We have been keeping track of the misadventures of the proposed California “bullet train” high speed railroad, that if and when built, is planned to run from San Diego to San Francisco, but which, according to its planners is getting started by blowing a few billion dollars building its first segment in the Central Valley (aka the middle of nowhere) between Bakersfield and Fresno. All along, viewing it as a transportation/engineering issue, we wrote about its problems, but it turns out that we may have been barking up the wrong tree. If today’s Los Angeles Times is to be believed, what’s afoot is a stealth attempt at doing some disguised social engineering. At first, we had trouble believeing it, but hey, why would the Times lie about something like that? See the front-page story by Ralph Vartabedian and Dan Weikel, A Collision of Visions on Bullet Train, L.A.Times, March 8, 2012 – click here.
It turns out that the high speed rail promoters’ plans “are also a means to alter the state’s social, residential and economic fabric.” According to these folks, “[t]he fast trains connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco would create new communities of high-density apartments and small homes around stations, reducing the suburbanization of California, . . .That new lifestyle would mean fewer cars and less gasoline consumption, lowering California’s contribution to global warming.”. . .”The rail system would reduce the economic and transportation isolation of the Central Valley, which would grow by 10 million or even 20 million people, according to Gov. Jerry Brown.”
Others disagree and “regard the ambitious project as a classic government overreach that will require taxpayer subsidies. But they also see something more sinister: an agenda to push people into European or Asian models of dense cities, tight apartments and reliance on state-provided transportation.”
So the proponents of this brave, new model of living, are assuming — optimistically, as Governor Brown concedes — that California will grow to 60 million people from the present 37.5 million, “with most of the growth [of some 10 million] in the agricultural heartland.”
We could go on wending our way through the various arguments pro and con, but it seems to us that California historian Kevin Starr hit the bull’s eye when he asked: “What are all of these 10 million additional people going to be doing for a living in the Central Valley?” What indeed? When California was absorbing lots of new residents they were attracted by employment opportunities in the the aerospace industry (among others) and comparatively cheap housing available to ordinary people on friendly terms. But what would attract them today, especially to the Central Valley? Besides, Californians, particularly those of the gringo persuation, are leaving California in droves. We don’t know any Californians, and can’t visualize many, who would pull up stakes and move from the higly developed Los Angeles-Orange County-Vetura County area (where, as Wille Sutton used to say, the money is) to, say, Fresno, because if they do, it’ll be only a two-hour hop on the “bullet train” to San Francisco.
We’ll just have to wait and see. We are pessimistic because we remember Jerry Brown’s last gubernatorial reign, when he cut back on freeway construction in order to worsen traffic and thereby motivate people to use public transportation. Except that there was no available public transportation equal to the task, and so he gave us gridlock instead.
Stay tuned.