Sheehan’s discussion of the Alta Velocidad Española (AVE) trains’ impact on farmland is very useful, although as before Sheehan does not necessarily draw the lessons from what he sees and hears:

On a crisp fall Saturday morning, Luis Valciente and Mercedes Martin enjoy the quiet of their farm about 20 miles northeast of Seville.

The retired husband and wife bought their patch of land in 1987, several years before Spain’s first high-speed trains started running between Madrid and Seville.

“It’s very tranquil, which is what we like after all these years,” Martin says through an interpreter.

Without warning, a loud “swoosh” briefly interrupts the couple’s conversation with a reporter. Within seconds, the noise subsides, and the couple picks up the chat, unruffled, right where they left off….

The AVE trains speed by the small farmstead several times an hour, “and it hasn’t affected us at all,” Valciente said.

“We don’t even feel them,” added Martin. Even though their house is so near the tracks, she said, the high-speed trains create no wind turbulence and are less bothersome than the slower-moving regional commuter trains because noise from the AVE trains passes so quickly.

Because conventional trains were already there when Valciente bought the farm, he doesn’t think the AVE trains affected his property value, and if the neighbors have any complaints, he says he hasn’t heard them.

This is a pretty insightful experience right here, but Sheehan misses its significance. He talks later about how the HSR tracks were engineered to have less impact on farmland, and we’ll discuss that in a moment. But the key lesson right here is, and I’ll bold it because it is very important, high speed rail isn’t as disruptive as some Californians claim it will be.

This conversation that Sheehan has with the couple is one that, to hear NIMBYs tell it, will never be able to happen again anywhere near the HSR route. They’re convinced that HSR will destroy their quality of life, although nobody Sheehan has talked to in Spain appears to believe those fears have become real in their experience. Sheehan, therefore, has exposed a pretty big flaw in NIMBY reasoning. It would be nice if he had called that out.

But his focus was instead on how HSR was engineered to have less impact on farmland, and it’s true that Spain took steps to do that. And Sheehan, to his credit, points out that the California HSR project proposes to do the same:

In Spain, the government worked with farmers from the outset to head off such concerns, said Pedro Pérez del Campo, environmental policy director for ADIF, the government-owned company that runs the track system.

“It’s in our interest to make it easier for the farmers,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. Pérez del Campo said the first priority is to make sure that farmers whose properties are divided by the tracks can still reach the other side of their land.

“About every 500 meters, there is the ability to pass from one side of the rail to the other,” he said. “We are obligated that if the rails were to cross your property, we have to give you the ability to cross.”

That access doesn’t come cheap. To prevent collisions, bridges and tunnels carry roads over or under the line. There are no at-grade crossings. Likewise, California proposes to build its high-speed line without at-grade crossings but with bridges and underpasses for selected roads and streets. It’s not clear yet how many crossings would be provided for farms in the Central Valley.

If building a bridge or tunnel for a farmer is too complicated, Pérez del Campo said, it can be cheaper for ADIF to pay more than the land is worth to simply buy the remnant parcel from the owner. That eliminates the need for the farmer to cross.

Pérez del Campo was adamant that the train system hasn’t hurt farming: ‘Especially in the wine industry, which is very important to Spain’s economy, if there were an issue, we would know by now.

If I were Sheehan’s editor at the Bee, I’d suggest that his next article be a follow-up on this very topic, examining exactly how it is that California HSR is going to be engineered and designed to address farmland impacts. He might even seek out the truth and determine whether the criticisms coming from Kings County farmers are accurate. He would also do well to examine the fact that addressing the impacts to farmers increases the cost of building the system, setting up a conflict between the two groups of HSR critics – the NIMBY types (I include farmers here) and the people who believe against all evidence that spending money in a recession is somehow a bad thing.

Sheehan also discussed briefly the impact of high speed rail on cities. Here again he missed a rather important point of comparison: that the way Spain built its high speed lines in urban areas is very, very similar to how California plans to build its high speed rail:

In larger Spanish cities such as Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Cordova and Barcelona, stations for high-speed trains are in already-developed central-city commercial districts, often near existing train stations to minimize disruptions. In Barcelona, preservationists’ fears about a train tunnel under the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia forced extensive and expensive engineering measures to avoid damaging the iconic church.

Merchants doing business near the stations generally say high-speed rail is good for commerce, even when they are unsure if it has directly helped their own stores and restaurants.

Stations for California HSR will also be in already-developed central-city commercial districts. In fact, they will in most cases be built as part of existing train stations, in order to minimize disruptions. And the results are positive. Merchants tend to be a fussy bunch, whether they’re in North America or Europe, highly sensitive to perceived impacts on their business. If they are convinced that HSR is good for their bottom line, then there’s a good chance they’re right. If it wasn’t good, they would not be shy about saying so.

One of the key discussions in the article is HSR’s impact on smaller mid-line cities. I criticized Sheehan last week for not discussing that in his first article, so it’s good that he covers the topic in the new article. However, Sheehan only talked to critics of HSR’s impact on smaller cities, and did not speak to those who believe its impact to be positive, meaning Sheehan doesn’t tell his readers that there are indeed a lot of people who believe HSR is a benefit to the smaller mid-line cities:

In Ciudad Real, a city of 75,000 people about 100 miles south of Madrid, hotel beds and hotel stays more than doubled between 1990 and 2007. The city’s population also grew at a much faster rate than the rest of Spain during the same period.

