I ask him if the new-and-improved business plan that Gov. Jerry Brown wants on his desk any minute now will have any surprises in it. “Yes, there’s a very big surprise,” Richard says, calmly removing his classes and rubbing his eyes. And that is…? “I think it will surprise everyone that we’ve actually listened to our critics for a change,” he says with a fraction of a smile. About what, specifically? “We simply can’t ignore urban areas when we build this thing,” he says.

Cryptic, no doubt, but potentially significant. What exactly is Richard saying here? Critics of the project may hope he’s saying that the money will be moved from the Central Valley Initial Construction Segment to the ends of the route, investing only in upgrades to existing rail service that could at some future time be used by high speed trains.

That is what Senator Alan Lowenthal has been gunning for since at least 2009, and it would mean essentially abandoning the high speed rail project. While upgrading urban rail is a very good idea, high speed rail’s promise is connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco via the Central Valley, providing a new form of transportation that can give travelers an alternative to flying and driving that they don’t have. It’s a choice that, as we’ve seen around the world, will likely prove very popular with Californians, create jobs, and provide a significant economic boost by saving money on oil.

If building better urban rail in SF and LA is the key to getting intercity high speed rail, well, wouldn’t that have happened by now? Metrolink has been around for 20 years. The Pacific Surfliner (originally the San Diegans) have been operating since the late 1970s. The passenger rail service now known as Caltrain has been in operation for nearly 150 years. Those are all very valuable, successful services that can and should be improved. But they haven’t helped produce statewide high speed rail.

That’s because the problem is the gap between SF and LA. The main gap lies between Bakersfield and Palmdale through the Tehachapi Pass. But even if that were closed, a lot of new track still has to be laid in the Central Valley and through the Pacheco Pass to connect the Bay Area metropolis to the SoCal metropolis.

In short, the key to California high speed rail is track in the Central Valley. Starting there makes sense because once that gap starts to get filled in, then you get the political momentum to connect that track to the Bay Area and to SoCal.

If you do it the other way around, however, and build better tracks in SF and LA, you do nothing to address the gap problem. Instead you’re deferring it to an uncertain future. Worse, by caving to the “omg you can’t build in the middle of nowhere” bullshit, you’re actually making it harder to eventually close the gap because the precedent has been set that building outside the urban areas isn’t a good idea.

There are other practical problems too. Could high speed service within the Bay Area or SoCal generate a profit? Neither the Surfliners, Metrolink not Caltrain do so. Nor should they have to, as the purpose of passenger rail is to connect people rather than make money. But Prop 1A forbids a state operating subsidy and more significantly, one of the political arguments against the Central Valley section is that it won’t attract enough riders to be successful. Never mind the fact the CHSRA has no intention to just operate a Central Valley-only system; the Initial Operating Segment would connect either to the Bay Area or SoCal.

But an urban-only rail system would have an even more difficult time generating ridership to be profitable. That’s because the universe of choice riders is likely much smaller. Around the world, in places like Spain, many of HSR’s riders switched from planes. And in California, spending less than 3 hours on a train from SF to LA would be a far more attractive option than spending 6 hours in a car, unable to use one’s digital devices.

Within urban areas, however, the choices are different. Nobody flies between SF and San José. A bullet train connecting those two points could save you 30 minutes over driving (perhaps more at rush hour) but that’s not as great a savings over driving between SF and LA. Perhaps there would still be enough riders to pay the operating costs of urban HSR, and I’m willing to be convinced if there are ridership projections indicating that’s the case. But based on what I can see, it doesn’t look promising.

In short, moving the money to the urban areas looks to be more risky than the current plan.

Now it’s not at all clear that’s what Dan Richard was intending to say. The federal government hasn’t signaled a willingness to move its share of the funding away from the Central Valley. And Richard may have been indicating a desire to fund upgrades to rail in the urban areas, perhaps with the $950 million in Prop 1A earmarked for rail systems that connect to HSR. That’s a good idea.

Prop 1A requires a federal or private match for any of the $9 billion that is directed to HSR, but perhaps the CHSRA has found a way to spend some of that money in the urban areas while also proceeding as planned in the Central Valley. I would be quite strongly supportive of this too.

But as of right now, it doesn’t seem like moving the money out of the Central Valley entirely makes any sense. I hope that’s not what Dan Richard has in mind. We will find out soon enough.

In 2011 a Republican House did gut HSR funding, but again this was not the CHSRA’s fault. But in a new report the State Auditor continues to hold the CHSRA responsible for Congress’ failures on funding transportation policy. The result is yet another flawed report from a State Auditor who does not appear to have a strong grasp of transportation funding.

Although the Authority has secured funding for the Initial Construction Section (construction section)—the first portion of the program—the program’s overall financial situation has become increasingly risky, in part because the Authority has not provided viable funding alternatives in the event that its planned funding does not materialize. In its 2012 draft business plan, the Authority more than doubles its cost estimates for phase one of the program, to between $98.1 billion and $117.6 billion. Of this amount, the Authority has secured approximately $12.5 billion to date. The success or failure of the program consequently depends upon the Authority’s ability to obtain between $85.6 billion and $105.1 billion by 2033.

So the Authority gives itself 21 years to get as much as $85 billion from the federal government (although they will need much less – once an Initial Operating Segment is open, private money will step up to the plate). They’ll obviously need money sooner than that, and while this present Congress isn’t likely to give it, this present Congress is not going to last beyond the end of this year. Democrats continue to dominate the generic Congressional polls, a key indicator of their growing chances to reclaim the House in November. So the chances of the Authority getting more federal funding in the near future are not nearly as bleak as critics imagine.

