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 2 hours, 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 2-hour, 40-minute time, in part because the assumptions that went into those simulations are highly optimistic and unproved. The premise hinges on trains operating at higher speeds than virtually all the systems in Asia and Europe; human train operators consistently performing with the precision of a computer model; favorable deals on the use of tracks that the state doesn't even own; and amicable decisions by federal safety regulators.
Frank Vacca, chief of rail operations for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said the system will be "fully compliant" with the law and able to make the trip within the time limit in regular operations.
Speed is crucial to the project, and not just because of the legal mandate. Fast trains will directly affect ridership and revenue.
But speed doesn't come cheap. Faster trains require costly longer tunnels and more viaducts. The price tag is $77 billion, up from the $33 billion when the project was approved.
State law does not give the project much room to maneuver.
The 2008 bond act approved by voters said the system had to be "designed to achieve" a trip time of 2 hours, 40 minutes. Rail authority officials have long contended that the legal fine print does not require them to actually operate trains on such a schedule. The interpretation raises the prospect that the state is spending billions of dollars on a capability it will never use.
"If they don't get 2 hours and 40 minutes, they are not going to get the predicted benefits of this very expensive system," said Daniel Brand, a retired ridership expert with Charles River Associates who conducted the early passenger studies for the project in the 1990s.
Vacca says it nonetheless makes sense: "You can have a car designed to go 150 miles per hour, but you don't drive that fast."
By international standards, the California timetable is audacious.
The Japanese Shinkansen operates between Tokyo and Osaka, a distance of 344 miles. The fastest trip takes 2 hours, 22 minutes, yielding an average speed of 145 mph, according to Japanese Railway schedules.
The French Train a Grande Vitesse, or TGV, operates the Paris-to-Lyon line over 243 miles and takes 1 hour, 59 minutes, according to TGV schedules. The average speed is 121 mph.
But the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco route, which would traverse three mountain ranges and five of the 10 largest cities in the state, is supposed to travel 438 miles in 2 hours, 40 minutes -- requiring an average speed of 164 mph.
When the rail authority solicited international firms to help finance and build the system, the Spanish firm Sacyr Concesiones S.L., which has helped build 40 bullet-train systems around the world, warned the state in a 2015 report that "one of the main cost drivers is the requirement of 220-mph operating speed."
"220 mph is higher than most if not all standard commercial speed for HSR," the firm wrote.
Top speeds require precise track alignment -- straight and level. Going over mountains requires deep tunnels so that the grades are half as steep as those on interstate freeways.
Quentin Kopp, chairman of the rail authority when the speed requirements were created in 2008, said the Legislature erred in trying to dictate train speeds.
"It does not make sense to run at these speeds given the cost, but it is too late to change," said Kopp, a plaintiff in a suit alleging the state is violating the bond act. "You would have to go back to voters and they would turn it down as a way of stopping the project."
Former California Treasurer William Lockyer, who was chief of the state Senate in 2008 and remains a supporter, has a similar opinion.
"These details of trip times may have been too specific, but that is easy to say now," he said.
The speed mandate was created by political staffers and bureaucrats huddled in a Senate conference room in 2008. They believed guaranteeing high speeds was crucial to the system and to persuading voters to back a $9 billion bond later that year.
The main proponent of mandating the trip times was Mehdi Morshed, the longtime chief executive of the rail authority who believes rail speeds would be endlessly compromised were they not backed up by law.
"High speed doesn't mean much if you don't put in the law that you will have to get from one place to another in a certain amount of time," he said.
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