Renfe, the government-owned company that operates the AVE trains, said high-speed trains have made it easier for students and professors to commute to Ciudad Real’s University of Castilla-La Mancha and for people in the town to commute daily to Madrid for work….

But academic researchers, including Chris Nash of England’s University of Leeds, say it’s difficult to measure the effects of high-speed rail on commerce, employment, and the economies of cities and regions. Most of Spain’s high-speed lines are too new to have made a significant mark. And experts are still looking for ways to distinguish the influence of high-speed trains from other economic factors–especially when stations are built in already-established city centers.

“The issue of wider economic benefits remains one of the hardest to tackle,” Nash wrote in a 2009 International Transport Forum article. “Such benefits could be significant, but vary significantly from case to case, so an in-depth study of each case is required.”

This is a fair conclusion, but Sheehan goes further to spin HSR’s impact as being negative:

[Germà] Bel, a professor of political economics at the University of Barcelona, said it’s much more likely that smaller cities along the line between Madrid and the larger destinations suffer economically because most of the travel and commerce by residents flows to the big cities.

“High-speed rail encourages the centralization of activities in the large hubs, especially in the services sector,” Bel wrote in a new book on infrastructure economics to be published this year. “The primary hubs of the network–more dynamic–can benefit at the expense of intermediary cities, which are usually the big losers of high-speed rail. For this reason, the efforts by many smaller-sized cities to get high-speed rail stations can be unfruitful and even counterproductive.”

Bel simplified his ideas in an interview at his university office. “If you are the small guy, you get sucked. Most of the trips go to the big hubs, not to the small cities,” he said.

Not everybody in Spain shares this bleak assessment. In 2009 the Wall Street Journal looked at Ciudad Real and heard much more positive things about the impact of high speed rail:

Perhaps the most striking example is Ciudad Real, a scrappy town 120 miles south of Madrid in Castilla-La Mancha which, [José María Ureña, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Castilla-La Mancha] 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.”

Those are pretty important impacts to Ciudad Real that Sheehan didn’t examine. Instead, following Bel’s lead, Sheehan argues that Fresno might not thrive with high speed rail:

“If you want to go to San Francisco for a theater performance or a concert, you could jump on the train and be back that night,” he said. “And more people will start coming here. The Save Mart Center (at CSU Fresno) is one of the most-used concert venues on the West Coast these days. People will be coming to Fresno to do stuff.”

But Bel has his doubts. “In California, nobody in San Francisco is going to travel to Fresno to buy things,” he said. “From time to time, somebody from Los Angeles will travel to Bakersfield. But they will not be going every weekend to Bakersfield.”

Bel may be doubtful, but other urban scholars like Richard Florida argue that HSR is essential for bringing places like Fresno into the urban clusters, much like freeways brought places like Santa Clara County into the San Francisco urban cluster 50-60 years ago:

Instead of further encouraging the growth of an auto-housing-suburban complex, the government should promote those forces that are subtly causing the shift away from it. Chief among these are the creation of inter-connected mega-regions, like the Boston-Washington corridor and the Char-lanta region (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh Durham) and ten or so more across the United States. Concentration and clustering are the underlying motor forces of real economic development. 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.

In fact, the key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic of 1873 and long downturn was forged by the transition from an agricultural nation to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs, which again intensified and expanded our use of space. Renewed prosperity hinges on the rise of yet another even more massive and more intensive geographic pattern—the mega-region. These new geographic entities are larger than the sum of their parts; they not only produce but consume, spurring further demand….

That means high-speed rail, which is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns. If the government is truly looking for a shovel-ready infrastructure project to invest in that will create short-term jobs across the country while laying a foundation for lasting prosperity, high-speed rail works perfectly. It is central to the redevelopment of cities and the growth of mega-regions and will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars. High-speed rail may be our best hope for revitalizing the once-great industrial cities of the Great Lakes. By connecting declining places to thriving ones—Milwaukee and Detroit to Chicago, Buffalo to Toronto—it will greatly expand the economic options and opportunities available to their residents. And by providing the connective fibers within and between America’s emerging mega-regions, it will allow them to function as truly integrated economic units.

Sheehan doesn’t discuss this, in part because these ideas are taboo for modern American journalism. Why that’s the case isn’t exactly clear. Perhaps it’s because many journalists see themselves as defenders of the status quo. Or maybe it’s because the average age of a newspaper reader is 55, and many (though thankfully not all) people of that age are currently among the most resistant to change in America. Whatever the case, the notion that HSR can and has brought a lot of benefits, and that new ways of arranging the state’s urban and economic geography are necessary for future prosperity, are just not looked on very kindly by reporters these days.

In fact, a dose of common sense can show us why Ciudad Real’s success is likely to translate to Fresno and Bakersfield. HSR has turned Ciudad Real into three things: a bedroom city for Madrid, a university hub, and a desirable place to do business. By being located an hour or so away from the Bay Area (in Fresno’s case) and LA (in Bakersfield’s case) via HSR, those San Joaquin Valley cities are poised to repeat all three of Ciudad Real’s successes.

Both cities have lower property values than the coastal metropolises, which will prove attractive to workers in the coming decades. After all, we saw the concept of the Valley serving as bedroom community to the coast proven during the ’00s when Stockton, Tracy and Manteca became bedroom communities for the Bay Area. The rising price of oil stopped that from continuing and helped touch off the wave of foreclosures in that area. But HSR, powered by electricity, has more stable and predictable operating costs, making it easier to support commuters.

