California’s $77bn high-speed rail project promised “to transform how Californians travel”.

Talk around what was conceived as America’s first bullet train dates back as far as 1981, with the plan centering around connecting eight of the state’s largest cities, from San Francisco to San Diego. In offering an alternative source of transportation, high-speed rail advocates hoped they would finally solve the state’s notorious traffic issue and lessen the subsequent air pollution created by stalled vehicles.

But decades later, the dream of traversing the state in just a fraction of the time it currently takes by car remains a distant – and costly – one.

And on Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom declared in his state of the state address that “the project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long”.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, the state-run organization tasked with overseeing the project, came into fruition in 1996. It spent years developing a plan of construction and operation in preparation for a ballot measure approving the project.

In 2008, voters approved almost $10bn in funding for a plan to to lay down hundreds of miles of new track, built upon elevated viaducts, to support a fully dedicated high-speed rail system.

But years of protest, lawsuits, politicking and replanning forced the authority to rework its plans. Instead of a dedicated high speed line, it now proposed a “blending” approach; a practice of sharing existing transit infrastructure where it’s feasible.

The project was divvied into two phases: the first phase was set to connect downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Anaheim with cities in the Central Valley, an estimated 520-mile long endeavor building on some existing infrastructure. Phase two extended the route north to Sacramento, east to Riverside and San Bernardino, and south to San Diego, bringing the total length to 800 miles.

Phase one was expected to be completed in 2029, but that has since been pushed to 2033.

Work on the first leg began in the Central Valley in October 2013, and trouble began from the start. The High-Speed Rail Authority broke ground before acquiring the land needed for construction or working with the local communities, failures that eventually forced them to build around several swaths of land.

“These unmitigated risks have contributed to $600m in costs overruns thus far for the three active Central Valley construction projects, with another $1.6bn in additional costs needed to complete the projects,” the state auditor Elaine Howle wrote in a scathing report released in November.

The report put the fault on “the authority’s flawed decision making regarding the start of high-speed rail system construction in the Central Valley and its ongoing poor contract management.”

California governor Gavin Newsom has said the current plan is too expensive. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Now, 13 years behind schedule, the high speed rail project is also currently about $44bn over budget.

Meanwhile, opponents and supporters have dug in.

Some Californians have been against the high-speed rail because it would cut through their beautiful landscapes. Others have questioned the high price tag of the project. “It’s an unambiguous money-waster at a time when we have many demands on public resources,” said James Moore, the director of the University of Southern California’s Transportation Engineering Program.

“It’s economically clear that it’s not going to turn a profit, even if we take construction out of the project, even if we just focus on operating costs,” Moore said. “By law, the system has to operate without a subsidy. The fares that would be necessary to begin to recover cost will be so high that there will be insufficient demand for that mode of transportation.”

Supporters believe that a state as large and widespread as California requires another form of transportation. Because of the housing crisis in the Bay Area, for example, 200,000 people drive in from the Central Valley each day to work, said Matt Regan, the senior vice-president of housing policy for the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

High-speed rail would not only ease the commute for those 200,000 people, but it would lessen the air pollution created by their cars while they sit in traffic, Regan said – 40% of the state’s greenhouse gas is caused by idling cars.

On Tuesday, when Governor Gavin Newsom made his cryptic remarks about the project during his state of the state address this week, the full breadth of the plan seemed all but done for.

“Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA,” Newsom said. “I wish there were. However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield.”

The governor’s opponents quickly seized on the moment. The House minority leader and California congressman Kevin McCarthy tweeted in misguided triumph: “The train to nowhere is finally stopped.” Trump called the project a “‘green’ disaster,” and demanded that California return the $3.5bn in federal money allocated to the plan.

Newsom’s office later clarified that the governor only meant “we have to be realistic about the project”.

The statement about San Francisco and Los Angeles was more about how there isn’t funding, the spokesman Nathan Click told Curbed SF, and Newsom later told ABC 7 that he is “fully committed to building high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles”.

“I think the governor made it very clear that high-speed rail is still part of the long term plans,” Regan said. “I’m fully confident that in my lifetime, I will ride a very, very fast train out of San Francisco down to the Central Valley.”