The State Auditor doesn’t explain any of this. Instead they continue to bash the project as “risky”:

In its 2012 draft business plan, the Authority identifies the federal government as by far the largest potential funding source for the program, yet the plan provides few details indicating how the Authority expects to secure this money. Further, the plan does not present viable alternatives in the event that it does not receive significant federal funds. In fact, one of the funding options the Authority characterizes as an alternative is not yet approved for use on high-speed rail projects. Although it is possible that the Authority may obtain the necessary funding to move forward with the program, it risks significant delays or the inability to proceed if it does not.

The problem is that this isn’t unique to high speed rail. Many transportation projects, like BART to San José, rely on getting federal funds that they’re not guaranteed to receive.

But we can make a bigger point. If Republicans prevail in November, winning the Senate and the White House in addition to the House, one could then say that pretty much everything the State of California does is “risky” since federal budget cuts could undermine virtually every service and program currently provided by the state, from schools to parks to roads. The State Auditor isn’t really telling us anything useful here.

Some of the State Auditor’s concerns border on the absurd:

Further, the Authority’s 2012 draft business plan still lacks some key details about the program’s costs and revenues. In particular, only within the business plan’s chapter about funding—more than 100 pages into the plan—does the Authority mention that phase one could cost as much as $117.6 billion, whereas it uses one of its lower cost estimates of $98.5 billion throughout the plan. Moreover, neither of these cost estimates includes phase one’s operating and maintenance costs, yet based on data included in the 2012 draft business plan, we estimate that these costs could total approximately $96.9 billion from 2025 through 2060. The Authority projects that the program’s revenues will cover these costs but it does not include any alternatives if the program does not generate significant profits beginning in its first year of operation. Further, the plan assumes, but does not explicitly articulate, that the State will not receive any profits between 2024 and 2060, because private sector investors will receive all of the program’s net operating profits during these years in return for their investment.

The State Auditor doesn’t examine the rising cost of oil or other globally successful HSR systems (virtually all of them, including the Amtrak Acela, cover their own operating costs), simply assuming that the system will somehow have trouble, unlike all the other HSR systems, in covering its costs. If the State Auditor still thinks gas will be at $4 a gallon 50 years from now they are simply delusional.

As to the state not receiving any profits, well, unfortunately that’s by design. But that isn’t a problem for the HSR project, since Prop 1A mandates that the state not subsidize its operations. That’s a moronic and stupid rule, but it is also a rule the system can meet. If the system covers its own costs, as global evidence suggests it will, then the state faces no obligations and if private sector investors get all the profits, that’s stupid but not necessarily a financial problem from the state’s perspective.

The State Auditor makes their own anti-rail biases clear in the way they attack the ridership studies by innuendo:

The accuracy of the Authority’s estimates of the program’s profits depends upon its ridership projections, which are thus fundamental to private investors’ interest. The ridership model the Authority presents in its 2012 draft business plan assumes an average ticket price of $81 and projects that passengers will take a total of 29 to 43 million annual trips by the completion of phase one. However, when the Authority’s chief executive officer commissioned a ridership review group to independently assess the ridership projections, he handpicked the group’s members, which may call into question the independent nature of their assessment.

OK, this is simply bullshit. If the State Auditor cannot actually find technical fault with the ridership recommendations or the peer review of those numbers, they have no business impugning the peer review group or Roelof van Ark for putting it together. This kind of baseless attack has no place in an official report such as this.

The report goes on to make a number of recommendations regarding contract oversight and those are all well and good. But it is frustrating to see the State Auditor continuing to hold the CHSRA responsible for Congress’ failures, and their unfair attack on the peer review of the ridership numbers is a particularly ridiculous move that shows their inherent biases.

But just as important was the context. Governor Brown rejects the argument from “the declinists” – people who believe that California is in decline and the state can’t do anything great again, that all California can do is lower its horizons and suffer:

Contrary to those declinists, who sing of Texas and bemoan our woes, California is still the land of dreams—as well as the Dream Act. It’s the place where Apple, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, QUALCOMM, Twitter, Facebook and countless other creative companies all began. It’s home to more Nobel Laureates and venture capital investment than any other state. In 2010, California received 48% of U.S. venture capital investments. In the first three months of last year it rose even higher—to 52%. That is more than four times greater that the next recipient, Massachusetts. As for new patents, California inventors were awarded almost four times as many as inventors from the next state, New York.

California has problems but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.

Governor Brown’s core belief is that California is a great place, but for that to be sustained the state has to continue innovating and building. Prosperity and the California Dream cannot be continued by complacency or an unwillingness to act. It’s important that he delivered that message directly to the state legislature, where some Democrats are giving in to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Rather than leading, some Senate Democrats would rather turn into right-wing Republicans and refuse to invest in the state’s future. And that’s especially true of high speed rail.

Brown devoted a lot of his speech to the project. Here’s what he had to say:

Just as bold is our plan to build a high-speed rail system, connecting the Northern and Southern parts of our state. This is not a new idea. As governor the last time, I signed legislation to study the concept. Now thirty years later, we are within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out.

President Obama strongly supports the project and has provided the majority of funds for this first phase. It is now your decision to evaluate the plan and decide what action to take. Without any hesitation, I urge your approval.

If you believe that California will continue to grow, as I do, and that millions more people will be living in our state, this is a wise investment. Building new runways and expanding our airports and highways is the only alternative. That is not cheaper and will face even more political opposition.

Those who believe that California is in decline will naturally shrink back from such a strenuous undertaking. I understand that feeling but I don’t share it, because I know this state and the spirit of the people who choose to live here. California is still the Gold Mountain that Chinese immigrants in 1848 came across the Pacific to find. The wealth is different, derived as it is, not from mining the Sierras but from the creative imagination of those who invent and build and generate the ideas that drive our economy forward.

