SACRAMENTO -- Despite lingering doubts about its future, a proposal to build a high-speed rail line between Southern California and San Francisco was kept alive Wednesday when the state Transportation Commission allocated $15.5 million for engineering and design work.
The money is a small fraction of the $40 billion that the system would cost to complete, but commissioners said they were not willing to pull the plug even though full financing had not been arranged.
"Us supporting that allocation doesn't mean it's going to get built," said Commissioner Jim Earp. "There are still a lot of hurdles. But there is no reason not to keep it alive at this point."
The money for various transportation projects has already been approved by the governor and Legislature as part of the state budget, but the Transportation Commission makes the final determination on which projects are funded.
The proposal calls for a 700-mile rail system in which trains traveling as fast as 220 mph whisk passengers from Southern California to the Bay Area in a little more than 2 1/2 hours.
The project was proposed more than a decade ago but has yet to pick up steam.
The money allocated Wednesday came from $20.7 million budgeted this year by the governor and the Legislature for the California High Speed Rail Authority, a state agency that oversees the project. The authority had asked for about $100 million from the state.
"It's a step, but it's not as big a step as we would like," said Kris Deutschman, a spokeswoman for the authority, regarding the commission's vote. "At least it's a vote of confidence."
Others questioned putting $15.5 million into a project that they do not believe will be built because they say it is not economically feasible.
"It's a complete waste of money," said James E. Moore II, a professor in USC's department of industrial and systems engineering. "It's pork for the engineering firms."
Although bullet-style trains have been popular for years in Japan and Europe, Moore said high-speed rail is not competitive in the United States, where a deregulated, low-fare airline industry has a lock on short-hop travel and the price of gas is still not high enough to get people out of their automobiles.
Backers, however, estimate that the cost of a one-way ticket from Los Angeles to San Francisco would be about half the price of an airline ticket, or about $55.
