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Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
Building a high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco was never going to be easy — but the critics who write it off are missing the real source of the project’s struggles.
While rail services like Metrolink’s Antelope Valley commuter line in Los Angeles and the Altamont Corridor Express in San Francisco do already cross the mountains, these are slow trains — necessarily so, because of the tortuous route demanded by the terrain. Even before Trump threatened to cut off the awarded federal funding, the Office of the Inspector General raised the possibility that the project could be between $3 and $6.5 billion short of completing the 172 miles from Merced to Bakersfield, depending on the variation in state cap-and-trade auction revenue. In Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it is the example par excellence of blue states’ failure to build, a casualty (if it ever lived) of environmental proceduralism, prohibitive regulatory processes, a bloated bureaucracy, and general infrastructural incompetence.
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