California’s Bullet Train Gets Yet Another Price Hike

Membership Ticker

Support Mother Jones with a year-end donation

Here are the facts: 1) We urgently need to raise $350,000 in online donations this month; 2) Readers told us fundraising is annoying; 3) Both journalism and US democracy are in trouble. So, to make this as un-annoying as possible, we’re hoping less is more right now—and we focus on three simple questions: Why us, why now, and why does your support for our journalism matter? We need a lot of help this month and can’t afford to come up short again. Please make a year-end gift if you can right now.

We need to raise $350,000 in online donations this month to keep Mother Jones charging hard. But readers told us fundraising is annoying, and we don’t want to add to the overwhelming noise. So we’re hoping less is more right now, and that we can “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” in making the case for the year-end gifts we need. Please help if you can right now.

California High-Speed Rail Authority

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Buckle your seat belts for yet another big surprise. This one is for Californians:

The estimated cost of building 119 miles of bullet train track in the Central Valley has jumped to $10.6 billion, an increase of $2.8 billion from the current budget….The new estimate was presented Tuesday by Roy Hill, who leads the main consulting firm on the project, WSP (formerly Parson Brinckerhoff). Hill said the cost increases were mainly driven by problems including higher costs for land acquisition, issues in relocated utility systems, the need for safety barriers where the bullet trains would operate near freight lines and demands by stakeholders for mitigation of myriad issues.

“The worst case scenario has happened,” Hill said bluntly.

Uh huh. The “worst case” scenario. Except that pretty much everyone who’s ever looked at this project figured this would happen. My guess is that this is nothing close to worst case.

I also wouldn’t assume that this is the last cost increase we’ll see on the bullet train. Still, it’s a 36 percent hike, which is plenty. And keep in mind that the Central Valley segment is by far the easiest segment to build. The current cost estimate for all of Phase 1 is about $65 billion, and this will go up by $23 billion if we see a 36 percent increase across the board. We’ll be at $100 billion before you know it.