On the Fast Track

(Page 4 of 5)

On average, 70 trains a day -- 35 in each direction -- run on the double tracks between Oakland and Sacramento. The majority of them are Skoropowski's trains, plus a few Amtrak California Zephyrs bound for Chicago. The rest are long, sluggish freights operated by the Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the tracks and underlying rights-of-way used by the Capitol Corridor. "We're pushing the capacity limit on our piece of track," Skoropowski says. "We're limited in our growth by the fact that we have to share nicely with others. For a travel market that's much larger than ours, such as Los Angeles to San Francisco, you need a TGV type of train. You need a true high-speed rail service on its own dedicated track, with nothing else on it."

The scenario Skoropowski describes is now taking shape. Last November, California voters approved Proposition 1A, a $10 billion bond measure that started the wheels moving on what is likely to become the nation's first true high-speed rail system. The initial phase of the project, a 432-mile stretch between Los Angeles and San Francisco, scheduled for completion around 2020, will allow passengers to travel from one city center to the other (projected fare: $55) in 2 hours and 38 minutes. That works out to an average of 170 mph, although the trains are expected to operate at sustained speeds above 220 mph. The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), which is responsible for planning, building, and operating the system, says that the initial $10 billion in state bonds will cover about a third of the phase-one construction costs. The rest would come from private investors, cities along the route, and federal sources. The entire planned system, which will stretch 800 miles from Sacramento to San Diego, is expected to cost more than $40 billion.

A ridership and revenue forecast commissioned by the CHSRA projects that when the high-speed rail network is complete in 2030, it will attract 90 million to 117 million riders a year and generate about $4 billion in annual revenues. The idea is to set fares at about half the cost of an airplane ticket (not that you can fly commercially between all the cities on the high-speed rail route). No operating subsidies will be required. In fact, the system is expected to net a profit of $1.4 billion a year, and this is projected to grow as ridership increases.

"All around the world, high-speed rail has a net positive cash flow," says Rod Diridon Sr., executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University and a past chairman of the CHSRA's board of directors. "We don't say ‘profit,' because you don't use that word in government. But after you deduct operating and maintenance costs, all those systems like the TGV and Shinkansen generate a positive cash flow. The surplus revenue then goes into expanding the system or paying off debt on prior construction. There's no reason we shouldn't expect the same kind of financial performance here in California."

Critics of the initiative aren't so sure. High-speed rail has no track record in the United States, they point out, so the ridership forecast is speculative. The only available ridership data come from parts of the world where population density is greater than California's, and where people are generally more accustomed to train travel than to hopping reflexively into their cars. So the success of high-speed rail in other countries, the critics say, will not necessarily be repeated here.

Dependence on the automobile is precisely the problem, rail and mass transit advocates say. Californians, and ultimately all Americans, "need to focus on the costs of not building a high-speed rail network," Diridon tells me during a conversation in his office, a mini-museum of railroad memorabilia. The shelves along one wall display engineers' caps, model steam trains, a golden spike or two, Union Pacific signage, and a scaled-down TGV train from France. "The state's population is set to double to over 60 million people by 2050," he says. "If we don't build a high-speed rail system to accommodate future growth, then the engineers tell us we'll need to build 3,000 more lane-miles of freeways and two more international airports. That would cost around $100 billion, more than twice the cost of high-speed rail. Then at midcentury we'd have to expand the roads and airports all over again. With high-speed rail, all you have to do to add future capacity is add more rail cars and locomotives."

According to CHSRA environmental-impact studies, California's proposed system will save 12.7 million barrels of oil in 2030 by reducing air and auto travel. It will also eliminate 12 billion pounds of CO2 emissions -- the equivalent of taking a million vehicles off the roads.

This is not to say that high-speed rail is carbon-free. The California system, when complete, will consume nearly 1 percent of the state's electrical load. With California's current mix of fossil fuel and clean energy, generating that much electricity would create slightly more than five billion pounds of CO2 emissions. That's still a net yearly reduction of seven billion pounds, and the CHSRA hopes to do much better. Last September the authority's board adopted the goal of using 100 percent renewable, carbon-free electricity to run the system by 2030. This is technically and economically feasible, according to a report released last summer by Navigant Consulting, based in Chicago.

Proposition 1A was approved in November not just on its environmental and transportation merits. It managed to pass in the midst of worsening economic conditions because, Diridon tells me, "most important for us right now, it's a jobs measure. The estimate is that it will create 160,000 construction-related jobs and 450,000 permanent jobs. Without it, we will fall further and further behind the rest of the world in terms of our economic capacity, because congestion will get so bad that we won't be able to get people to and from work, or products to and from the marketplace efficiently."

California's arguments for high-speed rail apply with equal validity to the United States as a whole. Congestion all over the country has grown to epic proportions. Since 1982, the amount of time Americans spend in their cars has more than doubled. According to a 2007 report by the Department of Energy, drivers in U.S. metropolitan areas wasted 4.2 billion hours stuck in traffic in 2005, the equivalent of 105 million weeks. These same drivers also wasted nearly three billion gallons of fuel, equivalent to a week's supply for the whole country. Traffic congestion costs drivers $78 billion a year in lost time and wasted fuel, to say nothing of the costs to the environment.

Thus overburdened, the country's transportation infrastructure has deteriorated to the point where it is exerting a powerful drag on the economy -- just when brakes are the last thing it needs. Almost a quarter of the country's major roads are in "poor to mediocre" condition, according to the Urban Land Institute. More than a quarter of our bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete. Poor road conditions are to blame for some 14,000 annual highway fatalities -- a third of the total. Meanwhile, government spending on infrastructure dropped from 3 percent of our gross domestic product in 1960 to 2.4 percent in 2008. China spends 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure; in Japan the figure is 10 percent. The main source of money for U.S. road and transit refurbishment, the Highway Trust Fund, has dried up. A time of reckoning has arrived.

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