VENICE, Italy — For whatever Yankee, Puritan reasons, Americans’ view of Italian efficiency is that it isn’t: that the nation required a Mussolini, referenced in this space last week, for the trains to run on time.
This misconception is cleared up 80 years after the demise of Il Duce by standing on a rail platform in the middle of nowhere in the Italian peninsula in the sleepy hamlet of Caldiero and watching, and feeling, half a dozen high-speed needle-nosed locomotives whoosh by on their way from Milano to Venezia and vice-versa while you wait for your milk train to arrive to take you to little Vicenza, where, in the name of efficiency, the fast trains don’t stop.
They don’t make any big deal about it, the Italians. There are no safety barriers keeping you away from the wild danger roaring by every few minutes. There’s just a recorded announcement on the loudspeaker, warning you, in English, to stay behind the yellow line. A swift, heavy piece of efficient public transit is about to pass through your station in seconds—and just because you can’t see it yet doesn’t mean it won’t blow you back with a blast of machine-made wind.
The Italian version of high-speed rail is not as supersonic as the Japanese bullet trains, which reach regular top speeds of 200 mph. The Italian jobs are only going on the order of 160 mph. But they do so up and down and across the Italian peninsula all day and all night long, and, for a Californian — with our similar-sized territory — every time they go by, they bring shame about how miserable our transit culture has been at building anything like it.
Special tracks and rights-of-way? Nothing doing. They’re using the same rail corridors, and mostly the same rails, as the regional carriers do. So far over budget that they are breaking the taxpayer bank without having yet laid down a single mile of track? Nope. For the equivalent of a few billion dollars annually, they’re connecting new regions of the country every year.
Only made possible by Euro-socialism, taxing the little guy to within an inch of his life?
Quite the opposite. While it is true that fastish trains — up to 120 mph — first appeared in Italy in 1938, during the Fascist era, with passenger service provided here by the precursor of today’s government-run Trenitalia, since 2012 the independent company Italo has been allowed to compete with the state-owned former monopoly.
In the same rail corridors. With different pricing and timetables, so long as they don’t run into each other, the government trains and the private trains run on the same tracks. Consumers can choose which ones they want to ride at their convenience. The competition has been good for both. They even have high-speed freight trains up and down the peninsula.
Italy is, sadly for Californians’ self-esteem, a perfect comparison for our inept effort over the last two decades to get a choo-choo to go from L.A. to San Francisco — er, from Bakersfield to Merced. The country is about the same size and shape as our state, with big cities dotted into vast rural, agricultural areas. But when fast trains became our goal, the ridiculous powers that be in California, rather than using existing rail lines or even just taking over the median of Interstate 5, decided that we needed an entirely separate right-of-way that savvy farmers set high prices for the purchase of. We can’t get out of our own way. It may never happen.
One weird Italian inefficiency: We’ve boarded half a dozen trains here, and there are no conductors, and no one has ever checked our tickets. Honor system, I guess. Beats no system at all.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.