By Marc Albert, California reporter for Government in My Backyard

It could prove this election’s sleeper issue.

Low on the ballot and dwarfed by both the presidential race and a furious campaign to vanquish same sex marriage, a $9.95 billion bond issue promising to change forever California’s love affair with the automobile rolled to victory last week.

Called Proposition 1A, the ballot initiative came out of a 15-year state government odyssey to study and sell the idea of a Japanese-style bullet train system to voters in the nation’s most populous state.

The measure, approved by a 52-48 percent margin, enables the state to sell bonds that backers say would cover about a third of the ultimate cost. Federal funds and investors would pick up the difference, backers say.

The 800-mile electrified, grade-separated rail network would link the 13 million residents of the urbanized Los Angeles basin with the seven million people who call the San Francisco Bay Area home via trains reaching up to 220 miles per hour. It is the most ambitious public works project attempted since President Dwight Eisenhower launched the Interstate highway system in 1956.

The line would travel up the spine of California’s Central Valley, with stations in secondary cities such as Bakersfield and Fresno.  Additional branch lines serving Sacramento, the state capital, and San Diego would follow.

First conceived in the 1980s, California’s system would attempt to replicate high-speed train systems that are now ubiquitous throughout Europe and still growing in Asia. Officials have been studying the issue in earnest since the creation of a state commission in 1993.

The world’s first and most extensive system, Japan’s Shinkansen, began revenue service in 1964 and cut travel times between that country’s two biggest cities, Tokyo and Osaka, from an overnight journey to a two-and-a-half-hour blur. The Shinkansen is so popular that 16-car trains depart every ten minutes.

Here in the U.S., the success of Prop 1A comes after several failed attempts to bring high-speed trains to other regions, including a Florida project ultimately rejected by voters in 2004, a number of Texas iniatives, and a proposed high-speed line linking Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Backers of Proposition 1A made a strategic choice by pushing for a lengthy line linking the two most populous areas of the state as the initial line, rather than shorter, less ambitious routes that would more immediately serve commuters. As a statewide ballot initiative, the bet paid off in spite of the project’s estimated $32 billion price tag. California election returns show that voters in the counties where the initial segments would be built largely supported the measure, in some places overwhelmingly, while voters in rural, desert and mountainous areas in the east and north of the state tended to oppose it.

Boosters of the effort say the voters’ decision will prove historic. "This effort will improve our once-matchless transportation systems in California by delivering a high-speed train system that will cost two to three times less than expanding freeways and airports to accommodate millions of new Californians by 2030," said Quentin Kopp, Chairman of the California High Speed Rail Authority’s board of directors in a written statement. "A reliable 220-mile-per-hour electric high-speed train system will reduce our dependence on foreign oil by more than 12 million barrels per year and reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming by 12.7 billion pounds annually," he said.

Added to the $32 billion cited by the High Speed Rail Authority are radial extensions to other cities that could require a further $10-$12 billion. The Authority estimates a one-way ticket will cost $55 and claims the system will not need an operating subsidy.

The Authority plans to apply for federal matching funds to double the contributions from state taxpayers, and asserts that private investors will emerge to cover the remainder.  The state agency also makes ambitious claims for job creation, saying that 160,000 jobs will come on line during construction, with nearly half a million permanent positions after completion.

Critics contend that such massive public works projects inevitably suffer from ballooning cost overruns that dwarf the original project cost estimates. Indeed, one need not look far from the system’s proposed northern terminus for examples. Extending Caltrain, a commuter line that links San Jose with San Francisco, another 1 1/2 miles to the proposed High Speed Rail terminal would cost $713 million (according to a 2003 estimate). Workers are still building a new segment for the Bay Bridge, a depression-era span that suffered damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake. A decade ago, officials opted to build an entirely new structure because repairs would cost $700 million whereas a new bridge could be delivered for $900 million. But as the 20th anniversary of the earthquake nears, cost estimates for the bridge have mushroomed to $6.3 billion.

These trends haven’t gone unnoticed by California’s robust anti-tax lobby, which got its start with the famous Proposition 13 in 1978 that cut property taxes statewide.  Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, called the proposed rail line a “Train to Nowhere,” a claim that might not sit well with Californians at either terminus of the proposed line.  

Meanwhile, garnering federal funding just got easier. H.R. 2095, a rail safety bill signed into law by President George Bush on October 18 had language and funding attached for a high-speed rail corridor in California, along with 11 other city pairs around the nation. California, which pioneered the freeway and popularized the cloverleaf, cruising and car culture, may be leading the nation down the off ramp and back onto the rail car.

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