us. Don't try to propagandize us. Lay out a realistic plan. Tell us what this thing will really cost. What it'll really cost to operate it. How much the ridership is really likely to be. Those are the sort of judgments that private investors are going to make. And they've already basically told them, `Hey, unless you give us revenue guarantees, we don't think this thing makes sense for us.'
So you have to do it. Why try to fool the public? When government gets into the business of propagandizing its citizens, even for good causes, even for stopping smoking or something like that, it starts your way down a slippery slope. Suddenly the taxpayers are paying for themselves to be manipulated by, for political reasons, and that's not healthy, no matter what the so-called good cause may be. Because it can just as easily be used for bad causes, can't it? I mean, that's just not a healthy thing to do in a supposedly free and open society.
[BATN: See also:
Interview: HSRA's Judge Quentin Kopp defends HSR
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BATN/message/46002
Walters: Unrealistic HSR poll mostly propaganda & spin
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BATN/message/45920
The Planning Problem: KALW radio documentary on CA HSR
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BATN/message/45860 ]