Both Fresno and Bakersfield already have universities, but HSR can make those universities even more significant as nodes of research and innovation. HSR can make those schools more attractive locations for top faculty members, as it closes the distance between the Valley and the coastal metropolises. It’s easier to recruit and keep faculty if you can explain that downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles are just an hour’s train ride away rather than a four or five hour car trip. And HSR makes it easier for top students to be willing to live in the Valley, as they would much more easily be able to visit family and friends on the coasts. Of course, it’s also possible, perhaps likely, that HSR would transform Fresno and Bakersfield and make them more desirable centers of culture and social activity.

Finally, it makes sense that HSR would play a big role in attracting businesses to Fresno and Bakersfield. Land values are cheaper there, and so are salaries. A startup based in San José or LA could rent factory or industrial space in the Valley at an affordable rate and employ local workers much more easily than they could now, since HSR closes the temporal and spatial gaps that currently keep coastal and inland metropolises apart.

There’s no guarantee that any of those things will happen, of course. But the case of Ciudad Real shows they are plausible. Nobody expects Bay Area residents to get their fashions in Fresno rather than in Union Square. Fresno, however, could be a place where they take classes, start a business, or maybe even purchase a home.

So while I’m glad that Sheehan touched on the Ciudad Real story, it’s also unfortunate that he did so in an incomplete and uneven way, without showing the full story or publishing what the supporters have to say about the example.

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.

So here’s a heads-up for staff and public officials at cities, counties and any other government agencies involved in construction projects: If you’re measuring job-years, say job-years. If you want to talk about jobs, then translate your job-year statistics before making public pronouncements. High-speed rail’s 1 million job estimate shrank under Mercury News reporter Mike Rosenberg’s scrutiny to about 60,000, once he’d parsed the methods, and the authority’s credibility, already shaky, took another plunge.

Watchdogs need to be on the alert, particularly when the public or legislators are going to vote on projects based in part on creating jobs.

Here’s my response: who cares?

Seriously. Why is this even an issue? 1 million job-years, 60,000 jobs, it’s a non-issue that obscures the fact that HSR will provide a badly-needed economic stimulus to the state. Maybe if California were functioning at full employment this might be a useful exercise. But with unemployment still above 11%, it’s absurd. The Authority was clear that it was speaking in “job-years” and while that term doesn’t really make sense to anyone but bureaucrats, it is a legitimate concept, as the Mercury News editorial notes:

Job-years is an excellent tool to calculate the amount of work needed to complete a project. A job-year is one year of work for one person; a new construction job that lasts five years is five job-years. It is a more precise measure because an individual job may last for six months or a year or forever.

So the Authority was using a more precise measurement, but because that number was far larger than another measurement, the anti-HSR Bay Area News Group paper had to attack it in order to make the Authority look bad:

In a weak economy like today’s, construction jobs are a factor to consider for projects like stadiums and transit systems. But the main consideration has to be the long-term value to the community, once construction is finished. What’s especially unfortunate about high-speed rail is that the real number of likely jobs, some 60,000, is substantial. Only because 1 million were touted is the rail authority’s credibility further damaged.

The only people who believe the Authority’s credibility is “damaged” by using what the Mercury News termed a “more precise measure” is the Mercury News. Most normal people don’t care. They understand that the jobs are “substantial.” More importantly, they understand that HSR provides clear long-term value to the community in the form of the ability to affordably and quickly travel from Santa Clara County to the other major metropolises of the state without having to depend on volatile oil prices.

Still, it’s worth continuing to push back against the Mercury News’ silly arguments. Writing at Fox and Hounds Daily, Michael Bernick, a former director of the California Employment Development Department defends the Authority’s approach to measuring jobs:

Recently, I reviewed ten projections associated with a range of infrastructure investments in California and the United States. The projections varied widely in the number and types of job years estimated for each $1 billion spent in investment. Some of this variance was due to the different types of infrastructure (water, transit, highway), and some was due to whether the jobs were in the region, state or nation. Yet even controlling for these factors, the estimates for direct construction jobs, indirect jobs (i.e. suppliers) and induced jobs (jobs created as project expenditures spread throughout the economy) yielded varied estimates for job years per dollar spent.

The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) estimates that the high speed rail construction will generate 6600 construction job years for each $1 billion spent. This falls roughly in the middle of the projections. Similarly, the CHSRA estimates that the project will create around 13,400 indirect and induced job years per $1 billion—which falls also around the middle of projections.

Bernick points out that the 2012 Business Plan was not always consistent, sometimes referring to “jobs” instead of “job-years” but that this small error can be corrected in the next revision. He also provides some good analysis of the impact of the jobs that the Central Valley project will create:

Using the estimate of 6600 construction job years per billion, the Central Valley Initial Operating Section (IOS) priced at $5.8 billion will create roughly 38,280 job years for construction-related direct employment. As the IOS will be built over a 5 year period, the number of workers employed at any time will fluctuate as the works ramps up and down. On average, using the Authority estimates, the IOS will be employing roughly 7000 workers at any time.

This employment will by no means “solve” California’s 11.3% current unemployment rate. However, two observations might be put forward on IOS employment impacts.

First, the number of these construction jobs dwarfs the construction jobs on all other highway and transit projects in California. Most of our highway and transit projects, even the larger ones, generate less than a hundred workers at any time; only a few projects even reach over a hundred workers at any time. High speed rail will generate more construction jobs than the current highway and transit projects in the Central Valley and nearby areas combined. The impacts will be greatest as the jobs can be targeted at construction workers in the Central Valley—where building trades unemployment has been over 25%-30% for the past few years.

