[Pedestrian]

How will we pay for the high-speed train to San Francisco?
By Adam Brinklow Feb 19, 2020, 9:48am PST

. . . for now, all the real work focuses on “phase one,” the SF-to-LA corridor. And even that is biting off more than enough to chew, according to the new draft plan. Here are a few key takeaways.

The good news is that costs have not significantly changed since last year: The authority still estimates a likely “base” cost of $80.3 billion (up slightly from $79.1 billion), with the worst-case scenario of $98 billion down a bit since 2019, and the pie-in-the-sky happy projection of $63.2 billion exactly the same. Voters originally approved a $45 billion plan in 2008—which comes out to roughly $55 billion in modern currency.

Right now the budget until 2030 runs as high as $23.4 billion. “While this amount of funding is considerable, it is not enough to build the entirety” of the SF-to-LA connection, says project CEO Brian Kelly. So far, the bullet train project has spent about $6.2 billion.

The only big milestone that Bay Area commuters will see in the near future for the larger project is that the state hopes to get the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) clearances for the region’s rail connection cleared up within the next two years. The major construction being done in the Bay Area is the ongoing Caltrain electrification, which will eventually allow HSR trains to use those tracks for the final stretch into San Francisco. However, this is a separate project that Caltrain would be undergoing anyway.

. . . construction is expanding . . . there are now 30 active build sites in the Central Valley and that construction is up to “600 onsite workers per week.” In March of 2019, that same figure was just 217 . . . .

(There are) some potential future moneymakers, including the eventuality of using fares from yet-to-be completed sections of the railway in the Central Valley. The most optimistic estimates put service five years away.

If the state extends the current cap-and-trade system to 2050, it could crank out up to $15 billion for high-speed rail.

Maybe the simplest solution is to “secure the remaining Proposition 1A construction funds at the appropriate time”—that is to say, collect on the rest of the nearly $10 billion that voters already approved that has yet to be appropriated . . . .

https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/19/2114...rain%20to%20SF

Just keep building with whatever money can be scraped together. Eventually I believe the value of this project will be recognized as air travel becomes nastier and more brutish and less efficient, and the available airport gates/runways will become ever more clogged with transcontinental and transoceanic flights.