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The state still needs to buy land for its high-speed rail project (Ted Rall / For The Times / January 31, 2013) |
Construction for high-speed rail through the Central Valley is supposed to start in July. But the state of California still hasn't purchased any of the land along the route. How will the train get from one city to the next? Magic.
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The bullet train project has been a deception from the beginning. Everything from the low-ball construction estimates to phony ridership numbers, all of which have been revised dramatically (in some cases by over 300%) since the voters approved the project, were used to deceive the public.
How can we prove this was all a deception? My brother-in-law, who's been a forensic accountant specializing in investigating criminal fraud for over 20 years, says it's a fairly straight-forward analysis. When you audit a project that's way off budget and the problem is legitimate errors in the assumptions, some costs and/or revenues will be over-estimated and some will be under-estimated. In other words, true planning errors appear in a random fashion, some too high and other too low.
The assumptions used for the bullet train analysis that was originally presented to the public were all perfectly aligned to maximize projected revenues and minimize projected costs. In other words, all the revenue projections were much too high, and all the cost projections were much too low. This is the classic pattern of an intentional financial deception.
This is not my opinion, but rather the opinion of a professional financial crimes investigator with over 20 years of experience.
Good god, I hope this damn train fails. What a boondoggle.
We don't need a highspeed rail from here to there, we have flipping Southwest Airlines. What we need is good public transit for people to actually use.. you know, locally.
So lame.
The real cost per passenger mile will be ridiculously high, which is why private enterprise hasn't built an hsr. The real cost per ticket on LA's Metrorail is around $34. For obvious political reasons this is well hidden from the public, as will be the real cost for a ticket on the HSR. Compare that to the real cost per passenger mile of a trip on a freeway and you will, I am almost certain, come to your senses, James.
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