California has offered the latest update for its high-speed rail project that was supposed to be completed three years ago. Unsurprisingly, the projected price tag has increased once again.
High Speed Rail Authority officials now estimate the project will cost $128 billion, a 13% increase from last year’s projection and a $95 billion increase from the price tag originally pitched to Californians. The original price tag of $33 billion for the train to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco (roughly 382 miles) is now less than the projected $35 billion tag for the train from Bakersfield to Merced (163 miles).
CALIFORNIA HAS WEAPONIZED TRANSPORTATION AGAINST ITS OWN POPULATION
HSRA officials did not offer an updated timeline for when the project would be finished, likely because there is a good chance it never will. The entire project was supposed to be finished by 2020. That has drawn out to the shorter Bakersfield-Merced line being given a deadline of 2030. More realistically, engineers and project managers have projected that the magic train will not be finished this century.
Yes, California’s high-speed rail is only about 80 years behind schedule. Who knows what the budget for the project will look like in 2100?
The high-speed rail was always a pipe dream, built on the fantasy of California’s climate cult and ignoring a litany of issues including land acquisition and, ironically, the state’s own climate laws and climate groups. It was also likely always a scam, pushed by labor unions and developers who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the lucrative state contracts. California is continuing to sink money into a project with almost no progress. It’s nice work — if you can get it.
The entire saga has been predictable, and it underscores just how incompetent the California Democratic Party really is. California Democrats have saddled taxpayers with a money furnace and don’t have the courage to simply admit that it was a failure. The high-speed rail project will continue to loom over residents for decades, and California Democrats will have nothing to show for it other than a few uncompleted rail structures sporadically placed among confiscated farmland.