Today the LA Times opinion page asked the public whether they should continue to endorse the project or not:

What do you think? Should we come out in favor of this in Friday’s pages, or opposed to this? Make your best argument, pro or con.

The flippant answer would be to tell them to read all 1,216 posts on this blog since March 2008. But even I wouldn’t want to wade through all that. It’s reasonable to want a short answer.

So, here it is: Like Boulder Dam, the California Aqueduct, and Interstate 5 before it, the high speed rail project is an essential element of getting out of this economic crisis and building lasting prosperity in California. Current infrastructure is not getting the job done, and expanding what we already have would cost significantly more than building HSR. By providing savings on transportation and environmental costs, the HSR project will spur billions in new economic activity that the state desperately needs. HSR has been a proven success everywhere else it has been tried and there is every reason to believe it will succeed here.

We can go into some depth on these points:

• HSR is essential to lasting prosperity in California. The LA Times has supported the project before, and they know as well as anyone that California is changing. In the mid-20th century the state turned to freeways and cars to meet its transportation needs. That may have worked for a while. But with rising oil prices, building transportation alternatives is absolutely necessary to avoid prolonged economic weakness. After all, it’s rising oil prices that helped get us into this economic crisis in the first place.

The numbers speak for themselves:

Unemployment is sky high and showing no signs of coming down:

One big reason for the crisis is the soaring cost of our dependence on oil. California spent 60 years building a transportation system where people had to burn fossil fuels to drive or fly to their destinations, literally ripping out the efficient and electrically-powered rail systems that had fueled growth and prosperity in the state for 100 years before that. Because oil is not a renewable resource, the price will eventually rise as supplies peak and global demand soars. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened in the last 5 years:

And all the evidence suggests gas prices will keep rising. In 2009 Deutsche Bank came out with this projection of where gas prices are headed:

When gas hit $3/gal in 2006, it burst the housing bubble and sent the state into recession. An economy built on suburban real estate serving long-distance commuters became unaffordable and in some places has literally collapsed. And it’ll keep rising, strangling recovery in the crib.

The effect would be catastrophic for the state’s already weakened economy. The effect of peak oil – the declining rate of new oil discovery combined with ever-increasing global demand – will push prices upward until there is significant demand destruction. There are two ways demand destruction can happen – either we build alternatives to driving and enable people to use mass transit to continue getting around, or people just stop driving with no alternative in place, and economic activity falls dramatically as a result.

• HSR will spur long-term economic activity. We’re not the only generation of Californians to face a profound economic crisis that required substantial change. In the 1930s, we built bridges, dams, and aqueducts even in the face of higher unemployment and a deeper Depression. We did those things because we knew not only would it create immediate jobs (estimates from the California High Speed Rail Authority suggest there could be tens of thousands of jobs created as a result of just the construction alone) but that it would also serve as the basis of long-term prosperity.

And so it has. LA still turns on the lights with electricity generated at Boulder Dam. It eats food grown with water conveyed by the Central Valley Project (a Depression Era project). Its neighbors to the north in SF use the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges to commute and move goods. And infrastructure built in subsequent years, like the California Aqueduct and the interstate freeways, merely added to the long-term economic activity.

But because oil is becoming too expensive, an alternative is needed. High speed rail from SF to LA and Anaheim isn’t the only electric passenger rail we need. But it is an important part of the need.

There are specific ways this works. One is called the green dividend. The concept is simple: money not spent on buying and burning oil is money that is spent on other things in the local economy. Portland’s green dividend is about $2 billion per year.

A 2010 US Conference of Mayors report found Los Angeles alone could reap a green dividend of $10 billion a year from high speed rail – both in the jobs it creates and the spending on oil it would allow to remain in the community, redirected toward more beneficial projects. Statewide that could reach $25 or $30 billion a year.

We also know from global experience that HSR spurs the development of mid-line cities. In California that is crucial, given the sky-high unemployment in the Central Valley. That unemployment costs the state government billions and acts as a drag on the economic potential of the entire state. California’s recovery requires a Central Valley recovery.

HSR can help provide a boost to places like Gilroy, Fresno and Bakersfield. It brings those cities into the globally competitive coastal economy, allowing residents there to get jobs on the coasts and allowing coastal businesses to set up shop inland where land values are cheaper.

• HSR is the fiscally conservative thing to do. Some “fiscal conservatives” think we should just run away from anything with a big price tag, that spending less money is always good. This is delusional. As the charts above show, we know gas prices will rise. So spending more money on oil-based transportation is absurd if there’s a more affordable alternative. And we know that California’s population will continue to grow. So spending $170 billion to expand freeways (which do not pay for themselves) and airports (which are very inefficient) on top of the increased cost of using those systems is also absurd if there’s a cheaper alternative.

I get that people wish we could just make everything that we have right now cheaper. That we could just continue along with the systems we have in place, just make them work again like they used to.

But those days are over. Cheap oil is never coming back. California will never again be able to rely on freeways and airplanes alone as the basis of our transportation system. Our choices now are to either stick with the failing system we have now and pay huge costs as a result, or invest over the next 20 years to lower our costs for the next few generations.

• HSR is a global success. It’s not like California is proposing to do something radical and untested. We’ve known for 50 years that high speed rail works. And it turns a profit – in Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, even the Amtrak Acela. And California compares favorably to those globally successful routes.

Many HSR critics and opponents are motivated by their belief that nobody will ride trains in California. Those arguments are completely baseless, fly in the face of the available evidence, and should simply not be taken seriously. Amtrak California is setting ridership records. Remember that the independent peer review found the HSR ridership numbers to be sound.

And of course, the business plan took those numbers and showed, using extraordinarily conservative assumptions, that HSR will turn a profit. Just like every other HSR line around the globe.

• The new business plan shows a sensible path forward. One could look at the above and say “sure, that’s nice, but will THIS plan work?” The new business plan answers that convincingly. It shows how the system will grow from an Initial Construction Segment in the Central Valley to a system carrying passengers from SF to LA. It is a sound, conservative plan.

The LA Times wonders about federal funding. I do too. But it’s not just HSR that Congress is threatening. Under the Republicans, the House of Representatives appears not to want to fund anything of value at all. They don’t want to create jobs. They don’t want to provide health care or teachers or cops.

Republicans won’t control Congress forever. In fact, as soon as January 2013 Nancy Pelosi may be back in the Speaker’s chair. We need federal HSR funding, but the best way to get it is to be persistent. That’s a problem to solve, not a reason to quit.

Ultimately, the LA Times has to decide a few things for themselves. Do they think the status quo of 12% unemployment and nearly $4 gas is working, or that we can and should do better? Do they think California should be a place that builds and innovates, or a place that stagnates while living on past glories? Do they think investing in the future is a good thing or a bad thing?

I can’t answer it for them. All I can do is show them that a better future never comes cheap, but the rewards are substantial. I hope they make the right choices.