Californias fake fast-train project puts millions in pen-pushers pockets and heres the real reason why

In 2008, California voters approved funding for a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.A group of contractors donated tens of thousands of dollars to support the ballot measure.

A state program manager projected that the initiative would create more than 100,000 construction jobs.Eighteen years and more than $15 billion later, not a single mile of high-speed track has been laid.The state hasn’t even laid track on the rump Merced-Bakersfield line that it wants to open in the 2030s.

In a recently resurfaced video from his time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom said the full project was unlikely to “materialize in our lifetime.”The bullet train, like almost every effort to build things in California, was killed by environmental regulations.The state’s high-speed-rail website contains more than 130,000 pages of environmental-review-related materials.

Stacked together, they stand 40 feet tall and weigh 1,300 pounds.All this has cost taxpayers more than $677 million and served as a meal ticket for consulting firms that backed the 2008 ballot measure.

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By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Never miss a story California law typically requires an entity to perform an environmental review when its building project requires a state permit.

In practice, that applies to many major efforts in California.These reports create delays, new expenses, and burdensome requirements, some of which have nothing to do with meaningful environmental protection.We wanted to find out how much environmental paperwork the bullet-train project has generated.

To do that, we had multiple AI systems scan the reams of reports linked on the California High Speed Rail Authority’s website, and asked them to catalog the files, establish each one’s page-count, and sum those numbers. Bo...