How much does it cost to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco by train?
Nearly $100 billion.
It’s not a punch line. It’s the sticker-shock price tag from the California High-Speed Rail Authority to build a bullet train that engineering and transportations experts now say probably will not reach speeds of 150 or 200 mph, offering instead a not-that-fast rail route between L.A. and the Bay Area, whose cost will be paid by Californians for decades.
The nine-member California High-Speed Rail Authority board — made up almost entirely of big-labor cheerleaders of the project, as well as Democratic and Republican ex-politicians with little grasp of bullet-train engineering, finance, management or construction — had insisted that the train would cost $45 billion.
Yet for the past two years, one independent analyst after another has pilloried that figure, or estimated the true cost as being far higher.
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H/t reader kevin a.
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