’60 Minutes’ Review of High-Speed Rail: A Lukewarm Look at the Project

The era when the CBS news show 60 Minutes broadcast hard-hitting stories that could upend the political agenda is long over. While the show has been in steady decline for decades, it is barely even seen as a serious news program these days, especially after CBS handed control of its news division to right-wing grifter Bari Weiss.

So when 60 Minutes announced a quarter-hour segment on high-speed rail construction in the United States, with a major focus on California’s embattled project to connect the Bay Area to Los Angeles, beginning with the Central Valley spin, I feared the worst. What I got was unexpected: the piece wasn’t nearly as sensationalist as I’d anticipated. In fact, it was kind of dull … and mostly ignored the progress the project has made over the past couple of years.

60 Minutes itself seems to recognize that it’s not possible to provide a complete picture of this complicated project in a just-under-15-minute segment. Its own description on YouTube reads: “High-speed rail can be found around the world. Yet so far, the projects haven’t tracked in the U.S., where both the public and private sectors have faced ballooning costs and delays.” That high-speed rail is expensive and difficult to build in America is not news.

The story revisits the difficulties the California High-Speed Rail Authority has faced getting off the ground over the nearly two decades since voters approved partial funding in 2008. It includes interviews with officials, advocates, and the CEO of Brightline, the privately owned rail company working on its own project to connect Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

But even though Sunday’s segment wasn’t especially spicy, American right-wing media used it to do what it does best: initiate a sensationalized high-speed rail pile-on. Headlines reviewing the piece include the New York Post’s “Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail humiliation deepens — as aide admits blunder and $126B line dubbed ‘Stonehenge,’” Fox News’ “California’s high-speed rail fiasco exposed in brutal ‘60 Minutes‘ segment,” another Fox News story repeating the same claims, “Newsom’s California rail project now expected to cost $126B, official admits, with still no tracks laid,” and a California Post editorial titled “High-speed rail: Gavin Newsom finds a faster way to Stonehenge.”

You know the rail haters are really feeling their oats when, nearly a decade after Elon Musk’s biographer reported that the dishonest billionaire’s “hyperloop” plans were nonsense, he’s back on Twitter pushing the same drivel to his remaining believers.

The ’60 Minutes’ Story Missed Some Big News

I’m not the only one who found the 60 Minutes piece underwhelming. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary, Republican Congressmember from Illinois, and current co-chair of U.S. High Speed Rail, Ray LaHood weighed in just hours after it aired.

“The project’s past challenges have been covered extensively,” LaHood noted. “What’s new is that the California State Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom passed a $20-billion investment in the project last fall. This steady, long-term funding — delivered in $1-billion annual allocations — is a game changer. It will allow California High-Speed Rail to issue bonds and attract private investors to begin construction into major population centers such as the San Francisco Bay Area.”

Ignoring the state’s commitment of $20 billion to complete the Central Valley spine is not the only omission. 60 Minutes notes that no track has been laid (true) and that there are large structures that seem to begin and end nowhere (also true) that will one day carry trains. But it fails to mention the extensive highway and road projects already completed to make the rail line feasible without major disruptions.

The wildly popular and successful electrification of Caltrain? Not even hinted at. At least the new business plan got a passing mention.

But the biggest omission is one that nearly every news outlet makes. And given that this piece was likely to be widely quoted and used to attack the project, that omission is glaring.

Governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom have been excoriated for the project exceeding the initial $30-billion estimate used to sell it to voters in 2008. But, as the 60 Minutes piece itself explains, that number was ill-conceived. It didn’t account for key specifics, the high cost of land acquisition, or the many road projects required to minimize disruption to existing networks.

In other words, it was never a good number. Measuring today’s costs against it to attack the state’s last two Democratic governors is dishonest. It’s lazy to frame federal opposition as a simple partisan clash between President Trump and Newsom. But it’s more than lazy—it’s misleading because…

…THE $30 BILLION ESTIMATE WAS CREATED BY REPUBLICANS WORKING FOR THEN-GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IN 2008. In fact, Schwarzenegger was governor for two years after voters approved the project and lobbied hard for more federal investment in the project’s early days based on these low estimations.

The National Story

By touching on the Brightline project under construction between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the existing Brightline service in Florida, and other proposed projects across the country, 60 Minutes briefly gestures toward the real story of high-speed rail in America—and the central challenge California has faced from the beginning.

High-speed rail isn’t failing in California because it can’t be built; it struggles because America chooses to invest in rail in the most difficult, fragmented, and politically fraught way possible.