Almost every Sunday evening for the past two decades, thousands of tourists from Southern California have sat in their cars in a slow-moving, 17-mile traffic backup on I-15 on their way back from a Las Vegas weekend, and said to themselves, “There has to be a better way.”
At various points over that twenty-year period, a high-speed rail line has been proposed as a fix for the time it takes to travel between the two entertainment capitals. It’s a project that has both invigorated and frustrated developers and lawmakers — routes have been proposed and extended, environmental assessments completed and then made to sit stagnant, and federal funds have been promised and then never materialized — as multiple companies have tried to turn the transportation dream into an approved reality.
