Yesterday we took a look at the debate over private funding for HSR, and determined that while there are serious issues to consider with how private funding is used, there doesn’t seem to be any real doubt that private funding would indeed materialize. That hasn’t stopped HSR deniers from peddling their misinformation to the media, which runs with it since most members of the California media, a few folks aside, do not have a good understanding of what HSR and how it works and succeeds in other countries.

Instead, working off a limited knowledge base of passenger rail operations that too often rests on the assumption that it is unprofitable and unpopular, and trained to be skeptical of government officials and government programs, too many California journalists find themselves willing to believe just about whatever they’re told by an HSR denier who has the sense to frame their denialism in moderate-sounding language. The result is that journalists get used as transmitters for anti-HSR talking points that are full of inaccuracies and distortions, because the journalist in question is either too unfamiliar with HSR to know any better, or too lazy to fact-check what these people are telling them.

We’ve seen a lot of these stories over the last two years, and unfortunately we’ll see many more. But it’s especially sad when a new news venture launches with a flawed story full of misleading HSR denialism as one of their feature stories.

That’s what’s happened with the Voice of Orange County, a new online news operation put together by veterans of the Orange County Register and the LA Times. As an Orange County native, I’m very excited to see such a journalistic effort be launched – and therefore am very disappointed to see their efforts sullied by a deeply, deeply flawed attack on HSR by Tracy Wood.

Wood is no journalistic slouch. According to her bio on the site:

Tracy Wood is a former foreign correspondent in Asia and a California investigative reporter and editor. As a reporter for United Press International, she was one of the few women assigned as a combat correspondent during the Vietnam War.

She joined the Los Angeles Times in California where she was an investigative reporter for 17 years, covering political and government corruption. Later she became the Orange County Register’s Investigations Editor, leading the paper’s investigations team when it broke the story of former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona’s ties to Nationwide Auction Systems founder and former Assistant Sheriff Donald G. Haidl.

As anyone familiar with OC politics knows, that story was particularly explosive. Sheriff Carona was seen at the time as “America’s Sheriff,” an up-and-coming media star and politically untouchable. But when the media broke the story of Carona’s misdeeds with his associate Haidl, it eventually led to the destruction of Carona’s career.

Unfortunately, instead of using those skills to provide a well-researched and informative look at the HSR project, Wood appears to have instead accepted without question the arguments of HSR deniers, in an article headlined “High Speed Rail Veers Off Track”:

California’s proposed $42 billion high-speed rail line, which is supposed to whip millions of passengers up and down the state at up to 220-miles-an hour, is so poorly thought-out at this point that even supporters say the plans might have to be completely overhauled.

“The (ridership and construction cost) numbers keep changing,” complained Sen. Alan Lowenthal, chair of the state Senate’s Transportation and Housing Committee. “I want to see real numbers.”

I am personally unconvinced Senator Lowenthal is an HSR supporter. He claims to be one, but in practice he has had nothing but criticism for the project, much of it unfair. Here he is embracing HSR denier terms. The ridership numbers haven’t changed since 2007, and the cost numbers haven’t really changed either – what did change was the year in which the costs are being priced. The 2008 cost estimate was in 2008 dollars. The 2009 estimate was in year of expenditure dollars, as mandated by the federal government. The “increase” was merely a shift in estimate based on anticipated inflation over the next 10 years. It’s not a sign that project costs have soared.

The Long Beach democrat, a supporter of high-speed rail, is among an increasing number of policymakers and experts who are worried that voters who approved the 2008 high-speed rail ballot initiative are becoming victims of a classic bait and switch.

“If history is any guide, rail projects have drastically over-estimated the ridership and drastically underestimated the cost,” said Eric Morris, a doctoral researcher in urban planning at UCLA and a supporter of passenger rail transit.

This is simply false, but has also gone almost totally unchallenged by Wood. The Metro Gold Line East Extension opened on-time and under budget. The Phoenix light rail line exceeded ridership projections by 33% – and that’s in America’s sprawl capital. The Seattle light rail line was also built on-budget.

