Is Trump going to kill California High-Speed Rail?

We've all heard of the infamous high-speed rail project in California. The rising cost, the slow building, the ambitious plans that the planners have, but does it really deserve the bad reputation, and also, is it doomed by Trump?

California High-Speed Rail has been on a rocky road ever since it was approved in 2008. Construction only began in 2019, and even then, it's going to take another year for the last segment of the historic railway to be fully enviromentally cleared. So what's up with all the delays?

Funding's always been a tenuous issue when talking about CAHSR, as some consider it a pipe dream, but the funds have been coming since 2008. From the ARRA grant to last year's Federal-State Partnership grant, partial funds have been secured for the project. Lots of these funds also come with restrictions, such as specific project sections, or even specific interchanges, so those funds are obsolete when it comes to building another section or even another overpass in the same city, and another problem is the costs are outrunning the funds.

The costs are ballooning now, and it's a problem. Back in 2008, when CAHSR was first proposed, the costs were projected to be just 33 billion dollars. Now it costs more just to build the section between Bakersfield and Merced. This is a huge problem for the project, and will make the project even less feasible. The total costs are now projected to be around 106 billion dollars, and although this is considerably less than a highway or airport equivalent, it still will be a problem for the project. And another problem is Trump.

Trump is almost guaranteed to pull the federal funds for the project, and with CAHSR already struggling to find the funds, it may be the final blow to the project. Without the project, America will fall even further behind China and Japan in the high-speed rail sector, and will cause America, and subsequently the world, to go a step back in the war against climate change, if we keep going in that direction. It's pretty bad.

This would be devastating to other public transport projects as well, because the project is very public and very controversial, and if it stops, there's a lot of wasted space and resources on a strip of land. If it gets stopped, there's not a lot of things to convert it to, but one of the major ideas is a public walking/hiking/biking path. I really hope this project doesn't get stopped, but if it does, this should be the last resort.

Obviously, this is a major problem, and I hope that the funds find a way to get here, even without Trump, but I think it's a possibility that this could have a wider impact on trains and public transport as a whole just because it's widely known. I hope that we don't have to go to that last resort, a path that costed billions of dollars just to buy. We've already paid billions, so why stop now?