Earlier this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he will be abandoning (at least for now) the state’s bullet train project because of massive, escalating costs. Although a little late, this is good news.  

“Let’s be real. The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency,” he admitted. The train was originally projected to cost $33 billion with a completion date in 2020, but ballooned to $77 billion, scheduled to be finished in 2033. This represents a whopping 133% cost overrun.

The Reason Foundation, a national think tank that promotes libertarian principles, has been warning the public for years that the California High-Speed Rail Authority was overestimating ridership and underestimating cost and speed.

The project was intended to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco, but that has been scaled back significantly. According to the Associated Press, “Newsom says he wants to continue construction of the high-speed link from Merced to Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley…And he says abandoning that portion of the project would require the state to return $3.5 billion in federal dollars.” He told the public his administration is “not interested” in sending this money “back to Donald Trump.”

 “Let’s just get something done,” he said.

Washington should learn from California’s disastrous mistakes so the state doesn’t find itself in a similar position years and billions of dollars later just trying to “get something done,” even if that something is a colossal waste of public money. Sometimes, doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing.

Governor Jay Inslee has tasked the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) with studying high-speed rail from Vancouver, British Columbia to Portland, Oregon. The taxpayer-funded $1.5 million business case study, $750,000 of it funded by Washington, is due July 2019. Local advocacy groups that support this effort include Cascadia Rail and All Aboard Washington. Last week, British Columbia announced they are throwing in another $300,000 to help fund the study.

At a press conference last year, Governor Inslee said, “When you build a high-speed rail line, you are building a monument to optimism.”

As Randal O’Toole, senior fellow at Cato Institute, points out – this is exactly a reason not to build. “High speed rail can be successful provided you build it in a corridor with 50 million people in which 70 percent of the travel is by conventional train and only about 10 percent is by either auto or air, which does not describe the Northwest corridor in any way.”

In an email exchange, Randal noted high-speed rail failures in Japan and European countries - all of which went into severe debt. In Japan, "by 1987 the state-owned railway was nearely $300 billion in debt...European countries with high-speed rail have all gone heavily into debt to build it and those debts are playing a big role in Spain and Italy's economic problems. With or without high-speed rail, rail's share of passenger travel has declined in Europe in the face of low-cost airlines and in Japan and China in the face of growing automobile ownership." Looking to these countries' efforts as examples for our region, as politicians often do, seems unwise.

Although Governor Inslee insists that “any mistakes [California has] made, we’re going to put it in the bank and learn from it,” choosing to move forward with overrated high speed rail and dragging the state into years of future debt seems evidence to the contrary.