High Costs & Construction Delays Plague Cali. High Speed Rail

The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020.

Not a single train has run, with train testing still six to seven years away, amid seemingly never-ending delays.

As the Los Angeles Times reported in January, Ghassan Ariqat, vice president of operations at bullet-train contractor Tutor Perini, sent a "Scorching" letter to California officials criticizing persistent construction delays, "Contradicting state claims that the line's construction pace is on target," and warning that the project could miss "a key 2022 federal deadline." "It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after , the authority has not obtained all of the right of way," Ariqat wrote.

Two years ago, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan think tank, called California's high-speed rail an outright "Failure" that has "Suffered from at least seven identifiable 'worst practices,'" causing it "To be indefinitely delayed."

One high-speed rail blogger wondered in 2009 if the state itself should make a bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics, since California was "On track" for "Fast, high-capacity public transportation" that would allow events and venues easily to be "Spread out over a much wider area." Twelve years later, as the Los Angeles Times has noted, the project "May run out of money" before the "171-mile starter system between Bakersfield and Merced" can be completed.

This month, rising costs forced the High Speed Rail Authority to reduce the planned pair of tracks between Bakersfield and Merced to a single track, saving $1.1 billion but likely coming at the expense of train speeds.

Cost estimates have bounced around since 2008, landing at various times at $64 billion, $77 billion, $98 billion, and $117 billion before settling, for now, at $100 billion for a scaled-back version that links Los Angeles and San Francisco.
 

https://www.city-journal.org/high-costs-construction-delays-plague-ca-high-speed-rail