Joe Mathews

Zócalo Public Square

When it comes to fast trains, a California consensus has hardened: High-speed rail is beyond us.

We may be the world’s high-tech capital, but high-speed rail is just too technically challenging for us. We may have one of the planet’s richest economies, but high-speed rail is too expensive. We are a sprawling state of 40 million, but we’re too small to construct even one high-speed rail line.

But if we’re right about powerlessness to deliver high-speed rail, then how do we explain Taiwan?

My recent visits to that beautiful island, where I was running a public democracy conference, put the lie to all the excuses Californians use to justify abandoning high-speed rail.

Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours — but still it managed to afford high-speed rail. It’s far less populous, with only 23 million people, but its fast trains attract a huge ridership.

Taiwan’s high-speed rail resembles what California’s might have been if we hadn’t lost our nerve.

Taiwan’s population, like California’s, is mostly along its west coast. So at the century’s turn, Taiwan started construction on a high-speed rail line linking Taipei City, in the north, to Kaohsiung, in the south. That’s a distance of 225 miles, about the same as California’s planned first phase of high-speed rail, from San Jose to Bakersfield.

But Taiwan began operating its line in less than seven years, at a cost of $18 billion. It’s unclear whether California’s will ever be finished, or what the costs, estimated at $68 billion, will be.

Paradoxically, Taiwan’s project was completed less expensively because it didn’t do high-speed rail on the cheap.

While California established an underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses came together to create a private corporation. The deal to establish the corporation gave the government a minority stake and created a concession: the company would operate high-speed rail for 35 years, after which it would have to give the system back to the government.

Construction difficulties that have been used as excuses in California were surmounted in Taiwan. The corporation struggled but acquired enough new land to create an entirely new right of way, without using existing train lines. The corporation persevered despite cost overruns. The Taiwan project, like the California one, also struggled to find workers — but it managed to import 2,000 professional engineers from 20 other countries. And Taiwan’s project also met strict environmental requirements, including establishing its own protection program for a beautiful-but-endangered bird: the Pheasant-tailed Jacana.

California’s earthquake faults, and the difficulty of tunneling through them, have long been excuses for delays and costs here. Taiwan, though, is as seismically active as California, and the consortium managed to build safely to incorporate risks from earthquakes — as well as from hurricanes, landslides, and subsidence.

While California’s high-speed rail authority has complained about costly viaducts and tunneling, Taiwan created a system with even more tunneling — especially under Taipei and Taoyuan — and with far longer viaducts, including the world’s second-longest bridge, the 97-mile Changhua-Kaohsiung Viaduct.

Taiwan’s project was not without problems. The corporation relied on loans, and built up a high debt. In 2009, with Taiwan’s economy in free fall, the government effectively provided a bailout by assisting with refinancing the loans, taking a larger ownership stake in the corporation, and extending the concession from 35 to 70 years. Service also was reduced.

At the time, relentless critics of California’s high-speed rail used media reports about the Taiwan bailout in their successful campaign to turn the public against the whole concept.

But Californians never got the rest of the story. The bailout worked, and the corporation endured. And as the global economy recovered, Taiwan’s high-speed rail system proved reliably profitable — and popular, with 64 million riders last year.

Indeed, high-speed rail has done nothing less than transform the country, linking its once-disconnected regions together. Bus and airline service fell as Taiwanese embraced high-speed rail; driving also declined.

Getting from Taipei to Kaohsiung once required an airplane ride or a difficult five-hour drive. Now it can be done by 300-kilometer-per-hour high-speed rail in 90 minutes. While California cities are trying to steal away state high-speed rail money for their own commuter lines, Taiwan cities like Tainan and Hsinchu have instead built their own robust transit links off of the high-speed line.

I learned first-hand what a difference this can make. With high-speed rail, it took me just 40 minutes to travel between the two cities where my democracy conference was taking place — Taichung and Taipei — even though they are as far apart as San Diego and L.A. The ticket price, regulated by the government, was $22, the cost of a round-trip from Oakland’s airport to San Francisco on BART.

During our conference, the national government provided the hundreds of attendees with our own regular train — similar to an Amtrak — which stopped at eight cities for democracy-related meetings on a two-day tour from Taipei down to Kaohsiung.

At 6 p.m. on the second day, with the tour complete, my colleagues got on the regular train for a three-hour journey back to our hotel in Taichung. But my son and I stayed in Kaohsiung to have dinner with the grandfather of one of his school buddies back in Southern California. After a lovely meal, we got on the high-speed rail at 8 p.m. for a 43-minute ride back to Taichung, 120 miles north. We were in our hotel beds by 9 p.m., just as the regular train with my colleagues was pulling into the Taichung station.

As a Californian, it was nice finally to experience the long-promised benefits from high-speed rail. It’s maddening that I had to do so in a smaller and poorer country in East Asia, rather than in California itself.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square. Email him at joe@zocalopublicsquare.org.