This worldview is driving current proposals in Sacramento to divert cap-and-trade funds to the bullet-train debacle and light-rail. But what’s both strange and unsurprising is how all the pols — and all the reporters covering them — ignore the fact that we could be on the verge of a transportation revolution because of driverless cars.

This is strange because so much has been written about driverless cars’ vast potential to change modern life. This essay just came out Friday. This Google boast came out last month. This Forbes analysis came out last year. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, an Orange County resident, had this to say:

“I think that genuine self-driving cars will be available within a decade and that they’ll be big game changers. When you’re not actually driving a car yourself, for example, you don’t care much about how powerful it is. So you’ll be happy to chug along in a super-efficient car, reading a book or playing on your phone. You’ll be more willing to share a car, since automated systems will be able to quickly put together carpools with guaranteed maximums on wait time. And of course, driverless cars will be fundamentally more fuel-efficient since computers can drive cars better than humans can.”

Oh, yeah, light rail can compete with this.

Beat reporters stuck in narrative ruts

So why is it unsurprising that the Sacramento beat reporters don’t incorporate this into their stories about mass transit, the bullet train or anything involving transportation?

Because they rarely directly challenge politicians’ long-established narratives and rarely take on conventional wisdom.

For example, I’ve never seen a single story in the Sac Bee or L.A. Times that ponders why the CTA and the CFT were so quick to go along with the governor’s Local Control Funding Formula change in how school funds are allocated.

The obvious answer is that they think it will be good for them — that they can manipulate the rules so that the extra funds supposed to go to struggling students instead go to teachers’ compensation.

But this is too obvious to write about, evidently.

So while excitement builds outside the Capitol as people contemplate a bold new world of driverless cars, inside the Capitol, the pols think it’s still the 1980s, and that light-rail is the bomb, and the journos don’t think that’s crazy.

Sigh.

By Chris Reed

Congress and most presidents have long been ridiculously tolerant of Amtrak and its never-ending need for federal aid — the equivalent of massive ongoing annual bailouts. But five years ago, lawmakers actually got a little fed up. The result was a law that required states to assume the subsidies on routes of less than 750 miles that were entirely within their boundaries, beginning in late 2013.

As the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, this is already causing consternation in New York, Pennsylvania and other states, which expect to have to foot annual bills in the tens of millions of dollars.

Here in California, this should set up an entertaining subplot in the battle over high-speed rail. It is difficult to quickly determine what the state’s Amtrak tab will be in coming years. The lengthy PDF of the state transportation budget for 2013-14 does not include any line-item expenditures showing an Amtrak subsidy, but the funds could easily be buried within a larger category. Also unclear from looking at the Amtrak California website is how many routes the state will have to subsidize. Some of the most popular routes that end in Los Angeles or San Francisco actually originate thousands of miles away in other states and apparently will continue to get federal subsidies.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that California is going to need to come up with millions of dollars to take over the subsidies for interstate routes such as those linking Sacramento and the Bay Area, and Sacramento and Los Angeles. And the need for the state to heavily subsidize Amtrak’s in-state routes will underscore one of the oldest and strongest critiques offered by critics of California’s bullet-train project and rail projects in general: They will never break even or make money because just about no train in the U.S. breaks even or makes money.

This will be a useful reminder — one more warning that the bullet train will never be a cash cow, whatever the grandiose promises made for Proposition 1A in 2008 or made now by Gov. Jerry Brown.

I would have put that it was a “powerful reminder,” but then I remembered this insane L.A. Times editorial.

For some people, belief in the bullet train has a quasi-religious vibe. Unfortunately for Californians and for rationality in general, that includes the editorialists of the state’s largest and most powerful newspaper.