At the USHSR conference in Los Angeles this week – an event where Californians For High Speed Rail‘s Daniel Krause also spoke – Quentin Kopp, member of the CHSRA board, said that they expect to start taking bids in 2011 in order to begin construction in early 2012:

The state has until September 2011 to complete an environmental review of the line intended to zip riders between the Bay Area and Los Angeles in less than three hours, Quentin Kopp, a California High-Speed Rail Authority board member, told Bloomberg on Friday.

Bids, likely from about 10 train manufacturers, will then be reviewed, Kopp told the news agency.

“Allow four months for the conclusion of proposals and bids, and I estimate conservatively that construction will begin by the first part of 2012,” Kopp told Bloomberg.

“I do expect many” bids from international companies, said Kopp, who was attending the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association conference in Los Angeles. “We have no examples within the United States, no models to follow,” he told Bloomberg.

This will be a extremely important part of the overall project, and you can expect this blog and CA4HSR will be watching this very closely to ensure the bidding works out in the best interests of Californians and future HSR riders.

Given the ongoing global recession, this schedule needs to be kept. We saw significant inflation in construction costs in the last decade, which was one reason the East Span of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge project ran into its own financial difficulties in 2004. Here in 2010, however, many infrastructure bids are coming in well below estimates. It’s the right time to start building, and those who suggest we wait are implicitly saying we should be willing to spend more money when we have no need to do so.

Of course, that will raise the question of where the rest of the money comes from. We still expect the federal government will provide its share, once this temporary, silly fit of Hooverism is over. So what about the remaining $10 billion or so?

In the past, I’ve suggested that public pension funds like CalPERS should consider making an investment in HSR as a source of stable, long-term revenue that can help smooth out the boom-and-bust cycle of stock market investments. CalPERS is apparently already looking at investing in transportation infrastructure, as evidenced by their recent purchase of a stake in London’s Gatwick Airport:

Calpers, the biggest U.S. public pension fund, said on Friday it had committed up to roughly $155 million to Global Infrastructure Partners for a 12.7 percent equity stake in London’s Gatwick Airport.

The commitment marks the first direct infrastructure investment foray by Calpers, the $200 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

It covers the equity purchase price and provisions for bridge costs and future administrative expenses, Calpers said in a statement.

“We are looking for opportunities to invest directly in high-quality infrastructure assets. We see it as a good fit for our burgeoning infrastructure program,” said George Diehr, chairman of Calpers’ investment committee.

CalPERS has about $180 billion in assets. Could they spare $10 billion or so to invest in high speed rail? That would be a significant expenditure for CalPERS; perhaps they could take a smaller share and split with other public pension funds around the country, such as CalSTRS and funds from other states.

But it would be a sensible solution to some of the questions about how to fund HSR. Instead of embracing the high risk that comes with private sector funding, public sector funds could be used to build a public sector project. HSR would be a safe, stable, long-term investment for CalPERS and other funds, and they could continue to augment that rate of return with their other investments.

It certainly sounds like the wheels may be turning at CalPERS on this. That would be a good thing for HSR, for people invested in the CalPERS system (like my wife), and for the state of California.