A company called Brightline has been saying for some time now they would "break ground in the second half of 2023" on a high-speed rail project that will connect Southern California with Las Vegas. Today, we enter the last twelfth of 2023 and I haven't heard or read anything to indicate that this has started. Assuming it happens as announced…
Brightline West will be America's first true high-speed passenger rail system. The modern, eco-friendly system will redefine train travel in America and connect two of our most iconic destinations: Las Vegas and Southern California. This 218-mile passenger rail service will be operated by Brightline West from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga, California, with 96% of its alignment within the median of the I-15 highway.
Sounds exciting, right? I hope they can pull it off but…well, even if my now-low enthusiasm for Vegas were to regenerate, I don't think I'd use it. For one thing, to get to the train station they intend to build in Rancho Cucamonga would not be easy. Rancho Cucamonga is around 44 miles from me. I just consulted Waze and it says that if I were to leave right now for the Rancho Cucamonga station, it would take 1 hour and 13 minutes in "typical traffic."
Since they probably won't be running a lot of trains to and from Vegas, at least at first, it would probably be a matter of arriving on time for my train or waiting many hours for the next one. "Typical traffic" in my city can get atypical without notice so I'd have to build a lot of pad into that drive to Rancho Cucamonga along with time to park. So add an hour to that 1:13. The Brightline train (they say) will travel at speeds up to 186+ miles per hour, delivering me to a station on the Las Vegas Strip in two hours and ten minutes.
So total time from my garage to the Las Vegas strip would be around four and a half hours…or about the time that Waze tells me if would take me to drive right now from my house to Caesars Palace. I just looked that up too.
I also tried figuring it if I drove or took an Uber to Union Station downtown to take a Metrolink train to Rancho Cucamonga. Union Station is nine miles and again, you have to allow pad time…and if I drove there, parking time as well. It works out to even longer.
Meanwhile, in addition to driving, there's another way I could get to Vegas and it's available to me right now: Drive or take an Uber the 45 minutes to LAX Airport. Add in an hour pad for traffic on the way or in the TSA line plus maybe parking, then take a nonstop Southwest Airlines flight (60-75 minutes) to the airport in Vegas. Figure a fifteen minute cab ride to the Strip…and that's probably well under four hours.
Going Brightline to Vegas may be way faster for people who live near Rancho Cucamonga but for me, it's not gonna be faster and given how many zillions they're spending to build this super-charged choo-choo business, I doubt it will be cheaper. If you book a flight in advance, you can find $44 fees on Southwest so when they talk about Brightline serving Southern California and a projected "11 million one-way passengers annually," I dunno. Most of Southern California lives farther from Rancho Cucamonga than I do.
Don't get me wrong: I love the idea. On the project's website, they talk about all the jobs it would create and all the environmental advantages and that all sounds peachy. And I'd love to see the day when a high-speed train would whisk me from my neighborhood to Las Vegas or even to Rancho Cucamonga for the transfer but I just don't see that happening. Here's hoping I'm wrong.