Look, I got to thinking about something after reading this piece from CalMatters Housing. California's high-speed rail project has been going on for about eighteen years now, ever since voters approved that initial bond back in 2008. The state promised we'd have trains running from LA to San Francisco by 2020, but here we are, and we're still not there yet. According to reporting out of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, the reality is pretty sobering when you compare what we're doing to what other countries are pulling off.
Here's what struck me most. Journalist Joe Mathews recently rode a high-speed train in Morocco and did the math. Morocco and California are basically the same size geographically and population-wise, but get this: California's economy is more than twenty times larger. Yet Morocco managed to build and complete a working high-speed rail line while California is still figuring out how to finish just the first segment. That first segment, which would connect Merced to Bakersfield, is projected to cost at least thirty-five billion dollars and probably won't be operational for another decade or so, if it even gets built.
The comparison gets even more interesting when you look at the expertise involved. The French national railroad company, SNCF, actually advised California early on and suggested a direct route that would have been more efficient and cheaper. But CalMatters reports that advice got overlooked in favor of a route influenced more by politics than engineering, and SNCF ended up leaving the project. They took their expertise to Morocco instead, where they helped build that high-speed system successfully. One of their project managers supposedly told reporters the state was just too politically complicated to work with.
Now here's the timing issue. Governor Newsom and the state legislators are currently deciding whether to keep funding the bullet train at one billion dollars a year, which comes from California's cap-and-invest greenhouse gas program. The program was recently overhauled, which cut overall revenue roughly in half according to the Legislative Analyst's Office. So keeping that billion-dollar annual commitment to the train would mean cutting other projects. CalMatters indicates this creates yet another difficult budgeting conversation for the state.
What I'm seeing locally here in the Bay Area and throughout the East Bay is that people are frustrated. We talk about transportation challenges constantly in my business because housing and getting around are connected. Folks want solutions that actually work and deliver results. When you see another country accomplish in a few years what we've been struggling with for nearly two decades, it makes you wonder about priorities and decision-making. For buyers and sellers here, better transit connectivity would genuinely change the calculus on property values and where people choose to live, but we need realistic timelines and actual delivery, not just promises.
