Greenhut dissects High-Speed Rail boondoggle

by CalWatchdog Staff | April 9, 2012 6:05 pm

[1]April 9, 2012

By John Seiler

Writing on Bloomberg, our Contributing Editor Steven Greenhut dissects the latest shenanigans [2]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[3] 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[4] 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[5].

 

 

 

Source URL: https://calwatchdog.com/2012/04/09/greenhut-dissects-high-speed-rail-boondoggle/

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