California and the No-Good-Very-Bad–High Speed Rail Project

Anyone with a map app can see that a high speed rail connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco would make sense. In the on-going debate of “why America can’t build high speed rail,” California offers us a cautionary tale. Back in 2008, California started construction on a high speed rail project between LA and San Francisco. However, it is 2023 and the project is not done and what’s worse is that it doesn’t really even connect the two cities together and the route has been changed so much that there are cost overruns in the billions of dollars and the number of stops has increased so as to make the train less efficient than it otherwise would be. In this video from Vox, we are going to learn more about the California HSR project and just what all went wrong.