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The Biden administration late on Thursday restored a $929 million grant for California’s high-speed rail that then-President Donald Trump revoked in 2019. ===== Trump had pulled funding for a high-speed train project in the state hobbled by extensive delays and rising costs that he dubbed a “disaster.” Trump repeatedly clashed as president with California on a number of policy fronts, prompting the state to file more than 100 lawsuits against the Republican Trump administration.

California’s bullet train has become a nearly forgotten source of trouble, eclipsed in the public eye by Covid-19, a gubernatorial recall, and out-migration from the Golden State. But it’s still out there, sucking up time and money, and as empty as it ever was. The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020. Instead, the project is moving at the speed of the museum piece it sometimes appears destined to be. Not a single train...

2014, when the rail authority awarded the contract, it went with the lowest bidder...which promised $300 million in cost savings by altering the design that the authority had proposed to regulators. Seven years later, these changes have been largely abandoned and have contributed to more than $800 million in cost overruns on the Kings County segment. That figure is 62% above the contract price tag, which the rail authority has agreed to pay, according to interviews and technical and contractual documents reviewed by The Times. In addition, the rail authority awarded the contract without first completing a scientific assessment of...

The fiasco of California’s pathetic attempt to build a high-speed rail (HSR) line between Los Angeles and San Francisco continues to generate far more embarrassment than actual completed track. Once again, for what seems like the umpteenth time, California is unable to meet the deadlines imposed by the federal government as a condition of receiving federal aid – in other words, subsidies from other states for building what should be commonly known as “Brown’s Folly,” after Jerry Brown, who go the itch to build it after riding bullet trains in Japan and Europe.Kathleen Ronayne reports for the Associated Press:California is...

Contractors for the rail authority are filing massive change orders and delay claims... Additional land is also needed, adding to costs. At the same time, the bullet train’s funding has taken several big hits. California’s cap-and-trade greenhouse gas auction system has provided about $3 billion to the rail project since 2015 and is counted on to provide at least $500 million annually until 2030. But as a result of COVID-19’s economic impacts, the last two auctions shorted the project by $140 million... The Trump administration last year terminated a $929-million grant, which is in legal dispute. But the money is...

In the midst of Sunday's presidential debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Biden blurted out that his campaign's high-speed rail plan would take "millions of automobiles off the road." This is the second debate in which the former vice president brought up the belief that bullet trains will get people out of their cars. This is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. Biden's campaign site calls for "the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American." Would bullet trains passing through major cities scattered across the U.S....

California High-Speed Rail Authority on Wednesday bumped its overall cost estimate for completing the rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles to $80.3 billion, blaming inflationary increases and better cost projections... After years of embarrassing cost overruns and delays, managers of California’s ambitious bullet-train project insisted that they are on pace to meet a preliminary 2022 federal deadline for laying track along the first segment in the Central Valley. But that will use up virtually all the money the project has available. The authority’s latest business plan comes amid unrelenting pressure from state lawmakers, some of whom want to...

Farmers up and down California’s Central Valley are up in arms over the state seizing their land to build its long-awaited high-speed railway and then failing to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars owed them for years. Thanks to an order of possession by the Superior Court, California can take private land through eminent domain for the troubled bullet train project. While landowners are expected to eventually be reimbursed for the property – and for expenses like lost farming production, irrigation replacement projects and road construction – many farmers in California’s agricultural heartland say state officials have offered them...

On a recent weekday morning, Liu Ai’jun boarded one of eight daily high-speed rail (HSR) services between Urumqi, capital of China’s north-western Xinjiang region, and Hami, an oasis town 614 kilometers to the east. The trip, along the longest and most expensive line in the country’s HSR network, took just three hours and cost RMB 167 ($24). Previously Liu, a self-employed elevator salesman and technician, used to rely on infrequent and expensive flights between the two cities. Before the new HSR line was completed in 2014, the train between Urumqi and Hami took seven hours. “If you’re not in a...

Well, California Governor Gavin Newsom has abandoned plans to build a high-speed railroad between Los Angeles and San Francisco. After spending billions of dollars in funds, much of it from the Federal government, the Governor said that the project should be shelved. He cited that the project was too expensive. The face of American politics today. This is the slick and well-packaged oligarchy pick for California. Mr. California Governor Gavin Newsom. Look how plastic he appears. Why, he could be right out of one of those political villains from a 1980’s John Cusack movie. California Is Abandoning A Plan To...

