California high-speed rail's long ride to nowhere
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson want a liberalism that builds things
At 6 am on October 1, 1964, two sleek blue-and-white trains left Tokyo and Osaka. Traveling in opposite directions at a top speed of 130 miles an hour, each train arrived in the other city in 4 hours, cutting 2 hours and 40 minutes off the typical trip, according to The Guardian.
Japan was hosting the Olympics that month, and its pioneering high-speed rail venture was a point of pride for a nation showing off its progress in rebuilding after defeat in World War II. Today the “Shinkhansen” trains are even faster, at up to 200 mph, making possible a two-and-a-half hour trip from city to city.
Japan’s achievement caught the fancy of rail enthusiasts and public officials around the world. Among them was California Gov. Jerry Brown. In 1982, he signed what the Los Angeles Times called a “speedily written” bill to build a $2 billion bullet train between Los Angeles and San Diego.
Nothing got built, and it wasn’t until 1996 that the state even established a California High-Speed Rail Authority. It took 12 more years for the voters to approve spending money on high-speed rail. The state lacks funding for a high-speed train line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and is working on a much smaller section planned for the Central Valley, which could link up with the two big cities if the financing ever materializes.
“The project is caught in a strange limbo between political fantasy and physical fact,” wrote Ezra Klein in the New York Times.
“The agency doesn’t have anywhere near the money or political capital it would need to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line Californians actually want, a system that is now estimated to cost $110 billion. It doesn’t even have the money to complete the Bakersfield-to-Merced segment that [Gov. Gavin] Newsom proposed. It has no line of sight on how it will get that money or that political capital. But since it has some money and some political capital, it is building anyway, in the hopes that Californians will want to finish what they started.”
The failure of California high-speed rail is a central example cited by Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson in their thought-provoking new book Abundance. They aim to expose the inability of liberal government to get beyond process and actually build things.
Double whammy
Coming as the Trump administration’s DOGE wrecking ball has targeted government agencies and workers, the Klein-Thompson book unintentionally functions as part of a double whammy against members of the public sector. Here are two committed liberals questioning the efficacy of the same kind of agencies Elon Musk is seeking to decimate.
Yet in some ways, the authors of Abundance stop short of fully examining the debacle of high-speed rail in California. Their complaint is that the state couldn’t finish the project. But the deeper question is whether it made any sense to begin with. They advocate a liberalism that builds, but the crucial question then becomes: “builds what?”
As much as it appealed to Jerry Brown and later Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, high-speed rail turned out to be the wrong investment.
Dense corridor
Japan built its bullet train partly to relieve congestion on another Tokyo-Osaka train line, demonstrating that there was a business case for spending the money. It had sufficient population density to make the project feasible.
The Tokyo-Osaka corridor is the core of the “Tokaido Belt.” As geographer Jean-Paul Rodrique of Texas A&M University wrote in his book The Geography of Transport Systems, that “term refers to the imperial road that linked Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto but now refers to an urban region accounting for more than 83 million people; 70% of the Japanese population. The most important agglomerations are the extended metropolitan region of Tokyo, with a population of 35 million, Nagoya and Osaka, with respective populations of 8 and 17 million.”
The Tokaido Belt’s population is more than twice that of the entire state of California. So it’s not a mystery why high-speed rail has proven effective there. Similarly, such projects have been built in population-dense parts of China and Western Europe.
Planes, trains and automobiles
Yet, Rodrique also wrote, “the prominence and relatively low cost of road and air transport have been factors playing against the development of HSR [high-speed rail]. The density of North American cities, including their central areas, is low, and it remains debatable if this density is sufficient to justify large-scale HSR projects.”
Further clouding the picture is the fact that the U.S. has already created two formidable transportation networks, having made an enormous investment in its interstate highway system and in a massive airport and air traffic infrastructure that enables cheap flights between cities.
The Eisenhower administration’s launch of the highway system is often cited as a precedent for investing in a national high-speed rail network, but in fact it is an argument against it. The U.S. already placed its transportation bets on cars and planes. And if driverless electric vehicles, operating on redesigned roads, become a regular mode of transportation, high-speed rail would seem even more redundant.
