Mathews: California should not emulate this high-speed rail system

A ride on Indonesia’s new 'Whoosh,' the first bullet train in Southeast Asia, was disappointing

The good news: California will almost certainly have a high-speed rail line someday.

The bad news: it may look a lot like “Whoosh.”

Whoosh is Indonesia’s new high-speed rail line, which opened last fall. Its existence is a breakthrough — Whoosh is the first bullet train in Southeast Asia. Similarly, California’s train could be the first truly high-speed service in North America. (Sorry, Amtrak’s Acela and Florida’s Brightline, you don’t surpass 150 miles per hour.)

I rode Whoosh during a visit to Java in February. It was disappointing, in ways that preview how Californians are likely to feel about the high-speed rail we eventually get.

Whoosh and California high-speed rail originated with grand ambitions. In Indonesia, the idea was to build high-speed rail across 600-mile-long Java, from Jakarta in the west to Surabaya in the east. California’s official high-speed rail plans are similar, extending 600 miles from San Francisco and Sacramento in the north to San Diego in the south. Both systems would have the same top speed of 220 miles-per-hour.

Short of ambitions

But rail realities are falling short of ambitions in both places. Whoosh’s newly opened first segment extends just 88 miles, the distance from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. Similarly, California voters in 2008 were told they’d be zipping from L.A. to the Bay Area in three hours by 2020. Currently, only a first segment — 171 miles from Merced to Bakersfield — is under construction, and won’t be operational until 2030.

I boarded Whoosh on a weekday morning. The red train was shiny and new on the outside. Inside, seating was spacious, comfortable and empty. Even with subsidized fares (my ticket cost $18), there were few passengers. Whoosh is already losing money, as high-speed rail systems worldwide do.

Why isn’t Whoosh more popular? One answer: in Indonesia, as in California, the first segment doesn’t take you to big city centers.

In Jakarta, you don’t board the train in the city center but at Halim Station, on the city’s southeast side. My taxi ride there from Central Jakarta took 45 minutes.

The train ride itself, from Jakarta to Bandung, was fast, lasting only 45 minutes — much better than the three hours the trip would take by car. However, on the other end of Whoosh, connections were even more fraught. The train doesn’t go near the  Bandung city center, dropping me well to the south, at Tegalluar station.

Failure to connect

There I found myself surrounded by open land and a soccer stadium. To get to central Bandung, where I was to interview local officials, I would spend another 45 minutes in a taxi. The two taxi rides — within Jakarta and greater Bandung — took 90 minutes, twice the amount of time I spent on the train ride.

On my return from Bandung to Jakarta, I tried an alternative route. I boarded a special feeder train from central Bandung to a different Whoosh station. That trip took 22 minutes. After Whoosh delivered me back to Halim station in southeast Jakarta, I boarded the Metro to return  to where I was staying in Central Jakarta. That ride took 70 minutes.

California’s approach to high-speed rail suffers from a similar failure to connect. The first segment remains entirely within the Central Valley, not penetrating even the outer edges of the Bay Area and of Southern California. That first segment’s endpoints, Merced and Bakersfield, have limited public transportation options; traveling to other destinations would require navigating slow transit questions, or accessing a car.

In California as in Indonesia, the obstacle to creating a robust high-speed system is the same: lack of funding.

So, both projects are dependent on money from outside the state.

Whoosh’s funding came from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Xi Jinping’s highly touted but faltering infrastructure loan program. (Chinese entities own a big share of Whoosh as a  result.) Meanwhile, California, despite state bond funds, needs the federal government to make high-speed rail happen. And Washington is an unstable supporter.  The Biden administration recently sent an infusion of $3 billion. The Trump administration previously took money away.

Worse still, both Indonesia and California have seen cost overruns and big delays on their first train segments — scandals which discourage further investment. Whoosh was more than $1 billion over budget, and four years late, on its first $7.2 billion segment. California’s first segment is estimated to cost $33 billion — as much as the estimated cost of the entire system when voters approved it in 2008. Now the entire system’s price tag is $128 billion, with completion still decades away.

What I learned in Java was that, in high-speed rail as in other things, you get what you pay for. And if your government won’t spend the money required to build robust and well-connected rail systems, you won’t get much.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.