New California High Speed Rail Exaggeration

The just released Environmental Impact Statement for the California High Speed Rail Phase I Los Angeles to Anaheim segment assumes a population of 44 million in 2049. In fact, the official state population projection, produced by the California Department of Finance (DOF) is just 40,800,000, according to September 30, 2025 data. Moreover, by 2070, the state is projected by DOF to have a population of 39.5 million residents, virtually the same as reported in the 2020 US census.

For decades, high speed rail aficionados have been claiming that it is necessary to handle California’s population growth. There is none. What decade are they living in?

There is a considerable body of literature documenting the overly optimistic ridership projections associated with high speed rail. There are also the cost overruns, which California and the United Kingdom (the HS2 project) seem to be trying to outspend one another, with little hope of ever completing extensions to Sacramento, Riverside-San Bernardino and San Diego (much less San Francisco, Los Angeles and Anaheim). Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield have similarly been put on the “back burner.”

When the wrong numbers are used, it is not surprising when projects fail to deliver on their advertised performance. The California High Speed Rail line has been on this track for some time.

Train derailment through the wall at Paris Montparnasse Station, 1897.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.