High-speed rail project: $100 billion more?

John Pritchett

High-speed rail story in SF Chronicle:

Three U.S. presidents have sat in the Oval Office since California voters approved a 2008 bond to build a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco. 

But the next president, whether it’s Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, could determine if the state’s beleaguered bullet-train project encounters new setbacks.

That’s mainly because the next administration will wield heavy influence over the federal government’s purse strings when California’s High-Speed Rail project is banking on federal assistance to start passenger service in the Central Valley.

Officials at the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority say they’re hoping to secure about $4.7 billion in federal money to pay for the bulk of the estimated $7 billion needed to finish construction of the project’s 171-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield. 

The project’s Central Valley segment is expected to start service between 2030 and 2033, serving four huge stations.

Experts and the project’s advocates say the federal government’s support for California’s bullet-train project would look drastically different under a Harris or Trump presidency.

“If past is prologue, it’s pretty clear that a second Trump administration would be very hostile to high-speed rail,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC Berkeley....

Former President Trump publicly clashed with Gov. Gavin Newsom over the state’s high-speed rail project and criticized it as a costly boondoggle that failed to deliver on its original vision of linking San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Trump administration withheld, $929 million in federal funds for the project in 2019....

Elkind said a second Trump term could be an administration that likely “would try to do everything they can to cancel any dollars that haven’t been allocated” to the project.

On the other hand, bullet-train advocates have high hopes that the federal government will steer more money to the project — which requires an estimated $100 billion to make the envisioned San Francisco-to-Los Angeles segment a reality — if Vice President Harris takes office.

Andy Kunz, president and CEO of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, said a Harris presidency increases the odds that “major new federal funding could be allocated to the project” to speed up its construction timeline.

Kunz said the project will continue construction regardless of who the next president is, though the outcome of the election could influence how fast it advances.

“The sooner we get trains running, the sooner the public can be riding, and the whole ‘boondoggle’ moniker will disappear,” he said.

Kunz estimates that the state’s high-speed rail project could compete for at least $5 billion from various federal funding pots, including the Biden infrastructure law that awarded $3 billion to the project last year....

In March, [CEO]Kelly told legislators at a Sacramento hearing that a Trump presidency would be “a high risk” for the project’s federal funding prospects.

“I’m going to be candid: it was the most dysfunctional state-federal relationship I’ve ever seen in 30 years in public service,” Kelly said of working with the Trump administration. “And so I don’t have high hopes that there’s a big change in terms of having a stable federal partner on this project.”

Kelly said in the March hearing that the authority could mitigate future attempts by the federal government to claw back funds by making measurable progress on construction.

“As long as we’re putting the federal dollars we get to good use, expanding economic opportunity and job growth, I think it gets harder to take those dollars away,” Kelly said.

To date most of the bullet-train project’s funding has come from California taxpayers. The project celebrated a milestone Sunday with the public launch of Caltrain’s new electric fleet as part of the commuter rail agency’s decades-long electrification project. 

That project benefits high-speed rail because both rail systems will share the electrified tracks from San Jose to San Francisco if state officials get the money to connect the bullet-train network from Merced to the Bay Area.

The project’s envisioned system connecting the Bay Area to Los Angeles faces existential questions. Rail officials acknowledge that the bullet-train system won’t be financially self-sufficient if it doesn’t connect riders to the state’s major economic hubs.

“If the system ultimately has any hope of getting built where it at least connects one of our major cities, it’s going to require a large infusion of federal dollars,” Ethan Elkind said. “It is a very pivotal election for the high-speed rail project, there’s no doubt about that. But there’s also a lot that needs to be done in the state to fix the project to really speed up construction, because it’s just taken way too long.”

See also:

Construction unions support the dumb project. Gee, I wonder why?

Randal O'Toole nails it.

Biden, Streetsblog, and High-Speed Rail

High-speed rail: Only issue Trump is right about.