The US desperately needs to figure out how to do big infrastructure projects like this. High-speed rail is a critical piece of a greener economy, because it can truly compete with air travel at medium distances, and blows car travel out of the water. It's really unfortunate that the political incentives seem to be that Republicans are just outright opposed to any kind of government infrastructure spending unless it's a money-making scheme for their donors, and Democrats want to defend any project that sounds good, and damn the costs or whether it's actually successful.
What we need is a willingness to do major, expensive projects (high-speed rail is just not going to cheap in California, or anywhere), and ruthless commitment to making them happen efficiently. When a project like this fails in this way, all it does it play into the hands bad-faith actors who will never support major infrastructure projects. Then, people who are acting in good faith oppose them too, because there aren't enough counter-examples of successful projects.
I think once automated taxis replace car ownership for most people (it will, it's more efficient, cheaper, and more convenient for travel) people will very quickly start to push for high speed rail. The demand is just not there yet for the greater masses (who will either just drive their own car or take a flight if they can afford it).
I’m definitely with you in spirit but I really wish we could also work on the “disagree but commit” skill directly. This project was going to have 10B in cost overruns, meanwhile the F-35 project has hundreds of billions sunk into it and the project is in no serious risk. Part of learning how to build infrastructure effectively is going to be to start building infrastructure and gaining experience, so if we are going to do it, let’s give a bit of breathing room to let it work.
FWIW, Trump proposed $1.5T in funding over a decade [1], but as of yet Congress still hasn't taken that up.
2019 State of the Union:
"Both parties should be able to unite for a great rebuilding of America’s crumbling infrastructure. I know that Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill, and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment."
I have yet to see a proposal for this type of infrastructure that makes intuitive sense. Not that intuition trumps engineering but the locations for these are usually head scratchingly odd.
I want an actual high speed train from the new downtown SF transit station to Union Station LA in two hours or less.
I would like a high speed train that won't be obsolete the day it is opened.
What was being (haltingly) built was a ridiculous route-by-committee with time consuming (and sprawl inducing) stops in whichever districts had an assertive rep willing to sacrifice a project of national importance for their little town.
All you needed to know about CA HSR could be learned by seeing it was not built on the I-5 corridor. Fresno and Palmdale should be spurs - not route benders.
High speed rail isn't that good for what you want. It will churn through too much infrastructure for too little value for point-to-point. What it is good at is creating regions. Done correctly it can open up a lot of land and opportunities. (I don't know the specifics of this project however).
IMHO: No. Way more important would be a high-speed BART for the Bay area, and an equivalent for LA. Most people would benefit from it; instead, an SF-LA high-speed with slow "local" public transport would only benefit a few.
The Bay Area already has enough train routes to create a viable commuter system, but they are not connected, or even time synchronized. Some are idle, or prioritize freight over commuters.
The systems include (counter clockwise from east bay):
Bart, Amtrak Capitol Corridor, ACE, VTA, the old valley <-> Santa Cruz line, Caltrain, and Muni.
The only part missing commuter rail stops is Marin county, and they have a nice ferry to SF (they intentionally blocked BART).
BART is also ridiculously slow. To compare, within the similarly dense and similarly sized Swiss middlelands I can hop on the train system and compete with cars going highway speeds while reading HN or do whatever. In the Bay area I felt like I had to plan half a day to get into SF one way alone. There's no reason why you can't have at least Swiss quality rail there, not even talking about Japanese levels.
I'm not sure what day you tried to take BART, but getting to SF from the far end of a line takes about an hour or less. Oh, and there are several stretches of that where the train will run at 70MPH - freeway speeds.
Sure, it could be faster (and quieter, and more comfortable) but it's not slow.
I went from San Jose to SF which is about 1h 35min for a distance that's slightly less than Basel to Zurich, once you get there. There's two major factors that make it slow for me: One, American trainstations are often far away from town centers. Two, BART stops everywhere even though it's quite a sizeable distance. For these distances we'd typically have an interregional connection that only stops 3-4 times. Basel Zürich takes about 55min btw. and you arrive right in each city's center, with tons of public transport to connect you further. SF main station by comparison looked tiny to me, with less connections than lots of Swiss towns with maybe 200k inhabitants have. And I'm not even talking about HSR, for that have a look at Paris to Lyon or Tokyo to Osaka for some example.
