California high-speed rail price tag jumps to $231B, nearly 7x 2008 estimate

https://kmph.com/news/local/california-high-speed-rail-price-tag-jumps-to-231b-nearly-seven-times-2008-estimate

by fortran77 • 3 months ago

63 111 3 months ago

polar8• 3 months ago

Don't forget the original $33B was for the entire line, not just Merced to Bakersfield.

Taikonerd• 3 months ago

I'm very in favor of high-speed rail, in general. But I remember when the price tag had jumped to "only" $100B, and that was already considered a scandal.

At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."

baggy_trough2• 3 months ago

The state has to consider whether it is capable of doing this at all (obviously, it isn't).

StableAlkyne• 3 months ago

The state is capable, it is just unwilling to leverage its power to achieve a meaningful outcome. This is relatively normal across the country; NIMBYs and small landowners have outsized influence and ability to delay.

China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.

European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.

cft• 3 months ago

For comparison, the construction cost of AlBoraq 200mph bullet train in Morroco is $5.3–5.7 billion in today's dollars. The line length is 200 miles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Boraq

bluGill3• 3 months ago

I doubt those will fix the issues.

A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.

Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)

CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.

johnea4• 3 months ago

Your understanding of how the route affects the price is misguided.

It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.

Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.

nradov6• 3 months ago

Land acquisition costs are one issue. The California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) is another. While well intentioned, it allows almost anyone to tie up any development project in court indefinitely based on trivial concerns. If we want to have a functioning industrial economy then we're going to have to scale back CEQA and accept a certain amount of environmental damage.

johnea4• 3 months ago

Or, maybe, at some point, the state has to say No, to real estate mafia insider trading?

Oh, never mind, that's obviously not going to happen...

itopaloglu835• 3 months ago

And that’s the real issue. It’s a continuous rent seeking behavior and resource extraction from masses to a limited number of individuals.

The Why Nations Fail book pointed out this exact issue that institutions that doesn’t serve the people’s interests is the main culprit.

cbdevidal• 3 months ago

I’ve heard a better idea.

“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland

gedy• 3 months ago

I am too, but folks have to realize this is handout to big construction and construction unions, it's not to solve problem of high speed travel between SF and LA. While that has always been a thing in public works, unfortunately in recent decades in the US we've gotten to point where it doesn't really matter if the project makes sense or is ever completed. It's a shame.

johnea4• 3 months ago

It should also be noted that the original route was from:

San Diego to San Fransisco

The state representative from San Diego was the original proposer of the high speed rail (after returning from Japan of course).

Once the crime and graft roulette wheel went into action, San Diego was almost immediately removed from "the route".

nradov6• 3 months ago

The California High Speed Rail Authority just posted about how many "good-paying jobs" they created, as if that's the goal rather than building a functioning railroad. Disgusting.

https://x.com/CaHSRA/status/2040474563847278877

grebc• 3 months ago

Someone mentioned sunk costs a couple of days ago, and here’s a glaringly stupid example but watch everyone justify the price tag with all sorts of reasons.

danny_codes2• 3 months ago

I don’t think the tech or the route is remotely the problem. This is purely a matter of political will.

Not sure if you’ve read Abundance. But the basic idea is that rich, developed countries have onerous processes in place to satisfy many needs, which is antithetical to building stuff.

For example, CA requires strict analysis and studies. CA has myriad legislation to protect private property. It has restrictions on what can be purchased, from whom, and from whence labor can be sourced. Together, this vast web of limitations makes big projects like HSR extremely expensive and unwieldy.

It’s not that the scope or ambition of the project is a problem in itself. It’s that the mega project comes along with many requirements aside from just building it.

Effectively, CA is working at cross-purpose.

The resolution is actually very simple. You just exempt your mega-project from all the legislation constraining it.

If CA wanted to they could simply change the law. Skip labor-sourcing laws, skip community feedback, skip permitting and approval (aside from safety), skip domestic parts requirements, and apply eminent domain with no feedback process.

