State rail project going nowhere fast

California's implausible, unneeded and increasingly costly high-speed rail project will be injected with $2.25 billion of taxpayer money by the Obama administration.

This money is as likely to be squandered as the $9 billion in bonds voters narrowly approved in 2008 for the project. There's scarcely a comparable rail system on the planet operating profitably, as proponents claim this train will. It's easy to understand why. Even proponents now concede it will cost riders about the same to take the train from Anaheim to San Francisco as to fly, and the train ride will take a lot longer.

If all the bonds eventually are sold, when proceeds are combined with the federal handout, the sum would represent barely a fourth of what's needed to complete the first phase, from Orange County to the Bay Area. That's giving the benefit of the doubt. Some estimate final costs will be closer to $100 billion. Ever optimistic, rail proponents expect private investors to jump on board this nowhere train to the tune of about $12 billion. We're hard-pressed to imagine why anyone would.

The Obama administration's $2.25 billion handout just about covers two years' worth of cost escalations since the project was first penciled out in 2006. As with so many government programs, real costs arrive long after campaign rhetoric is forgotten.

Proponents once claimed the price tag would be merely $33.6 billion. In December that fiction was exposed. The revised estimate is $42.6 billion, reflecting inflation through 2020, when construction is to finish on the basic Anaheim-San Francisco line.

Wendell Cox, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and three-term Los Angeles County Transportation Commission member, says overly optimistic ridership estimates are based on rail systems in other countries with much more densely populated areas where lines don't span nearly as many miles. Moreover, foreign rail systems that allegedly break even, he says, don't use generally accepted accounting principles. For one thing, they identify government subsidies as "revenue."

Unfortunately, proponents are likely to use the relatively puny Washington funding as justification to spend more. Expect to hear the plaintive cry: "We already spent (fill in the billions of) dollars. We can't turn back now!"

But turn back they should before squandering billions on a bad idea. The High-Speed Rail Authority can choose not to sell its bonds. It can even return Washington's handout.