“The proposed rail tunnel is intended to connect Caltrain—and future high-speed trains—at the Fourth and King streets station to the massive new Salesforce Transit Center. Project costs have ballooned from $6.5 billion to a staggering $8.25 billion since October 2022, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.”
“The Downtown Rail Extension has been decades in the making, and its estimated cost has increased multiple times in recent years. In 2016, the cost of the rail extension was estimated at $3.9 billion.”
This is why you will not see high speed rail in the US in your lifetime. Any politician from another state who dared to champion it will be buried by an opposition that will point to California and its bottomless money pit.
$8.25 billion dollars is a big number. Let’s shrink it a bit:
It’s about a mile from just before the tracks enter the current passenger station, over to the new transit center.
There are 63360 inches in a mile.
Thus, it is $130,000 an inch for this project–a much smaller number!
Oh, yes. And someone neglected to build the new transit center adjacent to BART. Unfortunately. It’s almost as if San Francisco doesn’t care to connect with the rest of the Bay Area.
But that would be like saying there will be a PATH connection in Bound Brook so commuters from Hoboken can get to 33rd Street. See here for situational awareness: