California

Map shows new California high-speed rail routes

Published

2 years ago

April 24, 2024

Map shows new California high-speed rail routes

A series of maps show the full extent of California’s proposed high-speed rail routes that would provide an efficient and quick way of travel between the state’s major cities.

Renewed interest has surfaced in high-speed rail travel after Brightline West, a new all-electric, 218-mile rail line bringing passengers from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Rancho Cucamonga, California, broke ground on Monday after construction was delayed for several years.

The project is expected to be completed before the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has another rail line planned that would provide a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours, but progress has been slow.

A rendering of the Brightline West high-speed rail under construction in southern California. The California High Speed Rail Authority is planning a statewide project that would take passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in…

Brightline West

According to maps on the Rail Authority’s website, the proposed high-speed rail line would traverse three regions—northern, central and southern California.

“The Phase 1 system will connect San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin via the Central Valley in under three hours on trains capable of exceeding 200 miles per hour,” the website said. “Phase 2 will extend to Sacramento and San Diego.”

A spokesperson for the Authority told Newsweek that the project is at an “exciting time.” There are 171 miles of rail line under construction, and there is environmental clearance for 422 miles.

“In the last year alone, the Authority has been awarded $3.3 billion in new federal funds to advance the work on the initial operating segment between Merced and Bakersfield, signifying a renewed federal partnership,” the statement said.

The map showing the total completed route for a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to San Diego.

California High Speed Rail Authority

Northern California project

There are two legs to the northern California project. Phase 1 involves creating a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Merced, with stops in between at Millbrae-SFO, San Jose and Gilroy. Phase 2 would bring travelers from Sacramento to Merced with stops at Stockton and Modesto.

For the San Francisco to San José leg of the journey, the Authority plans to introduce high-speed rail service to the Caltrain corridor. Environmental clearance was completed in 2022, and construction of the Caltrain electrification is under way.

Environmental clearance also was completed for the San José to Merced leg.

“Electrifying the existing rail corridor from San José to Gilroy will modernize the rail corridor for electrified high-speed rail service and allow Caltrain to extend electrified service to southern Santa Clara County,” the website said.

The northern leg of the high-speed rail route from San Francisco to Merced.

California High Speed Rail Authority

Central California project

The middle stint of the statewide project travels from Merced to Bakersfield with rail stations at Fresno and Kings/Tulare. Construction is most promising in this segment.

“The electrified high-speed rail line between Merced and Bakersfield is the first building block of the statewide system. This 171-mile line will offer the nation’s first true electrified high-speed rail service,” the Authority said on its website.

The spokesperson told Newsweek that this leg of the project is expected to be completed by 2030 to 2033.

The central leg of the high-speed rail route.

California High Speed Rail Authority

Southern California project

The southern California stint also involves two phases. Phase 1 would bring travelers from Bakersfield to Anaheim with stops in Palmdale, Burbank and Los Angeles. Phase 2 would travel from Los Angeles to San Diego with stops at San Bernardino and Riverside. The southern California map also shows the Brightline West route.

The southern leg of the high-speed rail route.

California High Speed Rail Authority

The statewide project has been plagued with delays and price jumps. Voters approved the project in 2008, KTLA reported, with Phase 1 taking travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles. At the time, the project was anticipated to be operational by 2020 and cost $33 billion.

Four years past the deadline, the project is still far from being completed and the price has jumped to $128 billion.

“The full Los Angeles to San Francisco line completion date is contingent on federal funding,” the spokesperson told Newsweek.

According to a U.S. House testimony by Lee Ohanian, a UCLA professor and Stanford University fellow, California began its journey to high-speed rail in 1993 by creating the California Intercity High-Speed Rail Commission. Three years later, the commission was replaced by the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

“California’s HSR project has little to show over this 30-year period. The project is significantly delayed, and its budget has increased to about four times its initial cost. Some of this is due to mistakes in planning, management, oversight, and accountability,” Ohanian testified.

“But other factors reflect more endemic challenges in building HSR, including limitations in understanding the scope and size of the problems and risks that can arise in such a major infrastructure project.”

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California

Police vow to ‘hunt down animals’ behind mass shooting at children’s birthday party in California

Published

2 hours ago

December 1, 2025

Press Room

Police vow to ‘hunt down animals’ behind mass shooting at children’s birthday party in California

Police have vowed to “hunt down” the “animals” behind a mass shooting at a children’s birthday party in California.

Three children and a 21-year-old died in Saturday’s shooting at a banquet hall, with 11 more injured.

“We all know that there are people out there [who] are violent and commit violent crimes,” said Patrick Withrow, sheriff of San Joaquin County.

“But these animals walked in and shot children at a children’s birthday party.”

Officers were called to the banquet hall in Stockton just before 6pm local time (2am UK time).

Around 100-150 people had gathered to celebrate a child’s birthday.

The sheriff told reporters he had been at a Thanksgiving celebration in Oregon during the incident but “put down my grandbabies to come hunt down these animals who took somebody else’s babies away from them”.

