LAO also presented concerns early on about the importance of the state’s building goodwill with local governments and public agencies to facilitate construction. Out-of-order completion targets? Some land that was being developed by HSR was never purchased, leading to one lawsuit after another. There is no pathway to funding beyond the Bakersfield-Merced route, and even that may be at risk. Private investors were supposed to line up to fund the “no-brainer.” To date, there are no private investors, and it is ludicrous to imagine that any will ever show up. The LAO’s concerns about project risks, funding, completion targets and the proper sequencing of targets sadly became remarkably prescient. If the HSR team can’t put together a proper timeline on paper, how could it ever be trusted to complete anything? As in locking the barn door after the horse leaves. The 2009 HSR report presented a completion timeline that was sequentially out of order. Take a moment to consider the last deficiency. Also, inconsistencies in the proposed order of events create some uncertainty.” The LAO found the HSR’s 2009 report to be flawed: “Discussion of risk management is significantly inadequate, lacking any description of mitigation processes or detailed considerations of many key types of risks” and “Few deliverables or milestones are identified in the plan against which progress can be measured. Not surprisingly, it continued to go south. The project continued without adequate planning, supervision, or oversight. The state government’s betrayal has continued ever since the incomplete and deficient 2008 business plan was not submitted on time. Our state government created and built capital projects efficiently and quickly. At one time, California governance was among the best in the country. They trusted that California’s state government was capable of spending their tax dollars effectively. Instead, voters trusted those whom they elected and voted to tax themselves to fund a project that was never going to be feasible. If the plan had been submitted by the required date-more than two months before the election-then these deficiencies would have come to light. And like most dreams, California high-speed rail has turned out to be a fantasy. Voters approved $9.95 billion in bond financing for a dream, not a vetted project. The 2008 business plan was anything but a business plan. Imagine a business plan without discussion of future funding, project capacity, demand at the product (segment) level, how costs would be allocated, or how risks would be mitigated. The plan did not present statistics on train capacity, forecasts of segment service levels, how funds would be secured, how costs would be distributed by system segment, an operating break-even point, what analytical methods were used to forecast ridership, expected completion dates for environmental review and construction, and how risks would be mitigated. A report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found that the program’s 2008 business plan-which had been legally required to be submitted to the state legislature on Septembut was not released until after the bond issue was voted-was deficient. The betrayal dates back to the project’s inception. And the reason it failed is because of a gross failure of state governance, one on such a grand scale that it is nothing short of a betrayal of Californians. Or perhaps ever.Ĭalifornia’s HSR is perhaps the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country. And the original budget of about $33 billion for the entire 800-mile system is now inadequate to build just one route (Bakersfield to Merced), whose cost pencils out to $207 million per mile-a cost that will almost certainly rise in the future, and for a route that may not be ready for ten years. Not one route has been completed, even though nearly all the $9.95 billion seed money has been spent. In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020.īut now, 15 years after the bond issue, three years after the expected completion date, not one train has left the station.
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