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.