Stops are not a problem. Japan's Shinkansen has exactly the same problem of prefectures/municipalities forcing railways to build a station in the middle of nowhere. There are literally dozens of such stations even on the busiest routes. The solution is simple: most trains don't stop at these station and pass them at near max speed. There are special "slow" trains that stop at each station and timed so that they get bypassed by quicker ones.
No, it really wasn't. Have you looked at a map of topography of California? I5 was built that route for a reason - it is the easiest route unless you want the route to be in 100s of km of incredibly expensive tunnel.
“Easy” isn’t the project. The project is to connect the two major population centers. Nobody cares about Merced to Bakersfield. And expensive? Building a hundred miles of line that nobody cares about is more expensive than building a train people would actually use. Why would I spend 4 hours riding to LA via Bakersfield when I can spend 45 min on an airplane. I live 12 minutes from the San Jose Airport. Facilitating air shuttles wouldn’t require billions of dollars and I wouldn’t have to waste time transiting the Central Valley for no good reason other than politics.
The really humbling thing about visiting things like the Hoover Dam is realizing that things like this are impossible today.
If they started that dam today, they'd spend 20 years and twice the money the dam actually cost just on lawsuits and papers and have nothing to show for it decades later.
96 people died building the Hoover Dam [1]. It was built 'on time and on budget' to a great extent at the expense of lives.
That's a lot of deaths.
For comparison, only 147 total coalition deaths as a result of combat with the enemy [2] in the 1991 Gulf war, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, the liberation of Kuwait and the overrunning of most of Iraq.
And that's saying nothing of the comp, overtime and other externalized issues.
Of course, the failure of rail is pretty bad and we need to learn, but we can't hold the Hoover Dam up as 'the example'.
Underrated comment. People yearn for the "good old days" when shit got done, fast and cheap! Let's just forget all the progress in safety and reduced deaths since then..
The 3 Gorges dam claimed over 100 lives before it was completed. I wasn't able to find fatality info for other large chinese dams, but I'd imagine they're not significantly better.
Is 100 lives that bad? This [1] source says 250,000 workers were estimated to be working on it in 2003 so we could estimate 5 million worker-years for construction. That's an annual death-rate of 0.002%. By comparison this [2] source says the average death rate for 30-34 year old males in the US is about 0.2%, or 100x more likely.
I never quite understood the idea that any amount of loss of life is unacceptable in projects such a these. I think we put far too high a value on human life, and fail to measure distinct numbers relative to their greater effects.
If we built this project at the cost of 100 lives, but got it done on time and on budget, and as a result we save 500+ traffic fatalities, and 500+ early deaths as a result of pollution, while improving the quality of life of all of California… I would call it a resounding success. And yet, most people would just focus on the 100 lives paid upfront and call it an unmitigated disaster.
First, 500 fatalities were not saved by this, so your point errs quickly into strawman territory.
And people do die all the time in construction etc. - there are already risks, but they are low.
There are zero construction projects going on planet earth today that need to increase the level of risk such that 100 people die trying.
Not even China is putting people down in those numbers for any reason.
It's basically a non-starter - there's no reason for anyone to die these days building pretty much anything, other than in the most precarious situations.
Well yeah, 500 fatalities were not saved because this was not built. Nor have 100 people died building this hypothetical project. The example is an illustration, the absolute numbers are irrelevant.
The points is, even if people die building a big project, it's quite possible that that's for the greater good and more people are saved as a result.
A bunch of people died in the Apollo missions. Does that mean we should have never attempted it and let the Russians figure out how to get to the moon? There's no way it would fly politically these days.
> I never quite understood the idea that any amount of loss of life is unacceptable in projects such a these. I think we put far too high a value on human life, and fail to measure distinct numbers relative to their greater effects.
What dollar value should we put on your life? $10,000? $200,000? $2,000,000? Should we encourage your boss telling you to do something stupidly dangerous, because the project's behind, and he doesn't want to pay your team overtime?
1000 people died building the Trans-Canada railway. In the early 20th century, 70 people died building a minor tunnel, used to construct a tiny hydro power plant in the greater Vancouver area. Any pre-WWII infrastructure project was built atop a literal graveyard.
The Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams were also impossible in their day due to so called environmentalists and in order to replace the power that would have been provided by them, the worse coal-fired Navajo Generating Station option was completed near Page, Arizona in 1976 for the the Central Arizona Project.
If each death results in a $10M lawsuit (which is a far underestimate), only 60 or so people could have died during the construction of the Hoover Dam. But as another comment points out, 96 people died.
77 billion for a train in 2033 ? And people wonder why we in the US think the government is completely unable to run these types of projects effectively. Total joke.
