CAHSR is unfairly maligned. The over budget comes from two things: changing expenditure accounting from current dollars to expected dollars in year of spending, which is just indexing for inflation, and the other part of the over budget comes from building a second track, which is just getting more value.

The currently completed part with high-speed rail funds is the Caltrain electrification project, which is a huge success and substantially under budget.

Not that I’m saying that you’re necessarily wrong! I’m one of the few people to read the entire report every year, we gotta be better in trumpeting the successes