ArcaMax

We're a long way from the transcontinental railroad.

We built the iconic American infrastructure project in the 1860s in about six years, putting down 1,776 miles of track and blasting 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Granted, working conditions back then didn't exactly meet OSHA standards. Yet, if today's rules and practices applied, the project would have been stalled for years somewhere outside Sacramento, California, caught up in endless environmental lawsuits.

The Golden State's emblematic, modern infrastructure project was supposed to be a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Don't expect, though, to see the equivalent of the Golden Spike any time soon, or perhaps ever.

The high-speed rail project has been agonizingly slow. After about 15 years of grinding delay and cost overruns, not one piece of track has been laid, a record of futility hard to match. California high-speed rail is the West Coast's answer to Boston's notorious Big Dig that took about a decade longer to build than anticipated at a much greater cost, although it was eventually completed.

Now, the Trump administration is cutting off $4 billion in federal funds for the project, arguing that it doesn't want to pour any more money into a boondoggle.

The imagined bullet train was always a misfire. The idea of high-speed rail has a nearly erotic appeal to progressives, who love communal trains over individualized autos and think cars are destroying the planet whereas trains can save it. High-speed rail is to transit what windmills are to energy -- an environmentally correct, futuristic technology that will always under-deliver.

California voters passed Proposition 1A getting the ball -- if not any actual trains -- rolling in 2008. The project was supposed to cost $33 billion and connect L.A. and San Francisco.

What could go wrong? Well, everything. Bad decisions about where to build the tracks, complacent contractors, environmental and union rules -- you name it.

The initial, scaled-back line is now supposed to be completed by 2033, and even that is optimistic. Elon Musk might put a man on Mars before California Gov. Gavin Newsom or one of his successors manages to get even a much less ambitious high-speed rail system underway.

The current focus is a line between Merced (pop. 93,000) and Bakersfield (413,000). No offense to the good people of either of these places, but these aren't major metropolises. In Northeast terms, this is less a rail connection between New York City and Washington, D.C., and more a connection between Newark, New Jersey, and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Passenger estimates for the California system have always been absurd. The fantasy is that ridership will be double what it is now is in the Northeast corridor. But as Marc Joffe of the California Policy Center points out, population is much denser near Northeast stations, it's easier to get around cities in the Northeast on the way to or from the train, and a rail culture is much more embedded in the Northeast than car-centric California.

As for reducing greenhouse emissions, the long-running project is itself a significant source of emissions, and the benefit of fewer drivers in cars will be vitiated by the fact that more and more people in California will be driving electric vehicles.

The original estimated $33 billion cost is now $35 billion for just the scaled-back line and more than $100 billion and counting for the whole shebang. There is no reason that the feds should pour good money after bad supporting a preposterous project that doesn't have any national significance. Newsom -- too embarrassed to admit failure or too drunk on visions of European-style rail -- remains fully committed.

In a statement, he said Trump's defunding decision is a "gift to China," as if Beijing cares whether people get to Bakersfield by car, plane or high-speed rail.

The project has already been a distressing object lesson in California's inability to build anything of consequence, and there's more where that came from.

========

(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2025 by King Features Syndicate