It should be the end of the line for California high-speed rail

What moves faster than California’s high-speed rail, nearly 20 years in the making with zero track laid?

Well, almost anything, apparently.

But in this case, we mean the evident bilking of taxpayers.

As the California Post recently reported: Per the project’s own inspector general, high-speed rail consultants collected more than $680,000 in dubious travel reimbursements — including for first-class plane tickets, international jaunts and rides to places like gyms, tiki rooms and nightclubs.

Taxpayers even covered bills for a flight via private aircraft, Uber Black luxury service, and rides from clubs at 2:30 a.m.

That’s galling — and yet another reason to bring the troubled project to a halt.

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California’s high-speed rail experiment, dubbed “the train to nowhere” for its uselessness, has failed.

Among the lowlights: a “shadow government” of consultants that effectively ran the troubled project and approved their own work — detailed in a blistering 2018 California State Auditor report.

Now, the California High Speed Rail Authority admits, again, that it lets consultants run the asylum.

While the authority has failed to curb consultants gone wild, the project’s budget is untenable: High-speed rail is projected to run dry of cash in 2027, the audit found.

Who can justify pouring more tax money into this mess?

At least one candidate for governor gets it: Steve Hilton, on the ballot Nov. 3, has pledged to halt taxpayer funding for the project on day one if elected.

State and federal taxpayers already have lavished up to $15 billion, combined, on the debacle — with no tracks, no trains and no rail travel to show for it.

Current estimated price tag for the project: $231 billion.

Compare that to what state voters were promised in 2008: a bullet train that would whisk riders from San Francisco to LA in two hours and 40 minutes, to be built for no more than $45 billion and completed by 2020.

To call that a joke is too charitable.

In 2026, the project inches along as a wasteful, pitiful, downsized shell of those promises. 

Seven years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom all but vowed to scrap it, only to backtrack and settle for (dreams of) abbreviated rail from Merced to Bakersfield. He went on to install cronies at the rail authority in May of this year.

This is the same Newsom who in 2014 said the project fudged numbers to keep tax money rolling in: The then-lieutenant gov called ridership projections “wildly overstated” and revenue figures “manipulated.”

Well. Is it any wonder the project’s a laughingstock?

Yet despite all the failure, all the shrunken ambition and all the ridicule — Newsom & Co. won’t consign the mess to the scrap heap. 

Why? 

From nose to caboose, the project’s been a fail.

The only thing slower than the project itself might be Sacramento’s will to course-correct.

This really should be the end of the line.