EDITORIAL: ‘It is a loser’

That cavernous abyss known as the California bullet train continues to deepen. Republicans in Congress should do everything they can to ensure that federal taxpayers aren’t yoked to a project born of deception and fantasy.

Proponents sold the rail plan as a means of decarbonizing the state’s transportation infrastructure: a high-speed rail line whisking passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours, 40 minutes; taking thousands of pollution-spewing vehicles off the road; and competing with the airlines. Voters bought the hype, approving bonds in 2008 to get things started, but, in reality, they were victims. The ridership and cost projections used to drum up support were absurd gobbledygook, as they are for most public transit endeavors.

The project was supposed to be running by 2020 at a cost of $33 billion. Here it is 2022, and not a single passenger has been moved. That’s because the state has only just begun building a 171-mile starter line connecting Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley. This segment is slated for completion in 2030, and the overall cost of the whole line is now $113 billion. And if you believe it won’t go any higher, we’ve got a beachfront estate in Gabbs that might catch your fancy.

This week, The New York Times concluded that “without a major new source of funding, there is little chance” the rail line “can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas.” The California High-Speed Rail Authority currently spends $1.8 million a day, but at that rate, the Times reports, “the train could not be completed in this century.”

Even three former chairmen of the rail authority told the paper that the train is a pipe dream. “I don’t think it’s an existing project,” one said. “It is a loser.” The speaker of the California Assembly said, “There is nothing but problems on the project.”

Progressives have a deep allegiance to government central planning despite more than a century of evidence highlighting its dangers and failures. The California rail line is a creature of that approach, elevating political considerations above all others, particularly involving route choices.

“This project’s failure is not a case of hindsight being 20/20,” writes Dominic Pino in The National Review. “It’s a case of hubristic planners and self-serving politicians doing exactly what conservatives warned they would do: waste taxpayer dollars on a politically motivated project that was doomed to fail from the very start.”

Supporters of this boondoggle now put their hopes in a Democratic presidential administration funneling billions more of taxpayer money to prop up a failed endeavor as a sign of solidarity with the Green New Deal. That would be fiscal malfeasance of the highest order. The sunk-cost fallacy too often leads elected officials to continue down a futile course simply because of the money they have already invested in that course. It’s long past time for California officials to show taxpayers some mercy and pull the plug.