Long road ahead: high-speed train

Source: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/53005332-82/rail-speed-planning-prices.html.csp

The problem with going to heaven is that you have to die first.

The problem with riding a high-speed train from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, Denver, San Francisco or Los Angeles — heavenly as that might be for people fed up with high gas prices and frazzled airport security lines — is that you would have to first come up with untold billions of dollars and slog through years of planning, environmental reviews and political battles.

So we’d better get started.

Many political leaders in the Salt Lake City area have joined the Western High Speed Rail Alliance. That group is in the early stages of planning high-speed rail links among the population centers of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Nevada, linking with a similar network under way in California.

If high-speed rail brings the benefits its backers expect, then our region certainly would not want to be left behind. Moving people out of their cars and out of aircraft and into Euro-style bullet trains could ease congestion and reduce dependence on foreign oil even as it spared the atmosphere the burden of billions of pounds of greenhouse gases annually. Besides, it could create a lot of the jobs that our jobless recovery has so far failed to generate.

But there are also some warning signals ahead. The California dream of a high-speed rail link between Anaheim in the south and San Francisco in the north has been bedeviled by huge cost overruns and other problems. The list price has reached $98 billion and the system won’t be ready until 2030 at the earliest. Last week’s $1 billion grant from the rail-friendly Obama administration will hardly make a dent.

There are also questions of whether the sparsely populated Intermountain West is really such a good candidate for passenger rail, high-speed or otherwise. The popularity of such systems in Europe and Japan — as along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States — is helped along by factors that include a culture that is accustomed to public transit, relatively shorter distances between population centers and, in other countries, much higher gas prices.

The American West has such a car-dependent heritage that there can be less confidence we would abandon our private vehicles for even the sleekest of trains. Especially if such an expensive undertaking would mean giant public subsidies and/or luxury-level ticket prices.

So, by all means, put some sharp minds and sharper pencils into the planning of high-speed rail in the West. Just understand that the road to any Golden Spike moment will be long, difficult and, perhaps, fruitless.