The Other California High-Speed Rail

Las Vegas to Los Angeles(ish) in 2 hours flat

Last month, the Bright Line West high-speed rail project officially broke ground. The line will connect Las Vegas with kinda, sorta Los Angeles (more on that later) and if it gets done on schedule (est 4 years) it’ll be operational before the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s San Francisco to Los Angeles route. 

Bright Line, the company behind the project, is a private rail operator that runs a passenger line in Florida.¹ For the California <-> Nevada project, they secured $3.5 billion in grant money from the Nevada Department of Transportation. They’ve gotten another ~$3.5 billion in funding via private activity bonds. The total cost estimate for the line sits at $12 billion, so there’s still additional capital to raise even after construction gets underway. 

Bright Line West Route Map

The route itself is almost entirely within the Interstate 15 right-of-way, avoiding the land acquisition problems that typically plague rail construction in the U.S. In fact, everything about the project seems like a conscious decision to follow the – in every sense of the phrase – path of least resistance. 

The Las Vegas station will be south of McCarran Airport – i.e. not downtown Las Vegas. Similarly, the Los Angeles terminus isn’t centrally located (or even really in LA). The end of the line in California is actually in Rancho Cucamonga in the San Bernardino Valley. 

Building these stations in the periphery of either metro reduces the number of pissed-off stakeholders inconvenienced by construction. It also lets them avoid the expense of having to acquire and demolish already-developed city blocks. 

The land acquisition piece is especially important for a business like passenger rail. While rail lines do generate revenue from ticket sales, the big money comes from monetizing the real estate in and around their stations. East Asian rail systems have used this model for decades and Bright Line’s parent company has already implemented this approach in Florida. 

So, to the extent Bright Line plans on internalizing the increase in land value caused by their rail service, buying low on the periphery also helps reduce upfront capital costs. 

Bright Line West: Connecting Las Vegas and Los Angeles Rancho Cucamonga

As someone-much-smarter-on-transit-than-me pointed out, the placement of the California station means that flying will still be more convenient for most folks in the greater LA region.

LAX (blue), Burbank Airport (red), and Ontario Airport/future Bright Line station (orange) 30 minute travel area by car

A flight from either LAX or Burbank to Las Vegas takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. Even factoring in airport security, flying will remain a more time expedient option for most folks in the greater Los Angeles region. 

But I don’t think that’s a knock against Bright Line West. 

Building something as capital intensive as interstate high-speed rail is, in some ways, not about the world as it is today; it’s about the world as we believe it could be tomorrow – especially if we put the resources into actively creating the future we envision. 

That could mean a future where San Bernardino becomes a more important center of economic gravity in the region. Like we’ve discussed in the context of Texas high-speed rail, effective transit is a multiplier on economic growth. There are also implications for the standing of high-speed rail in the U.S. more generally. 

Bright Line West is being talked about as if it will be the first example of high-speed rail in the U.S. Whether that’s technically correct is debatable, but the marketing angle matters.² 

At the Federal level, the Biden administration is fully supportive of the Bright Line West project.³ It fits neatly into a larger agenda of infrastructure investment and environmental policy. Getting this done would contribute towards building consensus amongst the bureaucrats and policy mandarins most proximal to the levers of power.

More importantly, though, it would expose millions of people in Las Vegas and San Bernardino County (if not the LA region in its entirety) to a real-life example of high-speed rail. That type of exposure could help depoliticize future projects elsewhere.

For non-Americans (or anyone sufficiently well-adjusted so as to not be a politics junkie), there's a bit to unpack here.

For some Americans, trains = communism (this is considered a bad thing).

More seriously, though, the U.S. has a bad track record with large-scale public infrastructure. Things take way too long and cost way too much relative to what peer countries are able to pull off. And up until recently, the face of American high-speed rail has been the state-led project to connect the SF Bay Area with Los Angeles. Four years past the original ship date of 2020 and things are not going well.

So, there's a valid worry about state and federal authorities being able to build major infrastructure. This, unfortunately gets rolled into a highly polarized ball with strange culture war/conspiracy theory adjacent issues.

If Bright Line West is successful, it could help a lot with all of that. Being "privately funded" helps sidestep some of the flack about government expenditure.⁴ And if Bright Line is able to capture the 3 million yearly car trips between the two metros that they hope to replace, that's a lot of people for whom mass transit becomes just a service they're happy to have. Knock on wood, Americans all expect the sewer systems to work and as far as I know we haven't politically coded sewer construction one way or the other. Maybe Bright Line West helps push us in that direction on the issue of transit.

The larger lesson to keep in mind has something to do with the old tech adage about minimum viable products (MVPs). Building the most bare-bones version of a solution let’s people kick the tires on the concept. And if the MVP actually works, people re-anchor on a status quo where they’re used to having the new product / service / solution in hand. If you can change the world and make the change stick long enough for people get used to it, status quo bias is a firm hand hold on the college rec-center rock climbing wall of societal progress. 

Hopefully, Bright Line West serves as one of these metaphorical hand-holds on the path to a more expansive system of high-speed rail. 

Postscript

That’s it for today, but if you’d like to learn more about high-speed rail projects in the U.S., I recommend Benjamin Schneider’s excellent recap on the state of play. And if you’re new to Urban Proxima and are dying for even more high-speed rail content, check out Texas High-Speed Rail for a thorough discussion on why the technology matters (and a bit of a love letter to Texas all rolled into one). 

1.  In fact, it’s the only private rail operator in the U.S.

2. Depending on who you ask (and what they mean by ‘high-speed’), Bright Line West won’t be the first high-speed rail in the U.S.; 150 mph is the unofficial definition for high-speed in the context of rail and Amtrak’s Acela line achieves speeds of over 150 mph for some specific stretches. Also, Bright Line’s train in Florida travels at speeds of ~125 mph, so high-speed-ish.

3. High-speed rail is way better in terms of per capita carbon emissions than either driving or flying.

4. As “privately funded” as we can consider a for-profit company receiving government grants and tax breaks on their debt issuance.