The Goldman State
Ed Goldman is a longtime newspaper and magazine columnist, the author of five books and creator of The Goldman State, a three-times-a-week online column with subscribers in 40 states, Canada and Europe. A professional playwright, composer and painter, Ed has also taught journalism at five California Universities and community colleges. His bucket list includes becoming the victim of a corporate takeover. This podcast is an extension of his unique take on the world around us and his interpretation, with all the creativity imaginable, of what that would literally sound like if he were to speak it.
The Goldman State
Episode 109: The Bullet Train Fires More Blanks.
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Ah, California’s bullet train. The gift that keeps on... waiting. Will we ever see it get built? It’s a bold vision — to build a train no one can ride, between places no one wants to go, with money no one has. Let me share my observations.
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00:01 - Ed Goldman (Host)
Hi, this is Ed Goldman with the Goldman State Podcast. I had really been hoping to ride high-speed rail in California before I died, but now realize my only hope of seeing it happen is if I'm reincarnated. As I've mentioned here before, this is also the only way I'll be paying off my MasterCard bill. It's not that I'm grievously ill, to my knowledge, nor terribly old. It's just that this project, which I first wrote about for my column in the Sacramento Business Journal 14 years ago, has proved to be California's own version of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia Basilica that's been under construction for 143 years. Must be all those change orders.
00:43
The one and only time I rode on a high-speed train happened in France more than a decade ago, when I took the somewhat fabled TGV for train à grande vitesse, which simply means high-speed train. The trip, which was about six hours, was from Paris to Nice. It was a surprisingly smooth ride, and I had the added satisfaction of looking out the window and seeing cars below and alongside the track backed up for miles at what appeared to be a complete standstill. In fractured French, I asked the conductor if the gridlock was always this bad, and he replied in uninjured English those cars are moving at 70 to 80 miles per hour. Monsieur, it was one of my favorite physics lessons ever. We were going so fast that speeding autos looked motionless. The other favorite physics lesson is whenever I load a pile of raw spinach into a frying pan and watch it shrink into a size, shape and texture that Popeye could easily pour from a can, he pops open with his bicep.
01:42
In late July, president Trump took back four billion dollars in federal funds for California's bullet train project because of the state's quote, cost overruns, delays, funding shortfalls, unquote and, if I may add, it being so Californian, it should be noted that the initial cost estimate for the project was pegged at $33 billion with a completion date of five years ago. For an unfair comparison, a private company built a 235-mile high-speed train from Orlando to Miami in 11 years for about $6 billion. That's from the Life Science column in the Wall Street Journal. To date, the Golden State has spent nearly $16 billion on the project. So at least on this matter, it's hard to fault the reluctance of our beloved blotus that's, bloviator of the United States to keep a bad thing going, in fact, of all the possibly warranted but inhumanely rendered funding cuts made by the current administration. This might be one that both parties can agree on, privately or not. This might be one that both parties can agree on, privately or not. It's a little like when your parents tell you no, you can't borrow $250 to buy Minecraft maps, skins and texture packs, and you sulk but are secretly relieved.
03:00
California's high-speed train was originally intended to go from San Francisco to Orange County in about twice the time it takes to fly that route, but about a sixth of the time it would take to go by automobile, and at a price well below the cost of flying. As the project evolved into a bureaucratic nightmare, the destinations were condensed. At completion, you'd be able to take the train from Madera to Shafter, whose combined population is under 90,000. Madeira has 68,079 denizens, shafter has 21,915. Forget farm to fork. This route would have been filmable as a travelogue called Farm to Farm.
03:34
I suppose if I want to take a bullet train ride again, I'll need to travel to China, japan, germany, spain, austria, portugal, belgium, italy, morocco, florida or back to France, since all of these places have somehow managed to build high-speed rail lines in my lifetime. I think I'll opt for Spain, though, but only if the tracks run to Sagrada Familia, bautilica. I'd like to see how that project's going every 143 years or so. I'm Ed Goldman. My column, the Goldman State, comes out every Monday, wednesday and Friday. You can subscribe for free at GoldmanStatecom. Thanks for listening.