Latest news with #CaliforniaHighSpeedRail
Newsweek
08-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
California High-Speed Rail Reveals New Plan To Save Project
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The California High-Speed Rail project, long beset by rising costs, delays, and political conflict, revealed a new plan led by its recently appointed CEO, Ian Choudri, that relies on $1 billion in annual state funding combined with private capital to help keep the project afloat. Choudri, who took charge of the High-Speed Rail Authority in August, explained during an interview at a transportation conference in San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, emphasizing the potential of public-private partnerships to move the rail initiative forward. Why It Matters While the construction of the California high-speed rail advances across the Central Valley, it has faced growing doubts from the federal government. President Donald Trump has criticized the project, previously calling it a "waste" and a "green disaster." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has also expressed doubts, citing concerns over the escalating costs and extended timeline, both of which have exceeded initial projections. An aerial image shows construction workers building the Hanford Viaduct over Highway 198 as part of the California High Speed Rail (CAHSR) transit project in Hanford, California on February 12, 2025. An aerial image shows construction workers building the Hanford Viaduct over Highway 198 as part of the California High Speed Rail (CAHSR) transit project in Hanford, California on February 12, 2025. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images What To Know Choudri's proposal centers on securing $1 billion annually from the state's climate emissions program, a fund typically allocated to clean energy initiatives such as public transit and electric vehicles, the Chronicle reported. "We are looking at state-level commitments so that we can bring private equity partners in," Choudri said in San Francisco while attending the American Public Transportation Association conference. The approach aims to establish a stable base of government support that can attract private investors to finance the remaining costs as the project advances. Industry partners see several revenue opportunities, including ticket sales and commercializing long corridors of railway rights-of-way. "There are significant ways to monetize (and) commercialize long linear rights of way," said Sia Kusha, senior vice president of Plenary Americas, which has experience in public-private infrastructure projects. Another option presented by former chair of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association Dan Richard was the possibility of auctioning operational rights for the Central Valley segment after attracting an initial customer base—a strategy that has precedent in Japan's Shinkansen rail privatization, the Chronicle reported. What People Are Saying U.S. High Speed Rail Association former chair Dan Richard said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle: "There's always been a desire to have the private sector involved at the right time, when the risk is understood." In a recent statement, the California High-Speed Rail Authority said: "Construction progresses every day on the California high-speed rail project. In addition to continued progress across the Central Valley, the Authority also announced the completion of four grade separations at Fargo Avenue and Whitley Avenue in Kings County, and at Belmont Avenue and Central Avenue in Fresno County... "Since the start of high-speed rail construction, the project has created more than 15,300 good paying construction jobs, a majority going to residents of the Central Valley. As many as 1,700 workers are dispatched to a high-speed rail construction site daily." What Happens Next The rail project is moving into its tracklaying phase this year, following the completion of most of its central infrastructure, Newsweek reported previously.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
New overpass opens in Fresno as part of California high-speed rail project
A new stretch of West Belmont Avenue has opened near Roeding Park in Fresno as part of the California High-Speed Rail project. The four-lane overpass, or grade separation, takes drivers over the Union Pacific tracks at Weber Avenue and also over the future tracks of the bullet train. The grade separation was built with bike lanes and pedestrian access. There will also be no need for train horns as vehicle traffic will bypass the train crossing. It will also improve the traffic flow on Belmont, said Augie G. Blancas, an information officer for the California High-Speed Rail Authority. As part of the high-speed rail construction project, 55 similar type of railroad crossings will be eliminated. The Belmont Avenue grade separation began in 2022 and is more than 611 feet long and 62 feet wide. Also recently opened is the Central Avenue grade separation in south Fresno between Maple and Cedar avenues. The overpass eliminated the at-grade railroad crossing and will now take traffic and pedestrians over the BNSF railroad and future high-speed rail tracks. Construction progresses every day on the California high-speed rail project. There are currently 171 miles under design and construction from Merced to Bakersfield. More than 60 miles of guideway is completed and of the 93 structures needed, 54 are complete and more than 30 are under construction between Madera, Fresno, Kings, and Tulare counties.
