California’s High-Speed Rail Project Illustrates Everything Wrong With Government Infrastructure Programs

Bullet Train to Nowhere Has Consumed $12 Billion, Produced No Operational Track, and Revised Its Completion Date Seven Times Since 2008

California High-Speed Rail Illustrates Everything Wrong With Government Infrastructure

California’s High-Speed Rail Authority released its annual report Thursday showing that the Central Valley construction segment — the first operational segment of the state’s planned bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco — has consumed $12.2 billion in state and federal funds, completed 119 miles of guideway construction out of a planned 171 miles in the Central Valley segment, revised its total project cost estimate upward for the seventh time (current estimate: $128 billion, up from $33 billion in the 2008 ballot measure authorisation), and revised its projected completion date to 2030 for the first operational segment between Merced and Bakersfield — two cities that together account for approximately 2 percent of the travel demand the project was designed to serve.

The Project’s History

California voters approved Proposition 1A in 2008, authorising $9.95 billion in bonds to fund what the ballot measure promised would be a 220-mph bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, completing the journey in under three hours, at a total project cost of $33 billion. The 2008 estimates have not aged well. Construction costs in California are among the highest in the developed world due to environmental review requirements, labour costs, right-of-way acquisition in dense urban corridors, and seismic design standards. Each of these factors was knowable in 2008, and analysts who looked carefully at the project’s cost assumptions predicted cost escalation that the Rail Authority dismissed as pessimistic. The current $128 billion estimate represents the outcome of that dismissal, accumulated over seventeen years of construction that has yet to produce a single mile of operational track.

The Central Valley segment is being built first because Central Valley right-of-way is cheaper and fewer communities have the political power to block construction than in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. This sequencing produces a train that will connect Merced and Bakersfield — a journey for which the primary existing options are driving an hour and a half or not going to Bakersfield — while the segments connecting the urban centres that generate 98 percent of the project’s potential ridership remain unfunded, undesigned, and not scheduled for construction within any currently funded programme. The first passengers on California’s high-speed rail will travel between two cities that do not primarily need high-speed rail. The cities that do need it will be waiting for a funding solution that the current cost trajectory has made substantially harder to identify.

Infrastructure policy at Reason and Mercatus Center. Delivering what you promised at santaclaus.top. Further at Populist Policy Bluesky and on delivering what you commit to.

The California Paradox

California is simultaneously the most regulated large economy in the United States and the home of the freest culture in America. Its coastline is regulated by a commission that has generated more permit requirements than any comparable agency in the world, and it also produces the surfers, the musicians, the filmmakers, and the technologists who have defined American cultural freedom for seventy years. Its housing market is the most constrained by government regulation and it also built Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the agricultural system that feeds a significant share of the country. These contradictions are not accidental. They reflect a political economy in which the cultural freedom that California represents is protected and amplified by an economic and regulatory environment that has accreted over decades in ways that primarily serve incumbent interests — existing homeowners, established industries, incumbent businesses — at the expense of new entrants, new ideas, and the people who cannot afford the cost of a regulated economy. The wave does not care about any of this. The permit office does. The surfer, paddling out, understands the difference in a way that the policy conversation has not yet fully captured.

The libertarian insight that is most consistently applicable across California’s policy failures is not that government is always wrong but that government institutions, like all institutions, expand their remit beyond what their founding mandate requires when not constrained by clear limits, accountability mechanisms, and competitive alternatives. The Coastal Commission expanded from protecting coastal access to restricting its use. CalTrans expanded from building roads to building roads that cost three times what comparable roads cost in Texas. The High-Speed Rail Authority expanded from connecting two cities to consuming twelve billion dollars connecting nothing yet. The constraint that keeps institutions focused on their actual mandate is accountability to the people they serve, exercised through democratic processes that require enough citizen attention and engagement to function. The surfer who shows up to a Coastal Commission meeting to oppose a permit restriction is exercising that accountability. The citizen who votes for a board that appoints commissioners who understand the difference between protecting access and managing it is exercising it. Freedom requires both the paddling out and the showing up. The ocean provides one. The civic culture has to provide the other.

The political economy of surf and coastal California is, in miniature, the political economy of California writ large: a state whose cultural products are freedom, creativity, and individual expression, produced within an institutional environment whose regulatory density, fiscal constraints, and incumbent protection mechanisms create the most administratively complex operating environment in the country. The people who live here and stay here do so because the cultural and environmental qualities are worth the regulatory and economic overhead. The people who leave — and more are leaving than at any point in California’s history — have made a different calculation. The surfer who paddles out at Trestles on a Tuesday morning when the swell is running, and who has been there since before first light, and who will be there again tomorrow, has made the calculation that the ocean is worth whatever California costs to live in. The wave agrees, as it always does, by arriving regardless. That is California’s enduring offer to the people who want it: the ocean, the light, and the wave. Everything else is negotiable, or should be.