Governor Gavin Newsom wants to defeat President Donald Trump in the war of ideas. I can’t think of a better symbol than the opening of a high-speed train all the way from LA to the Bay.
Trump just pummeled high-speed rail and said he wanted to investigate the project for cost overruns (wait until he hears about the cost overruns of federal highway projects). Recently, Elon Musk admitted he created hyperloop as a ruse to try and kill HSR. Republicans turned HSR into an ideological football from the moment it was proposed. The resulting on-again, off-again funding, according to which party is in power, has severely delayed the project and jacked up the costs. Sometimes petroleum-funded Democrats are as much to blame as Republicans.
This has to stop. Newsom needs to own HSR and just get it done. That means getting serious and fully funding it, now, without waiting for help from Washington that’s never coming anyway.
As Newsom and friends are fond of pointing out, if California were a country, it’d have the sixth largest economy in the world. That puts it ahead of the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries with extensive HSR systems. Compared to those nations, California’s lumbering, infrequent diesel train system is embarrassing.
The exception to that is the newly electrified Caltrain line from San Francisco to San Jose, which is already an unqualified success. It also happens to be the first rideable part of California’s HSR project. The state must build on that initial success, with haste.
Newsom needs to bring the proverbial ball home by cobbling together a one-seat rail connection to LA as soon as possible. The biggest hurdle to that, and arguably the one that should have been addressed first, is pictured below:
That’s the Tehachapi loop, built in 1876 to allow trains to get through the mountains from the Central Valley to LA. It was a marvel of engineering in its time, but the single-track alignment, built when tunnels were constructed with pick-axes and dynamite, has trains literally looping around and over themselves to get up the gradients in the mountains. It’s still used by freight trains, but is totally inappropriate for modern passenger rail.
The planning and environmental work is already done to build high-speed rail from Bakersfield, through the Tehachapi mountains, to Palmdale. Governor Newsom needs to push to get it fully funded so building can begin. From Palmdale, passengers can transfer to the existing Metrolink alignment to get to LA while the next and final high-speed segment is built directly into Union Station. Or maybe a passenger link from the Bay Area to LA can be created even faster by extending LA Metrolink’s Antelope Valley Line train service to somewhere near the old Tehachapi depot with a temporary station to allow transfers to a high-speed train. Perhaps high-speed trains could even be towed by diesel locomotives, albeit slowly, on those old tracks into Los Angeles, providing a one-seat ride between the Bay Area and Los Angeles sooner than anyone is currently expecting.
However it’s done, the governor needs to tell Caltrans to stop spending its $20 billion annual freeway budget and put it all into building high-speed rail across the Tehachapis. And get it built as if there’s a war on, because, in an ideological sense, there is.
It may seem premature to now put so much focus on the Tehachapi Pass tracks when the Pacheco Pass alignment to San Jose isn’t even built, and the state isn’t quite yet laying tracks in the Central Valley, but this state needs to move forward everywhere all at once.
So here’s the subject for Newsom’s next press conference: announce a plan to fully fund the project from a combination of the state budget surplus, more cap n’ trade, and the Caltrans highway widening budget, with a goal of phasing in a one-seat ride from San Francisco to LA before the decade is out. It’s time for the governor and all state Democrats to support and commit to high-speed rail, providing the money and political capital to get it done.
