The mess just got dumber if possible A report covering what was going on is massive.
Just a snippet.
The bullet train, like almost every effort to build things in California, was killed by environmental regulations. The state’s high-speed-rail website contains more than
130,000 pages of environmental-review-related materials. Stacked together, they stand 40 feet tall and weigh 1,300 pounds. All this has cost taxpayers more than $677 million and served as a meal ticket for consulting firms that backed the 2008 ballot measure.
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Some of the bullet-train reports include ridiculous measures. One proposed that
biologists count bumblebees, one by one. Another outlined
when a contractor was allowed to break down woodrat stick huts. Still others contemplated using
dogs to sniff for lizard scat or spending
$119.4 million on an overhead tube partly to limit the train’s “acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds.”
Such measures have prompted a flurry of expensive change orders. Contractors have requested
$480,000 “to dig small burrows for mammals by hand”;
$352,490 for lizard surveys and reports; and
$290,000 to implement the state’s environmental-requirements-tracking software. In one case, California’s high-speed rail agency revised its draft environmental report after the state proposed a regional mountain lion as a candidate for protected status.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/high-speed-rail-california-environmental-reports
