"From 2018 to 2025, Boris Lipkin was the Northern California Regional Director for the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA), leading development for 160 miles of the system between San Francisco and Merced Counties. That makes him uniquely qualified to understand why the system has gone so over budget. That's why he authored the paper Learning from California: Lessons Drawn from California High-Speed Rail for Other Large Infrastructure Projects, published Thursday by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State. From the report:"
"The idea was to model the project on the French TGV between Paris and Lyon, completed in the 1980s. However, the French didn't have to contend with America's political swings: over there, rail construction projects don't get funded and de-funded every few years depending on who is in power. That means in the U.S., construction can only be planned in two-year spurts, in those rare instances when the Democrats control the purse strings."
"...uncertainty of funding creates an added layer of complexity that project sponsors have to wrestle with. Every choice to move part of the project forward has to prove that it's the best use of a limited amount of resources and every prioritization exercise involves finding the balance between the top priority and the other priorities that the project sponsor ha"
The CHSRA planned a route and made key decisions, including technology choice, before seeking voter approval via Proposition 1A in 2008. Voters approved the project with 53% support and authorized $9 billion in general obligation bonds, while imposing requirements on system design and fund use. Construction broke ground in the Central Valley in 2015. The project was modeled on the French TGV, but U.S. political swings produce funding uncertainty, limiting planning to short two-year windows. That funding uncertainty forces constant prioritization, requiring each forward move to justify the best use of scarce resources amid parochial politics.
Read at Streetsblog
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]