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[quote user="oltmannd"][quote user="Sam1"]Unfortunately, as pointed out by the Government Accountability Office in its report on high speed rail projects, the proponents tend to overstate the number of riders and revenues that will be generated by their project whilst understating the costs. [/quote]They must be talking about projects worldwide. There are none to measure on shore....correct? I would suspect there are significant political and social differences between the US and other countries to render ridership and cost comparisons almost useless. The California HSR might be the cleverest way to not spend $2B and make it look like you're actually doing something. I'm starting to doubt whether they will ever be able to ante up their portion to get the $2B. [/quote] It has been about a year since I reviewed the GAO report.  As I remember the key points, the auditors visited Germany and France to look at high speed rail in other countries.  They also reviewed the documents for the Japanese system.  From their observations of these systems, they concluded that high speed rail has not and probably will not be able to cover its full costs.  They observed correctly that high speed rail requires a large government capital input. The auditors reviewed the revenue and ridership projection models for many of the proposed U.S. high speed projects.  I cannot remember the exact number.  They concluded, based on their analysis of the models, that many of them used numbers that were not well supported.  Moreover, they found that some of the models were inconsistent. Proponents for a course of action, i.e. high speed rail, mergers, acquisitions, etc. tend to wear rose colored glasses.  This was true in the case of the Fortune 250 Company where I was employed for decades.  Management finally authorized the auditors to look at the models used by the proponents of major projects or contracts to determine whether they made sense.  We found in most instances that the project proponents adopted the most optimistic estimates, even when a little scrutiny suggested that achievement of the most optimistic outcome was unlikely. Clearly, estimating ridership and revenue 20 years out is chancy.  Most of the corporate financial and organizational planners that I knew told me that anyone who thinks they can predict more outcomes more than 3 to 5 years with any degree of accuracy is just fooling themselves as well as their clients.
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