This is particularly important given that Central Valley Republicans like Jeff Denham, Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy have been trying to argue that the HSR money should go to freeway projects in the Valley instead. What Bernick points out is that HSR will create more jobs for the money than a freeway project would. And of course, HSR would cover its own operating costs, unlike a freeway, as well as not contribute to pollution, traffic, sprawl, and fossil fuel dependence.

Second, even more than the direct employment, if the Authority’s Small Business Plan currently under consideration is properly structured, the Central Valley economy will benefit from developing an expertise in high speed rail construction. The Central Valley segment is the first segment to be built in the United States. Businesses, including environmental, design, and construction management—that work on this first segment will be positioned for work on other segments in California and throughout the country, possibly the world.

In other words, the Central Valley would get to develop a high speed rail industry, helping to diversify the region’s economy. That’s a significant boost too, especially given the region’s ongoing and severe economic woes.

The Mercury News doesn’t seem to care much about this, focusing instead on a distinction its own editorial seems to acknowledge is small, to attack the high speed rail project for using a metric the Mercury News admitted was actually more precise.

I’m not sure what their approach adds to the discussion in California over high speed rail, jobs, and stimulus. But it does reveal a disturbing belief among the Mercury News editorial writers that playing “gotcha!” is somehow more important than helping the state to economic recovery.

California has already won about $4 billion of that stimulus money, and combined with the voter-approved Prop 1A money will be enough to get construction started on the Initial Construction Segment in the Central Valley, connecting Fresno and Bakersfield.

That is, if the state legislature agrees to release the Prop 1A funds. That will be, by far, the top battle California high speed rail supporters will have to fight in 2012. A coalition of people who share an opposition to creating jobs and to doing anything that might move California away from its 20th century transportation model are working hard to ensure that the legislature overturns the will of the people and blocks this funding. Even some Democrats like State Senator Alan Lowenthal would have California follow the lead of right-wing extremists like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and Florida Governor Rick Scott and reject billions in federal stimulus and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with it.

On the other hand, most California Democrats still support the project. That group is led by Governor Jerry Brown but it includes many other state legislators, as well as the once and future Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both our US Senators, and many Democratic constituency groups including the state labor federation. And of course, President Barack Obama remains a strong supporter of high speed rail. Would Democrats in the legislature really deal Obama a high-profile blow mere months before he is up for re-election? I have a very hard time imagining they would do that. (Including Sen. Lowenthal, who will be running for a seat in Congress this year.)

Still, HSR advocates will need to step up and work hard to provide public pressure and mobilize support for getting construction under way. Here are some of the key issues to push forward on as the year unfolds:

• HSR construction will provide a desperately needed jobs boost to the state. The Initial Construction Segment will create over 100,000 jobs during its five year construction timeline, a figured confirmed by the Mercury News’ recent analysis. That’s a big, big jolt to California and to the Central Valley in particular. Unemployment in California is still at a sky-high 11.7% rate, with Fresno County – the heart of the ICS – suffering from a shocking 15.7% unemployment rate. It is simply irresponsible for the legislature to reject this golden opportunity to provide a massive stimulus to the state’s economy. Any legislator who proposes to defund HSR needs to explain where they will find 100,000 jobs to replace those they would be destroying.

• HSR construction does not obligate the state to anything other than building an Initial Construction Segment. Some claim that California can’t afford the potentially $98 billion cost of high speed rail – even though such claims ignore the fact that California isn’t obligated to pay a dime more than the $10 billion voters approved back in 2008. Even if no more federal money materializes, then the state would have new rail infrastructure that other passenger rail systems can use.

• The ICS would have independent utility. Let’s just come right out and say it: Ralph Vartabedian is a liar for claiming in the LA Times that the concept of Amtrak using the ICS as a fallback option is a “sham”. Amtrak has indicated it likes the idea of using that track in concept, but details still have to be ironed out. In other words, if no more HSR money ever materialized, then California would still have created 100,000 new jobs and improved Amtrak California service in the meantime. Seems sensible to me.

• Support for HSR is strong in the San Joaquin Valley. Another criticism of Vartabedian’s article was its intellectually dishonest refusal to mention the numerous local governments that support the project after he mentioned that some local governments oppose it. Supporters include the city of Fresno and Fresno County, the city of Merced and Merced County, the city of Visalia and Tulare County. And there are a lot of HSR supporters in Hanford and Kings County who have been unfortunately shouted down. A lot of people in the Valley want this train and want these jobs.

• Californians embrace innovation and solve problems. Let’s remember the reason why Californians voted for high speed rail in the first place. A post from November 2011 lays out the case well, with plenty of citations and links.

The basic pitch: 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.

Despite what people like Alan Lowenthal, Doug LaMalfa, Elizabeth Alexis, and Gary Patton say, the legislature is still inclined to want to get HSR construction under way. And they will get a great deal of behind the scenes political pressure from higher ups to do so. But that isn’t sufficient. The public has to be mobilized too. And that’s the job of HSR advocates in 2012: to rally the public to push the legislature to get high speed rail under construction, as planned, this year.

California faces nothing less than a severe jobs crisis. That doesn’t mean any old job is a good job. But when you have an opportunity to create tens of thousands of jobs per year while building sustainable infrastructure that can save money and spur new growth for the rest of the century, you would be crazy to dismiss it. California didn’t dismiss those opportunities during the Great Depression, building dams and bridges that put people to work immediately and still help create economic value 75 years later.

