High-speed or not, passenger rail doesn’t make economic sense. Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner discusses California’s latest experience with high-speed rail silliness in a new article.
President Obama’s dream of a high-speed rail future for California is dead. The only question now is whether the state government will kill it in time to save taxpayers billions of dollars.
On Tuesday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued a new report conceding what critics have been saying for years — that the ambitious plan to build a bullet train linking San Francisco and Los Angeles would, “take longer and cost more than previously estimated.”
In 2008, when California voters approved the project in a ballot measure, the system was projected to cost $33 billion to build. Now, the revised projection is that the system would cost a whopping $98 billion, accounting for inflation over the life of the project. The date of completion was pushed back 13 years, to 2033.
Making matters worse, the new business plan predicts that only 20 percent of the funding will come from private sources. That means that even optimistically, planners will have to come up with $80 billion during times when federal, state and local governments are already strapped for cash.
