Immigrant Truck Drivers and Context

 Many posts have discussed immigration.

Erkki Forster at The Daily Beast:

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was basking in the spotlight over his crackdown on foreign truck drivers when a reporter pulled some inconvenient receipts from his own department.

President Donald Trump has long made undocumented truck drivers a target of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, casting them as a threat behind the wheel and claiming last month that they were “killing a lot of people.”

On Monday, Duffy took up the president’s cause, appearing before cameras in Detroit to announce that he was shutting down 110 truck driving schools, claiming a DOT analysis found 5,000 violations of federal safety standards requiring licensees to demonstrate English proficiency.

“If you’re here illegally and you can’t speak the language and you’re not well-trained, you don’t deserve to be in a big rig, driving American roads, endangering American citizens,” the Fox host-turned-transportation secretary said.

But Duffy’s press conference, which was attended by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullinin, was derailed when a reporter cited DOT data that poked holes in the crackdown.

“According to the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2025, only 17 foreign-born drivers holding immigrant or non-documented [commercial driver’s licenses] were responsible in fatal accidents,” the reporter said, as Duffy appeared to look down at his notes. “The slant here has been strongly about illegals, foreign drivers, but yet it accounts, according to U.S. DOT stats I see, for one percent of the issue.”

The reporter noted that a far higher share of drivers involved in fatal large-truck crashes did not have a commercial driver’s license. And Duffy’s actions have reduced the number of schools available to prepare drivers for the road.

Duffy, 54, brushed past the numbers and denied that his shutdown of the driving schools over English proficiency standards had much to do with immigrants.

The Streets of Los Angeles

Many posts have discussed failures of governance in California.

Constance Sommer at LA Reported:

Following this winter’s heavy rains, L.A. motorists reported 6,700 potholes in January, a 49% jump from the previous month. In the past, L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services, also known as StreetsLA, used to try to “repair every pothole within the next business day,” according to a former version of the bureau’s “How Do We Fix Potholes?” page. The current page doesn’t mention repair times at all.

L.A.’s streets are falling apart. At public hearings city workers complain that they can barely keep up with even the most basic street services. Hundreds of street staff were laid off last year. Trucks remain parked at city lots because there aren’t enough people to use them to perform major repairs. Since last July, the city has made do with stopgap measures like plugging potholes and laying down rectangular asphalt patches that stop short of a full resurfacing of the road.

According to the city’s own measurements, 60% of its streets were in good condition a year ago. Now it’s 53%.

Federalism and EVs

Three years after President Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure law, it has resulted in only 58 ERV charging stations. Marc J. Dunkelman at WP:

[By] the time of the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, progressives had soured on the establishment’s excesses. Men such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara had steered the nation into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Local power brokers such as Richard J. Daley and Robert Moses decimated whole neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

And so, to protect ordinary people, reformers erected mechanisms to dilute public authority. Slowly, over the course of the next half-century, bureaucracies they deemed too powerful became, in effect, impotent.

By the point the Biden administration turned its attention to expanding the nation’s EV charging infrastructure, the approach that FDR might have taken during the 1930s — just hiring people to do it — was entirely off the table. Such a plan would immediately be labeled a “socialist” enterprise that posed a threat to private companies.
...

Instead, the Biden administration was left to rely in large part on the system that governs 90 percent of federal transportation spending: distributing the money to the states. This pattern, established during the Eisenhower administration, works by sending federal dollars to the state highway departments that maintain the nation’s infrastructure. Each state figures out how to implement the law, which in this case called for high-speed chargers at least every 50 miles on major highways.

The states, of course, had no experience with EV technology. And so it was up to the federal government to help them navigate their new responsibilities. The Transportation and Energy departments quickly established a “joint office” to guide the work. Within weeks of the infrastructure law’s signing — lightning speed, by modern standards — the administration had published a draft rule establishing the requirements:

• The chargers would have to work on all electric vehicles (as opposed to just Teslas).
• They would have to be reliable 97 percent of the time (so drivers wouldn’t encounter broken stalls).
• They would have to be located in remote areas where there would otherwise be gaps (as opposed to the busy corridors where private companies might choose to place them without subsidy).

Over the course of 2022, the government incorporated public feedback into the rule, as mandated by the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. In the nearly 80 years since its passage, the APA has become the Magna Carta of bureaucratic governance, ensuring that agencies are fair and transparent. The attendant checks and balances, designed explicitly to prevent the bureaucracy from steamrolling opponents, almost inevitably slow things down.

Why People Hate TSA

 Many posts have discussed bureaucracy. The Transportation Security Administration is especially problematic.

Peanut Butter is a liquid. We said what we said.

— TSA (@TSA) August 23, 2024

"The Greatest Infrastructure Failure in the History of Our Country"

Many posts have discussed California's high-speed rail fiasco.

Lee Ohanian at Hoover:

In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020.

But now, 15 years after the bond issue, three years after the expected completion date, not one train has left the station. Not one route has been completed, even though nearly all the $9.95 billion seed money has been spent. And the original budget of about $33 billion for the entire 800-mile system is now inadequate to build just one route (Bakersfield to Merced), whose cost pencils out to $207 million per mile—a cost that will almost certainly rise in the future, and for a route that may not be ready for ten years. Or more. Or perhaps ever.

California’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians.

The Train to Nowhere

 California's "high-speed" rail project is a fiasco.

Ashley Zavala at KCRA-TV:

California's bullet train project that is meant to link Los Angeles to San Francisco faces more cost increases and potential delays, according to an update from project leaders released this week.

High Speed Rail Authority officials on Thursday could not provide an estimated completion date for the original vision pitched to voters but said the price tag for the entire project is now up to $128 billion, a 13% increase from last year's projections.

Construction is currently focused on a segment in the Central Valley, a 170-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Merced. Project officials last year estimated that the route would be ready for riders in 2030. While that is still their goal, the latest update shows service could begin sometime between 2030 and 2033.

The Central Valley segment also faces 41% in cost increases compared to last year's estimates, now expected to cost up to $35.3 billion. Part of the scoping plan changed between this year and last, with this year's estimate including light maintenance facilities and new elements for the station in Bakersfield. Project leaders also pointed to the impacts of COVID-19, inflation and supply chain issues that have raised the prices of labor, concrete and steel.

The Crazy Train, Continued

California's high-speed rail project is a fiasco -- predictable and predicted.

Dana Goldman and Alain Enthoven at CalMatters:

Instead of spending an additional $100 billion or more to drill rail tunnels through seismically active mountains and disrupt communities, the state should embark on a massive public works effort to meet its water needs. Advances in stormwater capture and recycling hold great promise. Los Angeles could meet 70% of its water needs locally by 2035 if enough investment is made in recycling and cleaning up its groundwater basins. Repairing and replacing leaky pipes, conservation, desalination and replumbing the state project are other pieces of a resilient, drought-resistant water system for California.

When voters approved a $10 billion bond issue in 2008 to help build the full rail line, the cost was estimated at $33 billion with completion by 2020. If the project started fresh today with a $113 billion price tag, would voters still support it?

Even the much-touted climate benefits of the bullet train are losing luster. California now mandates that every vehicle sold in the state must be electric by 2035. So if the bullet train is running by then, it would be replacing car trips that don’t produce greenhouse gas emissions. It might get some people out of planes, but the carbon impact will likely be less than envisioned as more fuel-efficient jets – possibly using biofuels – come online.

Meanwhile, construction itself will have produced plenty of pollution on its own.

Crazy Train 2022

California's high-speed rail project is a fiasco -- predictable and predicted.

Ralph Vartabedian at NYT:

Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.

Highways and Protests

Hadley Meares at LA Curbed:

When Angelenos gathered downtown to protest the murder of George Floyd, they started at City Hall and eventually made their way toward the 101. Pastor Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie from the Row Church led the first group of protesters onto the freeway, which they occupied for roughly 30 minutes.

Ever since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, uprisings protesting police brutality and racism have blocked freeways throughout America. The freeway and highway systems in the U.S. are part of “a long, long, long history of looting our communities, looting our lives,” Pastor Cue explains.

Nowhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, where several generations of Angelenos, mainly people of color, have been displaced or trapped by the construction of freeways in the name of progress and ease of movement for white residents, many of whom moved outward to the suburbs of L.A. and Orange counties as the postwar era dawned.

“Communities of color, or black folks, were not permitted to live in the suburbs through land covenants made between white homeowners, through racism, through redlining,” Pastor Cue says. “The whole narrative that black folks would bring down the value of the communities … that narrative is lingering in our society, even today.”

Though racially restrictive land covenants were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1948, years of Jim Crow policies had already institutionalized racist housing practices that relegated black people and other people of color to certain neighborhoods — and labeled those neighborhoods as slums.

Those “slums” were the first places on the chopping block when freeways began to be routed across America in earnest in 1956, the year in which construction on 41,000 miles of interstate highways were authorized at a cost of $27 billion.

In 1957, one Urban Land Institute official celebrated that “inner belt expressways” would “inevitably slice through great areas of our nation’s worst slums,” writes UCLA professor Eric Avila, in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.

Not just Los Angeles.  Alana Samuels at The Atlantic:

The urban planner Robert Moses was one of the first to propose the idea of using highways to “redeem” urban areas. In 1949, the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads, Thomas MacDonald, even tried to include the idea of highway construction as a technique for urban renewal in a national housing bill. (He was rebuffed.) But in cities across America, especially those that didn’t want to—or couldn’t—spend their own money for so-called urban renewal, the idea began to take hold. They could have their highways and they could get rid of their slums. With just one surgery, they could put in more arteries, and they could remove the city’s heart.

Spatial Mismatch of Jobs

Erica Pandey at Axios:

A new report from the Urban Institute analyzed 2017 application data across several types of low-wage, hourly jobs in 16 major U.S. cities, looking at the mismatch between openings and job seekers by zip code.

• In 41% of Boston-area zip codes, there were far more openings than job-seekers who lived a reasonable distance away. In other words, most possible applicants lived too far from the workplace — there either was no efficient public transportation to the job, or it cost too much to get there.
• In New York, 32% of zip codes had this problem. In San Francisco, 29%.

 ...

The backdrop: Half a century ago, there was a hollowing out of big cities. As high-earning workers moved to suburbs, low-income residents were left behind.

Today, as cities have had a resurgence, there are tons of jobs in downtowns, but gentrification and a surge in housing costs are once again keeping low-income workers away from jobs, says Yingling Fan, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

What's happening: Poorer city residents live in the "last-subway-stop" parts of cities, a couple of hours, or further, from work — and they can't afford to move.

Often, the long commute is not worth the trouble. "You could take a couple buses to that restaurant job if there’s a career ladder there or if the wages and benefits are worth it," says Christina Stacy, lead author of the Urban Institute report. But that's rarely the case.

Why There Was Pressure to End the Shutdown Yesterday

A letter to POTUS and Congress from five former DHS secretaries (Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, Jeh Johnson and John Kelly

While we are heartened to learn that communities, businesses and religious organizations around the country are providing assistance to DHS employees, this cannot and should not be the answer. One of the unfortunate consequences of this shutdown is the need for some DHS employees to seek either unemployment or find another employer. It is important to note that as unattractive as these alternatives may be, like other members of the military services, members of the USCG by law, cannot quit nor can they seek full-time outside employment. DHS employees who protect the traveling public, investigate and counter terrorism, and protect critical infrastructure should not have to rely on the charitable generosity of others for assistance in feeding their families and paying their bills while they steadfastly focus on the mission at hand. This is unconscionable.

As the shutdown drags on, the Department also risks talented people leaving their posts to pursue employment in the private sector. High-tech skills – such as information technology and cybersecurity –and law enforcement and security experience are in great demand in the private sector and the Department is facing a real crisis in retaining this workforce week after week.

We are awed by the sacrifices that the men and women of DHS and their families make every day and their extraordinary service to our nation. We call on our elected leaders to restore the funding necessary to ensure our homeland remains safe and that the Department’s critical national security functions continue without compromise.

