California Gov. Gavin Newsom has an important update on construction of the state’s high-speed rail system, made remarkable only by what he didn’t say. And, man, did he ever not say a lot. But don’t you worry, gentle reader — I won’t take you into the weeds on this one. Let’s just have a little fun instead.
Newsom chose to make his announcement out in the field where construction is currently taking place in Wasco, “right near Shafter,” as Newsom put it, and on the very off chance that helps dial in the geography for non-Central Valley residents.
Also, as my OG blogger acquaintance Joel Pollack first noticed, “Newsom is standing in front of a stationary freight train and talking about high-speed rail.”
But enough about the optics. Let’s take a look at the announcement — handily transcribed by Yours Truly to spare you from having to watch — and see what Newsom didn’t say, and how it stacks up against reality.
Here you go, and if you like, you can form mental images of his weird hand gestures:
So I’m here in the Central Valley in Wasco, right near Shafter, and we just made an announcement of our progress here on the high-speed rail system. We’re now in the process of starting to lay track [along the] 119-mile first phase, fully funded, because of the investments we’ll make through the Cap-and-Invest program through 2045. One thousand, seven hundred people, every single day — union jobs — go to work on this project, 58 large-scale structures have been completed, 29 others underway. Ninety-nine percent of the environmental work done. All of the hard work behind us. Now we’re going to see the fruits of that. We’re going to start seeing precisely what you see here [he gestures to the stationary freight train on the track he stands next to]. Real tracks, real progress.
If you’re feeling sturdier than I am at the moment, you can watch Newsom make the announcement here.
Real tracks? Maybe, almost. Apparently, crews are finally prepared to start laying those tracks on a section that was supposed to be fully operational four or five years ago. Now they’ll maybe have that section running in the 2030-2033 timeframe, but what’s a lost decade among well-connected friends getting rich on land speculation?
Now, about those 119 miles that Newsom boasted about…
And Another Thing: Who taught Newsom to move and gesture as though his body is operated by a half-dozen tiny alien creatures who have never seen a living human being in action, and whose comms just went out?
The 119-mile stretch will provide high-speed mass transit between [check notes, shakes it off, checks notes again] the city of Madera (north of Fresno) to Poplar Ave. south of Bakersfield in Kern County. That’s a rural, agricultural corridor, and if you’re wondering about the high-speed mass transit needs between those two stations, don’t worry, because Sacramento doesn’t seem to have wondered about it at all.
To be fair, the jam-packed Madera-Poplar Ave. route is just part of a longer, 171-mile Merced-Bakersfield phase. It takes about 2.5 hours or so to drive from Merced to Bakersfield, but high-speed rail will cut that down to 90 minutes, including stops. By the time you’ve factored in getting to and from both train stations, the time savings are negligible. And you’ll have to travel on their schedule. Without massive subsidies, I don’t see how they run one train a day. With massive subsidies, maybe they’ll run two.
Also left unsaid is how California’s Cap-and-Invest program (formerly known as Cap-and-Trade) works. It’s one of those carbon tax schemes that raises prices on consumers, makes operations more difficult (or even impossible) for energy producers, and will now have $1 billion of its annual fees diverted until at least 20245 to help pay for a section of rail system that hardly anyone will use and fewer actually need.
I’d also add that high-speed rail will never actually connect Los Angeles and Sacramento. You’ll have to ride a slow-moving CalTrain or grab a bus or pray for parking just to get to the “Los Angeles” high-speed rail that will deposit you at the “San Francisco” high-speed rail, where you’ll have to repeat the CalTrain/bus/Uber process all over again.
“What do you even know about life in California Central Valley, Steve?” Well, I did for a while date a lovely young lady who lived in Sacramento, requiring more hours driving I-5 than I’d prefer to count. And more to the point, I once spent the longest week of my life at a two-day conference in Fresno.
I suppose there might have been a place or two I was even more eager to leave, and in none of those cases did I want to have to wait for a damn train, no matter how fast it goes.
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