Miami Herald
08-06-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
US close to high-speed rail breakthrough
When the great and the good of the American high speed rail industry gathered in Washington, D.C. over May 13-15 for the U.S. High Speed Rail Association's (USHSR) 2025 annual conference, there was tremendous excitement tinged with anxiety. Several attendees told Newsweek they believe the U.S. could be on the verge of a high-speed rail breakthrough, setting the stage for the kind of comprehensive national system enjoyed in the likes of China, Japan and Western Europe. Ray LaHood, a Republican who served as Transportation Secretary under President Obama from 2009 to 2013, said if one of the two high-speed rail lines currently under construction is completed, it will prove 'wildly popular' and boost support for high-speed rail across the nation. Other insiders agreed, but argued permitting reform and more explicit federal support will be needed first. There has been concern over the Trump administration's attitude toward high-speed rail. The conference took place one month after Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced $63.9 million in funding for a proposed Dallas to Houston route had been scrapped, and amid rumors that the California High Speed Rail line under construction between Los Angeles and San Francisco could lose federal support. This week, Duffy said there is 'no viable path' to complete California High Speed Rail on time or on budget and warned the federal government could pull billions in funding. State of U.S. high-speed rail At present there aren't any high-speed rail networks — defined by the International Union of Railways (UIC) as operating at a minimum of 250 kilometers per hour (155 miles per hour) along specially built tracks — that are operational in the U.S. This compares unfavorably with the likes of Spain, Japan and France, which have around 2,460 miles, 1,830 miles and 1,740 miles of track respectively currently in use. Most impressively, China, the chief geopolitical rival of the U.S., has gone from having virtually no high-speed rail lines to nearly 30,000 miles over the past couple of decades. Construction is currently underway on two high-speed rail lines in the U.S.-Brightline West, which will connect Las Vegas to Southern California, and California High Speed Rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A range of other projects have been proposed around the country, including plans to link Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. in the Northeast; Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth in Texas; and Chicago to East St. Louis in Illinois. Obstacles When asked why the U.S. had failed to build a high-speed network comparable to other advanced economies, industry experts told Newsweek there are major issues with permitting, financing and cross-party political support. California High Speed Rail has sparked particular controversy, with its cost ballooning from $34 billion to over $128 billion, while the completion date has been pushed back. Terry Hynes, an attorney specializing in rail infrastructure projects, argued planning issues in particular have bottled up capital investment. He is currently part of a team investigating how the permitting process could be sped up for USHSR. Addressing Newsweek, he said: 'I've been in the business 46 years, making railroads, and I've been frustrated as hell representing the high-speed just takes forever. And there's private money that could be brought in. Wall Street's got a lot of money looking for infrastructure investments. 'This is a wonderful infrastructure investment, the trouble is they see those permitting times. Eight years for environmental review, then you build for four years and in year 13 you're finally going to see some money. Nobody's going to invest in that.' Hynes added: 'The biggest issue to my mind is this permitting issue. The review period takes so long, the cost goes up and the more expensive it is for people doing a cost-benefit analysis, the analyses looks less beneficial.' Brandon Wheeler, a senior program manager at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, a local government-based voluntary association, said a lack of national leadership has undermined high-speed rail construction across the U.S. Speaking to Newsweek, he said: 'We don't have a national single point of leadership on that single point of leadership it really is a little bit hopscotch and we're making the best we can of it. 'Until there is, like the interstate highway system, there's a national vision to create and you have a vision around the ability to move military and goods and those kinds of things. Until our airports get bad enough, until our roads get bad enough, until people have this massive outcry and we're able to concentrate them on something, we're going to have to find what that single vision is to rally around or we will fall behind the rest of the world.' LaHood agreed, saying: 'I think the success of these projects in Europe and Asia is largely due to the national government making investments but then encouraging the private sector. Once the national government makes a commitment, it's easier for the private sector then — they know it's going to be a stable project, they know their investment is going to be good.' If you build it they will come In 2023, Brightline, the first privately built rail line in the U.S. to open in nearly a century, began operations between Miami and Orlando in Florida and has since seen passenger numbers surge. While Brightline runs below the high-speed standard, LaHood said it showed Americans are ready to embrace new rail networks, and argued one successful project in the U.S. could turbocharge the whole industry. 'If you look at the Brightline project in is wildly popular,' he said. 'They're putting more and more trains on that track every day because people like the idea that they don't have to get on the I95 and they don't have to travel on highways that are crowded with big trucks and cars... 'If you build it they will come, if you build it it will be successful and I think that will be the case with Brightline West, Las Vegas to L.A., and I think it will be true San Francisco to L.A. I think they will be wildly popular. I really believe at this point if you build it they will come and the proof of that is Europe and Asia-their trains are wildly popular.' Speaking to Newsweek, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, who is advocating for a 'Cascadia' high-speed rail line linking the city to Seattle in Washington and Vancouver in British Columbia, said: 'Our system continues to be compacted and stagnant. 