Maybe you haven’t thought much about California’s plan to build a high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco since you voted for (or against) the nearly $10 billion bond measure to get the project started in 2008.

Maybe you didn’t live in California at the time, or you were too young to understand the instinctive appeal of an electrified transportation system that would replace gas-guzzling slogs up Interstate 5 with bullet train rides that would whisk riders between cities at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour.

If any of that is true for you, it will probably come as no surprise that turning that grand vision into a reality has been monumentally difficult. The price tag of the effort has ballooned, and the route has shifted amid political squabbling and legal challenges. The future of the project has become uncertain, even as construction continues in the Central Valley.

But now, as I reported this week, there’s also heightened urgency around the effort, as the United States struggles to seriously address climate change and to overhaul crumbling roads, bridges, tunnels and railways.