After more than 20 years of promising that high-speed trains would soon be zipping between Las Vegas and (almost) Los Angeles, another round of delays for the Brightline West project shouldn't be surprising. 

One can only hope that, when completed, the speed of the railway will be inversely proportional to the speed with which it became a reality. 

Despite a $3 billion loan from former President Joe Biden's administration and billions more in "private activity bonds" from various public municipalities and organizations, economic realities are nonetheless threatening to derail the most promising American high-speed rail project in years. 

Yes, ground has been broken and new promises have been made, but the massive headwinds facing a rail project in the Mojave haven't disappeared. If anything, with relentless inflation and a never-ending slew of changing tariffs on necessary materials, those headwinds have only gotten stronger. 

The leading challenge facing Brightline is the same as always: money. 

With a $6 billion loan from the Trump administration still in limbo and the company fielding bankruptcy options for its existing railway in Florida, initial plans to have the project completed in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles were obviously (laughably) overoptimistic.  

Although, even if everything was on schedule and funding had been secured, there would still be reasons to doubt the project would be as transformational and impressive as advocates suggest. 

After all, would-be passengers wouldn't have been whisked from Vegas to LA in time for the Olympic Games to begin. Instead, they would have been taken to Rancho Cucamonga, where they would then have to navigate a web of local transit options to trek the last hour of their journey into downtown Los Angeles — a final leg that would surely dull a bit of the excitement to be found in breezing through the Mojave at 200 miles per hour. 

And that inconvenience of merely getting somewhere vaguely close to Los Angeles isn't a minor problem. It raises an important question of just how much demand there will actually be for the ride, and whether or not ridership rates will be high enough to turn this ever-more-expensive project into some sort of profitable business down the line. 

Concerns about long-term profitability shouldn't be underplayed. Initially, the company had floated the idea of pricing tickets as high as $400 per person to make its business model work — a price that made even longtime advocates of high-speed rail bristle. Revised estimates have put the average one-way ticket price closer to $120 per person, but even that's still relatively expensive depending on what kind of low-cost airfares happen to be available at any given moment. 

There's also the very real possibility that millions of motorists who currently brave Interstate 15 traffic won't suddenly abandon their vehicles and flock to some new public transit option. 

As I've argued before, most of those motorists already have options to avoid massive traffic jams by altering their schedule or simply jumping on a plane. Their decision to nonetheless brave the uncertainty of Interstate 15 indicates they apparently value the independence of driving themselves more than shaving a bit of time off their holiday commute. That preference isn't going to be easily changed merely because one more mass transit option becomes available. 

Perhaps if Brightline approaches its route as an attraction in and of itself, it can still convert some of those automobile-addicted tourists into rail enthusiasts. 

As Ogilvy executive Rory Sutherland once argued about the Eurostar train in Europe, if the ride is made pleasurable enough then the speed of the journey suddenly matters a whole lot less. Serve a little free champagne to commuters or turn the trip into an entertaining spectacle in its own right, and the prospect of climbing aboard a train suddenly becomes a whole lot more attractive to potential riders, regardless of how fast it zips along the tracks.

Considering that most of the talk about the train has been entirely focused on reducing travel times between Vegas and an LA-adjacent suburb, it's not entirely clear that Brightline is thinking in such innovative terms. Indeed, the company's renderings of its yet-to-be-built train cars look as if the experience will be little more than a streamlined and modernized version of boarding an airplane or hopping on an Amtrak train — which might not be enough to get throngs of motorists lining up at the terminal gates. 

Whatever challenges to long-term profitability might exist, however, there remains hope that Brightline can still succeed where others have failed.  

For starters, Brightline West's financial woes are still nothing compared to the fiscal abyss of California's in-state rail project. And while the California High Speed Rail boondoggle is not an objectively high bar to clear, it nonetheless instills a bit of confidence that Brightline's current challenges are far more manageable. 

Additionally, even if the Trump administration decides not to move forward on its $6 billion loan, one can be fairly certain that some future administration, legislature or other government entity will be happy to throw funds at the project. After all, the romantic notion of bringing modern rail to America is one of those niche policy issues that simply never dies — no matter how many companies go bankrupt or how many trains to nowhere leech off taxpayers. 

For Brightline, this is probably good news as its "mostly privately funded" rail project now hinges on receiving billions of dollars in federal financing. Until that subsidy is given the final green light by a cadre of bureaucrats or lawmakers, however, it means the promise of connecting Las Vegas to the thriving SoCal suburb of Rancho Cucamonga will be delayed yet again. 

Luckily, that delay isn't going to faze most of us throughout the region. Like waiting in I-15 traffic near the state border, we've grown pretty used to it.  

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas and founder of Schaus Creative LLC, an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.