A statement from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) President Paul Rinaldi, Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) President Joe DePete, and Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) President Sara Nelson:

“We have a growing concern for the safety and security of our members, our airlines, and the traveling public due to the government shutdown. This is already the longest government shutdown in the history of the United States and there is no end in sight. In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break. It is unprecedented.

“Due to the shutdown, air traffic controllers, transportation security officers, safety inspectors, air marshals, federal law enforcement officers, FBI agents, and many other critical workers have been working without pay for over a month. Staffing in our air traffic control facilities is already at a 30-year low and controllers are only able to maintain the system’s efficiency and capacity by working overtime, including 10-hour days and 6-day workweeks at many of our nation’s busiest facilities. Due to the shutdown, the FAA has frozen hiring and shuttered its training academy, so there is no plan in effect to fill the FAA’s critical staffing need. Even if the FAA were hiring, it takes two to four years to become fully facility certified and achieve Certified Professional Controller (CPC) status. Almost 20% of CPCs are eligible to retire today. There are no options to keep these professionals at work without a paycheck when they can no longer afford to support their families. When they elect to retire, the National Airspace System (NAS) will be crippled.

“The situation is changing at a rapid pace. Major airports are already seeing security checkpoint closures, with many more potentially to follow. Safety inspectors and federal cyber security staff are not back on the job at pre-shutdown levels, and those not on furlough are working without pay. Last Saturday, TSA management announced that a growing number of officers cannot come to work due to the financial toll of the shutdown. In addition, we are not confident that system-wide analyses of safety reporting data, which is used to identify and implement corrective actions in order to reduce risks and prevent accidents is 100 percent operational due to reduced FAA resources.

More Likely to Die From Overdoses Than Car Crashes

From the National Safety Council:

 For the first time in U.S. history, a person is more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than from a motor vehicle crash, according to National Safety Council analysis. The odds of dying accidentally from an opioid overdose have risen to one in 96, eclipsing the odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash (one in 103). NSC unveiled the analysis on Injury Facts – the definitive resource for data around unintentional, preventable injuries, commonly known as “accidents.” The nation’s opioid crisis is fueling the Council’s grim probabilities, and that crisis is worsening with an influx of illicit fentanyl.
...
NSC analysis also shows that falls – the third leading cause of preventable death behind drug overdose and motor vehicle crashes – are more likely to kill someone than ever before. The lifetime odds of dying from an accidental fall are one in 114 – a change from one in 119 just a year ago.

To keep the public up to date on the latest injury and fatality trends, the Council has added “Poisonings,” “Older Adult Falls,” “Fire-Related Fatalities and Injuries,” and “Deaths by Transportation Mode” to Injury Facts. To demonstrate why Americans should be more concerned about preventable injuries than headline-grabbing catastrophes, the Council also added designated pages about airplane crashes, railroad deaths and consumer products – all issues that tend to spark nationwide anxiety but lead to far fewer fatal incidents than routine, everyday activities such as taking medication, driving or getting out of bed.

Preventable injuries are the third leading cause of death, claiming an unprecedented 169,936 lives in 2017 and trailing only heart disease and cancer. Of the three leading causes of death, preventable injuries were the only category to experience an increase in 2017, according to NSC analysis of the CDC data issued in December. A person’s lifetime odds of dying from any preventable, accidental cause are one in 25 – a change from one in 30 in 2004.

Additional new data on Injury Facts – digitized last spring after 98 years of hardcover publication – include:

• Bicycle deaths, which increased 28% in 2016
• Deaths by sex, age and cause, revealing more men die from preventable causes than women
• Intentional vs. preventable deaths, with preventable deaths far outnumbering intentional ones
• Visit injuryfacts.nsc.org for the Council’s complete Odds of Dying From … list and other information about leading causes of preventable death.

Automation Gains Momentum

Evan Halper at LAT:

Driverless vehicles threaten to dramatically reduce America’s 1.7-million trucking jobs. It is the front end of a wave of automation that technologists and economists have been warning for years will come crashing down on America’s political order. Some predict it could rival the impact of the economic globalization and the resulting off-shoring of jobs that propelled Trump’s victory in the presidential election.

