The California high-speed rail is a blank slate that everyone can cast their wildest dreams upon because it does not exist and isn’t anywhere on the horizon.
Among those projecting onto the non-existent train is state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), who posted, “Don’t believe the naysayers: CA high speed rail continues to be popular, polling at 56%. High speed rail will help our economy, lifting up Central Valley, connecting regions. High speed rail will help CA’s housing crisis. High speed rail will help CA achieve our climate goals.”
Wiener posted that with a link to a CalMatters piece, which touts all the revitalization of areas in Fresno, which is slated to become a hub for the train if it is ever built. Read through the piece, and you would assume that everyone loves it; it isn’t actually that far behind schedule, and it has a real possibility of being ready soon.
But even this piece paints how ridiculous the entire idea is. The piece admits that the price tag has ballooned to an “optimistic” estimate of $128 billion at the most and that the actual project has shrunk by about 300 miles. Officials “hope” that 119 miles from Merced to Bakersfield will be complete in 2026. The first tests are “slated” for 2028. The state has blown through every other timeline it has crafted for this project, but you are expected to believe that now they have a realistic one when “projections widely used by engineers and project managers” show that “the train could not be completed in this century.”
But the piece gives away the game when talking about the people who are supposed to be seeing this project built. The project is “at the whims of slow-moving bureaucracies that only show urgency when there’s a press conference or deadline.” California has “no money to connect the system to the Bay Area and Southern California until the federal government steps up,” but the federal government “has been largely absent.” Democratic Rep. Jim Costa keeps introducing legislation in Congress to fund the project, but it keeps failing and requires bipartisan support.
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According to the piece, “If you listen to California’s political class, the high-speed rail project sounds like a textbook boondoggle — over-budget, delayed and larded up with waste.” That’s because it is over budget, it is delayed, and it is larded up with waste. Fresno is no doubt going to love being showered in money to “revitalize” its neighborhoods, but that could have been an investment project by the state without the high-speed rail. The train is only going to cost more going forward, thanks to inflation, among other things. And it was supposed to be finished in 2020.
No matter how good the idea sounded in theory, the reality is that it was California’s Democratic government and bloated bureaucracies that were selling it to the public and would be tasked with completing it. That was always the biggest red flag, and neither that Democratic government nor those bureaucracies have changed in any way. There is no reason to be optimistic that the project will ever be realized until they do.