
The hunt for dollars to build the $64B bullet train - JumpCrisscross
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cash-20161224-story.html
======
yummyfajitas
I'm pretty sure the people calling it a boondoggle are correct. Obama included
$3B in the 2009 stimulus package for it back in 2009. Not a single yard of
track has been laid.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-
ca...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-california-
is-caught-in-a-political-
storm.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article)

[http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-
high-s...](http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-high-speed-
rail-stuck-in-station)

The project is hoped to finish in 2029, which is 12 years from now.

For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx
half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what
California has already spent.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinhuangdao%E2%80%93Shenyang_H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinhuangdao%E2%80%93Shenyang_High-
Speed_Railway)

Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. That's
twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying
track, or what it costs NYC to build 1-2 miles of track.

If we are serious about transit, we will figure out how to get the costs under
control. Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a
$2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.

If we want transit in the US we need to fix the insane cost problem. Anything
else is sheer folly.

(Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know
what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all
wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Not a single yard of track has been laid.

True but misleading. Actually laying track is the cheap and easy final part of
construction; building the viaducts, grade separations, etc., and doing the
other construction which prepares the route for track to be laid.is the time
consuming, expensive part, and plenty of that has been done and is being done
in the initial segment.

> Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B.

Which is a very different problem than a regional transit system. And, in any
case, acquiring right of way is cheaper in India, due to land prices.

> That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday
> laying track

California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction.

> Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B
> railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.

Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should
be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.

~~~
jack9
> California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction.

That's irrelevant. There is no planned path, just patches and the project is
going to be scaled back to an absurd degree (or sold off, which is basically
the same thing).

> Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California
> should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.

The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years
(procedurally discussed, not legislatively enforced).

Much like Federal budgets and projects, anything extended beyond the current
administration's term limits means it's someone else's problem. Putting people
on Mars and this project, should become a reality about the same time.

~~~
dragonwriter
> There is no planned path

Yes, there is a planned alignment for the entire system (and not just the LA
to SF "Phase I" for which most of the cost estimates and timelines usually
discussed apply, but also the Sacramento to San Diego "Phase 2".)

> just patches

No, even if you are referring to the context of the initial construction,
that's not true; it's directed with a clear plan of a specific segment for
initial operations between Silicon valley and the Central Valley.

> and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree

Pure speculation; it's true that there is uncertainty, largely political in
nature, about funding for the portion beyond the part that is supposed to be
operational in 2025. But there's also plenty of time to resolve that.

> The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years

It was a $10 billion conditional bond authorization (one of the funding
challenges has been meeting the conditions in that bond authorization) which
was very explicitly not expected to cover full construction cost of the system
(nor was there ever a 10 year timeline.)

------
baron816
I love public transit, but there is no doubt that this is in fact a boondoggle
that shouldn't be built. That money should be used to expand commuter rail in
LA and SF, or better yet, implementing BRT. When we have driverless cars on
the horizon, and the possibility that the hyperloop could work out, sinking
what will likely turn out to be $100 billion into yesterday's technology makes
absolutely no sense.

~~~
hristov
Hyperloop, if it ever gets built, will be at least 10 times more expensive
than this. Building a 500 mile vacuum tube is not easy. The hyperloop hype is
very unfortunate because it will prevent us from having a proper functioning
train in the hope of some pie in the sky project that will probably not happen
with the present technology.

~~~
trome
Worse yet, Hyperloop would move 1/20th the passengers, to the tune of only
1000 people an hour. Hyperloop is horribly inefficent, and has worse right of
way needs & engineering costs compared to High Speed Rail, not to mention the
lack of existing talent to build it.

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martinald
I really hope this project gets built. It will be such a huge boost for
California. In the longer term it will be completely essential and people will
wonder how the state functioned without it.

It would massively increased the bay area's effective commuting area too.

~~~
WillPostForFood
How is it essential? It does nothing for the real transit issues in
California, which is urban/suburban commuter traffic. There is no particular
need for high speed rail between SF and LA - that need is served by air travel
and the 5.

~~~
billions
And who wants to commute to Bakersfield?

------
aplomb
Our culture is incapable of building anything meaningful without extortion
pricing.

~~~
throwaway4891a
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig)

[http://bensommer.com/blog/big-dig-big-
corruption/](http://bensommer.com/blog/big-dig-big-corruption/)

There's a mix of ineptitude, poor/non-planning and some shady deals. With
larger projects, more waste is essentially inevitable because of the number of
moving parts and limited communication paths.

------
jrnichols
I wonder if the approach/partnership taking place in Texas will have better
results.

[http://www.texascentral.com](http://www.texascentral.com)

"Texas Central will deploy Central Japan Railway Company’s (JRC) “N700-I
Bullet” high-speed rail system based on their “Shinkansen” system that has
been refined over more than 50 years of operation into the most reliable,
comfortable and safe high-speed rail system in the world."

I remember when the $10 billion bond was passed in California and now over 10
years later, it seems like it was all spent on politics instead of progress.

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kwhitefoot
Why is everyone so obsessed with high speed rail in countries like the UK and
the US where local transport is what needs fixing.

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blisterpeanuts
It's a pity that the United States didn't embark on a concerted effort to
build a high speed rail system back in the 1950s and 1960s, when we had more
money and a smaller population. And fewer lawyers. Instead we wasted a couple
trillion (adjusted for inflation) on Vietnam. Think what we could have done
with that money not to mention thousands of lives saved.

It seems to me that California's highway problem is one of simple over
crowding. Even if they built ten high speed rails between SF and LA, it would
probably not make much of a difference, and I'm not even talking about the
issue of needing a vehicle once you arrive at LA central terminus. Trains
carry hundreds of people; let us say, a few thousand at any given time might
be carried on high speed rail cars, but this is a tiny fraction of the
millions of motorists clogging the highways 24x7 all up and down the coast.

I see no solution to California's clogged highways other than to siphon some
of the population off to neighboring states that are vastly less populous.
Perhaps this will happen naturally as technology makes it easier to disperse
workers over broader geographical areas. It seems to me that huge cities are a
legacy thing anyway.

Probably the next big thing will not be speeded up 18th century iron horses,
but electric long range buses and self-driving cars that will safely and
quickly negotiate the computerized traffic grids of the future.

California ought to spend a few billion on embedded markers and sensors in its
roads that self-driving vehicles can access; probably this will be a much
better investment in the long run.

