It took four years to even begin work, but not solely because of permitting — release of the funds was delayed until 2012. And they were held up further by a series of court cases that prevented the state from selling the bonds allocated by 1A until it identified the source of the rest of the project’s funding. During this time, the project received around $3 billion in federal funds from the Obama-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which came with requirements to match federal funds and to begin work in disadvantaged areas of the Central Valley.
The result was that work on the Central Valley segment’s initial 120 miles was delayed for several years. The first major construction contract, Construction Package 1, was issued in June 2013. In the meantime, then-Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature worked to grant CAHSR what would be its sole ongoing funding source. In June 2014, the project was awarded a 15% allocation of the revenue from sales in California's cap-and-trade carbon auctions, which in recent years have raised between $3 and $4.7 billion a year. In 2017, this allocation was extended until 2030. With this funding secure, contracts were finally issued for Construction Package 2-3 in 2015 and Construction Package 4 in 2016.
But the delays in issuing these contracts started a vicious cycle. At multiple points in the rail’s history, approvals and construction plans already started for utility reconstructions, interactions with and crossings of existing freight lines, grade separations, and so on were left incomplete. This led to pauses in work and further delays so that plans could catch up to the ground already broken. The lack of continuity between planning and construction — changes in contractors, personnel, and others with expertise — made necessary change orders that only drove the cost up higher.
Through Trump’s first term, the initial portion of bond funding, combined with funding from the cap-and-trade fund allocation, was enough to keep some progress moving forward in the Central Valley under rail authority CEO Brian Kelly. Concrete viaducts and grade separations began to rise as visible signs of the work in progress. However, there were strict limits on what could be accomplished because of the piecemeal disbursement of cash. The sum of these funds, the only source of persistent cash flow, was generally about a billion dollars a year. They also varied each year due to the fluctuation in the cap-and-trade auction system. As a result, yearly funds couldn’t be reliably planned against, nor could they be borrowed against. Thus, even when work was finally underway, progress was slower than hoped, as change orders resulting from delayed property acquisition and permitting interactions with freight railroads and local municipalities increased costs and complexity.
To put this into perspective: Brightline West, the high-speed rail project between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, is hoping to spend the $12 billion they have raised in just over four years. It has taken many times as long for California High-Speed Rail to have their first $12 billion in hand.
Gavin Newsom’s election as governor in 2018 introduced further problems for the project that continue to plague it today. “There simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA,” he claimed. “I wish there were.” Instead, he directed the project to focus on the 172-mile stretch between Merced and Bakersfield, through which an eventual route from San Francisco to Los Angeles might run. Crucially, Newsom also cut funding that should have gone to the geological surveys needed for designing the tunnels required to punch through the Diablo range south of San Francisco and San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles — thereby fulfilling his own prophecy.
Initially, Newsom also didn’t put political capital to work to push for more funding for the project. Indeed, for the first few years of his tenure, $4.1 billion in Prop 1A bond funds remained unallocated by the state legislature and thus unavailable for the project to use. It wasn’t until 2021, as debates about Biden-era federal infrastructure funding began, that Newsom finally began to pressure the legislature to release these funds to the project in hopes of attracting new federal matching funds. The legislature released the remaining bond funds in 2022, and that renewed state investment may indeed have played a role in the award of $3.07 billion in federal infrastructure funds in the fall of 2023.
With all this in mind, we can start to look at common criticisms of California High-Speed Rail in a different light. These critiques — maybe you’ve seen them on Twitter — generally glibly identify solutions or alternatives that are insufficient to address the rail’s real issues, and focus attention on the wrong problems.
One regular snipe is that it’s “easier to build rail in Morocco than in California.” This critique stems from the fact that the French national railroad company, SNCF, which participated early in the planning process before 1A passed, also helped design the Moroccan Al Boraq high-speed rail service. Such critics often note that the Al Boraq service is operational today and claim that the relative failure of the California High-Speed Rail “boondoggle” represents the political dysfunction of either California, the United States, or the West as a whole. This appears to be based entirely on one quote in the New York Times, from an SNCF project manager, that the company left for Morocco, “which was less politically dysfunctional.” In fact, SNCF has employees in 120 countries and has projects in Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea, among others.
This criticism also misunderstands one of the main challenges that CAHSR has faced. Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.
Another common criticism, as laid out in an article by Benjamin Schneider, is that California High-Speed Rail is built in the wrong place, to the wrong standards, and with the wrong goals — and that’s why it failed. The argument goes like this: The currently planned alignment through the Central Valley makes building unnecessarily complicated. Because it goes through major population centers — Bakersfield, Merced, Fresno — it introduces the necessity of grade separations (bridges or tunnels built so that trains and vehicles pass over or under each other) and requires complex property acquisitions. The right place to build the rail alignment is a direct route between Los Angeles and San Francisco paralleling Interstate 5.
