Work is set to begin Monday on a $12 billion high-speed passenger rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area, with officials projecting millions of ticket-buyers will be boarding trains by 2028.
Brightline West, whose sister company already operates a fast train between Miami and Orlando in Florida, aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track between a terminal to be built just south of the Las Vegas Strip and another new facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Almost the full distance is to be built in the median of Interstate 15, with a station stop in San Bernardino County’s Victorville area.
In a statement, Brightline Holdings founder and Chairperson Wes Edens called the moment “the foundation for a new industry.”
Brightline aims to link other U.S. cities that are too near to each other for flying between them to make sense and too far for people to drive the distance, Edens said.
I’m glad one of these is finally getting off the ground. So far we haven’t seen anything high speed in the US, just “fast”.
I’m afraid the money in our politics makes it impossible to get projects like these off the ground. There’s too much effort to line their own pockets by politicians, and not enough effort to serve their constituents.
This specific line was first proposed in the Clinton or maybe even Bush Sr administration. It changed concept so many times I really never though a single rail would ever get put down.
At one point there was even talk of connecting it to the monorail that runs down 30% of the strip. I think that’s when I lost hope.
Do you remember the highspeed rail from LA to SF we paid billions and billions towards? I remember voting against it saying, “if this is up and running in less than a decade I’d be shocked.” 20 years later it isn’t up and running.
Add in Elon’s bullshit Boring Company purposeful distractions to kill this project and the abuse of any environmental impact studies and you see why these projects never seem to get off the ground.
At least this project seems to have the approvals done, and they’ll probably move quicker being a company vs. government built.
I like how they announced the San Diego to Seattle line again, for the 4th (I think) time in 20ish years, only this time it’s missing half of Oregon. So if you want to go the whole way it’ll be high speed rail from San Diego to Medford, Oregon, then ¯\(ツ)/¯, then Portland (or possibly Eugene) to Seattle on high speed rail again.
High fives all around! We did it!
There’s a lack of stops in Oregon in that gap? Or there’s an actual gap in the rail line?
Gap. The Cascades kill the budget, so they want to skip most of them.
Maybe they’re hoping, once the rest of it is built there’ll be enough interest/potential to get the expensive part financed?
I think that’s the goal. My head canon is that somewhere in the committee an engineer familiar with the PNW finally said “You know if you try to go over the southern passes the line will be down for 2 months out of the year because of storms.” Then they showed their tunnel math and plans suddenly changed.
Well Lyle Lanley was in charge of the project at the time they were going to connect it to the Monorail.
Ogdenville, North haverbrook. That line was gonna connect everywhere.
Which is why Brightline takes private money to get it done.
That and they’re using a right of way in the median of the highway, which is much cheaper than trying to get other land rights. Some law on the books about land adjacent to highways being available for rail.
Which is why Brightline takes private money to get it done.
Ah. Another Private Public Partnership.
We have those in Canada. Inevitably they fail, but not so much they’d actually die and leave room for replacement.
- find a service that conservatives complain about as being too expensive on the gov payables and no good for their rich friends
- find, among those, an essential user-pay service that riders complain about but couldn’t do without
- bonus: see how it almost died during pandemic, like the Vancouver transit system and its c$4.7b debt (not including the ransomware costs)
- cross-reference them or notice the sizeable overlap
Those will be the public-private partnerships who have reached full enshittification. Because that’s what their boards direct them to do.
Stopping in Rancho Cucamonga? Awesome. Now instead of driving 4 hours to Vegas from the West side of LA, I can drive an hour to Rancho Cucamonga, find parking, wait for the train, sit on a train for 1.5 hours (total guess assuming 150mph), then take a shuttle or taxi or uber to the hotels.
This will be great for people on the East side of LA who don’t want to drive 3 hours or drive 1.5 hours to LAX (with traffic), but stopping in downtown LA would have allowed me to get on the Metro to downtown and transfer to the Vegas line. I’ve been wanting high speed rail to Vegas from LA for decades, but stopping so far from downtown sucks for 75% of the city.
At least it’ll take tons of cars off the road for those common use cases.
Yeah, it would be great for it to go into LA itself. I hate it when transport hubs are on the edge of the city.
I’m not familiar with LA, but it looks like there’s existing rail service to Rancho Cucamonga? Hopefully the terminal is also a station for one of those services so that changing is easy (though really I’d want them to just continue on that track right into LA).
Yeah I saw a YouTube video explaining that it connects with Metrolink regional rail at Rancho Cucamonga.
