Late last month, a little-noticed milestone planned high-speed rail project: The state High-Speed Rail Authority’s board approved environmental documents for the project’s final 33-mile leg between Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and a transit hub in Anaheim.
With that approval, the entire first 494-mile phase of the high-speed rail project from San Francisco to Anaheim has now achieved environmental clearance.
Normally, the wrapping up of environmental approvals for the project in Southern California would signal that construction would soon begin. But this is California’s high-speed rail project, where delays have stretched into decades and recent cost projections have reached into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Critics have long called it a boondoggle of vast proportions, leading to a growing skepticism that the project will ever be completed.
According to a survey last year by the Politico/Citrin Center Possibility Lab, just 27% of respondents said the project has a high likelihood of completion, with 47% saying it has a low likelihood of completion.
“Right now, it’s hard to see this train carving out a space in our infrastructure firmament,” said Michael Manville, professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Promises not kept
When California voters in 2008 approved nearly $10 billion in future bond sales for the high-speed rail project and select commuter rail improvements, supporters promised that trains would run on a dedicated track between Los Angeles and San Francisco at speeds up to 220 miles per hour, with the entire trip taking just two hours and 40 minutes. Trains were supposed to be up and running by 2020.
An accompanying analysis from the state Legislative Analyst’s Office cited an earlier report that put the overall cost of the high-speed rail project at $45 billion, though supporters of the measure touted a much lower cost figure in campaign advertising of $33 billion. The idea was that roughly one-third of the funding would come from the state bonds, another third from the federal government and the remaining third from private sector investment.
Today, 18 years later, not a single mile of track has been laid anywhere along the 494-mile project route, despite nearly 12 years of construction along a 119-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Merced in the southern Central Valley.
Soaring costs, shifted parameters
Meanwhile, the cost estimates for the entire project have skyrocketed, with a low-range estimate of $128 billion and a high-range estimate of $231 billion. The latter estimate appears in a footnote and uses what’s known as the “bottom-up” cost calculation, trying to add up the known costs of each component involved in construction. Bottom-up cost calcu- lations are generally regarded as more thorough and accurate.
A variety of factors have combined to drive up these costs, including much higher-than-ex- pected land acquisition costs, soaring material and labor costs, additional regulatory hurdles and litigation costs. But UCLA’s Manville said the extent of the cost increases was exacerbated by political considerations to get the ballot measure passed in 2008: “The people who put this on the ballot used a very favorable estimate of how much it would cost,” he said. “After the voter approval, reality set in.”
The first serious indication that the project cost figures cited in the ballot measure were unrealistically low came in the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s 2011 business plan that had a revised low-end cost estimate of $98 billion. And that was before the huge runup in materials costs and overall inflation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2012, the authority started rethinking the concept of dedicated high-speed rail track for the entire route. The authority decided to have segments in the Bay Area and much of Los Angeles County share tracks with regional rail networks. While this was designed to save billions of dollars in land acquisition and other costs associated with the construction of a dedicated high-speed rail track in highly urban areas, it would necessitate cutting the top speeds to about 80 miles per hour on those joint-operation segments. As a result, the total train travel time between San Francisco and Los Angeles is now estimated at just over four hours, with another 37 minutes to Anaheim – way over the travel time in the 2008 ballot language.
With these travel times, Manville said, the high-speed rail line would not be competitive with air travel; flight durations between L.A. and San Francisco are typically under 90 minutes.
SoCal last on priority list
As for when Angelenos might be able to ride California High-Speed Rail trains, it will be 2040 at the absolute earliest. That’s because the segment between Bakersfield and Anaheim would be the last to come online – assuming the funding ever shows up.
This segment includes stations in downtown Palmdale, underneath Hollywood-Burbank Airport, Union Station and at an existing intermodal transit hub in Anaheim. The route would go southeast from Bakersfield through the Tehachapi mountain range to Palmdale, then through a series of tunnels through the San Gabriel Mountains – roughly paralleling the 14 Freeway – to Burbank and then share tracks with the Metrolink regional rail system to Union Station and finally to Anaheim.
According to Jim Patrick, spokesman for the authority, track could start being laid on the Bakersfield to Merced segment as soon as the end of this year: “The plan is to finish Merced to Bakersfield and proceed toward the Bay Area to initiate fare service as soon as possible because that is going to be a profitable route,” he said.
The plan, he said, is to use fare revenue on those portions of the route to help fund construction of the Bakersfield to Anaheim segment.
Funding challenge
The biggest cost hurdle for the Bakersfield to Anaheim segment is the nearly 40 miles of tunneling required through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel mountain ranges. To go through the San Gabriel range, the plan calls for four tunnels totaling 28 miles in length, including two tunnels of at least 12 miles each. Those tunnels would be among the longest rail tunnels ever constructed in the U.S.
As a result, the 2026 business plan puts the construction cost for the two segments between Bakersfield and Burbank at $42 billion.
Currently, Patrick said the authority has $39 billion in funding on hand, most of which is for the Bakersfield-to-Merced segment. Last year, President Donald Trump pulled $4 billion in previously committed funding for the project, citing waste and inefficiencies. Patrick said the agency is exploring the possibility of finding a private company willing to fund the Bakersfield to Anaheim segment up front in exchange for running trains on the route. And in a statement to the Business Journal last month emailed before he abruptly resigned, then-authority Chief Executive Ian Choudri said, “We are exploring different strategies to connect the system to the L.A. basin faster, with a combination of interim Metrolink line upgrades and a dedicated high-speed rail tunnel.”
The idea is to upgrade the lines of the Metrolink regional rail system that already runs from Union Station to Palmdale to handle high-speed rail trains on an interim basis until funding for and construction of the tunnels through the San Gabriel Mountains can be completed.
