Rusty CorgiI really like Wendover Productions, but the California High-Speed Rail: An Autopsy video he put out today is pissing me off.
Spoilers, but the conclusion it comes to is that California HSR is too ambitious and it failed to be pragmatic because it checks notes actually services people in the Central Valley. Based on the way the video started, I expected to think that the California HSR authority made a bunch of stupid decisions that drove the project costs up. By the end of it, all of the stupid decisions basically boiled down to, "It's going to service more people." Like. 
Just to go point-by-point:
- "It'll increase travel times between LA and San Francisco." So? Everyone deserves to have access to the line. People in LA and SF can sit on a train for an extra dozen minutes if it means tens of thousands of more people can use the line.
- "Putting it through downtown corridors is more expensive." That is incredibly short-term thinking. Americans have a plethora of park-and-ride rail systems that are failing because getting in your car in order to use a train is inconvenient and, frankly, fucking stupid. More people will use the network if it's more accessible, ultimately costing the project less in the long-term.
- "The costs are too high." California has a staggering gap between what it pays per-capita into the federal government vs what it gets back. If California wasn't being bled dry by failing red states it's forced to subsidize, it would have no problem paying for the rail project. The federal government needs to suck a big fat one and pony up to pay for it, because they owe it to the state at this point. It'd cost 10% of the pentagon's annual budget, which is less than the amount of money that disappears from the Pentagon's budget every year when it's audited. It's not too expensive.
I'm so tired of people doing autopsy videos on the California HSR project like it's somehow dead. It's not. It's being built, and it's being built (mostly) correctly.
#California #CaliforniaHSR #Rail #HighSpeedRail #Trains #WendoverProductions #Wendover
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