Some have complained that Dockery snuck the amendment on the ballot at the last minute, pre-empting a full discussion of the measure that would have included its price tag and implications for taxes. Others say Dockery fooled voters with language so vague and full of apple pie that no decent soul could vote against the train. A more generous interpretation is that many voters, whatever they thought of the merits of Dockery's fast train, sent the state a message about traffic and the need to start incorporating mass transit into Florida's transportation planning.
Some parts of all of those are true, so take your pick. The question is what the state should do now, with a train-sized wart on its Constitution and a written-in-stone mandate to start spending money real soon on a railroad -- even as the state has exhausted its capacity to take on more bond debt until 2003. Even as the state faces
a total Medicaid bill this year of nearly $1 billion.
I'm on record in this space as saying that a bullet train's a bad idea, and I still think so. The $14-billion price tag -- that's just the starter figure, folks, you know how real that number will be in five years -- amounts to about $1,000 for every citizen of Florida. That's a pretty hefty ticket price before you even get to buy a ticket -- especially in a state that's in the bottom five in educating its children. (The constitutional amendment that voters approved in 1998 establishing education as a state priority didn't put nearly so rigorous a timetable on improving schools as Dockery's amendment did on building a train.)
In addition, Florida doesn't have anywhere near the population density to support it and won't for decades. Assuming you ride it, will you be where you really want to be when you get off? To get there, you'll have to, most likely, rent a car. How much faster can a train really make the trip between St. Petersburg and Orlando, for example?
You can also expect a reprise, politically, of what happened in Japan with bullet trains: To muster enough political support for a train, just about everybody with any clout along the route ends up with a stop. So the ostensible Tampa-Orlando-Port Canaveral-Miami route becomes a Tampa-Brandon-Lakeland-Kissimmee-Orlando-Port Canaveral-Melbourne-Vero Beach-Fort Pierce-Stuart-West Palm-Boca, you-get-the-idea route. And suddenly, the bullet train starts to look more like a knuckle ball train, speed-wise.
While the voters have spoken, it may be a good idea to go back and ask them again if Dockery's train is exactly what they had in mind. The answer to what the state should do may be to spend a little now on preliminary engineering studies and the like -- a few million to figure out what the real price tag will be and to begin to figure out the logistics of a rail system.
Then, the Legislature should put a new amendment before the voters -- probably on the off-year election ballot in 2002 -- that would let voters choose to remove the train/transportation from the Constitution, while keeping it in the forefront of the state's public policy discussions. As Don Crane, president of Floridians for Better Transportation, points out, transportation is a major expense (along with education) that can increase the state's earned income by increasing economic productivity.
If the voters say, "Yes, we did mean we want C.C. Dockery's train," in a second referendum, then the state can proceed on the basis of the initial work it funded in good faith.
I hope they change their minds. I am old enough, for better or worse, to have ridden passenger trains before Amtrak. I remember fondly trips between Florida and North Carolina on trains with names like the Silver Star, Silver Meteor and other, lesser, lights in the Seaboard Coast Line Railroads constellation. I also remember a number of trips when I was the only passenger for three cars. I remember drivers stopped at crossings as the train rumbled through, looking up, frustrated, at all the empty train windows, with no face but mine staring back.
If I live long enough to ride the bullet train that's now part of the state's Constitution, I expect I will be able to repeat that experience. The ticket will have cost much, much more, however.