Critics of the high-speed rail project abound as they often do when something of this magnitude is proposed. During the 1930’s, The Central Valley Water Project was called a “fantastic dream” that “will not work.” The Master Plan for the Interstate Highway System in 1939 was derided as “new Deal jitterbug economics.” In 1966, then Mayor Johnson of Berkeley called BART a “billion dollar potential fiasco.” Similarly, the Panama Canal was for years thought to be impractical and Benjamin Disraeli himself said of the Suez Canal: “totally impossible to be carried out.” The critics were wrong then and they’re wrong now.

This is a strong and ringing endorsement of the HSR project from the governor, and I especially like how he framed it as part of a vision for California being a place that builds and innovates. California is a place that solves problems, rather than hide from them.

Senate Democrats need to hear this message loudly and clearly. There’s too much talk from Senators DeSaulnier, Lowenthal and Simitian about quitting on high speed rail. Rather than find solutions to get high speed rail construction started in 2012, these Senators appear more interested in embracing a politics of decline and failure.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats understand the importance of investing in our future by building high speed rail. So too do Assembly Democrats. Many State Senate Democrats understand it too. So why would these three Senators – including Alan Lowenthal, who wants to go to Congress – join in a right-wing attack on not just high speed rail, but on President Obama’s agenda?

Californians expect their legislators to solve problems and help the state grow, innovate, and lead. They don’t expect their legislators to run in fear from tackling the issues voters elected them to solve. Let’s hope that Senate Democrats join their fellow Democrats, including Governor Brown, in building a better future for California, rather than joining right-wing extremists like Jeff Denham and Scott Walker by attacking the project and denying its funding.

UPDATE: Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, via his spokeswoman Alicia Trost on Twitter, had this to say about HSR just now:

We have an obligation to balance the budget and build the economy. HSR is an important part of that 2nd obligation.

Let’s hope he brings the three wayward Senate Democrats back into the fold.

That isn’t happening at the LA Times right now, not their HSR coverage. Ever since Ralph Vartabedian took over the beat midway through 2011, the Times’ coverage of the project has shifted away from independent and informative to very profoundly biased against the project. We’ve gone over this before – the myriad ways in which Vartabedian’s stories are repeatedly slanted against the project, rarely ever reporting from a neutral place and rarely ever acknowledging the project’s merits or quoting supporters. Vartabedian checks the journalistic box by getting a quote from California High Speed Rail Authority officials, but in his world it’s the Times versus the Authority, with people like Elizabeth Alexis – one of the state’s most prominent opponents of the high speed rail project – passed off as a neutral analyst.

Vartabedian’s latest smear job tackles the question of the cost of alternatives to high speed rail. The story’s bent is obvious: the Authority is somehow making shit up again, heroes like the City of Burlingame and Elizabeth Alexis (project opponents, but never mentioned as such) call them out, and Vartabedian’s just reporting on what he sees.

Except as always, his reporting is full of flaws and errors, especially errors of omission. For example, his article doesn’t actually discuss whether or not the $170 billion cost figure for expanding freeways and airports cited by the Authority is valid or not. He doesn’t look into projections of freeway usage, construction costs, or inflation factors. He doesn’t total up the list of proposed and desired projects to see whether $170 billion makes sense or not.

Instead he simply is parroting arguments against that figure made by known project opponents. His article is really about whether the Authority should rely on Parsons Brinckerhoff for these numbers or whether they should rely on the rabidly anti-HSR UC Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies, whose 2010 report on HSR was a deeply flawed product reflecting its own biases.

Here’s the closest Vartabedian gets to talking about the cost of building other transportation infrastructure that HSR could help handle:

Caltrans predicts that traffic on Interstate 5 and California 99 in the Central Valley will double over the next 25 years. But agency officials say they have not scaled back plans to make highway improvements in the state’s agricultural heartland because of the high-speed rail project. Not until the rail system is built and actually reduces traffic on both roads would Caltrans adjust its investment strategy, officials said.

That’s a typical stance of highway planners across the country – they typically refuse to accept that demand for freeway lanes could actually decline, so they won’t adjust their plans until the proof is staring them in the face. Besides, Caltrans can plan to widen I-5 and Highway 99 all they want to – we know the cost of widening 99 alone will be $25 billion, and that’s a 2006 estimate that has surely soared too since that time. I am willing to bet money that Vartabedian will never, ever challenge the wisdom of that project.

And yet this anecdote doesn’t actually shed light on the core question of whether the Authority’s $170 billion figure makes sense. Vartabedian should have looked at the cost estimates for those widening projects, but never did so. Apparently that would have gotten in the way of his anti-HSR bias.

Surely the Times can actually find a reporter willing to look at the facts rather than just pass along quotes from known project opponents. Maybe a letter writing campaign to the Times is needed. Remember, we aren’t asking the Times to be pro-HSR. Instead we’re asking them to do their jobs and report accurately and independently on the project, rather than allow an anti-HSR bias to color every single article with a Ralph Vartabedian byline.

Republicans are uniting in opposition, and three key Democratic state senators — Joe Simitian, of Palo Alto, chairman of the budget subcommittee overseeing transportation; Alan Lowenthal, of Long Beach, chairman of the Select Committee on High-Speed Rail; and Mark DeSaulnier, of Concord, chairman of the transportation committee — have started applying the brakes.

The three have supported high-speed rail and voted to put it before the electorate in 2008. But in separate interviews last week, they indicated that the current plan could not win their vote.

If these three legislators are going to buck the will of the voters as expressed in November 2008, they had better have a damn good reason. If they’re going to turn their backs on thousands of immediate jobs in a place with some of the state’s highest unemployment, they better have a damn good reason. If they’re going to side with right-wing extremists like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and California Republicans like Jeff Denham, they better have a damn good reason.

As it turns out, they don’t.

They voiced concerns about plans to start in the Central Valley with a 130-mile link that will not attract enough riders and could become California’s version of the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere.”

“This is an albatross potentially,” Lowenthal said.

What Borenstein doesn’t mention is that Senator Alan Lowenthal has been an opponent of this high speed rail project since at least 2009, and has been pushing since that time to gut the project and spend the money only on upgrades to local rail. That’s all he cares about. You’d think that would be important context, but it’s not given here.

More importantly, Lowenthal is deliberately ignoring the construction phasing plan. Nobody is talking about operating HSR from Fresno to Bakersfield alone. Lowenthal knows this. Instead the plan is to start construction in the Valley but have the Initial Operating Segment connect either to the Bay Area or to LA. The Authority’s business plan indicates that riders will use that and that the private sector will be interested at that point.

That distinction is lost on Lowenthal, who is deliberately using right-wing framing to undermine President Barack Obama, job creation in California, and intercity rail. And remember, this guy wants to become a Democratic member of Congress!

We know Lowenthal is a hater. But it is sad to see Senator Mark DeSaulnier, who I respect a lot, join in:

Instead, they are pushing to begin in urbanized areas. “You need to spend the money where the need is and where it will attract private-sector funds,” DeSaulnier said. “You need to put it where the ridership is.”

And the ridership, Senator, is in a statewide system that goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It’s not in the small pieces within those regions. After all, does Caltrain generate a profit? Does Metrolink? Does the Pacific Surfliner? None of them do. To be absolutely clear, those are all excellent passenger rail systems that do not need to generate a profit to be valuable, and they each deserve more investment (which they will get under the provisions of Prop 1A).

But the ridership comes with the Initial Operating Segment, which provides the intercity service that California currently lacks.

After all, if simply investing in regional rail was the secret to building high speed rail, we’d already have done so. But we’ve made those investments and it has not led to high speed rail. You have to fill in the missing link, and the Central Valley is a key part of that missing link.

But it’s Senator Joe Simitian’s quote that made me the most annoyed:

“Whether they are federal funds or not, they should be used wisely,” Simitian said. “Whenever someone tries to hustle you into a quick decision, that should give you pause. I feel like we’re getting jammed by the threat of losing the federal funds.”

As he points out, the state should not “make a $100 billion mistake to save $3 billion” from Washington.

A quick decision, Senator? California has been debating high speed rail for 30 years – since the last time Jerry Brown was governor. The current high speed rail plan has been under development since 1996. Californians heard the debate and voted in favor. This project has been developed for 15 years. The plans are solid and detailed and have been subject to endless scrutiny. An independent peer review found the ridership projections were sound.

So who’s husting and rushing who here? Looks to me like the hustle is coming from Simitian and Lowenthal, with (the mark) DeSaulnier falling for it. They’re the ones rushing to act, insisting that California side with right-wing extremists to abandon its high speed rail project and abandon federal stimulus funds. They’re making these claims based on flawed interpretations and in ignorance of the evidence.

Looks like a hustle to me.

Hopefully the rest of the Democratic caucus in Sacramento will side with President Obama, Senators Feinstein and Boxer, and Governor Brown rather than follow Lowenthal and Simitian’s lead and side with Scott Walker and Jeff Denham.

Spain is also very similar to California. Both have a Mediterranean geography, with large metro areas separated by expanses of plains, deserts, and mountains. Their demographics are similar and their population densities are similar. The SF and LA metro areas are bigger than Madrid and Barcelona.

So it makes sense to look at Spain’s high speed rail system to get some ideas about how high speed rail would function in California. After all, this blog has repeatedly done so. My own interest in high speed rail developed after a December 2001 trip on the AVE from Madrid to Sevilla. While watching the Southern California-like landscape roll by at nearly 180 miles an hour, my immediate thought was “this makes total sense for California – why don’t we have it there?”

The Fresno Bee’s Tim Sheehan also saw the parallels between Spain and California, and recently went to España to see the AVE for himself. His article, Spanish Lessons: What California Can Learn From Spain’s High Speed Rail is now live, and is being syndicated across the state. That makes it a significant article in its own right and worth examining.

Unfortunately, the article misses many crucially important points about the Spanish HSR system. It is largely shaped by Sheehan’s own preconceptions. When I mentioned last night on Twitter that Sheehan’s article reflects his preconceptions, he responded by saying he didn’t have an agenda. And I agree with that. The difference is that an “agenda” assumes he went there already knowing what conclusions he wanted to make, with a specific ax to grind. But I chose my words carefully. By “preconceptions,” I meant that Sheehan went to Spain with specific questions he wanted to ask, specific areas on which he wanted to focus, and it seems, some pre-existing assumptions about what kinds of lessons would be important to draw, although not about what the content of those lessons would be.

Sheehan is a good reporter and I certainly think he didn’t try to fit his reporting to premade conclusions. But like most other American reporters, unfortunately, his preconceptions wound up limiting what he discovered and what he wrote about. Most American journalists no longer go out and try to find “the truth” – instead they try to fit events and issues into a pre-existing set of ideas, values, and assumptions that one might call the “conventional wisdom” rather than trying to develop new insights and knowledge. And that means the “lessons” he offers are themselves of quite limited value for understanding what Spanish high speed rail can teach California.

The main preconception is that HSR should be judged by whether it can pay for itself, rather than by the economic and transportation benefits it creates. Sheehan assumes it’s reasonable to ask whether HSR can cover both its operations AND construction costs, despite the fact that nobody ever asks that question of highways:

Ulied and Germà Bel, a professor of political economics at the University of Barcelona, agree that none of the Spanish high-speed rail routes has enough riders to make the system financially sustainable.

“There is no question whether it can cover its costs. It cannot,” Bel said. “It actually has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment. The government claims they are recovering the operating costs, but the numbers are not clear.”

Sheehan quotes only expert critics but not expert supporters, so we don’t actually know whether these claims are justified or not. In fact, Bel seems to be confusing the issue here. RENFE says it is recovering the operating cost and there’s every reason to believe this is the case. We don’t know the evidence these guys are using to justify these claims – Sheehan basically takes them at their word rather than investigating or even asking RENFE for a response. (If he did ask them, their reply wasn’t in the article.)