“This is one of the biggest policy changes of our generation,” said Sam Loesche, head of government affairs for the Teamsters. “This is not just about looking after the health and welfare of America’s workers, but also their livelihoods.”

Washington isn’t ready for it. The Trump White House already has indicated it sees it as some future administration’s problem. Silicon Valley remains in shock over Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin’s remark in the spring that economic fallout from this type of automation is 50 to 100 years off and “not even on my radar screen.”

“I don’t think anybody there is thinking about this seriously,” said Martin Ford, author of “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.” “They are still looking at this as futuristic and not having an impact and not politically toxic. … Once people start seeing the vehicles on the roads and jobs disappearing because of them, things will quickly become very different.”

The arrival of that reckoning is getting accelerated by Washington’s bipartisan excitement for self-driving technology, one of the few policy issues advancing. New Trump administration regulations don’t require industry to submit certain safety assessments, leaving it voluntary. And legislation — already approved in the House and expected to pass in the Senate — strips authority from states to set many of their own safety guidelines.

At Reuters, Lisa Baertlein and P.J. Huffstutter explain that immigration crackdowns are creating more jobs ... for robots

 Convincing big U.S. dairy owners to buy robots to milk their cows - and reduce the farmhands they employ - used to be a tough sell for Steve Fried. Recently, his job has gotten easier, he says, in part because of President Donald Trump.

...
 Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration through stepped-up arrests and border enforcement has shaken the U.S. agricultural sector, where as many as 7 in 10 farm workers are undocumented, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

...
A 2014 report by WinterGreen Research forecast significant growth in the use of robotics in “every aspect of farming, milking, food production” and other agricultural enterprises. The report put the market for agricultural robots at $817 million in 2013 and projected that it would reach $16.3 billion by 2020.

TSA #Fail

Ron Nixon reports at The New York Times:

Facing a backlash over long security lines and management problems, the head of the Transportation Security Administration shook up his leadership team on Monday, replacing the agency’s top security official and adding a new group of administrators at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

In an email to staff members, Peter V. Neffenger, the T.S.A. administrator, announced a series of changes that included the removal of Kelly Hoggan, who had been the assistant administrator for the Office of Security Operations since 2013.

Beginning late that year, Mr. Hoggan received $90,000 in bonuses over a 13-month period, even though a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security showed that auditors were able to get fake weapons and explosives past security screeners 95 percent of the time in 70 covert tests.

In addition, several employees who say they were punished with reassignments to other airports after filing whistle-blower complaints have alleged that Mr. Hoggan played a role in their forced transfers.

Mr. Hoggan’s bonus was paid out in $10,000 increments, an arrangement that members of Congress have said was intended to disguise the payments. During a hearing of the House Oversight Committee two weeks ago, lawmakers grilled Mr. Neffenger about the bonus, which was issued before he joined the agency in July.

Californians Want Cars

California Governor Jerry Brown wants to get people out of cars.  Californians want to keep them.  Dan Walters reports:

During his first governorship 40 years ago, Brown’s Department of Transportation suddenly restricted some lanes of the heavily traveled Santa Monica Freeway to carpools. The resulting traffic jams created an intense political backlash.

Initially, Brown defended the action, saying, “Obviously, the ethic of unlimited freeways that attempt to pour cement from one end of the state to the other is over, and it takes a while for people to adjust to that.”

As the furor escalated, however, Brown ended the experiment, claiming that “Diamond Lanes” were devised by predecessor Ronald Reagan’s administration, not his.

Since then, the state’s population has climbed by two-thirds, but vehicular traffic has more than doubled to 330 billion vehicle-miles a year. With very little expansion of roadway capacity, congestion has reached epic proportions.

A recent study of traffic congestion determined that Los Angeles County has 10 of the nation’s 20 worst corridors, including a No. 1 stretch of Highway 101.

