With a grand high-speed rail project struggling to lay its first track nearly two decades after voters approved it, California seems to be moving on to its next transportation fiasco: A high-speed bus system connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco that reaches an implausibly brisk 140 mph along the way.
It seems more likely that we’d see a city bus driven by Sandra Bullock jump the unfinished gap in a freeway ramp and land it like a 747.
But CalTrans sees high-speed bus travel “as a potential enhancement to the state’s public transportation network.”
At a recent hearing, Sen. Dave Cortese of San Jose, chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, said “high-speed buses are not a bad idea.” They are, in fact, “a good idea” and “certainly an option to rail.”
The hearing explored a recent CalTrans proposal for running high-speed buses in exclusive lanes.
The proposal reads as if someone took plans for the high-speed rail and substituted “bus” for all references to the train. For instance, “achieving safe, high-speed operation requires dedicated infrastructure, substantial vehicle redesign, and advanced safety and communication technologies.” But unless hills are flattened, sharp curves are smoothed and “specialized vehicles” that travel at hyper velocities while also avoiding crashes can be produced, speeds will be lower than promised.
The project would also need to complete “impact assessments for noise, emissions, and energy consumption,” while somehow forming “multidisciplinary consortia with stakeholders including federal and state agencies, academia, automotive manufacturers, and technology developers to leverage pooled resources and expertise.”
Sounds like a list of challenges that the high-speed rail (HSR) has been unable to overcome.
To keep costs down, existing lanes would be used “wherever possible.” Anyone who has kept up with the “progress” of the HSR would recognize this ploy and also wonder how it would work when the report says the buses need their own lanes to “mitigate risks associated with mixed traffic.”
The report also examines for instructive purposes how other countries “have approached high-speed ground travel.” But as we’ve seen with the HSR, bullet train success abroad has had zero impact in California.
There are a number of additional hurdles mentioned in the report, from necessary statutory and regulatory changes to questions about sustainability and operational reliability to the need for a genuine economic analysis. Again, there are too many similarities with the HSR to ignore.
None of this is to declare that we’ll never see high-speed buses. The last 150 years of innovations have improved transportation exponentially. We are no longer constrained by the limits of horses, the inefficiencies of slow and dirty coal-powered locomotives, and the hardship of wagon and stagecoach travel. Modern jets and assembly lines that turn out millions of automobiles every month have shrunk the world.
But given the embarrassing history of the high-speed rail’s setbacks, the causes of which are almost exclusive to the state’s won’t-build-can’t-build climate, don’t expect California to be the bullet bus leader.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.
