 You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas on board a high-speed train. I am obsessed with trains. I love trains. How long is it going to take before I get my high-speed rail? Well, I'll tell you, I can't wait. I feel the same way you do. In Liberals Dreams, this is what America's high-speed rail network looks like, was the headline of a Slate article about this map by graphic designer and transit advocate Alfred Tuw. That was eight years ago, but the map has started to get attention amid thoughts of new high-speed rail funding. In January 2020, I Want Her So Fucking Much was retweeted or quote-tweeted fifty-three thousand times from an account with under a thousand followers. The user then reply-tweeted with a rendering of the US if we had a high-speed rail system. While a lot of people on Twitter say hyperbolic things for retweets and jokes, even Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg shared a recent Vox article featuring the map saying, Gen Z is dreaming big, it's time we all did the same. What these people may not be paying attention to is that in the real world, high-speed rail is wildly expensive and predictably destructive to communities. Building it requires bulldozing and disrupting neighborhoods to lay down the track. The Transportation Secretary's definition of dreaming big is applying 20th century technology to the problems of the 21st. When funding for the initial part of the California high-speed rail line was voted on in 2008, it was supposed to link Los Angeles with San Francisco for about $33 billion and take about a decade to complete. As the years dragged on, the cost ballooned to $100 billion at one point, and the project had to be scaled back significantly. I like trains and I like high-speed trains even better. In 2019, after Governor Gavin Newsom replaced Jerry Brown, he scaled the project back to a section running between Merced and Bakersfield. Current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. What Gavin Newsom has done is he's spitting Jerry Brown's eye. Newsom basically said, you know, Jerry, this is your little choo-choo, and you know what, I can't afford to pay for your dream. Joel Cockin is a fellow of Urban Studies at Chapman University and a longtime critic of high-speed rail. This is the ultimate train to nowhere. Going from two places that, first of all, don't have any particular relationship with each other. You have to get a car once you get to the station, and it doesn't go to any job center that anyone's going to commute to. So it's really almost like a vestigial organ that's been left. You know, it's like the transportation appendix. While people dream on Twitter about high-speed trains connecting American cities, California's project is an example of what it actually costs to build. What we're talking about is a vision for high-speed rail in America. In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed building 8,600 miles of high-speed rail and received $10.1 billion from Congress toward that goal. 12 years later, there's nothing to show after the money went to upgrading Amtrak instead. The Kato Institute's Rando O'Toole estimates that based on the cost overruns and setbacks of the California project, building 8,600 miles of high-speed rail would have cost well over $1 trillion. I don't think there should be any additional funding because I think it has been poorly managed, and I think the project needs to be canceled. Baruch Feigenbaum is the senior managing director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason TV. Feigenbaum says we could be on the verge of a dramatic shift in how Americans work and live that makes high-speed rail even more absurd. But high-speed rail typically is business travelers. And if we're going to see more substitution with Zoom and more of meetings that are remote and fewer in-person trips, that's going to make high-speed rail even less viable than it already is. We've got to take things to the next level. You look at what our counterparts in Japan are able to enjoy, but really across the world, a place like the UK or Turkey, I want the US to be leading the world. Comparing the US to Europe and Japan, well, we are not those other countries. We have an interstate system. We have much lower population density overall. Less density means fewer passengers, which means less revenue. Modern trains typically require massive taxpayer subsidies, the same as expected for California's high-speed rail. So you're actually having some subsidies from lower-income Californians, subsidizing business travel, which seems to me to be a very odd policy. Right now, there simply isn't a path. Governor Newsom has taken some very interesting positions. From my point, he has some good position. When he came into office, he basically pared down the rail system and said we are going to focus on the Central Valley. We're not going to focus on San Francisco and Los Angeles at that time. Because we don't have the money and basically because high-speed rail is something for upper-income Californians who are not the group that voted for me anyway and not really my priority is, you know, someone who's pretty far the left and pretty progressive. We'll see what happens. I don't think he would turn down federal money for the California high-speed rail project. This is the future. This is the future of transportation in California. 100% electrified system cleaning up here. Newsom, along with a few other politicians, are already vying for those federal dollars, now that the White House, at least in theory, is behind the idea. There is a transportation reauthorization bill that is the same as the infrastructure bill. It's passed every five to six years by Congress. Traditionally, there has not been money for high-speed rail in that bill. The other way they could do it is supplemental funding. Feigenbaum says neither is likely to happen in the near future, nor are two new bills that would fund an interstate high-speed rail network likely to pass, one that would provide 32 billion and the other 205 billion. So the question is, will there be money? What we're seeing is a lot of talk about high-speed rail money, but not a lot of action. I want the U.S. to be leading the world when it comes to access to high-speed rail and I think we have a real opportunity to do that, especially with the bipartisan appetite for real investments that we have before us this year. President Biden promised to make sure that America had the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world during the 2020 campaign. As Congress plans to vote on a massive infrastructure bill that President Biden has already signaled should include some type of high-speed rail, politicians should pay more attention to California's costly disaster than a map they find on Twitter.