Construction of Brightline West, the high-speed train connecting Las Vegas to Los Angeles, has officially begun.
With Brightline West, a trip from Vegas to LA (or vice versa) will be literally cut in half.
READ MORE: China wants to build a $200 billion underwater train between its mainland and the US
One thing that hasn’t really changed in the US over the last few decades is the way one can get from A to B.
Different things have been tried, both on a local and national level, with mixed results.
The Boring Company, owned by Elon Musk, operates Vegas Loop, which is like an underground taxi service using Teslas.
And then on a broader scale, you’ve got several projects for so-called ‘vectrains’, including the Hyperloop project which, according to rumors, has actually now been scrapped.
But, at the end of the day, anybody who’s trying to get from anywhere to anywhere else across the US is still only stuck with two viable options, they can either fly or drive.
The ‘Brightline’ project aims to fix that issue by connecting large metropolitan areas via a high-speed train.
Even though this type of train is still not really a thing in the US, it has been available in other parts of the world such as China, Japan and Europe for a while.
In Italy, for example, you can travel from Milan to Rome, or from Rome to Venice in about three hours.
By car, even with the best possible road and traffic conditions, you’d need at least seven or eight hours to complete that journey.
That’s the same idea behind Brightline West.
Flight time from Las Vegas to Los Angeles is just over an hour, but we all know the hassle that comes with boarding a flight, so if you include check-in times and border control and so on, realistically that looks more like three or four hours.
A road trip takes even longer than that.
Even if you never stop for fuel, you’re looking at a five-hour trip.
With the 186-mph high-speed train, the trip would only take around two hours.
It’s an ambitious plan, with a projected cost of around $12 billion, and the goal is to get to a capacity of 11 million passengers annually.
If everything goes to plan, the first train is set to depart in 2027, with proposed stops in Palmdale, Rancho Cucamonga and Hesperia.
So stay tuned for that.
Some of the images used for this article were generated using AI
