California’s flailing High-Speed Rail project is undergoing yet another marketing smokescreen, with soaring costs leading officials to pitch a pipe dream of bullet trains depositing riders at Yosemite National Park.
Facing ballooning costs and missed deadlines, the boondoggle – now estimated to cost well over $100 billion if it’s ever completed – has state rail officials and Central Valley leaders floating a plan to shift the future Merced station out of downtown and rebrand it as a Yosemite access point.
However, the newly proposed station, which would reportedly be about four miles southeast of the originally proposed station in downtown Merced, would still require bus shuttles to ferry tourists 70 miles to trailheads.
“This is just gaslighting,” Assemblymember David Tangipa (R-Fresno) said. “Their model is just to rename it and let’s make everyone feel good.”
The Yosemite rebrand comes on the heels of Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Democrats proposing legislation that would bury records related to High-Speed Rail’s costs — now pegged at $215 million per mile.
“Instead of opening up their books, they now want to reroute the train to an orchard four miles outside of Merced and market it as the ‘Gateway to Yosemite,’” Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo (R-Tulare) told The Post.
“This is an affront to taxpayers. No matter what way it is branded, the High-Speed Rail has been nothing but a colossal failure.”
“Taxpayers continue to be swindled.”
The California High-Speed Rail Authority has been scrambling since last year, when it quietly floated a plan to bypass Merced altogether and swing the tracks west toward the Bay Area. That sparked backlash from local officials, who accused the state of breaking yet another promise.
The governor’s office and high-speed rail officials did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Merced Mayor Matthew Serratto has urged state officials – who would need to pass legislation to revise the 171-mil route – to lean into the rebrand, telling the San Francisco Chronicle: “It could be a Merced-Yosemite station. Call it that. That’s how you should market it.”
But not everyone in Merced is on board.
Darin DuPont, a city councilmember, called the proposed change “more sleight of hand by the High Speed Rail Authority.”
Newsom leaned into the spin on high-speed rail last week during a press conference in Kern County, framing the project as a success story rather than a cautionary tale after being pitched with an original price tag of $33 billion.
About $15 billion has been spent to date on the project, which so far is nothing but a collection of viaducts, overpasses and other “structures” scattered across the Central Valley, pictures obtained by The Post show.
“We’re now in the process of starting to lay track,” Newsom bragged in a video posted to social media as he gestured towards a freight train in Wasco.
With the specter of the project bleeding even more red ink, Merced’s newly proposed station would be plunked down in unincorporated farmland lined with pistachio orchards and a shuttered warehouse.
Peter Whippy, the rail authority’s chief of external affairs, pitched the southeast station to the Merced City Council, and he called the change “value engineering” as it could save as much as $1 billion.
However, land-use experts said the pivot abandons the very benefits high-speed rail was supposed to deliver.
John Radulovich, a former Bay Area Rapid Transit director, told the Chronicle: ““From a land-use and planning perspective, a station out in the middle of nowhere is almost always the worst possible outcome.”
