Debate Nirvana

A project such as the high speed rail will cost a lot of money, and this money could go to better uses.

In 2008, “The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report” projected that the final cost for the complete system would be $98 billion. Later, in 2011, they eliminated certain tracks to bring the cost down to 68 billion dollars, because of public and political complaints due to the high cost. However, a research study done by Bent Flyvbjerg, a University of Oxford business professor, showed that the average high speed rail project has seen a 45 percent cost growth. Judge, that would add 30 billion dollars to the total cost, bringing it back up to 98

million dollars, and they would need to change the project even more to lower the costs. When the bill to create the HSR was passed, early estimates had the cost at 33 billion dollars, a third of what it probably will be. Already, this project has seen major cost increases, and there are probably more to come. California’s total debt, according to US Debt Clock, is 453 billion dollars, so clearly we do NOT need to add anymore to the burden we already have.

It appears that the CHSRA 2030 ridership projections are absurdly high—so much so that they could well rank among the most unrealistic projections produced for a major transport project anywhere in the world. Under a passenger-mile per route-mile standard, the CHSRA is projecting higher passenger use of the California system than is found on the Japanese and French HSR networks despite the fact that these countries have conditions that are far more favorable to the use of HSR. The CHSRA has been increasing forecasted ridership over time and has issued a Base Projection of 65.5 million intercity riders and a High Projection of 96.5 million intercity riders for 2030. The CHSRA ridership projections are considerably higher than independent figures developed for comparable California systems in Federal Railroad Administration and University of California Transportation Center at Berkeley studies. Using generous assumptions a new study by researchers at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, projects a 2030 base of 23.4 million intercity riders, 64% below the CHSRA’s base of 65.5 million intercity riders, and a 2030 high of 31.1 million intercity riders, nearly 60% below the HSRA’s high of 96.5 million. It is likely that the HSR will fall far short of its revenue projections, leading to a need for substantial additional infusions of taxpayer subsidies.

With projects as big as the high speed rail, it is hard to know how they will turn out ahead of time. Many projects have been projected to be great, but run into unexpected, costly, problems. Also, some projects don’t end up with the support and riders they would need to be successful.  According to the KCW, a Berlin transportation consulting firm, the HSR project in Germany is “not in keeping with transportation needs”. If a country has invested billions of dollars into a high speed rail, it should be able to keep up with transportation needs. California’s high speed rail is supposed to cost 68 billion dollars, 57 billion more than the German high speed rail. If the german high speed rail did not produce good results, why should we invest so much money into making something that may not make California’s money back. We are investing a lot of money into this high speed rail, so a lot of money could be lost on this project. Bart's new train cost them 484 million dollars. This train was fully automated and went from the Oakland Coliseum to the Oakland Airport. This trained was hyped up to be one of the best trains in California, but it produced underwhelming results causing Bart, a government program, to lose a lot of money. Judge, this train was much cheaper than the High Speed Rail, so why should California invest their money into a new train when recently millions of dollars were wasted on a train in California, and the new train could lose billions more.

The high speed rail won’t be completed until 2026 at the earliest, and we shouldn’t wait that long to start developing transit-oriented developments. We’ll see no return on the money spent to get it working until it opens, and although it’s cheap to build things now because of the recession, the cost of materials and labor will increase dramatically by then, which should make it increasingly more difficult to predict just how far you can make $90 billion go. Not only that, but it will take Carbon emissions to build for transporting materials and more. We can’t wait for 2026 to save the environment, but we can make things that will help us in the short run, like spending the 90 billion dollars on research for renewable energy.