How to Revive California’s Republican Party Which is Currently Dead

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Anyone taking a look at California’s June 2018 state primary ballot would have plenty of evidence to suggest the Republican Party in that state is dead. For starters, California’s GOP has two credible candidates for governor, businessman John Cox and State Assemblyman Travis Allen, which in a normal state might be a good thing. But California’s Republicans are a super-minority party in an open “top-two primary” that pits them against at least two well-funded Democratic candidates, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Although Cox is polling better than Allen, they’re both likely to be aced off the ticket in November.

Worse, California’s Republicans have no viable candidate for U.S. Senate. The most recognizable candidate—indelibly listed as “Republican” on the ballot despite being kicked out of the recent GOP state convention—is Patrick Little, whose campaign website’s home page includes a “learn more” button on the topic of “How We Will End Jewish Supremacism.”

There is not one higher state office in California where a Republican has a realistic chance of victory. Nearly every position—lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer, controller, and state superintendent of schools—Democratic candidates are likely to win. The lone exception is insurance commissioner, where the respected Steve Poizner, who has already held that office as a Republican from 2007 to 2011, is now running as an independent.

California’s GOP Party Organization Has Failed
If you go to the California GOP website to view endorsements, you will see the party faithful failed to choose a gubernatorial candidate. This failure of leadership means that their two candidates, Allen and Cox, are likely to split the support of GOP voters, which increases the likelihood that neither Republican will advance to the general election. (Though current polling suggests Cox could squeak through.) Given the fierce determination of both these candidates, one might forgive the state GOP for not managing to make a selection.

But the state GOP’s failure to make endorsements, which are critical in open primaries where only the top two candidates advance, continues down the ticket.

For state treasurer, there is “no endorsement,” despite two Republican candidates on the ballot. For U.S. Senate, there is “no endorsement,” despite 11 Republican candidates on the ballot. That lapse renders it likely that the top Republican vote-getter in the race for U.S. Senate will be the candidate with the most name recognition—you guessed it, the loathsome Patrick Little.

For insurance commissioner, the state GOP apparently didn’t know what to do, since most of them realize former Republican Steve Poizner is a good choice. So instead of “no endorsement” showing up, they simply omitted that position from their list of endorsements. Why couldn’t the state GOP recruit and promote top candidates? Is there really any excuse for this, when there are still tens of thousands of highly successful men and women who are registered Republicans in California and would be good candidates?

When you look for leadership in California’s Republican party, you might consider the last candidate for governor who had a respectable showing: Meg Whitman. (The less said about Neel Kashkari, the better.) But Whitman just publicly endorsed a Democrat, Antonio Villaraigosa. With leadership like that, who needs enemies? Is Whitman a RINO? Is she a turncoat? Or, to be brutally honest, is she just recognizing the cold reality that California is a one-party state, so she wants to support the person she perceives to be the lesser evil?

Demographic Trends Favor the Democrats
If demographic trends and current voting patterns persist, California is going to be a one-party state for a very long time. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, among California’s “likely voters,” more whites are registered as Republicans, 39 percent, than Democrats, 38 percent. But “whites” are only 38 percent of California’s population, and that percentage is dropping fast. Among residents under 18 years old, excluding illegal aliens, whites are now barely 25 percent of California’s population. Why does this matter?

Because among likely voters, Latinos registered as Democrats (62 percent) far outnumber Latino Republicans (17 percent). Among blacks, the disparity is even greater—82 percent Democrat versus 6 percent Republican. Among Asians, where the disparity is less, the Democrats still have a nearly two-to-one advantage, 45 percent to 24 percent.

California’s Democrats successfully have tainted Republicans as racist ever since Governor Pete Wilson supported Proposition 187 in 1994. That citizens’ initiative, narrowly passed by voters then utterly decimated by liberal judges, would have—gasp!—denied taxpayer-funded public services to illegal immigrants. Ever since, any attempt to place realistic curbs on benefits for illegal aliens has been met with militant opposition by Democrats who control a supermajority in California’s legislature. California’s Democrats have played the race card with impunity.

In late 2016, when incoming President Trump proposed to deport criminal aliens, Democratic Assemblyman Ricardo Lara—now running for insurance commissioner—threatened to “fight in the streets” to preserve “the work we have done.” Democratic State Senator Kevin de León—now running for U.S. Senate against long-time incumbent Democratic Dianne Feinstein—frequently refers to “President Trump’s racist-driven deportation policies.” California attorney general Xavier Becerra has been quoted stating that “Trump was showing himself to be a racist in every respect.” Examples are endless. This November, California’s Democrats are going to make Patrick Little and Donald Trump the running mate of every Republican on every ballot in the state.

But will this work forever? Does California’s GOP have to stay dead? Will “people of color” continue to believe that California should be a one-party state?

Demographics Is Not Destiny
Eventually, California’s Democrats are going to go too far, because their policies are economically unsustainable. Gavin Newsom, the favorite to occupy the governor’s mansion in 2019, proposes a single-payer health care system for the state, something that would cost at least $200 billion a year, in addition to sowing chaos throughout California’s healthcare industry. Meanwhile, California’s Democrats propose to offer full health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, spend tens of millions to provide free college tuition to illegal immigrants, in a state where taxpayers already fund over $25 billion per year to provide public services to illegal immigrants.

How long can this go on?

Objecting to these costly programs may attract accusations of racism, but growing numbers of Latinos, blacks, and Asians, along with white liberals, may eventually decide that Democrats no longer have the answer. All it will take is one major stock correction, or one more downturn in the historically cyclical tech industry, and California’s public finances will implode. All of a sudden, hundreds of billions in tax receipts necessary to sustain free health care, free tuition, and public-sector pensions, to say nothing of benefits for illegal aliens, will vaporize. Economic calamities that reach deep into the pocketbooks and tragically disrupt the lives of ordinary voters have a way of focusing the mind.

The GOP’s case in such times, and to prevent such times, is not abstruse. It goes like this: For decades, Democrats have told you that the most important issue in the world was protecting yourselves from white racism. But while you were voting for the people who kept telling you this, their government unions, controlled by Democrats, were destroying the public schools that might have provided your children with a useful education.

Their government bureaucracies, controlled by Democrats, were driving small businesses out of business with ridiculous, punitive regulations, forcing many of them to flee the state, denying you jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Instead of investing in transportation and water infrastructure to enable a reasonable quality of life to long-time residents and new arrivals alike, Democratic politicians used taxpayers’ money to overpay the government employees, so that government unions would fund the Democratic Party.

The GOP’s case doesn’t end with exposing racism as a diversion from the real issues of economic growth. It also exposes extreme environmentalism, and the synergy between the environmental movement, the overbuilt public sector, and left-wing oligarchs.

For decades, these extreme environmentalists, all of them Democrats, prevented perfectly benign land development in a state literally sprawling with open space. They did this in the name of saving the earth, downplaying how the resulting real estate bubble pumped up government property tax receipts and goosed the returns for the real estate portfolios in government pension funds. They prevented private investment in cheap conventional energy—in particular, clean natural gas and nuclear power—so residents have to pay twice as much (or more) for electricity as people in other states. Democrats barred private investment in oil drilling and refining, and imposed automotive and fuel standards in conflict with the rest of the United States, so Californians pay substantially more at the gas pump.

A Pro-Growth Economic Opportunity Agenda for California
Turning California back into the land of opportunity isn’t that hard, since it still has the best universities, the best weather, and the largest, most diverse economy in America. And California’s GOP politicians can make it happen, by promoting a pro-growth agenda at the same time as they expose identity politics and extreme environmentalism for what they are—a gigantic scam that distracted voters from the real issues. Here is a pro-growth, economic opportunity agenda for California:

Education

Restore the balance in California’s colleges and universities so that the ratio of faculty to administrators is 2-to-1, instead of the current ratio that allows administrators often to outnumber teachers.

End all discrimination and base college admissions purely on merit. Expand STEM curricula so it represents 50 percent of college majors instead of the current 20 percent.

Enforce the Vergara reforms so it is easier to retain quality public school teachers and easier to fire the incompetent ones. Eliminate barriers to charter schools.

Criminal Justice

Restructure the penal system to make it easier for prisoners to perform useful public services. For example. along with working the fire lines during fire season, they could work all year clearing dead trees out of California’s forests. Use high-tech monitoring devices to reduce costs. Reserve current prisons only for the truly incorrigible.

Infrastructure

Scrap the high-speed rail project and instead use the proceeds to add one lane to every major interstate in California, and upgrade and resurface all state highways.

Use additional high-speed rail funds to complete plant upgrades so that 100 percent of California’s sewage is reused, even treated to potable quality.

Pass legislation to streamline approval of the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach, and fast-track applications for additional desalination plants, especially in Los Angeles.

Spend the entire proceeds of the $7 billion water bond, passed overwhelmingly by Californians in 2014, on storage. Build the Los Banos Grandes, Sites, and Temperance Flat reservoirs, adding over 5.0 million acre feet of storage to the California Water Project. Pass aggressive legislation and fund aggressive legal actions and counteractions, to lower costs and enable completion of these projects in under five years (which is all the time it used to take to complete similar projects).

Energy

Permit slant drilling to access 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits from land-based rigs along the Southern California coast. Build an LNG terminal off the coast in Ventura County to export California’s natural gas to foreign markets. Permit development of the Monterey Shale formation to extract oil and gas.

Permit construction of “generation 3+” nuclear power plants in geologically stable areas of California’s interior. Permit construction of new natural gas power plants.

