California’s high-speed rail line could connect rural Merced to Bakersfield by 2032, local authorities say, though it will operate at a massive loss.
That’s according to an annual report released Friday by the California High-Speed Rail Authority — the first report after the Trump administration canceled $4 trillion in federal funding to the project, which has long since abandoned the idea of linking San Francisco to Los Angeles.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has clung to the rural portion of the project, even after canceling the San Francisco-to-L.A. segment in his first weeks in office in 2019.
Currently, Merced and Bakersfield are easily connected by ordinary road and rail, or — in a pinch — by air. The lack of demand for high-speed rail is reflected in the annual report’s own projections, which says that upon completion, “This service would generate a passenger revenue of $39.28 million to $55.6 million. … Ancillary revenue (e.g. parking, retail, advertising, and broadband) is projected to be approximately $16 million to $34 million. However, the operation and maintenance costs are forecasted to be between $120.6 million and $122.1 million annually.”
The report describes a potential link between the broader San Francisco and Los Angeles areas that could be built by 2038, at a cost of $87 billion. The original referendum authorizing the project in 2008 promised to build a direct line between the two cities, taking three hours to travel, at a cost of $33 billion by 2020.
A different high-speed rail line, launched by private investors, could eventually connect L.A. and Las Vegas.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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