We don’t do that for political reasons. This isn’t a technical problem

mcphage• 3 months ago

We don’t do that for political reasons.

We don't do that because of all the reasons those laws were put into place.

xracy• 3 months ago

I feel like we need to hold Gov't Contractors to higher standards.

Like half of these ballooning budgets are things that Private Businesses brag about on the other side. "I got a $200B Private contract with the CA Gov't." Is a big win for the company, and a big loss for the taxpayer. To some extent I think CA should be able to reclaim a large portion of their contract (in some way) because costs ballooned.

The same for Military contractors. There needs to be better enforcement of "this is the budget that you bid, we won't increase that, and you still have to deliver."

Imagine if companies ended up having to sell part of their company to the gov't if they failed to deliver their contract.

fastball• 3 months ago

A truly unbelievable amount of grift and inefficiency.

inglor_cz2• 3 months ago

That is absolutely fascinating.

Spain has so far spent about 60 billion Eur on its (much more extensive) HSR network. It has a lot of harsh terrain as well, crossing mountains and semi-deserts.

There are functional HSRs in Morocco and Uzbekistan, Egypt is building its first own HSR.

What's wrong with Californian governance?

raldi• 3 months ago

Can't blame unions, considering how easily Europe gets it done. Most likely issue is that in the US, every landowner and minor municipality is empowered to delay and obstruct these projects and thus milk them.

yonaguska• 3 months ago

unions in the US aren't necessarily even comparable to in EU.

TheGRS• 3 months ago

Yea I would definitely like to know what the response is to eminent domain in other countries where its working better. I've never been in that situation and I can totally understand the resistance to losing your property, but I can't see American's being particularly unique in that feeling. Maybe the laws are just more permissive in the US for contesting the government.

kristopolous2• 3 months ago

It's that foot dragging whiners have outsized power and can gum up any project they want in the courts and tack on higher price tags

All you need is a few people who don't like it for any reason whatsoever and the other 99.99% of people who want it ... They no longer get a voice.

Only the blockers, the nimbys, the ideological naysayers, they get all the power - the podium, the press, and the ear of the court.

The yes people have effectively Zero political power

That's the American difference: we grant whiners sainthood

33MHz-i486• 3 months ago

I recall a lot of the original funding (Billions of dollars) was spent on 3rd party consultants to run various multi-year long review processes (environmental, legal compliance, eminent domain, community agreements etc.)

porphyra2• 3 months ago

Actually, the Spanish HSR builders have been involved with the project.

[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/europe8an-gian8t-be...

Jensson2• 3 months ago

That is only a $1.2bn deal and shared with another firm. Having different contractors from all over the world do different little parts isn't a good way to reduce costs.

jackp96• 3 months ago

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tackle this specific example (along with others) in their book Abundance that came out last year. It's a pretty easy read, and a really interesting examination of why projects like this struggle.

But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).

Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.

But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.

BrenBarn2• 3 months ago

Ironically it is largely because of private actors (those NIMBYs) that such things wind up being slow and expensive.

insane_dreamer• 3 months ago

overregulation

Europe and Japan are much more regulated than the US, and yet, they build rail just fine over there.

johnea4• 3 months ago

If the rail is just routed through minority neighborhoods, I'm sure eminent domain can be arranged...

NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark sarcasm"

This rail would displace a huge amount of air travel, thus, it's not "viable" in terms of airline industry losses...

NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark reality"

porphyra2• 3 months ago

$231 B can subsidize over 400 years of free air travel between LA and SF (assuming $200 per round trip and 2.7 million flights per year [1]).

The hope is that the high speed rail would allow way more trips between the two cities, as well as the central valley cities in between, bolstering the economy, compared to the current amount of flights. I will keep my fingers crossed for the next 30 years.

[1] https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...

dangus6• 3 months ago

While I think the project should cost less money, thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope.

The $20 I spend on feeding myself a healthy dinner could buy 10 sundaes at McDonald's, that doesn't mean I should eat 10 sundaes.

Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.

xnx9• 3 months ago

thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope

I agree. Flights would also be much faster and more flexible.

xnx9• 3 months ago

Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.

Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.

joegibbs• 3 months ago

They’d probably get some good results if they spent $100 billion on coming up with more fuel-efficient ways of flying and still have enough left over for 200 years of flights

pasttense01• 3 months ago

"Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit."

It's a question of what gets the most bang for the buck. Suppose you spent $230 billion on replacing fossil fuel with renewables for electricity generation, on switching to EVs from gasoline powered cars, on insulating houses? I think you get a lot more bang for the buck from these or lots of other activities.

itopaloglu835• 3 months ago

I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.

In the end we’re working for creating a form of transportation that could move people from point A to point B. However, everything from land use to infrastructure development costs a lot of money and nobody has any reason to lower their prices either.

I bet a brand new fully sustainable city could be created with that amount of money. But nimby will make it impossible, because (I believe) it’s about resource extraction and not service delivery.

SilverElfin3• 3 months ago

I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.

Don’t forget unions. The big large union networks (like SEIU, teachers unions, etc) corrupt politics but also benefit from that corruption.

aeternum2• 3 months ago

Cancel it and sell what is built to the highest bidder, you can be assured that some company will buy it and complete it.

xnx9• 3 months ago

you can be assured that some company will buy it and complete it

I don't think any profit-driven company would touch this. It's a massive money loser.

aeternum2• 3 months ago

The value of that continuous tract of land along California could easily make all the money back.

silotis• 3 months ago

At this point it's extremely unlikely the needed funds will be secured for the foreseeable future. Even if the federal government were willing to contribute, spending $100+ billion of federal tax money on a regional rail project would be a hard sell to say the least.

Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.

dangus6• 3 months ago

The Big Dig in Boston cost almost $30 billion in inflation-adjusted money and had nowhere near the impact on the region as a high speed rail system would have in California.

It basically had zero impact outside of the City of Boston.

(And it should have been spent on demolishing that highway, not burying it and not replacing it, then expanding regional rail and transit connectivity in the Boston metropolitan area.)

Or perhaps we should bring up military spending: https://irancost.com/

tapoxi2• 3 months ago

Silver Line was part of the Big Dig, but I agree the North/South Rail Link should have been part of it. Having no direct connection between North Station and South Station is stupid.

But you can't just get rid of 93

dekhn• 3 months ago

I wish that they had done just San Jose to Burbank with a couple stops on the west side of the central valley (starting building from both directions at the same time). I think that was the maximum achievable initial goal.

htx80nerd• 3 months ago

Asking $200+ billion AND still need private investors.

Is the rail made out of gold?

Under current projections, assuming funding and construction proceed as planned, service between San Francisco and Bakersfield could begin around 2033, while the full Los Angeles to San Francisco connection could extend to 2040.

Brilliant stuff.

I predict the rail will never happen and only more and more money going "somewhere".

thrownaway561• 3 months ago

They need to just accept their lost and cancel the project. I think the people of CA have given this enough money and time. It's become a joke and nothing more than a giant way for they governor to launder money. Looking at you NEWSCUM.

xnx9• 3 months ago

The purpose of large rail projects is to take public money and give it to engineering firms, construction companies, consultants, and politicians. In no scenario does this project even make the top 10 in a list of ways to transport people between these locations. It would be cheaper to give away 5 million cars!

mitthrowaway2• 3 months ago

Do the 5 million cars come with a free highway?

xnx9• 3 months ago

Yes, and it's already built!

jmward012• 3 months ago

Other countries do this just fine and we can easily build freeways and highways. This is because of intentional sabotage. US politics are actively harming citizens by sabotaging projects to 'prove how bad x is' when in reality x is the right answer if you don't have active bad actors.

colechristensen• 3 months ago

To be fair our interstate highways were built many decades ago by mostly just disregarding poor neighborhoods and taking land from them indescriminately.

jmward012• 3 months ago

We do build new ones (I26 is happening now) and that doesn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars. We can and have built big projects. We can and will build bigger ones. This is just sabotage at every possible chance. I have seen this my whole life. We are so far behind on solar adoption because of groups actively making things worse, often at a real cost to the group, just to make it look like actual good ideas are bad ones. Our politics are toxic and the core problem here, not the idea or the technology. This is toxic sabotage politics where it is better to break things than to let the other side have a good idea.

briandw• 3 months ago

You are claiming that this is anti train and pro car conspiracy. Counter ponint : the SF Bay_Bridge cost 6.5 Billion, but was originally budgeted at 200 Million.

