California Governor Gavin Newsom may be a typical far-left coast Democrat, but evidently even he knows what a rotting corpse smells like:
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in his State of the State speech Tuesday that he intends to scale back California’s $77-billion high-speed rail system, saying that while the state has “the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield … there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.”
By the time Newsom pulled the plug on the boondoggle, it had already swelled to $77 to $98 billion in projected costs for the unlikely goal of reducing automotive travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The original cost was estimated to be $25 billion.
The good news is that the most incredibly expensive part of this colossal waste of taxpayer money is now cancelled. No more worrying about paying for extremely expensive land or 13.5 mile tunnels or how to span active earthquake faults. This is progress!
The bad news is that the stupidest and cheapest part of the boondoggle is still alive. Bakersfield has a population of 380,000. Merced has a population of 83,000. Between them is Fresno, population 428,000. None of these cities is nearly as congested at rush hour as Los Angeles or San Francisco. A “high speed” rail line there serves no purpose except soaking up federal government subsidies, and the only reason construction started on that part of the boondoggle was because the land was (relatively) cheap and California government functionaries could point at it and go “Look! Progress!”
To quote Iowahawk:
All aboad the Pointless Express, with stops in Merced, Shelbyville, Fresno, North Haverbrook, Bakersfield and points in between pic.twitter.com/fDG3J0sCfe
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 12, 2019
I suspect that at some point the rest of the boondoggle will be quietly cancelled, as the Bakersfield to Merced makes no sense apart from connect Los Angeles to San Francisco (except, of course, for lining the pockets of well-connected consultants and construction firms).
Tags: California, Democrats, Fresno, Gavin Newsome, high speed rail, Merced, waste
I find a amusing that the one stated reason to keep going on the middle part was that they had to or else give back $2 billion to the Feds. IOW If we don’t waste this $2 billion we’ll have to let someone else waste it and that would be wrong.
[…] long documented the failures of California’s still unbuilt high speed rail, and now a video from Simon Whistler (yeah, him) covers a similar doomed British high speed rail […]