For California’s bullet train, progress is being made but its completion date remains a mystery

In California’s Central Valley, construction of the long overdue and over-budget high-speed rail line that may eventually shuttle passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours is underway, as KTLA saw firsthand during a recent visit.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority took reporter Chip Yost on a tour of the Hanford Viaduct. The viaduct is essentially a massive 6,300-foot-long land bridge that will one day, if everything goes as planned, have four lanes of high-speed rail track on it and a regional station where people can get on and off the train if they want to.

It should be finished sometime next year; multiple other structures along the route have already been completed. In total, 78 have been completed or are currently underway.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has repeatedly voiced his support for the work, stating in his 2019 State of the State address, “High-Speed Rail is much more than a train project. It’s about economic transformation. It’s about unlocking the enormous potential of the [Central] Valley.”

Financial data released in January showed that the construction project has been a major boon to the Valley. Its produced $18 billion in economic output and $7 billion in labor income and construction jobs in the Central Valley grew from 2,500 in 2018 to to 12,200 in 2023.

Recent polling by UC Berkeley found that the majority of Californians still support funding the high-speed rail project, even as costs grow and the timeline shifts.

Critics, however, like California State Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-San Diego), think the project should be stopped in its tracks.

“I think this is going to be one of the most historical government boondoggles ever in the United States of America,” Jones said.

The project was approved by California voters in 2008, when the first phase, from San Francisco to Los Angeles and Anaheim, was aggressively planned to be up and running by 2020, at a cost of about $33 billion.

Now in 2024, the full length is nowhere close to being done, and the estimated cost to complete it has ballooned to as high as $128 billion, which is around $100 billion more than what the California High-Speed Rail Authority has budgeted to spend.

The Authority cites inflation and uncertainties involving the scope of the project, the design, land acquisition, utility relocation, permits and legal challenges as reasons for the delayed timeline and growing costs.

Because funding for the entire project remains an uncertainty, a decision was made to spend the state and federal money the Authority does have, and some that officials hope to get in the near future, on completing a much shorter 171-mile section of the project from Merced to Bakersfield, called the “Initial Operating Segment.”

The area currently has passenger rail service via Amtrak’s San Joaquins line, but that trip takes about three hours and offers only seven roundtrips per day. Those trains also share tracks with freight trains, which often leads to delays and slowdowns.

If and when it’s completed, the Initial Operating Segment would whisk riders at speeds of up to 220 mph along that same distance in half the time with 18 roundtrips per day on dedicated tracks, meaning no traffic congestion.

The Authority recently received a $3.1 billion infusion from the Biden Administration to help it reach that goal. Even so, it will still need to find around $5-7 billion more to do so. Officials say the project will need more assistance from the federal government to ensure its completion.

As for when the San Francisco and Los Angeles/Anaheim legs will be finished, nobody can say because, in addition to funding questions, there are unanswered engineering questions as well.

“In total, in Southern California, we have about 40 miles of tunneling to do, and we haven’t done the geotechnical work yet to know what we’re dealing with,” said Jim Patrick, Southern California Director of Communications for the California High-Speed Rail Authority. “So it could go really well, and it could go not so well. And that’s definitely the biggest question mark we face from an engineering standpoint.”

The Authority does say that the tedious task of achieving environmental clearance of “Phase One” is almost entirely complete, with 422 miles already cleared. Officials say the final leg between Palmdale and Burbank, which stands in the way of the Bay Area to L.A. promise, should get environmentally cleared this year.

The 33-mile Los Angeles-to-Anaheim segment, considered to be one of the most complicated and complex along the system, could be cleared by 2025.

If and when the complete Phase One section from San Francisco to Los Angeles and Anaheim is ever completed, those 2008 voters were also told connections to Sacramento, the Inland Empire, and San Diego could follow.

Sacramento to San Diego would be part of the Authority’s “Phase Two” of the system, although an exact timeline for that is even further in the distance.

Officials from the Authority stress that this is the most ambitious infrastructure project in the state’s history and California is the first in the nation to try and make true high-speed rail work.

They also say a lot has been learned from the massive undertaking and its stumbles along the way. For example, current cost estimates now account for inflation and are intentionally given a wide range to account for unexpected variables.

But Brian Kelly, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, has repeatedly said that the biggest factor determining the project’s cost is time. The longer it takes to build, the more expensive it will be.