Anti-planner on California high speed rail

A new poll finds that, if high-speed rail were on the ballot today, 62 percent of California voters would vote against it. The complete poll report also indicates that 63 percent of Californians say they would never ride it if it were built.
The poll asked people about their state funding priorities. The top priorities were education (76 percent), public safety (69 percent), and social services (65 percent). Water and irrigation (29 percent) and clean energy (18 percent) scored much lower. At 11 percent, high-speed rail was last.
So why did people vote for it in 2008? “The more voters know about high-speed rail, the more they are likely to vote to stop the project,” the poll found. People who said they were very familiar with high-speed rail were 26 percent more likely to oppose it than people who had heard of it, but didn’t know much about it. How many other rail projects received voter approval because voters were ignorant about the benefits and costs–and how many would the voters have rescinded after cost overruns and other problems became known?
Partly based on this poll, transportation expert Ken Orski argues that “it looks like the end of the line for high-speed rail.” However, the California High-Speed Rail Authority still has several billion dollars of spending authority and the mandate to begin construction in the Central Valley by September 30, 2012 (or it will lose federal dollars). Unless the state legislature stops them, I would be more surprised if they voluntarily stopped than if they began building a train to nowhere. Antiplanner

This is a classic California coordination problem. We are maladjusted enough to start a bad idea, the federals carry it or a while then it collapses.