Scott Lincicome at The Dispatch:
On the leaderboard of government boondoggles, California’s high-speed rail system must surely rank near the top. As Cato Institute analyst Marc Joffe documented in 2023, California voters first approved a $10 billion bond for the project in 2008, with the understanding that zippy service between Los Angeles and San Francisco would begin in 2020 at a total cost of just $33 billion. Three years past that deadline, however, the project had ballooned in both scope and cost, while not a single piece of track had been laid—even though state, federal, and local taxpayers had already spent at least $13 billion on the project
Since then, the news has only gotten worse. The cost estimate has now been upped to $135 billion—more than $100 billion higher than the original proposal!—and, as the Associated Press reported in late April, the CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) said it might take two more decades to complete “most” of the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles segment.
Even this schedule, however, is almost certainly too optimistic. As the AP notes, the only construction underway now is for a 119-mile stretch in California’s Central Valley, but only 22 miles will be ready for track-laying next year and, per the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole, another 52 miles haven’t even begun construction because “CHSRA did not meet the deadline for having the final configuration footprint completed by the end of 2024” and “the agency still needs to reach agreements with 12 of the 38 local agencies and utilities on utility relocations.”
The debacle was predictable and predicted. Neel Kashkari, ELEVEN YEARS AGO: