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Train to nowhere: can California’s high-speed rail project ever get back on track?

Andrew Gumbel

11-14 minuti

In the depths of the 2008 recession, Californians were sold on a beautiful dream: a bullet train that
would whisk them between Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours.

The project was to be the start of a new era of high-speed rail that would eventually stretch the full
length of the west coast, from San Diego to Vancouver, across the desert to Las Vegas, and, eventually,
all across the continental United States.

California voters that year approved the sale of $9bn in state bonds, on the understanding that the LA
to San Francisco line would be up and running by 2020. It was not long before the incoming Obama
administration upped the ante, with a national plan for 8,600 miles (13,840 km) of high-speed rail
lines, later increased to 12,000 miles (19,312 km), that would help kick-start a dormant economy and
wean a highly mobile nation off the fossil fuels threatening to destroy the climate.

Fast-forward to the present, and the dream is all but dead. The Obama plan collapsed, falling victim to
a combination of inexperience, mismanagement and furious opposition from several key Republican
legislators and state governors. The California project is still technically up and running, but it is so far
behind schedule that it has yet to lay a single mile of track, despite 14 years of work and about $5bn
spent.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is no longer talking about the 500-mile stretch from LA to San
Francisco, because the projected price tag has skyrocketed far out of reach. Instead, his office is
focusing on a 172-mile segment connecting a handful of medium-sized cities in the flat agricultural
Central Valley. Even if the stars align, though, and a restive legislature can be persuaded to release the
necessary funds, the segment still might not start serving passengers until 2030.

Reviving rail in a country built on it

The optimistic view for the project’s future – espoused most vigorously by California’s high speed rail
authority, its consultants and its lobbyists – is that the stretch from Merced to Bakersfield will, once
finished, provide proof of concept and thus convince state and federal authorities to shell out the
many tens of billions of extra dollars it would take to extend the line north and south. Yes, the project is
expensive, they argue, but so were the public investments in the highway system and the passenger
airline industry, and the economic benefits of those are inarguable.

The boosters also sense a unique opportunity, since California is currently running a $97.5bn budget
surplus and the White House, led by “Amtrak Joe” Biden, has been offering billions more, largely
thanks to last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which allocated up to $108bn for public
transport projects. “All we need is one system up and running. The rest will follow,” the editor of the
industry publication Railway Age, William C Vantuono, all but pleaded in a recent article. “California
right now is our only hope,” he added.

The more pessimistic view is that the project has turned into a boondoggle, the proverbial “train to
nowhere”, and no good can come of continuing to throw money at it. The Merced to Bakersfield stretch
is projected to cost more than $20bn – several billion dollars more than a previous projection made in
2019 and likely to grow only more expensive. It is also far from clear who would ride on it since it largely
duplicates an existing Amtrak rail route.

“It’s dreamland. It’s unrealistic. It will never cover its own expenses from the farebox,” said Quentin
Kopp, a retired former legislator and judge who led the charge for an LA-San Francisco high speed line
for two decades, starting in the 1990s, but has now lost hope that it will ever see the light of day.

“Who cares about going from Merced to Bakersfield? I am appalled and angry over the bastardization
of the promise to taxpayers … It’s a stupid waste of money. All this is doing is making contractors and
engineers and bureaucrats fat and happy.”

The high speed rail authority said it was “simply untrue” to suggest that its timeline and budget
projections were unrealistic. Authority spokeswoman Annie Parker stopped short of predicting that the
Merced-Bakersfield leg would break even, however, saying only: “We see a robust demand and a
profitable system in our future.”

Part of the high-speed rail San Joaquin River viaduct through the Central Valley. Photograph: Patrick T
Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

Newsom is making his second attempt in two years to jump-start construction by persuading the
legislature to release the remaining $4.2bn left in the 2008 bond fund and combine it with federal
money to jump-start construction. “This is the future of transportation in California,” he said in a
promotional video released when he first launched his funding campaign in March 2021. When
completed, he promised, the high-speed line through the Central Valley would take 400,000 cars off
the roads, clean up the air, and create new jobs.

Even if Newsom gets his money, though, it is far from clear what it will buy. The state’s legislative
analyst complained earlier this year about a lack of up-to-date budgetary information, making it “very
difficult for the legislature to make informed decisions”.

The legislature, for its part, has shown a particular reluctance to electrify the line from Merced to
Bakersfield up front, and if that decision sticks it would reduce the line, at least temporarily, to a
conventional track unable to meet the promise of 220-mph speeds. The rail authority, meanwhile, has
developed its own plan to start with just 119 out of the 172 miles – a plan that among other things,
would leave riders 19 miles short of Bakersfield and oblige them to complete the journey by bus.
Authority chief executive Brian Kelly acknowledged in the most recent business plan that this is “not
an ideal operating segment”.
As legislative leaders haggle with Newsom over high-speed rail and the rest of California’s latest
budget, they are not tipping their hands about possible outcomes. But a number of them went into the
talks skeptical if not downright hostile. “The idea that you would spend all your money on a train that
doesn’t connect to anything and just hope you’re going to get more money, I find a really frightening
business proposition,” the chair of the California Assembly’s transportation committee, Laura
Friedman, told the policy news site Cal Matters earlier this month.