But some in the media believe we should indeed dismiss these opportunities. Concerned more with breaking a story than with playing a meaningful role in building a better California, they prefer to find reasons to not do something useful to address unemployment.

And so you get Mike Rosenberg’s attack on high speed rail jobs in today’s San Jose Mercury News:

Though California’s high-speed train faces an intensifying backlash over its $99 billion price tag, political leaders from Washington to Sacramento justify the cost by touting another huge number: 1 million jobs the rail line is supposed to create.

But like so many of the promises made to voters who approved the bullet train, those job estimates appear too good to be true.

A review by this newspaper found the railroad would create only 20,000 to 60,000 jobs during an average year and employ only a few thousand people permanently if it’s built.

My reaction? So what! I have been consistent on this blog in saying that whether HSR creates 20,000 jobs or 1 million jobs, it’s still a good idea and still would provide a badly needed economic boost to the state of California.

First off, 20,000 to 60,000 jobs a year is a very significant number. Rosenberg dismisses it (though one wonders how he’ll feel the next time the Bay Area News Group conducts another round of layoffs) but we can see just how big that number is by making some comparisons.

Apple Computer, based in the Mercury News’ backyard, employs 60,000 employees. About 10,000 are in Cupertino, but looking at their overall workforce, Rosenberg is saying HSR could create the equivalent of Apple Computer once every year and that’s somehow a bad thing.

Microsoft employs 55,000 people in the USA, most of them in Washington State but some of them in Silicon Valley.

Cisco employes 17,000 workers in Santa Clara County, the county itself employs 15,000, and Kaiser Permanente employs 13,000.

If any one of those companies closed or left the state it would be a blow to the economy. So for Rosenberg to dismiss 20,000 to 60,000 jobs per year is just an absurd thing to do, suggesting he is deeply out of touch with the tough economic conditions many Californians face right now.

But there are specific problems with Rosenberg’s analysis that deserve to be called out too.

But state leaders, it turns out, quietly beefed up employment estimates. First, they counted every year of work as a separate job. So if one person were to work 10 years, that would count as 10 jobs. Next, they figured outside companies, such as restaurants and retailers, would hire two new people for every single construction worker.

Grand total: 20,000 construction workers and 40,000 “spin-off” employees — each working the entire 22-year project — would count as more than 1 million jobs.

As it turns out, there really are secondary job growth effects of employing people on major projects. Look back up at that list of Santa Clara County employers. Cisco, Kaiser, Apple, and government workers all have to eat somewhere. They all have to have their cars serviced. They all have to buy clothes. Rosenberg is implying that the notion that one job doesn’t create the conditions for another job, and that’s just denying reality.

More importantly, I’m not entirely clear what the difference is between Rosenberg’s analysis and what the CHSRA is saying. Let’s go back to his lede:

A review by this newspaper found the railroad would create only 20,000 to 60,000 jobs during an average year and employ only a few thousand people permanently if it’s built.

Notice he doesn’t say what an “average year” is. If the project is 22 years long, and say 50,000 jobs per year are created, well, you’re at 1.1 million.

Just as important as what Rosenberg said is what he left out of his analysis. Nowhere in his article does he discuss the green dividend – the economic activity created by the money saved on oil purchases. As people buy less oil, they have more money available for other purchases thereby supporting new growth. In Portland the annual green dividend is estimated at $2.6 billion.

The same holds true for high speed rail. In 2010 the US Conference of Mayors estimated that HSR would generate $10 billion in green dividend for the Los Angeles area alone – statewide it could be double that amount. That includes new jobs.

As to long-term job creation, Rosenberg appears skeptical of that too. But here again, he just isn’t paying attention to the realities around us. 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.

Rosenberg frets about job losses that might stem from construction:

What’s more, officials have not taken into account the potential job losses from the railroad, which will displace many businesses along the train route, including several along the Caltrain corridor between San Francisco and San Jose.

This is pretty fundamentally misleading. First, the businesses that are displaced don’t die out. They’re bought out and can relocate to continue operating. More importantly, there’s no analysis at all that suggests any jobs lost to construction would come anywhere close to even 20,000 a year. Rosenberg is just idly speculating here.

And he doesn’t discuss the other drags on the economy that come from relying too much on oil to get around. After all, the present economic crisis – which Rosenberg barely mentions – is the product of reliance on oil at a time when its price continues to rise.

So what Rosenberg has done is the typical move of a contemporary reporter. Instead of actually talk about the project in context, he treats high speed rail as an isolated thing disconnected from the rest of the economy and from our other natural resources. He assumes that the status quo is just fine, that if we don’t build HSR we won’t have any other costs or threats to jobs.

This is the default perspective of most modern American journalists. And it is corroding our society. Journalists shouldn’t act as boosters. But they also have a responsibility to help pull this country out of its present crisis. Instead journalists are trained to break stories by finding incidents of government being misleading, rather than breaking stories by finding examples of fundamental problems being ignored. This is particularly true when it comes to green infrastructure, which is so important to our economic future. It’s as if journalists are crabs in a barrel, pulling back down anyone who tries to climb out.

Even if Rosenberg wants to focus on job projections, he did so in a biased way, excluding important other facts and analysis that challenge the skeptical conclusions he drew.