Also I see this on their website:
High-speed service could potentially one day be extended down the San Bernardino line into LA Union Station itself. Brightline West is also designed to accommodate connectivity to Palmdale via the separate “High-Desert Corridor” project, which would provide passengers a link to a separate Metrolink line as well as future California High-Speed Rail service. When California High-Speed Rail is complete, a one-seat ride from Las Vegas to San Francisco will be possible.
Yeah, that’s not really LA. Optimally, the train should go to Union Station. Seems to make the most sense to end there.
Phase 2?
Exactly. The cost from Rancho to the station is nearly the same as the rest of the line. It’s a huge last mile problem.
Of course it should go into downtown LA, but it’ll take a long time to align, secure, and slowly build it without disturbing the city (Americans are wusses about construction). In the mean time, trains can be serving the East side of the city.
I wouldnt say Americans are wusses about construction, its moreso that American cities are a lot like Roman bureaucracy and insane 4d ouroboros where if ya cut one area half the system grinds to a halt. Kinda like when ya dont plan out a city in City skylines and the highway expansion nukes half the economy.
drive an hour to Rancho Cucamonga
the goal is to Strategically place the intermodal points and help the other travel mediums (media) find their own way. Sometimes it works, and we have passenger ferries right where the subway lets out. Other times it fails, and we have really inefficient links to terminals.
They’re spoon-feeding justification for a decent transit system AND avoiding plumbing their own larger and more complex routes through trickier areas. You don’t want high-speed going through the middle of an American town, unless it’s 100% underground like the amtrak (a non-high-speed) going into Penn/Moynihan in NYC. The same shitbags with too many fingers shining lasers at airplanes will drop bricks from overpasses.
While I want to counter your argument with saying nearly every European major city has above ground high speed rail going through the city, Europe doesn’t seem to have the same number of bricks from overpasses per capita as the US.
A smart man will build a casino next to the exit from the train.
They’re planning timed transfers with metrolink. Something like arriving 20 minutes before the brightline departs IIRC. Seemed like a bigger gap than I’d like but not too terrible.
At this point, we need to start somewhere. Boring under the city would be insanely expensive. Especially since this is a private company. Someday, we will have a politician with the balls to lay out a vast plan like the highway network of the 50s or the space program of the 60s. However, even babysteps like this are good.
Gotta take the W where you can and prove that HSR is a completely viable option in this country, just like literally everywhere else, haha.
This could be a clever ploy by RC to incentivize the financing of Metro service to Downtown.
I’m sure RC stands for something relevant, but I can only think of the off brand soda and am trying to figure out why Big Cola is getting involved with highspeed rail.
Just didn’t have time to type Rancho Cucamonga!
Although Big Cola is pretty nefarious…
Hell yeah, high speed rail anywhere in this nation is worth celebrating. Hopefully this drives some other areas of the nation to look into building links like this between cities. I’ve long dreamt of a KC-STL-CHI link that could be further benefited by having links throughout the Great Lakes with Chicago serving as a hub to connect the likes of Detroit and the Twin Cities to the heartland with high speed rail
I would love to be able to do that, hell I could take the damn train for work then.
When we got married we had our wedding in Vegas because it was the cheapest place for everyone to fly to. I assume casinos somehow help subsidize airfare. If they subsidize rail to increase profits and Vegas becomes the western hub of high speed rail, I’m ok with that.
I’d love to see them do Vegas to Flagstaff to Phoenix to Tucson next. I’d probably take a lot more weekend trips to Vegas if it was fast (200mph+) and cheap and keeps me away from TSA.
Yea it’ll be about price for me too. I don’t even like gambling but I like the weirdness of Vegas. If it can get me to the heart of Vegas at a reasonable price I would go more often, public transit will also play a part though. Not sure how good it is but it’ll need to be better
Honestly I just hope it helps to alleviate the traffic issues between Baker and Victorville.
Obligatory City Nerd video analyzing the utility of the rail line
City Nerd top 10 videos never get old. I look forward to my weekly 15 minutes of nerding out about a very specific urbanism metric
At about 37.5M$ per km, (60M$ per mi), it’s arouns as inexpensive a high speed rail line as one is going to get in the USA.
The TGV in France reportedly costs 25 million per kilometre, which I thought sounded ridiculously expensive
This is costing 36 million per kilometre!
Wonder who’s pocketing the extra?
This is really good. Americans need an easy High Speed Rail victory and the experience that comes with building the first few HSR projects in the US. Fingers crossed for a planned, federally funded, and organized Cascadia HSR that links up Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver, BC.
