In 2008, California voters took a fateful vote to borrow money and build a $40 billion high-speed rail system that was supposed to connect San Francisco to San Diego by 2022.
Ten years later, the cost estimate for California’s crazy train has now gotten as high as $98 billion, blowing the doors off the original estimate.
There’s no end in sight for potential future increases. If the price tag has more than doubled in the first 10 years of the project, just imagine what the next 10 years might do — because there won’t be a functioning train for at least that long.
Somehow, with every bit of common sense recommending that the state cut its losses and move on, the insanity continues. This month’s City Journal offered the newest depressing update on this eternal project, on which a new governor, Gavin Newsom, will now have to decide how to proceed. Even if he goes full speed ahead, California high-speed rail won’t transport anyone anywhere until at least 2029. Even then, the train is only expected to run between San Jose (more than an hour’s drive south from San Francisco) and Bakersfield (a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles).
As slow as that may seem, the project has actually gone too fast for its own good. A recent report by the state auditor attributes an estimated cost increase of $1.6 billion to a decision to begin construction way back in 2013, before the proper approvals had been secured.
The biggest problem with high-speed rail was never its cost-to-build (which is atrocious, of course) but that the high cost will never be recouped because high-speed rail is a money-loser. As Baruch Feigenbaum found in his 2013 study for the Reason Foundation, only two high-speed rail lines in the entire world (in Japan and France) actually make money, with one additional line (also in Japan) breaking even. All other systems lose money. Meanwhile, train travel between many cities (Paris and London, for example) is more expensive and takes longer than just taking a flight. (For the record, Feigenbaum also made a very persuasive case that the rail system’s imputed environmental advantages are also imaginary.)
High-speed rail has always been a desirable thing for people whose main goal is to make America more like Europe. For everyone else, it’s at best a white elephant and at worst a black hole.
Fortunately, only $1.4 billion has already been thrown down the drain so far on California’s project. That means there’s still a chance to set things right. But just imagine what California could have done with that extra money.
More importantly, imagine what it could do with more than $100 billion that will be spent between building this boondoggle and subsidizing its operations when it inevitably proves unprofitable — that is, unless someone pulls the emergency brake now.
What’s funny is former President Barack Obama wanted to build high-speed rail lines like this one all over the nation. In 2011, vice president and railroad buff Joe Biden announced a $53 billion national program under the stimulus package that would both subsidize California’s project and build additional high-speed rail lines in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida.
Three newly elected Republican governors (Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, and Rick Scott of Florida) were brutally criticized at the time for flat-out refusing billions in federal stimulus dollars when they killed the high-speed rail projects that Obama had envisioned in their respective states. Walker turned down $810 million; Kasich shrugged off $400 million; Scott turned down $2.4 billion.
Who turns down free money? Smart governors, it turns out. Judging by California’s experience, Walker, Kasich, and Scott deserve to have statues erected in their honor. They could hardly have known how much hassle and suffering they were saving their states’ citizens when they just said no to trains.
And in California, taxpayers’ only hope is that Democrats will figure out what should be obvious to everyone already: Pull the plug on a project that should never have been started.
