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Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

California Governor Gavin Newsom said Tuesday the state will not complete a $77.3 billion planned high-speed rail project, but will finish a smaller section of the line.

Is this really the Governor's call? Doesn't the legislature need to, you know, pass a law to rollback the earlier plans?

In June 2014 state legislators and Governor Jerry Brown agreed to apportion the state's annual cap-and-trade funds so that 25% goes to high speed rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Leg...

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I don't understand California but it's weird that then-Governor Jerry Brown had the authority build as much of this train as he did.

IIRC, the voters approved a train that did LA-SF in 2h40m and met some affordability criteria. The project cost and projected time from LA to SF exceeded what the voters approved, it seems like there was a court case about whether the vote 'counted' for a train system that didn't meet its obligations.

wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Leg...

> Abandoning high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it.

This seems like a nice adherence to the sunk cost fallacy.

It would be very interesting to see a breakdown of the cost difference to abandon now and demolish vs finishing (including any economy boosts) in the next <big number> years. If it's possible to save money demolishing, I would like to see this put up for a vote and the funds redistributed to something more useful.

Thats probably why it was mentioned that the state could only find/allocate 30-odd billion, for a project that had potentially ballooned to 98 billion.

Sure there is the possibility of some administrative process to make this announcement, but I'm not aware of it, so feel free to find a potential problem. Legislatures often delegate wide authority to their head of state, so it could be a really old and obscure power of the Governor.

And we have Jerry Brown to thank for Prop 13.

Voters voted for it. Governors cannot sign it or stop it.

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