Train Ride to Hollywood

I'm not talking about Bloodstone's 1975 pop movie.

Brightline Holdings, a company known for building passenger rail lines, is constructing a new high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.  Well, not exactly all the way to LA.  It would terminate at Rancho Cucamonga, California, where it would like to commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles.  Most of the 218-mile track would be laid in the median of Interstate 15 to relieve weekend traffic between the two cities.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is quite bullish on the project.  He made that clear at an event celebrating the project at the site of a terminal to be built outside the Las Vegas Strip.  "People have been dreaming of high-speed rail in America for decades," he said.  "It’s really happening this time."

Whatever.

If I sound blasé about this project, that's because I am.  High-speed rail works best when it connects transit-friendly cities, and Los Angeles and Las Vegas are probably the most autocentric cities in America, or at least the most autocentric cities in America west of Houston. Woody Allen once joked that Los Angeles' idea of a cultural advantage is a right turn on a red light, while Las Vegas, apart from the Bellagio's art collection, doesn't have a culture.  It does, though, have a lot of casino-hotels so far apart for each other that the idea of taking an Uber from one of them to the railway terminal would be a trek in and of itself.

Also, both Los Angeles and Las Vegas are major metropolises that were built in the desert.  LA is too big for its location along a semi-arid stretch of the Pacific coast, and Las Vegas has even less reason to be in such a remote, hot corner of Nevada.  Ironically, it was founded as a "tank town" - a town meant to service the railroad line between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City because it was roughly equidistant from both cities.  Why would you want to build any transport project to encourage more growth in cities stretched way beyond their limits? 

And - and you knew this was coming - why doesn't Brightline build a high-speed rail line connecting ur heavily populated megalopolises in the Northeast or the Midwest?  Better yet, why doesn't Amtrak do that?  In the Northeast, Acela remains a joke, and in the Midwest, Republican governors and legislatures have successfully resisted efforts to upgrade Amtrak service to high-speed rail.  These places need bullet trains the most.  And if Buttigieg really wants to help high-speed rail in California, he'll get the Biden administration to get that Los Angeles-San Francisco line finished.  That line is way over budget and way behind schedule.  As for Brightline's track record (no pun intended), it operates a train in Florida from Orlando to Miami that only runs 125 mph - a slowpoke by European standards.   

As for me, I'm not pushing for bullet trains anymore.  It's become obvious that real high-speed rail, at least where I live (full disclosure: I live in the Northeast), is a pipe dream.  If I ever do ride on a bullet train, it will be in Europe - assuming, of course, Trump isn't returned to power and doesn't close the nation's borders to people wanting to leave.