Housing

Repeal the 2006 “Global Warming Solutions Act” and “Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act” of 2008 and make it easy for developers to build homes on the suburban and exurban fringes, instead of just “in-fill” that destroys existing neighborhoods.

Pensions and Infrastructure

Require California’s public employee pension funds to invest a minimum of 10 percent of their assets in infrastructure projects as noted above. They could issue fixed rate bonds or take equity positions in the revenue-producing projects, or a combination of both. This would immediately unlock approximately $80 billion in construction financing to rebuild California’s infrastructure. At the same time, save the pension systems by striking down the “California Rule” that prevents meaningful pension reform.

These reforms would lower the cost of living in California, at the same time as they would create resource abundance and hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs.

Why Republicans Are the Most Qualified to Rescue California
Once you’ve debunked the narrative that Republicans are racists, it is easier for voters, regardless of their ethnicity, to see their virtues. To a startling degree, California’s Republican legislators typically come from business backgrounds, whereas most Democratic legislators come from a government agency or a nonprofit background.

In 2016, an analysis of the biographies of California’s state legislators showed that 69 percent of Republican legislators came from a business background, 19 percent of them had some business and some government or nonprofit experience, and only 11 percent of them came exclusively from a government or nonprofit background. By contrast, only 6 percent of Democrats came from a business background, only 18 percent of them came from a mixed business and government or nonprofit background, while a whopping 76 percent of them came exclusively from a government or nonprofit background. One can draw profound conclusions from this unambiguous data.

In business, competence is emphasized; in government, personal connections are everything. In business, the objective is to competitively build and run productive companies; in government, to control, coerce, and redistribute. To work in business one must study engineering or finance and accounting. To work in government, one may study sociology or earn a major in any number of social justice-oriented “studies.”

What is the result of California’s Democratic lawmakers, in overwhelming numbers, lacking any experience in business? A state where financial realism is eclipsed by confrontational, utopian fantasy. A state where self-righteousness and self-deception are the currency of governance, instead of factual analysis and hard choices. A state where the infectious optimism that defines and is a prerequisite for business leadership is absent from a dismal capital.

Republicans can offer an irresistible alternative. They can promote abundance instead of scarcity; prosperity instead of an “era of limits;” hope and opportunity instead of resentment, retribution and redistribution; universal upward mobility instead of divisive scrapping for diminishing wealth.

They need to get busy.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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California’s Transportation Future, Part Three – Next Generation Vehicles

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The next generation of vehicles will transform transportation in several fundamental ways. What is coming will be as revolutionary in our time as the transition from horses to horseless carriages was over a century ago. Some increments of this dawning revolution are already here in realized products. Electric drivetrains. Collision avoidance systems. Self-driving cars. Cars on demand. Aerial drones. Nearly all of the enabling technology for this dawning revolution is already here. Artificial intelligence. Visual recognition and sensor systems that use radar, sonar and LIDAR laser scanning. Mapping capabilities. GPS. Data collection. Memory chips. Communications systems. And every one of these technologies, along with investment capital, more than anywhere else, is concentrated in California.

As this revolution unfolds, our conception of what constitutes vehicular transport will change. Many vehicles will be modular and reconfigurable. On the road surface, the wheeled chassis, or “skateboard,” will contain the essentials to power and navigate the vehicle. Depending on the duty cycle, a skateboard chassis may be small, only capable of carrying a two passenger cabin, or small freight payload. Other skateboards will range in size from those capable of carrying a sedan or SUV sized passenger unit, all the way to the largest versions which, with freight or passenger units attached, would weigh up to 80,000 pounds.

Even more variation will be present in the passenger modules. An SUV sized passenger module, for example, might hold 6-8 passengers like a mini-bus. Or it might be a conference room or an office where a group of passengers could conduct work while being transported. Or it might be a sleeper unit, a rolling hotel room, where a lone passenger or a family or work crew would sleep while en-route to their destination.

Perhaps even more amazing are the aerial modules that are coming. A passenger module may arrive at a staging area on a wheeled chassis, where an aerial drone will attach itself to the top of the passenger module at the same time as that module is released from the skateboard chassis. In an automated, seamless process, the occupants will then be flown beneath this drone to their intended destination.

SELF DRIVING VEHICLES

All of the above is happening with surprising rapidity. Dozens of partnerships between major automakers and the technology partners they need to complete this process have already been formed and continue to be formed. San Francisco based Uber is working with Volkswagon and Nvidia, a major chipmaker and world leader in visual computing. Uber is also working with Toyota to develop self driving cars. Silicon Valley based Tesla continues to test “full self-driving hardware,” competing with Google spin-off Waymo, also located in Silicon Valley. Another credible Silicon Valley self-driving car startup is Aurora, which as reported by the San Jose Mercury earlier this year, is “formed by one-time heads of autonomous car projects at Google parent Alphabet and Tesla [and] will develop self-driving electric vehicles with Volkswagen and Hyundai Motor.”

Not to be excluded, Silicon Valley heavyweight Apple is confounding critics who claimed they might find achieving their business model of vertical integration too challenging to include vehicles. According to a March 2018 report in Fortune, referring to testing in California, “with 45 cars on the road, Apple is now testing more vehicles than its top rivals. Tesla, for instance, has 39 permits. Uber has 29 permits, according to the report. Alphabet’s Waymo had more than 100 permits in June 2017 and has 24 now.”

According to the same report, “Apple is now second behind General Motors’ Cruise company, which has 110 self-driving car permits in California.” The GM owned company, Cruise Automation, is headquartered in San Francisco. GM’s strategy? According to The Street, GM intends to “deploy self-driving taxis in dense urban environments to take passengers from point A to point B. Rather than a one-time sale of the vehicle, the automaker can milk hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per vehicle.” And in that same report, Ford’s strategy is “using a new vehicle capable of carrying both people or items. The unit will run a hybrid engine and operate about 20 hours per day.”

The Mercedes F 015 “Luxury in Motion” Self-Driving Concept Car

The above photo of the Mercedes F 015 “Luxury in Motion” Self-Driving Concept Car provides a glimpse into just how much vehicular travel is going to change. Note that the dashboard and control surfaces, including an almost vestigial steering wheel, are on the right side of the compartment. The front seats are swiveled to face the rear seats, turning the area into more of a lounge or conference room than a traditional vehicle compartment. The presumption is that most of the time the car will be self-driving, allowing the passengers to pursue many of the same sedentary activity options in the vehicle that they might pursue outside the vehicle.

When it comes to major automakers and high-tech corporations, it’s hard to find a company that’s not getting involved in autonomous vehicles. A March 2018 report in TechWorld attempts to catalog all of them – some not already mentioned above include Rinspeed AG, a Swiss automaker teamed up with Samsung; Volvo, teamed up with Uber; Chinese internet giant Baidu’s self-driving vehicle platform Apollo, which includes vehicle hardware, software and cloud data platforms to help others in the autonomous cars industry; Intel, which bought Israel-based driverless car technology firm Mobileye, in partnership together with BMW; Audi in partnership with graphics cards maker Nvidia; the list goes on.

Convinced yet? Driverless vehicles are coming. They are coming in myriad forms and will employ myriad business models. Stepping to the curb and using your phone to dial up a robotic ride, any type of ride, to any destination, will become commonplace. Scheduling personalized transportation services in advance will become routine. Ownership models will become more diverse. Individuals will own cars, but so will automakers, transit agencies, taxi services; who will own these cars of the future and to what purpose is only limited by one’s imagination.

PASSENGER DRONES

If the world of self-driving cars is just around the corner, then just down the street, also set to arrive sooner than expected, are passenger drones. And again, most of the major players are operating in California. Uber has formed “Uber Air,” or Elevate, to develop aerial transportation systems. Google has two companies, operating in stealth, Cora, and Kitty Hawk. Also active in California are the companies Aurora, in partnership with Boeing, and Vahana, in partnership with Airbus.

Cora’s experimental electric powered “Air Taxi” –
takes off like a helicopter, flies like a plane

An interesting company based in Santa Cruz is Joby Aviation. While over a $130 million in financing and over 120 employees isn’t all that much so far, Joby Aviation appears to be a serious contender. Investors include Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, and Capricorn Investment Group. Despite being one of the most secretive startups in a sector where stealth is the rule, not the exception, an excellent report on Joby’s progress was published by Bloomberg earlier this year.  From a remote test station deep in the mountains of California’s central coast, the Bloomberg reporters were given a ride. From the article: “Powered by electric motors and sophisticated control software, the taxi performs like a cross between a drone and a small plane, able to zip straight up on takeoff and then fly at twice the speed of a helicopter while making about as much noise as a swarm of superbees.”

This is fascinating stuff. Apparently most “air taxis” (or “sky cabs”) being developed are powered by electricity, and in many respects are just enlarged versions of the drones now commonly used by hobbyists and photographers. Joby Aviation intends to build an aircraft with a range of 150 miles on a single battery charge, carrying up to four passengers. They would travel at relatively low altitudes to avoid having to pressurize the cabin. They expect to be “100 times more quiet during takeoff and landing than a helicopter and near-silent during flyovers.”

LAND/AIR HYBRIDS

No discussion of the imminent revolution in vehicle transportation is complete without considering the possibility of travel by land and by air in the same passenger module, with a separate wheeled module for land travel, which detaches from the passenger module when it is lifted airborne by a flight module. As reported earlier this year in Electrek.co, Audi and Airbus are working on just such a solution. The following two images are from a visualization of this futuristic transportation option prepared by Italdesign in partnership with Audi and Airbus.

Aerial drone/electric car hybrid concept –
passenger module prepares to detach from land module

 

Aerial drone/electric car hybrid concept –
passenger module now attached to flight module

THE HYPERLANE OPTION

If the Hyperloop might represent the fastest conceivable mode of land based travel, then, similarly, the “Hyperlane” might represent the fastest conceivable mode of travel by autonomous wheeled vehicles on a flat road surface. The hyperlane concept was conceived by UC Berkeley graduate students, Baiyu Chen and Anthony Barrs, who proposed the hyperlane concept in 2017 as their winning entry in the Association of Equipment Manufacturers “Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge.” AEM’s 2017 challenge to entrants was to present concepts to “support high-speed transportation by the year 2050.”

As reported in Fortune, “The duo’s idea was to construct a ‘Hyperlane,’ or a single platform the size of four interstate lanes that would run parallel to pre-existing highways in order for self-driving cars to travel at high speeds with no chance of getting into a jam. …’we realized we could remove the tracks and deploy new, emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles.’”

Whether the Hyperlane is a dedicated four lane highway, elevated over existing highways on existing right-of-ways, or additional specialized lanes similar to the HOV lanes we’ve already got, emerging automotive technologies support safer, denser traffic at higher speeds. Electric traction motors not only have extraordinary torque which delivers impressive acceleration, they also have a wide functional RPM range, zero to 20,000, far greater than combustion engines. Back in the 1990s, a prototype version of the now legendary General Motors EV1 was clocked at 183 MPH. The current crop of electric vehicles have top speeds that are deliberately limited by software; the Chevy Volt tops out at 100 MPH, the Tesla Roadster at 125 MPH, and the Tesla Model S at 130 MPH.

Using dedicated lanes for high speed vehicular travel has been tried already. The fast lanes on the German autobahns easily qualify. If you’re driving 120 MPH in the fast lane on the autobahn, you’d better watch your rear view mirror, because if a car traveling 160 MPH crashes into your rear end, it’s your fault. German drivers obey strict rules, the most critical of which is slower drivers must always yield to faster drivers by moving promptly into the slower right lanes, and faster drivers must never pass on the right. And it works. The fatality rate on the autobahn is much lower than on the United States interstate system.

THE CASE FOR CARS

The conventional enlightened policy wisdom is that driving cars on roads is an obsolete way for millions of people to travel. Policy driven alternatives, costing billions each year, include light rail, high-speed rail, trolleys and bike lanes. In support of these policy alternatives, “transit villages” are zoned, along with “densification,” based on the theory that if more people live near mass transit stations, and, in general, if more people live and work in smaller urban footprints, there will be less need for people to own cars.

To explore the costs and benefits of densification and urban containment goes beyond the scope of this report. But the primary problems currently inherent in relying on cars to fulfill the requirements of mass transportation – low speeds, unsafe, congested roads – are all being solved through innovation. With upgraded roads and updated driving laws, modern cars can sustain speeds as fast or faster than California’s proposed high speed rail. And there are a variety of ways that the new innovations that are transforming vehicular travel will increase safety and relieve congestion.

Private sector funding:

With minimal government investment, the private sector is creating connected and autonomous vehicles, completely redefining the car. The enabling technologies draw from diverse industries, resulting in consortiums that bring together participants from sectors including automotive, semiconductor, telecommunications, smart phones, aerospace, robotics and AI. One challenge is ensuring that the makers of this next generation of vehicles incorporate common standards.

To navigate the roads without a driver, self-driving cars rely on vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications. The Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, (CAR) with a mission ” to educate, inform and advise stakeholders, policy makers, and the general public on critical issues facing the automotive industry,” has produced several recent reports evaluating what they call “intelligent transportation systems.” In their 2017 report “Planning for Connected and Automated Vehicles,” they define V2V systems as “wireless communication between vehicles, such as safety warnings and messages.” They define V2I systems as “wireless communications between vehicles and the infrastructure, such as a system that connects a vehicle to cellular towers for navigation purposes.”

As the technology matures, several industry associations are working to harmonize standards for intelligent transportation systems, nationally and globally. In CAR’s 2016 report “Global Harmonization of Connected Vehicle Communications Standards,” they explain how interoperable communications systems in vehicles are necessary to resolve the following questions:

  • Which entities communicate and to whom (e.g., vehicle, pedestrian, roadside infrastructure, central servers)?
  • Which message set is used within the communication?
  • What media and channel allocation is used (e.g., 5.9 GHz)?
  • What application is implemented and how?

Private entities supported by industry are funding this effort and working closely with the U.S. Dept. of Transportation as well as with most states. Just a few of the major organizations involved in this effort include the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), ASTM International, SAE International, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), National Transportation Communications for Intelligent Transportation System Protocol(NTCIP), American National Standards Institute (ANSI), European Committee for Standardization (CEN), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC), and the European Telecommunications Institute(ETSI).

In April 2018, as reported in the industry publication Transport Topics, two of the most prominent associations involved in setting standards, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Center for Mobility announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding with the  to help accelerate development and deployment of voluntary technical standards for connected and autonomous vehicles.

Lower costs to the consumer:

To some extent, the fact that consumers will spend less for transportation is a function of the convergence of increasingly automated manufacturing, the availability and superiority of new composite materials to replace expensive steel, global competition, and progressively lower costs for software, chip sets, sensors and other high-tech components. Moore’s law is alive and well, and doesn’t just apply to semiconductors. But lower costs and more options for consumers of transportation will not only result from ongoing advances in manufacturing, they will also result from the rollout of a variety of new business models that offer a variety of new modes of transportation.

The disruptive impact of Uber, a ride hailing service that has challenged the taxi industry to its roots, is an early example of what is coming. Uber and its competitors are already testing autonomous vehicles, something that will become common. These driverless taxis will cost less to ride, since there won’t be a driver. Similarly, privately funded “micro-transit” services will offer mini bus services based on a connectivity and AI driven dynamic awareness of consumer demand and road conditions, offering shared rides based on aggregating riders who are boarding and exiting the mini bus along routes that are optimized to move the most passengers the fewest miles in the lowest amount of time.

Ride sharing, the 21st century version of picking up a hitchhiker, will also become a more viable option than ever. For example, participants in many ride sharing services will be members, vetted in a manner similar to the vetting that occurs with the hosts and the occupants of Airbnb properties. The advantage for the vehicle owner, of course, is a having a paying passenger join them on their commute, with the added benefit of becoming eligible to drive in carpool lanes.

Car sharing, where the user takes over a vehicle, is similar to a conventional car rental. The differences are a reflection of the new technologies. For example, using their smart phone or other connected device, consumers will order a car, and within minutes the driverless vehicle will arrive wherever they are. The car can be rented by the hour, or per day, or for a longer period. The price includes fuel and insurance costs.

Also on the way are mobility services, online aggregators of all transportation options. These mobility services will offer consumers transportation options tailored to their preferences. A consumer will be presented with a variety of ways to reach their destination, ranging from a single vehicle going point-to-point to a collection of travel legs utilizing public and private transit services.

The sheer variety of these emerging transportation options, primarily funded by the private sector, suggest that there will be vibrant competition for the consumer, driving down prices. Another significant factor in lowering prices is the fact that in general, the transportation services being offered will involve multiple riders on each vehicle, spreading the per-mile costs over more people, lowering per-mile costs for each of them.

Less traffic congestion:

The ability of next generation vehicles to create cost-incentives for individuals to opt out of purchasing their own cars will reduce the number of cars competing for space on congested roads. It will also reduce the demand for parking spaces and parking garages. This will be accomplished in a variety of ways. Through ride hailing, ride sharing and micro-transit services, fewer cars will be used to deliver the same number of commuters from bedroom communities to urban centers. Through sharing of self driving cars, an early commuter may arrive at their destination, but the car itself will immediately drive itself to the nearest next consumer, transporting them to their destination instead of taking up a parking space for the rest of the day. Mobility services will present consumers with customized options, resulting in compelling incentives for them to opt out of purchasing a car, or a second car.

The other way 21st century vehicles will alleviate traffic congestion is because as semi-autonomous vehicles – for example, collision avoidance systems which are already standard on most new cars – and fully self-driving vehicles become widely adopted, the safe distance between vehicles will shrink, as will the safe speed for vehicles. The adoption of next generation vehicles will mean that the same network of lanes and roads will be able to deliver more people. Michigan’s  Center for Automotive Research, in their 2017 “Future Cities” report, depicts how in the long term, once autonomous cars are fully adopted, urban boulevards may be reconfigured with narrower lanes and fewer lanes, without compromising mobility.

Autonomous Cars – Same Road Capacity With Narrower and Fewer Lanes

PREPARING FOR NEXT GENERATION VEHICLES

It appears likely that the technologies for next generation vehicles, operating on roads and in the air, will mature faster than our ability to develop policies and infrastructure to accommodate them. This is particularly difficult since autonomous vehicles will not suddenly displace conventional manually controlled vehicles on our roads, but will share the roads with them for many decades. But the encouraging possibility with next generation vehicles is that the public infrastructure necessary to support them is relatively limited compared to the transit solutions that currently consume huge allocations of public resources.

For example, establishing uniform standards for autonomous vehicles is being actively coordinated and funded by the major automakers and aerospace companies, along with other private sector participants. The role of the state and federal departments regulating highway travel and aviation is vital, but will not consume significant funds compared to the cost of major infrastructure investments.

In the case of aviation, next generation solutions, ranging from passenger drones today to the supersonic electric airplanes that are likely tomorrow, are virtually all designed for vertical takeoff and landing, meaning that expensive airport runway infrastructure does not require expansion in order to accommodate them.