The US can't build anything efficiently. It's due to the massive mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense, environmental review, permitting and NIMBY lawsuits.

The real conspiracy is that "they" never wanted a train, "they" wanted an endless jobs project.

nradov6• 3 months ago

The SF Bay Bridge cost $6.5B, and somehow still didn't include a bike lane.

kristopolous2• 3 months ago

It's mostly that we allow whiners to control the project and that's literally it.

This is the only actual difference between the US and other places

Take Los Angeles, the Santa Monica train slows down around a stop called farmdale because some whiner ran a bogus fear mongering campaign in 2011. I was at those meetings nobody liked this guy.

15 years later every trip, every day is still delayed because of this one man's stupid bitchfest

kurthr• 3 months ago

In Japan the cost of building the tunnels through mountains and undersea for Shinkansen ranges from $20-100M/km. Since there's no default ownership of subsurface land rights in CA it would be cheaper and faster to dig tunnels than pay for the land rights and environmental impacts.

For the $231B you ought to be able to get 2-3000 miles of tunnel done (3x what is proposed on the surface). Of course the stations are still a huge cost, because those have to be above ground, but you could choose where to put them. The bridges and aqueducts that have been built so far (Bakersfield to Merced) are intentionally where land costs are low and no one will ride them.

I agree, this isn't about figuring out how to build high-speed rail for riders. This is about figuring out how to extract maximum funds from tax/rate payers. It's just like PG&E. I'd go as far as to say that all the consultants and construction companies that have been paid should be banned from future public infrastructure builds unless the money spent is paid back.

And I WANT highspeed rail.

ZeWaka• 3 months ago

Seems like California needs to figure out how to use Eminent Domain.

dmix2• 3 months ago

They already acquired 99% of the land needed to the line.

havaloc• 3 months ago

Maybe California should ask Brightline to take a look at it. They've had some pretty good success in Florida, although it's a totally different model.

xnx9• 3 months ago

Brightline is going bankrupt: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...

SilverElfin3• 3 months ago

Corruption and waste. The real problem is that the quality of people in public office and appointed by them cannot responsibly manage these amounts of money. But also that the incentives are all broken.

California isn’t the only state with this problem though. Oregon and Washington and New York are just as bad. And the big cities in these states have the same problems at the city level.

How long can they go before they can no longer raise debt to do things?

givemeethekeys• 3 months ago

We need a proposition to cancel the project.

WalterBright5• 3 months ago

Musk could probably do it for $3 billion.

ericmay• 3 months ago

This is awful and perhaps what is most awful is that this is the headline folks see, then they have a gut-reaction that because this project is so fucked up that all transit projects must be like this. And of course, there's the fun fact that many highway and road construction projects come in way over budget too.

If you don't live in California, the lesson to take away here is to figure out what the transportation departments and highway lobby did to secure the space needed for highways, and copy those tactics, not to look at California's failure and believe that extrapolates to your state or area.

In Central Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to fund bus transit and dedicated lanes in high-density corridors in Columbus. Now the project is already being set back perhaps as long as a year and a half, because the Ohio Department of Transportation is concerned car traffic may be negatively affected and wants a new traffic study. Huge waste of time, the exact kind of thing you would have wanted a DOGE in its most idealized form to nuke. You have to imagine these kinds of tactics x1000 because once California and others see the success of rail the jobs programs that are most state DOTs are going to be in serious trouble.