This was, in fact, the route proposed by SNCF prior to Prop 1A’s passing. The I-5 alignment would save mileage, reduce grade separations and utility relocations, and use property already under the control of the state’s department of transportation. These cities could then perhaps be connected with branch lines to the high-speed rail trunk, establishing a line through the Central Valley with a faster build out and lower cost compared with the more expensive “political” route directly through Central Valley cities and towns.
Although it has intuitive appeal, this proposal suffers from major issues. First, the I-5 route avoids every major population center in the Central Valley, bypassing more than a million people who would be unserved. The only way to connect them to the line would be through stub-end branch lines. Building these lines would add the same kinds of costs as the as-built line directly through the Central Valley cities while offering them worse service. Second, it’s quite possible the I-5 alignment would never have been popular enough to pass as a ballot proposition. The Central Valley population areas only narrowly voted in favor of 1A. Had the original proposal outlined in the ballot initiative offered a different route from which Central Valley residents would not benefit, it’s possible it would not have passed at all.
Third, much has been made of the fact that construction has begun on the middle section of the alignment rather than in Los Angeles or San Francisco. This is, in fact, standard practice in building high-speed rail around the world. The route alignment as selected means that even if the Central Valley portion of the rail is all that operates within the next decade, it will still see service, as it will replace the existing Amtrak line that already carries a million riders a year between the Central Valley population centers. Only if the Central Valley alignment had been selected would CAHSR actually the “train to nowhere” that critics deride it as.
Perhaps most importantly, critics appear to forget that the Central Valley alignment, political or not, overambitious or not, is nearly built. The property is acquired and cleared, embankments are under construction, and many viaducts and bridges have been completed. Abandoning it in the current state and switching to I-5 would almost certainly cost more than finishing the current alignment.
And this alignment isn’t the real problem, anyway. The true cost driver for CAHSR isn’t the difference between I-5 and the Central Valley, but access into Los Angeles and San Francisco. There, the challenge is not permits or politics but geology. While rail services like Metrolink’s Antelope Valley commuter line in Los Angeles and the Altamont Corridor Express in San Francisco do already cross the mountains, these are slow trains — necessarily so, because of the tortuous route demanded by the terrain. According to the 2024 California High-Speed Rail business plan, the total cost of the three major required tunnels is expected to make up approximately half of the total project cost. The Central Valley’s 172 miles under construction and advanced planning are estimated to cost up to $33 billion. The total to get from the Central Valley into the Los Angeles region is expected to be $34 billion, while at the north end of the Central Valley, the link from the Central Valley to the San Francisco Bay region is expected to cost $20 billion, including the tunnel and improvements along existing rail corridors from San Jose to Gilroy. These costs can’t be blamed on Californian political dysfunction: These are tunnels on the scale of the Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland, which had a similar cost-per-mile.
A second line of criticism comes from the abundance movement. Critics like Ezra Klein emphasize the problems created by environmental permitting and cooperating with utilities, and other existing interests like the freight railroads and (mostly Republican) landowners. All of these are real problems, and each has been a factor in delaying CAHSR. Environmental review has taken over a decade. Breaking ground sometimes uncovered new lawsuits. The entire project has been negotiated and renegotiated, inflating prices at each step. But every single one of these problems is also faced by other infrastructure projects — new bridges and highways in particular — that manage to proceed in spite of regulatory difficulties.
One major reason that highway infrastructure succeeds where CAHSR has failed is that such projects are routine. Highways have assured funding from federal and state sources. They also have significant political support from state and federal officials. More to the point, there is an industry of professionals experienced in both building roads and navigating the red tape necessary to make doing so possible. The equivalent network for American high-speed rail does exist — yet. This is part of the reason that high-speed rail costs many times as much in the United States as it does in European countries. Unless we actually commit to building and finishing high-speed rail, that network will never form.
Many commentators have suggested the project cut its losses and bow out. But one piece missing from the discourse is an accurate understanding of what the project has cost to date and what it needs to be completed. This problem dates to the earliest days of the project. If the CAHSR has an original sin, it is that the bond issue that went before voters didn’t ask for enough money. Early business plans in 2008 expected a total budget of $33 billion to be sufficient, approximately $50 billion today with inflation. Because the expectation was that federal government or private investment would bear much of this cost, the bond issue requested less than a third of the amount needed even in these early estimates.
It was only in 2011, once the project was able to finalize more of the route plan in detail, that the projected price rose to $65 billion. Inflation adjusted, that is $94 billion today — close to the base-cost estimate of $106 billion from the 2024 business plan that so many have critiqued. As many critics have rightfully and fairly noted, this is a higher cost-per-mile of track than in many countries that routinely build high-speed rail. But America, of course, does not routinely build high-speed rail, and the project remains only slightly more expensive than it was forecasted to be 13 years ago. Most important, to date, CAHSR has spent only about $15 billion, which has limited the ability to proceed with extensive planning beyond the Central Valley. It has also stopped the award of any new heavy construction contracts since the initial 119 miles of Construction Packages 1 through 4. Work has begun on the next 50 miles of civil construction to bring tracks to Merced, where they will connect with ACE and San Joaquins train services to San Francisco and Sacramento, and to Bakersfield, where connections are available via Amtrak Thruway bus service into Los Angeles. Contracts are also intended to be issued this year for the tracks, overhead electrical system, and trains to run the initial segments.
