All aboard! Except – the train will never leave.

California’s highspeed rail fiasco shows the USA has forgotten how to make progress

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During the week the nation’s attention focused on conflict in Los Angeles. Overshadowed was another Golden State story – the apparent collapse of the troubled California highspeed rail project.

Your writer loves trains – riding them, watching them. (See below for a trainspotting experience.) I even love model trains. Once I drove one of these locomotives along a General Electric test track. A couple years ago I and some family had a lovely time aboard the Thalys highspeed rail from Amsterdam to Paris. Trains are great stuff.

That said – the California bullet train is a fiasco of the first magnitude. Rioting in Los Angeles dominates the news cycle. The failed train project may have more lasting import, if it presages a near future in which the United States simply can’t build things.

The Trump Administration just cut off federal funding for the bullet train, after a Department of Transportation study found California has “conned the taxpayer out of its investment, with no viable plan to deliver even partial [service] on time.”

Blue administrations in Washington and Sacramento shoveled money by the hopper-car to the California bullet train, which has been in the works for 16 years and is on track (sorry!) not to move passengers for years to come, if it ever does.

Sunday’s New York Times page one unironically declared the train due for “major delays.” Talk about understatement!

The 200-MPH Al Boraq bullet train in Morocco was six years from greenlight to in-service. California spent six years merely on its train’s Environmental Impact Statements.

Bullet trains work well in Japan, Italy, France. Italy’s is Le Frecce, The Arrows. A super-ambitious rail project recently succeeded in India. China leads the world in highspeed rail, with more than 17,000 miles of service, versus zero miles for California. Most of China’s extensive highspeed system opened since 2008 -- the same period the largest U.S. state was spending lavishly but building nothing.

Actual photograph of California highspeed rail prototype.

Failed highspeed rail in the largest state epitomizes the blue governing mindset in which process, regulations, litigation, ritual displays of grievance, preposterous claims about climate, DEI, subsides to NGOs and “community engagement” matter more than results. Not just for trains – for housing (more in a moment), grid improvements, clean energy and other social needs.

Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, and misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, threw at least $2 trillion (the final tab may be higher) at public construction projects, and have yet to produce visible gains beyond largess to consultants and NGOs. The California bullet train is a stark example of how maximum spending can lead to minimal results when the blue mindset is in charge.

First the train project itself. All aboard!