[Federalist] The 2.25-mile SkyLink project broke ground in 2019, with a promised opening date of 2023, at a budgeted construction cost of $1.9 billion. Today, the project might start serving passengers in 2027, and construction costs are expected to top $3 billion.
A transportation project in Los Angeles may start to serve passengers next year, or it may collapse into financial chaos, abandonment, and a desperate search for someone to start running the thing after lenders bail out and it all falls apart. But first, the courts will have to work through the allegation that an engineer spied on a legal strategy session, and the builders will have to figure out why electrical arc flashes are charring the tracks.
It’s not the state’s infamously late high-speed rail project, but all of the same themes are there. Democrat-run California is the place where delivery never has any relationship to the promise, the cost estimate never comes close to suggesting the actual cost, the scheduled completion date is an open joke, and the failures and misunderstandings descend into allegations so bizarre they seem like a series of Mad Libs answers.
With the summer Olympics bringing crowds to Los Angeles in 2028, the City of Los Angeles decided to reduce traffic congestion at its famously nightmarish airport, LAX, by at-long-last linking the terminals and off-site rental car facilities with an automated train. The 2.25-mile SkyLink project was approved in 2018 and broke ground in 2019, with a promised opening date of 2023, at a budgeted construction cost of $1.9 billion. A larger dollar figure cited in that approval, totaling just under $5 billion, was supposed to be the cost of construction plus the cost of operating the system, covering the first thirty years of the project. |