California journalist Joe Mathews rode Morocco’s high-speed train recently and penned a fully justified and blistering comparison between what the North African nation achieved quickly and relatively inexpensively and California’s laughingstock bullet train project.
“Morocco and California are remarkably similar in size (Morocco is 172,000 square miles, California 163,000) and in population (California is 40 million, Morocco 38.4 million),” he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Both are long and narrow places on a continent’s edge, with coastal cities, glorious beaches, interior deserts, and heavily irrigated agriculture.
“The big difference is that California is more than 20 times richer. Morocco is a lower-middle-income country (96th in the world rankings) with a GDP of $182 billion. California’s economy is creeping toward $4 trillion.
“Yet California claims it doesn’t have enough money for high-speed rail, while Morocco built a 323-kilometer (201-mile) line across floodplains, requiring 286 engineering structures and 13 viaducts — including the landmark 3.5-kilometer Hachef Viaduct.”
California has been attempting to build a bullet train for 18 years, ever since voters approved a $9.95 billion bond issue in 2008 on assurances that Los Angeles would be connected to San Francisco by 2020 at a cost of $33 billion.
Its first 171-mile segment, connecting Merced with Bakersfield, is now estimated to cost at least $35 billion and will not begin service until sometime in the next decade — if it gets built.
Completion of even that relatively short segment, however, assumes the state will continue to allocate $1 billion a year from its “cap-and-invest” program of auctioning off emission allowances of greenhouse gases. It also assumes the revenue stream can be used to borrow enough money to maintain construction and the High Speed Rail Authority can set and meet a construction timetable after years of empty promises.
What would happen after the Merced-Bakersfield line is opened is even more uncertain. Connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles would require about $100 billion more in financing and construction of several long tunnels through mountains that lie in the route chosen by the authority that was influenced more by politics than engineering.
The existential connection between Morocco’s project — now being extended — and California’s is the French railroad SNCF.
Morocco relied on SNCF’s expertise to build its high-speed line quickly and inexpensively. SNCF also advised California during the early stages of its project and recommended a direct route that would minimize expensive and difficult tunneling. However its advice was ignored, journalist Ralph Vartabedian revealed in a 2022 article for the New York Times. SNCF pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” SNCF project manager Dan McNamara told Vartabedian. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
By happenstance, Mathews’ article was published just as Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators are deciding whether to continue the state’s $1 billion annual bullet train appropriation.
In recent years, the project was getting a quarter of the revenue from the state auctioning greenhouse gas permits, about $1 billion per year. Last September the program was revised, but the bullet train secured its annual $1 billion share for the next 20 years.
However, a deeper overhaul this year — as implemented by the state Air Resources Board to lower impact on refineries and other industrial segments — reduces revenue by about half, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Thus Newsom and legislators must reduce spending.
Maintaining the bullet train’s share would require cuts in other projects. It is yet another chapter in a seemingly endless political melodrama.
Dan Walters’ commentary is distributed by CalMatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters.