This money has also paid for contributions to the electrification of Caltrain in San Francisco, grade separations removing freight crossings from streets in Los Angeles, and the complete environmental clearance and basic geotechnical design of the entire route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Completing the Central Valley segment will cost between $4 and $7 billion.
The additional funding required to reach San Francisco and Los Angeles to complete the core route will be approximately $80 billion. This is a lot of money, but as inflation-adjusted estimates show, it is not due purely to incompetence and cost overruns. More to the point, California can afford projects on a similar scale. The recent BART extension to San Jose is expected to cost $12.75 billion, and Caltrans receives a budget of $15 billion a year. California has had substantial budget surpluses in the past decade. In 2022 alone, the surplus totaled nearly $100 billion (although the budget is now roughly balanced). As a matter of practical economics, the project could be paid for. The question now is if the political will is there to fund it either in whole or in some revised form.
Despite more than a decade of predictions of its failure, the project has persevered — even if its completion is in limbo. The initial operating segment between Merced and Bakersfield is projected to begin operating in 2030. Progress is invisible to those in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and it can’t be seen just driving along I-5. But everything from satellite imagery to drone footage to a drive along State Route 43 reveals the progress being made along the 119 miles of construction underway in the Central Valley. The 22 miles making up Construction Package 4 are effectively complete, from the massive Wasco Viaduct, where the high-speed rail rises to cross over Burlington Northern and Santa Fe freight railroad tracks, to the numerous smaller-grade separation structures rising from the valley floor.
A ceremony was held in January 2025 to mark the beginning of work on the “construction railhead,” where 10 miles of freight rail yard will be built to support track laying and the erection of overhead wires in coming years. This will also include some of the first permanent high-speed tracks to be laid on the alignment. Of the 81 structures planned between Construction Packages 1-3, all but seven are underway. Seventeen structures are planned to be completed in 2025, including rail viaducts over low-lying swamps and rivers, and underpasses and overpasses that will remove grade crossings with urban streets in Fresno.
While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route. For comparison, were this project a highway, at this stage it would need only paving and striping. If funding holds from the state, contracts for track laying and the purchase of the first train sets should go out this year. Work is also proceeding on the remainder of the route: Design work and property acquisition are underway for the next 50 miles of right-of-way extending to Merced and Bakersfield, this time phased to allow utility relocations and other local interference to be cleared ahead of construction on the main structures. All of the environmental permits are complete for extending the tunnels through Pacheco Pass to Gilroy and up to San Francisco and from Bakersfield south to Palmdale and Los Angeles. The only thing holding back construction is money.
Watching the progress has converted some former skeptics. Kings County Supervisor Doug Verboon was once a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits seeking to stop the project in its tracks. As of this year, he’s expressed support for finishing the sections of the project already underway. In an article in the Hanford Sentinel from December 2024, he expressed that, as chair of the San Joaquin Valley Rail Commission, he now wants to see the structures completed to make use of the investment.
For those who can see every day the tangible progress of the project, opposition has evolved into something quite different: doubt about whether the funding can be provided to finish the job. The dream of a complete line from San Francisco to Los Angeles remains as popular as it did when 1A first passed with 52% of the vote in 2008. An Emerson College poll commissioned by KTLA in February found that 54% of Californians still support the project. When Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, came to Los Angeles to announce the administration was investigating the project, he was met by a large crowd of protestors chanting “build the rail” loud enough to drown him out on press microphones.
The next four years of the second Trump administration will prove a crucial test of support from the state government. Even before Trump threatened to cut off the awarded federal funding, the Office of the Inspector General raised the possibility that the project could be between $3 and $6.5 billion short of completing the 172 miles from Merced to Bakersfield, depending on the variation in state cap-and-trade auction revenue. The project has sufficient California funds only to last through the Trump administration, complete and electrify the existing 120 miles, purchase train sets, and begin construction of the Merced and Bakersfield extensions — but not fully complete them.
This is not an easy project. But exaggerating the difficulties of completing it can blind us to both the possibilities and the reasons the project was — and remains — popular. A high-speed rail connection in San Jose would place the Central Valley a mere 30-45 minutes away, opening up options for new housing and commercial opportunities. Effectively, it would make something like the “California Forever” plan possible in a different region of the state, complete with high-speed rail connections directly to Silicon Valley. Long term, connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco by high-speed rail would be time competitive with flying and several times faster than driving.
If California politicians match action to desires, it is within California’s capability to fund the project itself. Governor Newsom and the California legislature have hinted at such a possibility. Rather than buying into the narratives of predetermined failure pushed by the project’s longtime opposition, Californian citizens and politicians should push for the project’s continuation — and for as much support as the state can give.
