kcra.com, Ashley Zavala:

NEW: California’s High-Speed Rail project needs $7 Billion by next summer, lawmakers learned today.

“We have no plan, we have a good likelihood it's going to get worse, and we have a short time to solve the problem,” said Democratic Asm. Steven Bennett.

From the accompanying news article: "That's not a good place for government to put itself into".

Back to the thread on X:

Lawmakers on the Assembly’s budget subcommittee focusing on transportation learned about the budget gap in a hearing this morning.

That hearing happened hours after Gov. Newsom released his latest podcast episode, in which he spends a chunk of time defending the project.

There are some good points made by commenters in the thread on X linked above, plus a call for fact-checking on the podcast with Ezra Klein.

And then there is some real snark, not to be shared with California legislators. These innocents in the State Assembly likely have only the best of intentions. They won't understand. Starting with comparisons like this:

Food $200

Data $150

Rent $800

Monorail payment $7,000,000,000

Zombie hobo arsonists $10,000,000

Utility $100

Please help my family is dying

Also from the accompanying news article. We've seen most of these points before. But as reminders:

The project was originally pitched to voters in 2008 as a $40 billion bullet train that could take riders from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Since then, the price tag for the original vision has swelled to at least $100 billion, and most of the money has yet to materialize.

I imagine that the reason the project suddenly needs 7 billion dollars by June for the Bakersfield to Merced run is that work has actually sort of started. When the project began, land was condemned and torn up here and there mostly along an even shorter route - Shafter on the south to somewhere a little north of Fresno. In other words, they started with what they thought would be the easy parts of the project so there would be no turning back. It caused a lot of problems for locals, but this is not a highly populated area, and the farmers whose land was affected don't have a lot of political power.

Now there are detours and impressive mounds of dirt and holes in the ground everywhere. There is work on vehicle overpasses and such. Less of the giant diesel equipment and support vehicles which have long been featured in the landscape seems permanently fixed in place. Those giant machines move!

Let's recall February of 2019, when Newsom broke the news to Jerry Brown that he was putting Brown's dream of the Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed rail on the back burner. And he also defied AOC's hysteria over an all-electric train system for the country:

Gavin Newsom decides to destroy the planet, maybe go to Washington someday

Dan Walters is a long-time critic of the California HSR project, and he remains a critic of Newsom's new plan:

Casting aside Brown's obvious love for a statewide system linking Sacramento and San Francisco in the north to Los Angeles and San Diego in the south, Newsom called for completing just the roughly 100-mile-long initial San Joaquin Valley segment, from Merced to near Bakersfield, and making it a high-speed system.

However, electrifying the track now under construction and buying high-speed trains to run on it would be an enormously expensive gesture for such short service. More likely, the stretch of track, when completed, will be folded into the region's existing Amtrak service.

But about the rest of the State of the State address, Walters wrote:

All in all, Newsom set an ambitious agenda for his governorship, the sort of multi-point plan that Brown had often denigrated. And in doing so, the new governor set a high mark for his political future.

Achieving all he seeks would propel him into White House contention sometime after 2020. Failing, for whatever reason, would make him a footnote in California's political history.

How is that working out for Newsom?

What about the Transbay Transit Center?

Newsom's home turf. From 2019 again:

When we last reported on the extraordinarily expensive (but dreamy) Transbay Transit Center, it was due to open in 2017. It apparently opened for bus service in August of 2018 and closed for repairs in September of 2018, It remains closed. Cracked girders were found. After Newsom's recent announcement, backers are wondering how to pay for rail lines into the center:

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who chairs the county Transportation Authority board, was unfazed. At this point, he said, San Francisco and the South Bay should go it alone.

"Our responsibility has always been connecting Santa Clara County to downtown San Francisco by bringing Caltrain to the Transbay Terminal, and we will continue to do that with zeal," he said. "Otherwise, we will have built the most expensive bus terminal in the history of humankind."

The shorter but more realistic link from Bakersfield to Merced would be a mere shadow of what Newsom described at the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for the transit center, when he was mayor of San Francisco.

You can count on Newsom not to be consistent.

Transbay Terminal, 5/22/2024

S.F.’s massive plan to create a ‘Grand Central Station of the West’ wins major funding grant

Ricardo Cano:

San Francisco’s vision to make the desolate Transbay transit center the “Grand Central Station of the West” has received support from the federal government, which has pledged $3.4 billion toward the city’s downtown rail extension project.

The massive, four-block transit hub in SoMa opened in 2018 equipped with a dormant train platform in its basement and has, so far, lived a muted existence. That could change with the completion of a 2.4-mile rail extension that would connect California’s High Speed Rail and the Peninsula’s Caltrain commuter rail to the heart of downtown.

The dreams keep getting bigger. Demands for money keep getting bigger, too. Wonder why the realities keep falling short of the dreams?

WEEKEND

Music

Maybe people can ride horses from Bakersfield to Merced.

Quote

MagicMuffinman

BREAKING:

GERMANY WILL TAKE DECISIVE ACTION TO BECOME THE WORLDS LEADING EXPORTER OF TAXPAYERS.

Do you think this assessment is accurate?

What about states in the USA?

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, March 22, I Found Out Something That I Am Very Good At! (Misanthropic Humanitarian is good at something that many of us are also good at.)

Two weeks ago:

Why don't they change? You know, in a more positive direction?

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on old threads. But don't try it anyway.