“WITH HIGH-PROFILE ROLL-OUTS IN FRANCE AND JAPAN, BULLET TRAIN MANIA WAS UNDERWAY. AND THEN REALITY SET IN.” Reason TV: The Politician Behind California High Speed Rail Now Says It’s ‘Almost a Crime.’

So is the “road diet” that Jerry Brown set down to (further) punish California drivers, to help advance his pet project. But as the Cato Institute noted in a paper on light rail titled “The Desire Named Streetcar:”

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

The California high speed rail project, is that graft on Barry Bonds-level steroids, and as Reason TV’s Justin Monticello says in the above video, it “will be both the slowest bullet train in the world—and the most expensive. The Rail Authority cut costs by using track mixed with conventional rail, which means the train won’t reach the speeds they promise. Coupled with a sinewy route that winds its way between endpoints, that means it will never go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the promised 2 hours and 40 minutes. The train, if it ever comes to pass, will also be competing with air travel at a time when a new generation of quiet supersonic planes is about to take flight.”

Haven’t we learned anything from the debacles of the 1970s?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUERtAe73NI