A Not So Brightline: California’s Other Bullet Train Boondoggle

Editor’s note: This is excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute’s Right by the Bay blog.

It’s happening. This time, it’s really happening.

That’s what dignitaries at the pseudo-event told themselves on April 22, 2024 — the day Brightline West “officially broke ground on the nation’s first true high-speed rail system.”

Bureaucrats, politicians, and civic leaders predicted nothing but sunshine for the long-sought HSR route linking Southern California and Las Vegas. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg praised “one of the very best examples of America’s infrastructure comeback.” U.S. Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., extolled a “convenient alternative to driving [that] will reduce the number of cars on the road, decreasing emissions and reducing congestion in our High Desert communities.” U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., swooned over “the beginning of a new era for southern Nevada.”

Twenty-eight months later, Brightline West looks more and more like yet another SoCal-to-Sin City dead end. Delays, an enormous cost overrun and a looming financial calamity for an affiliated railroad threaten doom. Consequences of a flameout would be cruel to both taxpayers and investors.

Brightline West’s boosters are probably shocked by the reversal of fortune. Veteran transportation researchers aren’t. HSR connecting greater Los Angeles and Las Vegas has always been more razzle-dazzle than brass tacks. In 1988, Sacramento and Carson City created the California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission (CNSSTC). Two years later, eight commissioners journeyed — at taxpayer expense — to France and Germany, for a firsthand look at how Europeans were progressing with state-of-the-art passenger rail.

The CNSSTC granted Bechtel a “conditional franchise” to build a magnetic-levitation line from Anaheim to Las Vegas. The construction firm, then based in San Francisco, submitted the only bid, the Los Angeles Times reported, because “Morrison-Knudsen and Bombardier Corp. … pulled out of the competition, saying that the lack of public financing for environmental planning made the project ‘excessively risky’ to would-be financial backers.”

The years dragged on, funding was not found, and Bechtel bailed.

Find out how the story ends here.

D. Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.