Nearly two decades after California voters first approved a bond measure to launch a high-speed passenger rail system, the project remains a lightning rod for infrastructure debate, balancing its vision as a transformative clean energy project against a history of ballooning costs, political conflict, and significant execution challenges.
The origins of the project trace back to 1979 when Gov. Jerry Brown first proposed a bullet train. In 1996, the state legislature passed the High-Speed Rail Act, officially creating the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
Voters approved Proposition 1A in 2008, allocating $9.95 billion for the initial planning and construction of a system intended to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours. It was estimated to cost $33 billion then with a projected completion date of 2020. The ballot measure itself
The project has faced considerable headwinds, with
"The project was controversial politically, which was always a problem," said Dan Richard, who was chair of the CAHSR board from 2011 to 2019, during Brown's second run as governor.
His first task as board chair was to get the Legislature to approve execution of the bond measure — and that took eight or nine months, Richard said.
Analysts and critics have often pointed to the decision to begin construction in the
"There were things we could have done differently in the initiation of the project and things we could have done differently in the execution of the project," Richard said, citing a lack of serious planning early on. "The High-Speed Rail Authority was created in 1996 and they dinked around doing studies and junkets... I think part of the problem is that no one really took it seriously enough initially."
After voters approved the bond measure, there was just an assumption that everyone would get the concept of high speed rail and support it, he said.
The concept of high-speed rail as a standalone project wasn't consistent with the idea of creating a project that would be the backbone for modernizing the entire rail system, he said. The current iteration involves connecting the bullet train line to the commuter train lines of Caltrain in the San Francisco Bay Area and Metrolink in Southern California, which critics say doesn't match with the concept of high speed rail.
Critics like Marc Joffe, an adjunct fellow with the California Policy Center, argue travel times and station locations dictated by Proposition 1A precluded more efficient routes.
"It's absurd that it took 20 years to get environmental approvals," said Ezra Silk, political director of the U.S. High Speed Rail Coalition, citing "the sheer volume" of paperwork, red tape and litigation.
While the project now
"There's never been a pathway to fund even the original $30 billion... $1 billion a year is clearly not enough for a $150 billion project," said Eric Goldwyn, program director at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, who co-authored
How it all began
Barack Obama became president in
"Obama declared he wanted 87% of Americans to be able to travel on high speed rail," Richard said. His vision was to create a modern version of Eisenhower's Interstate highways, but at that point high-speed rail became political.
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1956, to improve national defense, transport commerce, and connect major cities via unified, high-speed, limited-access roads.
An Interstate system-level federal program is "needed to fix the capacity crunch that the whole transportation system is facing," Silk said. "The airports are overloaded. We are not going to be able to expand those systems. If we built more lanes into the interstate highway system, it just draws more traffic. We haven't built a new international airport in this country in many years."
A rail system would not need to be expanded, because the system could keep adding trains to the schedule and make trains longer, forever growing capacity, he said. He noted Japan's high-speed rail system has trains running every five minutes.
"It would make the country more dynamic and catapult us forward," Silk said. "Congestion is creating a huge burden on the economy with people idling in traffic."
It was unfortunate that Obama's vision drew so much opposition, "because there had been many members of Congress and the California legislature who were supportive of high speed rail," Richard said. "We lost all of the Republican support we had."
Funding volatility
The high-speed rail project's reliance on fluctuating revenues has historically complicated long-term planning.
The problem has always been the money, Goldwyn said.
While a
"Private investors need to get paid back at some point," he said, noting the project is years away from being operational.
The state's decision to dedicate $1 billion a year is a positive move, but it doesn't close the funding gap, Goldwyn said. "This is a project they estimate at $150 billion. So $1 billion a year is clearly not enough."
Shifting political winds at the federal and state level have also created roadblocks.
"California's high‑speed rail project has never been fully funded from the start, and with federal support now below 10 percent, the state's action to secure $1 billion per year in Cap‑and‑Invest funding through 2045 has provided the stability needed to finish Merced to Bakersfield, the backbone of a statewide system connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles," said Micah Flores, a CAHSR spokesman.
"That foundation has allowed the Authority to maintain steady construction progress, begin laying high‑speed rail track later this year, and launch a partnership with a world‑class consortium to evaluate privately financed expansion and long‑term commercialization," Flores said.
"We had federal funds [in 2016], but then they were put on hold by President Donald Trump when he was in office the first time," Richard said. "Congress didn't appropriate more money. Then the Legislature provided cap-and-trade, but there was no floor to it, so it was dependent on the vagaries of the carbon market. It was just impossible to have serious planning with so much variability in the funding stream."
The original concept for California's high-speed rail was that the federal government would pay a third of the cost, the state would pay a third and a third would come from the private sector.
"Since there is no existing base of high-speed rail in America, like there is in Europe, there was no way for private equity to evaluate the risk," Richard said. "It became our business plan that the government needed to put a leg of high-speed rail into operation and develop some ridership. The government's role was to de-risk the project, so private money could come in."
He noted that when Japan built the first high-speed rail line ahead of the 1964 Olympics, they didn't auction it off to private investors until the 1980s — with years of hard data about ridership. "If you go to private equity on Day 1, you get one value and if you auction it off with stable ridership, you get another value. We wanted the public to get its best return on investment."
Japan today has a network of high-speed rail that spans the country, Richard said.
California's high-speed rail project has been a magnet for litigation, with environmental reviews and land acquisition efforts — particularly in the Central Valley — driving up costs and causing significant delays.
Supporters say the project has entered a new chapter under the leadership of CEO Ian Choudri, who took the helm in 2024 with a mandate to stabilize the project.
"When I look back on my time, there are things I wish I had done differently or anticipated — there are a lot of consultants who chew up a lot of money," Richard said. "I would say the new CEO has done a really good job of paring that back. I think during my time we never really had the engineering project development expertise we needed to manage the contractors."
Contractors are really good at exploiting loopholes, Richard said.
The current strategy focuses on "right-sizing" the system, managing contractor performance more effectively, and aggressively pursuing public-private partnerships to monetize assets like fiber optics and ancillary developments along the rail corridor, according to authority leaders.
The authority maintains that
"I think once Americans have experienced this, it will change the dynamics of public finance," Richard said.
Despite the push for progress, the project continues to face sharp scrutiny.
Critics say the project is over budget and behind schedule, and question whether it can ever achieve its original promise of connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in under three hours.
"One major issue is that certain decisions were locked in the language of Proposition 1A. For example, it set travel times and dictated station locations," Joffe said.
This precluded the more efficient approach of routing along Interstate 5, instead of through the urban centers of the Central Valley and potentially choosing slower speeds, Joffe said.
"Dropping down from 220mph to 186mph is technically illegal because we wrote the two hour and 40 minute travel time into the state constitution," he said.
In this vein, Joffe said, he is co-sponsoring a change.org petition with HSR advocates to bring the issue back to the ballot in 2028.
"We shouldn't continue to have this dishonest situation where we are pretending to build a viable investment when we aren't," Joffe said. "If voters want to double down and issue $100 billion in bonds to get it done, they should."
The solution is for voters to approve another bond measure, like they did in 2008, to insure stability for the project, he said.
The plan proposed by Joffe and two others would create a "framework for successful early segments to help generate less taxpayer-dependent funding for later extensions. It would also encourage corridor investment zones: voluntary, locally-partnered value-capture frameworks that coordinate California's existing infrastructure financing tools across major transportation corridors, not just individual stations or isolated local districts."
He contends the $1 billion a year guaranteed by the Legislature through 2040 is dependent on lawmakers making up the difference even in years when there is a budget shortfall.
"There are multiple problems with securitizing debt, because it's money the Legislature can end in the next fiscal crisis," Joffe said. "A bond buyer won't settle for a low interest rate with that kind of risk. Securitizing risky revenue isn't a recipe for good government finance."
He also doesn't think the deal with Plenary offsets government risk or offers a real solution to get the next phase done.
"The idea that a private company would put real skin in the game is really hard to believe, because this project has not been working out," Joffe said. "They will only do that if there is taxpayer investment at the end."
Silk says the project makes sense, because the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco corridor is one of the busiest in the nation.
"They have overcome a billion obstacles at this point," Silk said. "They are a long way into construction and beginning to lay tracks in the next few months and the electrical system by the end of the year.
"It's insanely difficult to do these projects, but none of that is a reason to give up," Silk said.
Caitlin Devitt contributed to this article.
