The bullet train to the Bay Area might not be dead after all.
Gov. Gavin Newsom sowed confusion this week about the future of California’s controversial high-speed rail project, suggesting that the state must focus on a much-abbreviated Central Valley route instead of the long-heralded San Francisco-to-Los Angeles vision.
But local leaders insisted on Thursday that even if the $77 billion project isn’t on track for the Bay Area anytime soon, the governor’s goal is still to link the Central Valley, with its abundance of affordable housing, to the economic engine of Silicon Valley.
“The governor has personally communicated to me a commitment to a Valley-to-Valley connection,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said in an interview. “I take him at his word.”
And while it’s not clear when that will happen, “it wasn’t obvious to any of us that the connection was going to happen in this decade anyway,” Liccardo added.
Newsom told reporters as much in Fresno on Wednesday, saying he was confident the rail line would eventually be built to the Bay Area. For now, the state will focus on the Bakersfield-to-Merced route, a roughly 170-mile segment that Newsom hopes will serve as a proof of concept to help generate private investment or additional federal funds to connect it to Silicon Valley sometime after it starts running in 2027 or 2028. A connection to Southern California would come even further into the future.
“I actually want to get something done,” Newsom said, arguing that building the Central Valley line first was necessary in order to avoid the project ending with “nothing to show for it but angst, frustration and finger-pointing.”
The massive infrastructure endeavor, which was championed by Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, initially promised to whisk Californians from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours, with extensions connecting to Sacramento and San Diego. California would be the first state in the nation with true high-speed rail, connecting the state’s population centers like never before and drastically reducing carbon emissions.
But cascading delays and overruns chipped away at that grand vision. The project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule, and the state still lacks billions of dollars necessary to build the train from the Central Valley to San Francisco — to say nothing of Southern California.
Newsom, who had raised concerns with high-speed rail’s funding during his campaign for governor, said in his State of the State address Tuesday that “there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were. However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield.”
In the days since, his office has clarified that those broader plans aren’t dead, even if they’re on the back burner while the state builds the Central Valley segment.
“The man who sets the tone has done a 180-degree shuffle in the last 24 hours,” said Paul Dyson, the president of Rail Passengers Association of California, a nonprofit that supports building more rail. “He made a bit of a Brexit out of it.”
Notably, the state will keep paying $741 million for Caltrain’s electrification project, which will replace most of the commuter rail’s fleet of diesel trains with new electric trains that are faster and more energy efficient. The bullet train would share tracks with Caltrain as it goes from San Jose to San Francisco.
South Bay officials are still planning an expansion of San Jose’s Diridon Station, which is proposed as a major transportation hub serving not only high-speed rail, but also BART, Caltrain, the VTA, ACE and Amtrak.
And in San Francisco, local leaders are continuing to raise the money needed to build an underground rail line from the current Caltrain terminal at 4th and King streets to Salesforce Transit Center downtown — tracks that would be shared between Caltrain and high-speed trains.
“All this is continuing the focus and pursuing additional funds to connect what we’re already building and will be running service on in the Central Valley, both here in the Bay Area and in Southern California,” Boris Lipkin, the Northern California regional director of the High-Speed Rail Authority, said at a meeting Thursday.
One project that is being postponed for now is state funding to additionally electrify the Caltrain line from San Jose’s Tamien Station south to Gilroy.
Meanwhile, the ACE rail line — which connects San Jose to Stockton — is working on a separate extension to Merced, although it is not fully funded and doesn’t have a timeline for completion. If it is built by the time high-speed trains start running in the Central Valley, commuters could take high-speed rail to Merced and transfer to a slower ACE train to San Jose.
But many are skeptical that stopping construction in Merced without bringing the line to the Bay Area would create enough demand on its own to be viable.
“We all agree that the system only makes sense if it gets to Silicon Valley, or else it will be the only high-speed rail system on the planet that does not connect to a job center,” Liccardo said. “I think the governor gets that.”
Newsom’s State of the State comments were vague enough that observers interpreted his words vastly differently. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, applauded Newsom’s decision, declaring that “the train to nowhere is finally stopped.”
And President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday night that Newsom should return the $3.5 billion in federal funding for the high-speed rail line, arguing that it had been cancelled. “We want that money back now,” he said, calling the project a “‘green’ disaster.”
But the state doesn’t have to return any of the federal funds as long as it completes a segment of the route in the Central Valley and finishes the environmental review for the entire San Francisco-to-Los Angeles segment.
“The train is leaving the station — better get on board!” Newsom tweeted in response to the president.
Fake news. We’re building high-speed rail, connecting the Central Valley and beyond.
This is CA’s money, allocated by Congress for this project. We’re not giving it back.
The train is leaving the station — better get on board!
(Also, desperately searching for some wall $$??) https://t.co/9hxEfEX8Vm
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) February 14, 2019
Even if the hubbub over Newsom’s comments amounts to a delay for the Silicon Valley portion of the line instead of a death sentence, it shows the new governor differentiating himself from Brown, a train enthusiast who has been the project’s most prominent supporter.
Newsom’s “declaration may be having the effect of reducing expectations, which is not a bad thing,” said Rod Diridon, Sr., the former chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the namesake of San Jose’s downtown station.
Carl Guardino, the president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which has long supported efforts to improve transit access to Diridon Station, said Newsom’s plan made sense considering the project’s lack of funding for a connection to Silicon Valley.
“He’s not giving up on the vision by being financially responsible,” Guardino said. “A dream delayed is not a dream derailed.”
