California is really bad with infrastructure. But it could be worse. It could be like Peru, which just built an airport most people can’t reach:
A new airport in Peru’s capital comes with obstacles that promise a uniquely horrible experience. A highway meant to whisk travelers to the $2 billion terminal has yet to be built, even though flights are supposed to begin operating in just seven weeks. A bridge to get across a river that runs along the grounds was never constructed. There’s a subway stop labeled “Airport” planned for Lima’s new metro system, but that station is set to be built (three years from now) much closer to the old airport that’s being decommissioned. Such head-scratching blunders at Jorge Chavez International Airport are the painful fallout from Peru’s relentless political turbulence….
The current airport — the region’s sixth-busiest, and a hub for Latam Airlines Group Inc. — is at its limit, transporting 24 million passengers last year, almost twice its capacity. The new one will accommodate 30 million travelers and have the capacity to grow up to 60 million.
The new airport has internal roads that don’t go anywhere because of a bridge the government failed to build…The new airport — technically in the municipality of Callao, which is adjacent to Lima — is scheduled to open March 30, and Peru’s government is trying desperately to get it ready. It has created a new entrance separate from where the highway was supposed to go, deploying two temporary pre-fabricated bridges meant for natural disasters to get across the Rimac River.
The bridges will get private cars from congested side roads into the terminal, but there’s no bus service currently scheduled, and there’s no room to allow pedestrians to walk across. That’s a problem for the airport’s 17,000 workers, most of whom now arrive at the existing terminal via public transportation. And officials are worried about the safety of travelers forced to navigate the traffic-choked streets in the crime-filled neighborhood that surrounds the airport.
Peru is wasting less money than California, though. California spends far more per mile of road than the typical state, in both construction and maintenance costs (in 2021, road maintenance costs were over $40,000 per mile in California, compared to less than $14,000 per mile in Virginia). And the U.S. as a whole spends far more per mile of road and per mile of rapid rail transit system than countries like Spain, France, Germany, and Japan.
California wants to spend $128 billion on a “high-speed rail” project that would cost far more per trip than flying, and transport people far more slowly. As noted earlier,
The state’s political class bamboozled voters into approving a high-speed rail project intended to ultimately connect Los Angeles with San Francisco. Construction was supposed to be completed early this decade, and residents were assured that the shiny new ‘clean energy’ train could be theirs for the low, low price of $30 billion,” said the Review-Journal. “Instead, the project is more than a decade behind schedule and is now projected to cost $100 billion…and counting. Officials now hope they can complete a 171-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Merced by the end of the decade.”
That 171-mile stretch will likely be the only part of the project that is ever completed. But few people will ever travel that remote stretch by rail. It runs between two cities that are already connected by a speedy highway, Route 99. It only takes a little over two hours to drive from one city to the other. Merced has only about 80,000 people, so it is not a frequent destination. It’s a city with an extremely high poverty rate, that attracts few tourists or business travelers.
This rail project is so expensive that it will cost more to travel by train than by airplane, even though traveling by train is slower. As the Review-Journal notes, “high-speed” rail can’t “compete with air travel in terms of time or price.” Reason Magazine says California’s “high-speed” rail system “will have ticket prices higher than airfares and will take nearly twice as long as flying.”
The rail project will also harm the environment. The Review Journal calls it an “environmental nightmare.” As the Daily Wire notes, “During the project’s more than 10-year life so far, it has been sued multiple times by environmentalists for harming wildlife along the proposed route.”
Cars and buses use less energy per passenger-mile than the little-used trains will, and building the rail line results in greenhouse gas emissions. Operating high-speed rail will “take massive amounts of electricity,” “raising questions about the power grid’s ability to meet the demand,” says the Fresno Bee. “High-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure” compared to a “four-lane freeway,” says a transportation expert.
