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Kevin Drum comes out against Prop 1A, the California high-speed rail initiative.
In order to be competitive, it relies heavily on a projection that the train will make the LA-SF run in about 2.5 hours. This is almost certainly a fantasy given terrain, trackage, and existing technology. It will probably be closer to 3.5 or even four hours, which would make it almost completely noncompetitive with air travel.Hrrm? I'd guess that 3.5 hours from Los Angeles to San Francisco would be extremely competitive with air travel. First, assume 7-9 hours by car, once you add traffic into the mix. A plane flight is closer to an hour-and-a-half, but you have travel to the airport (in Los Angeles, that's a good hour), security lines, waiting for the plane, travel from the airport, etc. And it's a huge hassle.In my final year at UCLA, my girlfriend lived in Santa Cruz. The drive between the two is a bit shorter than the drive to San Francisco, but not by much. I could afford to fly. After a couple tries, I didn't. Six hours in the car was far easier than four hours of air travel, not to mention trying to figure out public transportation to the airport. Similarly, I now live in DC, where I could hop on a plane for a quick flight to New York. But I always take the train or the bus, as do most folks I know. Air travel is just too much hassle, and much too pricey. Meanwhile, California's high-speed rail line is supposed to cost around $50. How could that fail to be competitive?Meanwhile, Kevin does publish some expert e-mails that make some fair-sounding points against the initiative and I'm not informed enough to offer a particularly detailed counterargument. But I basically agree with the endorsements offered by Matt Yglesias and the LA Times and the SF Chronicle and would add that building up the high speed transit infrastructure is a good in itself and we should arguably be funding projects on an almost indiscriminate basis -- particularly right now, when we need the economic stimulus of infrastructure spending. If there were indeed some better rail project that was competing with Prop 1A, I could see being for that. But 1A looks to be better than nothing, and that's actually the choice at hand.