It’s not every day a state manages to burn through billions and still ask for more. But California’s high-speed rail project has always been exceptional in that way.
Last month, the federal government finally said enough, scrapping $4 billion in funding after years of missed deadlines, ballooning budgets and political theatrics. You’d think that would halt the train. Instead, the state celebrated by tweeting about construction jobs and posting photos of rebar.
Ten years ago, I did the math and showed that for the price of California’s high-speed rail project, we could fly every Californian roundtrip to Tokyo, buy them a bullet train ticket to Kyoto and put them up for two nights at the Ritz-Carlton. And we’d still have money left over for sushi.
A decade later, the bullet train still hasn’t arrived. But the fantasy rolls on, powered by taxpayer dollars and bureaucratic inertia.
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With the federal spigot finally turned off, the California High-Speed Rail Authority responded not with humility but with a victory lap: proudly tweeting that it had created "15,500 jobs" on what it still calls "America’s only high-speed rail project."
The image? A construction worker twisting rebar beside an American flag – an attempt to wrap a failed infrastructure project in patriotism. But no flag can cover what this really is: a taxpayer-funded monument to mismanagement.
The promise that voters approved in 2008 was clear: a 220 mph electric train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles for $33 billion. A transformative project that would rival the Shinkansen in Japan or the TGV in France. But since then, the cost has soared to $128 billion – and the finish line keeps receding into the future.
The real project today? A partial rail segment between Merced and Bakersfield, two cities that were never at the heart of the project’s original purpose. It’s like building an airport shuttle that runs between a cornfield and a rest stop. No one asked for it. No one will ride it.
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The High-Speed Rail Authority now leans hard on "job creation" as the justification. Of course it does. When a project stops making sense as transportation, "jobs" becomes the political life raft. But as Milton Friedman famously said, if you just want to create jobs, you could hand workers spoons instead of shovels.
Ten years later, the math still checks out. You could:
Fly every Californian – roughly 39 million people – roundtrip to Tokyo in coach: $1,200 per person
Add a roundtrip Shinkansen bullet train ticket to Kyoto: $200
Two nights at the Ritz-Carlton Kyoto: $1,400
Total: $2,800 per person × 39 million = $109 billion
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That’s still $19 billion cheaper than California’s train to nowhere. Or put differently: for what we’ve spent on a train no one can ride, we could have given every person in the state a literal journey of a lifetime.
And yet the project continues – because no one in Sacramento wants to be the one to stop it. Least of all, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who publicly "paused" the project in 2019, then quietly restarted it three years later.
He now appears to be auditioning for national office. But if he runs, this project will run with him. It should. It deserves his name: The Newsom Line. A monument to ambition without competence.