
$68B California bullet train project likely to overshoot budget and deadline - chambo622
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html
======
fijal
I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous
car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming
everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you
can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady
environment and all of that going 300 km/h.

That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive
than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.

~~~
Lazare
The original plan called for a LA to San Fran trip time of less than 2 hours
or 40 minutes, which would have required peak speeds of over 350 km/h (faster
than any other train in the world), and average speeds of 320 km/h. This would
be difficult to achieve anywhere, but it's especially hard (read: utterly
impossible) to achieve on that route, since for regulatory reasons the train
will be limited to 160 km/h for significant portions of the route.

Since then, the plan has changed repeatedly, and not for the better. It
currently looks like average trip times will be in the 4-6 hour range. That is
hopefully achievable (although they haven't built it yet), but one thing it
_isn 't_ is high speed. (They're hoping to work in some "express" trains which
will do better, but it's an open question whether they're manage it, and even
if they do, they won't be remotely as fast as Europe, China, or Japan.)

You're talking about trains going 300 km/h, but California is looking to build
a train that will be doing _literally_ half that. By many common definitions,
it's not even "high speed rail".

> I have a question to all the naysayers

I love high speed rail, and I hope maybe one day California will try and build
a high speed rail network. :) Naysaying what they're actually building doesn't
mean I don't like rail.

~~~
guard-of-terra
High speed rail between Moscow and Sankt Peterburg takes 4 hours exactly. This
includes leaving Moscow urbanized area from city centre, a few intermediate
stops, and traversing Sankt Peterburg to city centre. I don't see why
traveling from SF to LA would take more than 3:30 given that the distance is
100 kilometers shorter.

(It also costs around $50 currently but obviously don't expect that)

~~~
fulafel
WP says that train only goes 250 km/h and that the railway is congested, with
another rail being built for just the high speed. So it is really a low lower
bound.

------
vishnuks
The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they’re proposing in California would be
the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk
said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” California’s high-
speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in
about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes
about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing
the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk.
He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go
faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out
into a new city.

From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk

~~~
JDDunn9
To be fair, experts said that $6-$10 billion estimate was not realistic. First
time projects always overshoot their budget. Also, it assumed placing tubes on
the highway, instead of buying land (by far the biggest expense of the
project).

~~~
abritinthebay
> Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land

Which is a good idea and should be done. In fact any scheme that doesn't
include this should be by definition classed as a unnecessary money-sink.

------
ChuckFrank
Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are
sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the
actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving
important infrastructure projects.

What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political
willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians
'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a
rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that
everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early
estimate.

If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation,
sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we
need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically
convenient.

Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad
infinitum.

Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future
dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad
ideas should.

The Swiss seem to be able to do it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel)

On time and on budget.

~~~
tfgg
I've noticed during the HS2 high-speed rail arguments in the UK that one
effect of giving more accurate costing up front (which the UK govt appears to
have got better at recently) is that people will just double your numbers
anyway, due to long-standing lack of trust. Despite the government giving a
very generous £40bn cap on the project, opposition groups still quote £80bn as
the final price.

Of course, no-one will actually know if the costing was accurate until it's
finished. Does being accurate really pay off for a politician?

~~~
adwf
And then there are the people who will round that figure up. I've heard some
Green campaigners calling it a £100bn project...

------
djcapelis
The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an _optional_ alignment that is
being _studied_ by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in
affected areas.

It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA
will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for
longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before
finalizing the route for this stage.)

------
melling
From the submission yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702)

America seems to be unfixable:

"The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14
years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8
billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind
schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."

~~~
hga
Blue state America, at least. Around here we routinely do projects on time and
budget.

Might be as much a scale problem, are there any Red state America projects
being done on vaguely similar scales, with, say, a billion dollars as a
minimum baseline?

~~~
MLR
Can't say much for America, but in the UK our own HS2 high speed rail line,
which probably won't be too far longer than 200 miles of track in total is
projected to cost £40bn, with some suggestions that the true cost will be
closer to £80bn.

Conversely we're also building a new west-east railway across/beneath London
that seems to be going fairly well for about £15bn.

High speed rail is just a hugely expensive thing to get built in the developed
world it seems.

~~~
melling
The question is why? If China can build 10,000 miles of HSR and the developed
world can't build 400 miles, won't there be an infrastructure penalty at some
future time?

Spain has built 1500 miles of HSR so it seems that the extreme high cost is
avoidable.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
speed_rail_in_Europe#Sp...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
speed_rail_in_Europe#Spain)

~~~
dragonwriter
Two major drivers of the cost, as I understand it, are geography and geology
of the region and existing land values, especially near the termini (eminent
domain, in the US, requiring fair compensation to existing landholders.)

~~~
hga
There's also non-cost factors involved with the PRC: for a land based empire
like their's, internal lines of communication are critical, and since 1866
Prussia has shown the utility of railroads for that. Faster ones are obviously
better, modulo how much heavy equipment you might need to move as well (for a
lot of the PRC's issues, lightly armed troops are just fine).

------
apsec112
The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars;
rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is
planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using
whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.

