Cutting BART's budget per Newsom's Jan announcement may have been an unwelcome surprise to some legislators, but the CA Focus's Thomas Elias points out that it's high time we focus public funds on more efficacious services. With BART's ridership 45% below pre-Covid numbers, expansion into DTSJ is neither logical nor fair to taxpayers.

VTA's light rail system is widely considered one of the worst-performing in the country. BART's expansion to downtown SJ is riddled with dubious cost overruns and declining ridership projects. And now we learn: those empty metallic beasts will get extended to Eastridge. Mark Joffe at Cato Institute runs the numbers on local transit boondoggles—and it's not pretty.

If Bay Area Rapid Transit is such a broken, anachronistic system, why are we forking over the big bucks to extend it to downtown SJ? Even Bloomberg acknowledges that with its dismal ridership numbers, dearth of adequate funding, and declining credit score, BART has no business expanding to DTSJ and Santa Clara. Rather than hoping taxpayers will shell out additional dough to keep BART alive, the transit agency should consider closures and service cuts, says analyst Skylar Woodhouse.

Edward Ring reports for American Greatness on what voters originally green-lit, way back in 2008, as a $33 billion endeavor: CA's high-speed rail project, now estimated to cost $127 billion. As taxpayer money melts into nought over decades, the HSR can hardly promise any environmental or communal benefits.

As SJ continues climbing out of its longtime drought status, Edward Ring reminds us in the WSJ that additional rainfall means nothing if we aren't adequately extracting and storing water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Such approaches would eliminate CA's water deficit without harming the environment.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani voiced her concerns at a recent committee meeting that SF's chosen replacement for partner org UCHS—which is the Felton Institute—might be just as dangerous. FI has been accused of disrupting union organization via withholding raises, not-good-faith bargaining, and bullying behavior; yet SF still hedges on enforcing accountability in nonprofit partners' contracts. The SF Standard's report below.

Barrier-free taxpayer-funded homeless housing is often lauded by the left as The Compassionate Approach. Housing First meets individuals where they're at, whether they're addicted to substances or experiencing a severe mental illness. However, the Daily Caller's roundup of recent stats tells a different story: Unrestricted housing policies have only seen increased rates of homelessness and death.

School choice options are supported by many Californian families from a variety of political affiliations. In light of the CA Senate's education committee recently rejecting an educational savings account (ESA) bill, Jeffrey Carter explains on his Substack blog why supply side economics are, indeed, effective when applied to education.