As to recovering the infrastructure investment cost, so what? The estimated cost in 2006 dollars of building the Interstate Highway System is $450 billion. The federal government paid 90% of the cost of construction, funded by gas taxes. That’s directly analogous to the European Union helping Spain build HSR. And the farebox recovery rate of an Interstate freeway is 0%.

More importantly, these questions are never asked of freeways because there is widespread public agreement that they provide economic benefits to the state and the locality. A visit to Spain is a good opportunity to see whether high speed rail is delivering similar economic benefits as well. That would require moving beyond the centrality of the “does HSR cover its costs?” question, and examining whether it’s a sound investment that pays off in other ways than direct cost recovery.

Instead Sheehan assumes that during a severe recession, it’s sensible to scale back on major spending, even though it is widely acknowledged that austerity policies are destroying the European economy:

Over the next decade, the Spanish government plans to spend up to $77 billion more to expand and improve its high-speed lines, said Juan Ignacio Campo Jori, director of international projects for ADIF, another government-owned company that manages and operates Spain’s railway infrastructure.

But with no sign of Europe’s financial crisis letting up, some say the government needs to slow its spending.

Well, we know that those who say the government needs to slow its spending are advising an extremely destructive course for Spain, a country that needs to create jobs and economic growth if it’s to avoid the kind of brutal suffering being experienced in Greece – where two years of austerity have failed to render Greece solvent.

Sheehan’s focus on ridership and cost questions meant he didn’t focus on other important aspects of the Spanish HSR system. There was no discussion at all of the profound economic boost to smaller cities that stems from high speed rail in Spain:

Perhaps the most striking example is Ciudad Real, a scrappy town 120 miles south of Madrid in Castilla-La Mancha which, Mr. Ureña says, “had completely vanished from the map.” In medieval times, the town was a key stopover point on the route between the two of most important cities of the time, Córdoba and Toledo. But the railway and the highway south later bypassed the town, and Ciudad Real began to wither.

Now it has an AVE station that puts it just 50 minutes away from Madrid, and Ciudad Real has come alive. The city has attracted a breed of daily commuters that call themselves “Avelinos.” The AVE helped attract a host of industries to Ciudad Real, and the train is full in both directions.

Indra, an information technology company, moved a “software factory” to Ciudad Real a decade ago. “Along with the University, the AVE was one of the key reasons we moved here,” says Ángel Villodre, the director of the center.

The University of Castilla-La Mancha’s campus here has grown sharply in size and importance. “The school is here because of the AVE,” says Mr. Menéndez, the department head. “Without it, it would be impossible to attract the high-level staff we need.”

Sheehan didn’t examine any of this at all. For a reporter from Fresno, a city with much in common to Ciudad Real, that’s pretty surprising. Especially since Sheehan’s colleague at the Bee, Bill McEwan, made similar arguments about HSR just a few months ago.

Sheehan visited Valencia and spoke to some locals, but appears to have missed some key insights:

Maria Jose Martin, who manages the nearby C&A clothing store, said the company typically sends people on the train for business trips because it’s cheaper than flying.

“I think it’s good,” she said through an interpreter. “It brings Madrid and Valencia closer together and allows for more flow of people between the two cities.”

And, she added, the trains are good for Valencia’s business community because they bring more tourists on day trips.

But Martin acknowledged that “the ticket price is still pretty high” for families on holiday.

You can tell a lot about someone’s preconceptions by their choice of words. Look at that last sentence. “But Martin acknowledged” sets up for the reader the idea that what is to come is a core truth, implying that what came before may not be as important.

Even if the ticket price is “still pretty high” for families on holiday – and consider that this is in Spain, a nation reeling from high unemployment and idiotic austerity policies, look at what she said earlier. Sheehan didn’t really investigate it closely, but Californians should. She pointed out that for C&A, a major European retailer, HSR generated a lot of cost savings for the company and helped support local businesses by closing the distance between major cities.

Those are pretty damn important lessons. Right now many American businesses are focused on cutting their costs. As fuel prices increase again (something else Sheehan never once discussed) that drive to cut costs will continue. So far most companies prefer to cut costs by laying off workers or cutting wages. That’s catastrophic for the economy because it sets off a downward spiral that’s hard to escape.

So it makes sense – it in fact becomes imperative – for Californians to find other, less destructive ways to help companies cut their costs. And one of Spain’s lessons is that high speed rail can help do that.

Another lesson that was offered to Sheehan in Valencia was the importance of closing the distance between cities. Sheehan’s preconceptions meant that he didn’t see the importance of this lesson either. In the 20th century freeways closed the distance within metro areas and airplanes closes the distance around the globe. But air travel has become expensive and inefficient, and rising fuel prices mean that there needs to be another form of travel offered between metro areas that are less than 500 miles from each other.

We know that what Sheehan saw in Valencia can be applied to California. Shops in San Francisco can cater to visitors from Los Angeles, and vice versa. More importantly for Sheehan’s Fresno audience, HSR can bring people to smaller cities like Fresno to shop, work, or live. As I discussed above, however, Sheehan didn’t grasp the lessons from smaller cities like Ciudad Real or Zaragoza. Instead his preconceptions that ridership is an issue and that HSR should focus on covering its costs meant he simply accepted service cuts to smaller cities rather than exploring what this would mean for a place like Fresno – and whether a focus on costs over creating value and business really was the right way to assess an HSR project.

Economic observers like Richard Florida have argued that because of this ability to close distances, high speed rail is essential to recovering from this deep recession. Florida in particular argues that we are facing a deep structural economic crisis that can only be resolved by making fundamental changes to the way we live and travel:

As Jane Jacobs identified and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas later formalized, clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates the diversity required for new ideas to fertilize and turn into new innovations and new industries…

It’s now time to invest in infrastructure that can undergird another round of growth and development. Part of that is surely a better and faster information highway. But the real fix must extend beyond the cyber-economy to our physical development patterns—the landscape of the real economy.

