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Posted on 10/30/2026 5:23:56 PM PDT by MtnClimber
In 2008, California voters approved funding for a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A group of contractors donated tens of thousands of dollars to support the ballot measure. A state program manager projected that the initiative would create more than 100,000 construction jobs.
Eighteen years and more than $15 billion later, not a single mile of high-speed track has been laid. The state hasn’t even laid track on the rump Merced-Bakersfield line that it wants to open in the 2030s. In a recently resurfaced video from his time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom said the full project was unlikely to “materialize in our lifetime.”
The bullet train, like almost every effort to build things in California, was killed by environmental regulations. The state’s high-speed-rail website contains more than 130,000 pages of environmental-review-related materials. Stacked together, they stand 40 feet tall and weigh 1,300 pounds. All this has cost taxpayers more than $677 million and served as a meal ticket for consulting firms that backed the 2008 ballot measure.
California law typically requires an entity to perform an environmental review when its building project requires a state permit. In practice, that applies to many major efforts in California. These reports create delays, new expenses, and burdensome requirements, some of which have nothing to do with meaningful environmental protection.
We wanted to find out how much environmental paperwork the bullet-train project has generated. To do that, we had multiple AI systems scan the reams of reports linked on the California High Speed Rail Authority’s website, and asked them to catalog the files, establish each one’s page-count, and sum those numbers.
Both systems tallied more than 130,000 pages. To verify the results, we reviewed one of the AI systems’ spreadsheets, which included each document’s web link, title, and page count. Remarkably, across more than 27,000 pages of cross-referenced files, the AI system didn’t make a single page-count error. A California High Speed Rail Authority spokesperson told us that the authority “does not maintain a running page count of all environmental documents,” but did not deny the 130,000-page figure.
Some of the bullet-train reports include ridiculous measures. One proposed that biologists count bumblebees, one by one. Another outlined when a contractor was allowed to break down woodrat stick huts. Still others contemplated using dogs to sniff for lizard scat or spending $119.4 million on an overhead tube partly to limit the train’s “acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds.”
Such measures have prompted a flurry of expensive change orders. Contractors have requested $480,000 “to dig small burrows for mammals by hand”; $352,490 for lizard surveys and reports; and $290,000 to implement the state’s environmental-requirements-tracking software. In one case, California’s high-speed rail agency revised its draft environmental report after the state proposed a regional mountain lion as a candidate for protected status.
Environmental reviews are one reason that costs continue to spiral. Another is poor oversight. A November 2018 state audit, for example, found that a contractor received a $3 million amendment from the rail authority. The authority, however, could not demonstrate that it had independently verified the contractor’s claims. Instead, it had lifted part of its report “directly from the contractor’s amendment request.”In June 2018, the authority unanimously approved amendments worth more than $142 million.
Who benefits from all this? Politicians and contractors. The scheme is straightforward: the contractors back the bullet-train boondoggle and shuffle money to politicians, and California directs millions of dollars to the firms to perform endless environmental reviews. It’s a massive gravy train.
Three contractors, HNTB, AECOM Tech, and Parsons Brinckerhoff (later acquired by WSP), were among the biggest donors to a committee supporting the 2008 bullet train ballot measure. They donated $63,000, $75,000, and $76,500, respectively.
The firms have also sent wads of cash to California Democrats and their pet causes. Newsom’s gubernatorial campaigns received $5,000 from AECOM’s PAC, $18,500 from WSP, and $26,000 from HNTB’s PAC. Governors Jerry Brown and Newsom solicited payments worth $55,000 and $75,000, respectively, from AECOM for charitable purposes. HNTB’s PAC donated to California rail advocate Scott Wiener’s campaign.
Their efforts seem to have paid off. AECOM, WSP, HNTB, and Parsons Brinckerhoff were paid $38 million, $61 million, $86 million, and $101 million, respectively,to perform high-speed-rail-related environmental reviews, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. One former HNTB employee, Ian Choudri, has become the bullet-train project’s chief executive.
California voters were promised a high-speed rail system delivering riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. Nearly two decades later, they face the prospect of a train transfer and an hours-long bus ride between Bakersfield and Los Angeles.
The main beneficiaries of this program are not California residents but consulting firms that bankrolled the ballot measure. For them, the point of California’s bullet train is not to move people, but to move money, for as long as possible—with taxpayers footing the bill.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
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It is working exactly as planned, defrauding the taxpayers once more.
Lifetime job for union workers.
And the LAX PEOPLE MOVER
Well, to be fair the LAX People Mover has 2.5 miles of track which 2.5 miles more than the Cal Bullet Train.
Only 110 billion more to go to get a partial track running from Merced to Bakersfield. Truly a route no one has interest in. Possibly the worst boondoggle in USA transit history....by a Gavin Greaseball MILE!
RE: 18 years of work....
The US Transcontinental Railroad covered 1,911 miles between 1863 and 1869 with primitive machinery mapping of terrain.
18 years and not one mile completed.
Belushi on his 7 years of college now worthless in Animal House: “I might as well have joined the Peace Corps.”
RE: People Mover....
As to the Pony Express....
• Total Route Length: ~1,900–1,966 miles across eight states (Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California).
• Distance per Rider: Individual riders typically rode 75 to 100 miles per shift.
• Distance per Horse: Horses were swapped out for fresh mounts every 10 to 15 miles at relay stations.
• Total Cumulative Distance: Over its 19-month operation, riders covered approximately 650,000 miles by horseback.
It’s California’s version of Boston’s “Big Dig”.
Just less complicated and more money scammed.
But the basic purpose of making billions of taxpayer dollars disappear and making insiders wealthy is exactly the same.
Gee, I used my zoology degree to research heart disease. If I had been really smart, I would have gone into environmental impact assessments. I actually like wood rats and lizards and migrating birds, and it sounds like it would be more lucrative than being a lab tech.
AND NOW, THE REST OF THE STORY
HISTORY
In February 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott refused $2.4 billion in federal seed money for a proposed Orlando-to-Tampa high-speed rail project.
He cited multiple reasons for the decision.
!. Risk of taxpayer-funded cost overruns exceeding initial estimates by many billion of dollars.
2. The Obama administrations overly optimistic ridership and revenue projections
3. Fear that Florida would be locked into mandatory state-funded operating subsidies if the rail project was actually built.
LITIGATION
Democrat politicians sued Florida Governor Rick Scott to force acceptance of the seed money and begin construction of the high-speed rail project.
In March 2011, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the governor had the constitutional authority to reject the federal seed money.
OUTCOME
The Obama administration made the rejected federal funds available to other states.
California swooped in to grab seed money for its own proposed high-speed rail project which has become another multi-billion dollar boondoggle for the state.
Democrat politicians praised California for it forward thinking and and ridiculed Florida as a slow thinking southern backwater.
SCORE
Florida = Billions of taxpayer dollars saved
California = Billions of taxpayer dollars scammed
“SCORE
Florida = Billions of taxpayer dollars saved
California = Billions of taxpayer dollars scammed”
That is a feature, not a bug, to the people that matter in California.
one the biggest and most insane aspects of this boondoggle that is NEVER mentioned in any article is that this train system is MANDATED to operate only with “green” energy!
even if they manage to finish the railbed and track, they will still have to build billions of dollars worth of solar panels, windmills, inverters, storage devices and transmission infrastructure parallel to the tracks, all independent of the local grids ...
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