There is a tension in American life right now between those who want to do everything on the cheap – even if it means inferior or even failing services, even if it means long-term recession – and those who see value in making a long-term investment so that we do things right, whether that “thing” is economic recovery or high speed rail or education or something else.

Some people, when confronted with challenges and costs, prefer to shrink back and lower their horizons, to undermine the things that would make a project successful merely because they are unable or unwilling to countenance paying what is required to invest in our future, or because they are so conflict-averse that they would fatally weaken a good proposal merely to buy someone’s silence.

California political columnist Tom Elias clearly falls into that category. Although he is no expert on high speed rail, and appears to not be all that familiar with the project, he heard that there was some controversy about the cost and about the route, so his solution is to naturally just scale everything down, even though doing so would destroy the project’s effectiveness and financial viability.

Elias doesn’t mention any of the serious long-term problems and costs that HSR is designed to avoid, from rising oil prices to the need to build HSR as a centerpiece of new economic geographies. But he appears stuck in a late 20th century mentality, one that says “when you face a problem or a cost, simply do something less effectively and hope you can fight another day.” Our current recession is a product of that thinking, and below I’ll explain why it is totally inappropriate to apply it to HSR.

Here’s what Elias has to say:

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.

This is entirely untrue and betrays a lack of familiarity with the project. The CHSRA board has been asked several times to cut out parts of its plan, including the San Francisco to San José segment. They refused, for the following perfectly valid reasons:

1. HSR would be far less effective in meeting the state’s transportation needs if it did not go to SF.

2. HSR would have serious trouble meeting its ridership projections and making the operating profit it is required to produce if it were slowed or stopped short of key destinations and population centers.

3. California voters were sold a true bullet train system connecting downtown LA to downtown SF, and to change that now would violate the will of the voters.

Elias starts from a position of obvious ignorance, but plows ahead anyway:

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 another $2.25 billion. It’s anybody’s guess where the rest of the money might come from.

No it’s not. The rest of the money comes from the federal government and the private sector. If those funds do not materialize, then we don’t build. It’s not really that difficult to understand, unless you are employed as a State Auditor.

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.

Elias is playing a dishonest trick on his readers here, arguing that “of course this can’t be done on-budget” even though construction costs are quite low these days, and even though many rail projects have indeed been brought in on-budget. He’s just making an assumption, treating it as proven fact, and treating anyone who disagrees as being deluded.

That, at least, is implied in a 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.”

And as we know, Elaine Howle wrote a deeply flawed and error-prone report that also suggests she does not really understand this project. Unsurprisingly, we again see the damage that flawed report has done. Incredibly, the State Auditor’s office has so far failed to make amends for this inaccurate report.

This, of course, didn’t keep the authority from hiring a French/South African executive with experience running high-speed rail systems in Europe as its chief executive at $375,000 per year, plus a housing allowance.

Right, because when you’re building a $40 billion project, you want to hire someone on the cheap and lacking experience.

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 San Francisco Peninsula but rising in the Anaheim-Los Angeles corridor.

Why should it? “Local opposition” is overstated, as the loud NIMBYs are unrepresentative of their communities, having commandeered a flawed local process to dominate and distort the conversation. The State Auditor made a rare good move in refusing to take such small-time opposition seriously.

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.

This was not a bait-and-switch. The $55 projected fare is still a projected fare. The $105 projected fare is merely another option. Further, Elias doesn’t compare those fares to the cost of driving or flying, which in ten years’ time will be much higher than it is right now. Elias also misleads his readers in not telling them that the projected fare of $105 is set at roughly 80% of comparable airfares.

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.

The Prop 1A is a general obligation bond, so the bond repayments are not contingent on ridership. But the HSR project will add $10 billion a year to the state’s economy (considering just the LA area alone), which would make it much easier to repay the bonds.

In fact, this is a common error made by those who remain locked in a late 20th century mindset – that any government spending or project merely takes away from the economy, instead of adding to it. As we know from the projects undertaken in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the opposite is true. California would be a much poorer place were it not for big government projects like Boulder Dam, Shasta Dam, the interstate freeways, the State Water Project, and the like.

Elias refuses to include the economic stimulus benefit from HSR, therefore distorting his assessment of the project’s costs and value.

Given this dicey picture for the future of California high-speed rail project, maybe it’s time to redesign the system’s planned map to eliminate its most expensive portions while keeping the fundamentals intact.

This is what we call a “false economy.” An effort intended to save money actually costs money. The “most expensive portions” of the project are those that create the greatest value and generate the most economic activity in the state – and that are the most essential to the HSR project’s financial and practical viability. Elias is either being hypocritical here, or simply doesn’t care that his concept is designed to weaken the project instead of improve it.

Here’s how to do that: Run high-speed trains on existing track in densely-populated areas even if that means running them at ordinary train speeds. Tie them in with existing transit systems. So Southern California trains, for example, might run full-out from Carlsbad north to about Tustin and then slow down as they use ordinary, existing track between Anaheim and Los Angeles. It might add a few minutes to the trip, but would cost billions less.