'The great cities from around the world are all tending to go towards high-speed rail and we need an opportunity to unlock our economic renaissance, which is what's missing in our country right now, and high-speed rail would move us forward and get us completing again with the world.' Trust fund A number of industry insiders told Newsweek the formation of a federal government trust fund could provide the financial muscle for a major U.S. high-speed rail expansion. Asked what one development would most speed up U.S. high-speed rail, Jim Derwinski, executive director of Chicago rail system Metra, replied: 'A trust fund so it's national, it's bipartisan so it doesn't change from administration to administration and it can be supported through the states as a national effort. 'If you're going to build something, to compare it to Europe and Asia right now, it's got to have a national campaign right now.' Arthur Sohikian is executive director of High Desert Corridor, a proposed high-speed rail line that would link Brightline West to the California High Speed Rail line. He expressed a similar view to Derwinski, telling Newsweek: 'We have to energize the public to make that been trying to get a trust fund for rail since I started my career, it seems. 'For whatever reason why the politicians won't grab onto that and won't do that, especially when you realize the Highway Trust Fund keeps diminishing as cars get more efficient, we're paying less in gas taxes, that fund is have to invest in this infrastructure as a nation, and until that happens, seriously, we're all going to be trying to do our little pieces.' The U.S. High Speed Rail Association paid travel and hotel expenses for Newsweek reporter James Bickerton to attend its 2025 annual conference. Related Articles Portland Plan To Eliminate Homelessness 'Right On Schedule'Texas High Speed Rail Plan Issued Blow From Trump AdministrationTexas Bill Seeks To Thwart High-Speed RailPossible Northwest High-Speed Rail Route Gets $50 Million Boost 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
New York Times
08-06-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Trump Administration: President Says He Has No Desire to Mend Alliance With Musk
The Trump administration's plan, announced this week, to terminate $4 billion in grants to California's bullet train project could delay the start of even limited passenger operations on the nation's largest infrastructure project for what some analysts said could be as long as a decade. Even if the state can eventually win a legal challenge or a future president elects to restore the money, the project, already plagued with delays and funding shortages, is facing one of the most serious setbacks in its 17-year history. The project to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with a high-speed train that could make the trip in two hours and 40 minutes has already been scaled back numerous times, as costs spiraled and construction schedules faced repeated delays. Until now, however, the California High-Speed Rail Authority always had enough money in the bank to take incremental steps forward. But over the last four years, the state has drawn down almost all of a $9 billion bond that voters approved in 2008. Losing the federal grants will put the project on a near starvation diet to complete even the limited, 171-mile initial segment in the Central Valley, linking Merced and Bakersfield, both of which are far from the state's major population centers. 'I don't think we are going to see electric trains running on track from Merced to Bakersfield for a long, long time,' said Louis Thompson, a railroad veteran who spent more than a decade as chairman of a state-appointed peer review panel for the rail project. 'Not in 10 years with no federal money. This is reality, and reality is painful.' If the Transportation Department moves forward with terminating the grants next month, as it has said it intends to do, it is likely that California will file suit to challenge the decision, a case that could drag on for years. Even if the political landscape changes after President Trump leaves office and a future president delivers a new bundle of cash, it would take years from then to issue contracts for electrical systems and high-speed trains. Delivery and testing of those items would take years more. State officials said this week that they would press on, relying on state funding as they have for most of the project's history. At the slower pace required, the project becomes even more vulnerable to annual inflation, sending total costs higher. The plan as originally envisioned called for deploying 220-mile-per-hour trains between the state's two largest population centers at a cost of $33 billion by 2020. Today, building the full system is a distant goal and could cost as much as $128 billion if it ever happens. The initial segment in the Central Valley will cost up to $35 billion, more than the original estimate for the entire system. Even if the federal grant is not terminated, the initial segment would still have a funding shortfall of about $7 billion. A lengthy compliance review by the Federal Railroad Administration this week made nine findings that the project was not complying with grant agreements, noting that it had failed to meet deadlines, incurred significant change orders and reported ridership estimates that exceeded what was likely. It said there was no 'viable path' to completing the initial segment in the Central Valley by a 2033 deadline set under the grant. In reviewing $1.6 billion in change orders on construction, the agency told state officials that 'the sheer volume and frequency of these change orders shows waste through an inexcusable combination of poor planning, implementation, or mismanagement of contractors, insufficient legal authority and technical expertise, and other factors.' The high-speed rail authority rejected the criticism and said the project would continue to move forward. 'The authority strongly disagrees with the F.R.A.'s conclusions, which are misguided and do not reflect the substantial progress made to deliver high-speed rail in California,' a spokeswoman said in a statement. 