Time for Newsom to show leadership: End the high-speed rail disaster

The project is already more than a decade behind schedule, and Gavin Newsom has already said it would not connect LA and San Francisco, as envisioned.

Enough already.

It is well past time to pull the plug on California’s high-speed rail project. Getty Images

If California wants “green” alternatives to existing road, air, and rail, there are other, more workable ideas.

Elon Musk said recently that his Boring Company could “build a Hyperloop tunnel” — a new propulsion system operating on the same principle as pneumatic tubes — “from downtown SF to downtown LA for <5% of this cost and it would be a technological marvel exceeding any high speed rail on Earth.”

That was when the cost of high-speed rail was estimated at $126 billion.

Another critic, Hans Mahncke, said: “If you gave away $126 billion to subsidize free flights between LA and San Francisco at current demand levels, you could fund roughly 150 to 200 years of travel before the money runs out.”

Now you can double that. Four hundred years of flights for the cost of a train no one will use.

Here’s another comparison: It cost about $4 billion to send human beings to the dark side of the moon and back on the recent Artemis II mission.

For what California is spending on a delayed train between Merced and Bakersfield, we could fund more than 50 round trips to the moon.

The project is already more than a decade behind schedule, and Gavin Newsom has already said it would not connect LA and San Francisco, as envisioned.

And as Republican State Sen. Tony Strickland told The California Post, the $231 billion figure likely underestimates the total price tag, because it doesn’t take the cost of borrowing into account.

It’s not like deficit-plagued California has that kind of cash handy. We would have to borrow — and pay interest.

Gavin Newsom has backed the high-speed boondoggle for years. But he used to have a more realistic view of the world.

In 2019, in his maiden speech to the legislature as governor, Newsom said that the bullet train “would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long.”

He was right.

But he didn’t scrap the entire thing, because too many special interests had a stake. Too many contractors, too many unions, too many politicians on both sides.

If Newsom wants to burnish his leadership credentials, it’s not too late.

End the high-speed rail project, before it drags the state down.