About That CaHSRA

I think that everyone is misinterpreting newly-elected California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement yesterday that California would scale back its ambitious Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed rail project. I don’t think they get it. He thinks that just waiting a bit will mean that the federal government, i.e. not Californians, will pay for it for them. The “Green New Deal” resolution and various infrastructure plans being pushed from both sides of the aisle tell him that’s a good strategy.

Meanwhile, in her WaPo column Megan McArdle explains why the United States doesn’t have high-speed rail and probably never will. To her reasons I will add two:

• Corruption. The reality of life in these United States is that any high-speed rail program is viewed as a license to steal by everyone involved in the process. Cost overruns by orders of magnitude are par for the course. It’s viewed as a victimless crime.
• Those who benefit most are not willing to pay. Why is the New York to Boston route so criminally slow? Because whatever its benefits the people of Boston and New York aren’t willing to pay for upgrading it. If they were we’d already have high-speed rail, particularly in the Eastern United States where they don’t have mountains and earthquakes to contend with.