Similarly, autonomous land-based vehicles are designed to operate at higher speeds in closer proximity to each other, reducing the need to increase road capacity. Moreover, the emerging business model for next generation vehicles strongly incentivizes consumers to forego purchasing their own car, opting instead for ride hailing, ride sharing, car sharing and micro-transit services, which also reduces the number of cars sharing the road. These new mobility solutions will also reduce demand for parking spaces and parking garages, taking further pressure off of infrastructure requirements.

It may be that for urban areas, the impact of next generation vehicles combined with the contributions from aerial transportation options, combined with congestion pricing, will mean that the only road investment necessary within urban centers is to maintain and upgrade existing roads. For major intercity connector roads, highways and freeways, however, important policy decisions loom. Because as it is, these roads are not designed or maintained in a manner sufficient to allow next generation vehicles to reach their potential.

The implications of this are profound. Next generation vehicles, in all sizes and configurations, have the potential to replace most if not all proposed mass transit solutions both for intercity and long-range travel. The maximum safe and sustainable cruising speed of a modern electric vehicle is conservatively pegged at 120 MPH. Vehicles of the future will not only be configured similarly to conventional cars and SUVs, they will also be mobile hotel rooms, entertainment lounges, offices, conference rooms, and buses of all sizes, offering countless levels of services. On properly designed and maintained roads, there is no reason these vehicular solutions cannot replace literally all current or proposed modes of surface based transit, certainly including high-speed rail but probably including light rail as well.

Policymakers have a choice. They can recognize that private industry is creating new ways to travel on land and in the air. They can cooperate to develop uniform standards and updated laws to expedite this transformation. They can revise zoning laws, redirect funding priorities, and invest in new roads and communications infrastructure. Or they can neglect road construction and instead continue to build public mass transit systems that offer dubious prospects of ever solving growing transportation bottlenecks.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is a privately funded transit solution that transports private vehicles point-to-point underground, moving them on and off surface streets with elevators. On the Boring Company’s FAQ page, focused on ways to dramatically reduce the costs of tunneling, a provocative assertion is made: “The construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”

The next installment in this series will explore the implications of this assertion. What would it take to improve productivity in the heavy road construction industry? There has been a healthy public discussion regarding how much it will cost to build California’s high speed railroad. But how much does it cost to build roads in California? How much would it cost not only to catch up on all the deferred maintenance on California’s roads, and upgrade them incrementally, but to actually build new roads, north to south and coast to mountains, engineered for the cars of the future?

This article was originally published for the California Policy Center.

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California’s Transportation Future, Part Two – The Hyperloop Option

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In July 2012, Elon Musk sat down for a “fireside chat” with Sara Lacy, founder of the PandoDaily website. In between discussions of Paypal, Tesla, and SpaceX, 43 minutes in, Musk unveiled his idea for the “Hyperloop,” a new transportation technology that “incorporates reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on air bearings driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.”

The concept wasn’t new. Hyperloop concepts have existed for nearly 200 years. Small scale “pneumatic railways” were actually built in Dublin, London, and Paris, mostly as a novelty, as far back as the 1850’s. In 1910, American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard proposed a train that would go from Boston to New York in 12 minutes. Goddard’s design advanced the technology, replacing wheels with magnetic levitation of the passenger capsule inside a vacuum-sealed tunnel.

Musk’s “Hyperloop Alpha” study was released by a joint team from SpaceX and Tesla in August 2013. This 58 page study remains an excellent investigation of the financial and engineering feasibility of Hyperloop technology. The concept is relatively simple. Passengers and freight travel in “pods” or “capsules,” through a tube that has had all the air pumped out, eliminating the friction of air resistance. Moreover, these pods ride on electromagnets, repelled away from the inner surface of the tube, eliminating the friction of wheels. Not only would these electromagnets keep the pods levitated off the inside surfaces of the travel tube, but through “linear induction,” they would provide the force to propel the pod through the tube. Most proponents claim these innovations make speeds feasible in excess of 700 MPH.

A system like this, assuming there were nonstop service, could deliver passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in around 30 minutes. From the Hyperloop Alpha report, here is the route a Hyperloop system could take in California:

“Hyperloop Alpha” – The Original Proposed Route Connecting SF to LA

The Hyperloop Alpha study was released as an open source document, and none of the companies currently developing Hyperloop systems are directly affiliated with Musk or his companies. Since 2013, at least three noteworthy companies have emerged. Each of these companies have developed substantial technical changes to the design imagined in Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha study. And sadly, despite two of them being headquartered in California, none of these companies are currently proposing a system to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles.

THE MAJOR HYPERLOOP CONTENDERS

Virgin Hyperloop One, founded in 2014, is based in Los Angeles. They have over 300 employees and have raised over $295 million in investment capital. The company was rebranded in October 2017 after receiving a significant investment from Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. In May 2017 they began testing a Hyperloop system on a 500 meter “development loop” built in the desert north of Las Vegas. Regarding next steps for the company, a spokesperson for Virgin Hyperloop One claimed “we’ve already seen ground-breaking commitments in India, UAE, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.” He said construction of the Mumbai-Pune route in India could begin as early as 2022 and be completed in less than five years for passenger operations.

Virgin Hyperloop One’s 500 meter long “DevLoop” in the Nevada Desert

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or “HTT,” founded in late 2013, is based in Culver City in the Los Angeles area. They claim to have over 800 collaborators located all over the world who are working mostly in exchange for stock options.  While HTT uses crowd sourcing and is crowd funded, they have developed proprietary technology. An HTT spokesperson reached for comment said “The model is tricky to define. It isn’t open source, we call it ‘open collaboration.’ We don’t disclose our patents and schematics, we have signed contracts and non-disclosure agreements. But this way qualified candidates can be found worldwide and can contribute their talents in exchange for stock options.”

A Harvard Business School case study on HTT had this to say about the company’s prospects using this business model: “Rather than employees, HTT has invited over 800 people to contribute a minimum of 10 hours per week in exchange for future equity. Everything from recruitment, incentives, culture, technology, and intellectual property controls are handled with the idea that a community can work together to solve a global problem (transportation) by ‘turning a collective passion into a vision and the vision into a reality.’ The open question is how this approach will fair as the organization moves from design to delivery.”

Apparently so far HTT’s novel approach to financing and recruitment is working, because in April 2018 they announced construction of a kilometer-long test track near its R&D center in France near Toulouse. In addition to being headquartered in California with a test track underway in France, HTT has entered into government partnerships to perform feasibility studies and testing in Slovakia, India, as well as in the U.S. states of Ohio and Illinois. HTT also has impressive commercial technology partners including AECOM, Ansys, and Oerlikon.

Hyperloop Transportation Technology’s full-scale tubes are transported to French test site 

Another entrant in the Hyperloop industry is Transpod, founded in 2015, based in Toronto with satellite offices in Italy and France. In 2018 they announced plans to build a half-scale, 3 kilometer test track in France. Transpod president Sebastien Gendron, reached by phone, said construction would start this summer. He expected it to be ready for tests to begin within a year, or by Spring of 2019. He stated the decision to go at half-scale was based on a need to finalize the technology based on the results of the testing.

The designs Transpod are exploring are illustrative of the variations in the engineering solutions being developed at these three main competitors. Gendron explained that to reduce the cost per kilometer of tube, a major factor is the type of magnetic levitation. “We are developing technology to keep 80-90% of the levitation system on the vehicle itself,” he said. This would eliminate the need for expensive permanent magnets powered up for the entire length of the corridor. Like his counterparts at Virgin One Hyperloop and HTT, Gendron was reluctant to explain further details of their proprietary technology.

Hypothetical Hyperloop Station (artists rendering from Transpod)

WILL HYPERLOOP WORK AND IS IT SAFE?

A rather caustic attempt to debunk Hyperloop technology was released in July 2016 by Phil Mason, a British scientist and videoblogger who has nearly 800,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. His video, entitled “The Hyperloop Busted!,” has gotten over 1.5 million views, and takes a dim view of Hyperloop technology. Some of Mason’s criticisms are valid but obvious, and not deal killers. In particular, that Hyperloop systems will cost more than claimed by proponents, and that Hyperloop systems will use more energy than claimed by proponents. Mason is almost certainly correct in these criticisms, but they don’t necessarily kill the argument for Hyperloop transportation solutions. How much more will they cost? How much more energy will they consume? Other concerns merit more attention.

For example, Mason claims that current designs for lengthy Hyperloop routes don’t take into account thermal expansion of metal tubes that are literally hundreds of miles long. When reached for comment on this challenge, a Hyperloop One spokesperson said “We have successfully built a test track in the Nevada desert which is the perfect environment to test the impact of temperature changes upon the Hyperloop tube as temperatures range from over 100F to below freezing. The DevLoop tube experiences daily movement due to expansion and contraction of the steel during temperature swings. To accommodate this movement, we have designed proprietary structural systems into the DevLoop columns to allow for this movement which allows the tube to expand and contract without causing structural damage to the tube, vacuum, and other supporting mechanisms. As systems get longer, we are confident that we can build a flexible, strong, affordable, safe system that can endure a multitude of weather conditions given our testing experience in the harsh climate of the Nevada desert.”

Until systems get longer, it is difficult for Hyperloop proponents to muster convincing arguments that it will be absolutely safe. Depressurizing a tube several hundred miles long is a major engineering feat requiring a lot of energy, as is constructing a tube that long that is capable of structurally withstanding depressurization. There are many unanswered questions.

