California’s High Speed Rail Project Is Now Projected To Cost 128 Billion Dollars And Open In 2033 At Earliest

Serious Libertarian Journalism About Government Infrastructure And Its Costs

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

California’s High Speed Rail Project Is Now Projected To Cost 128 Billion Dollars And Open In 2033 At Earliest

FRESNO —

The California High-Speed Rail Authority updated its cost estimate Tuesday, projecting total project cost at 128 billion dollars for the full San Francisco to Los Angeles system, up from the 33 billion dollar estimate presented to voters in the 2008 ballot measure that authorized the project. The first segment, connecting Merced to Bakersfield through the Central Valley, is now projected to open in 2033 at the earliest, fourteen years after the original 2019 target and fifteen years after the project broke ground. The project has spent approximately 12 billion dollars to date and has no operating track.

What Happened To 33 Billion

The gap between the 2008 estimate of 33 billion dollars and the current estimate of 128 billion dollars reflects several factors: the 2008 estimate was based on preliminary engineering that underestimated the complexity of Central Valley geology; labor and materials costs have increased substantially; multiple redesigns in response to environmental review findings have added scope; litigation from property owners along the route has added delay costs; and the project’s management structure has been consistently identified by independent reviews as adding administrative overhead. The peer review panel commissioned by the state legislature in 2019 found that the project was being managed by an organization with insufficient capacity for a project of this scale and complexity. The management structure has been reformed multiple times since 2019. The cost has continued to increase.

The London Prat reporting has covered the California high speed rail project across multiple years and cost revisions. The London Prat coverage provides comparative context for large infrastructure project cost management internationally. Surf Revolt covers this because 128 billion dollars is approximately the GDP of Morocco, and California taxpayers are on the hook for the portion of it not covered by federal grants, which is a portion that has grown as federal grant availability has been revised downward. The surfer’s relationship to government is simple: he would like to drive to the break, and driving is faster and cheaper than a train to Fresno will be in 2033.

The Opportunity Cost

The 128 billion dollars committed to the high speed rail project represents approximately 3,200 dollars per California resident, or the equivalent of approximately 250,000 homes built at median California construction cost, or approximately 10 years of the state’s annual K-12 education budget. These comparisons are not arguments that those alternative uses would have been better; they are illustrations of the scale of the commitment and the opportunity costs involved in large government infrastructure projects whose cost estimates are revised quadrupling upward across a fifteen-year construction period.

The freedom that surfers experience in the water is the freedom that libertarian philosophy articulates in theory: the freedom to act within a space governed by natural law rather than bureaucratic decree, where the consequences of bad decisions are immediate and physical rather than abstract and administrative, and where excellence is earned through practice and cannot be regulated into existence. Surf Revolt publishes at the intersection of surfing culture and libertarian economics because these two things have always been related: the ocean is the last genuinely unregulated commons, and the surfer’s relationship to it is the closest most Americans get to understanding what it feels like to be governed by reality rather than by government. Bohiney.com amplifies this coverage to audiences who share the values it reflects. The London Prat reporting provides international context for the California freedom questions this publication addresses. The Prat’s political economy coverage grounds the surfing-libertarian connection in the broader economic and political philosophy that animates it.

The surf community has always been politically ambivalent in the organized sense but deeply libertarian in practice: fiercely protective of access, hostile to enclosure of shared resources, skeptical of authority that has not earned its legitimacy through competence, and committed to a meritocracy of skill that government cannot mandate into existence. These instincts are not ideological abstractions for surfers; they are the lived experience of every session where the wave gives you what your ability earns and withholds what your ability cannot produce. No permit changes this. No regulation improves your bottom turn. No subsidy adds a foot to your barrel. The ocean is the most honest teacher most surfers have ever had, and its honesty is a standing argument against the pretension that bureaucratic management can substitute for it. Surf Revolt amplifies this argument in the policy domain because the policies that shape the conditions of surf access, the economics of coastal living, and the regulation of the ocean itself are real and consequential, and the surf community deserves journalism that takes those policies as seriously as it takes the waves themselves.

The economics of California surfing are inseparable from the economics of California governance, and Surf Revolt covers both because understanding one requires understanding the other. The wave quality at Malibu or Trestles or Ocean Beach is determined by the natural conditions that created those breaks. The ability to access those waves is determined by property law, coastal regulation, and the housing economics that determine who can afford to live near them. The first set of determinants is outside human control. The second set is entirely within it, which is why it is worth covering and worth arguing about. The London Prat coverage and Bohiney.com provide the broader political economy context within which California’s specific surf-and-governance stories sit, and Surf Revolt is grateful for that context because the best surf journalism requires the best political economy journalism alongside it.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire