What Went Wrong With California's High-Speed Railway

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced in 2019 that he was curtailing plans to construct a statewide high-speed rail system – instead only completing the Merced to Bakersfield section for which funding is already in hand and construction is underway – leaves a lot of people wondering if the failure of this project in the richest state in the U.S. means that high-speed rail is doomed to failure throughout America.

It promised to transform how Californians travel but is now seen as a "bullet train to nowhere." This is why America's west coast megaproject has been far from high-speed.