How will passenger pods exit the main Hyperloop route and switch onto sidings to board and disembark passengers at intermediate stops? How will pods airlock themselves to exit points at the station without letting air into the tube? Since these pods will be traveling at very high speeds, packing almost unimaginable kinetic energy, how certain can operators be that a pod might never bump into the inside of the tube? Wouldn’t a minor “bump,” at high speed in a narrow tube, result in a catastrophic collision, rupturing and depressurizing the tube and likely killing not only the passengers in the colliding pod, but all the passengers in all the pods transiting the tube as they encounter a wall of air?

THE TUNNELING OPTION

One of the strongest arguments for Hyperloop systems, should they function as planned, is that implementing them uses less space. Hyperloop systems can be put onto pylons, elevating the tubes so they don’t disrupt activities on the ground below them, whether that is farmland or the median of a divided highway or freeway. Hyperloop tubes can also be buried underground, enabling them to establish routes through densely populated cities.

It may be that the first use of Hyperloop technology will be within urban areas, where the space advantage they offer constitutes a more decisive argument for investing in a system than the maximum speeds they might achieve on longer routes. It may be the technology can be perfected at lower, safer speeds. Elon Musk, who is not directly involved with any of the companies vying to build the first Hyperloop systems, has founded The Boring Company, where he hopes to apply the same aggressive innovation to tunneling technology as he has applied to rocketry with SpaceX.

If SpaceX challenges NASA in the field of rocketry, The Boring Company faces a similarly entrenched competitor in the German firm Herrenknecht AG. Founded in 1975, its massive factory nestled along the Rhine, this multi-billion dollar company sells tunneling systems – sophisticated snakelike machines that can be over 1,000 feet long – all over the world. Herrenknecht TBMs (tunnel boring machines) dug the 35 mile long Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Swiss Alps in 2009, the longest and deepest tunnel in the world. Today, most of Herrenknecht’s TBMs are digging subways in urban areas, primarily in the Middle East and Asia. For more on Herrenknecht and tunneling technology today, read “The Long Dig” (New Yorker, 2008), or watch this fascinating animation of an operating TBM.

Tunneling, like blasting payloads into low earth orbit, is extremely expensive. But The Boring Company claims tunneling costs can be dramatically reduced. On The Boring Company’s FAQ page, the following innovations are proposed: (1) Triple the power output of the TBM’s cutting unit, (2) Continuously tunnel instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls, (3) Automate the TBM, eliminating most human operators, (4) Go electric, and (5) Engage in tunneling R&D, “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”

Apparently tunneling, whether for Hyperloop pods, or just electric powered “skates,” has the attention of the Los Angeles City Council, which in April 2018 approved a CEQA exemption so The Tunneling Company can immediately begin digging a 14 foot diameter, 2.7 mile long tunnel through the heart of West LA. The Boring Company believes they will complete this tunnel in 9 months. Don’t laugh. SpaceX is now routinely reusing first stage rocket boosters, an achievement that eluded NASA for decades. And imagine how long it would take LA Metro to complete the same project.

According to The Tunneling Company, tunneling using conventional methods costs about $1.0 billion per mile. But the current standard for a one-lane tunnel is approximately 28 feet. By placing vehicles on a stabilized electric skate, the diameter can be reduced to less than 14 feet. The area of a 14 foot diameter circle is 615 square feet, whereas a 28 foot diameter circle has an area of 2,463 square feet, exactly four times as much. If Musk is correct that a 14 foot tunnel – which just happens to be the diameter of the tunnel he’s been approved to dig in Los Angeles – is a viable size for mass transit, he’s just brought costs down by 75%. If other proposed innovations are successful, The Boring Company may reduce tunnel costs from $1.0 billion per mile per lane to $100 million per mile per lane. As shown in this animation, electric “skates” can carry cars through these tunnels at speeds of 120 MPH, using elevators to move them down to the tunnel and back up to the roads.

THE FUTURE OF HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY

The pace of innovation clearly makes a case that California’s high speed rail project could end up being obsolete before it’s even completed, at staggering expense. But can the same be said for the Hyperloop? What are the emerging competitors to Hyperloop?

Within urban areas, where transportation challenges remain most acute, tunnels underground don’t have to move people at 700 MPH through zero PSI to constitute breakthrough improvement. They can use proven, much safer technology, such as electronic skates that transport cars through tunnels at normal air pressure. Traveling from the San Fernando Valley to downtown Los Angeles takes about 15 minutes if you’re going 120 MPH. You don’t need to go faster.

Between urban areas, there is a clear case for Hyperloop as a superior competitor to high speed rail. Assuming the safety issues and remaining technical challenges can be overcome, it is probably cheaper to construct, and it’s much faster. But these are big ifs. And even if Hyperloop can compete with high speed rail, that’s a low bar. What about conventional air travel? Can Hyperloop construct a network of zero PSI tunnels that connect every major city in California, the way, for example, Southwest Airlines does today?

And at what point does Hyperloop itself become obsolete, unable to cost-effectively compete with new innovations? When the energy density of batteries descends to under 400 watt-hours per kilogram (the best are currently already packing about 300 watt-hours per kilogram), high-speed electric planes become feasible. Because these planes would not have air-breathing jet engines, they could ascend to 60,000 feet where the thinner air offers less resistance, allowing them to travel at supersonic speeds using less energy. And because these planes could be designed like the V-12 Osprey, with rotating engine nacelles, they could take off and land vertically, eliminating the need for airport runways.

One big problem with Hyperloop, ultimately, is same problem with any rail transport. You can only go where the rails – or tubes – go. And only very specialized vehicles can go onto these rails, or into these tubes. Roads, on the other hand, can accommodate anything with wheels. The air, an even more versatile transportation medium, can accommodate anything that flies.

The next article in this series will examine advances in small scale transportation innovations. Advanced vehicles designed for roads and for flight. These new technologies will deliver passengers and freight at high speeds, with ranges that reach from the fringes to the center of large urban areas. It may be that embedded rail or tunnel technologies only make sense in the most densely packed urban cores, or along heavily traveled transportation corridors.

It makes sense to come up with high speed options to connect California’s North Central Valley to the Silicon Valley, or to connect California’s South Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin. To connect the Silicon Valley to Los Angeles does not make sense for high speed rail, because it doesn’t go fast enough to compete with jets. Whether or not Hyperloop technology provides any of these solutions depends on whether it can indeed reduce the costs significantly below high speed rail, at the same time as it delivers safer, much faster transportation than high speed rail. It also depends on what other high-tech transportation solutions are on the way, using those most versatile of all transportation technologies, wheels and wings.

This article was originally published for the California Policy Center.

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California’s Obsolete Transportation Solutions

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AUDIO:  A discussion of how California’s innovators lead the world in transportation innovation at the same time as California’s policymakers continue to ignore progress and fund obsolete solutions – 7 minutes on KOGO San Diego – Edward Ring on the Carl DeMaio Show.

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California’s Transportation Future, Part One – The Fatally Flawed Centerpiece

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California’s transportation future is bright. In every area of transportation innovation, California-based companies are leading the way. Consortiums of major global companies have offices throughout the San Francisco Bay area, pioneering self-driving cars that consolidate technologies from not just automakers, but cell phone manufacturers, chip designers, PC makers, telecoms, and software companies. In Southern California from the aerospace hub surrounding LAX to the Mojave desert, heavily funded consortiums experiment with everything from passenger drones to hyperloop technologies to hypersonic transports. It’s all happening here. It’s wondrous.

Meanwhile, instead of preparing the roads for smart cars, or designing hubs that integrate buses and cars-on-demand with aerial drones and hyperloop systems, the centerpiece of California’s transportation future is a train that isn’t very fast, being built at what is probably the highest cost-per-mile in the history of transportation, which hardly anyone will ever ride.

There is a stark contrast between California’s private entrepreneurial culture, as reflected in the marvels of transportation engineering they are developing, and California’s political culture, as reflected in their ongoing commitment to “high speed rail,” in all of its stupefying expense, its useless grandeur, its jobs for nothing, its monumental initial waste, situated miles from nowhere. Exploring that stark contrast, its origins, the players, the projects, the problems and the solutions, will be the topic of this and subsequent reports.

HIGH SPEED RAIL – THE FATALLY FLAWED CENTERPIECE

The fatally flawed centerpiece of California’s transportation future, the “Bullet Train,” unfairly dominates California’s transportation conversation. Unfair not only because it represents a prodigious waste of public resources and an epic failure of public policy, but because in spite of the Bullet Train fiasco, California’s private sector is designing and building a transportation future for the world at dazzling speed. But before surveying the excellent progress being made elsewhere in the Golden State, it is necessary, yet again, to tick through the reasons why the Bullet Train is the wrong solution, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Fifty years ago, before air travel became affordable to nearly anyone, before you could fly from San Francisco to Los Angeles for less money than it would cost in gasoline to drive there in your car, rail travel might have made sense. But today, airfare is only about twice the cost of bus fare, with total air travel time a minute fraction of what the same trip would take on a bus.

Fifty years ago, before land values and environmentalist lawsuits rendered any capital project prohibitively expensive, building a high-speed rail corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles might have made sense. But today, the latest cost estimates for the SF/LA route exceed $100 billion.

Unrealistic Projections

High speed rail makes sense for intercity applications in megapolises. For example, a high speed rail line connects three of Japan’s largest cities, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Nearly all of this 300 mile corridor is urbanized – in all, over 70 million Japanese live in this region of Japan.

By contrast, just phase one of the California high speed rail project, linking San Francisco with Los Angeles, will be 520 miles long, connecting about 24 million people. This doesn’t pass the density test. Compared to a successful high speed rail system – which the Tokyo/Osaka system certainly is – the San Francisco/Los Angeles system would be nearly twice as long, and serve only about one third as many people.

