Opinion: CA’s bullet train is ‘off-track’

Fifteen years ago (now closer to 16 years), the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CAHSRA) began work on a transportation system that would supposedly carry passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours. Since then, the CAHSRA has stumbled, bumbled, and tumbled through billions of dollars and now has hundreds of Stonehenge-like structures dotting the Central Valley from Madera to somewhere north of Shafter. And there are no structures anywhere near either San Francisco or Los Angeles.

About the time that the CAHSRA was beginning its planning, I was on a conventional train between Milan and Lake Como in Italy. I sat with a family (husband, wife, teenaged daughter) from Philadelphia. They had heard that California intended to spend $10 billion to build a “bullet train” and wondered if I knew anything about it. 

The teen daughter was busy reading a copy of Medea, by Euripides, which was on her high-school’s summer reading list. I wondered if any California high-school students had even heard of Euripides, a Greek philosopher who died around 406 B.C.E. Then, I wondered the same about the members of the CAHSRA. After all, the members don’t seem to be the sharpest pencils in the box, although they probably rank right up there with the best of the erasers. They’ve had plenty of practice obliterating existing plans for the bullet train project and coming up with new ones.