California’s High Speed Rail Costs Exceed Original Estimate by 500 Percent; Officials Still Surprised

2008 ballot measure’s $33 billion estimate now exceeds $100 billion; no passenger service after 13 years of work

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

CALIFORNIA — The California High Speed Rail Authority updated its project cost estimate this week, reflecting a number substantially larger than the figure presented to voters when they approved the project in 2008 and substantially larger than every subsequent revised estimate, in a pattern that infrastructure project analysts call optimism bias and that critics of large government projects call predictable and that project officials call an accurate reflection of evolved project scope and construction cost realities. All three characterisations are accurate. Their coexistence does not resolve the accountability question they collectively pose.

The original 2008 ballot measure presented voters with a cost estimate of $33 billion for a system connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles. The current estimate exceeds $100 billion for a system that remains partially constructed, that has delivered no passenger service despite work beginning in 2013, and whose completion timeline has been revised multiple times to a date now measured in decades rather than years. California voters approved the project. California taxpayers are funding the project. California residents are not yet riding the project. The gap between these three facts is the rail project’s defining characteristic and its most honest description.

What This Teaches About Government Infrastructure

The California High Speed Rail project combines most of the pathologies of large government projects: optimistic cost estimates that underprice risk, political timeline commitments that do not survive contact with construction reality, procurement processes that add cost and time, and the political economy of distributed benefits and concentrated costs that makes cancelling failed projects more politically difficult than continuing them. Reason has covered the high speed rail project since 2008. Cato provides the comparative analysis of public vs private infrastructure delivery. The train will eventually run, or it will be cancelled, or the partial system will be turned into something else. The cost will be what it is. The lesson about large government infrastructure procurement will remain available to anyone who wants to learn it, which is not the same as it being learned.

The story continues past any single article or news cycle. The details accumulate into patterns, the patterns into systems, and the systems are what determine whether institutions built to serve people actually do so. Paying attention is the most democratic act available. Satire is the second. Both require looking at what is actually happening and refusing to pretend it is something else, especially when what is actually happening is considerably funnier than the official account suggests. The record continues. The analysis continues. The accountability continues, imperfectly and necessarily, because the alternative is worse.

The Libertarian Surfer’s Creed

The ocean does not ask for your papers. The wave does not check your permits. The dawn patrol requires no government approval, and the hour before sunrise on an uncrowded point break is governed by nothing except the swell period, the wind direction, and the willingness of the surfer to be in the water when conditions align. This is the freedom that the libertarian tradition values most concretely: not the theoretical freedom of political philosophy but the lived freedom of the person who has made choices the government did not sanction and has found the outcomes to be their own. California surrounds this freedom with regulations, taxes, permits, and the administrative infrastructure of the world’s most comprehensive state government. None of it reaches into the water. None of it governs what happens between the surfer and the ocean in the moment that everything else disappears.

The libertarian case is not against clean water. It is for the freedom that clean water makes possible. It is not against the coastal access laws that keep the beach public. It is for the public ownership of the beach that those laws protect. The surfing community’s political philosophy is more complex than its antiauthoritarian reputation suggests, because it has always understood that some of what makes the ocean accessible and worthwhile requires collective action and legal protection. What the community resists is the extension of that logic beyond its useful domain into the regulation of adult choices that harm no one, the permit requirements for activities that predate the concept of permits, and the fiscal policies that extract more from working people than the services provided justify. Reason covers this. Cato analyzes it. The surfers experience it, and then go surfing, which is the most direct political act available to someone whose preferred freedom is governed by physics rather than legislation.

The analysis, the accountability, the satire, and the serious journalism all serve the same function: keeping track of what is happening and insisting that it matters, which is the work that good journalism has always done and that the current moment requires with particular urgency given the complexity of the information environment and the scale of the decisions being made in it.

The record of events accumulates daily. The analysis of their causes and connections is the work that distinguishes journalism from mere reportage. The satire that finds the absurdity within the serious and the seriousness within the absurd is the work that makes the analysis bearable over the long run. All three are necessary. All three continue. The stories do not resolve on a weekly deadline. They continue past publication, past the news cycle, past the season, into the larger history that all current events eventually become. The journalism that covers them is, at its best, a first draft of that history — written under deadline, corrected in subsequent editions, and ultimately judged by whether it was accurate about what mattered and honest about what it did not know, which are the two criteria that good journalism has always been judged by and that the current moment requires with the same urgency as every previous moment that believed its circumstances were unprecedented, as they always were, and as they always will be.

Freedom dispatches: NewsThump | The Babylon Bee

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com