------
mickgardner
Not surprised. But not hugely important in the scheme of things. The fact that
the project exists and is being worked on seems a win to me given public
transit history in the USA.

~~~
CamperBob2
Building more trains and other fixed-location transit systems that will be
finished right around the time autonomous road vehicles start to become viable
seems like a bad idea.

Public transit planners need to get a clue, seriously. The cars of 2050 are
not going to be their father's Oldsmobile. This is more of an issue in urban
environments than for cross-country transit, of course, but still... if trains
are the answer, then we're asking the wrong question.

~~~
guard-of-terra
One train is like 500 autonomous vechicles on one road, and more comfortable.
It will still win energy-wise. That you can hop on robotaxi after arriving
makes it even more desirable.

~~~
hugh4
> It will still win energy-wise.

What are we basing that on? Let's look at some numbers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV)

Let's take the Eurostar trains as an example:

> The Three Capitals sets are 394 m (1,293 ft) long and have 766 seats,
> weighing 752 tonnes.

Most of the other trains seem similar. The mass is about one tonne per
passenger. So in terms of mass of metal you need to drag around per passenger,
a _full_ train is very similar to a small car (say, the latest model Mazda
Miata which weighs 1056 kg) occupied by a single passenger.

But of course trains are very rarely entirely full (and cars average more than
one passenger). But the whole mass of the train needs to make the journey
regardless of whether there's people onboard or not! The train I caught the
other day was probably dragging around ten tons of metal for every passenger.
This is what makes trains a horrendously energy-inefficient means of
transport.

Aerodynamics? Self-driving cars could draft behind each other at high speed.
Probably not a drag coefficient quite as low as the aerodynamically designed
train, but it also has a colossally lower cross sectional area, because a
train is ridiculously high and ridiculously wide (in the interests of not
being ridiculously long, and also for historical reasons).

What else? Oh yes, the car doesn't have to stop 'til it reaches the
destination, trains tend to have stops along the route.

For speed, I don't see any reason why, once self-driving is solved, you
couldn't have cars cruising at 200mph+ in self-organised "trains" on the
existing I-5. No present car is really optimised for that kind of thing, so
it's difficult to say how hard it would be, you'd need different tyre
compounds for a start.

As for comfort I'll take the privacy of my own little bubble over travelling
in the close company of four hundred random strangers.

~~~
guard-of-terra
It won't be your own little bubble. You're not going to own a 200MPH
autonomous car. You will lease it by hour.

And even that is very far away. Meanwhile trains just work. No high-speed
connection between LA and SF is an anomaly by world standards given size,
proximity and economical importance of two cities.

Also, modern high-speed trains don't have 4-person compartments (or have those
at premium), they are rows of seats not unlike plane business class seats. You
usually have power, sometimes wi-fi. You can get coffee and a newspaper.

~~~
CamperBob2
_You 're not going to own a 200MPH autonomous car. You will lease it by hour._

I don't _want_ to own it. I don't _have_ to own it. The transit authority can
own and operate it.

This will be so much better than fixed-track transit it's not even funny.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Why? I can understand that for short trips but not for 3+ hours.

~~~
CamperBob2
Let's try an experiment. Let's meet in the lobby of an office building in the
middle of downtown LA, and see how long it takes each of us to get to a bar in
downtown SF. Loser buys the drinks.

You fly at 500 MPH, I'll drive at 65-70 or whatever the speed limit on I-5 is
these days.

I will win this bet, most likely. You will lose. A train won't help you much,
if at all, because it's going to embark and disembark on its own fixed
schedule, probably in some crappy/scary part of town miles away from where you
need to go. (Here's another reason: eventually some terrorists are going to
attack the train. The TSA will muscle its way in, and you'll have to arrive at
the station an hour or two early, just like we do now when we fly.)

There's just too much hassle and overhead involved in multi-modal transit...
which is why people who can afford to drive still do, even when they have
alternatives.

------
staunch
Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. It should be
canceled, or maybe turned into a new kind of highway designed for 100%
autonomous cars.

I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated
car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a
busy public train.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant.

No, they aren't. One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both
the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an
alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses)
of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will
support.

Autonomous cars don't address either of those concerns.

~~~
CamperBob2
_One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the
environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative
to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding
the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support._

This is absurd. The cars are going to get _much_ more efficient, and the roads
are already there.

~~~
dragonwriter
The road capacity is not already there, and to meet the increased capacity
needed will be quite expensive. The cost avoided in terms of road load was a
major justification for HSR.

~~~
CamperBob2
You don't think that a fleet of networked, semi-autonomous vehicles will be at
least several hundred percent more efficient at using existing road space than
human drivers?

------
hugh4
For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and
everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times.
And that's _before_ it starts going over budget.

But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes
from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build
something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another
hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the
indeterminate future.

~~~
apsec112
The $68 billion figure includes the full length of the line from downtown LA
to downtown SF. The segment from Burbank to Merced is just the first one to be
built. There are already tracks (albeit not high speed ones) from Burbank to
LA and from Merced to Oakland, so when that section finishes you'd still have
a one seat ride except for the last five miles crossing San Francisco Bay (for
which you'd have to transfer to BART).

