SF Chronicle: California’s high-speed rail needs $100 billion to finish — scrapping the project is a possibility

I’m a huge fan of high-speed trains, but California’s project gets more and more unfathomable as the costs escalate with no pretense of honest accounting.

They should either shut it down, right now, or prove they can finish without further ridiculous overruns. It all smells like a giant scam.

Investigating this should be on journalism’s agenda. (I’d love to see ProPublica take a crack at it. Instead, what we see from news media are mostly incremental “discoveries” that the costs have — yet again — soared from the previously avowed estimates.

I hate saying this, and I’ve already gotten some pushback at Mastodon. Waldo Jaquith, who knows his way around governmental projects, wrote:

Major transit projects, like major tech projects, routinely cost multiples of their planned costs, for the same reasons. The solutions: have the state actually employ engineers etc. to oversee the work knowledgably, inspect the actual work being done *constantly*, cancel contracts for non-performing vendors, and don’t have a single prime vendor that outsources to a bajillion subs.

This isn’t hard. The problem and solutions are well documented.

Maybe so. But the solutions, however well documented, don’t ever seem to be put into practice — and California is notorious for expensive, failed projects.

This project is — quite visibly — little but smoke and mirrors. The state keeps launching endless billions of our dollars into…what?

California high-speed rail should have happened. Long ago. But the people who’ve profited from it have vaporized too much of our money at this point. They are obviously not going to become honest, or competent, enough to actually finish this project. I loathe them and their enablers, because they’ve compromised California’s future.

But it looks to me like it’s over, kaput. The only question seems to be when we’ll stop throwing good money after bad.