Then there's the infrastructure envy syndrome: "We have to finish it because [France / Spain / China / Japan / even Morocco] has high-speed rail and doggone it, California deserves nice things too."

But what if we take a step back, given the nightmare that this has become, and ask, “What are the actual justifications that don't involve sunk cost or emotional attachments? What is the problem for which California High Speed Rail is the solution?”

I would suggest that there's no good answer to that for which this proposal, at this scope, given these wholly predictable setbacks, is anywhere near the best use of resources.

The opportunity cost of the High Speed Rail effort—not just money, but political capital, time and energy that could have gone to other things—has been heavy from the outset, and an object lesson in why going with the least-dumb idea consensus provides is not a good governing principle. Every objective of this project is one that California could be well underway to addressing by now had the money been distributed across other, higher-returning, less risky investments.

The state High Speed Rail (HSR) authority cites four benefits of high speed rail:

• Increase Mobility: Improve mobility in the face of growth—with the state's population estimated to reach 50 million by 2050. • Better Air Quality: Improve air quality by shifting people from cars and planes to clean trains. • Needed Alternative: Provide a more convenient and productive way to travel and new opportunities to collaborate on business. • Job Growth: Stimulate job growth across the state—now with construction jobs and long-term with maintenance and operation jobs.

I'm confused by "needed alternative," which just seems circular (we need it because we need it, duh!), so let's look at the other three.

If the problem is mobility: California's bigger mobility problems are not travel between regions, but within them. The state's urban freeways are choked with super-commuters priced out of its big cities by untenable housing costs, and day-to-day public transit within those big cities is sorely inadequate. San Francisco Muni horror stories are the stuff of legend. These systems are crying out for hundreds of small-scale fixes to reliability, frequency, comfort, and route distribution. What could we do with $77 billion?

If the problem is air pollution: I'm going to lump air quality together with the issue of greenhouse gases here. 41% of California's 2016 greenhouse gas emissions were from the transportation sector, but only 2.5% of those were from air travel. A full 89% were from car travel. If we want to reduce car travel in California, high-speed rail might help, but the intercity trips it caters to are small potatoes next to the problem of what you do when you step off the train. We need to focus on urban land use, urban public transportation, walkability, and bikeability. On those fronts, what could we do with $77 billion?

If the problem is economic development: High speed rail would certainly open up much more convenient travel from the Central Valley to the Bay Area and to LA, and likely strengthen economic links between the Central Valley (poorer and more agrarian) and those booming tech-driven economies. Those links might come in the form of more of those super-commuters fleeing coastal housing costs, who would create demand for new businesses in Central Valley cities. But again, what is the return on investment? What if we spent even a fraction of that money directly on producing home-grown wealth in the Central Valley, say, through any of these five tested, low-risk strategies? What could we do with $77 billion?

It's The Process, Stupid

The problem is that we don't have a process to make $77 billion in a mix of public investment, private investment leveraged by that public investment, and debt financing available to a grab bag of incremental projects with a high rate of return (and diverse enough that if some of them fail to deliver, it's not a big deal).

We do have a process to make untold billions available to a pipe dream of statewide high-speed rail. Which might not even prove to be a bad investment once we got it up and running: I'm not going to prejudge that. But which is certainly a tremendous gamble with heavy opportunity costs. A big part of the tragedy here is all the things California has spent over ten years years not doing while fixated on high-speed rail.

Want to transform transportation in California? So do I. There are thousands of small, low-risk, neglected needs in California’s transportation sector alone. What would it take to have a system in place that would let those thousand flowers bloom?

(Cover photo: Shinkansen (bullet train) in Japan. Wikimedia Commons.)