Democrat-controlled California consistently has problems keeping anything they do on a budget. Unable to make a straightforward plan, every green group in the state has their hands out to get a piece of the pie along the way. With all these costs quickly adding up, a six-mile addition to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail system into San Jose and Santa Clara is coming at a hefty price jump.
Skyrocketing from $4.4 billion up to $12.75 billion per the San Jose Spotlight, these six miles of track now cost more than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Sample Return trip to Mars, according to ABC News. Coming in at a projection of just $8 billion to $11 billion, a trip to the red planet seems like a bargain compared to the six miles of track in California.
Given the project’s costs, you would think it was designed as a rush job. Oddly enough, though, the BART extension was slated to be completed by 2026, but even with this fluff budget, the timeline has already been bumped out by a decade.
By comparison, the same cheaper NASA mission will fly to Mars and deploy multiple robots to bring back samples of the atmosphere, geology, and soil for testing on Earth. Slated to happen between 2026 and 2027, experts have nudged that expectation back to 2033 to be more realistic with the evolution of space travel.
Projects like the BART should serve as examples to the American people of everything that is wrong with Democrats running the show. A 12-month project anywhere else takes California 48 simply because they need to form a group to discuss organizing a study. If it passes, they’ll do a study about how useful a research project into the idea would be. Those two steps alone will add 12-18 months and millions of dollars. In essence, they add at least 5 extra steps in each phase of the process.
No wonder it’s cheaper to float amongst the stars than catch the El to San Jose.
