Greenhut dissects High-Speed Rail boondoggle

April 9, 2012

By John Seiler

Writing on Bloomberg, our Contributing Editor Steven Greenhut dissects the latest shenanigans in the High-Speed Rail boondoggle. An excerpt:

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has a serious public-relations hurdle: how to sell its proposed Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train without the word “boondoggle” attached.

But the rail authority’s latest compromise plan to solve this problem — with its focus on building the system in a“better, faster, cheaper” manner — not only doesn’t fix the system’s fundamental flaws, it may plant the seeds of its destruction….

Governor Jerry Brown and Democratic leaders claim that not building the system is more costly than building it (based on inflated estimates of coming transportation needs), so they continue to move forward — pushing out the authority’s old leadership and making changes that claim to slash $30 billion in costs and that would link the Central Valley to Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Critics argue that the savings seem to have magically appeared — without sufficient detail explaining where they will come from.

Read the rest here.