The Brown administration’s newly published California Transportation Plan 2040 indicates that one strategy for moving Californians out of their cars is to let congestion worsen.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/dan-walters/article68340617.html#storylink=cpy

Turning Away from Mass Transit

At The Los Angeles Times, Laura J. Nelson and Den Weikel report that fewer people are using mass transit in Southern California in spite of increased spending on trains and buses.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region's largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating. Despite a $9-billion investment in new light rail and subway lines, Metro now has fewer boardings than it did three decades ago, when buses were the county's only transit option.

...
"It's a bit perverse," said USC engineering professor James E. Moore II, who has been a critic of rail transit. "You're spending all this money and you're driving ridership down. If you're investing heavily in transit, you'd hope ridership would increase."
...
The longer immigrants live in the U.S., the less likely they are to take the bus or train, either because they begin to drive or move to suburbs with less transit service. After two decades in the United States, about 6% of immigrants ride transit, only slightly higher than native-born residents, [USC professor Evelyn] Blumenberg said.

After a surge in immigration in the 1980s, which significantly bolstered bus and rail ridership, the influx of foreign-born people peaked in California in 1991 and has been declining since, she said.

A new avenue for driving also might have opened up for immigrants who are in the country illegally. A law that took effect last year allows them to obtain California driver's licenses. So far, the Department of Motor Vehicles has issued more than 605,000 such licenses, a spokesman said.

In addition, some transit officials say the recovering economy has helped transit riders find at least partial access to cars. During the last five years, the number of former OCTA bus riders who gained access to cars almost doubled, agency surveys show.

"It's not the dream of every bus rider to arrive in a bus that was on time, air conditioned and clean, where a seat was available," said Moore of USC. "It's the dream of every bus rider to own a car. And as soon as they can afford one, that's the first purchase they'll make."

Crazy Train Update

Ralph Vartabedian reports at The Los Angeles Times:

The monumental task of building California's bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles.

Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped.

It will be the most ambitious tunneling project in the nation's history.

State officials say the tunnels will be finished by 2022 — along with 300 miles of track, dozens of bridges or viaducts, high-voltage electrical systems, a maintenance plant and as many as six stations. Doing so will meet a commitment to begin carrying passengers between Burbank and Merced in the first phase of the $68-billion high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

However, a Times analysis of project documents, as well as interviews with scientists, engineers and construction experts, indicates that the deadline and budget targets will almost certainly be missed — and that the state has underestimated the challenges ahead, particularly completing the tunneling on time.

...

But Bent Flyvbjerg, a University of Oxford business professor and a leading expert on megaproject risk, said the lagging schedule, litigation, growing costs and permit delays arising so early in construction are warning signs that even more delays and higher costs are coming.

"You have an 80% to 90% probability of a cost overrun on a project like this," Flyvbjerg said. "Once cost increases start, they are likely to continue."

Flyvbjerg's research found that high-speed rail projects around the world experience an average of 45% cost growth, though 100% increases occur in some cases.

Although the state hopes to correct some of its early setbacks, the odds are stacked high against it, said Robert Bea, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a pioneer in civil engineering risk analysis.

"You can never make up an early cost increase," Bea said. "It just gets worse. I have never seen it go the other way in 60 years."

Frontiers of Geographical Illiteracy

Tina Nguyen reports at Mediaite:

WFTV Washington correspondent Justin Gray was flying back to DC from Orlando, Fla., when a TSA agent halted him for holding a license from a state he didn’t recognize, and asked him for his passport. Gray was confused: he didn’t bring his passport, because his District of Columbia driver’s license should have been sufficient. The agent insisted that he didn’t recognize it.

People from New Mexico have a similar problem.  In 2007, Lynn Neary reported at NPR:

Let's say you really need a vacation. You decide to stay here in the U.S. but when you're making your plane reservations, the booking agent advices you to bring a valid passport to the airport. Not possible, you say?

Well, if you live in New Mexico, it may sound familiar because it turns out some people don't realize that New Mexico is part of the United States. In fact, this happen so often that New Mexico Magazine has a monthly compilation of these stories called "One Of Our 50 Is Missing." Its editor is Walter Lopez. He joins us now from Santa Fe.

