Brightline in the Sand
California’s high-speed rail odyssey, and the incentives that make all the difference.
“You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.”—Margaret Thatcher
In the critically acclaimed Starz drama series Boss, Kelsey Grammer plays Tom Kane, the powerful and ruthless mayor of Chicago. Although diagnosed with Lewy body dementia—a degenerative neurological disorder with no known cure—Kane keeps the condition secret as he battles to maintain his grip on power. The role showcased a broader range of Grammer’s acting skills, offering a dark contrast to his comedic performances in Cheers and Frasier. For his work in Boss, Grammer was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama Series in 2012.
Key to the show’s intrigue is a massive, decades-long improvement project at O’Hare International Airport—a source of fraud, bribery, kickbacks, and other hallmarks of big-city political scandal. Taxpayer money is just another vig to be exploited, with ethics and good public stewardship reduced to quaint notions of the naïve. Sadly, as those who have lived in Chicago and interacted with its city leadership can attest, the show’s portrayal of Windy City politics rings true. Like Kane’s mental state, the terminal decline of yet another once-great American city seems all but impossible to reverse.
A useful model for understanding the State of California is to consider it a much larger version of Chicago—replete as it is with corruption, single-party rule, and iconically incompetent political management. Almost everything the state touches devolves into parody, perhaps none more so than the California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) project—a Boss-style boondoggle if ever there was one.
In its current incarnation, CAHSR is planned to span 800 miles across California in two phases, the first aiming to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles via the Central Valley. Books will eventually be written about the scandal-plagued initiative, but suffice it to say things are going as you’d expect. Billions have been wasted, deadlines wildly missed, and total project costs keep ballooning, with the latest estimate pegged at over $100 billion. After decades of misfires, the track is only now beginning to be laid, and one wonders if CAHSR will ever be completed.
Were CAHSR a purely California issue, it would be easy to write it off as another example of blue-state madness. However, the project has received billions in support from the US federal government, with billions more earmarked to help facilitate its alleged completion. CAHSR has now become a political tug-of-war between President Donald Trump and his potential successor, Governor Gavin Newsom:
“Department of [Transportation] Secretary Sean Duffy said Thursday he has ordered the Federal Railway Administration to perform a ‘compliance review’ into federal funding for a long-planned high-speed railway that would carry Californians between San Francisco and Los Angeles via the Central Valley. Advocates say an investigation is the first step toward killing the long-planned project.
Duffy was greeted with boos from protesters at Union Station in Los Angeles, where he claimed the railway had been ‘mismanaged’ and beset with funding problems, citing its ballooning costs and delayed timeline since voters first approved a related bond in 2008.”
Meanwhile, a second high-speed rail project in California is running under the radar—one that aims to connect the suburbs of Los Angeles directly to the Las Vegas Strip at speeds of nearly 200 miles per hour. Unlike the government-run CAHSR fiasco, this Brightline West (BLW) project is spearheaded by private equity. If completed on time and within budget, BLW will cut the travel time to Las Vegas in half, reduce vehicle miles driven, and stand as a compelling example of how large infrastructure projects in the US might be built in the future. Will it succeed? Let’s head to the Golden State and assess the probabilities.