This is simply ignorant, betraying an almost total lack of understanding of rail operations on the corridor – and that’s even before we talk about the cost in lost ridership. First, the CHSRA is already talking about track-sharing, even though Elias apparently missed that rather key detail.

Second, you can’t run “full-out” between Carlsbad and Tustin given the state of the tracks there and the other trains on the corridor. Current service runs as fast as it can given the available track – which, in the San Clemente area, isn’t much, and there’s no room to widen it. Elias is condemning the LA-SD run to be nothing more than is currently offered by the Pacific Surfliner, which negates the purpose of HSR – to provide faster, reliable service that improves transportation in California.

It’s going to add more than “a few minutes” to the trip and will not save a dime. It will instead cost a lot more money, since the HSR project will generate neither the ridership nor the economic value to justify the expenditure.

Of course, if Elias is suggesting upgrades to tracks between Carlsbad and Tustin (which will come at an astronomical cost) so trains can go 220mph and then slower from LA-Anaheim…well, that is essentially already what is being proposed (except that to serve SD, the trains head east from LA and south to SD in Riverside/San Bernardino). Elias comes off as simply not knowing what he is talking about.

From Los Angeles, the trains could run at ordinary speeds into the San Fernando Valley and then go full-out through the Central Valley. Rather than running over the Pacheco Pass to Gilroy and San Jose roughly along Highways 152 and 101, the train could be rerouted over the Altamont Pass into the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco, where passengers could switch to special Bay Area Rapid Transit trains for a nonstop run into San Francisco on existing track. The Sacramento spur, to be added later under current plans, would remain pretty much as it now stands.

This is a nihilistic approach, destroying the train’s viability by causing it to hemorrhage riders. Abandoning San José, the state’s third-largest city and major economic hub, makes no sense. Forcing riders to transfer from an intercity train to a metro rail to complete their trip to SF is nonsensical – it could add as much as 30 minutes to the trip and, coupled with the lack of amenities, would cause ridership numbers to crash well below the levels needed to make HSR self-sufficient in terms of operating costs.

That eliminates the need for the most expensive rights of way.

No it doesn’t. The ROW is already owned by public rail agencies, especially on the Peninsula where very little ROW acquisition will be needed.

It satisfies Peninsula cities and environmentalists who have demanded a tunneled system that would add billions of dollars to the project cost.

Environmentalists support the current project; those who criticize the current project are doing the work of the oil and pollution industry, whether they acknowledge it or not. Peninsula cities cannot block this project, so we should not destroy the system to appease them.

It might add as much as 45 minutes to the entire ride, but would still leave passengers to enjoy hundreds of miles of travel at very high speeds.

He’s being conservative here; it’s likely to add at least an hour. His “save money and avoid controversy at all costs” approach ignores the fact that there are some concerns among Central Valley folks, from farmers to Bakersfield High School alums, about the routes chosen there as well. What happens when they make a fuss? Will Elias say “gee, maybe we just shouldn’t have high speed rail at all, and remain wastefully and expensively dependent on oil just because it’s too hard to build HSR?”

It would take high-speed rail trains away from areas that are now resisting it most strongly and leave the plan intact in areas that are welcoming it. And it would cost billions of dollars less, probably coming in at close to the state’s existing means.

The HSR trains need to go to these areas – which aren’t “strongly resisting it” – remember that the critics and opponents do not represent, and have generally succeeded in shouting down, the much more numerous HSR supporters in their communities.

It would not save billions of dollars, it would cost billions of dollars in dependence on oil, traffic congestion, lost jobs, wages, and tax revenues. And the state’s existing means are considerable – California is a very wealthy state that could quite easily pay for the entire HSR project ourselves, were we not politically committed to letting the rich and the large corporations escape their tax burdens.

There is precedent for all this, too. Amtrak currently runs successful trains that link to buses between Union Station in Los Angeles and Bakersfield and from Emeryville on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay into the city itself.

Those bus services aren’t successful in the sense that they fail to meet the state’s transportation needs. They are absolutely NOT a model to be emulated – the HSR project is intended to move above and beyond those stopgap measures that throttle ridership. Elias basically seems to be saying we shouldn’t improve on current passenger rail services at all – probably because he does not understand or chooses to ignore the reasons why that service must be dramatically improved.

Do this and if the mass of Californians still want more when the project is up and running, more could be added. But build a sensible, economical system first.

We’ve already done that. California created the current intercity passenger rail network in the late 20th century and voters already demanded more in November 2008. They want a sensible and economical system and know that the current plan provides it. Elias’s proposal is not sensible at all, given how it would destroy the project’s effectiveness and cause ridership to crash – and as a result it is not at all economical.

Too many people came out of the 20th century with a belief that being cheap is being economical. It’s not. Sometimes the economical and fiscally responsible thing to do is to spend a LOT of money, especially when the alternative is to spend even more money on a failing transportation system in a long-term recession caused by a silly unwillingness to spend.

Elias’s proposals for HSR are absurd. But they need to be pushed back against, in case California political leaders, many of whom are still in the grip of the same failed late 20th century thinking, start to agree with Elias’s flawed ideas.