How this plays out in Spain is an important lesson for California. Spain is going through many of the same economic problems as is California – suffering from the effects of a burst property bubble, with austerity politics making matters much worse. How is HSR helping Spain get through the crisis? How is it positioning Spain for later recovery? That would have been an excellent issue to examine and include in the article.

But Sheehan didn’t do that. One reason is that for most American journalists, the issues that Florida discussed are simply taboo. The average reader of a newspaper, usually someone above age 40, does not want to hear that the “American way of life” rooted in the automobile that they were taught as kids was The Greatest Thing Ever is failing and that change is needed. So that never gets discussed, with rare exceptions. Journalists don’t really discuss the severity of unemployment, the need for major changes to address it, or innovative solutions to fix it.

In fact, journalists actually treat with extreme skepticism efforts to produce innovative change. Solar power and green jobs get hit with that all the time. And so too does high speed rail. American journalists are trained to see government-backed innovation as inherently risky. That’s one of their central preconceptions. It’s damaging our country in profound ways, and it is one of the main reasons why Sheehan’s article turned out the way it did.

Sheehan went to Spain to see what he thought he needed to see based on the media-driven discussion of HSR in California. As a result, he missed out on some very important lessons for California that were staring him right in the face. California can learn a lot from Spain’s HSR experience, but the most valuable insights didn’t find their way into Sheehan’s article. That’s unfortunate. But at least we know what those insights are, and we can share them with other Californians ourselves. As we can see, we may be the only ones who are able to do so.

Fitch believes that U.S. high speed rail (HSR) networks and other regional rail solutions are likely to proceed despite the difficulties faced by proposed projects in California and Florida. We expect, over time, options such as HSR to become a necessary part of the modern transportation network. However, financing and implementation measures should reflect the size and scope of such undertakings.

Societal and practical factors are creating incentive for HSR networks. Ideas around driving less have entered the mainstream and are sometimes at odds with basic transportation needs. State and federal spending on transportation has not kept up with needs, while interstates (particularly in land-constrained regions) have seen an increase in congestion that requires expensive highway expansions.

Over the short term, the HSR project in California is likely to struggle under the weight of state cuts and a voting public that will continue to feel the effects of the economic downturn, as did Florida. We believe that good ideas are being proposed in many parts of the country, but they will face significant difficulties absent thoughtful long-term planning and recognition of the true life cycle costs of these projects.

Breaking HSR projects into smaller subprojects will increase the likelihood that they are completed on time and within budget constraints. Plans need to include subsidies that run beyond the startup phase, as these projects are rarely (if ever) profitable from their origins. Clear funding from the federal and state levels is necessary given their regional scope. We believe that bipartisan support is critical, since the lengthy implementation periods and funding needs will cross multiple election cycles.

Over the short term, securing the considerable political and public support for HSR and other rail solutions is much more important than beginning the work on them.

One wonders if members of the California State Legislature are reading this. They ought to. Fitch isn’t going to just make this up as a favor to Jerry Brown. Fitch’s analysis is that high speed rail has a bright future for fundamental reasons, implying that it will potentially represent a good investment – but only if governments provide long-term, sustained political support.

Fitch is also calling out legislators, indicating that their focus on the project’s details is missing the point. What’s needed from the legislature isn’t nitpicking but a strong, lasting political commitment to solving any problems with the project so that it can move forward. State Senators like Joe Simitian and Alan Lowenthal, of course, have shown no interest in solutions and are spending their time working to undermine the project even though each of them are termed out of the legislature at the end of this year.

Governor Jerry Brown, at least, understands the need to continue moving forward on high speed rail:

“We’re pushing forward,” Brown said. “We’re going to build, but we’re not going to be stupid … We’re going to be very careful and build incrementally as we go.”

He said, “A lot of people want to turn off the lights. I’m not one of them. We’re going to build, we’re going to invest, and California is going to stay up among the great states and the great political jurisdictions of the world.”

Fitch gets it. Governor Brown gets it. President Obama gets it. Let’s hope the legislature gets it too, rather than following Scott Walker down the path of ruin.

I am writing to express my strong support for your plan to move the California High Speed Rail Authority into a Transportation Agency under your Administration’s direction. I encourage you to act swiftly to address the high speed rail project’s problems, which I fear will put more than $3.5 billion in Federal funding at risk if not addressed.

Deploying the expertise and resources of CalTrans towards this effort over the next six months – in direct cooperation with the California High Speed Rail Authority – could permit a rapid reassessment of the route, decisions regarding the stages of construction, and substantial progress on acquiring right of way, in order to expedite the beginning of construction by the Federal government’s Fall 2012 deadline.

…As I have discussed with you previously, putting this project on a steady path to success would demonstrate that California remains capable of building big projects, putting thousands of our citizens to work, and leading the nation. I am concerned that our state’s future would be greatly hindered if this project either failed to get off the ground, or failed to be completed. I have spoken to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood about the importance of utilizing CalTrans’ expertise, and we both agree that your leadership in this area could improve prospects for success.

Feinstein and Brown have been allies before (and Feinstein officiated at Brown’s 2005 wedding to his wife, Anne Gust) so this is likely a show of support more intended for state legislators than the governor, though it’s easier to just write to one governor than 120 legislators. Still, it’s significant that Feinstein weighed in on this and her words will carry weight in Sacramento, particularly since she is one of the state’s most powerful politicians. It will force legislators to give serious consideration to the concept, and make it harder for them to dismiss the consolidation proposal. And adding Ray LaHood’s imprimatur to the concept just makes the argument even more compelling.