Many of the skeptics, including Friedman, are big-city Democrats, legislators one would usually expect
to embrace public investment in high-speed rail. So their skepticism – and the failures, delays, cost
overruns and broken promises that lie behind it – is a particularly heavy blow to those Americans who
love the idea of reviving rail travel in a country that was largely built on it.

These are people who have ridden the Eurostar, or darted through the Tuscan countryside en route
from Rome to Milan, and want nothing more than to see similar systems in place at home. “When
people experience this in the United States,” industry consultant and unabashed train lover Eric C
Peterson said, “they’re going to say: why couldn’t we have had this earlier?”

Doomed from the beginning

High-speed rail in California was always going to be a moon shot. Many transportation experts point
out that high-speed rail systems are tricky to deliver because of high start-up costs and long
construction schedules, and the costs are often compounded by the complications of purchasing
land, building stations, blasting through mountains and bridging rivers. Countries that have moved
fastest on such systems tend to have a highly centralized governmental system, like France’s, if not an
out-and-out authoritarian one, like China’s.

The United States, by contrast, has a highly decentralized system of government, with multiple
competing jurisdictions jostling over land, water, electricity and other vital resources, and a political
tradition, especially in the west, that celebrates personal freedom and private property over collective
enterprises in the public interest.

In this 2015 photo, a full-scale mock-up of the high-speed train at the Capitol in Sacramento.
Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

In the decades after the second world war, inter-city train travel faded fast because of the boom in car
ownership, cheap gasoline and the interstate highway system. Today, it has a meaningful presence
only on the northeastern seaboard, where Amtrak trains remain a popular, traffic-beating option
between Boston, New York and Washington. In most places, Tom Zoellner writes in his 2014 book
Train, the American railroad “is still regarded as a charming antique, an object of art for eccentrics and
a last resort for the poor. Approximately 98% of the American public has never set foot on a city-to-city
train.”

While European countries have developed high-speed systems with a lot of accumulated expertise
and a pre-existing base of regular riders, the US flew almost completely blind in the years after 2008.
California’s leaders didn’t want to finance a high-speed rail line without voter approval, and when
Quentin Kopp chaired the effort to craft a successful ballot initiative he found himself boxed in by
requirements deemed politically necessary that arguably doomed the project from the outset.

The initiative promised a journey time between LA and San Francisco of two hours and forty minutes –
a timeframe that demanded exceptionally high speeds if the train was to stop anywhere along the way
and greatly complicated the engineering. The initiative also promised that the service would pay for
itself, with no operating subsidy, a promise that now seems near-impossible to keep.

After voters approved Proposition 1A, narrowly, the High-Speed Rail Authority found itself woefully
understaffed and spent a small fortune on outside consultants, who wrote lots of reports and hired
lots of other consultants but did not get the line built. Even today, progress consists of just a handful of
new viaducts and bridges, along with most (but not all) of the necessary land purchases and
environmental approvals.

That’s still better than the rest of the country, where every last high-speed rail project proposed during
the Obama era has been dropped, in large part because of furious resistance from Republican
governors and legislators. By now, Republican party orthodoxy is hotly opposed to high-speed rail, in
line with a 2021 Cato Institute study that called it “an obsolete technology because it requires
expensive and dedicated infrastructure that will serve no purpose other than moving passengers who
could more economically travel by highway or air”.

When Newsom first announced he was paring back the California project, in 2019, it prompted the
Trump administration to yank back nearly $1bn in federal funding. While the money has since been
restored by the Biden administration, many California legislators worry that if the Republicans take
back Congress after this November’s mid-term elections or – worse – if they take back the White
House in 2024, it could kill whatever is left of the country’s last surviving high-speed rail project,
regardless of what gets decided in Sacramento.

A growing number of critics thinks California may have made a strategic mistake with its“high-speed
rail or bust” approach and should have put more money into lower-cost projects to link the disparate
parts of the existing state rail network. Kopp, still formidable and furious at the age of 93, agrees with
that approach. He thinks the only responsible thing to do at this point is declare high-speed rail a
failure and devote the remaining money in the bond fund to extension projects in the Los Angeles and
San Francisco metropolitan areas.

“I think it’s done,” he said. “Nobody else in the United States is wasting money on this. The legislature
should stop the funding again this year, and Newsom should wise up before it becomes part of the
historical record that he threw our money away.”