From the New York Times:
How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Oct. 9, 2022
Updated 1:37 p.m. ETLOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.
But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.
The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
The article’s thesis is that the original 2008 plan to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles was fine, but political wheedling by [more Republican] politicians in between S.F. and L.A. asking the high speed rail to serve them as well is what has doomed it.
My view instead is the fatal flaws were always there: they weren’t these minor political wranglings focused upon in the article, but instead are inherent to California’s political culture going back to the transition from Governor Pat Brown’s can-do build build build terms in the early 1960s and his son Jerry Brown’s “Era of Limits” environmentalist terms in the 1970s.
The idea of building a monster train to roar through the San Francisco Bay Area, the richest, smartest, most Not-In-My-Back-Yard place in the country, was never plausible. It’s proving very difficult to get the approvals in the Central Valley, so how’s that going to go in the San Francisco Bay Area when they finally get around to that?
Best line, about a French company with experience building high-speed rail that tried to get a California contract:
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
