The big California big green screw up

LA Times:

How the bullet train went from peak California innovation to the project from hell

It was billed as the most ambitious public works project since the transcontinental railroad opened up the West.

The high-speed rail network would transform California — ​cleaner air, less congested freeways and airports, and more limited suburban sprawl with a whole new style of housing around rail stops.

“Fresno could become a bedroom community of the Silicon Valley,” the California High-Speed Rail Authority said a month before voters approved Proposition 1A in November 2008.

Yet bite after bite, huge cost overruns, mismanagement, political concessions and delays ate away at the sleek and soaring vision of a bullet train linking San Francisco to San Diego. A project meant to drive home California’s role as the high-tech vanguard of the nation was looking more and more like a pepped-up Amtrak route through the Central Valley.
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If California regulations and liberals had been in charge the transcontinental railway would never have been complete either.  They tend to bog down everything from building houses to transportation.  Imagine how much damage they could do to the country if they were attempting to implement the Green New Deal. 

Since that proposal calls for replacing airplanes with bullet trains it is easy to see who disastrous a policy it would be.  Sarah Palin famously called the project "the Bullet Train to Bankruptcy."  She was not wrong about that.