MORE ON: high-speed rail

  Although planners of California’s bullet train won praise last week for candor about the train’s cost, an analysis of their 230-page plan shows they are still making highly speculative assumptions about funding and ridership.  Despite hostility toward the project... + read more

For California’s high-speed rail project, it’s been an inauspicious autumn. Disparaged for its lack of public outreach, the California High-Speed Rail Authority hired a new deputy director for communications and public policy, Lance Simmens, who introduced himself to Kings County... + read more

A once-scrapped route option for high-speed trains through Kings County is in play again. A line that bypasses Hanford to the west will be revived by the California High-Speed Rail Authority for consideration. The agency announced Wednesday that it will recall a controversial draft... + read more

Even if state officials can scrape together the billions of dollars needed to fund California's ambitious high-speed rail plans, lawsuits from local cities and opposition groups still could delay, divert or derail the project altogether. In the Bay Area, cities and nonprofits are suing... + read more

An influential group formed to review ridership estimates for the California High-Speed Rail Authority has withdrawn some of its earlier criticisms, even as it urges improvements to a forecasting model being used to guide decisions ranging from ticket prices to train schedules. Though short of... + read more

For two years, the California High-Speed Rail Authority said it could build 520 miles of high-speed train tracks between San Francisco and Los Angeles for about $43 billion. But that figure – long derided as unrealistic by critics – went off the rails this month when the authority... + read more

The first two stretches of California’s proposed high-speed train system in the San Joaquin Valley would close dozens of roads, displace hundreds of homes and businesses, affect thousands of acres of farmland, and cost billions more to build than originally anticipated. But environmental... + read more