President Trump announced that the federal government would no longer provide financial support to the California High-Speed Rail project, according to the New York Times.
According to Trump, “That train is the worst cost overrun I’ve ever seen,” “It’s, like, totally out of control.” He added: “This government is not going to pay.”
Izzy Gordon, spokesman for Governor Gain Newsom responded: “With 50 major structures built, walking away now as we enter the track-laying phase would be reckless — wasting billions already invested and letting job-killers cede a generational infrastructure advantage to China.”
In fact, the recklessness was California’s alone, which chose to spend billions of money that it did not have, apparently on the assumption that the taxpayers of the other 49 states would have no alternative but to continue funding. The “unused 50 major structures” could ultimately become a memorial to an overly costly project that had been oversold from the start. An appropriate name could be “Stonehenge in the Valley.”
Recently, Unleash Prosperity released my report (“California High-Speed Rail: Still Stuck at the Station”) suggesting that the presently estimated $128 billion ultimate cost to link Los Angeles to San Francisco could double that amount ($250 billion), if the cost escalation of the first third of the project continues. As the state established Peer Review Group has said, so far the work has been in the easy part. The much more complicated segments from Palmdale to Los Angeles
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.
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