Rosenberg is a smart reporter, so it’s depressing to see once again a journalist throw their integrity to the winds in order to try and make the high speed rail project look bad. It’s unfortunate that he chose that approach. But Californians have rejected these kinds of arguments before, and they should continue to do so now.

A generation later, legislators of both parties did it again. This time the economy was booming and money was no problem, but still our leaders recognized that the California Aqueduct, the freeways, and schools and universities were essential to current and future prosperity.

We’re living on the benefits of those investments. But it is time to make new ones, for a new century, to face new challenges, and get us out of a new crisis. Sadly, the present leadership in the legislature – especially the Senate – appears to want to reject the proven path California took in the 20th century. Rather than spend money to create jobs and lasting economic value through new infrastructure, several Senate Democrats are now sounding just like right-wing Republicans in their attacks on the high speed rail project:

“The Field Poll confirmed what I already had come to believe: The public patience for this project is about exhausted,” said state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

DeSaulnier said he has long supported the bullet train service as a way to fight congestion and greenhouse gases.

But he said Tuesday that he could turn against the project unless the California High Speed Rail Authority soon can answer questions about spiraling costs and uncertainty over federal and private funding for the project.

“I think it’s time to fish or cut bait with this project,” he said. “It may be too late.”

DeSaulnier, who I have had a lot of respect for, is clearly out to lunch on this one. He’s going to let one poll that asked a limited question about HSR and therefore isn’t actually a good guide to public opinion on the subject convince him to give up on building California’s future?

That’s an absurd attitude to take. It’s defeatist. And many of the infrastructure projects California now enjoys faced similar problems. After voters approved the Golden Gate Bridge bonds in November 1930, the financial crisis nearly made it impossible to sell the bonds. Ultimately the federal government worked out a deal to help back the bonds, and construction got under way by 1933, with the project completed by 1937. California didn’t quit when the project got difficult. They worked hard to find solutions and got it done.

DeSaulnier, by contrast, appears ready to just give up. It makes no sense.

Especially when so much of California’s hopes at economic recovery are riding on this project. The Central Valley initial construction segment could create over 10,000 construction jobs in the coming years. There is nothing else on the horizon to produce nearly that many jobs in this state, especially in one of the parts of the state where unemployment is the highest. DeSaulnier is reckless to just toss those jobs to the wind.

Particularly since California isn’t actually risking anything by moving ahead with that segment. Prop 1A is quite clear that $9 billion in bonds are all that are authorized, and can only be spent on a 1:1 match with federal funds. If no more federal funds come, then no more state money is spent. The worst possible outcome is a bunch of people are paid good money to build unfinished rail infrastructure in the Valley and we call it a day. Even that would be a big stimulus for the Valley and the state.

And yet we know that outcome isn’t very likely. The federal funding picture isn’t very bright right now, but that is likely to change in the next few years. If not, again, the state isn’t on the hook for anything else, so there’s no risk but lots of potential rewards.

California’s present crisis is the product of legislators who weren’t willing any longer to do what it took to produce a stable, lasting prosperity. Rather than take their cues from Republicans and Democrats of the ’30s, the ’50s, and the ’60s, they began to simply hide from their obligations and responsibilities. The state’s education system is in crisis, unemployment is sky-high, poverty is rising, and because legislators wouldn’t do enough to reduce dependence on oil, the state is in a lasting economic slump.

High speed rail is one way to help get out of it, by following a proven path of using infrastructure to provide short-term stimulus and long-term value. Democrats in Sacramento should know as well as anyone the need to do this and benefits it brings. I am pretty damn sure Mark DeSaulnier knows better than to just give up on California’s future. And yet he might just do it all because one of unfavorable poll? That’s a pretty damning indictment of the state legislature’s ability and willingness to do what it takes to fix California.

The problem is that this is not what a majority of the population of California actually believes. In November 2008, as the recession was already under way and two months after the global financial system nearly collapsed, 52% of voters approved spending $10 billion in state bond money on the high speed rail project.

Two years later, voters gave the strongly pro-HSR Jerry Brown a 13 point victory over Meg Whitman. Whitman pledged to slash the state workforce by 40,000 employees, whereas Brown didn’t make any commitments of the sort at all. And yet Whitman still lost by a wide margin.

Today Governor Brown announced a plan to raise taxes on the rich to help close the state’s budget deficit. Brown’s proposal is just one of several circulating around California right now to close the deficit by increasing taxes.

What this means is that Californians have rejected austerity. They no longer believe that simply cutting budgets and spending will produce recovery or even a society that provides a good quality of life. They know now that new revenue is needed to restore the California Dream. It’s now just a question of which revenue sources to use.

That’s a bad sign for HSR opponents. If Californians are turning against austerity, then it means that the political will still exists to build high speed rail. It’s the same logic as in the Great Depression, when California built expensive bridges and dams and aqueducts despite the financial problems the state faced. In fact, California built those things because of the problems we faced at the time. Realizing the need for short-term jobs and for infrastructure that could support long-term economic activity, Californians built new infrastructure that nearly 80 years later is still helping create jobs and support economic activity.

For California to not build high speed rail now could save a few billion in the near future. But at what long-term cost? Estimates have placed the cost of expanding freeways and airports at $170 billion. The annual green dividend of the HSR project for LA alone could be up to $10 billion – meaning it would take just ten years for California to recover all the construction costs of HSR from economic activity in just Southern California. That doesn’t include activity in the rest of the state, and doesn’t include the fact that California would only pay part of the HSR cost, with the federal government and private funders picking up the rest.

