Take the area of gasoline-powered transportation as an example. After World War II, when American car culture was brewing in Southern California, the state used a gas tax increase to build one of the first modern highway networks. In the 1950s, the United States federal government borrowed that same model to build the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, finally banning its sale in 1992, four years before the United States as a whole followed suit. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for automobiles, California reached an agreement with the world’s major automakers, from Ford to Honda, VW and BMW, to make existing standards even stricter in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (later ratified by the Biden administration).
It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in some crucial areas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m pleased to report that the United States taking shape on its Pacific Rim is once again inventing solutions much more quickly than conventional wisdom had anticipated.
I was optimistic about these emerging transformations even before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential candidate. If he wins, what he knows about California will presumably affect how he approaches the country and the world. Her Californianness is one of the least discussed but most important aspects of her, including the optimistic approach to today’s diversity and tomorrow’s opportunities that contrasts so much with Donald Trump.
But if it doesn’t go that far, California will likely move forward with even more purpose, upholding its national example of how things can be done differently. Regardless of who guides national policy, California deserves new attention as a “state of reinvention” rather than a “state of resistance.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California disappears, eventually the country and eventually much of the world will disappear. Here are some illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these are “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always emerged.
Train to somewhere
To start, let’s get back to the topic of transportation: At this point, of course, the pioneering highway system that California built in the 20th century is a congested, maxed-out mess. And the State cannot build more highways; Where they are needed, there is no more space and those that are built fill up as soon as they are opened. Without new forms of transportation, the state will become increasingly paralyzed and all its other problems will worsen. That’s why, back in 2008, California voters approved an initial bond issue of nearly $10 billion to build a high-speed rail line that would eventually run some 500 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the California corridor. Central Valley. That was 16 years ago. If you’ve heard anything about this project since then, it’s that it’s a white elephant, a doomed relic, a cautionary tale, and any other metaphor for failure you can choose.
And yes, the list of complaints is long. The project is well over budget (about $100 billion) and far behind its original schedule. Some parts of the line were supposed to already be in operation. As things stand, first service isn’t projected to begin until 2030, and then only on the 171-mile segment from Merced, in the northern half of California’s Central Valley, to Bakersfield, at the southern end. This initial abbreviated route has been dubbed the “train to nowhere,” a common insult that irritates people in the Central Valley but captures the frustration of people stuck in Los Angeles or Bay Area traffic. And given that the entire funding-hungry project has become the subject of culture wars, it is no surprise that, to many, the project seems as remote and implausible as human settlement on Mars.
But I’ve been following the comings and goings for more than a decade and have begun to see California’s high-speed rail project with new clarity. In the world of aviation, pilots are trained to recognize the “point of no return,” when you have come so far that you would only lose if you return. That’s where California is with high-speed rail. Consider the weight of some recent facts: This summer the project received a full “environmental clearance” for the 463 miles from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco, and clearance is expected for another 31 miles from Los Angeles to Anaheim next year. Almost all of the thousands of land needed have been secured. Construction in the Central Valley is much further along than most people realize: About 12,000 people have been working there for a long time, and test trains should be running in three or four years. And what hasn’t sunk in is that, when completed, this will be one of the fastest high-speed rail systems operating anywhere on Earth. (At 220 mph, it would surpass the 200 mph range of European trains and the famous Shinkansen in Japan, or match the fastest stretches of the Beijing-Shanghai line in China.) Not only that, for the first time in the world, the California train system will use solar-generated electricity throughout the entire journey.
Over the past decade, I have visited Fresno, the largest city along the initial route (population 545,000), about a dozen times. There and in the surrounding area you can see how the railway is taking shape month by month, kilometer by kilometer. You see the kind of gigantic heavy industrial construction projects that I remember from my life in China, when it seemed like a new subway line opened every month. You see excavators bigger than school buses; Concrete bridge supports as long as airliners.
