National Review Online
Friday, July 18, 2025
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has terminated the remaining $4 billion of unspent federal
funds for California’s beleaguered high-speed rail project. The move is well
justified.
In 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure that
would allow the state to issue up to $9.95 billion in bonds to support an
ambitious plan to build a high-speed rail system. But the state has not lived
up to the promises made to its own voters who approved the measure and to the
federal government.
When it was sold to Californians 16 years ago, state rail
officials presented a business plan that envisioned a sprawling 800-mile network
that would first link San Francisco to Los Angeles, with a second phase
extending the line to Sacramento and San Diego. The cost of the first segment
was projected to be $33 billion and it was supposed to be capable of supporting
up to 100 million riders by 2030.
Barack Obama hailed the promise of high-speed rail and
Democrats approved billions of dollars of funds for the project as part of his
economic stimulus program in 2009. As other states including Wisconsin and
Florida balked at the cost and declined federal funds, more was diverted to
California’s project. But none of the lofty promises have come anywhere near to
fruition thanks to budget overruns, schedule delays, and California’s own
onerous environmental regulations.
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom declared the original
vision dead, conceding, “there simply isn’t a path to get from
Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA.” Instead, he
proposed limiting the train to a 171-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield, a
significantly less populated corridor in the Central Valley. But to this point,
no track has been laid, despite support for the project from the Biden
administration, and a recent inspector general report from California
determined that it was “unlikely” even this segment would be completed by 2033, as
had been promised. Even if completed, the ridership on the segment is projected
to be just 3 million a year, nowhere near enough to justify the cost unless the
entire originally proposed San Francisco-to-Los Angeles section is built. But
cost estimates for that now exceed $106 billion.
While California officials are still touting the
possibility of private funding, they have been desperately seeking such funding
from the project’s inception, to no avail, because demand is likely to be
significantly lower than the 55 million riders initially projected by 2030
(which assumed they would be able to keep fares at half the price of airplane
tickets). To provide some context, Amtrak reported 33 million riders last year
– for the entire country.
Rail enthusiasts like to cite European countries for
having high-speed rail, but such systems transport riders from one densely
populated and walkable city to another. In contrast, riders who would take
trains from San Francisco to Los Angeles (let alone Merced to Bakersfield)
would need cars to get around once they reach their final stop. This
dramatically reduces the appeal of rail relative to flying – as flights are
cheap and abundant within California and allow passengers to get between Los
Angeles and San Francisco in under 90 minutes, or about half the time of a
projected SF-LA high-speed rail link. For sure, some Californians may prefer
train travel anyway, but clearly, investors have determined that there are
unlikely to be anywhere near enough to make the system profitable and justify
the upfront costs. Almost certainly, even if built, any California high-speed
rail system would require significant ongoing subsidies.
If Newsom and California lawmakers had any sense, they
would view Duffy’s decision to cut off funding as an act of mercy, and finally
pull the plug on this doomed project. If, as early indications suggest, they
seek to plow forward, they should waste their own money.
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