Hi, Walter. Good to have you with us.

Mr. WALTER LOPEZ (Editor, New Mexico Magazine): Hi. How are you doing?

NEARY: You know, Walter, when I first heard this, I really couldn't believe it. How often does this really happen that Americans don't know that New Mexico is one of the 50 states?

Mr. LOPEZ: It happens quite often. Normally, I would say in 50 to 100 different submissions a month.

NEARY: Do you have any favorites?

Mr. LOPEZ: Yeah. Yeah. Our favorite story is Phil, who lives in Santa Fe and he had a relative who was competing in the Atlanta Olympics so he desperately wanted tickets. So he gave them a call and the lady said, well, you got to have to call the Mexican Consulate in order to order your tickets. And he said, why is that? I'm in the United States. I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The supervisor said, old Mexico, New Mexico it's still the same. You're going to have to call the Consulate.

The Green Revolving Door

A number of posts have discussed the revolving door between government and interest groups. Timothy Carney writes at The Washington Examiner:

President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has left the administration and joined an electric bus company he subsidized and praised while in office.

Proterra Inc. makes buses that require no gasoline or diesel – they run on electricity and fuel cells.
...
According to a 2011 DOT press release, Proterra received a “$6.5 million research grant provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Transit Administration.”

On top of all this, LaHood's department subsidized Proterra through grants to municipalities that buy electric buses. These grants to local transit authorities cover 80 percent of the cost of a battery-powered electric bus.

In September 2012, for instance, the Worcester Regional Transit Authority in Massachusetts bought three Proterra buses with $4.4 million in DOT grants.

Most of Proterra's sales are subsidized. “The majority of transit agencies buy with federal funds, which cover about 80 percent of the cost,” explained Proterra Vice President Ian Shackleton in a company publication in March 2013.

...
On Feb. 18, Proterra announced that LaHood, who left DOT last year, was joining the company's board of directors. “LaHood's government experience and leadership in transportation policy innovation make him an excellent fit for Proterra,” the company said in a news release.

...

Federal ethics rules prohibit LaHood from lobbying for the time being, but they don't stop him from taking money from Proterra, publicly advocating for the company, or providing lobbying advice.

"Crazy Train"

Previous posts have discussed California and its high-speed rail project.  Republican gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari has written Governor Brown:

February 18, 2014
The Honorable Edmund G. Brown, Jr.
Governor of California
State Capitol, First Floor
Sacramento, California 95814

Dear Governor Brown,

I am writing to request that you take appropriate measures to cancel the high-speed rail program. It is an egregious example of your priorities being completely out of touch with the struggles of millions of California families.

Although you refused to acknowledge these realities in your State of the State address, the facts are: 17 percent of Californians are in need of work. Our schools are ranked 46th in America. 24 percent of Californians are living in poverty. And now, in your own words, we face “the worst drought that California has ever seen since records began being kept 100 years ago.” Given these harsh realities, the high-speed rail is a vanity project we cannot afford.
In 2008, the California people voted for the high-speed rail before the full effects of the Great Recession were felt. Since that vote, millions of California families have come under severe hardship:

• The number of Californians in need of work has increased by 29 percent.
• California’s poverty rate has increased by 27 percent.
• The number of Californians living on food stamps has increased by 87 percent.

The Central Valley has been hit especially hard, suffering some of the highest unemployment in the state. With almost 40 percent of all Central Valley jobs tied to agriculture, the drought is devastating for the region. The rail is a distraction that diverts time and resources away from addressing the most pressing needs of Californians.

Even Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, a fellow Democrat, has changed his mind and acknowledged the high-speed rail is a mistake. “I would take the dollars and redirect it to other, more pressing infrastructure needs … I am not the only Democrat that feels this way… I am one of the few that just said it publicly. Most are now saying it privately.”

I am sure you would agree it is far better to admit a major error than to stubbornly maintain a deeply flawed course of action – especially when so many Californians are struggling. I sincerely hope you will agree to cancel this vanity project. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
Neel Kashkari