It just shrank again.
Last September, during a San Francisco press conference about energy prices, California Gov. Gavin Newsom took a moment to express relief about the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project. After years of planning and property acquisition, he said, all of that early stage stuff was finished: “We’re on the other side of all of the acquisitions.” The route is state-owned, clear, and ready for construction. Now it’s just time to finish it all up.
Over the summer, though, a small city in California’s Central Valley did a remarkable thing, and they did it in an important place. As the Fresno Bee first reported on August 21, officials in Shafter have approved a large housing project in the middle of what was supposed to the route of the high-speed rail line. Here’s the map the Shafter City Council saw at the meeting to approve the new housing tract:
See the red lines? That’s Gavin’s train.
Here’s why Shafter is such an important place: In 2008, California voters approved a bond measure to fund a 494-mile high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with a Phase Two that would extend the system to Orange County, the Inland Empire, and Sacramento. In 2015, active construction began, and state officials shifted to a focus on a smaller Phase One of the Phase One for the project: First they would connect only the Central Valley with high-speed rail, linking Bakersfield to Merced with a 119-mile initial line. That’s what they’ve been building ever since.
Shafter sits along that initial line, about twenty miles north of Bakersfield, so the state can’t connect Bakersfield to Merced without it. It’s also just south of the state’s landmark marshaling yard in the small town of Wasco, which was full of freight cars and construction activity for a press conference early this year before it completely emptied again.
Quite significantly, as the Fresno Bee reported, city officials and the real estate developer that owns the land waited for years to hear from the High-Speed Rail Authority, knowing that the state wanted to run a train through the developer’s Shafter property. But when the state didn’t move to acquire the land, 11 years into active construction, the city and the developer gave up and moved forward with the new houses.
Contacted for an explanation this week, Newsom’s consistently inept office didn’t respond, but the High-Speed Rail Authority did. On Tuesday, a press representative sent this message to The Federalist: “The site you’re referencing is part of the planned Bakersfield extension. As design for this segment advances, we continue to assess property needs and work directly with affected landowners as part of our acquisition process. Final property requirements will be established as the design is further refined.”
The same email from the media affairs office of the High-Speed Rail Authority said proudly that “high‑speed rail track is scheduled to be laid as early as November of this year.” Again, you can go back up to the video of Gavin Newsom and see him saying, in September of 2025, that the project was already laying track. They didn’t explain the chasm between those two claims.
So the current project is to actually to connect Wasco to Merced, finishing well short of Bakersfield, but once Phase One of Phase One of Phase One is complete, the state will begin thinking about connecting high-speed rail to Bakersfield, which will constitute Phase Two of Phase One of Phase One. Update your conceptual map: The State of California does not currently believe that it’s building an initial stretch of high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced, but it hopes to one day. In another decade or so, and after an initial cost of tens of billions of dollars, you might be able to get on a train twenty or thirty miles north of Bakersfield and absolutely race to Fresno.
Also, when Newsom said that the state could move forward a lot faster now because all of the land acquisition is behind them, he didn’t mean that the state could move forward because all of the land acquisition was behind them. He meant they had all the land for the first little part as far as Wasco, which seems like somewhat less of an accomplishment. It’s unfortunate that we all didn’t understand that he meant this more limited claim, merely because he didn’t say it that way.
Gavin Newsom is right: California is on the other side. Unfortunately, it’s on the other side of sanity, competence, and the ability to take meaningful action in the physical reality.
