Will California ever get its bullet train?
If you’ve waited in an LAX security line longer than it takes to fly to the Bay Area – or inhaled the acrid smell from that wretched cattle feedlot along the 5 Freeway – you’ve probably muttered this question out of frustration. I certainly have, both in earnest (because I really, really want to take the promised high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco) and because I have doubts I'll ever get the chance to ride the bullet train.
That support tinged with pessimism reflects the feelings most Californians have about the high-speed system they seeded with $10 billion in Proposition 1A funding in 2008. Voters then were told it would take $33 billion to get service going from L.A. to San Francisco by 2020. As if.
At a hearing Monday after the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its draft 2026 business plan, Assembly Transportation Committee members spent nearly two hours discussing the roughly $35 billion it will take to get trains rolling on just 171 miles of track in the Central Valley by 2032. Yikes.
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Still, the system is getting built – a lot slower and more piecemeal than anyone would like, and at much, much greater expense. Hopefully, the pieces will finally connect and Californians will wonder how they ever lived without it.
At the hearing, Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo (R-Visalia) was skeptical that the High-Speed Rail Authority could pull it off. She pointedly asked Benjamin Benlap, the agency’s inspector general, “In one of your reports, you said there was not a viable path forward, correct? For the San Francisco to Los Angeles [line], or something along those lines.”
Belnap, no puller of punches on the rail authority’s shortcomings, corrected Macedo and offered a smidgen of hope to aspiring bullet train passengers: “I've never said in any report that there's not a viable path for [San Francisco to Los Angeles]. What I have said is that the clearest path … is successfully building Merced to Bakersfield and gaining momentum from there.”
Julie Marquis
In other words, a lot is riding on the success of the initial segment. It’s the backbone of the larger system and yet it’s constantly derided by critics as a boondoggle train “from nowhere to nowhere.” Completing it will give California its best shot at mitigating the climate-wrecking transportation infrastructure – freeways and airports everywhere – built over generations.
Few dispute the need to harden the electric grid (also very expensive) or water systems against climate change. Building infrastructure that takes hundreds of thousands of greenhouse gas-spewing vehicles off the road and fuel-burning planes out of the sky is just as crucial.
Under the rosiest current scenario, bullet trains from San Francisco won’t roll into Los Angeles until 2040, and by then the High-Speed Rail Authority predicts the system will have cost $126.2 billion to build. That’s hugely expensive, yes, but it’s also reflective of the fact that large transportation projects often take a lot longer and a lot more money to build than originally envisioned, because massive construction projects aren’t fully predictable.
Examples abound. The nation’s largest ever infrastructure project, the Interstate Highway System, was supposed to take 12 years and cost $27 billion when Congress authorized it in 1956. The program blew past both estimates: The Federal Highway Administration declared the system finished in 1992 at a cost of $129 billion. Imagine the mess of a highway system we’d have today if critics had managed to stop construction halfway through because it was taking too much time and sucking up so much taxpayer money.
David Freed
In Boston, the so-called Big Dig buried miles of freeway that previously scarred the heart of the city, costing $22 billion instead of the originally projected $2.8 billion and taking twice as long as planned to finish. Nearly 20 years after completion, few question if the dramatically transformed urban landscape was worth it all.
Much closer to home, Los Angeles will soon welcome the first section of the long-awaited Metro D Line extension along Wilshire Boulevard. Judging by the celebratory anticipation – most notably a viral, suggestive T-shirt – you’d think all of L.A. was on the same page about it. But a subway beneath one of the nation’s densest transportation corridors had to overcome decades of political opposition and, later, delays and cost overruns. When the 3.9-mile extension broke ground in 2014, Metro estimated it would cost $2.8 billion and open in 2024. The final cost will come in around $3.5 billion.
None of this is to argue for ignoring cost overruns or mismanagement. In fact, previous case studies show the importance of rigorous oversight, and to that end, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in 2022 establishing an inspector general for the High-Speed Rail Authority. At the Assembly Transportation Committee hearing, legislators grilled the bullet-train agency’s chief of staff over possible spending gaps and further delays – and they should continue to do so.
But keeping a sharp eye on mismanagement shouldn’t dim the state’s focus on the goal of a better connected, more sustainable transportation system, even if that goal is years or even decades away. Who wouldn’t want to step on a morning train in Los Angeles and arrive in San Francisco for lunch, the same way French, Japanese and Italian travelers move efficiently around their countries sans cars and airport security?
California stands to undergo such a transformation, but it will take years of patience and persistence to get there.
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