Waste of the Day: Santa Clara Will Spend $213 Million on Rail Cars – They Won’t Use Until 2037!

Topline: This May, the County of Santa Clara, California agreed to spend almost $213 million on 48 new rail cars. There’s just one problem: Santa Clara has yet to build its new railway.

Santa Clara buying mass-transit rail cars 13 years in advance?

Instead, the rail cars will service nearby counties until Santa Clara opens its Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) station in 2037, at which point the cars will be a quarter of the way through their lifetime.

This is the true definition of putting the cart before the horse.

Key facts: Santa Clara’s new rail station was supposed to be completed by 2026 at a cost of $4.4 billion, but delays have pushed the project back 11 years and added over $8 billion to the price tag.

But the county already had an agreement with BART in place to buy new rail cars in 2026 at a discounted rate. If they don’t buy them now, the discount will expire and the cars could cost more than $450 million, county official Tom Maguire told The Mercury News.

Santa Clara can’t just keep the cars in storage until 2037 either. Maguire says that would degrade them faster than if they’re being used.

The only option is to let BART use the rail cars in other California cities until the Santa Clara station opens. The county voted to do just that, shelling out $172.6 million for the cars and agreeing to pay $4 million per year for maintenance over the next decade.

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But the grants keep coming

Critical quote: “If I have a child and they’ll turn 16 and start driving, I’m not going to buy a car for them when they’re born so that by the time they’re 16 that car will be worth a lot more,” County Supervisor Otto Lee told The Mercury News. Lee voted against the rail car purchase.

Background: Rather than cut costs, the federal government has decided to support to the final phase of the Silicon Valley BART Extension project with a $5 billion grant. County officials say it’s the second-largest federal investment in any transportation project in U.S. history.

Santa Clara is one of several counties around the U.S. wasting taxpayer money on delayed transportation extensions. U.S. Senator Joni Ernst calls these projects, “billion-dollar boondoggles.”

Construction on the Red Line light rail system in Baltimore has been paused and restarted by several governors since 2008. It will now cost up to $4.3 billion more than it would have without the delays.

The Southwest Light Rail Transit Project in Minnesota was supposed to open last year at a cost of $2 billion. New estimates say it will open in 2027 for $2.85 billion.

Summary: Taxpayers deserve transportation systems that are completed quickly and stay under budget. When projects get mired down by technicalities and rising costs, everyone loses.

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This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.