We'll get there, it's just going to be a long battle against entrenched lobbying and special interest groups (highway departments, construction companies, auto manufacturers, &c.) which need to profit off of your requirement to have a car to participate in society.

By the way, I'm not "against" cars or anything. Have one and love it. But the primary mode of transportation in our more dense areas has to change.

softwaredoug• 3 months ago

Meanwhile private rail is connecting cities in Florida. Somehow with less fuss.

Something about blue states make progress on basic things costly, time consuming, and difficult. Every stakeholder needs their say. Any NIMBY can veto. The loudest, most obnoxious snowflakes dominate public comment. And officials don’t tell them to STFU.

And I don’t see a lot of appetite for soul searching in these states. Just “let’s raise taxes”

You don’t have to convince me we have a broken society where the oligarchs have too much power+wealth. But I’m also not willing to pay more taxes without blue states removing veto points on these projects so can’t easily be derailed by every dumb special interest.

We’re all paying more so loudest amongst can derail and shape progress on important issues.

xnx9• 3 months ago

Meanwhile private rail is connecting cities in Florida. Somehow with less fuss.

I wouldn't cite that as a success story, Brightline is going bankrupt: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...

dmitrygr• 3 months ago

Make corruption, appearance of corruption, or anything that looks like it might possibly look like corruption (including having ever had lunch with someone who knows someone who has heard of someone whom you pick as a contractor) at minimum a lifetime-in-jail offense and watch the prices and timelines melt.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

I have worked on CAHSR and I can tell you that some of the extra expense is that State of CA procurement rules are highly complex and cause a great deal of added expense. Bureaucracy creates added costs.

dashdoesdata• 3 months ago

Sadly, the economics of this will never work out.

I ride BART and Caltrain multiple times a week. Trains are delightful. And so are planes.

It typically costs about $100, and takes an hour to fly from SF to LA. The train will be slower and almost certainly more expensive. Where is the benefit?

Long distance trains work in Europe because they are supported by a rich network of public transit options stemming from city centers, and a population that uses transit frequently.

But California public transit is a mess. When you rock up at LA Union Central and want to get out to say, Newport Beach, it's another three hours of navigating buses and the metrolink.

The money would have been far better spent integrating agencies and building out high speed rail in our urban areas. BART should be running out to Sacto, Stockton, Silicon Valley, and Marin. Requisition the Amtrak line and build a highspeed rail from San Diego to Santa Barbara - now that'd be something.

danny_codes2• 3 months ago

This HSR line makes a good deal of sense if it could be built. Your analysis of flying is wildly incorrect. The train will be faster door to door than the average flight.

But the main benefit will come from massive secondary economic growth. Cities along the line will experience dramatic increases in demand and economic activity. Cities at the terminus will have a massively increased share of workers in the commute threshold.

Further, the HSR line serves as a backbone for future lines, tying the state together.

The plan is very good on paper. It’s getting creamed in implementation because CA is not politically aligned on this project. Half the state doesn’t want it to succeed at all.

ibejoeb• 3 months ago

Isn't Artemis weighing in at somewhere about $100B?

satisfice• 3 months ago

They should investigate alternatives to solid gold carriages. Gold is not only expensive, it’s very heavy, requiring much more energy to operate. It also has less tensile strength and its way too ductile compared to aluminum.

I’m not a railway engineer, but encrusting the tracks with “pillow cut” diamonds from “actual pirate hoards” seems like a security risk. And pirate hoards are only more rare over time.

atmavatar• 3 months ago

Is there a breakdown of the estimated costs anywhere?

I see a lot of speculation over how "it's expensive because of X" (e.g., unions, land owners, regulations, etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a detailed breakdown of the estimated costs which would support anyone's hypotheses as to why it's actually as expensive as it is.

For all I know, the high-speed rail project is going to cost $231B because it calls for using osmium rails in its tracks.

WalterBright5• 3 months ago

In Seattle, the money disappears and nobody is able to account for what happened to it:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

California high-speed rail price tag jumps to $231B, nearly 7x 2008 estimate

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