The president assures us there will be no pork in the $3.8 trillion federal budget for 2011. That may be true if we ignore the proposed $2.3 billion high-speed-rail grant for California. An undetermined amount of that money would be spent as a down payment on a $42.6 billion proposal to connect Anaheim with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco and Los Angeles with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Las Vegas. That’s an “oink-oink” if I ever heard one. I can understand the Las Vegas high-speed link to accommodate the thousands of Californians who want to flee to Nevada to escape California’s high taxes.

First, HSR is not pork any more than the Interstate Highway System was pork. It is a national project that was awarded on the basis of merit. Right-wingers love to frame any spending they don’t like as “pork” in hopes of delegitimizing the project.

Second, it’s amusing to see that while he calls out Pelosi and Reid, Stegemeier doesn’t note that one of the HSR corridors funded by the stimulus grant connects Los Angeles to “Curt Pringle’s Anaheim” – or did the Register, long an ally of Pringle’s and the OC Republican Party, veto that reference?

High-speed rail as part of a short-term economic stimulus package is nonsense if it takes a decade or two to build.

Of course, if construction work is taking place in that time, it very much counts as stimulus. Or does he think magic faeries will build the tracks and trainsets?

The environmental impact statement itself will take years.

Yes, it has. And it’s almost done. In fact, as a condition of spending stimulus funds, a Notice of Decision/Record of Decision that officially closes the EIR/EIS process must be in place by September 2012 on stimulus-funded corridors.

Acquiring 680 miles of right-of-way will be contested in thousands of eminent domain lawsuits and will take at least a decade to complete.

That’s rather doubtful, and as is the standard practice with HSR deniers, Stegemeier offers no evidence to back up this claim. Most of the ROW will be bought from willing sellers. Where eminent domain must be used, it won’t take a decade to complete.

If high-speed rail serves intermediate cities then it will increase travel time, create noise and interrupt traffic flow at thousands of intersections. If it bypasses smaller cities to gain the advantage of speed, then it serves only the end terminals and disadvantages everyone in-between.

Reading this, I have to believe Stegemeier has never been on a high speed train in his life. As we know, California HSR will do both – it will serve intermediate cities AND the end terminals, with a mix of express and local service. The noise will generally be less than the loud diesel trains and their horns, and since it will be fully grade-separated, traffic flow will actually be improved.

The right of way to Las Vegas must cross or encroach on multiple wilderness areas. Some are controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, others by the Forest Service and the National Park Service. The Department of Interior and the EPA would certainly contest this proposal.

This isn’t entirely accurate. There are no federal “wilderness areas” along the Victorville-Vegas route, though the Mojave National Preserve reaches up to the southern side of Interstate 15 between Baker and Mountain Pass. That Preserve will be an issue for HSR. But getting BLM permits may not be so problematic. Of course, Vegas HSR wasn’t funded at all by the stimulus, so there is time to sort this out.

The French TGV train reaches 190 mph for the three-hour trip between Paris and Marseille, a distance slightly longer than Anaheim to San Francisco. Each train carries up to 345 passengers, slightly fewer than wide-body airplanes. Without government subsidies the fare would be two to three times the price of flying.

Lots of nonsense here. How many widebody planes serve the SoCal-Bay Area route? Southwest’s planes seat either 122 or 137 passengers. Last time I looked, 747s aren’t flown between LAX and SFO as part of the regular shuttle route.

Of course, what would the fare be without government subsidy for air travel? Some airports are built and operated with subsidies. The airlines themselves have received tens of billions of dollars in subsidies in the last decade, most notably in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Stegemeier’s main point, however, seems to be that HSR isn’t a good deal when it comes to fuel conservation:

So, what are the advantages of high-speed rail, considering that an airline infrastructure is already in place? It conserves fossil fuel. On the Paris-Marseille route, each TGV train trip consumes about 30 megawatt hours of electricity that’s produced from France’s nuclear power grid. Because of California’s aversion to nuclear power, we can’t do that. Almost 65 percent of our electricity comes from coal or natural-gas-fired plants. Today’s power generation in California would take about 1,500 gallons of jet fuel equivalent to make enough electricity for the Paris-Marseille trip by rail. That’s slightly more than four gallons of fuel per passenger.

Of course, California is embarking on a project to produce more renewable power. HSR is a core element of that project, with the Authority having committed to seek 100% renewable power sources for its electricity, providing a guaranteed buyer of solar, wind, and other renewably generated electricity.

A Boeing 747 can make the same trip in about half the time. It carries slightly more passengers but would consume a little more than twice as much fuel, or nine gallons per passenger, one way.

Again, is Stegemeier serious? My grandfather flew 747s for TWA for 15 years. His route was usually LA-London, or LA to some European/Middle Eastern destination, not LA-SF. Those planes are enormous and totally unsuited to routes like those HSR will serve.

Statistics show that there are about 100 round-trip flights each day between the Southland and San Francisco, carrying more than 6 million passengers a year. If all airline travel ceased on that route, 50 high-speed trains, serving all those passengers, could save about 30 million gallons of fossil fuel, or about one gallon for every Californian, each year.

Of course, all airline travel won’t cease on that route. But as we’ve seen in Spain, Taiwan, China, and even the Northeast Corridor, HSR will take as much as half of the market share on the route from airlines, if not more. As to fossil fuel, the California High Speed Rail Authority estimates that HSR will save 12 million barrels of oil annually.

The economics of high-speed rail are bleak. Interest alone, at 4 percent on a $42.6 billion municipal bond, would cost $1.7 billion per year – almost $300 per projected passenger. That’s triple the cost of an airline ticket, just to cover the interest on the debt. It’s also $60 per gallon of fuel saved. Surely, there are better investment opportunities for taxpayer dollars than this fantasy.

Of course, that would come out to roughly $47 per year for all 36 million Californians – or 9 cents a week. Brother, can you spare a dime?

It’s almost comical that the Register turned to a former oil company CEO to attack HSR – and that he did such a bad job of it. But then at least they went directly to the source, rather than relying as the usually do on oil company-funded think tanks like the Reason Foundation.