Your eyes on California Government

NOV. 9, 2011

By CHRIS REED

In the past three weeks, The Los Angeles Times has lived up to its journalistic responsibilities on three occasions in its coverage of the California High-Speed Rail project.

On Oct. 23, reporter Ralph Vartabedian wrote a deeply troubling article that sported the print headline, “Bullet train plan would leave path of destruction.” It explained the immense disruption that would result if the California High-Speed Rail Authority followed through with its construction plans in the Central Valley for the initial segment of its bullet train.

He wrote, “Across the length of the Central Valley, the bullet train as drawn would destroy churches, schools, private homes, shelters for low-income people, animal processing plants, warehouses, banks, medical offices, auto parts stores, factories, farm fields, mobile home parks, apartment buildings and much else as it cuts through the richest agricultural belt in the nation and through some of the most depressed cities in California.”

The story also hinted at the Achilles’ heel, not just of the bullet train, but of the largely white, affluent rail cult in general: The brunt of their grand plans is almost always disproportionately borne by minority communities with far less clout than the green true believers with paler skin hues.

“More than 228 homes and more than a half dozen churches would be taken, many of them in low-income minority communities on [Bakersfield’s] city’s east side,” the Times noted.

On Nov. 4, Vartabedian and Dan Weikel wrote another powerful story with the print headline, “As rail panel seeks funds, dissent builds.” It laid out the escalating sense of horror in the Central Valley among residents who saw the determination of the Obama administration and the California High-Speed Rail Authority to rush to begin construction next summer, no matter what.

“The authority board sat silently Tuesday in a Sacramento hearing room as one speaker after another said the train’s construction would ruin their homes, walnut groves, dairy farms, businesses and potentially their families’ futures,” the Times explained. Evidently no rich white rail cultists turned out to explain to the terrified, benighted Central Valley folks that they were getting in the way of social and environmental justice.

‘Costly Boondoggle’

Then this past Sunday, the Times’ opinion pages printed a scathing piece, “Take this bullet train, please; California’s proposed high-speed rail project is a costly boondoggle,” by Stanford historian Richard White. He’s the  author of “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.”

In a careful deconstruction of the business plan for the project released Nov. 1, White systematically outlined its lies, wishful thinking and double-talk about funding, ridership, operating costs, fare prices and much more.

One example: the rail authority’s forecast of ridership that “will be immense — anywhere from 28.6 million to 37.1 million. This admittedly may appear realistic compared with the 90 million once promised. It is, however, not far from the 39 million projected in 2009. The agency can’t go much below this. It needs high ridership or the model for turning a profit falls apart.”

White continued, “But these kinds of projects always overestimate their ridership. Actual ridership of the BART line to San Francisco’s airport, for example, was in 2009 only 25 percent of the 2003 prediction. If California high-speed rail captured the same percentage of riders as Amtrak’s Acela does today in the Northeast corridor, an area with a long tradition of rail travel and a higher population than California, it would have about 5 million riders, not 28 million to 37 million.”

White’s conclusion: The members of the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s board “are supposed to protect the California public, but there is too much money to be made from this project to do that. They are boosters who tell us what they want us to know. They sell the Legislature short, and in this they may be right. They sell the governor short, and in this too they are probably right. They also sell the California public short. They think we are suckers.”

Times Editorial

But against this backdrop of informed reporting and incisive analysis — which paralleled reporting by the San Jose Mercury-News, California Watch and The Orange County Register — what did the editorial page of the Times do?

Incredibly, on Nov. 4, it offered an editorial, “Still on board the bullet train,” a continued embrace of high-speed rail that was alternately condescending, misleading and historically unhinged — all capped with a literally juvenile exhortation.

The fact that the train project was sold to voters in 2008 with a farrago of lies and exaggerations was treated as a minor detail. Even after acknowledging the authority’s past history of using propaganda to advance its cause, the Times’ editorial gave credence to a fresh round of preposterous claims: “[U]nlike freeways that require continual government expenditures to maintain, the train would self-sustaining. Under even the most conservative assumptions considered in the business plan, the line is expected to turn a profit,” the Times argued.

Says who? The same authority that once asserted the bullet train system would carry 117 million passengers a year — more than quadruple the 26 million passengers Amtrak carries in its 46-state system?

The blitheness about the authority’s lack of integrity was also on display when it came to political realities in Washington, D.C.

“The good news about the rail authority’s new business plan is that it’s no longer a fantasy. It lays out a sensible and politically feasible strategy for building the line in segments, starting with the 130-mile, $6 billion section from Fresno to Bakersfield slated to break ground next year, thanks to $3 billion in stimulus funds kicked in by the federal government (the other half of the money will presumably come from the state in the form of Proposition 1A bonds, assuming the Legislature approves them).”

Huh? So it’s “sensible and politically feasible” to commit to a project whose future funding is based on legislation that is highly unlikely to pass Congress and that depends on just the sort of domestic discretionary spending the congressional supercommittee is expected to target for many years to come?

But the Times’ editorialists weren’t content to ignore thousands of inconvenient, contrary details. They also went hallucinatory with their hyperbole: “[T]he train is a major public work whose value to future generations could be compared to that of the California Water Project.”

That’s a reference to the project championed by Gov. Pat Brown in the early 1960s that legendary California historian Kevin Starr referred to as “the most ambitious water storage and distribution system in the history of the human race … the fulfillment of nearly 85 years of vision and planning and local construction as California irrigated itself, metropolitanized itself, suburbanized itself, invented itself through water.”

The Times compared this to the bullet train? Who put the PCP in the Times’ water fountains?

Little Engine

It was at this point in the editorial that I began to wonder if it were written by someone who understood what a farce the bullet-train project was and was actually trying to subtly mock the boondoggle.

I felt the same way after reading the final graph and its invocation of “The Little Engine That Could.”

“It’s a gamble, and not one to be taken lightly,” the Times wrote. “But gasoline isn’t going to get any cheaper in the future and the freeways aren’t going to get less clogged. We think California can find a way to get the train built. We think it can. We think it can….”

Feel free to groan and groan and then groan some more.

The whole piece — especially the lunatic likening of the bullet train to the California Water Project — made me think about the old saw about how, if you gave a roomful of monkeys typewriters and enough time, eventually they’d produce “King Lear.”

I think they would be much more likely to write, “Still on board the bullet train.”

Tags: BART, California High-Speed Rail Authority, California Water Project, Chris Reed, Los Angeles Times, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, Ralph Vartabedian, Richard White