NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {U} .K. prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that his government is canceling the second leg of a high-speed rail project because of spiraling costs and years of delays. The High Speed 2 project would have connected London with Manchester, by way of Birmingham. Sunak said that now, only the London-to-Birmingham portion will be built.
The timeline of the project will sound familiar to American ears. A north-south high-speed rail project was first proposed in 2010. Thirteen years later, the project is nowhere near completion, and estimated costs had more than tripled.
A 2012 cost estimate for the proposed route from London to Birmingham, with spurs to Manchester and Leeds, was £32.7 billion. A year later, the government revised it to over £50 billion. In 2015, it rose to £55.7 billion. A 2019 report from the chairman of the body constructing the project said it wouldn’t be completed until 2040 and would cost £88 billion. A January 2020 cost estimate had an upper bound of £98 billion. A February 2020 review said £106 billion.
That was all before construction even began.
Construction of the London-to-Birmingham leg started in September 2020, ten years after the idea was initially proposed. In November 2021, the government canceled the spur to Leeds, leaving the single London-Birmingham-Manchester line. In June 2023, the government estimated that train service between Birmingham and a station outside of central London would begin sometime between 2029 and 2033, and service to Manchester wouldn’t start until as late as 2041.
Former prime ministers Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson all opposed Sunak’s decision to cancel the project. Johnson called it “Treasury-driven nonsense.” Cameron said Sunak’s decision “throws away fifteen years of cross-party consensus, sustained over six administrations, and will make it much harder to build consensus for any future long-term projects.”
If consensus wastes money, it deserves to be broken up. Sunak said the government will use the estimated £36 billion that will no longer be spent on the Birmingham-to-Manchester segment on other transportation projects in the region, including highways and public transit.
It might be embarrassing to admit failure, but proponents of the project should have already been embarrassed. It doesn’t prove that the government can deliver for the people to complete a project in 30 years at over three times the initial estimated cost. Better to level with the voters and promise to stop lighting their money on fire.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, canceling infrastructure projects is not always a political loser. Republican governors Scott Walker (Wis.), Rick Scott (Fla.), and John Kasich (Ohio) all refused federal funding for high-speed-rail projects in their states, earning ire from commentators for turning down “free money.” The Obama administration gloated that the money would instead be diverted to blue states such as California.
A decade later, we now know that Walker, Scott, and Kasich all won reelection as governor. Florida ended up getting a new intercity rail line anyway: the privately owned and operated Brightline between Miami and Orlando, which began construction in 2014 and carried its first passengers in 2018. And California still has zero miles of track laid on its Los Angeles-to-San Francisco Merced-to-Bakersfield line.
When will California come to the realization Sunak did and cancel its never-ending project? The state has been throwing good money after bad since 2008, when borrowing for the project was first approved in a referendum. The project is such a mess that French rail operator SNCF gave up on advising California in 2011 to instead work on a different high-speed rail project in a place it viewed as less dysfunctional: Morocco. The 201-mile Al Boraq high-speed rail line between Casablanca and Tangier became operational in 2018.
California is still working on environmental review for parts of its high-speed-rail project. The cost estimate for the 171-mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield, the part that’s easiest to build given the geography and the only part that is currently under construction, is now higher than the 2008 estimate for the entire 500-mile line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The $33 billion project voters approved in the referendum is now projected to cost $128 billion. And the earliest date any part of the system could carry any passengers is 2030.
California can’t get back the money and resources it has already wasted on the project, but it can stop wasting more in the future. After a similar period of cost overruns, political promises, and little actual construction, the U.K. stopped persisting in the sunk-cost fallacy and canceled its wasteful rail project. California should too.