'We remain firmly committed to completing the nation's first true high-speed rail system connecting the major population centers in the state.' Authority officials also sharply disagreed with analysts' predictions of a possible 10-year delay. They said that they believed the state would ultimately be allowed to keep the federal grants and that they would be moving ahead with a plan to lay high-speed track within the next year. They noted that Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed that the project continue to receive $1 billion annually from the state's greenhouse gas program, although that money is already accounted for in the state's current plans through 2030. State authorities did not directly address, however, what delays the project might face if the state did, in fact, lose access to the federal money. Many experts on the construction project said that while the state might be able to hobble along with construction under existing funding, it appeared highly unlikely that it would be able to deliver an operational train within the next decade. When the state adopted the plan for the scaled-back Central Valley system in 2019, it was supposed to start service by 2028. In his first term, Mr. Trump terminated a $928 million grant to the project dating back to the Obama administration. California sued, but before the case went to trial, Joseph R. Biden Jr. became president and restored the grant. Still, the state had not been able to draw on the money because of milestones that had to be passed first. The funding Mr. Trump is seeking to terminate includes not only the $3.1 billion grant issued under Mr. Biden but that earlier $928 million in funding. The authority has about $4 billion in cash on hand, mostly from its share of California's greenhouse gas auction program. That is enough to make some progress in completing construction that is already underway along 119 miles of farmland, but hardly enough to begin operations. 'Having this money taken away could potentially mean that they won't be able to continue to construct it, at least at anywhere near the pace and scale they've been at,' said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, who has been a supporter of the high-speed rail project. 'If there is a big gap in funding, it is going to mean layoffs and stalling the project at a certain point,' he said. Conservatives have long supported cuts to funding for California high-speed rail. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy last week called the project a 'boondoggle.' Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a deputy assistant secretary for research at the Transportation Department during Mr. Trump's first term, said that the system, if it is ever built, had no hope of being profitable and that people were not likely to want to use it. She noted the substantial decline in public transportation users since the coronavirus pandemic. 'They prefer driving,' she said. The California bullet train was originally expected to carry about 100 million passengers a year, but the estimate was later slashed by two-thirds. Estimated ridership on the mini system in the Central Valley was reduced by 25 percent in recent years. But Mr. Elkind and other supporters have said the project could improve the quality of life in California and help drive the economy. 'You're just really greatly increasing mobility and connecting the economy, and in ways that no other mode of transport really could do as efficiently, and you're doing it all in a very low-carbon way,' he said. The state has 30 days to respond to the Trump administration's notice. The rail authority said in its statement that it would 'fully address and correct the record in our formal response to the F.R.A.'s notice.' Legal analysts said that if the state sues, as Mr. Newsom promised, it is not clear that the state would prevail. The Trump administration appears to have been careful to set up a legal basis for cutting the funding, making a lawsuit challenging, some analysts said. But Eloise Pasachoff, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in federal grant law, noted that the proposed funding cut 'comes against the backdrop of the Biden administration doing a review of the exact same project last year and awarding another $3 billion in federal grants.' California, she said, will most likely challenge the termination on many grounds, including that the administration was 'arbitrary and capricious' in its decision to revoke the money. It is not enough, she added, for the administration to assert that funding a high-speed rail system is not a policy priority. Such a decision should go back to Congress, she said. David Freeman Engstrom, a law professor at Stanford University, said the longstanding political antagonism between California's Democratic governor and Mr. Trump might have been a factor in the decision to pull the grant, but it was unlikely to form a basis for a successful legal challenge. If California argues that the termination is 'just an effort to get back at Governor Newsom, an enemy of the administration, I'm not sure that a court's going to be willing to credit that argument here,' he said. Still, he said, there appeared to be little doubt that the termination, apart from the legal issues, was seen in Washington as a way to 'stick it' to Mr. Newsom. 'By returning to the high-speed rail issue, Trump is once again lifting up a powerful symbol that liberal California is the problem, not the solution, and needs to get its own house in order.'
New York Times
07-06-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Trump's Proposed Cut Would Deal Serious Setback to California High-Speed Rail
The Trump administration's plan, announced this week, to terminate $4 billion in grants to California's bullet train project could delay the start of even limited passenger operations on the nation's largest infrastructure project for what some analysts said could be as long as a decade. Even if the state can eventually win a legal challenge or a future president elects to restore the money, the project, already plagued with delays and funding shortages, is facing one of the most serious setbacks in its 17-year history. The project to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with a high-speed train that could make the trip in two hours and 40 minutes has already been scaled back numerous times, as costs spiraled and construction schedules faced repeated delays. Until now, however, the California High-Speed Rail Authority always had enough money in the bank to take incremental steps forward. But over the last four years, the state has drawn down almost all of a $9 billion bond that voters approved in 2008. Losing the federal grants will put the project on a near starvation diet to complete even the limited, 171-mile initial segment in the Central Valley, linking Merced and Bakersfield, both of which are far from the state's major population centers. 'I don't think we are going to see electric trains running on track from Merced to Bakersfield for a long, long time,' said Louis Thompson, a railroad veteran who spent more than a decade as chairman of a state-appointed peer review panel for the rail project. 'Not in 10 years with no federal money. This is reality, and reality is painful.' If the Transportation Department moves forward with terminating the grants next month, as it has said it intends to do, it is likely that California will file suit to challenge the decision, a case that could drag on for years. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
