Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has terminated the remaining $4 billion of unspent federal funds for California’s beleaguered high-speed rail project. The move is well justified.

In 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure that would allow the state to issue up to $9.95 billion in bonds to support an ambitious plan to build a high-speed rail system. But the state has not lived up to the promises made to its own voters who approved the measure and to the federal government.

When it was sold to Californians 16 years ago, state rail officials presented a business plan that envisioned a sprawling 800-mile network that would first link San Francisco to Los Angeles, with a second phase extending the line to Sacramento and San Diego. The cost of the first segment was projected to be $33 billion and it was supposed to be capable of supporting up to 100 million riders by 2030.

Barack Obama hailed the promise of high-speed rail and Democrats approved billions of dollars of funds for the project as part of his economic stimulus program in 2009. As other states including Wisconsin and Florida balked at the cost and declined federal funds, more was diverted to California’s project. But none of the lofty promises have come anywhere near to fruition thanks to budget overruns, schedule delays, and California’s own onerous environmental regulations.

In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom declared the original vision dead, conceding, “there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA.” Instead, he proposed limiting the train to a 171-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield, a significantly less populated corridor in the Central Valley. But to this point, no track has been laid, despite support for the project from the Biden administration, and a recent inspector general report from California determined that it was “unlikely” even this segment would be completed by 2033, as had been promised. Even if completed, the ridership on the segment is projected to be just 3 million a year, nowhere near enough to justify the cost unless the entire originally proposed San Francisco-to-Los Angeles section is built. But cost estimates for that now exceed $106 billion.

While California officials are still touting the possibility of private funding, they have been desperately seeking such funding from the project’s inception, to no avail, because demand is likely to be significantly lower than the 55 million riders initially projected by 2030 (which assumed they would be able to keep fares at half the price of airplane tickets). To provide some context, Amtrak reported 33 million riders last year – for the entire country.

Rail enthusiasts like to cite European countries for having high-speed rail, but such systems transport riders from one densely populated and walkable city to another. In contrast, riders who would take trains from San Francisco to Los Angeles (let alone Merced to Bakersfield) would need cars to get around once they reach their final stop. This dramatically reduces the appeal of rail relative to flying – as flights are cheap and abundant within California and allow passengers to get between Los Angeles and San Francisco in under 90 minutes, or about half the time of a projected SF-LA high-speed rail link. For sure, some Californians may prefer train travel anyway, but clearly, investors have determined that there are unlikely to be anywhere near enough to make the system profitable and justify the upfront costs. Almost certainly, even if built, any California high-speed rail system would require significant ongoing subsidies.

If Newsom and California lawmakers had any sense, they would view Duffy’s decision to cut off funding as an act of mercy, and finally pull the plug on this doomed project. If, as early indications suggest, they seek to plow forward, they should waste their own money.