As to ridership, this is where, once again, California journalists fail to consider global HSR success. For some reason, they never ask “do other HSR systems meet ridership goals?” The answer is unfailingly yes, even if it typically takes about 5 years or so for the ridership goals to be met. Sometimes it happens sooner.

But you’d know none of this from reading Wood’s article. She merely quotes so-called “experts” as if they are speaking truth, instead of fact-checking what she has been told.

Among the things that make Lowenthal and others uneasy is a current business plan that estimates almost one-third of the expected 41 million annual riders will stay within the Los Angeles basin or in the San Francisco Bay area. And one that appears to compete with existing lines for fares.

In short, this indicates that 1/3 of the riders will be commuters of some sort. Is that such a crazy expectation? If service between San Francisco and San Jose takes just 30 minutes, or service between LA and Anaheim takes just 20 minutes, that would beat all other transportation options. It stands to reason that people would indeed choose the fastest option for intraregional travel.

As to “competing with existing lines,” that seems a fundamental misreading of the situation. If one’s travel plan is downtown LA to ARTIC, then sure, you’d take HSR over a Metrolink or Amtrak train that makes more intermediate stops. But if your travel plan is downtown LA to Fullerton, or downtown LA to San Clemente, or Santa Ana to San Bernardino, or Van Nuys to San Gabriel, well, you wouldn’t take HSR. HSR would handle certain point-to-point service, but would enable Metrolink, Caltrain, and Amtrak to beef up service for other routes and other destinations. Plus, as Wood doesn’t mention at all, HSR investment helps those other rail lines get improved infrastructure to enable their own faster speeds, boosting their ridership and farebox recovery.

They also must deal with the rail line’s impact on local communities (like Buena Park), the accuracy of financial estimates and the need for a professional staff accountable to state taxpayers rather than teams of temporary consultants.

There are also questions about the rail authority’s qualifications to oversee the high-speed train system. One alternate proposal would replace the current rail authority with a state agency to oversee and coordinate all passenger rail issues.

It’s true that the CHSRA has to deal with these things. But that doesn’t mean, as Wood clearly implies, that all these charges are valid. The CHSRA does need to have more staff, but that also means they need more reliable funding – something Senator Lowenthal has not supported.

Wood continues her bias toward quoting HSR deniers:

And GOP Assemblywoman Diane Harkey of Dana Point has introduced a bill that would stop the train altogether.

“While high speed rail may benefit certain areas of the state, the lack of specifics as to cost, subsidies, financing, and ridership, added to the state of the state’s finances, should cause the Legislature to reconsider its overall value to the people of the state of California,” said her staff summary of her bill blocking construction of the rail system. “Public resources might be better spent on a steady supply of water, roads, prisons and schools.”

What is never mentioned anywhere in Wood’s article, however, is that all HSR projects cover their operating costs through fares. None needs an ongoing operating subsidy, including Amtrak’s Acela. Readers don’t know that based on Wood’s article, however, and Asm. Harkey’s claims stand unchallenged.

Also unchallenged are the vague and unsourced claims of passenger rail critics:

Experts like UCLA’s Morris talk like they’re watching the first act of a play they’ve seen over and over. Overblown ridership estimates, he said, sometimes were intentional ploys. But in other instances, they were the result of an “optimism bias…an honest misreading of things because you’re excited about things and you think it might work.”

Prof. Eric Heikkila of USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, another passenger rail supporter, sounds a similar warning. “It seems that for rail projects around the country before the fact,” he said, projections “have been, in many cases, wildly optimistic.”

This is where a Wikipedia citation needed tag would be useful. Where is Morris’s evidence that the California HSR project’s estimates are flawed or deliberately overstated? As Wood should know, you don’t just report claims like that which lack supporting evidence. She wouldn’t have let Sheriff Carona get away with it, but she lets this doctoral researcher do it because it suits her overall argument? Other questions and assertions are left unchallenged – which rail projects were wildly optimistic? As I showed, in Phoenix (just one example of many) the ridership estimates weren’t accurate because they were too low.

