By the beginning of next year, California will have a new governor and perhaps a new perspective on its largest building project of this and the next decade — the controversial bullet train now under construction in Madera and Fresno counties.

A new governor could mean a new board of directors for the High Speed Rail Authority and a new outlook on the current management’s biggest error: its insistence on routing the train through the most populated parts of the Central Valley rather than along the much more open route of Interstate 5 on the valley’s western edge.

It’s not often that a state agency can reverse course, give up on a mistake and still give Californians something they would need and use. But this is such an opportunity.

There are many reasons why the bullet train project, with almost $10 billion in state bonding authority OK’d at the polls 10 years ago, has lost much of its support. (Fewer than half of voters polled early this year supported its continuance.)

But a need for fast ground transportation between Northern and Southern California remains. Anyone who has fought traffic at the Los Angeles or San Francisco airports knows congestion there grows steadily, making flying far more difficult than it was a few years ago.

The obvious solution from the beginning was to route high-speed trains along the state’s most traveled and shortest north-south route, Interstate 5. That route has very wide medians for much of the distance.

But Rail Authority members appointed first by Arnold Schwarzenegger and later by Jerry Brown wouldn’t hear of this. Instead, they opted to send the bullet train through Bakersfield, Fresno, Madera and Merced before turning it west along Highway 152.

That decision spurred myriad lawsuits from farmers and other landowners whose livelihoods could be disrupted by the train’s tracks and viaducts. It led to fierce opposition from San Joaquin Valley Republicans in Congress as they backed their supporters in agriculture.

It has caused delays of a half-decade and contributed heavily to cost overruns expected to double the original $35 billion estimate. This forecast comes from the authority’s own latest business plan, which also has cut expected speeds far below the originally promised 220 mph for much of the current route.

Imagine how many more lawsuits, delays and cost overruns the bullet train will encounter when and if construction reaches the San Francisco Peninsula, where Silicon Valley’s massive wealth could be arrayed against it.

There’s also the issue of whether intermediate stops in cities like Fresno and Merced are worth having. The experience of Europe’s Paris-to-Amsterdam Thalys bullet train is instructive here. That line stops at major cities like Brussels and Rotterdam, but almost no one enters or exits there. Almost all riders stay aboard for the full run.

If stops in much larger cities are barely used during a European run of almost the same distance as Los Angeles to San Francisco, why believe that many will use stations in the smaller California cities?

The latest cost and speed estimates for the California train have plainly put the project in peril. There’s a strong risk the bridges and viaducts already built will someday be monuments to a huge failure.

Better to abandon them now, before investing billions of dollars in even more prospective white elephants, and switch to a far saner, cheaper and less disruptive route up I-5 and over the Altamont Pass to Livermore, where passengers could easily switch to new high-speed Bay Area Rapid Transit trains for the rest of the ride into San Francisco.

The time and money saved would be phenomenal, even if some politicians and their appointees would lose face in the process.

Email Thomas Elias at

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