Don’t Build California High Speed Rail Like We Built the Bay Bridge

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A recent article by the UT San Diego made some good points on the way to its underlying bad thesis that California shouldn’t build the High Speed Rail.  Looking for ANY reason to take a knock at HSR, the UT stated the obvious, that the building of the Bay Bridge that connects Oakland and the East Bay to the city of San Francisco has been a disaster.  What was slated to cost $1.1 Billion and be finished in 2003, is now over $6 Billion and 10 years past due.  Let’s not even get started on the last minute SNAFU that is setting the Bridge back a few more months and several more million dollars.

Absolutely, the Bay Bridge’s new eastern span is a mess.  The one argument that no one is making is “We shouldn’t even be building it”.  There is no doubt that the work horse bridge needed the new span, there is no doubt that the old span is not safe, and there is no doubt that without the bridge all together a serious economic harm would be done to the entire Bay Area.  So all that is left is to attack, and rightfully so, the management and quality control at every step of the construction.  People should lose their jobs, suits should be filed for negligence against contracting corporations for their terrible and dangerous work, and lessons should be learned so as NEVER to be repeated.

Let’s look at every mistake that was made, at every junction on the Bay Bridge and use it as a template for avoiding the same mistakes on HSR.  Let’s FIRE all the people who made those mistakes or should have caught those mistakes and hire new people.  Let’s find new mechanisms for oversight that should have been in place by our state and federal transportation leaders in the process of the Bay Bridge, and use that oversight on HSR. 

No one should be talking about whether or not we should be building HSR (echoes of frustration when we built the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges 75 years ago around the Great Depression, and of hair burning screeching from the start of BART’s construction), because we will look back more than likely and say “good thing we built HSR”.  Could I be wrong?  Sure, and I can admit that.  But the cost of me being wrong after building HSR is far smaller than the repercussions of HSR critics being wrong and not building HSR (i.e. constant gridlock on the I-5 that chokes our air with smog and weakens our environment, infrastructure, and economy).