Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).
It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.
I was bullish on these emerging transformations even before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president. If she wins, what she knows from California will presumably affect her approach to the country and the world. Her California-ness is one of the least-discussed but most important aspects of her, including the upbeat approach to today’s diversity and tomorrow’s opportunities that is such a contrast to Donald Trump.
But if she doesn’t get that far, California is likely to chug along with all the more purpose, maintaining its nation-scale example of how else things can be done. Whoever guides national politics, California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.
Train to Somewhere
For starters, let’s return to the thread of transportation: By now, of course, the pioneering freeway system California built in the 20th century is a maxed-out, congested mess. And the state cannot build more freeways; where they’re needed, there’s no more room, and any that are built fill up as soon as they’re opened. Without new forms of transportation, the state will become increasingly paralyzed, and all its other problems will become worse. Which is why, back in 2008, California voters approved a nearly $10 billion initial bond issue to build a high-speed rail line eventually running some 500 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the Central Valley corridor. That was 16 years ago. If you’ve heard anything at all about this project since then, it’s that it is a white elephant, a doomed relic, a cautionary lesson, and any other metaphor for failure you might choose.
And yes, the complaint list is long. The project is way over budget (to the tune of $100 billion) and far behind its original schedule. Parts of the line were supposed to be up and running already. As it is, the 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, on the southern end. This abbreviated initial route has been dubbed a “train to nowhere,” a stock insult that grates on people in the Central Valley but captures the frustration of people stuck in LA or Bay Area traffic. And given how the entire funding-hungry project has become an object of the culture wars, it is little wonder that for many, the project seems as remote and implausible as human settlements on Mars.
But I’ve been following the back-and-forth for more than a decade, and I’ve started to see California’s high-speed rail project with a new clarity. In the aviation world, pilots are trained to recognize the “point of no return,” when you’ve gone so far that you’d only lose by going back. That’s where California is with high-speed rail. Consider the weight of a few recent facts: This summer the project received full “environmental clearance” for the entire 463 miles from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco, with clearance for a further 31 miles from LA to Anaheim expected next year. Nearly all of the thousands of necessary land parcels have been secured. Construction in the Central Valley is much further along than most people realize: Some 12,000 people have long been at work there, and test trains should be running in three or four years. And what hasn’t sunk in is that, when done, this will be among the very fastest mainline high-speed rail systems running anywhere on Earth. (At 220 mph, it would beat the 200-mph range for European trains and the famed Shinkansen in Japan, or match the fastest stretches of the Beijing-to-Shanghai line in China.) Not only that, in a worldwide first, California’s system will use solar-generated electricity the entire way.
Over the past decade, I’ve visited Fresno, the biggest city along the initial route (population 545,000), about a dozen times. There and in surrounding areas you can see the rail taking shape month by month, mile by mile. You see the kind of gigantic, heavy-industrial construction projects I remember from living in China, when a new subway line seemed to be opening every month. You see earth movers bigger than school buses; concrete bridge-supports as long as airliners.