The Trump administration officially canceled $929 million in federal grants earmarked for California’s ambitious high-speed rail project, escalating tensions between the federal government and the most-populous U.S. state. Federal Railroad Administrator Ronald Batory said in a letter Thursday to Brian Kelly, the chief executive officer of the state agency running the project, that California has failed to show progress and meet requirements under the agreements for the funds. Governor Gavin Newsom, through a spokesman, vowed a court fight.“It is now clear that California has no foreseeable plans, nor the capability, to pursue that statewide HSR System as originally proposed,” Batory...

The Trump administration declared California’s high-speed rail project dead yesterday, even while state officials extolled its beautiful plumage. Noting that the state had abandoned the full San Francisco to Los Angeles vision which prompted federal funding for the project, the White House pulled back nearly a billion dollars — and said it would come after the remaining $2.5 billion in federal investments as well: Put simply, this project has been a disaster from the beginning. Newsom and California officials claim that this move is payback for their opposition to Trump’s border policies, but these decisions stand well enough on their...

Critics of California’s plan to link the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas by high-speed rail have cited the estimated cost of the project – and now that cost is projected to increase by about $2 billion, according to a report. The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority now estimates that the plan will cost about $79 billion – with the price of the Central Valley segment already under construction rising from $10.6 billion to $12.4 billion, Bloomberg reported. The revised cost estimates were attributed to changes in the scope of the project and planning for contingencies, the report said.

The California rail authority delivered a sharp rebuttal Monday to the Trump administration, saying its threat to cancel and rescind $3.5 billion in grants for the state bullet train project is “rash and unlawful.” In two letters to the Federal Railroad Administration, state officials say they have not breached the terms and conditions of the grants and are making progress in building what would be a transformative passenger rail system. The federal agency issued notice two weeks ago that it intended to terminate a $929-million grant issued in 2010 for the high-speed rail system and was exploring options to seek...

The $2.5 billion has already been spent — but California has failed to deliver the high-speed rail (on time, or at all) as promised. Therefore, the Trump administration argues, the state has to repay federal taxpayers. The Los Angeles Times quoted Stanford law professor David Freeman Engstrom, a Stanford law professor, describing Trump’s effort as a “nuclear option.” The practice of recovering money after a breach of contract, while common in the private sector, was virtually unheard of in government, he explained. “There is a reluctance to penalize misspending by local government agencies. … Almost never do those violations result...

**SNIP** Perhaps the biggest blow to the high-speed rail project came in 2010, when Republicans won control of the U.S. House of Representatives. They proceeded to block any further federal funding for high-speed rail, undermining the California project’s financial plan. Ironically, Gov. Newsom’s decision to pause high-speed rail comes just as Democrats have retaken the majority in the House, making possible a Green New Deal and billions in high-speed rail funding. California ought to show the country how to overcome these obstacles. If we believe climate change is real, then we are obligated to do something about it, and not...

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it was canceling a federal grant to California worth nearly $1 billion after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the cancelation of the state’s high-speed rail project last week.

Despite what you might have heard, Gov. Gavin Newsom reaffirmed California's commitment to high-speed rail in his State of the State speech on Tuesday. Newsom said California must "be real" about high-speed rail in the state, and that there "simply isn't a path" to completing the full vision of the project, which would connect San Francisco and Los Angeles by bullet trains in less than 3 hours. At the same time, he affirmed the state's commitment to completing the 119-mile first phase, which will connect Bakersfield to Merced. Most media reports portrayed Newsom's announcement as a scaling back of the...

Yesterday, our writer, Allahpundit took a deep dive into the somewhat shocking announcement that Gavin Newsom, the new governor of the Golden State, was canceling California’s massive, decades-long cash sinkhole known as the high-speed rail line from LA to San Francisco. It seemed like a fairly common sense decision, given how much cash has been poured down that particular rathole and the ballooning estimates of the additional bills to come. But it creates some very sticky political terrain, particularly at the dawn of the Green New Deal (GND) era. Perhaps that’s why Newsom appeared to be walking the announcement...

<p>California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday in his “State of the State” address at the California State Capitol in Sacramento that he would abandon the state’s high-speed rail system because it was too expensive.</p> <p>The plan to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles by high-speed rail “would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long,” he told legislators. He said the state would still build a portion of the system under construction in the rural Central Valley, denying that it would be a “train to nowhere.” He said the state would not send $3.5 billion back to the federal government to be spent by President Donald Trump.</p>