He appealed for the public to send in “any little bit” of information that could lead to the arrest of the gunmen.

“If you know anything about this, you have to come forward and tell us what you know.”

There is currently nobody in custody over the incident.

Although the investigation is still under way, Sheriff Withrow said there appeared to have been “multiple shooters” who began the attack indoors and then moved outside.

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The shooting was “not a random act”, he said. “They walked into this area and were probably looking for somebody in particular.”

He confirmed that guns had been found on the roof of a nearby building but it was too early to say whether they were “related to this crime”.

Police have also towed multiple cars in the area, some damaged with bullet holes, in case they can be used as evidence.

“Please continue to give us more information,” he said, “and we will follow every single lead.”

A vigil was held for the victims on Sunday, according to local media, with the entire local council in attendance.

On Saturday, Stockton mayor Christina Fugazi said that “families should be together instead of at the hospital, standing next to their loved one, praying that they survive”.

California governor Gavin Newsom’s office added that he had been briefed on the “horrific shooting”.

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Commentary: Short, beautiful Southern California reads for our doomscrolling times

Published

18 hours ago

November 30, 2025

Press Room

Commentary: Short, beautiful Southern California reads for our doomscrolling times

Amid the fusillade of terrible headlines this year, one pierced my nerdy heart.

“Enjoying this headline? You’re a rarity: Reading for pleasure is declining …” was the topper to a story by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August. Pleasure reading among American adults fell more than 40% in two decades — a continuation of a trend going back to the 1940s.

I get it. We don’t want to read for fun when we’re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online and make sense of our terrible political times. But as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” series, said, “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I’m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading — bite-size jewels of intellect, if you will. Through essays, short stories, poems and pictures, each of my suggestions will bring solace through the beauty of where we live and offer inspiration about how to double down on resisting the bad guys.

“California Southern: Writing From the Road, 1992-2025” by LAist reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.

(Gustavo Arellano / Los Angeles Times)

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s warm voice has informed Angelenos about arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long called KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3. What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn’t seem to care for them.

Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.” Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio dispatches have always had a prose-like quality often lacking among public radio reporters, whose delivery tends to be as dry as Death Valley.

In mostly English but sometimes Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., employing the type of lyrical bank shots only a poet can get away with. I especially loved his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets away/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.” Another highlight is contained in “Trucks,” where Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to L.A. and name their businesses after their hometowns.

“Say these names to praise the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to document the passage. Say these names to remember the trek.”

Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings recently with Lisa Alvarez, who published her first book, “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories,” after decades of teaching English — including to my wife back in the 1990s! — at Irvine Valley College.

The L.A. native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into made-up stories because the real world is fantastical enough: She made me not just read fiction but enjoy it.

Alvarez’s debut is a loosely tied collection centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for someone who fought during the Spanish Civil War and a resident of O.C.’s canyon country tipping off the FBI about her neighbor’s participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

Author, activist and professor Lisa Alvarez

Most of the protagonists are women, brought to life through Alvarez’s taut, shining sentences. Memories play a key role — people loved and lost, places missed and reviled. A nephew remembers how his uncle landed in an FBI subversives file after attending a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. shortly after serving in the Navy in World War II. An L.A. mayor who seems like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa considers himself “the crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book” as he tries to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.

To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past is never dead in Southern California — it isn’t even past.

While Alvarez is a first-time author, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned important essays about L.A. history and geography for decades, has gathered some of his recent efforts in “Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire.”

A lot of his subjects — L.A.’s mother tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Hass avocado — are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. But few of us can turn a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín, he writes, “The twin cities of Los Angeles and Los Ángeles, evoked by [their] voices … may seem to be incommensurate places to the unhearing, but the borders of the two cities are porous. Sound travels.”

Man, I wish I would have written that.

“Elements of Los Angeles” is worth the purchase, if only to read “Taken by the Flood,” Waldie’s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster that killed at least 431 people — mostly Latinos — and destroyed the career of L.A.’s water godfather, William Mulholland. The author’s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s famous “There it is. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the city’s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.

But then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: “Friends, I leave you/with this sad song/and with a plea to heaven/For those taken by the flood.”

The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not the dead from the St. Francis Dam but all Angelenos for buying into the fatal folly of Mullholland’s L.A.

“Elements of Los Angeles” was published by Angel City Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that also released “Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.”

Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerhouse of a coffee table book by taking what could have easily sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the history of a community that has seen the promise and pain of Southern California like few others.

We see Japanese Americans posing in front of souped-up imports, reveling in SoCal’s kustom kulture scene of the 1960s, standing in front of a car at a World War II-era incarceration camp and loading up their gardening trucks at a time when they dominated the landscaping industry.

“One can read entire histories of American car culture and find no mention of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.

The rest is a delight that zooms by like the rest of my recs. Drop the doomscrolling for a day, make the time to read them all and become a better Southern Californian in the process. Enjoy!

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