California would be leaving more than $100 billion in savings on the table if it abandoned the high speed rail project. Yet that is precisely what HSR critics want us to do, because building the trains could cause short-term inconvenience to a few and because it would not be a cheap thing to do.

California did not become great by being cheap. It did not become prosperous by neglecting infrastructure. It did not become a leader by clinging to a failed status quo.

Yet HSR critics and NIMBYs would have us do exactly those things. Californians once before saw through that nonsense and voted for the HSR project. I am confident they would do so again if asked.

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.

California, like the rest of the country, stands at a crossroads. Either we can continue forward as before, down a path that has produced record unemployment and massive inequality – or we can do the hard and sometimes costly work of investing in and building a better future.

Let’s not kid ourselves about the crisis we face. 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:

Looking at those stats, it’s really difficult to imagine why anyone would prefer the status quo, why anyone would argue against strong measures to produce economic recovery. Unfortunately, too many people became convinced that the last 30 years of boom and bust – where recessions appear to have come and gone like a fierce winter storm – are the norm. After three years of Depression, it ought to be clear that recovery isn’t just magically going to happen. We have to make significant changes to the way we do things in this state and this country. The status quo is unacceptable.

One reason we’re in this mess is that since about 1980, California and the United States generally refused to invest in infrastructure and transportation. When we did, we usually poured good money after bad on expanding freeways, with a pittance going to rail. Even that meager investment is showing results, with Amtrak California setting new ridership records.

But we don’t usually do more of it because we are afraid of spending money. When a proposal comes along, the default American attitude has been to look only at the bill and ignore the benefits of what is being purchased, or even the long-term savings and benefits that the investment brings. It is a self-destructive logic that ensures no progress is ever made, a recipe for permanent depression. It is an attitude that abandons the future in order to bizarrely cling to a failed present.

California is ready for passenger rail. California is ready to invest in the future. And California is ready to build the bullet train.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what we know about the new business plan from the California High Speed Rail Authority. The projected cost is a lot higher than before. But the benefits are stronger too.

The headline is that the system can be built in sections that can operate independently – and at a profit. Under all ridership scenarios, the system turns a profit. And most importantly, by providing a sustainable way for Californians to get around the state, it begins to liberate the economy from dependence on oil, spurring significant job creation, economic growth, and new tax revenues.

The obsolete thinking would have us look only at the price tag. The sensible and accurate thinking would have us look at the entire investment, costs and benefits. And it would place at the center of the discussion the question of whether we’re willing to risk doing nothing.

Juliet Williams of the Associated Press has a good overview of the business plan, at least based on what we know so far:

The new business plan for California’s high-speed rail system shows the nation’s most ambitious state rail project could cost nearly $100 billion in inflation-adjusted funding over a 20-year construction period, according to a draft copy of the plan shared late Monday with The Associated Press.

But the plan also says the system would be profitable even at the lowest ridership estimates and wouldn’t require public operating subsidies.

The report estimates the actual cost at $98.5 billion if the route between San Francisco and Anaheim is completed in 2033. The plan assumes private investment will account for roughly 20 percent of the total cost, with much of the rest coming from additional borrowing.

Let’s take a closer look at the ridership and profitability questions, since those are the most important:

The new business plan says the system will be built in sections than can operate independently and make money, even if no more track were ever built, [California High Speed Rail Authority Board Member Dan] Richard said. Planners hope each new section will generate momentum — and private investment — to complete subsequent sections.

The business plan also says the high-speed rail system will use existing rail lines to carry passengers on the final legs into San Francisco and the Los Angeles basin. Doing so instead of building new high-speed lines not only saves money but makes the project more politically palatable by reducing neighborhood objections….

Even under the most conservative ridership projections, the report said the rail system would have a net operating profit.

It pegs ridership at anywhere from 7.4 million to 10.8 million riders by 2025 for an initial southbound phase. Even at low ridership projections, the project would have a net operating profit of $352 million a year, the report said.

In other words, rather than trying to come up with the entire project cost all at once, the business plan would leverage available public and private funding to build a segment at a time. Each segment would generate ridership, profit, and momentum to continue funding the construction of additional segments. That’s the model that has been used, with some variations, in France and Spain to build their extensive rail networks.

HSR critics and opponents will immediately claim those ridership and profitability questions aren’t credible. But those arguments are completely baseless, fly in the face of the available evidence, and should simply not be taken seriously. Remember that the independent peer review found the HSR ridership numbers to be sound. And keep in mind that around the globe HSR turns a profit – in Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, even the Amtrak Acela. And California compares favorably to those globally successful routes.

More importantly, the business plan includes a hedge. If for some reason the other segments aren’t funded, that’s fine – the segments that do get built can be independently operated, and can be done so at a profit.

Williams’ article didn’t mention the benefits of HSR, but we know them to be considerable. HSR is a boon to mid-line cities 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.

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.

It also will be a jobs machine:

The first 130-mile segment would create about 100,000 jobs in the hard-hit Central Valley, according to the report.

Some people will sneer at that number and others will call it overstated. Even if the total number of jobs created is just a tenth of that projected total, however, that’s 10,000 jobs in a region with unemployment hovering around 15%. Only a cruel elitist would dismiss the huge and desperately needed impact of those numbers.

