We are told to look at the tracks being poured in the Central Valley as a monument to ambition. The orthodox narrative is simple, comforting, and entirely detached from fiscal reality. Proponents of California high speed rail argue that setbacks are merely bumps on the road to a greener, more connected future, and that abandoning the project now means surrendering to a car-dependent dystopia.
It is a seductive fairy tale. It is also an expensive delusion.
I have spent years watching massive infrastructure initiatives hemorrhage capital while politicians double down on sunken costs, hoping that a miracle will materialize if they just throw another billion dollars at the problem. The defenders of California's bullet train want you to believe that opposition stems from a lack of vision. They are wrong. Opposition stems from elementary math, changing commuter patterns, and a stubborn refusal to admit that the original premise of the project died a quiet death years ago.
Let us define terms. A high-speed rail system is not just a fast train; it is a high-throughput, point-to-point transit corridor designed to connect dense economic nodes that are too close to fly between conveniently and too far to drive comfortably. The San Francisco to Los Angeles route was conceived in an era before remote work decoupled knowledge labor from downtown offices, before low-cost regional air carriers saturated the skies, and before tunneling through the Tehachapi Mountains became an engineering nightmare of astronomical proportions.
The lazy consensus relies on comparisons to European or Asian networks. Shinkansen in Japan work because they connect mega-regions with astronomical population densities along narrow corridors, anchored by existing legacy transit systems that distribute commuters effectively at both ends. California has sprawling, decentralized metropolitan areas designed entirely around the automobile. Dropping a multi-billion-dollar bullet train station in the middle of Palmdale or Bakersfield does not magically transform those car-dependent expanses into walkable transit hubs. It just creates very expensive concrete islands surrounded by parking lots.
Proponents love to point to construction progress in the Central Valley as proof of momentum. But laying track through empty farmland is the easy part. The hard part is the mountain passes, the environmental lawsuits, the land acquisition battles, and the subterranean tunneling beneath heavily populated urban cores. Every time cost estimates balloon—from the initial thirty-three billion dollars to over one hundred billion and counting—apologists wave it away as the cost of doing great things.
Great things do not require endless financial bleeding with zero operational revenue to show for it.
Imagine a scenario where the state took that one hundred billion dollars and aggressively electrified existing regional rail networks, upgraded freight corridors, subsidized zero-emission transit fleets, and fixed the crumbling local roads that actual citizens drive on every single day. You would have a functional, multi-modal transport network serving millions of people within a decade instead of a half-finished monument to bureaucratic stubbornness that might run a partial route by the time my grandchildren are collecting social security.
The defenders of the project will accuse my perspective of being cynical. They will say I lack imagination. But true cynicism is looking at a project that has missed every major deadline, exceeded every budget projection by orders of magnitude, and lost its core economic justification, yet insisting we must stay the course because admitting failure is politically inconvenient.
Admitting failure is the first requirement of good governance. Continuing to shovel taxpayer money into a project whose original economic case has evaporated is not visionary. It is reckless.
We do not need a monument to 20th-century technocratic hubris. We need a transit strategy built for the century we are actually living in.
Stop funding the ghost train.
