L.A. Metro Officials Question the L.A.-Anaheim Bullet Train

Art Leahy, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, criticized the high-speed train project before a group of Southern California city and rail officials...."I really can't understand their approach," he said. "In many cases they've ridden roughshod over the host of cities in Orange County and in Los Angeles. They have ignored input and there are assumptions that are just astonishing." ...widening the corridor to add dedicated bullet train tracks could require taking out hundreds of homes in Anaheim alone, he noted.....If the planning does not become more rational, Leahy warned, "I don't think there is going to be a project."

How the Los Angeles-Anaheim segment unfolds in terms of public and political acceptance, as well as cost and passenger service, is important because it will be one of the first and most heavily used legs of an eventual 800-mile system stretching from San Diego to San Francisco and Sacramento. Projections place the cost of the Anaheim-to-San Francisco first phase at about $45 billion, although critics say that is likely to rise.....Adding separate high-speed rail track and potentially needing to take hundreds of pieces of private property have helped double cost projections for the L.A.-Anaheim segment to about $4.5 billion....Up to $2 billion might be trimmed from the local segment's costs by improving and sharing existing track wherever possible.

On Jan. 11, the Legislative Analyst's Office issued a terse eight-page report on the latest business plan for the California High-Speed Rail Authority. That's the agency that was funded by Proposition 1A, a $9.95 billion bond measure approved in 2008 as a down payment on a private-public bullet-train system - a hugely ambitious joint venture with a minimum cost of $42.6 billion.Besides depicting the business plan as vague and insubstantive, the LAO analysis noted its funding plan "appears to violate" Proposition 1A language that "explicitly prohibits any public operating subsidy." That's because authority officials concluded they couldn't attract the necessary tens of billions of dollars in private funding without offering investors a minimum revenue guarantee. To attract investors, the plan also presumed that government agencies would cover the vast cost of insurance for rail operations.

This is not a minor problem. This is an immense and fundamental problem. No subsidies, no investors. No investors, no high-speed rail. Nevertheless, nine weeks after the LAO report, its import is still not being acknowledged by many key players.