{"id":35210,"date":"2016-07-01T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T07:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35210"},"modified":"2016-06-30T10:45:24","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T14:45:24","slug":"is-the-end-in-sight-for-californias-high-speed-rail-fiasco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/07\/01\/is-the-end-in-sight-for-californias-high-speed-rail-fiasco\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the end in sight for California&#8217;s high speed rail fiasco?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2016-06-28\/california-hits-the-brakes-on-high-speed-rail-fiasco\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia Postrel<\/a> says the state&#8217;s high speed rail boondoggle may finally run out of chances:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>California&#8217;s high-speed rail project increasingly looks like an expensive social science experiment to test just how long interest groups can keep money flowing to a doomed endeavor before elected officials finally decide to cancel it. What combination of sweet-sounding scenarios, streamlined mockups, ever-changing and mind-numbing technical detail, and audacious spin will keep the dream alive?<\/p>\n<p>Sold to the public in 2008 as a visionary plan to whisk riders along at 220 miles an hour, making the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a little over two and a half hours, the project promised to attract most of the necessary billions from private investors, to operate without ongoing subsidies and to charge fares low enough to make it competitive with cheap flights. With those assurances, 53.7 percent of voters said yes to a $9.95 billion bond referendum to get the project started. But the assurances were at best wishful thinking, at worst an elaborate con.<\/p>\n<p>The total construction cost estimate has now more than doubled to $68 billion from the original $33 billion, despite trims in the routes planned. The first, easiest-to-build, segment of the system &mdash; the \u201ctrain to nowhere\u201d through a relatively empty stretch of the Central Valley &mdash; is running at least four years behind schedule and still hasn\u2019t acquired all the needed land. Predicted ticket prices to travel from LA to the Bay have shot from $50 to more than $80. State funding is running short. Last month\u2019s cap-and-trade auction for greenhouse gases, expected to provide $150 million for the train, yielded a mere $2.5 million. And no investors are lining up to fill the $43 billion construction-budget gap.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virginia Postrel says the state&#8217;s high speed rail boondoggle may finally run out of chances: California&#8217;s high-speed rail project increasingly looks like an expensive social science experiment to test just how long interest groups can keep money flowing to a doomed endeavor before elected officials finally decide to cancel it. What combination of sweet-sounding scenarios, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,237,13],"tags":[35,185],"class_list":["post-35210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-railways","category-usa","tag-california","tag-highspeedrail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-99U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35211,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35210\/revisions\/35211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}