How California's Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

[California Democrat Failures]

https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-californias-bullet-train-went-off-the-
rails/

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.

By Ralph Vartabedian
Oct. 9, 2022
Updated 1:37 p.m. ET

LOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would
connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable
technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous
seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and
towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was
never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path
out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the
rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient
advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful
Los Angeles county supervisor.

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years
when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions
of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever
be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure
building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-
speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects
can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost
estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects
that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too
big to fail.

The article’s thesis is that the original 2008 plan to connect San
Francisco and Los Angeles was fine, but political wheedling by [more
Republican] politicians in between SF and LA asking the high speed rail
serve them as well is what has doomed it.

My view instead is the fatal flaws were always there: they weren’t these
minor political wranglings focused upon in the article, but instead are
inherent to California’s political culture going back to the transition
from Governor Pat Brown’s can-do build build build terms in the early
1960s and his son Jerry Brown’s “Era of Limits” environmentalist terms in
the 1970s.

The idea of building a monster train to roar through the San Francisco Bay
Area, the richest, smartest, most Not-In-My-Back-Yard place in the
country, was never plausible. It’s proving very difficult to get the
approvals in the Central Valley, so how’s that going to go in the San
Francisco Bay Area when they finally get around to that?

Best line, about a French company with experience building high-speed rail
that tried to get a California contract:

“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was
very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which
was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them
build a rail system.”