Another Day, Another California Rail Boondoggle.
California did it again.
LAX just opened up its glitzy new $3 billion airport train. Except it didn’t open. Nobody’s riding it.
The Skylink Automated People Mover is barely two miles long, and it’s still stuck in testing while its bonds get downgraded to junk.
The Orange County Register summed it up best. They said LAX’s people mover and California’s high-speed rail are in a race to be the state’s “best non-functional transit system.”
Skylink was supposed to cost $2 billion and open in 2023. It’s now pushing $3.3 billion, and Fitch just put its bonds on negative watch.
The project is 99.6% done, but the airport and its contractor are still fighting over money, with deadlines this fall that could blow the whole thing up even further.
Here’s the kicker. LAX is already raising fees to pay for it. Uber and Lyft trips are jumping from $4 to as much as $12. That cost gets passed straight to travelers.
This is the same California playbook my opponent, Vinny Spotleson, wants to bring to Las Vegas.
Spotleson has said his top priority in the Legislature is building light rail here within seven to ten years.
He points to Paris as his model. He doesn’t point to LAX.
Or to Seattle, where a $53.8 billion light rail promise from 2016 has ballooned toward $185 billion for the same 61 miles.
He doesn’t point to California’s high-speed rail either, which has spent well over a decade and billions of dollars without laying a single mile of usable track.
Nevada already ran this experiment once.
Back in 2019, the RTC studied an 8.7-mile light rail line on Maryland Parkway. The price started at $750 million. It climbed past $1 billion before a single shovel touched dirt.
RTC commissioners voted it down. Unanimously. A valley-wide light rail system was estimated to cost between $7 billion and $12 billion.
Even Spotleson’s own party looked at this earlier this year and couldn’t make the math work.
A legislative working committee spent seven months trying to find a way to pay for regional rail in Nevada. It came back with nothing.
No funding source. No plan. Just a promise to keep studying it in 2027.
That’s the same pattern every time. Study it, promise it, underestimate it, then watch the bill triple while taxpayers get stuck footing it through higher fees or new taxes.
LAX’s contract even came loaded with add-ons that had nothing to do with moving people, like requiring the maintenance shop to run on solar power.
Add-ons like that don’t come free. They come out of the budget, and eventually out of your pocket.
Spotleson still hasn’t signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. So when his light rail dream needs a new funding source, and it will, ask yourself who pays.
I’m not opposed to good transit. I’m opposed to writing Nevada families a blank check for a project that keeps failing everywhere it’s tried, most recently at our own regional airport two states over.
LAX spent years and billions of dollars to build a train that still can’t carry a single passenger. That’s not a model. That’s a warning.
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