More than a decade ago, dummies voted yes for a high-speed rail to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco that was supposed to cost $40 billion. The total cost is now up to $118 billion.
The train was supposed to speed along at 220 miles per hour. It is now down to 110 miles per hour and only for part of the trip. It would fail to surprise that by the time the train is built and running, which has been pushed back to 2029, it will be as fast but more convenient to board a self-driving car to make the trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Californians already have high-speed transportation between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is called jet aviation.
Yet, it gets worse. As reported by Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox of the New Geography (see: RESTORING THE CALIFORNIA DREAM, NOT NAILING ITS COFFIN), the recently-installed inept governor Gavin Newsom proposes to squander $1.75 billion to subsidize the construction of houses.Decades of regulations applied by regulatory agencies, which are more like socialist councils has kept the supply of one-family houses low. With an ever-growing population, now well-past 30 million owing to the flood of illegal aliens being harbored in California, prices for houses have been kept artificially high.
With low regulation, new cities would have popped up in California by now and smaller, established cities would have grown.
The oligarchy-technocracy of California, the rich people, the heads of unions and Ph.D.s of academia who run the state are clueless.
Even if meddlesome government were to be involved, meddling in both transportation and house construction, the smarter move would have been to build high-speed rails out to nowhere in the desert, linking Los Angeles to Desert Center and to Baker.
With wide open land, plenty of free-market, low-priced houses would have been built. Likely too, eventually, the people of Nevada would have extended the LA-to-Baker line and the people of Phoenix would have extended the LA-to-Desert Center line.
Even a third line between Sacramento and Fresno would have made sense. There is plenty of open-space desert around Frenso where new cities could have sprang up.
It is possible that by the time the inept technocrats of California government finish the construction of high-speed rail, people will take to the skies in flying cars.
Braggart propagandists tout the ambitious nature of the California HSR project. In comparison, men built the Hoover Dam in the 1930s with 1930s technology and know-how in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River then the largest concrete structure ever built and they completed the massive project two years ahead of schedule.
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