Lacking knowledge and expertise in HSR – and unwilling to seek out such knowledge to judge what she reads – Wood winds up totally misinterpreting the Taiwan HSR experience:

A Senate Transportation Committee staff analysis noted Taiwan financed and constructed a $19 billion, 208-mile high-speed rail line using private resources.

The private company was supposed to operate the rail line for 35 years and then turn it over to the government. Service began in 2007, according to the staff report, and by 2009 had only 87,000 riders a day when ridership forecasts had predicted 280,000.

In the end, the government had to bail it out financially, exactly what voters were promised won’t happen in California.

The Taiwan experience, the Senate staff report said, “suggests that an overly optimistic original forecast was made.”

Wood regurgitates a State Senate staff report without challenging it or its assumptions. The truth about the Taiwan HSR project is that a series of flawed decisions made during the design and construction phase, largely to please politically connected friends of the government, led to cost overruns that in turn forced the system to open without full buildout. Although the trains were showing steady ridership growth year over year and had grabbed a majority market share away from planes and buses, the underlying finances of the system fell apart.

But not because HSR is inherently flawed. Instead the problem was that the specific way the Taiwan HSR project was funded was flawed. Yonah Freemark explained it well at the Transport Politic last September:

The Taiwanese system, which cost more than $15 billion, was the first in the world built entirely with private funds — 80% of which were secured through bank loans at high interest rates. Though the line’s fare revenues, lower than projected, make up for operations, maintenance, and even most interest payments on the initial capital costs, elevated depreciation charges put the railroad into its misery. The recession, which decreased interest in travel, put the final stake in the company’s heart.

The problem in Taiwan was that the project was overleveraged and overindebted, and when ridership was not high enough to meet the staggering debt service levels, a bailout was forced. What the Taiwan experience suggests is not that HSR is doomed to fail, or even that private funding of HSR to some extent is always a bad idea. Instead what it shows that that too much private funding is massively risky, but public funding such as that used in Spain or France seems pretty damn reasonable.

Significantly, those successful HSR experiences are never discussed in Wood’s article.

Wood continues with the fear, uncertainty, and doubt-laced article:

But once construction is completed in 2035, planners haven’t figured out how high-speed rail will pay for itself. So far, according to the rail authority’s most recent business plan, the most profitable system appears to rely on about 12 million of the expected 41 million annual riders staying inside the boundaries of the Los Angeles basin or traveling among stops in the San Francisco Bay area.

Again, as mentioned above, this is not implausible. That would still leave well over half the ridership revenue coming from travelers going across the state, between north and south.

Perhaps one reason Wood’s article is so biased toward HSR deniers is that’s almost all she interviews. Wood does not talk to a single HSR supporter that’s not affiliated with state government – I would have happily spoken with her had I been contacted. The only pro-HSR statements come from Curt Pringle (Sen. Lowenthal does have a quote that’s favorable to HSR, but he is not a project supporter). Instead Wood sets up a storyline of “flawed, overpriced, misleading government vs. a few brave critics.” It’s a familiar trope for investigative journalists, and sometimes is true. But in this case, it’s not. Yet you wouldn’t know it from Wood’s article, since she did not take the time to speak to independent project supporters or fact-check the quotes she was given from her sources.

This article isn’t going to make or break HSR. But it is yet another example of why it’s important to combat HSR deniers, since their misinformation tends to find its way into media stories on HSR, written by journalists who don’t understand passenger rail, who won’t look around the world at successful HSR projects, and who apparently can’t be bothered to do those things.

Orange County residents and Californians deserve better. It’s not impossible to get HSR journalism right – but you wouldn’t know it by reading the Voice of OC. And that’s a shame.