California needs faster trains, not more freeways

By Michael Dukakis

California voters will be voting this fall on a piece of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long-range transportation infrastructure plan. A far cry from his original proposal, it reminds me of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

True, there’s some money in the package for investments in desperately needed public transit projects, and a small amount the legislature included to keep the proposed California highspeed rail plan alive. But spending billions on hundreds of miles of new or reconstructed highways — if they are ever built — won’t solve California’s transportation woes.

If there’s one thing we have learned ever since California and the nation decided to pour nearly a trillion dollars into their highway systems, it is that the number of cars always increases to fill new highways. The end result: more highway gridlock, more road rage.

The infrastructure project that ought to be getting top priority is getting the short end of the stick: a first-class high-speed rail system that connects Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose and the Central Valley to Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego, offering the same kind of service that our friends in Europe and Japan have been enjoying for years — service that could get us from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in less than three hours and from Los Angeles to San Diego in 55 minutes.

This is not a partisan issue. The California High Speed Rail Authority was created under a Republican state administration. Governors of both parties have supported it. It would take tens of thousands of cars off the freeways, save oil, help the effort to reduce global warming and have a profound impact on airport congestion. Yet the governor says that any major bond issue for the proposed high-speed rail system should be postponed indefinitely while the state attempts to build itself out of its highway mess.

Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International have been in the middle of seemingly endless battles with their surrounding communities over plans for airport expansion that would cost billions. Yet onethird of the flights out of both airports are for 350 miles or less, trips that a high-speed rail system could handle far more quickly — without costly, time-consuming connections and airport security searches.

Under the terms of the highspeed bond legislation, half of the estimated $35-billion cost of the project must be in federal matching funds. In short, for less than $20 billion in state dollars, a fraction of the governor’s proposed long-range transportation plan, Californians could have the comfort, speed and pleasure of state-of-the-art rail transportation. They would save unnecessary spending on highways that won’t work and airports that are driving us nuts.

The choice is ours: more of the same, with the same predictable results, or a 21st-century solution to a 21st-century problem. Which way, California?

Dukakis, who was governor of Massachusetts, the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate and vice chairman of Amtrak, is a visiting professor of public policy at the School of Public Affairs.