California

California lays tracks for high-speed rail but will it ever become a reality?

   Governor Jerry Brown and other supporters are betting on the $64bn
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   California’s proposed high-speed rail network

   [ ] Artwork illustrating California’s proposed high speed rail network.
   Photograph: hrs

California breaks ground on high-speed rail project but completion not
assured

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   America’s first high-speed rail system basked in praise and attention
   this week when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, visited San
   Francisco and echoed the enthusiasm of California’s leaders for the
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   The bonhomie between Abe, the California governor, Jerry Brown, and
   executives from the California High-Speed Rail Authority on Thursday
   masked an awkward fact and a discomfiting prospect. The $68bn system
   does not yet exist. And perhaps never will.
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   species.”

   America’s dream of high-speed rail dates back half a century to the
   High-Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965, when the country was
   preparing to send humans to the moon and anything seemed possible.

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   The US is making another attempt to join the club. There is a proposed
   high-speed (but not maglev) project to link New York and Washington,
   another between Dallas and Houston. There is also the Hyperloop, Elon
   Musk’s fantastical concept of aluminium pods hurtling at 800mph through
   an elevated tube.

   California’s high-speed rail, conceived in the 1970s, is no longer a
   pipe dream. It became tangible in January at a groundbreaking ceremony
   in Fresno, a sleepy, sunbaked city amid plains of parched crops.

   “The high-speed rail links us from the past to the future; from the
   south to Fresno and the north,” said Brown, the project’s champion.

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   tunnels, let alone the track.

   That will soon change, said Jeff Morales, the High-Speed Rail
   Authority’s chief executive. “The pace will pick up considerably in the
   next few weeks and months and then we’ll be off to the races.” Bridges
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   things going up.”

     The high-speed rail links us from the past to the future; from the
     south to Fresno and the north

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   Abe, Japan’s prime minister, needs no convincing. He used his weeklong
   US tour to tout Japan’s bullet-train system, known as the Shinkansen,
   as a supplier to America’s high-speed rail projects. Germany, Spain,
   France and China are jostling with their own bids.

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   “What we cannot support is financial foolishness and government deceit,
   and that is what this high-speed rail project is all about,” Jim
   Patterson, an assembly member and former Fresno mayor, told a press
   conference.

   The big question mark is funding. In 2008, voters approved a $9.9bn
   high-speed rail bond. The Obama administration committed $3.2bn in
   stimulus and transportation money. A quarter of the California’s
   cap-and-trade revenues – payments from polluters who emit greenhouse
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   “We’re still here,” smiled one employee.

   California high-speed train construction

   Workers reroute a storm drain canal in downtown Fresno to make way for
   California’s high-speed rail. Photograph: Rory Carroll

   To break the deadlock, officials are increasingly using eminent domain,
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   unfair term, given what I’ve seen.”

   Brewer rode the Tokyo-Osaka high-speed rail in 1970, and was impressed.
   But he wonders if California’s version will survive its funding holes
   and land right battles. “I think there’s still a question mark,” he
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   construction.

   “Who would argue against the bridge now? I put the high-speed rail in
   the same category. There are those who can see the vision and those who
   live in the past.”