How Shaky Is Brightline's Bet on High-Speed Rail to Vegas?

A new high-speed rail project is aiming to reshape travel between Southern California and Las Vegas, but some feasibility questions are starting to bubble up. NPR checks in on Brightline West, the company behind the effort, which in April 2024 broke ground on a 218-mile route that's poised to become the nation's first true high-speed rail. The price tag is steep: at least $12 billion, with only about half of that raised to date. That's with cost-saving measures factored in, like placing the California terminal not in downtown LA but in Rancho Cucamonga, a city about 40 miles east, and running much of the track in the median of Interstate 15 to avoid some land acquisition costs.

Marc Joffe, a visiting fellow at the conversative-leaning California Policy Center, is starting to see some red flags, he tells NPR: The company said its construction costs keep climbing, and he points to lower-than-expected revenue and ridership for the company's current (slower) lines in South and Central Florida. "I think it'll be late. I think it will generate less revenue than they expect," said Joffe. "Between those two things, I don't think it'll be successful, at least from a financial point of view. I think that there's a lot of risk around it failing, and I wouldn't have said that a year ago."

Las Vegas Weekly has some skeptical thoughts of its own. It wonders just how many people will be willing to fork over the $400 that Brightline CEO Wes Edens in 2024 suggested the round-trip might cost. (Though more recent reporting indicates that once service is "stabilized" the roundtrip cost could be as much as 40% lower.) And once riders are in Las Vegas, the journey isn't quite over: The future station site "is miles away from the tourist action on the Strip and Downtown," which would ostensibly mean riders would then have to hop in an Uber, taxi, limo, hotel shuttle, or transfer to public transportation.