This bill allows for the issuance of 4.5 billion dollars in bonds to begin funding the first leg of the project, stretching the 130 miles from Madera to Bakersfield. It is roughly 500 miles – in a straight line – from San Francisco to San Diego.
That initial 4.5 billion will not fund even the Madera to Bakersfield stretch, however. Even with the 3.3 billion in matching funds the federal government, courtesy of Conductor-in-Chief Obama’s oddly adolescent fascination with trains (he has 8 billion in the 2012 budget alone for high speed boondoggles), is heaping on the pile, there is a very good chance that even this modest stretch of track will not see completion without further spending for California.
But how much could a bullet train line spanning most of the length of California cost? In 2009, the initial estimate of the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) for this project was around 35 billion. In late 2011 the cost skyrocketed to 98.5 billion. At the beginning of 2012, a panel of experts, created by state law in order to vet the feasibility of the CHSRA’s work, said that it felt the 98.5 billion dollar price tag was too low. They issued a blistering report about the sheer, shrieking insanity of the plan. This panel, which included a former Caltrans director, a University of California dean of engineering and several private-sector finance experts, issued a dire warning that the project was doomed to failure even before it started.
Of course, the work of these experts was promptly ignored because, well… trains are cool. Just ask my nephew.
The real, underlying problem here, however, is ego. There are large swaths of people (mostly in government, though some of these twits dwell in the private sector was well) that are sick with envy that our economic inferiors, like France, Japan and China, all have fast, sleek, and perhaps most importantly, shiny bullet trains zipping around their respective countries. Every day on the playground at the UN Hu Jintao and Francois Hollande mercilessly mock our poor, pathetic train collection. It is time for us to do something about it, damnit!
1 Comment
Jerry Brown is the biggest reason successful businesses are fleeing California for other states. He’s a hardcore left winger who has no understanding of running a business. For that matter, neither do most of the Democrats who run the state assembly and senate, of the majority that voted for them — courtesy of the radical teacher’s unions that are not interested in students but only in increasing pay for their (there are several teacher’s unions) members. Californians had a chance to do the right thing and vote for Meg Whitman, who actually did run a successful company, but they chose not to — to their peril.
What’s funny is that even the reporters knew that high speed trains are boondoggles. Several of them shouted questions out a Brown when they asked him how it was going to be paid for. His answer was similar to “if you build it they will come.” Jerry, this is real life and not a Hollywood movie. He’s a moron who helped put the final nails in the state’s coffin. We can only hope that some of the lawsuits being waged will put a stop to this bogus train mess.