Cancel the Bullet Train

The latest cost estimate for the Fresno-to-Bakersfield segment is $7.1 billion. Greyhound will get you there in two hours for ten bucks.

At a time when California's budget is already $340 billion in the red, with so many infrastructure needs unmet, with so many pressures to pay for education and health care, we don't need or want a bullet train.

A California judge has ruled that the project no longer resembles the proposal that voters approved, and he has stopped the sale of $9 billion in bonds to fund the construction of it.

The House of Representatives has voted to withhold the $3 billion that the 2009 stimulus bill set aside for California's high-speed rail because the portion of the funding that was to be provided by state taxpayers and private investors has not materialized.

Even if the $9 billion and the $3 billion were in hand, the projected cost of the bullet train is upwards of $68 billion.

On January 1, gasoline prices will jump by an estimated 12 to 20 cents per gallon because of the state's "cap-and-trade" law, and the billions collected will go into a fund that was supposed to be used for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Sacramento politicians have just designated 25 percent of the "cap-and-trade" fund to go to the bullet train. Every year.

So you'll be paying what amounts to a gasoline tax of perhaps 20 cents a gallon, with the money going not to repair our devastated streets, but instead to the construction of a high-speed rail line which is now "blended rail" and will not even come close to the speeds once advertised.

Governor Brown says the bullet train is an "elegant" form of transportation.

For $68 billion, we could buy Southwest Airlines and convert all the cabins to First Class.