One More Nail

The Washington Post editorialized against spending any more tax dollars on California’s high-speed rail project, saying “California should have to fill in its project’s economic and logistical blanks” before more federal or even state dollars are spent. While no one is surprised to see fiscally conservative papers such as the Washington Examiner come out against high-speed rail, the fact that the traditionally liberal Post is against it suggests that the end is near.

Naturally, rail advocates accuse the Post of being “unfair,” but they miss the Post‘s point, which is that the California High-Speed Rail Authority only has a tiny fraction of the money it needs, no private investors have offered to contribute (despite the Authority’s predictions that they would provide at least $6 billion in funding), and the Authority has been accused of mismanagement and optimism bias by, among others, the California State Auditor, a peer committee of transportation engineers, and experts at the University of California at Berkeley.

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