Is California’s slow road to high-speed rail worth chipping in $1 billion a year?

California journalist Joe Mathews rode Morocco’s high-speed train recently and penned a fully justified and blistering comparison between what the North African nation achieved quickly and relatively inexpensively and California’s laughingstock bullet train project. Morocco is a lower-middle-income country (96th in the world rankings) with a GDP of $182 billion. “There were so many things that went wrong,” SNCF project manager Dan McNamara told Vartabedian. Gavin Newsom and legislators are deciding whether to continue the state’s $1 billion annual bullet train appropriation. Last September the program was revised, but the bullet train secured its annual $1 billion share for the next 20 years.