> Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties have a combined population of ~2.9 million. For the $77 billion price tag, you could buy a Toyota Prius for every single resident of the entire area served by HSR (including children), and still have ~$8 billion left over.

The $77 billion price tag was the most recent year-of-expenditure estimate (which kept going up,in no small part because the year of expenditures kept getting later) for the whole originally planned system (well, the SF to LA part, not including the Sacramento and San Diego connections that were to be done afterwards.)

The small segment Newsome refers to isn't anywhere close to $77B.

Good catch, I misread. I would be interested to see the projected cost of the de-scoped project.

Operating & maintenance costs would also be critical to determining whether this actually makes any sense.

This is the wrong comparison. They are paring down to the Merced-Bakersfield line to avoid spending the full $77B.

8 billion is probably not enough to pay for all the added parking needed, cover higher accidents rates, more roads, etc.

How much would it cost to increase highway capacity to support all the traffic?

Another way of thinking about it is, if we assume roughly 1M households with an average land price of $100K and the HSR increases that to 1.2M households with an average land price of $150K, then you've created $80B worth of value from scratch and justified the cost. That doesn't happen via buying everyone a Prius.

> For the $77 billion price tag, you could buy a Toyota Prius for every single resident of the entire area served by HSR (including children), and still have ~$8 billion left over.

How much do the roadways cost?

I mean, the Prius isn't an all-terrain vehicle. You need nice roads to run, and freeways to go somewhere fast. Without them you can't go anywhere in your Prius.

So how much do the roads you need to exist to drive around in those Prius cost?