California, You've been swindled again...

...and you can't have water infrastructure.

//California’s high-speed rail project has broken more promises than ground. At every stage, the project has underestimated costs and overestimated benefits.

Travel times are up 40 percent. Ticket prices have risen 78 percent. Construction costs have nearly doubled – from initial estimates of $33 billion to $64 billion. So far, roughly 1,000 construction jobs have benefited the Central Valley – a far cry from the 160,000 construction-related jobs and 450,000 permanent tourism jobs originally promised.

California’s high-speed rail is a classic case of a sunk cost trap. In behavioral economics, the sunk cost fallacy describes that uniquely human circumstance by which we throw good money after bad ideas, persisting with a losing proposition because it’d be a waste to walk away now, after all we’ve spent.//

But you can bet that there has been graft and corruption and political donations floating into Democrat politicians that are keeping this sucking chest wound alive.

Our Dysfunctional Political Class.

California is in complete economic decline, but our politicians think that the answer is a train that will go from Bakersfield to Madera at 200 mph.

Seriously?

Like a drunk looking for his keys under a light - rather than where he dropped them, because the light is better there - California is building the train where there is no ridership because the land is cheaper.

John Fund writes:

I went down to the state capitol here on Friday afternoon to watch the state senate approve, by a single vote, a $4.7 billion bond package to build a high-speed-rail system from nowhere to nowhere. If the whole system is ever built — highly doubtful — it will cost at least $68 billion and run between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But this first 130-mile segment will run from Madera to Bakersfield, a stretch that less than 3 percent of the line’s potential ridership can use.

“Where [Governor Brown], with the state going bankrupt, is even thinking about an expenditure like this is beyond comprehension,” leading California demographer Joel Kotkin told the Wall Street Journal. “When the schools are falling apart, when the roads are falling apart, the bridges are unsafe, the state economy is in free fall. We’re still doing much worse than the rest of the country, we’ve got this growing permanent welfare class, and high-speed rail is going to solve this?”

The whole operation began in 2008, when voters narrowly approved $9.9 billion in bonds. It was a time when the estimated total cost was $33 billion and projections showed the project would be finished by 2020. The bond measure stipulated that the system must deliver passengers from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in 160 minutes or less.

I relish the idea of flitting down to Bakersfield in an hour, which, when you factor in the time spent checking in and checking out of the station, will take as much time as driving.

For this we are going bankrupt.

Ridiculous.

More Happy Joy-Joy for California!

The Economist describes California's High Speed Rail project as a "mess."

The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density—and affluence—of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.


California wants a share of that bullet-train hubris. Where Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin have turned down billions of federal dollars for high-speed rail, the Golden State has been pressing on with its $43-billion scheme to build a high-speed rail service from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area, with spurs eventually to San Diego, Sacramento and San Luis Obispo.

The irony is that California has the highest rate of car-ownership in the country, if not the world. It also, despite years of neglect, has one of the best road networks anywhere—certainly leagues ahead of Japan’s. On top of that, it enjoys a highly competitive network of budget airlines serving its main cities. The Los Angeles Times got it about right when it editorialised on May 16th that “California’s much-vaunted high-speed rail project is, to put it bluntly, a train wreck”.

And an expensive one at that. Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in some $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and Citizens Against Government Waste put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.

That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state's Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion—and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.

The report warns lawmakers in Sacramento not to appropriate any money for the project until big changes are made in the way it is managed. The biggest such change is to transfer day-to-day operations from the High-Speed Rail Authority (HSRA), set up to oversee the project, to the California Department of Transportation. Caltrans, which designs and manages the state’s major roadworks, is widely respected around the world for its engineering prowess and professionalism.

That has not stopped the HSRA from racing to get construction started by 2012. To be fair to the authority, $3.6 billion of the funding from the federal government is stimulus money earmarked for use before the presidential election in 2012. While it would make more sense to use this cash to make a start on the link between San Francisco and San Jose, the only part of the proposed route not plagued with political infighting is the sparsely populated Central Valley. Besides, the White House has insisted that the stimulus money be used to create jobs within the Central Valley, where unemployment in many farming communities exceeds 20%.

As a result, the first section of California’s high-speed railway, estimated to cost $5.5 billion, will run 65 miles between the tiny towns of Bordon and Corcoran in the midst of the Central Valley’s farmland. When it was announced last December, critics promptly labelled it “the line to nowhere”.

In short, a political boondoggle that will waste money and accomplish nothing.

Travel from Corcoran to Borden in a high speed train!

Megan McCardle explains the reason why the Central Valley will be the first part of California's high speed rail to be opened:

So basically, the feds wanted to spend $2.6 billion, plus any cost overruns or operating costs, to put in a train for which there was no evident demand.  Why?  Because they didn't have any better options, and they wanted to build a train.  The California High Speed Rail project, following similarly sound reasoning, is going to start out in California's not-very-populous Central Valley, because . . . it's easier to get the right of way.  Never mind that there aren't any, like, passengers.

Philip Klein at the Spectator has more:

As the Authority was fighting off the "train to nowhere" label, it had some good luck -- incoming Republican governors John Kasich and Scott Walker turned down high-speed rail stimulus funds granted to Ohio and Wisconsin, saying they couldn't afford the rail projects given their states' fiscal problems. The Obama administration acted quickly to divert $624 million of the rejected money to the California project. The new infusion, with matching amounts from California, allowed the Authority nearly to double the proposed first segment, to 123 miles, and make it reach just north of Bakersfield (though short of its downtown).


Officially, the Authority gives several explanations for the location of the first section. The cost of building in the Central Valley and of acquiring any land is cheaper, and the terrain is much flatter.

Who cares about the economics of the plan.  They've got funding and Central Valley is flatter than where most Californians actually live!

Serving "passengers between the unincorporated town of Borden and the half-incarcerated town of Corcoran."

Reason magazine does not have high hopes for the high speed rail:

California's high speed rail project could be shaping up as the awesomest catastrogeddon of 2011.


The California High Speed Rail Authority is committed to breaking ground on a leg of the train that will serve passengers between the unincorporated town of Borden and the half-incarcerated town of Corcoran.

Whether you call it the train from nowhere or the train to nowhere, nobody will be riding it even when it’s done. That’s not libertarian cant: The actual plan for the $4.15 billion leg is that upon completion it will sit idle until other sections of track are