So when California voters approved a $10 billion to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to cry. The idea behind the line was absurd, and the proposed budget didn’t even qualify as a bad joke. After all, it took about a billion dollars to build a 12-mile light-duty rail line; there was no way on earth that $10 billion would get them even to the point of breaking ground. And with that $10 billion they were going to build a bullet train and light rail lines to hook up to it. It was so absurd that soon after the vote the budget was revised upward by 300%.

In other words, the voters were lied to from the moment this line was proposed. Every single person involved with pushing this project consciously lied to get the first of many tranches of money that would be poured into this boondoggle.

The New York Times is finally admitting the obvious: this project is such a disaster that it likely never be complete, despite billions of dollars having been poured into it.  Out of the 500 miles of rail originally proposed, perhaps a fifth or quarter will ever get built–from nowhere, to nowhere.

Now the Times doesn’t come out and admit the obvious fact that the voters were scammed. They still maintain that with hindsight there were “errors.” Yet there were no errors: every single “mistake” was intentional, and the cost overruns are a feature and not a bug. Those dollars are going into pockets, and that was the point all along.

First, the Times sets the stage by focusing on how the project started:

LOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.

$1 trillion infrastructure bill. Spent by the same kind of grifters who gave us this project.

Not to have buried the lede, but I wanted to give you some context before revealing the current price tag:

When California voters first approved a bond issue for the project in 2008, the rail line was to be completed by 2020, and its cost seemed astronomical at the time — $33 billion — but it was still considered worthwhile as an alternative to the state’s endless web of freeways and the carbon emissions generated in one of the nation’s busiest air corridors..

Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal.

 

Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the “final plan” raised the estimate to $113 billion.

The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.

Yes, you read that right. Voters approved $10 billion. The current plan, which will certainly be revised upwards, is more than 11 times higher. And they are nowhere near completion of the “starter line” that literally goes nowhere that Californians want to go–from one small city to another–in the middle of the state, where the people are not.

No L.A. or San Francisco any time in the foreseeable future.

As of now, there is no identified source of funding for the $100 billion it will take to extend the rail project from the Central Valley to its original goals, Los Angeles and San Francisco, in part because lawmakers, no longer convinced of the bullet train’s viability, have pushed to divert additional funding to regional rail projects.

“There is nothing but problems on the project,” the speaker of the State Assembly, Anthony Rendon, complained recently.

Really? Are those problems, really? Or was spending billions of dollars the whole point in the first place? If a train came out the other end–which was never likely–that would have been a nice bonus.

The Times argues that the problems begin with poor choices made for political reasons. This assumes, of course, that the political benefits weren’t the point in the first place. The cost overruns that resulted from those choices were a feature, not a bug, and in that light, the choices weren’t poor. Well, they may turn out to be, as a new batch of politicians are looking elsewhere for graft that will benefit them more directly. As Forbes notes,

Four years ago, the state tapped Kelly, a veteran transportation official, to get matters back on track after early management blunders threatened public support. Legal challenges and securing all the land needed to build even the first, relatively flat phase were also priorities. Today, 119 miles of concrete, bridgelike viaducts and other structures on which electric trains will someday run at over 200 mph are being built—bringing temporary headaches to downtown Fresno—with new work poised to begin on the remaining 52 miles that are now funded. Critically, Kelly and his team have also secured more than 90% of the land needed to keep construction on track.

“Threatened public support” tells you everything you need to know. The management problems only mattered because voters were waking up to the fact that they were scammed. The powers-that-be were absolutely fine with the failures as long as people tolerated them. But when support began to flag, it was time to change management. Have to keep the grift alive, after all.

How do I know this? Because the politicians were told from almost the beginning that the management in power could not complete the project:

The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.

The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.‌

The company‌ ‌pulled out in 2011.

“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.

Morocco. F’ing Morocco could do this, but California can’t. And I think it is safe to say that at least one reason for that is because the California politicians never cared one way or another whether the train carried a single passenger. Spending the money was the point, not having a train. If you accept that fact everything else makes sense.

With all the problems out in the open, you would think the project is now doomed, but again you would be wrong. As I have said, the grift is the whole point.

President Donald Trump withheld $929 million of federal funds awarded years earlier and threatened to claw back $2.5 billion doled out by the Obama Administration. Longtime train commuter President Joe Biden restored those funds in 2021 and wants more bullet-train projects, both for the jobs they’ll generate and to help cut climate-warming emissions from cars.

With Democrats back in control and a trillion dollars of “infrastructure” money out there to raid, the project just keeps on trucking:

Orders for the first trains could go out as soon as next year. Companies including Siemens, which has a passenger-train factory in Sacramento, and Alstom, which builds them at East Coast plants, both have Amtrak contracts and will likely compete for California’s business.

“There’s several other train manufacturers, from around Asia and the world, building high-speed trains,” Kelly said. “There’s no shortage of suppliers.”

Auto-obsessed America is a global laggard in high-speed rail, a service widely available across Europe, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, which pioneered the technology six decades ago. While many of those trains run at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, the fastest line in the U.S. is Amtrak’s Acela service between New York and Washington, topping out at 150 mph. Amtrak is upgrading the Acela fleet on its profitable Northeast Corridor between New York and Boston with new Alstom trains that will boost speeds to 160 mph. Future track improvements should increase that even further.

Yoo hoo! We can pretend to be Europeans as the politicians, unions, and construction firms get rich off of tax dollars. As long as you can claim a goal of becoming more European everything is justifiable to gullible Democrat voters who think that the people in charge actually care about them.

In theory spending money wisely on infrastructure can provide returns that vastly outweigh the costs. The Interstate highway system was a no-brainer investment–although you may have noticed that Leftists are now attacking it for being racist and environmentally unsound. Trains, they say, are much better. And indeed trains can be a very efficient way to move freight.

But passengers? There are very few cases where it makes sense. Not none, but few. In the US air transportation is substantially more efficient in most cases where cars are not practical.

With this in mind Democrats should never be allowed to be in charge of spending infrastructure dollars. Not that Republicans are reliable enough for my taste, but at least they are more likely to represent areas where roads dominate, so they will only choose to waste money on projects with a higher return.

Why are we unable to make smart investments any more? My guess is that there is just too much money sloshing around to be plundered, and we are at the late-empire stage of development where the entrenched interests have acquired so much power that the system totally ignores the common good.

Maybe I am too pessimistic, but I doubt it. Every time I think that I have gotten too cynical I am reminded by something like this that I am not yet cynical enough.