![]() ![]() The HSRA estimated that spending would have to be pumped up ninefold, to $27 million per day, to meet its deadlines. ![]() According to a Los Angeles Times report in August of 2018, the project consumed $3.1 million per day over the previous year. Even accounting for inflation-$33 billion in 2008 is equivalent to about $44 billion in 2022-costs of the high speed rail project have bloated beyond recognition. Bakersfield high speed rail route full#When voters went to the polls in 2008 to approve the High Speed Rail Bond Measure, the HSRA set the full cost of the North-South line at $33 billion. The year before that, in a draft that came out just weeks before the pandemic hit, the HSRA projected a price tag of $80.3 billion. That plan came less than a year after the previous draft, which itself had been delayed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, put the cost at an even $100 billion. As recently as February 2022, the California High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA)-the agency created by the legislature in 1996 to oversee the high speed rail project-published a business plan that showed the total cost coming in at $105 billion. That $9 billion is but a tiny fraction of the cash it will take to complete the project. The Fresno groundbreaking did not take place until more than six years after voters approved Proposition 1A in 2008, a measure that authorized the state to issue $9.95 billion in bonds, $9 billion of which was earmarked for construction of the system connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco. In other words, California is not Japan-the pace of the state’s high speed rail project has been excruciating. Price Tag Now Tops $100 Billion and Climbing The Los Angeles-San Francisco train is now, perhaps dubiously, projected to start carrying passengers in 2033. A 171-mile high speed rail line running from Bakersfield to Merced is currently expected to go operational in 2028 or 2029. Those deadlines have since been pushed back considerably. Four years later, the entire “Phase One” of California high speed rail was supposed to be complete, connecting San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center (now called Salesforce Transit Center) with Union Station in Los Angeles in a trip of only two hours and 40 minutes. The first segment of California high speed rail infrastructure, a track that would run from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, was scheduled to run its first trains in 2025, a full decade after the ceremonial groundbreaking. Japan by then had nine shinkansen lines (with more in the works), making travel from almost any point within that country to any other quick and efficient. 6, 2015, Brown-then four years into his second turn in the governor’s mansion- presided over a ceremony in Fresno to break ground on the first segment of high speed rail track in California, and for that matter, anywhere in the United States. The project was trashed before the end of 1984.īut nearly four decades later, the California dream of high speed rail lives on. The project was beset by controversy from the outset, and AHSRC failed to raise any more than half of the $50 million it needed to complete planning for the bullet train. The entire project was supposed to cost $3.1 billion, with funds from a private company, the American High Speed Rail Corporation (AHSRC), providing the balance. On an Amtrak, the commute runs a little short of three hours. ![]() Jerry Brown signed AB 3647, intended to raise $1.25 billion in bond issues to fund a high speed train that would make the trip from Los Angeles to San Diego in 59 minutes. In California, the effort to create a high speed rail system has been grinding away for at least 40 years. 4 Decades of California High Speed Rail Dreaming Ground was finally broken in 1959, and a mere five years later the first Hikari Shinkansen arrived. Japan had been planning to create a high-speed rail system since the 1930s, even before the country launched the war that became World War II. The era of high speed rail travel had begun. The trains were the Hikari Shinkansen-bullet trains. Each train cut that journey almost in half, arriving in just four hours, precisely on schedule. The trip by rail between the two metropolises had until that day consumed a grueling seven hours. On October 1, two trains pulled into stations in Japan’s two largest cities-Tokyo and Osaka. The world's first high speed rail project was unveiled in 1964, as Japan was reentering the world after the U.S occupation that followed the Second World War. High speed rail has yet to come to California, despite decades of effort. ![]()
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