In 2009, voters approved a $10 billion bond to build a high-speed rail line that would connect San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. Californians were told they would be taking their first trips along the line starting in 2020. Total costs were estimated at $45 billion.
How quaint that seems now. As of 2025, only part of the first segment — a 171-mile stretch from Merced to Bakersfield — has been built. That section is now slated for completion between 2030 and 2033, and it alone is estimated to cost $35 billion. Completing the entire 776-mile project could cost $128 billion, according to the California High Speed Rail Authority’s latest estimates.
What happened? Growing labor and material costs are only partly to blame. There’s been another major obstacle — the California Environmental Quality Act.
Critics of the law point out the irony that a train system intended to reduce carbon emissions and help the state meet its lofty climate goals has been paralyzed time and time again by a law intended to protect the environment.
Passed in 1970, CEQA was meant to force public agencies to consider how a proposed project might harm the environment, and explain how it would mitigate any such impacts. But the law’s scope has expanded over time. Now, nearly anyone with a lawyer can file a lawsuit claiming that the agency’s environmental impact report hasn’t been thorough enough, forcing them back to the drawing board or — in some cases — stopping a project in its tracks.
Dozens of groups — from farmers in the Central Valley to wealthy enclaves on the Peninsula — have sued the rail authority under CEQA. To resolve these challenges, the authority has had to change its route, redo station designs and pay out expensive settlements.
Environmental defenders and special interest groups say CEQA cements protections for the environment and public health. The changes the authority has made, they argue, will ultimately lead to a better high-speed rail.
But each lawsuit is costly — not only in the legal fees spent by high-speed rail to defend itself, but also the funds it expends to alter complex plans. That takes time — critical time — during which labor and material costs rise further.
Consider, for example, all the CEQA challenges the rail authority faced after it released its final plan for the route from Bakersfield to Merced:
• The City of Bakersfield, unhappy with the authority’s planned route going through downtown, sued under CEQA. The rail authority agreed to consider a new route, as well as a new location for the Bakersfield station.
• Three lawsuits from farmers in Madera and Merced counties resulted in the rail authority promising to consider alternative routes, creating a $5 million fund to buy agricultural “conservation easements,” and coughing up $1 million in legal fees.
• Three other lawsuits came from Kern County, Dignity Health, which owns a hospital along the planned route, and First Free Will Baptist Church, which runs a school next to the high-speed rail. All reached settlements — the church got the rail to pay for $500,000 in renovations to help them mitigate noise during construction. Dignity Health had the authority pay up a seven-figure settlement and change its route, said George Martin, the company’s attorney.
• Coffee Brimhall, a developer, owned land in Bakersfield where it planned to build retail, offices and homes. It sued the authority in June 2014 under CEQA, arguing that the railroad would cause “severe noise vibration impacts on residents.” The rail authority settled, agreeing to consider a route that would avoid the property.
• The City of Shafter, a town of 16,988 in rural Kern County, sued. To settle, the rail authority agreed to put the railroad on its own elevated track, so that it would not interrupt traffic when passing through town.
• After suing under CEQA, Kings County got the rail authority to pay a $10 million settlement to cover the cost of moving a fire station displaced by the railroad. The rail authority also paid out $1 million to Corcoran, a city of 24,813 in Kings County, to “make up for aesthetic effects from the rail route.”
It took years for the authority to resolve just those lawsuits. The authority finally broke ground on the first segment in 2015, three years after it released the environmental impact report.
Meanwhile, Bay Area groups were waging their own war on the route between San Francisco and San Jose:
• In 2010, a group of wealthy cities along the Peninsula — Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto — banded together to challenge the authority under CEQA. Their motivation? Concern over noise generated by the train whipping through their cities at 110 mph. After multiple rounds of revision to its environmental report and discussions of a settlement, the lawsuit advanced to the courts, which upheld the authority’s environmental review.
• The rail authority had plans to build a maintenance facility in Brisbane and planned to use eminent domain to acquire 121 acres of land owned by Universal Paragon Corp., a San Francisco developer. But UPC didn’t want to sell those 121 acres, which it had envisioned as part of a 580-acre master-planned community there called Brisbane Baylands. The project would bring much-needed housing to Brisbane (and vastly expand its tax base). Brisbane sued the rail authority. It settled, agreeing to shrink the footprint of its maintenance facility by nearly half.
The Southern California segment has also seen its own set of lawsuits. The Hollywood Burbank Airport filed a CEQA suit in 2022, for example, arguing that plans to build tracks and a station nearby would impact the airport’s operations. The authority settled that suit, too, agreeing to compensate the airport for $250,000 in legal and technical expenses.
As of 2024, the rail authority had received complete environmental approval of the route from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Still, it could be decades before it’s ever built.