California’s high-speed rail project continues to be a national embarrassment, with officials admitting it will cost nearly $100 billion more than first advertised.
Gavin Newsom gave up on building the LA-to-San Francisco portion in 2019. Today, the most visible sign of construction is a set of pillars in Fresno that locals call “Stonehenge.”
As The California Post noted earlier this year, the train is already destroying small communities in its path, disrupting businesses and changing historic sites forever.
California Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin even admitted to CBS News’ 60 Minutes this weekend that “”mistakes have been made.”
“I don’t think the voters fully understood” the costs and the difficulty of building the “bullet train,” he said, “and neither did we.”
The truth was that voters were misled by successive California administrations — and that Democratic administrations in Washington kept throwing good money after bad, sending billions to keep the failing effort afloat.
To recap: voters approved a relatively small bond in 2008, during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second term, for a bullet train that we were told would connect California’s two main cities in less than three hours by 2020.
Local regulations, right-of-way battles, environmental difficulties, and geological fault lines immediately created problems.
Within a few short years, the train’s planners had given up on making the LA-to-San Fran trip in less than three hours.
“The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency,” he told the state legislature.
He was right. But in true California liberal fashion, he kept the project going, since it promised access to federal money, and because of local special interests.
Absurdly, Newsom proposed to connect rural cities in the Central Valley — cities that already use regular Amtrak service and the Interstate 5 freeway.
President Donald Trump rightly tried to claw back federal money that would no longer be used for its original purpose.
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But President Joe Biden restored billions in spending on the project — to no effect. Meanwhile, costs kept growing, and deadlines kept being pushed further and further away.
In eight years in office, Newsom has failed to lay a single inch of track thus far. He celebrated the creation of a railhead earlier this year. Perhaps he will see some actual track laid before he launches his campaign for president, which seems to be his all-consuming goal.
It would have been more efficient, and more useful, for California to spend the money on upgrading California’s existing roads and rail lines, which are in a state of general disrepair.
A high-speed rail link between LA and Vegas, which began with private investors, holds more realistic hope of being built.
But in the meantime, California’s high-speed rail failure has become a symbol of the state’s dysfunction, a monument to waste, and to the triumph of green ideology over common sense.
There is one bright side to the failed project, however.
If Newsom hasn’t managed to connect LA and San Francisco by high-speed rail, at least he’s found a faster way to get to Stonehenge.
