Cali-to-Vegas Train That Was Never Happening Now 1.75 Times More Not Happening
The high-speed train project that was never happening is exponentially not happening based upon new cost estimates. The cost of the project was originally $12 billion; now it’s $21 billion (an increase of 75%).
The project has just $5.5 billion in funding ($3 billion in federal grant money, $2.5 billion in bonds), which means the unfunded portion of the project has increased by about 2.5 times.
Of all the Las Vegas projects never happening, this one has been not happening the longest, or at least 25 years. It never gets old, and our local media never tire of talking about it like it’s real. You know, Tuesday.
Brightline West is the company behind the whimsical high-speed train project that would connect Las Vegas to the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Rancho Cucamonga, California.
Like another unfunded project in Las Vegas, the A’s ballpark, Brightline has been doing superficial work along the imaginary train track. You know, “geotechnical work.”
The appearance of progress is important in the process of snookering potential investors, politicians and, ultimately, taxpayers.
See also Bally’s Corp.’s completely insane rendering for its imagined resort on the Tropicana site.
As mentioned, the idea of a high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas has been discussed for several decades.
In the late 1990s, the California–Nevada Interstate Maglev project proposed a 310 m.p.h. magnetic levitation train between Anaheim and Las Vegas.
In 2005, DesertXpress was proposed, aiming to connect Victorville, California, to Las Vegas. This project later evolved into XpressWest and was eventually acquired by Brightline West in 2018.
According to Bloomberg, from whom our friends at the Las Vegas Review-Journal pilfered their “scoop” (again, Tuesday), “Brightline West is betting it can capture about 20% of the 47 million annual trips projected between Southern California and Las Vegas by 2031, according to bond offering documents. The all-electric trains on the rail line, built along a median on Interstate-15, are expected to reach speeds as high as 200 miles per hour. Service is expected to begin in September 2029.”
At one point, service was expected to begin in 2028.
While we’re just pulling numbers out of asses, Brightline will serve 48.6 trillion of those little liquor bottles to 12 billion bachelorettes when service begins next week sometime.
It’s all just so mind-numbingly stupid.
The average airfare from L.A. to Las Vegas is about $100 (often less). The flight is about an hour. Brightline’s tickets are expected to be $120. The ride will take more than two hours.
After riders get to Rancho Cucamonga, they have to jump on Metrolink, a regional commuter rail service, to get to L.A.
It doesn’t matter how optimistic Brightline is, or how great their trains are doing in other states, or how breathlessly our local journalists report about this train. It’s a pipe dream, an empty promise, a fictional daydream, a fool’s errand, a wild goose chase, a ghost project.
A bubble inside a smoke screen wrapped in a mirage.
In case you’re not picking up on the nuance here: It’s utter bullshit. Again.
Do we love being the only one to call bullshit on bullshit projects? Yes, sort of. Would we rather not have so many bullshit projects to call out as bullshit? Probably.
As we said in another story recently, in the absence of real journalism, the grifters write the headlines.
We only come up with one really good quote a year, so we’re trying to make the most of it.
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