Bullet Trains to Nowhere
An eighteen-year demonstration of what happens when progressive utopianism meets the discipline of cost, geography, and schedule.
Friday, May 1, was the statutory deadline for the California High-Speed Rail Authority to deliver its 2026 business plan to the legislature. The date was missed. After eighteen years and roughly $15 billion in public money a missed date is almost comical to note. What is not so funny is the the fact that in nearly two decades not a single mile of high-speed track has been laid. Things are so bad that not even a document describing what has not been built can be provided.
There is something very wrong here.
Mislaid Plans
To understand what is going on, a quick history lesson will suffice. In November 2008, California voters approved Proposition 1A by a 53-percent margin. The measure authorized $9.95 billion in general obligation bonds toward an 800-mile statewide high-speed rail system that would carry passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and forty minutes, at speeds of up to 220 mph and a fare of about $50. The Authority’s own 2006 estimate, presented to voters in the Legislative Analyst’s official ballot analysis, placed the total cost of the system at roughly $45 billion, financed by the state bond, federal grants, and substantial private capital. Anticipated completion: 2020.
Six years past that target, the network does not exist. The Authority’s own draft 2026 business plan, released in February, now estimates the full Phase 1 buildout at $231.3 billion in today’s dollars, with a “right-sized” alternative at $126.2 billion. Either figure is roughly five times the 2008 estimate. Ridership has been revised from 95 million annual riders by 2030 to a range of 23.6 to 30.6 million annually under the latest Phase 1 plan. The full statewide network has been quietly abandoned. What is now under construction is a 171-mile inland segment from Merced to Bakersfield, and according to the Authority’s own former peer review chair, Lou Thompson, even that fragment cannot be finished by 2032 without funds the Authority does not have. “The state of denial should end,” Thompson wrote in March.
The Fare Comes Due
Last summer, the federal government intervened. Following a 300-page Federal Railroad Administration compliance review that identified nine specific defaults, including a $7 billion shortfall on the Initial Operating Segment alone and a missed 2024 deadline to procure trainsets, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy terminated approximately $4 billion in unspent federal grants. California sued. Then, in December, Attorney General Rob Bonta voluntarily dismissed the case after a federal judge had already declined to throw it out.
What is so troubling about California’s train fiasco is that proponents of the project understood the financial risks well in advance. Proposition 1A was structured around a tripartite financing model. The private capital, which was supposed to do most of the work, never materialized at scale. The federal share was always politically contingent. Thus, the state’s $9.95 billion bond, sold to voters as a “down payment,” became the only reliable money. Cost overruns were absorbed silently. Routes were redrawn inland, away from the dense corridors that justified the original ridership projections. Construction began in the Central Valley, the cheapest segment, on the theory that political momentum would deliver the rest of the funding. None of it did.
The Authority is now pursuing $1 billion per year through 2045 from California’s cap-and-invest carbon allowance program, a revenue stream subject to the same political contingencies that doomed the original federal partnership.
Damn the Excuses
For readers interested in historical parallels, the Hoover Dam is an instructive example. The project was authorized in 1928, broke ground in 1931, and was dedicated in 1935. It took four years, and all of this notwithstanding the nationwide depression. Or how about the Empire State Building? It rose in 410 days. Or take the implementation of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which launched a 41,000-mile interstate system that was substantially complete within a generation. Those projects had no engineering advantage over California’s; they had institutions willing to bind cost, schedule, and ambition into a single deliverable. The high-speed rail project has now consumed eighteen years and three administrations without producing a foot of operating track.
Federal dollars carry obligations, and after fifteen years of missed milestones the Federal Railroad Administration concluded that those obligations could no longer be met. California’s response, which moved from litigation to abandonment to the search for unsecured private capital, is the response of a project that has run out of arguments.
What the American Founders understood about republican government applies, in modified form, to its physical works. A regime is judged by what it can finish. California promised its citizens a railroad and gave them, instead, eighteen years of evidence that the progressive vision animating the project was never on speaking terms with cost, geography, or time. One question is whether California’s leaders will concede the point, or whether they will continue spending public money proving it.
The other question is where did the $15 billion go?