Perhaps just as importantly, Feinstein also addressed the Peer Review Report in her letter:

The California High Speed Rail Peer Review Group’s recent report, which failed to endorse state funds for the California High Speed Rail project until further steps to reduce project risk are taken, vividly identifies the need to act quickly. As you know, without the Legislature’s approval of this appropriation, more than $3.5 billion in Federal funding competitively awarded to California would be at risk. Specifically, the Group called for the Authority to:

* select an initial operating segment as soon as possible,

* include a deployment plan for electrified high speed trains with positive train control systems,

* further develop the business plan to address risk and cost issues,

* involve the private sector in project design,

* increase project management capacity,

* subject demand forecasts to greater scrutiny, and

* “reduce the risk to the state of a stranded project” by investing initial funding in the segments that currently serve significant train ridership (San Jose to San Francisco and Anaheim to Los Angeles).

I find it very hard to debunk some of the Group’s key conclusions. But I also believe that many of the concerns could be addressed quickly with a concerted effort under your leadership.

The first five of these make sense to me and are, from my perspective, uncontroversial and sensible. I don’t quite know what she means by “subject demand forecasts to greater scrutiny” – an independent peer review (by a different group, not by the authors of the report Feinstein references) did indeed subject the ridership forecasts to greater scrutiny and found the forecasts to be sound. I continue to be confident that further review will only reconfirm that conclusion but at some point this gets to be ridiculous.

The last bullet point of hers is the most troubling. She is clearly suggesting that the money be moved from the Central Valley to the endpoints. She didn’t say that the White House or LaHood agreed with this approach, but if Feinstein is going down that path then it certainly raises the possibility that the Obama Administration may indeed give in and allow the money to be moved.

I am not sure that would be a good idea. We’ve tried the path of investing in existing systems in those locations and while it’s helped build ridership, it also hasn’t done a damn thing to generate momentum to close the system gap between Bakersfield and Los Angeles. Folks like Paul Dyson have correctly been advocating for closing that gap for years now, but I have to believe the problem is the incremental approach.

If they’re only going to fund investments in urban areas, then what they are doing is a de facto investment in local rail service. It will be seen as such and won’t do anything to generate political momentum to provide the intercity connections that the Central Valley Initial Construction Segment – and a Bay Area to Valley or Valley to LA Initial Operating Segment – would provide. Building in the Central Valley, however – as part of an Initial Operating Segment that connects either to San José or LA – helps fill the gap and build on the promise of intercity rail.

It’s not quite clear what Senator Feinstein is after here. Maybe she wants the other changes and is less focused on where the ICS is located. But it’s worth making a stand for the Valley as the beginning of construction. The jobs impact will be the most significant there, but crucially, it will also help fill in the missing link needed to connect the regions of California – like a high speed rail project should.

As a result, Brown had the foresight to avoid the mistake of his recent predecessors in the Governor’s Office. Instead of looking at the state budget as a revenue or spending problem, Brown has proposed a strategy of “realignment” that would shift more state responsibilities to local governments. At first this might seem to be nothing more than a political ploy, but it’s actually not. Just as defining the relationship between the states and Washington is the central question of a federal government, the same is true for states and local government.

And that’s where high speed rail comes in.

For the first time in a generation, the state actually has a project that puts statewide priorities and assets ahead of local ones. And that is why opponents are so hopping mad. For example, the campaign director for Proposition 13, Joel Fox, will happily tell you the motivation behind it wasn’t just stopping higher taxes. It was also about the miscalculation that conservatives (like Ronald Reagan) made about adopting a full-time Legislature in Sacramento. But as Fox might be reluctant to admit, it was Prop 13 that made the full-time Legislature (and the initiative process) the behemoth it has become. Now counties, school districts, cities, and the like are heavily dependent on the state apportioning money from its taxes as opposed to using local sources.

In other parts of the country, property taxes are much higher, but counties and cities aren’t necessarily better off. That’s because in the West, property usually was not valuable without improvements like roads or irrigation. In the South, Midwest and East, the opposite is true. Most cities there had ample rainfall to grow crops and many cities were settled on the fall line where rivers became no longer navigable. Thus, states have engaged in all manner of tax policy that often pay little heed to effects on local jurisdictions.

That is the core of the anti-HSR movement. Why spend money on some new project when there isn’t enough to go around already? It’s a great question rhetorically. But it’s not logical. For example, someone living in Modoc County is eligible to attend a University of California school. They are able to drive on state roads, and are protected by state law enfoecement regardless of wherever they go. They can visit state parks and beaches. And they can receive unemployment or food stamps. But they can’t enroll their child in Siskiyou County for school. Nor can they vote in another county, nor can they purchase a car in another county and not be charged the reciprocal sales tax rate. And perhaps, most tellingly, they can’t get a library card outside their home county as well.

So it’s no surprise that as counties fall short of attracting financial resources for burgeoning problems like air quality, homelessness, epidemics, and even home health care, the state has stepped in and sacrificed all its signature assets like the UCs and state parks to save those held hostage by their local Board of Supervisors. But as Governor Brown knows all too well, counties have become too reliant on statewide funding.  And cities are not that far behind.

So like Alexander the Great, Brown has responded by slashing the Gordian Knot in two. Dismember those functions that belong at the local level, and fund what the state should do properly. Like bridges, prisons, universities, mental hospitals, beaches, aqueducts, and the like.

Still it’s natural for a resident of California’s far-flung counties to ask why high speed rail confers a statewide benefit to them specifically.  This is especially true if  you live outside the Bay Area or L.A. and won’t live anywhere near a station. Why is HSR like unemployment benefits, the UC system, state parks, prisons, and not like libraries? In a word, capacity.

HSR frees up capacity on existing roads and railways in the San Joaquin Valley to ship more freight. It lowers the amount of jet fuel needed to produced at refineries and allows more to be put towards lighter fluid, gasoline, and other consumer products. But it also increases efficiency, allowing the state to spend less money on mobility and more on education, law enforcement, and vaccines. And it reduces the amount of subsidy that the state has to pay for highways and train service that rely on gas or diesel.

