The sad, tragic, outrageous story of the California high-speed rail boondoggle continues, as Ralph Vartabedian writes in the New York Times.

When California voters first approved a bond issue for the project in 2008, the rail line was to be completed by 2020, and its cost seemed astronomical at the time — $33 billion — but it was still considered worthwhile as an alternative to the state’s endless web of freeways and the carbon emissions generated in one of the nation’s busiest air corridors.…

[Recently] the “final plan” raised the estimate to $113 billion.

The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.

Advocates of high-speed rail always present it as the modern, efficient, environmentally sensitive alternative. It seems like an obvious choice for a technologically advanced society. But in the real world, not only are there serious questions about the likely ridership and the environmental benefits of high-speed rail, planners always forget that politicians will be in charge. Read every word of Vartabedian’s article. Instead of a quick, direct route between two of the nation’s biggest cities, politicians insisted on running it “through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor” and through the less-populated Central Valley and San Jose. We’ll have hovercraft before this rail line connects Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Vartabedian points out the big picture:

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.

And I say, as I did 10 months ago when Vartabedian wrote a similar critique of big infrastructure projects nationwide, that it would have been more useful to members of Congress and the public if the Times had published these stories during the many months that Congress was debating the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan.

Maybe I’m in a grumpy mood because I just endured an Amtrak journey that arrived at 5 a.m. (by bus!) instead of the promised 9 p.m. by train. But I was writing about this disastrous project long before that trip, as here and here.