California’s Laughing Rail Stock

The bullet train’s price tag goes up again, this time to $105 billion

WSJ editorial.

"California Democrats once hoped that their 500-mile bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco would be a high-speed rail model for the nation. It’s a model, all right—in how politics can drive public works off the rails.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority this week increased its cost estimate for the bullet train to $105 billion from $100 billion two years ago. In 2008 when voters approved $10 billion in bonds for the choo-choo, the estimated price tag was a mere $40 billion. That’s enough to have built 10 large water reservoirs in the parched state.

This latest $5 billion doesn’t even account for rapidly rising material and labor costs. Most of the plus-up, according to the rail authority’s business plan, is for environmental “mitigation,” including changes to address the “visual effects” around the César E. Chávez National Monument, to “enhance noise barriers” in the city of Tehachapi (population: 14,414), and to restore a stream along a hiking trail.

Recall how the Obama Administration dangled $3.5 billion in federal funds to force construction to start in the sparsely populated Central Valley. The White House said there would be fewer environmental obstacles, though one apparent motive was to reward Rep. Jim Costa (D., San Joaquin Valley), a longtime project proponent, for his ObamaCare vote.

Yet communities along the train’s first 119-mile operating route, from Wasco (population: 27,047) to Madera (population: 66,224), have demanded design changes anyway. Meantime, Democratic state legislators are pushing to delay electrifying that 119-mile segment and to redirect bond funds to commuter rail in metropolitan areas.

The first trains that run might be slow, diesel and mostly empty. “I’m worried that we’re dead in the water,” Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said last fall. “I’m also worried that we have what would be a laughingstock for California.” Too late."