Feds pull plug on CA High Speed Rail
Photo by Itoldya420
In a dramatic vote of No Confidence, the federal Dept of Transportation terminates its financial support of California's doomed high-speed rail boondoggle. The widely panned project (which is hilariously still supported by the SJ City Council) is light years over budget and likely on its last legs. National Review reports.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has terminated the remaining $4 billion of unspent federal funds for California’s beleaguered high-speed rail project. The move is well justified.
In 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure that would allow the state to issue up to $9.95 billion in bonds to support an ambitious plan to build a high-speed rail system. But the state has not lived up to the promises made to its own voters who approved the measure and to the federal government.
When it was sold to Californians 16 years ago, state rail officials presented a business plan that envisioned a sprawling 800-mile network that would first link San Francisco to Los Angeles, with a second phase extending the line to Sacramento and San Diego. The cost of the first segment was projected to be $33 billion and it was supposed to be capable of supporting up to 100 million riders by 2030.
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom declared the original vision dead, conceding, “there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA.”
Instead, he proposed limiting the train to a 171-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield, a significantly less populated corridor in the Central Valley.
But to this point, no track has been laid, despite support for the project from the Biden administration, and a recent inspector general report from California determined that it was “unlikely” even this segment would be completed by 2033, as had been promised. Even if completed, the ridership on the segment is projected to be just 3 million a year, nowhere near enough to justify the cost unless the entire originally proposed San Francisco-to-Los Angeles section is built. But cost estimates for that now exceed $106 billion.
While California officials are still touting the possibility of private funding, they have been desperately seeking such funding from the project’s inception, to no avail, because demand is likely to be significantly lower than the 55 million riders initially projected by 2030 (which assumed they would be able to keep fares at half the price of airplane tickets). To provide some context, Amtrak reported 33 million riders last year – for the entire country.
If Newsom and California lawmakers had any sense, they would view Duffy’s decision to cut off funding as an act of mercy, and finally pull the plug on this doomed project.
Read the whole thing here.
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