Of course, some people will focus only on the possible $98 billion cost of connecting San Francisco to Anaheim. That’s not cheap. But it IS cheaper than the alternatives, a point that HSR critics and opponents will never, ever acknowledge, and a point that even the media rarely admits. Which is why Juliet Williams deserves a ton of credit for making that point in her article:

The report notes that while the $98.5 billion tab seems high, California’s growing population would otherwise require about $170 billion in new infrastructure, such as freeways and airport runways.

And that $170 billion cost is just for construction. We know that freeways do not generate a profit. They are massively subsidized, and the cost to use them is soaring – just scroll back up to the top of this post and look again at the gas price chart. That chart is predictive – in 2009 Deutsche Bank came out with this projection of where gas prices are headed:

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.

This process worsens with economic recovery. During the worst recession in 60 years, gas prices never fell below $3/gal in California for any significant period of time. As the economy recovers and gas demand rises, so too will the price. $5 gas is something we WILL see within the first half of this decade.

The solution is obvious: we have to build alternatives to driving. Californians understand this very well, which is why they not only approved $10 billion in high speed rail funding, but also why 2/3 of voters in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Sonoma and Marin counties voted to tax themselves to expand their passenger rail systems.

(Some might point to electric vehicles – but even if those were widely adopted, the cost of owning a car is still high, and rising population means freeways will still be jammed. Further, it’s still impractical and undesirable to spend 6 hours in a car driving from SF to LA, disconnected from one’s digital devices and from the global economy.)

Oh, and what does Governor Jerry Brown think of all this?

Late Monday, Brown issued a statement saying the first section in the Central Valley will create jobs “at a time when we really need them.” He also noted that a high-speed rail line will accommodate the state’s population growth “without the huge expense and intractable problems of massive highway and airport expansion.”

Of course, had California listened to Jerry Brown in 1982 we might already have HSR from LA to San Diego, and could have been well along the way of building a statewide network. Hell, that statewide network could have been completed by now. Instead California doubled down on freeways and oil, helping to create the present economic crisis.

The question California has to ask itself as it looks at this project isn’t whether $98 billion is too much money. The question is “can we afford not to do this?”

If we are going to give up on our future and just accept a long-term Depression, then yeah, let’s run away screaming at a bigger cost estimate. But if we are going to embrace our future and build something better, a state where we can live affordably and travel sustainably, then let’s figure out how to make it happen. The business plan, whose details we will see for ourselves tomorrow, shows us how to get there.

I’m still as excited as ever by the California high speed rail project. And I’m still confident in its success. I hope you are too

High speed rail has the potential to transform the San Joaquin Valley from a region dependent on agriculture alone to a diverse and prosperous place with a wide range of jobs, tied into the global economy by having a fast and affordable connection to the all-important coastal economic engines.

Others are beginning to make the same point. As Fresno Bee columnist Bill McEwen explains, the Valley has to be willing to take some risks if it is to have any hope of escaping what is an economic depression:

“I see a huge future for high-speed rail. It’s great that the first link that’s going to get built in California is between Fresno and Bakersfield,” says [Mary] O’Hara-Devereaux, keynote speaker at today’s Fresno County Economic Development Corp. annual report luncheon.

Why then is high-speed rail so divisive that polite folks don’t discuss it around the dinner table?

“There is always a lot of controversy around transportation shifts,” O’Hara-Devereaux says.

O’Hara-Devereaux, founder and chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Global Foresight, says that she’s aware of the Valley’s steep economic challenges. But she is of the opinion that the region can prosper by diversifying its economy, continuing to be a world leader in agriculture and forming partnerships with top academic institutions.

“The San Joaquin Valley has struggled and lagged behind other areas in California,” O’Hara-Devereaux says. “But I’m not pessimistic about the future. A lot of it depends on not getting lost in familiar territory and stuck in mindsets.

And that’s exactly where HSR opponents and critics are – lost in familiar territory and stuck in a 20th century mindset where people will only ever want to drive.

We’ve seen around the world that HSR provides a boon to mid-line cities who are suddenly able to attract talent and capital from the major metros that become just an hour’s train ride away. Fresno and Bakersfield are poised to become the next Ciudad Real or Zaragoza. The freeway turned San José from an orchard town to the center of a global industry. HSR can turn Fresno into an important part of the 21st century economy.

After all, HSR allows the global economy to tap into the resources the Valley currently has:

O’Hara-Devereaux’s crystal ball also includes this possibility: a shift in overseas manufacturing jobs to the low-cost Valley.

“There’s a play in strategically thinking about how you bring more manufacturing,”she says. “It has to be done in a comprehensive manner, so you’re also making the investments in education and training. Almost all manufacturing is going to be more high-tech, so you’re going to need more skills.”

The Valley is low-cost, but it’s also geographically isolated. In the ’00s boom that isolation was temporarily overcome when the Bay Area began spilling over into San Joaquin County, but the end of cheap gas stopped that and turned Stockton into one of the most depressed housing markets in the country. But that boom did prove the concept – if the Valley can be linked to the coast with the right kind of transportation, capital, jobs, and people will flock to the Valley.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone in the Valley would want to turn down that opportunity. Because HSR spurs growth within existing urban areas due to the desire to have proximity to a station, it won’t threaten most farmers. And because it will create construction jobs as well as bring jobs to the Valley and put current residents in the market for coastal jobs, it will be as beneficial to the local economy as were the canals and aqueducts of the New Deal era.

The opportunity and the rewards are too great to let a few kinks in the project hold the Valley back from what may be its best chance at escaping long-term economic malaise.