The Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Berkeley has analyzed the ridership projects of California’s high speed rail plan and found them wanting.
We found that the model that the rail authority relied upon to create average ridership projections was flawed at key decision-making junctures,” said study principal investigator Samer Madanat, director of ITS Berkeley and UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering. “This means that the forecast of ridership is unlikely to be very close to the ridership that would actually materialize if the system were built. As such, it is not possible to predict whether the proposed high-speed rail system in California will experience healthy profits or severe revenue shortfalls.
Read the rest of their report here.
This joins a long list of reports (neatly summarized here) questioning the analysis behind CA’s HSR plan, not the least being Reason’s own due dilligence report on the plan.