~~~
kurthr
Although I agree with your conclusions it's worth considering that Japan's
bullet trains run 2000 passenger trains both directions every 3-5 minutes
(<<1min delay) on their high traffic corridor.

That is very conservatively (2 passengers/car) 1000 cars every 5 miles with on
125ft spacing equivalent to a perfectly functioning 10 lane freeway.

More realistically (1 passenger/car) 2000 cars every 3 miles on 250ft spacing
is equivalent to a 60 lane normal freeway.

For the air travel equivalent (much lower latency, but higher cost) you would
need 1000 full 737-900 every hour (8000/day) compared to the total number of
flights on California on a busy day, 3000.

If you build it, will they come?

~~~
hyeonwho2
While that density is impressive, Japan is the only place where that density
happens. Here in Korea, we generously run a train only every twenty minutes on
the Seoul-Busan corridor. I would argue that this is much higher than what is
likely to be attained in California, as both Seoul and Busan have well-
developed public transit infrastructure and a comparatively low rate of car
ownership, which reduces the burden on riders at both ends.

(Even ignoring the TSA, 6B in ridership fees to be made up, and general
messiness of American commuters.)

So now your 1300 passengers, generously, are spread out over 20 miles of
freeway, instead of three.

(2600 passengers/20 miles) * (1 car / passenger) * (250 lane-ft/car) * (1
mile/5280ft) = 6.1 lanes.

Now, that was assuming one passenger per car. Add a single bus per mile-lane
(seated passengers only) and this drops to four lanes. With self-driving cars
and more busses, you could safely add only a single dedicated self-driving car
lane and a sigle dedicated bus lane in each direction, and still have room to
increase "ridership". For the price, I think that is ridiculous.

------
johan_larson
Back in the day, you could get from Berlin to Moscow and back in less than
five years. Today, that's not enough time to get from LA to San Francisco.

~~~
DrScump

      Back in the day, you could get from Berlin to Moscow and back in less than five years.
    

Like the German army in 1941-1945?

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throwaway4891a
I've been hearing about a bullet train for 30 years.

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trhway
well, the good thing about that staggering out-of-your-mind price tag (which,
trusting to and believing in the process, i suppose will grow even more in the
coming years :) is that it provides an opportunity for the R&D for alternative
transportation options. That has potential to make CA and specifically Silicon
Valley a leader in the transportation innovation too. By efficiently building
such railroads at $4B a piece China effectively stripped its own innovation
houses of such an opportunity :)

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SteveWatson
popup warning

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davidf18
One way to get the money is to enforce the law and send the illegal immigrants
in California out of the country. Governments city and State and other
governments spend billions of dollars for K-12 education, health care costs,
and even college education for illegal immigrants.

Take the savings and invest it into bonds for the high speed railway.

------
labrador
As a California usually in favor of all sorts of new technologies and
futuristic projects, I am totally opposed to building this train system. The
air travel infrastructure is already in place and could work even better with
an investment of a fraction of the $64B. Airplanes don't need expensive rails
to ride on in the sky. What's better about getting into a coach of a train and
rolling on the ground over getting in the coach of a plane and flying through
the sky? Let's stick with what is and what works and spend the money on
desalination plants, wind farms, solar plants and a smart electrical grid.

~~~
ubernostrum
If you think the existing air travel infrastructure was built in its entirety
for "a fraction" of $64B (in 2016 dollars), I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd
like to sell you.

Most of the cost of air travel is hidden in places you don't think about, and
might surprise you if you knew how much it added up to (or how much tax money
-- in the US, around $300 million per year currently, and around $9m/year of
it in California -- goes into subsidizing unprofitable air routes in order to
keep airlines flying them, for sake of maintaining connectivity).

~~~
billions
Per your numbers 64B / 9m per year = 7 thousand years California could
continue subsidizing those air routes for the cost of the track. Can't you see
the disparity in cost?

~~~
ubernostrum
That's to keep service on a few routes that get direct subsidies. That's not
the cost of running the entire airport and air-travel infrastructure in the
state, which _also_ runs on a lot of direct or indirect taxes. And it's not
the cost of building out that infrastructure in the first place.

And I suspect that when you add it up you'll find that $64B is not much money
compared to what having a well-developed air-travel network costs, and in fact
this sort of argument is precisely the point people make when they argue for
building out better rail service along major corridors: the cost seems steep
when someone presents you with the bill up-front, but we routinely pay and
have paid bills just as high or higher for things that we'd now yell and
scream about if they got taken away.

