California’s high-speed rail project connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco is now estimated to cost $126 billion, a rail authority board member said in an interview released by CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
But the High-Speed Rail Authority, according to its 2026 Business Plan issued in February, forecasts $39.3 billion in capital funding through 2045, a shortfall of around $87 billion.
“It is a big gap to fill,” board member Anthony Williams said, “[but] we have an understanding of how to get there and to fill that gap.”
The project, approved by voters in 2008, was supposed to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles by high-speed rail for around $33 billion and a completion date of 2020.
“We’re now in 2026,” Republican Congressman Vince Fong of Bakersfield said in the interview. “There are no trains. There’s no track laid. It was a complete bait and switch. The business plan that was put out in 2008 was very theoretical. You know, ‘This is what we think is gonna happen.’ And it became very clear that they didn’t have the specifics worked out.”
Toks Omishakin, who became California’s secretary of transportation in 2022, admitted that mistakes had been made and a lot of the project’s criticism is “very fair.”
Hellbound and Down 