How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned.
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LOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.
But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.
The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
Proposed California High Speed Rail
The California bullet train’s route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, traversing the state’s mountain ranges and its Central Valley, is shown in a dark black line. The route was selected over proposals that would have roughly followed the I-5 and the I-580 highways between Southern and Northern California. The light gray line shows a proposed second phase that would extend the system to San Diego and Sacramento, though it has not received environmental approvals or funding.
Sacramento
80 miles
Nevada
San Francisco
Stockton
Modesto
Merced
San Jose
Madera
Gilroy
Fresno
Kings/Tulare
PHASE 1
CALIFORNIA
Bakersfield
Palmdale
Burbank
Los Angeles
Riverside
Anaheim
PHASE 2
San Diego
A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.
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