California’s long-delayed high-speed rail project could be operating in the Central Valley by 2032, but it is far short of securing the funding it needs to connect up north toward the San Francisco Bay Area and south toward Los Angeles, according to a report by officials released Friday.
It will cost roughly $87 billion to build between Gilroy, about 80 miles southeast of San Francisco, and Palmdale, about 37 miles north of Los Angeles, the High Speed Rail Authority’s report says. That section is expected to start running in 2038.
“While challenges remain, so too does the potential to deliver a modern transportation system worthy of the state’s ambitions — one that reflects the scale, complexity, and promise of California itself,” Authority CEO Ian Choudri wrote in the report. “Let’s go build it.”
The project is designed to shuttle riders across nearly 500 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles. When voters approved a proposition in 2008 to authorize a bond to fund a third of the project, the cost was estimated at $33 billion and was to have been up and running by 2020. It could now cost up to $128 billion to build, the authority estimated last year. Officials will release an updated estimate in a business report next year, authority spokesperson Micah Flores said in an email.
There is 119 miles of construction underway in the Central Valley. But the state needs to make progress to build toward larger population centers near the Bay Area and L.A. and secure stable sources of funding to attract potential private investors, the report says. The project desperately needs help from the private sector. The authority recently heard back from 31 potential private investors who expressed their interest and started meeting with them this month.
A 171-mile section in the Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield is expected to cost nearly $37 billion. That’s up slightly from a previous estimate, but the authority said that figure would have ballooned to $51 billion had it not taken recent cost-saving measures.
The project has received nearly $24 billion in funding to date, most of which has come from the state through a voter-approved bond and money from the state’s cap-and-trade program. The rest has come from the federal government. But the Trump administration said in July it was pulling $4 billion in funding from the project, which the authority quickly sued to try to get restored.
The authority has spent about $14 billion on the project through May of this year, according to the new report. Dozens of structures have been built in the Central Valley, including viaducts, underpasses and overpasses, along with 70 miles of guideway, the report says.
President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy both have slammed the project as a “train to nowhere.”
“The Railroad we were promised still does not exist, and never will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July. “This project was Severely Overpriced, Overregulated, and NEVER DELIVERED.”
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wants lawmakers to reauthorize the state’s cap-and-trade program through 2045 and ensure high-speed rail receives $1 billion a year from it. The program is set to expire at the end of 2030.
