California express transportation cost billions — and it’s almost done
Express trains used to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. But they will never drive a car. There is a reason for that.
This is what California bullet trains should look like, according to a mockup from 2015. Almost none of this has been achieved so far.
Photo: AP
French railway engineers SNCF threw in the towel. They came to California to help the world’s fifth largest economy build a high-speed railroad.
The project seemed feasible, as there were no insurmountable obstacles to communication between Los Angeles and San Francisco. On the contrary: the “bullet train” can be steered along the highway and the travel time is reduced to two hours and forty minutes – half the distance that the car can cover in the best case.
For the French engineers, based on their experience with the TGV, it was clear: the route should be determined as direct as possible. Terminals had to go to downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco to take advantage of the passenger potential.
But what was possible in Europe, Japan and China quickly became a matter of growing frustration in California. From the very beginning, the project was launched on the basis of the principle of least resistance – and therefore less useful. Instead of building in the two main gatherings, dozens of bridges and tunnels were built first in the agricultural area of the Central Valley. They quickly used the fledgling capital, but had not yet produced a navigable kilometer.
Beautiful bridges for a lot of money: a section of the high-speed line in Fresno.
Photo: PD
French engineers predicted a fiasco in 2008. They left California and helped Morocco build a high-speed railroad. In 2018 it was commissioned.
There were always doubts about the project. But when the newly elected governor in 2019, Gavin Newsom raised serious doubts about the possibility of financing the project in his inaugural address, the political momentum was lost. More and more Democrats in Parliament distanced themselves.
Despite constantly building bridges and constructing roads between Bakersfield and Modesto, three former project managers now admit failure is unavoidable.
“I was completely naive when I took on the project,” says Michael Tenenbaum, a former Wall Street banker. California bureaucracy is known to be complex and unpredictable, but according to Tenenbaum it’s just a handicap.
Cow trade is expensive
The bargaining with the cows, through which special territorial orders were paid, was all the more heavier. In Los Angeles, for example, a very wealthy Democrat and real estate partisan shark was forced to build a sideline in the Mojave Desert, where speculative developments were planned. This required an additional 40 miles of desert rail and made the project 16 percent more expensive.
Local politicians in San Jose also wanted to drive a special train. This lateral line, however, required the construction of tunnels of approximately 60 kilometers in length without securing funding.
Tenenbaum told the New York Times that the situation today is “utterly ridiculous,” and it’s a “outrageous waste.” Quentin Cobb, another project manager, says the project would be up and running today without the permanent cow trade. “But it is no longer possible like this. The project is lost.”
No money from the government
When voters approved the project in 2008, the budget was $33 billion. Commissioning has been promised for 2020. The cost is now $113 billion and the construction plan is not entirely clear. Calculations show that if the current pace of construction continues, the first train of this century will not run.
The administration of President Joe Biden recently made it clear that the situation is hopeless. Of the $1 trillion infrastructure package, it freed up $25 million for the “bullet train.” This means that the work can be done for about two weeks.
The setback is a symptom of a country that has neglected railways to the point that it is no longer financially feasible to make passenger railways a viable alternative to road and air transportation. Rail freight is working and thriving, but at the expense of employees with extremely long and erratic working hours.
Many other railway projects are on the verge of collapse
Even private commuter trains are going through hard times in the United States. An express train connecting the Texas metropolitan areas of Dallas and Houston is on edge after landowners went to court en masse over land expropriations and the administration was recently fired. Projects in Florida and the Northwest also remained in the planning stage.
The failure in California is not really surprising. The Golden State is still a motor state with well-developed highways and highway patrols often generously interpreting speed limits. Even record petrol prices have not discouraged the desire to drive.
The project may have been planned too grandly, says Dan Richard, the longest-serving project manager. Instead of connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, building the railroad clustered between Los Angeles and San Diego, for example, would have made more sense. But this train also left.
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