Well, LA Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian is at it again.
Last month he triggered a false alarm over high-speed rail operating costs. Now he has made new allegations over the “aggressive” construction schedule:
If California starts building a 130-mile segment of high-speed rail late this year as planned, it will enter into a risky race against a deadline set up under federal law. The bullet train track through the Central Valley would cost $6 billion and have to be completed by September 2017, or else potentially lose some of its federal funding. It would mean spending as much as $3.5 million every calendar day, holidays and weekends included — the fastest rate of transportation construction known in U.S. history, according to industry and academic experts.
This is nonsense. Compare to the recently completed TGV-Est line in France. It took the French 5 years to complete a 190-mile project. And that was the whole enchilada, including electrification and signalling. Here we are talking about 4 years to do the track-only portion of a 130-mile project.
Systemic Failure 
He says that it’s unprecedented only in US history. As you well know, the USA is famously bad at transit infrastructure construction.
Yeah, and even then he’s wrong. The Interstate program spent money at a higher rate. (Yes, it was in many locations. And the ICS is 5 separate contracts, of which 4 can be done simultaneously and independently. It’s not like, say, a subway, which has to be done in a linear fashion. And by the way, East Side Access is spending money not much more slowly than the ICS – $8 billion over 10 years, rather than $6.3 billion over 5.)
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