Make no mistake, the argument for “realignment” is far from academic. Governor Brown has the highest approval rating of any politician in the state. Most Californians acknowledge there are structural problems that must be fixed. But because we live in demographically (and hence politically and socioeconomically) divisive times, it’s important to recognize that realignment is happening everywhere. The Baby Boom generation’s influence and its core of native-born, white Americans is dwindling and leaving behind a system that is dysfunctional by design. Realignment, and by extension, HSR, is the ultimate solution not just to high unemployment or skyrocketing gas prices but to California’s seemingly broken government.

High speed rail is not, as Robert suggests, the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Hoover Dam or some sort of Depression Era sop. It is the Salt River Project, a development that will change how the country lives and works forever. And though it will always be vulnerable to human shortcoming, it’s important to recognize that there’s no turning back. There’s no point, as others have pointed out, to attempt to convince voters why it cannot be done. Instead, as Jerry Brown’s approval ratings show, the focus must be on what is possible instead of what’s not.

The trouble with this kind of expert analysis, though, is that it seldom takes politics into account. Planners didn’t have much choice but to place the initial segment where they did, because to qualify for federal stimulus money they had to guarantee that construction would begin quickly, and the Central Valley portion was thought to be the only part of the line that would be ready to meet Washington’s deadline. No source of future funding, such as a higher gasoline tax, has been proposed because the economy is rotten and voters would be unlikely to approve it right now. So does that mean the whole thing should be scrapped?

As they explain, the answer is clearly “no,” but their explanation of the politics matters a lot here. I know that the more technical-minded folks out there get driven crazy by these political factors, but there has yet to be a human society without politics of some kind. And so far, in my view, the political factors have not compromised the value, benefits, or operational sense of the HSR project.

The LA Times continues in their defense of the project, making some interesting comparisons that aren’t exactly the first ones that come to my mind – but then again, maybe comparisons to the Interstates, the California Aqueduct, Shasta and Boulder Dams, and the Bay bridges are getting old:

The project’s current political ills remind us of the firestorm that erupted over L.A.’s subway, when sinkholes appeared on Hollywood Boulevard, construction mismanagement led to cost overruns, and voters became so disillusioned with subways that they approved a measure in 1998 forbidding the expenditure of county sales tax money to pay for them ever again. A decade later, they realized how shortsighted they had been; failure to complete a subway to the sea contributed to worsening gridlock on the Westside, and the subway had such clear benefits for riders that its construction troubles were largely forgotten. The result: County voters approved a new measure in 2008 to raise the sales tax to pay for, among other things, more subway construction.

Well, OK, this comparison is actually a pretty good one. Even after voters had approved Metro Rail in 1980, there was a great deal of debate about whether it was a good solution for a famously car-dependent metropolis. As construction began, as sinkholes appeared, and as stores exploded momentum began to halt. Even after the first segments of rail opened in 1993, controversy led to the infamous 1998 vote. Today, support for rail is virtually unanimous in LA County, with only a few scattered groups of NIMBYs and deniers left to try and hold back the pro-rail tide.

Of course, we hope HSR won’t face the same kind of problems that plagued the Wilshire subway (and one way to ensure it doesn’t – build fewer tunnels in urban areas!). But as we found with Metro Rail, delays don’t solve anything. They just drive the price up and generate greater costs and inconveniences in the short term.

One of the common comparisons for HSR is to Boston’s Big Dig. Normally it’s a derisive comparison meant to signify that HSR would be some sort of “boondoggle.” But the Times recognizes that, on the whole, the Big Dig has been a boon for Boston:

The same phenomenon is already happening in Boston, home of the nation’s most expensive transportation project. The Big Dig highway tunneling scheme was a political catastrophe a few years ago, what with mistakes that prompted severe delays and caused the price tag to skyrocket. Although the Big Dig is nobody’s idea of the right way to build infrastructure, Bostonians are now reveling in a downtown park built on what used to be an expressway, and a tangled traffic mess has been unsnarled. In a few more years, the headaches will probably have been forgotten.

They’re certainly right about the big picture. And one of the reasons for the Big Dig’s high costs was poor planning – constant delays and politically-motivated changes to the design being the main culprits.

The Times even reaches back into ancient history:

Worthwhile things seldom come without cost or sacrifice. That was as true in ancient times as it is now; pharaoh Sneferu, builder of Egypt’s first pyramids, had to try three times before he got it right, with the first two either collapsing under their own weight or leaning precipitously. But who remembers that now? Not many people have heard of Sneferu, but his pyramids and those of his successors are wonders of the world.

Well, at least we can be assured that California’s HSR system won’t suffer the same fate, given that HSR has been built countless times around the globe. And rather than being built by slave labor, it will be built by well-paid, unionized workers, providing a significant economic boost to a state that could really use it.

Their conclusion is excellent:

The point is, you can take the long view or the short view toward the bullet train. The expert panels are taking a short view; we prefer the long. In the end, if Californians have the patience and the political will to stick with it, they’ll have a project with extraordinary environmental, economic and transportation benefits. If they don’t, they’ll have worsening congestion, rising pollution and soaring transit expenses as gasoline prices continue their inevitable rise. We like the first vision of the future better.

All in all, another solid and strong op-ed from a newspaper that has been a key supporter of the project since at least 2008.

At least, their editorial pages have been supportive. Maybe one of them can have a talk with their HSR reporter, Ralph Vartabedian, the shockingly anti-HSR biased reporter who is using the LA Times’ pages to spin misleading stories and sow misinformation about the project. Their reporting shouldn’t have to follow the dictates of the editorial pages, of course, but their reporting should also be honest, focused on facts and evidence, and not characterized by a clear and obvious bias. That’s not happening right now, and it’s a serious problem for the LA Times.