The Los Angeles Times reports:

Planners of California’s high-speed rail project want to discard a more direct route from Los Angeles to Bakersfield over the Grapevine and continue development of a sweeping dogleg through Palmdale and Lancaster.

Though the option was ruled out in 2005, the Interstate 5-Grapevine corridor was revived for further study last May after state officials and some transportation experts thought it would save billions in construction costs and up to 12 minutes of travel time between Los Angeles and the train’s ultimate destination: the Bay Area.

But a new study by the California High Speed Rail Authority now indicates that the longer, more tunnel-heavy route that turns east from the Central Valley through the Tehachapi Mountains to the Antelope Valley is the better option.

More tunnels? I’m no geologist, but are tunnels a good idea in earthquake country?

Though the Grapevine route would be slightly less expensive, researchers said the $15-billion-plus Palmdale alignment would serve one of the fastest-growing areas in Los Angeles County, have fewer environmental effects and allow planners more flexibility in route selection through the mountains.

Because of changes in the length of both routes, researchers from Parsons Brinckerhoff and Hatch Mott MacDonald, two of the project’s main contractors, concluded that the time savings for the Grapevine corridor would be only three to five minutes, far less than the initial estimate of 10 to 12 minutes.

The Times goes on here, without touching on the very real issue that this project — financially — will never make sense.

Luckily today’s WSJ has an op-ed today that shines some light on the bougs double-counting the CHSRA is using to pimp their project. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s an excerpt:

A few days ago, the California High Speed Rail Peer Review Group, an expert body mandated by state law, expressed serious doubts about the proposed Los Angeles-San Francisco rail system. It concluded that it “cannot at this time recommend that the legislature approve the appropriation of bond proceeds” because the project “represents an immense financial risk” to the state.

But hell hath no fury like a state agency scorned. The California High-Speed Rail Authority issued a quarrelsome response claiming that the rail system is, well, a bargain! The agency repeated its claim that without high-speed rail, Californians would pay more because the state would have to build equivalent transportation capacity through road and airport expansions costing about $171 billion, or between $53 billion and $73 billion more than the $98 billion to $118 billion estimated cost of a rail line.

The constant refrain that it’s “more expensive not to build the rail line” is specious. But it deserves further explanation because of the light it sheds on tricks used to justify other ill-conceived projects to an unsuspecting public.

Estimating the cost to build additional highway and airport capacity in the absence of the rail line requires estimating how many people would be attracted to the train from cars and planes. But that’s not how they did the math, judging by the methodology the authority published.

Proponents based their estimate on train capacity (including empty seats) of 1,000. Their rail plan calls for trains with only 500 seats, but this fictional doubling of capacity nicely boosts the amount of highway construction they can claim would be needed if the train line isn’t built. The authority also assumed that more than twice as many trains would run as they now plan to run when the line is complete. They even include the cost of some highway expansions that would not be needed for hundreds of years at normal growth rates. All of this is absurd. Empty seats do not increase the demand for roads (or airports, for that matter).

Yet inflating the amount of new highways that would have to be built is the name of this game. By imagining huge new demand for train travel and other false premises, for instance, rail planners concluded that it would be necessary to add three lanes to each adjacent highway segment to handle the same demand, whether in the busy Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas or the far lower-demand segments in the San Joaquin Valley. They also doubled the supposed cost of road construction by assuming that the state would need to build three lane expansions on both Interstate 5 and the parallel state Route 99 between places like Bakersfield and Fresno.

The capacity that proponents used to justify additional highway expenditures is more than three times the total current travel on some freeway segments. Not even the rail authority forecasts high-speed rail ridership that will remotely approach the exaggerated capacities used to estimate alternative highway expansion costs. It’s as if rail planners value empty seats on future trains as contributing to reducing highway congestion.

In other words, they are lying. The whole piece here.