Put another way, there are 233,000 Japanese, per mile, living along the Tokyo/Osaka route, whereas there are 46,000 Californians, per mile, living along the proposed San Francisco/Los Angeles route. That means there are five times as many potential riders on Japan’s centerpiece bullet train as there might be on California’s.

Low ridership isn’t just a consequence of insufficient population density, although that is a critical precondition. Low ridership also stems from impracticality. The California High Speed Rail Authority’s 2018 “business plan” is disingenuous on this topic. They claim that travel to and from the airport chews up time, yet ignore travel time to and from a high-speed rail station. Travel time to these stations, air vs. rail, are entirely offsetting. Then they claim time that boarding high speed rail is quicker than boarding an airplane. Why? A frequent air traveler has TSA Pre, and typically sails through check-in and security. And won’t security be in place for high speed rail? Of course it will. Boarding time – also entirely offsetting. Which brings us to the actual travel time.

The current projection according to the CA HSR 2018 business plan (ref. page 7) is three hours for nonstop service from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This is definitely a best-case estimate. As reported on March 18th in the Los Angeles Times, “Of the roughly 434 miles of track between Los Angeles and San Francisco, 136 miles — nearly one-third of the total — could have at least some speed restrictions.” This would include tunnels, sharp curves, all transits through urban areas, and, incredibly, shared track and shared right-of-way with conventional rail carriers.

It is going to take twice as long to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles via high speed rail vs. an airplane. Let’s not forget there are three major airports in the San Francisco Bay Area – SJC, OAK, and SFO. Five major airports serve the Los Angeles area – LAX, ONT, BUR, LGB and SNA. And flights connect all of them to each other, all day, every day.

Perpetual Financial Drain

Even if you accept the official projections for California’s high speed rail, the financial projections are unlikely to attract private capital. The table depicted below uses baseline projections from the CA HSR 2018 business plan (numbers directly taken from the business plan are highlighted in yellow, with numbers in intermediate years, which were not disclosed in the business plan, arrived at by extrapolation) to construct a cash flow for the “Phase One” portion of the project, those segments connecting San Francisco to Bakersfield. All of the variables are taken from that document. Several generous assumptions are necessary to accept these projections. They are:

(1) The entire capital cost for construction of the Phase One system linking San Francisco to Bakersfield is $40.1 billion (ref. page 32, exhibit 3.2 “Summary of Cost Estimates by Phase and by Range”). This is crazy. It will probably cost half that just to bore a tunnel under the Pacheco Pass.

(2) Ridership on this segment will grow to 31.9 million fares per year by 2035. Assuming primarily commuter traffic, this assumes over 120,000 riders per day (ref. page 90, exhibit 7.1 “Ridership: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Ridership”).

(3) Incredibly, fare revenue will hit $1.86 billion by 2035. This assumes an average ticket price, in 2017 dollars, of $60. This, in turn, infers that the average commuter will be spending $1,220 per month to ride the bullet train (ref. page 90, exhibit 7.3 “Farebox Revenue: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Revenue”). This is perhaps the most far fetched of all assumptions made in the entire business plan. Imagine over 120,000 regular commuters spending $1,200 per month to ride this train, noting the fact that this sum would not include the additional costs virtually all commuters would incur to travel from their home to the HSR station, and then from the HSR station to their workplace, on both their outbound and inbound commute, day after day.

(4) Operations and maintenance for the train will be a mere $1.4 billion in 2035, then, after adjusting for 3% inflation, will only increase 11% by 2060 even though ridership is projected to rise from 31.9 million passengers in 2035 to 51.2 million by 2060 (ref. page 91, exhibit 7.5 “O&M Costs: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Cost Estimate”). This defies credulity. How will ridership increase by 61% between 2035 and 2060 while O&M costs only increase 11%?

(5) “Lifecycle Costs,” the capital reinvestment necessary to replace worn out rolling stock and other fixed assets, i.e. “capital rehabilitation and replacement costs for the infrastructure and assets of the future high-speed rail system,” as near as can be determined from the 2018 business plan, is estimated to only total around $5 billion between commencement of operations in 2029 and 2060, over 30 years (ref. page 91, exhibit 7.6 “Lifecycle Costs: Silicon Valley to Central Valley Line through Phase 1,” “Medium Lifecycle Cost”).

(6) In the analysis below, loan payments are deferred for up to ten years until rail operations begin in 2029. In reality, of course, payments begin as soon as the money is loaned. Notwithstanding that, the annual loan payments are calculated based on loan of $40.1 billion, a 30 year term, and 5% interest.

CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL
CASH FLOW USING 2018 BUSINESS PLAN’S “BASELINE” PROJECTIONS, $=M

Taking into account these are – for the six reasons just stated – very optimistic projections, there remain problems with these numbers that would give any investor pause. For starters, there is a cumulative negative cash flow of $14 billion, representing the period up until 2039 when the system is projected to become cash-positive. This represents over 20 years of negative cash flow. Where will this $14 billion come from? Bear in mind it will be more than $14 billion, since payments on the loans commence when the monies are loaned, not when the system begins operations. Maybe some of it will come from “cap and trade” proceeds, although if so, it would consume nearly all of them. Would private investors step up?

The problem with that is if you review this best-case scenario, you can see that selling the future positive cash flow to finance the initial negative cash flow would yield an internal rate of return of 4.7%. While that’s not an impossibly low rate for a municipal financing, it is exceedingly low for a private financing subject to this level of risk. And what about the risk?

High Speed Rail Cash Flow Using Conservative Assumptions

The next chart shows a cash flow scenario for high speed rail, phase one, with key assumptions changed. Instead of costing $40.1 billion, it costs $49 billion, the “High” range of cost estimates as disclosed on the HSR 2018 business plan, page 32. Instead of an average ticket price of $60, a more affordable $30 price is used, based on the assumption that the average commuter will not be willing to spend more than $600 per month on train fare. As ridership grows by 60% between 2035 and 2060, operations and maintenance costs are escalated by 30% instead of only 11%. And instead of spending a mere $5 billion on ongoing capital investments between 2029 and 2060, that is doubled to a still paltry $10 billion. What happens?

CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL
CASH FLOW USING ALTERNATIVE (CONSERVATIVE) PROJECTIONS, $=M

As can be seen on this alternative analysis, if ridership revenue is significantly lower than projected, and if – one might argue – realistic operations and capital budgets are projected, and, if one merely uses the HSR Authority’s own high estimate of capital costs, there is no financial viability whatsoever to this project. The internal rate of return formula basically blows up, which is what happens when you burn through $91 billion before having your first break-even year in 2059. The question instead becomes, what else might Californians have done with $50 billion? The other question raised by this more conservative financial scenario, more disturbing, is what if high speed rail never makes money? How many additional tens of billions will be required to subsidize its operation?

The problem with dismissing these more bleak financial scenarios is simple: this is the sort of analysis that any savvy investment banker would start with. Then they would ask questions. WHY do you think 120,000 people are going to be willing to spend $1,200 per month in train fares to commute, not even including their costs to get to and from the train station? WHY do you think you can increase ridership by 60%, but only increase operations costs by 11%? WHY do you think you can operate a $50 billion railroad, and only expect to reinvest ten percent of that amount in capital equipment over thirty years?

The “Monte Carlo” Method of What-If Analysis

Instead of confronting these questions in plain English, the high speed rail authority did what-ifs using a “Monte Carlo” analysis. Here’s how they describe this (ref. page 93):

“Breakeven forecasts measure the likelihood that farebox revenue is equal to or greater than operations and maintenance costs in a given operating year. The analysis works as though there are two large bags full of marbles, one with thousands of marbles each representing a potential operations and maintenance cost, with more of the marbles having values around the median cost estimate than around the extreme (high or low) values. The second bag of marbles contains potential revenue outcomes, again with more marbles with values around the median than the high or low outliers.

The breakeven Monte Carlo analysis simply “picks” one marble at random from the revenue bag and one marble at random from the cost bag, subtracts the number written on the cost marble from the one written on the revenue marble and records the value. The analysis then puts the marbles back into their respective bags and repeats the process thousands more times which builds a distribution of potential results and generates a degree of confidence (or confidence interval, expressed as a percentage) as to the likelihood of project breakeven.”

If anyone wonders why projects in California cost far more than they should, please consider the role of consultants. The variables governing success or failure for California’s high speed rail project are tangible. They require urgent debate by practical people. How much will it cost to bore a tunnel through the Pacheco Pass? How likely is it that Union Pacific will share their right-of-ways with high speed rail, and if so, how much will that reduce costs, and how much will that reduce the speed of the train along those segments, and why? What is the real cost of the many engineering and environmental studies, and how many of them are necessary? Why is it that so many other nations, from socialist Europe to fascist China, manage to build these systems for a fraction of what Californians must expect to pay?

These are the questions that require answers. Counting metaphorical marbles does not add value to the process, nor does it add credibility to the financial projections. These qualitative questions regarding California’s high speed rail project have not been answered, because perhaps they cannot be answered. But the reasons California’s high speed rail system is so staggeringly, prohibitively expensive, are not problems that are confined to the high speed rail project. They infect every infrastructure program in the United States, and especially in California. Identifying the reasons infrastructure projects cost far more than they should, along with exploring tantalizing alternatives to high speed rail, will be the topic of future reports.

This article was originally published for the California Policy Center.

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Compassionate Nationalism

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One might think that President Trump’s frequent references to “America First” would be palatable to all Americans, especially since Trump takes every opportunity to assure foreign leaders that he fully expects them to put the interests of their own nations and citizens first as well. But given the virulent opposition Trump seems to attract, particularly with respect to policies that embrace the principle of America First, it would be helpful to try to explain some of its moral foundations.

Just as conservatism suffers a rhetorical disadvantage when pitted against liberalism, nationalism suffers a rhetorical disadvantage when pitted against globalism. With measured success, conservatives have risen to the challenge, offering up versions of compassionate conservatism based on principles of prosperity, freedom, opportunity, liberty, and so on. So how might one define compassionate nationalism?

AMERICA CAN’T HELP THE WORLD UNLESS AMERICA IS STRONG

The crucial moral argument in favor of nationalism is that America cannot be a force for good in the world unless it is internally cohesive and economically strong. Ironically, this is a globalist argument, but differs from liberal globalism insofar as it asserts that America’s way of life is more effective than that of most other nations in delivering freedom and prosperity to its people. Therefore protecting the American way of life is a prerequisite to America helping the rest of the world achieve that way of life.

This is an arrogant claim. It makes people uncomfortable. But it’s true. Standing up for American values, and more generally, for Western values and traditions, is a nationalist sentiment. But it isn’t ugly, it’s beautiful. It isn’t jingoistic, it’s compassionate. America and the West have given the world nearly everything that gives individuals hope for the future – democracy, technological revolutions, capitalism, social welfare, equality of opportunity, individual freedom, environmental stewardship. Parliaments. Railroads. Medicine. The internet. The list of wondrous innovations that make life better for everyone, everywhere, is endless – and nearly all of them came from Western societies. This should be boldly proclaimed, because it is the moral basis for why America must absorb immigrants who will be assimilated, not immigrants who will reject American values in favor of multiculturalism.

One of the most contentious elements of the America First agenda is changing America’s immigration policies. But if current policies are not changed, America as we know it will cease to exist. America needs to restrict immigration primarily to individuals who are highly skilled in professions where there are shortages of American workers. Moreover, priority needs to be granted to immigrants from cultures that are fundamentally compatible with our own. This means cultures that respect individual freedom, cultures that do not accept corruption as a given, cultures that embrace religious freedom and women’s rights.

The moral argument against this, of course, is that America should rescue the impoverished refugees and offer them safe haven. The problem with that argument is simple – the numbers don’t work.

AMERICA CANNOT POSSIBLY ACCOMMODATE THE WORLD’S POOR

America currently has a population of 330 million people. According to the UNICEF, over 3.0 billion people – ten times the population of America – live in poverty. Over 1.3 billion people – four times the population of America, live in extreme poverty. But it doesn’t end there, as if we could actually transport over a billion people to America.

According to the United Nations, the population of India will increase by another 353 million people in just the next twenty years. Similarly, in only twenty years, Nigeria is projected to add 122 million people to its population, Pakistan will add 97 million, Indonesia, 69 million, Congo, 65 million, Egypt, 47 million.

In fact, according to the latest projections from the United Nations, not including China, the fifty nations in the world with the greatest projected increases to their population only include two developed nations, America and Great Britain. America is projected to add 55 million people to its population in the next twenty years. Great Britain, another 11 million. The other 48 nations? They are projected to add 1.7 billion people to their population in the next twenty years.

Here’s more irony: Already living within these 48 nations are nearly all of the world’s 1.3 billion people who live in extreme poverty. So as the United States adds 55 million people to their population in the next twenty years, with more than half of that increase due to immigration, it has a choice. Shall it import people who will contribute to society as, for example, doctors and engineers, or shall it import unskilled economic refugees who will drain its wealth and further undermine national cohesion?

There is an argument to be made that unskilled immigration still constitutes a net economic gain for the host nation. But even those who still make that argument concede that there is a greater economic gain to be had via entry of highly skilled immigrants. And these arguments miss the point, which is that even if America admitted millions of economic refugees, there would still be billions of people still living in desperate poverty in the nations those relative few had left behind.

Put another way, if the liberal globalists want open borders for moral reasons, what they are basically doing is acknowledging that mass migration of unskilled people is a form of foreign aid. And if so, the vastly more effective way to offer foreign aid is to remain economically strong, and then offering actual foreign aid to these struggling nations. In nearly all iterations, direct foreign aid helps more people, more effectively, if it is spent over there. A good example is the case of displaced war refugees, where at least five times as many can be supported in relative comfort in areas close to their country of origin, when compared to the life-time cost of resettling and supporting these refugees in the United States.

FOREIGN AID COSTS LESS AND HELPS MORE THAN MASS IMMIGRATION

The moral argument in favor of favoring direct foreign aid over mass immigration of destitute, unskilled people is magnified if one examines the challenges that could be addressed for a fraction of the funds that would be necessary to resettle millions of immigrants. The situation in Sub-Saharan Africa provides searing examples of need. According to the United Nations, the Sub-Saharan’s 800 million population is projected to rise to 1.5 billion by 2050. It has the highest fertility rate in the world, and the lowest life expectancy. It has 90 percent of the world’s malaria cases, with well over 100 million cases per year. Similar rates of affliction apply in Sub-Saharan Africa for diarrhea, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, and other infectious diseases. These illnesses not only kill millions each year, but almost invariably leave survivors with permanent cognitive impairment.

Aggressive programs of foreign aid can solve many of these problems. Malaria was nearly wiped from the earth in the 1950s. Diarrhea and intestinal worms can be largely eliminated with basic hygiene and a sanitation infrastructure. Tuberculosis can be eliminated by identifying and treating cases – before they spread via contagion – through a comprehensive national health service.

What about violence, civil strife, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, female genital mutilation? What about malnutrition, iodine deficiency, iron deficiency, pollution, illiteracy? All these problems can be alleviated with foreign aid. Often foreign aid is exposed as ineffective. But mass immigration would cost much more, to accomplish even less. As a form of foreign aid, mass immigration is the least practical way to help the destitute of the world, yet that is the core moral argument for open borders.

If America is economically strong, with skilled, capable immigrants who have left behind a diverse assortment of poverty stricken nations, foreign aid isn’t the only way to help those nations. Direct investment in infrastructure and industry are also ways to quicken these nations’ rise to prosperity, especially if they are practical. Here again, the conventional liberal globalist wisdom is flawed, because these nations don’t need wind farms and solar panels, they need cost-effective natural gas and nuclear power plants. They need dams and aqueducts. They need to drain swamps, refurbish and expand their railroad network, become net food exporters, engage in sustainable forestry, and build universities, hospitals, roads, cities, industry – they need to join the 21st century. Instead, the liberal globalist sends them just enough medicine and food aid to ensure a burgeoning population, demands nothing of their governments in return, and pretends that a few solar panels will somehow power their economies to prosperity. It’s virtue signaling that is oblivious at best, maliciously opportunistic at worst.

Embracing compassionate nationalism is the moral path towards making America great again. If America truly recovered the energy and vision of the nation it was a century ago, Americans would invest in mega-projects in developing nations. They would invest in projects to green the Sahel by diverting water from the Ubangi River into Lake Chad, or by planting a trillion drought tolerant trees along the latitude of 15 degrees north, from Mauritania to Sudan. Projects to make the desert bloom, and expand the forests. It was done in Israel. It took about seventy years. Where’s the difference? If the will was there, Americans could lead this effort, and other great works, and truly help midwife the emergence of a global civilization.

If we could see five hundred years into the future, we probably wouldn’t recognize much. It will probably be a transnational civilization, populated by transhuman beings. But in the meantime, and to ensure we survive the present, America must be strong. Whatever globalist future is in store for us, it is best served by exercising compassionate nationalism, not virtue signaling nihilism.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness on March 25, 2018.

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Libertarians Will Turn America into a Socialist Hell

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If you believe in limited government, then you need to know that Libertarians are the most dangerous people in America. Because thanks to Libertarians, Democrats – completely controlled by left-wing oligarchs and public sector unions – are going to extend government control into every facet of American life. If you doubt that, come to California, a one-party state where Democrats enforce everything from the trivial – outlawed plastic straws, to the tyrannical – water rationing, urban “densification,” confiscatory taxes.

Libertarians apparently believe their principles justify them running candidates that steal far more votes from Republicans than Democrats – for the obvious reason that people who favor limited government tend to vote Republican. But despite all their intellectualizing – go online and try not to puke as you read their high-brow badinage as they banter over Hayek and the Austrian School and “objectivism” – they can’t understand simple math: If you siphon votes away from Republicans, Democrats win.

Just this week, a Libertarian candidate in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District attracted 1,379 votes, which handed the election to a Democrat who won by 627 votes. Good job.

If the Libertarians, thank God, hadn’t ran a vapid stoner for President in 2016, Hillary Clinton would be our president today, falling down the White House stairs on her way to turning America into California, instead tripping while touring the Jahaz Mahal palace in India. Think about that.

And what of “libertarian” thought? On every political issue of significance to this nation, Libertarians are wrong.

When it comes to immigration, Libertarians believe in open borders. “Free movement of people.” Wonderful. But when you pin them down, Libertarians acknowledge that they don’t believe in welfare, or government-sponsored multiculturalism, or racial hiring quotas, or any of the other taxpayer funded programs that make America a magnet for destitute immigrants. Like Democrats, Libertarians love to pat themselves on the back because they support “open borders.” Because they’re not racist. We’ll worry about ending all that welfare stuff later. Meanwhile, let millions more pour in, and let government expand to accommodate them. Don’t worry, there’s only 1.5 billion people in the world who live in extreme poverty. No problem.

