EDITORIAL: California’s bullet train boondoggle is way over budget and behind schedule

Sit down and brace yourself because this is a real shocker. The California bullet train project that’s supposed to eventually connect Los Angeles to the San Francisco? It’s well behind schedule and the taxpayers are getting crushed.

Who woulda thunk it?

The Los Angeles Times reports that just the first leg of this massive government boondoggle — 118 miles from Merced to Shafter in the central part of the state — could come in $3.6 billion over budget while taking seven years longer to build than promised.

None of this bodes well for those still touting the financial feasibility of a high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Victorville, Calif., along the Interstate 15 corridor.

The newspaper obtained a confidential Federal Railroad Administration analysis that attributed the ballooning costs and delays to a number of factors, including problems acquiring federal grants, lagging environmental reviews and difficulties securing the necessary private property.

The project thus follows a well-worn pattern for mass transit endeavors that is intimately familiar to bureaucrats and public-sector empire builders everywhere: Intentionally low-ball cost estimates and exaggerate ridership and revenue projections in an effort to mislead the public and generate taxpayer support.

Remember that California voters back in 2008 agreed to a $9.95 billion bond referendum to move the rail proposal forward as a green-friendly project that would allow riders to travel between the state’s two major metropolitan areas in 2.5 hours. Private-sector investment would limit taxpayer contributions and the rail line would ultimately compete against the airlines without subsidies, proponents insisted.

Turns out such promises, writes Virginia Postrel of Bloomberg View, were “at best wishful thinking, at worst an elaborate con.”

The latter sounds about right.