Cutting Costs On California HSR Doesn’t Have To Add Delays

Scrapping viaducts like this would make California HSR cheaper, faster to build, and easier to maintain, without a loss in quality

The recent peer review report recommending that California delay construction on the first segment of its high-speed rail project has caused a bit of consternation in the transit twittosphere. Blogger The Overhead Wire wrote, “Sorry, but defunding HSR won’t make local agencies $10b richer.” I replied, “But it might start a long-overdo convo on costs,” and he responded (and many agreed): “and then nothing will get done in my lifetime and costs won’t matter….