Jerry Brown’s Rail Fantasy Keeps Getting Pricier – IOTW Report

Jerry Brown’s Rail Fantasy Keeps Getting Pricier

Thursday, 29 March 2018, 2:30 MJA Uncategorized 20

 

 

 

CPR: “That’s bulls**t,” Gov. Jerry Brown told a group of union leaders in Sacramento this week as he addressed the latest bad news about his pet project to build a bullet train connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles. The union folks probably loved the tirade, given that the proposed rail system is more of a make-work project for union members than a transportation system. But the governor’s promise that the state can build the railway if “we don’t let these small-minded people intimidate us into lowering our expectations” rang a bit hollow.

Brown said he is “so tired of all the nonsense that I read in the paper and you hear from other politicians.” But the latest nonsense comes from his own High-Speed Rail Authority, which released its latest business plan. The project already is over budget and behind schedule. The new plan bumps the predicted costs from $63 billion to $77 billion — and delays the opening date by four years, to 2033.

Those costs will surely grow even more given that the current overruns are taking place on the flat, easy-to-build section of the system through the Central Valley. Just wait until the real engineering challenge is confronted, as rail planners figure out how to take the train through the Tehachapi Mountains separating the valley from Southern California.

Look at other major California infrastructure projects for an idea of realistic cost overruns. Rebuilding the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, following the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, was 2,500 percent (that’s not a typo) over the original estimate and wasn’t completed until 2013.

Apparently, it’s “small minded” for Californians — including one of the authors of the 2008 statewide initiative that secured $9.95 billion in funding for the train project — to question the overruns, delays, and failure of the latest plan to live up to the promises made to voters. That author, former Sen. Quentin Kopp, remains an advocate of high-speed rail in concept, but he calls the current alignment “foolish” and said “it is almost a crime to sell bonds and encumber the taxpayers of California at a time when this is no longer high-speed rail.”

Kopp is right. To make it feasible, rail boosters created a route alignment that shares tracks with commuter trains (the blended route) on the peninsula south of San Francisco and in the Los Angeles area. It’s highly unlikely that it will connect the state’s two megalopolises anywhere near the promised time of 2 hours and 40 minutes given how slow the trains will go in these areas.  more here

20 Comments on Jerry Brown’s Rail Fantasy Keeps Getting Pricier

  9. Brown’s funding plan is to wait until the Democrats take Congress and then pressure them to divert a $100 billion (or more, much more) to finish Jerry’s Jerk-Off Joyride to Nowhere. So we would like to thank Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, the Dakotas, Tennesee, Kentucky, Indiana, etc. etc. for their future financial contributions to yet another California fraudulent fantasy both now, and far, far into the future.

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  15. @Tsunami and Bill Clinton: Governor Kate Brown of Oregon is self-proclaimed as “bi-sexual” although she is married (apparently to a cuck). She is only a “sister” to Jerry in that they are kindred spirits.

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  16. 77 billion

    just to transport what ? maybe 200 people all the way from la to san fran and back a day ?

    to make work for unions ?

    hell this will be the closest thing to unending that man will ever see this side of the grave.

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