Romance of fast trains
Of course, the romantic appeal of fast trains far exceeds that of crowded six-lane highways and airport security lines. Klein quotes President Barack Obama, speaking in April 2009: “Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.”
Obama’s vision captures the allure of fast trains to high-end tourists and business travelers, including denizens of the Acela corridor between Boston and Washington. But the lowest-priced fares for high-speed service just from New York to Washington on that line often exceed $250, and sometimes are more expensive than airfares. And the rail network itself isn’t optimized for high speed trains: while the Acela can travel at speeds up to 150 mph (and the new fleet being phased in at 160 mph), there are many stretches of track where speeds are much slower.
Acela is a luxury good, not a realistic travel option for most Americans. In Japan, the landscape is different: many companies pay for their workers’ commuting costs, a fact some blame for the nation’s “commuter hell” of long trips on crowded trains.
Despite California’s failure and Acela’s shortcomings, there are some less ambitious high-speed rail efforts around the U.S. that show signs of promise, including projects in Florida and Texas.
Housing and more
Government should be able to build, particularly in the field of housing, a key point Klein and Thompson make in Abundance. The billions that have been wasted on California’s high-speed rail could have done some good in building and permitting apartments to relieve the housing shortage and the homelessness crisis.
There are other technologies lauded by Klein and Thompson, including lab-grown meat, supersonic jets and desalination to expand the water supply. None of these seem likely to win massive support from voters.
The authors deserve credit for attempting to chart a way out of the wilderness for Democrats, but “Abundance” likely isn’t it.
Cost of living
Americans aren’t rebelling against Democrats because of transit failures or inadequate responses to the climate crisis. The 2024 election showed that the issue that mattered most to swing voters was the cost of living, made substantially higher by the post-Covid inflation spike.
How do I know this? From Ezra Klein’s own podcast interview with Democratic data analyst David Shor. He said:
“In our polling, the way that we measure issue importance is by presenting people with random issues and asking which of these problems facing the country today is more important. People pick, and when you model it out, anytime you have cost of living or inflation put up against something else, eight or nine out of 10 people picked the cost of living and inflation…”
More troublingly for Democrats, Shor added, “If you look at the top issues that voters care the most about — cost of living, the economy, taxes, government spending, the deficit, foreign policy and health care — other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages of about 15 points on all of the issues that voters care the most about.”
Klein and Thompson rightly point out that the exodus of people from blue to red states will weaken liberals’ power even further in the reapportionment of Congress after the 2030 census. But the migration out of New York and California to Texas, Florida and the Carolinas isn’t because of what state governments have failed to build. It’s a result of how much they are spending and taxing.
If states with better climates and lower taxes can offer public services approaching what New York and California provide at high cost, some people will make the move.
Coda
In January, 2015, on the day after Jerry Brown was sworn in for his last term as governor, he traveled to Fresno, California for what the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney called a “decidedly ceremonial groundbreaking for his Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed train.”
He was actually marking the beginning of construction for just a 29-mile stretch from Fresno to Madera, a small fraction of the overall planned 520-mile line.
Give Brown credit for consistency. He was just as enthusiastic in 2015 about a California high-speed rail project as he was in 1982 — and just as blind to its flaws.
“People do get pusillanimous,” Nagourney quoted Brown as saying, while a small protest was taking place. “I wanted to use that word because that’s the adjective I’m going to affix to all the critics. You can look it up on your cellphone right now. Pusillanimous. It means weak of spirit. The Golden Gate Bridge, that was attacked. BART — the mayor of Berkeley said this thing was a complete boondoggle.”
Rich -- If Donald Trump were smart (hold down the laughter, please), he would embark on a massive project of high-speed rail. Instead of being recalled as a scoundrel, Trump would have a chance of history's affirmation as a visionary. Even if a boutique service, high-speed rail would give Americans an option beyond the awful rigors of airline travel and tedium of long-distance driving. Thanks for another exhaustive look at an important subject and its not-so-obvious implications. Last thought: the Klein "Abundance" idea is worthy of debate. Trick is to achieve abundance but not excess.