In October, our governor requested $4.7 billion in Federal stimulus money. This week, we learn that we've received about half of that amount, with $2.25 billion of it marked for California's much-debated high-speed rail project.
In case you've lost track, the high-speed rail project was authorized by California voters in the form of Prop 1A in the November, 2008 elections. This prop authorized taking out bonds on the order of $10 billion, which equates to $20 billion in debt over thirty years, to build high-speed rail connecting the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. The main constraint on the project as written into the proposition was a requirement for matching Federal money.
With $2.25 billion coming in, that means the High-Speed Rail Authority is now authorized to issue $2.25 billion in bonds to start work on the project. What will that get us?
If you refer back to my original analysis I estimated that the full $9 billion for high-speed rail plus full matching Federal funding would yield a high-speed rail route from San Francisco to Paso Robles. Notably, not Los Angeles. If I extend this same analysis to having just $4.5 billion total to work with, we should expect to be able to generate some 60-70 miles of track.
That's roughly the distance from San Francisco to Morgan Hill (just south of San Jose), or from Los Angeles to Oxnard or Ventura.
That's a significant state debt to take on in exchange for trying to exchange, say, the Peninsula's Caltrain rail system for a high-speed rail system on the same right of way.
Right now, I can't cleanly and quickly make my way around the entire SF Bay Area using public transit. I take Caltrain to and from work, and can exchange from Caltrain to BART or VTA and beyond, but each transfer slows the trip tremendously. It seems as if it would have been rational to seek Federal funding to support metropolitan public transit improvements, as these would in turn directly generate jobs as well as facilitating job growth by connecting commuting employees to employers they could not otherwise reasonably reach.
$2.25 billion in Federal money would buy a lot of trains and buses. Or 60 miles of high-speed rail.