If you’d like to travel by bus from Bakersfield to Los Angeles Friday evening, you have two options.

For $56.98, you can take a Greyhound bus that will get you there in two hours and forty minutes.

Or for about $100 billion, you can take high-speed rail that will get you there in 14 years.

Either way, you’ll be riding a bus from Bakersfield to Los Angeles.

This is the plan from the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Californians may have voted in 2008 for a bullet train that would take passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours, but what they got is an imaginary, shape-shifting, unfunded ghost train on wheels. Well, it’s not on wheels yet. Gov. Gavin Newsom says it’s entering the track-laying phase.

But even if it someday enters the wheels phase, the current plan calls for high-speed rail to get as far as Bakersfield, and there the passengers bound for Los Angeles will board the high-speed rail bus.

This is not a satire.

In the newly released draft business plan, Table 2.1 shows the “net proceeds outlook” for the “first full year of service in 2040” between San Francisco and Bakersfield. The rail authority projects farebox revenue between $1 billion and $1.3 billion, with costs of roughly $700 million to $800 million for operations and maintenance. A footnote to the table discloses, “Farebox revenue and operations and maintenance includes a connecting bus service to Los Angeles.”

A second chart, Table B.7, shows estimated ridership for the San Francisco-to-Bakersfield route in 2040, and the same disclosure is repeated.

You don’t have to be very good at math to calculate that the high-speed rail that’s required by law to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours is going to have some challenges if the Bakersfield-to-L.A. segment alone is two hours and forty minutes on a bus.

The project has other legal problems. In 2022, the governor signed Senate Bill 198 in an effort to get the train on track somewhere. SB 198 provided that high-speed rail bond funds appropriated to the High-Speed Rail Authority in the Budget Act of 2021 had to be spent “exclusively” for the Merced to Bakersfield segment.

This was defined in the law as “a 171-mile electrified dual-track segment that is usable for high-speed rail service in the central valley from Merced to Bakersfield, with a new combined station in downtown Merced, and connections to the Amtrak San Joaquins and the Altamont Corridor Express.”

But now that’s a challenge. To save money, the rail authority is looking at building the station on the outskirts of Merced instead of downtown. And the cost of replacing any single-track, non-electrified shared rail with dual-track electrified rail, well, let’s just say it’s not in the budget.

But it is in the law.

The legislature and the governor can change the law. The Legislative Analyst’s Office testified at an Assembly Transportation Committee hearing this week that several legal adjustments may be necessary if the project is going to meet the latest version of what passes for a schedule. Streamlining of environmental approvals and enforceable deadlines were mentioned.

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Another change to the law that’s needed by the High-Speed Rail Authority involves the difficulties of financing construction. Consumers in California are paying a hidden tax for gasoline, electricity and anything else that emits greenhouse gases in its production, and that revenue goes to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. By law, $1 billion per year will be sent to the High-Speed Rail Authority through 2045.

However, the rail authority needs the money upfront to build the Merced to Bakersfield segment.

It’s not workable to borrow money by issuing bonds that will be repaid with Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund revenue, because nobody knows how much revenue will come in from the auction of permits to emit greenhouse gases. Investors will want to be paid a high interest rate, if they’ll even take the risk.

At this point, it’s not clear who wants to take the risk or the ride, let alone the bus.

Once a futuristic promise, the bullet train has become an old albatross. Time for it to reach the end of the line.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley