Will California's bullet train be up to speed?
LOS ANGELES - When California voters approved construction of a bullet train in 2008, they had a legal promise that passengers would be able to speed from Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes.
But over the next decade, the state rail authority made a series of political and financial compromises that slowed speeds on long stretches of the track.
The authority says it can still meet its trip time commitments, though not by much.
Computer simulations conducted this year by the authority, obtained by the Los Angeles Times under a public records act request, show the bullet train is three minutes and 10 seconds inside the legal mandate.
Such a tight margin of error has some disputing whether the rail network will regularly hit that two-hour-40 minute time, in part because the assumptions that went into those simulations are highly optimistic and unproven. The premise hinges on trains operating at higher speeds than virtually all the
