More than a decade ago, Californians voted yes on Proposition 1A to authorize the building of a big, beautiful bullet train connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles. On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom finally bit the bullet on the high-speed train’s $5 billion sunk cost and put the project out of its misery.
President Barack Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, once bragged that Californians were “obviously way, way ahead of everyone else,” heralding the administration’s billions in federal funding to the state for the bullet train. Republicans, not just in California but ones across the country who didn’t want to foot the bill, warned that the train would be far more cost-, time-, and labor-intensive than rosy eyed environmentalists claimed, but the Democratic leadership in Sacramento and the White House ignored them, pressing on with the proposal as a green beacon of hope to prevail over the stupid concerns of idiot conservatives.
In a prophetic moment of hubris, the New York Times’ Timothy Egan wrote in a column titled “California Beaming”:
All of it together — the rerouted rivers, the train moving at the speed of Superman, taxing the rich and welcoming a Latino majority — is a road not taken by any other state. You can laugh at the sunbaked barbarians, even wish them ill. But you should not fail to see in their fledgling renaissance another chapter in the American experiment, no less daring than the Golden Gate Bridge or the castle that Hearst erected at continent’s edge.
Of course, we all now know how that story ends. The train’s projected cost exploded from $33 billion to $100 billion since Prop 1A was first passed, and the predicted time required to complete it more than doubled. The state has already burned through more than $5 billion, half of which came from taxpayers across the country. When reporters asked Newsom what he’d do with the train during his gubernatorial campaign, he suggested lopping the train by more than half, connecting San Francisco to the thriving metropolis of Fresno, a drive that takes less than three hours on a decent day and almost no one ever actually needs to do. But Newsom knew the truth: The bullet train was an all-or-nothing promise, either a Japanese-style giant to connect the state’s two massive business corridors or a nonstarter.
So Newsom did what politicians refused to do for more than a decade and euthanize the financial travesty. Sure, he’s a Big Government Grinch who refuses to give the federal government back $3.5 billion that they allocated to the project, but at least he’s less of a hack than the morons who thought that you could replace a $100 hourlong flight or $40 five hourlong drive with a $100 billion bullet train to nowhere.
If California were its own nation, its economy would close out the top five in the entire world. The state has the highest income tax rate in the nation, and the Obama administration did almost everything in its power to make the bullet train happen.
But it didn’t. It couldn’t. And if California failed to make it happen, how the hell could the rest of the country replace our entire airline system with high-speed trains? The answer, of course, is that even though the dozens of Democratic leaders demanding that we do so as a part of the “Green New Deal,” we can’t and we won’t
