When I attended the Naval Post Graduate School in 1976 I learned about the McNamara Whiz Kids. These young geniuses transformed the Defense Department into an institution held accountable to its budgets through the introduction of Integrated planning, scheduling, and budgeting and measuring performance against plan. The two most accomplished and revered Whiz Kids were Charlie Hitch and Alain Enthoven.

Those two legends are quintessential examples of bright, articulate, prescient and accomplished hard workers that Harold Geneen would have hired in a New York minute if he could get them.

This web link details Dr. Enthoven’s days in the trenches

Web Link

Dr. Enthoven is spot with regard to high speed rail. The public was duped with inflated ridership numbers and lowball procurement and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. For instance how can Gilroy attract more ridership than Baltimore? How can HSR make money when the Washington D.C. New York Amtrak corridor with the highest population density in the United States is losing money? The answer is it can’t and HSR will be an albatross around the necks of every California resident unless we kill it soon.

You always get the most bang for the buck from intra-city transit. That is because far more people go to work than go on trips and the population density of the San Francisco Bay area is far great than the HSR corridor. However the main benefit is keeping traffic off the highways. 101 is at saturation level and can not take any more. If CalTrain goes belly up we will see the worst traffic nightmares beyond anyone’s imagination. We should forget HSR and electrify CalTrain. This subsidy is well worth it in terms of time saved for commuters, carbon footprint reduction, and commuter stress reduction. It is the right thing to do and it is the smart thing to do.