The only problem with the California High-Speed Rail project is the unreasonable expectation that it will take passengers from one place to another.
If you drop that requirement from the business plan, the whole thing looks much rosier.
In fact, the California High-Speed Rail Authority seems to have done this already. The website at hsr.ca.gov brags that more than 16,000 jobs have been created, with more than 900 small businesses “engaged” and more than $26 billion in “economic output.”
What about the train? Oh, yes, 119 miles are “under construction.” How far under, it’s best not to ask.
The project has all kinds of problems, most recently that its draft business plan violates a state law that was passed a few years ago to try to get some portion of a passenger train running within the lifetime of your great-grandchildren. True, the project isn’t even planning to meet the requirements of the law, but laws can be changed, so that doesn’t matter.
What matters is the outstanding accomplishment of the California High-Speed Rail project, which is the record-breaking speed at which it has moved money from your wallet to someone else’s. It’s so fast, sometimes the money flies right past your wallet, disappearing from your paycheck without ever touching the ground.
A truly remarkable achievement.
Yet many people don’t appreciate it. Some insist on a passenger train. California Senate Transportation Committee Chair Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, told KCRA’s Ashley Zavala that the project has to be completed. “We are way too deep in the water,” he said, pointing out that more than a mile and a half of viaducts have been built.
You see, people don’t appreciate the technology that goes into mixing concrete with your tax dollars to make giant concrete viaducts that don’t connect to anything. Do you think Japan could do that? They wish. Once again, California leads.
Another person who’s not appreciative of the light-speed transportation of your money is Lou Thompson, a noted rail expert who helped to form Amtrak in the 1970s and is a railways advisor to the World Bank. He was a member of the California High Speed Rail project Peer Review Group from 2012 until he resigned in 2024.
Thompson said in his resignation letter that the Legislature should commission an independent study of the project’s problems because of the “risks the project poses to the State.” About a month ago, he wrote to the Legislature to say he believes the high-speed rail project “has reached a dead end.”
He’s just not thinking creatively.
If you assume that the project was a money-transfer technology all along, the opportunities for transferring the money back begin to come into focus.
What can be done with a mile and a half of concrete viaduct, roughly 40 feet wide and 40 feet tall?
How about a chain of skate parks? Thrills, chills, spills, just $200 for an all-day pass. Let’s get the ridership-estimating team right to work on this. How many all-day passes would we have to sell to get our investment back?
Maybe the insurance costs would make that unworkable. Here’s another idea. We’ll sell it to the Pentagon. It’s a natural fit for a drone landing strip. We can negotiate a great deal. We’ll get a hospice consultant from Van Nuys to teach us how to overbill the federal government.
Or how about this. We call in a top demolition team to pack explosives into the viaducts and blow them up into ten million baseball-size chunks of concrete. Then we package each one into a custom-printed box and sell the pieces of the boondoggle for $1,000 each. We can call them Boon Rocks.
Makes a great gift for Fathers Day.
Alas, the Legislature in Sacramento has other ideas. They’re busy passing Assembly Bill 1608, which would give the inspector general of the high-speed rail project the power to keep certain findings and records secret from the public if the disclosure would harm the project.
The position of inspector general of high-speed rail was created to bring more transparency and accountability to the project.
AB 1608 would bring more confidentiality and secrecy to it.
Boon Rocks. That’s the way to go.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley