By Rich Lowry
Saturday, July 19, 2025
We’re a long way from the transcontinental railroad.
During the 1860s, we built the iconic American
infrastructure project in about six years, putting down 1,776 miles of track
and blasting 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Granted, working conditions back then didn’t exactly meet
OSHA standards. Yet, if today’s rules and practices applied, the project would
have been stalled for years somewhere outside Sacramento, caught up in endless
environmental lawsuits.
The Golden State’s emblematic, modern infrastructure
project was supposed to be a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San
Francisco. Don’t expect, though, to see the equivalent of the Golden Spike any
time soon, or perhaps ever.
The high-speed rail project has been agonizingly slow.
After about 15 years of grinding delay and cost overruns, not one piece of
track has been laid, a record of futility hard to match. California’s
high-speed rail is the West Coast’s answer to Boston’s notorious Big Dig, the
highway project that took about a decade longer than anticipated at a much
greater cost, although it was eventually completed.
Now, the Trump administration is cutting off $4 billion
in federal funds for the Golden State project, arguing that it doesn’t want to
pour any more money into a boondoggle.
The imagined bullet train was always a misfire. The idea
of high-speed rail has a nearly erotic appeal to progressives, who love
communal trains over individualized autos and think cars are destroying the
planet whereas trains can save it. High-speed rail is to transit what windmills
are to energy — an environmentally correct, futuristic technology that will
always under-deliver.
California voters passed Proposition 1A in 2008, getting
the ball — if not any actual trains — rolling. The project was supposed to cost
$33 billion.
What could go wrong? Well, everything. Bad decisions
about where to build the tracks, complacent contractors, environmental and
union rules — you name it.
The initial, scaled-back line is now supposed to be
completed by 2033, and even that is optimistic. Elon Musk might put a man on
Mars before Governor Gavin Newsom or one of his successors manages to get even
a much less ambitious high-speed rail system underway.
The current focus is a line between Merced (pop. 93,000)
and Bakersfield (413,000). No offense to the good people of either of these
places, but these aren’t major metropolises. In Northeast terms, this is less a
rail connection between New York City and Washington, D.C., and more a
connection between Newark, N.J., and Bridgeport, Conn.
Passenger estimates for the California system have always
been absurd. The fantasy is that ridership will be double what it is now in
Amtrak’s Northeast corridor. But as Marc Joffe of the California Policy Center
points out, population density is much greater near Northeast stations, it’s
easier to get around cities in the Northeast on the way to or from the train,
and a rail culture is much more embedded in the Northeast than in car-centric
California.
As for reducing greenhouse emissions, the long-running
project is itself a significant source of emissions, and the benefit of fewer
drivers in cars will be vitiated by the fact that more and more Californians
will be driving electric vehicles.
The original estimated $33 billion cost is now $35
billion for just the scaled-back line and more than $100 billion and counting
for the whole shebang. There was no reason for the feds to pour good money
after bad supporting a preposterous project that doesn’t have any national
significance.
Newsom — too embarrassed to admit failure or too drunk on
visions of European-style rail — remains fully committed. In a statement, he
said that Trump’s defunding decision is a “gift to China,” as if Beijing cares
whether people get to Bakersfield by car, plane, or high-speed rail.
The project has already been a distressing object lesson
in California’s inability to build anything of consequence, and there’s more
where that came from.
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