Does California Deserve the Lion’s Share?

The Antiplanner has been so busy in Washington this week that I’ve barely had time to download email, much less read your no-doubt excellent comments on the posts I wrote earlier this week. But I did read a story about high-speed rail from the San Francisco Examiner.

Apparently, California thinks that it deserves “the lion’s share” of the $8 billion in the stimulus package for high-speed rail. Of course, in Aesop’s fable, the lion ended up with all of the stuff that was in dispute.

But whoever makes the decision parcelling out high-speed stimulus funds to the states will have to confront the fact that California’s high-speed rail plan is qualitatively different from those of most other states. These qualitative differences make it quantitatively at least a dozen times more expensive, not to mention far from shovel-ready.

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