At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.
European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.
The state in China, is competent.
A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.
Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)
CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.
It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.
Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.
Oh, never mind, that's obviously not going to happen...
The Why Nations Fail book pointed out this exact issue that institutions that doesn’t serve the people’s interests is the main culprit.
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
San Diego to San Fransisco
The state representative from San Diego was the original proposer of the high speed rail (after returning from Japan of course).
Once the crime and graft roulette wheel went into action, San Diego was almost immediately removed from "the route".
Spain has so far spent about 60 billion Eur on its (much more extensive) HSR network. It has a lot of harsh terrain as well, crossing mountains and semi-deserts.
There are functional HSRs in Morocco and Uzbekistan, Egypt is building its first own HSR.
What's wrong with Californian governance?
All you need is a few people who don't like it for any reason whatsoever and the other 99.99% of people who want it ... They no longer get a voice.
Only the blockers, the nimbys, the ideological naysayers, they get all the power - the podium, the press, and the ear of the court.
The yes people have effectively Zero political power
That's the American difference: we grant whiners sainthood
[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/europe8an-gian8t-be...
But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).
Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.
But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.
NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark sarcasm"
This rail would displace a huge amount of air travel, thus, it's not "viable" in terms of airline industry losses...
NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark reality"
The hope is that the high speed rail would allow way more trips between the two cities, as well as the central valley cities in between, bolstering the economy, compared to the current amount of flights. I will keep my fingers crossed for the next 30 years.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...
The $20 I spend on feeding myself a healthy dinner could buy 10 sundaes at McDonald's, that doesn't mean I should eat 10 sundaes.
Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
I agree. Flights would also be much faster and more flexible.
You also can't be productive on a flight packed in like sardines and being required to put away your laptop for for a large portion of the flight time.
From an engineering and planning perspective HSR makes sense anyway you look at it. The problem is our inability to build major infrastructure projects. Even highway construction and expansion in these regions is becoming absurdly expensive, along with all other forms of development. Completely independent from HSR, we need to fix our regulatory policies. The ballooning price tag for CAHSR shouldn't inspire ire against HSR, it should inspire ire against our regulatory policies and governance.
Given California's extreme susceptibility to climate related disasters, avoiding flights is a great idea.
Never seeing a good public transport project everyone assumes that it’s not possible. It is possible when the goal is to provide transportation services, not resource extraction from masses to limited (in the grand scheme of things) number of individuals.
Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.
In the end we’re working for creating a form of transportation that could move people from point A to point B. However, everything from land use to infrastructure development costs a lot of money and nobody has any reason to lower their prices either.
I bet a brand new fully sustainable city could be created with that amount of money. But nimby will make it impossible, because (I believe) it’s about resource extraction and not service delivery.
Don’t forget unions. The big large union networks (like SEIU, teachers unions, etc) corrupt politics but also benefit from that corruption.
I don't think any profit-driven company would touch this. It's a massive money loser.
Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.
It basically had zero impact outside of the City of Boston.
(And it should have been spent on demolishing that highway, not burying it and not replacing it, then expanding regional rail and transit connectivity in the Boston metropolitan area.)
Or perhaps we should bring up military spending: https://irancost.com/
But you can't just get rid of 93
Is the rail made out of gold?
>Under current projections, assuming funding and construction proceed as planned, service between San Francisco and Bakersfield could begin around 2033, while the full Los Angeles to San Francisco connection could extend to 2040.
Brilliant stuff.
I predict the rail will never happen and only more and more money going "somewhere".
The US can't build anything efficiently. It's due to the massive mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense, environmental review, permitting and NIMBY lawsuits.
The real conspiracy is that "they" never wanted a train, "they" wanted an endless jobs project.
For the $231B you ought to be able to get 2-3000 miles of tunnel done (3x what is proposed on the surface). Of course the stations are still a huge cost, because those have to be above ground, but you could choose where to put them. The bridges and aqueducts that have been built so far (Bakersfield to Merced) are intentionally where land costs are low and no one will ride them.
I agree, this isn't about figuring out how to build high-speed rail for riders. This is about figuring out how to extract maximum funds from tax/rate payers. It's just like PG&E. I'd go as far as to say that all the consultants and construction companies that have been paid should be banned from future public infrastructure builds unless the money spent is paid back.
And I WANT highspeed rail.
California isn’t the only state with this problem though. Oregon and Washington and New York are just as bad. And the big cities in these states have the same problems at the city level.
How long can they go before they can no longer raise debt to do things?
If you don't live in California, the lesson to take away here is to figure out what the transportation departments and highway lobby did to secure the space needed for highways, and copy those tactics, not to look at California's failure and believe that extrapolates to your state or area.
In Central Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to fund bus transit and dedicated lanes in high-density corridors in Columbus. Now the project is already being set back perhaps as long as a year and a half, because the Ohio Department of Transportation is concerned car traffic may be negatively affected and wants a new traffic study. Huge waste of time, the exact kind of thing you would have wanted a DOGE in its most idealized form to nuke. You have to imagine these kinds of tactics x1000 because once California and others see the success of rail the jobs programs that are most state DOTs are going to be in serious trouble.
We'll get there, it's just going to be a long battle against entrenched lobbying and special interest groups (highway departments, construction companies, auto manufacturers, &c.) which need to profit off of your requirement to have a car to participate in society.
By the way, I'm not "against" cars or anything. Have one and love it. But the primary mode of transportation in our more dense areas has to change.
Something about blue states make progress on basic things costly, time consuming, and difficult. Every stakeholder needs their say. Any NIMBY can veto. The loudest, most obnoxious snowflakes dominate public comment. And officials don’t tell them to STFU.
And I don’t see a lot of appetite for soul searching in these states. Just “let’s raise taxes”
You don’t have to convince me we have a broken society where the oligarchs have too much power+wealth. But I’m also not willing to pay more taxes without blue states removing veto points on these projects so can’t easily be derailed by every dumb special interest.
We’re all paying more so loudest amongst can derail and shape progress on important issues.
I wouldn't cite that as a success story, Brightline is going bankrupt: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
I ride BART and Caltrain multiple times a week. Trains are delightful. And so are planes.
It typically costs about $100, and takes an hour to fly from SF to LA. The train will be slower and almost certainly more expensive. Where is the benefit?
Long distance trains work in Europe because they are supported by a rich network of public transit options stemming from city centers, and a population that uses transit frequently.
But California public transit is a mess. When you rock up at LA Union Central and want to get out to say, Newport Beach, it's another three hours of navigating buses and the metrolink.
The money would have been far better spent integrating agencies and building out high speed rail in our urban areas. BART should be running out to Sacto, Stockton, Silicon Valley, and Marin. Requisition the Amtrak line and build a highspeed rail from San Diego to Santa Barbara - now that'd be something.
polar8•1h ago