This just in! How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails! Yeah, the NYT’s Ralph Vartabedian has the story on California’s long-struggling mega-mega project, a 200 mph bullet train running between San Francisco and LA, aka “the train to nowhere”:
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned.
Who could have seen this coming? Who? Who? Well, me, for one, since I’ve been touting both spiffy Cirrus SR-22 propeller planes and big-ass buses as more sensible alternatives to the West Coast Bullet as far back as 2008.
Much of the problem, Ralph tells us, is the choice of the route between the two cities, which, surprise, surprise, was significantly shaped by politicians rather than engineers and, you know, geography:
The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.
Well, we can chuckle over the “only now” portion of Ralph’s rap; the West Coast Bullet was always a guaranteed disaster, as I’ve said many times. Ralph can tell you in excellent detail how this particular boondoggle “went off the rails”—somebody give that headline writer a raise!—but the real reason is that projects like this are always treated essentially as money trees. No one cares if they ever get done, because spending money—and publicity—are the real purposes of these programs. As I said a year ago, casting a skeptical eye on President Biden’s stimulus plan, and referencing a one-mile, $3.4 billion subway project in New York:
Any large-scale government spending project attracts a host of “gate keepers”—interested parties who, to prove their worth to their constituents, must get a piece of the action. The Democrats, being the “coalition” party, is particularly vulnerable to these groups, and the overt political goal [of the Biden proposal] of currying favor with the supposedly neglected white working class, particularly those located in “declining” economic areas—areas where one might even say there is no reason to expect economic growth to occur—all but guarantees that the first priority will be to spend money as an end in itself. And the fact that the Biden administration intends to be aggressively union friendly also guarantees that labor costs will be as high as possible.
The California project could be worse, of course. It could be military spending.
