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| 2021: HSR construction in Fresno |
We thought it was effectively killed when Governor Newsom drastically scaled back the project in 2019. However, a state agency kept HSR alive in 2020 despite bipartisan efforts to kill it.
The change in Administrations in Washington rewarded the bureaucrats' stalling:
California will receive $929 million in grant funding toward its high-speed rail project — funding that former President Donald Trump had previously canceled in 2019 — under a deal announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office late Thursday night.Americans are divided over policy matters, such as where to spend government funds. But they're close to unanimous against spending money on things that will never work.
The Las Vegas Review Journal: [bold added]
In the early aughts, the state’s political class bamboozled voters into approving a high-speed rail project intended to ultimately connect Los Angeles with San Francisco. Construction was supposed to be completed early this decade, and residents were assured that the shiny new “clean energy” train could be theirs for the low, low price of $30 billion. Instead, the project is more than a decade behind schedule and is now projected to cost $100 billion … and counting. Officials now hope they can complete a 171-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Merced by the end of the decade...Like a monster in a lucrative horror movie franchise, HSR keeps coming back after you thought it was dead.
The Golden State bullet train is already an environmental nightmare, and there’s absolutely no evidence it can — if it’s ever actually in operation — compete with air travel in terms of time or price. President Joe Biden might as well have held a Rose Garden photo-op while chin-flicking taxpayers and taking a blowtorch to a $1 billion pile of cash. That would have been more honest than propagating the fiction that the California high-speed rail debacle is vital to saving the planet.
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