Then there’s infrastructure. Libertarians don’t want government to get involved in funding football stadiums and concert halls. Fair enough. But what about freeways? What about airports, seaports, railroads, reservoirs, aqueducts, and the like? According to libertarians, a “public/private” partnership is a dirty word. Creeping socialism. Libertarians, a pitiful minority, nonetheless manage to mobilize the pseudo-intellectual heft and activist outrage necessary to help kill these projects, especially since approval usually hangs by a thread. They hand victory to environmentalists who don’t want to build anything. And public sector unions laugh all the way to the bank, since they get to pocket all the money the public saved, in the form of increased pay and benefits.

What about government sponsored research and development? “Never,” cries the Libertarian. Let the private sector make those investments. That’s fine. Nobody’s stopping them. But it was government funded research that gave us aerospace technology, atomic power, computers, the internet, life-saving medicines – the list is endless. Perhaps the U.S. government should stop funding all of this vital research, so other nations who’ve managed to curb their libertarians can overtake us in every strategic technology sector where we remain competitive.

Which brings us to trade. According to libertarians, “free trade” means if you can make cheap wool, and your trading partner can make cheap tea, then you should stop making tea, and they should stop making wool, and everyone in both nations will buy cheap tea and cheap wool. But what if the wool is actually steel, and what if the tea is actually oil, and what if all of a sudden you need a lot more steel, and a lot more oil, and all of a sudden your trading partner doesn’t want to sell it to you any more? Or what if the country that made wool paid their wool manufacturers a subsidy, so they could sell it to you for nothing right up until all your own wool manufacturers went out of business? Or what if you bought so much wool, and tea, and steel, and oil, that you had to borrow money and hock all your assets just to pay for it all?

The real world is messy. Let’s not finish without considering the military. According to Libertarians, everyone in the world just wants to trade freely, and move freely, and the “principle of non-aggression” will keep us all safe and secure. Stay out of foreign entanglements. Abandon the sea lanes. Demilitarize space. Vacate overseas military bases. But power, like culture, abhors a vacuum. Disengage, and soon enough, the world will become a far less libertarian place. Funny how that works. Libertarians – please get your nose out of Adam Smith and read some Edward Gibbon instead.

Libertarians haven’t really thought things through. If all they manage to do is put Democrats in power, America might actually have a chance. But imagine if the Libertarians were in power. In their perfect world, everyone is a super-yuppie, who trades thin gold coins for services. Some of them are software engineers, and others design websites. They’re all around 26 years old, have stylish tattoos, and have sophisticated taste in music and fashion. But here’s the deal – in the real world, people aren’t all super-yuppies. They’re old, battered, hard working, ordinary Americans. And they deserve more.

Ultimately, libertarians are arrogant simpletons. The world they want is a Social Darwinist hell. The world they’re going to give us, if they don’t wake up, is a Socialist hell. Tough choices.

An edited version of this post originally appeared on the website American Greatness on March 24, 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

A Post-Janus Agenda for California’s Public Sector Unions

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“If you do not prevail in this case, the unions will have less political influence; yes or no?” Kennedy asked. “Yes, they will have less political influence,” Frederick answered.
–  an excerpt from the Janus vs. AFSCME trial, quoted in the Washington Post, February 26, 2018

Earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the Janus vs. AFSCME case. Mark Janus, a public employee in Illinois, is challenging the right of unions to charge “fair share” fees, because he disagrees with the political agenda which he claims his fees help pay for.

What if government unions were accountable to their members? What if the politics of these unions mirrored the politics of the members? Would Mark Janus still want out?

It’s already possible for public employees to “opt-out” of paying that portion of their dues that fund explicitly political activity, although in practice the unions typically make that opt-out process very difficult. But Mark Janus is arguing that all dues paid to public sector unions are political, because the consequences of collective bargaining in the public sector impact taxes, government debt, budgets and spending priorities. He is arguing that the agenda of public sector unions, including collective bargaining, is inherently political.

In reality, saying all public sector union activity is inherently political is itself an understatement. In California, public sector unions spend about $300 million per year on explicitly political activity – funding political campaigns, political action committees, and lobbyists. But they spend at least another $700 million every year not just on collective bargaining – which for government workers is inherently political – but on education campaigns that attempt to influence voters on countless political topics.

Equally important is the influence California’s public sector unions wield that doesn’t derive its power from how much money they can spend, but from the fact that elected officials come and go, but the union hierarchy is permanent. Public employees who want to advance in their careers do not cross these unions.

Government unions are so powerful that only a very aggressive outcome in the Janus ruling will suffice to significantly undermine their power in California. The court must rule that union membership must be renewed annually via a transparent opt-in process. Only then will these unions become accountable to their members.

If there is an aggressive ruling in the Janus case that truly forces public sector unions to become accountable, imagine how it may affect the political agenda of these unions. One may hope it would ignite a civil war within these unions. Even in California, for example, about 40% of public school teachers identify as conservatives. Among public safety employees, a majority identify as conservative. Yet these unions are the power behind a state legislature ran by the most liberal politicians in the history of the United States.

Just for a moment, consider what these unions could do, if their leadership was committed to making California a land of opportunity again:

A PRO-WORKER AGENDA FOR CALIFORNIA’S PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS
(if they actually cared about all of California’s working families)

1 – Restore the balance in California’s colleges and universities so that the ratio of faculty to administrators is 2 to 1, instead the current ratio wherein administrators often outnumber teachers.

2 – End all discrimination and base college admissions purely on merit. Expand STEM curricula so it represents 50% of college majors instead of the current 20%.

3 – Enforce the Vergara reforms so it is easier to retain quality public school teachers and easier to fire the incompetent ones. Eliminate barriers to charter schools.

4 – Restructure the penal system to make it easier for prisoners to perform useful public services. For example. along with working the fire lines during fire season, they could work all year clearing dead trees out of California’s forests. Use high-tech monitoring devices to reduce costs. Reserve current prisons only for the truly incorrigible.

5 – Scrap the High Speed Rail project and instead use the proceeds to add one lane to every major interstate highway in California.

6 – Use additional High Speed Rail funds to complete plant upgrades so that 100% of California’s sewage is reused, even treated to potable quality.

7 – Pass legislation to streamline approval of the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach, and fast-track applications for additional desalination plants, especially in the Los Angeles basin.

8 – Spend the entire proceeds of the $7.0 billion water bond, passed overwhelmingly by Californians in 2014, on storage. Build the Los Banos Grandes, Sites, and Temperance Flat reservoirs, adding over 5.0 million acre feet of storage to the California Water Project. Pass aggressive legislation and fund aggressive legal actions and counter-actions, to lower costs and enable completion of these projects in under five years.

9 – Permit slant drilling to access 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits from land-based rigs along the Southern California coast. Build an LNG terminal off the coast in Ventura County to export California’s natural gas to foreign markets. Permit development of the Monterey Shale formation to extract oil and gas.

10 – Permit construction of “generation 3+” nuclear power plants in geologically stable areas of California’s interior. Permit construction of new natural gas power plants.

11 – Repeal AB 32 and SB 375 and make it easy for developers to build homes on the suburban and exurban fringes, instead of just “in-fill” that destroys existing neighborhoods.

12 – Require California’s public employee pension funds to invest a minimum of 10% of their assets in infrastructure projects as noted above. They could issue fixed rate bonds or take equity positions in the revenue producing projects, or a combination of both. This would immediately unlock approximately $80 billion in construction financing to rebuild California’s infrastructure. At the same time, save the pension systems by striking down the “California Rule” that prevents meaningful pension reform.

These reforms would lower the cost of living in California, at the same time as they would create resource abundance and hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs.

It is encouraging to think that the Janus ruling will reduce the political influence of public sector unions. But another possibility is equally tantalizing, that Janus will force unions to become accountable to their members. This, in turn, could be reflected in these unions fighting, for a change, to help all Californians.

To expect public sector unions to pursue the agenda outlined above is fanciful. But if California’s public sector unions were as committed to that pro-growth agenda as they are to their current agenda which is bankrupting California’s cities and counties at the same time as it obsesses over race, gender, and environmentalist extremism, they could probably get all of it done. And no other special interest could do this.

Only California’s public sector unions have enough power to successfully take on their current allies; the environmentalist lobby, the trial lawyers, and their puppet masters, the leftist oligarchy. No other special interest could take on these profiteers who have gotten filthy rich spouting leftist tripe, while they impoverished a generation of Californians.

Post Janus, it is time for a civil war within public sector unions. Using, hopefully, their option to not opt-in, it is time for public servants who care about ordinary Californians to make their voices heard.

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Union Members Should Want Pro-Business Policies

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AUDIO: A discussion of public sector unions, how they are harming ordinary Californians, and how an insurrection within these unions could create a win-win scenario. If public sector union leadership truly embraced pro-business polices to lower California’s punitive cost-of-living, everyone would benefit – 37 minutes on 1380 AM KTKZ Sacramento – Edward Ring on the Phil Cowan Show with Katy Grimes as guest host.

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The Coming Impact of Pension Payments on California’s Cities, and How Reforms Could Happen

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AUDIO: Part One – Employer contributions to pension systems for state/local workers are set to double in the next six years, best case. Ways agencies are trying to increase taxes and cut services to find the money – 10 minutes on 1440 AM KUHL Santa Barbara – Edward Ring on the Andy Caldwell Show.

AUDIO: Part Two – A discussion of how California’s pension crisis began, what potential reforms could make pensions financially sustainable, and the organizations that could successfully push these reforms – 10 minutes on 1440 AM KUHL Santa Barbara – Edward Ring on the Andy Caldwell Show.

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