Jon Coupal: The lamest excuse for perpetuating the high-speed rail project
Opposition to California’s High Speed Rail project keeps mounting.
What began as a $10 billion bond measure to fund a rail project that would travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco has morphed into America’s most embarrassing boondoggle costing hundreds of billions of dollars. Throughout its tortured history, the project’s detractors have been proven right over and over again. It started with a Due Diligence Report from the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association prior to the November 2008 election authorizing the HSR bond. The study concluded that, “The CHSRA [California High-Speed Rail Authority] plans as currently proposed are likely to have very little relationship to what would eventually be built due to questionable ridership projections and cost assumptions . . .”
As predicted, just three years after the original passage of Proposition 1A authorizing nearly $10 billion in High-Speed Rail bonds, the estimated cost of the project had gone from $40 billion to $98 billion.
Californians were stunned. Back on its heels, the High-Speed Rail Authority came up with a plan costing “only” $68 billion by relying partially on conventional rail lines. But the new “blended” system plan did little to convince critics that the project wasn’t fatally flawed. Even Quentin Kopp, the former Chair of the HSR Authority, turned against it. In litigation challenging the project, he submitted an affidavit saying that “this is not what the voters approved.” Likewise, in January of 2018, the San Jose Mercury News, an early endorser of the bond measure, ran an editorial entitled, “Stop the California Bullet Train in its Tracks.”
More recently, this column in December revealed how the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) put the project on its list of expenditures as undeserving of any more federal funding. That was confirmed early last week. President Trump suggested that the HSR project was so embarrassing that it would render Gavin Newsom unelectable in a presidential run. “I’ve watched a lot of stupid people build a lot of stupid things, but that’s the worst cost overrun I’ve ever seen,” Trump said. “This government is not going to pay. I told our very great new Secretary of Transportation . . . we’re not going to pay for that thing.”
Only those interests which benefit financially from continued construction of the project are defending it. But their financial gain is the weakest of reasons to throw good money after bad. It’s the taxpayers’ money. Although voters were promised that private investors would provide a big chunk of the funding for high-speed rail, that never happened.
We all saw this coming. The deception was there in plain sight. By starting construction in the Central Valley, the rail authority engaged in the classic Willie Brown strategy. The former Assembly Speaker, in a moment of candor, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
A spokesperson for Governor Newsom, in response to President Trump’s statement last week, said basically the same thing: “With 50 major structures built, walking away now as we enter the track-laying phase would be reckless — wasting billions already invested.”
This statement is a prime example of the “sunk cost fallacy,” defined as a cognitive bias where individuals continue investing in a failing endeavor because of the resources already invested, even when the continuation is not rationally justified.
The governor and the backers of HSR are willfully ignorant of how their toxic embrace of the sunk cost fallacy is harming California.
Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.