By ERIN BALDASSARI | Staff writer
SACRAMENTO — Completing the dream of linking San Francisco to Los Angeles with direct, high-speed rail service is four years behind schedule and may cost at least $77.3 billion, roughly $13 billion more than planners anticipated, transportation officials said Friday.
The California High Speed Rail Authority released its updated business plan, a biennial report that offers a glimpse into the project’s construction costs, timeline, funding sources and ridership forecasts, showing a wide range of potential costs to complete the project — anywhere from 20 percent to 35 percent for each leg of construction.
The update comes on the heels of news that the first 119-mile segment between Madera — in the San Joaquin Valley — and a station north of Bakersfield is forecast to cost $10.6 billion, up from an initial estimate of $6 billion, due to a “worst case” combination of construction delays and higher-than-anticipated land acquisition costs. That segment is still on track to be completed by 2022, according to the report.
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But, delays in other segments of the project, along with inflation and the need to increase contingency costs also helped drive up the cost, officials said. And, it’ll take more time. The full first phase of the project, which would extend from San Francisco to Anaheim and include a Merced station, is not expected to be complete until 2033, four years behind the completion date planners estimated in 2016.
The sobering report is the first for the authority’s new CEO, Brian Kelly, who took over in February. The former secretary for the California State Transportation Agency acknowledged the challenges facing the project.
“The plan reflects our commitment to apply lessons learned and make organizational improvements necessary to deliver this project to initiate high-speed rail service between the Silicon Valley and the Central Valley as soon as possible, while completing environmental work and making important investments in Southern California,” Kelly said.
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It’ll also take longer to get the first leg up and running. Initially, planners had expected to begin operating the train between San Jose and the Poplar Avenue station north of Bakersfield by 2024 but have revised the scope of work to include San Francisco and Bakersfield with a potential start of service in 2029.
“This line has stronger ridership potential and higher commercial value,” the report reads. “This is a strategic enhancement that will generate higher revenue which can then be used to help fund expanding the system in Southern California.”
The new plan is considerably less optimistic than the authority’s last update in 2016, which included a reduction in project costs from $67.6 billion to $64.2 billion, because of low bids. But those gains slipped away as construction delays, litigation and land costs mounted.
The revised estimate has risen significantly from the $45 million quoted to voters in the ballot description for Prop 1A, a nearly $10 billion bond measure approved in 2008 to finance a portion of the project. When completed, the 800-mile railroad is expected to whisk passengers on a three-hour ride between San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds of over 200 miles per hour for half the cost of an airline ticket.
Since its inception, transportation planners assumed the project would be funded with a mix of federal, state and private dollars, each portion contributing roughly one-third. So far, the private funding hasn’t materialized, but officials hope that investment will come once the first segment starts running and passengers begin riding the new train between the Central Valley and San Jose.
Beyond the nearly $10 billion bond measure, the state has also committed Cap and Trade auction proceeds to help fund the system, which is expects will provide over $10 billion in funding.
California already secured $3.5 billion in federal funds for the project, but future federal funding is far from certain. The project faces staunch opposition from California Republicans, who sent a letter last year asking the Trump administration to block funding for Caltrain electrification because it plans to share its tracks with the bullet train.
The overall plan for a bullet train has been met with resistance.
Opponents of a pair of potential train routes that would cut through the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles submitted letters and petitions this week to a local city councilwoman, urging her to call for the routes’ removal.
A proposed high-speed railroad line from Anaheim to Los Angeles drew the ire of local officials several years ago was gradually building support appears in Southern California cities such a La Mirada, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs.
Officials in those cities said many details were left to be worked out with the state’s rail authority.
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For Gov. Jerry Brown, in his final term, the bullet train has been called his legacy project. But it’s a project he’s had to vigorously defend, as critics take aim at its costs.
The high-speed train is worth the rising costs, he said in his State of the State address in January, noting that “it will be fast, quiet and powered by renewable electricity and — best of all — last for a hundred years.”
Staff reporter Elizabeth Chou contributed to this story.
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