Cost of California’s High-Speed Rail Goes Up Again

It was supposed to cost $33 billion when voters approved the train in 2008. It will now cost at least $126 billion.

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It was supposed to cost $33 billion when voters approved the train in 2008. It will now cost at least $126 billion.

It was also supposed to be carrying 65.5 million to 96.5 million intercity riders a year by 2030. Yet now 2040 is the date for “full service to start.” Skeptics don’t believe we’ll ever see the train run with paying customers aboard.

“In my judgment, the Draft 2026 Business Plan describes a project that has reached a dead end,” says Louis S. Thompson, a 15-year member of the California High Speed Rail Peer Review Group that was established by legislation.

In a letter to lawmakers, Thompson, who was also on the team that created Amtrak, said that after so many changes in the project—cost, design revisions, longer estimated trip times—it’s “not, not even remotely, the system the voters approved in Proposition 1A” in 2008.

Early last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom, that “Steel Driving Man,” promised there soon would be some visible manifestation of the train’s “progress.” A few months later, HSRA CEO Ian Choudri promised, “We are going to be laying high speed tracks next year.”

The HSRA “expects to achieve several other procurement milestones in 2026,” but not track laying and there is no hard deadline for it to begin to be found in the plan. There is only a three-and-a-half-year timeline, which starts in July for the “Track & Systems Design & Construction” of the first section in the Central Valley.

In other words, the HSRA has provided itself cover should it fall short of its 2026 promise.

California’s perpetually unfolding mess has caught the attention of the editorial board of a newspaper one state over after a recent “60 Minutes” report “shined the spotlight on what has become the most embarrassing and costly government infrastructure boondoggle in US history.”

“Has there ever been a greater fraud perpetrated on the taxpayers than California’s high-speed rail travesty?” asked the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Where are the folks at ‘American Greed’ when you need them?”

That is, of course, a reference to the CNBC documentary series “American Greed: Scams, Scoundrels and Scandals.” It won’t happen, but it would be fitting, if the HSRA borrowed the program’s name for the subtitle of its 2027 business plan, which this year is shamelessly being called “Transforming California’s Future.”

Originally published on Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, reposted from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)