God I love intellectual honesty.
From MJ:
As regular readers know, I've been skeptical of California's LA-SF bullet train from the beginning, and my skepticism has only grown as cost estimates have doubled to nearly $100 billion in only a few years. But unrealistic cost projections have neverbeen the only reason to be dubious. There were also unrealistic ridership projections, along with unrealistic estimates of what the alternatives to high-speed rail would cost.
Until today, though, I didn't know just how unrealistic some of those estimates were. Rail supporters say that even if the LA-SF train costs $100 billion, it's still a bargain compared to the $171 billion it would cost to expand road and air infrastructure to handle the increased traffic between LA and San Francisco that we're going to get regardless. But check this out:
The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008....In October, Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion, a number that initially appeared in the authority's draft business plan released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.
Previously:Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.This is just jaw-droppingly shameless. There's not even a pretense here of providing a reasonable, real-world traffic estimate that could be used to project the cost of alternative infrastructure. A high school sophomore who turned in work like this would get an F....MORE
Don't Argue Choo-choos With Reason: PolitiFact Gets High-Speed Rail Facts in Florida Wrong
California High-speed Rail Costs Triple to $100 Billion (and it will be arriving late)
California High Speed Rail: The Man Who Predicted The Cost and the Delay
Jerry Brown Rejects $100 Billion Cost Estimate, Says Cap-and-trade Fees Will Fund High-speed Rail
