Californians know their state is a punching bag for Donald Trump’s administration, a “paradise lost” that the president intends to wrest back from the “radical left lunatics”. But when Trump took aim at the state’s much-delayed high-speed rail project earlier this month, saying it was “the worst managed project” he’d ever seen, some of those leftwingers – and more moderate voters – found themselves in the unusual position of conceding he might have a point.
California’s beautiful dream of a bullet train whisking passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours has been more than 16 years in the making, approved by voters but dogged by so many delays, broken deadlines and cost overruns that it has only just reached the initial stages of laying down track.
Originally the whole 494-mile route – stretching south beyond Los Angeles to Anaheim, home to Disneyland – was supposed to be finished by 2020, at a cost of around $30bn. Now, the state’s high-speed rail authority is refocusing its ambitions on a truncated 171-mile middle section in California’s Central valley, at a cost of more than $35bn and a tentative completion date of 2033. The budget for the entire line has ballooned to more than $100bn, with no end date in sight.
“It’s impossible that something could cost that much,” Trump complained to reporters in the Oval Office in the midst of his slash-and-burn campaign to cut government spending across the board. He and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, have launched an investigation and are threatening to withhold more than $4bn in federal grants previously approved by the Biden administration.
California officials from the governor, Gavin Newsom, down have made a show of defending the project, calling it a catalyst for economic development that, after more than $13bn of investment to date, has progressed too far to justify any change of plan. “We just have to accept the responsibility of where we are, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” Newsom said last month at a ground-breaking ceremony for a railhead outside Bakersfield, at the southern end of the truncated Central valley line.
With or without federal funding, California will have to come up with the lion’s share of the budget and currently has no plan in place to do so, beyond a study proposed by the state legislature to explore public-private partnerships and the possibility of using revenue from new economic development along the track to keep financing more of it.
That comes on top of what supporters and detractors alike describe as years of top-heavy bureaucracy, too much money spent on consultants, and endless negotiating with property owners and public utilities who have felt little pressure to respond to the rail authority’s requests.
The inspector general responsible for overseeing the high speed rail authority just issued a pair of reports, one anticipating that the project will keep missing deadlines including the 2033 completion date for the Central valley stretch, and the other detailing long delays caused by the latest negotiations to move water, electricity and gas lines out of the way of the rail route.
Republicans, many of them opposed in principle to high-speed rail, have taken to calling the project “the train to nowhere”. But they are not the only ones. David Lazarus, a liberal commentator for the Los Angeles television news station KTLA who is in favor of a bullet train built right, said the state was “in the middle of a boondoggle of bad decisions that is now light years from its original plan and seems to be getting worse”.
Elected Democrats who feel similarly have been largely silent since Trump and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, led by Elon Musk, started voicing their criticisms in the wake of last November’s presidential election. In the past, though, many of those Democrats have voiced concern that a botched high-speed rail line in California might spell the death of climate-friendly mass transit in the future.
Fiona Ma, the Democratic state treasurer, told the Guardian in 2023 she thought the government should get out of rail-building and defer to private enterprise because “government is not in the business of being efficient”. That same year, a Democratic state assembly member, Corey Jackson, said: “I don’t think history’s going to judge us well from the decisions we’re making on the project right now.”
Newsom, Ma and Jackson did not agree to an interview request or requests for comment.
For now, the high-speed rail line retains modest public support. An opinion poll conducted earlier this month for KTLA showed that 54% of California voters still believed it was a good investment, slightly down from a similar survey published by the Los Angeles Times three years ago. Whether those numbers can hold for another decade remains an open question, however, and some Republicans are already smelling blood in the water.
“This is not the project the voters approved,” Republican assembly member Bill Essayli said in December. “I believe it should go back to the voters to ask them if they want to continue this project and say what it’s actually going to cost and accomplish.”
Another Republican assemblymember, Alexandra Macedo, has introduced long-shot legislation to redirect state funding for the rail project to wildfire prevention and water infrastructure projects – both hot topics in the wake of last month’s devastating fires that destroyed whole neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.
The high speed rail authority, meanwhile, remains sanguine about the risk of losing federal funding, saying it welcomes the Trump administration’s investigation. “We stand by the progress and impact of this project,” the chief executive Ian Choudri said in a statement.
Asked how the authority planned to continue financing the project, with or without federal money, a spokesperson said they were looking at a variety of options including private investment and government loans. “We are building what we can where we can as other funding is identified,” spokesperson Kyle Simerly said. “It is common for major infrastructure projects to be built in phases to spread costs and manage complexity.”
Many policy insiders, including Ma, favor the private rail-building approach taken by the Florida-based company Brightline, which is building a high-speed line from Las Vegas to the eastern Los Angeles suburbs. In fact, Brightline is considering a branch line to connect its route to the future high-speed LA-San Francisco line.
The only problem? The connection point, in the desert town of Palmdale north of Los Angeles, is 95 miles short of the Central Valley high-speed segment and unlikely to be linked up to it for decades.
The branch line would mainly serve as a roundabout way for Brightline passengers to reach downtown Los Angeles from Las Vegas, including a slow stretch of commuter rail over the final 60 miles. On the map, the route looks like a giant wiggle around the San Gabriel mountains instead of a much straighter line along the freeway system. Still, in January, the Biden administration awarded a last-minute $1m federal grant to prepare the Palmdale station for high-speed rail traffic – an act of faith the Trump administration looks unlikely to repeat.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