Even I was surprised by the timeline. A high speed train by 2033, really? China has them now, Japan has them now. India is building a bullet train with roughly the same length as SF to LA in 3 years. The US shouldn't be so slow compared to these other countries.
Japan has them now and has had them for more than 60 years. If we meet the 2033 deadline (seems doubtful, given our track record), Japan will have had HSR 80 years before CA got its first. Further, Japan continuously expands and improves the bullet train lines. Despite earthquakes, Japan's largely mountainous terrain, a shrinking population, and other challenges, every year work continues on making the bullet train network larger and faster.
Meanwhile in the US we spend nearly 700 billion annually on the military (roughly 75% of the Japanese government's entire budget). Get what you pay for (in our case, missiles).
> Meanwhile in the US we spend nearly 700 billion annually on the military (roughly 75% of the Japanese government's entire budget). Get what you pay for (in our case, missiles).
That’s an ironic comparison. Japan is not allowed to have a military, just a small self defense force. Japan is okay with that state of affairs because the United States has tacitly committed to defend Japan from its belligerent neighbors. Your example illustrates in the same breath why US military spending is so high while it is so low in other countries.
Also, the new bullet train lines mostly are built with private money so there is that too.
> That’s an ironic comparison. Japan is not allowed to have a military, just a small self defense force.
That's kind of my point. Japan just has a small self defense force and has instead focused its energies on education and infrastructure. Whether that is by choice or not is irrelevant.
On the other hand, it was definitely a choice by the US to spend our money on military involvement in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria instead of using it on schools and trains.
> Japan is okay with that state of affairs because the United States has tacitly committed to defend Japan from its belligerent neighbors. Your example illustrates in the same breath why US military spending is so high while it is so low in other countries.
Yes, I understand the reason the US has such a big military budget is because we insist on stationing submarines, aircraft carriers, and ground troops in every corner of the world to "keep the peace."
My argument is that doing so is a catastrophic misallocation of resources.
> Also, the new bullet train lines mostly are built with private money so there is that too.
The Shinkansen was mostly built by private companies, mainly JNR, but public money played a huge role. JNR racked up nearly $300 billion in today's USD of debt, and that debt was taken on by the government when JNR was disbanded and reorganized (again by the government). I don't think the railways in Japan can be thought of as being completely privatized or completely nationalized. Even when officially managed by private companies, the government continues to play a role in planning and funding.
What I’m curious of is why we haven’t yet tried contracting the companies responsible for Japan’s train system and just letting them run the show, with our only responsibility being acquiring the required land and clearing associated political hurdles. I’m sure Japan would be willing to lend a hand and they may even be able to do it for less time and money than domestic companies could.
Chinese and Japanese companies were filling to partially fund HSR in the US since it would open markets for their trainsets, but they all backed out because the US imposed "buy American" requirements that would make it impossible for them to use their trains.
My understanding is that the French offered to build out HSR along I-5 between SF and LA during the Great Recession and California said they could do a better job for less money.
Yes, I believe it was Thalys with a proposal to build the train for $55B, and no further government subsidies! But that would not have helped the Californian politicians line their pockets, so that proposal was rejected.
Infrastructure is the textbook example of pork barrel spending. i.e. each voting representative says, "I will only approve this project if <widget> is sourced from my district".
I understand the issue to be dealing with three or four layers of government in each municipality as well as sourcing labor—not engineering competence.
It seems like the overwhelming majority of delays stem from legal issues. We would need to borrow Japan or China's legal system, not their rail companies.
What does that have to do with the cost and timeline of the project? Why should the population density make the project take 10x as long and cost 10x as much?
You're right that it should really make it cheaper if the tracks mostly go through empty land.
Then again the fact that there isn't much need for this train due to the low potential ridership makes it so the heart of the state was never in the project, and no one was really committed to it.
They also require huge populations to travel on them to justify the huge costs. That's where California falls short.
If we doubled the population, it would be pretty OK, and we have the job market for it, but that would require constructing housing, and California doesn't do that.
Correction - 77B for a train that will be relatively slow when it was scheduled to be unveiled in 2033.
My generation never took Amtrak seriously because it was relatively slower than other transportation modes. In 2033 and beyond, those generations will ignore CA HSR for the same reasons.
If you’ve ridden the nicer Euro HSR much, you see that the extra 40 minutes that CA HSR was supposed to provide doesn’t matter much. On a comfortable train with tables, power, wifi, and a coffee car, you’re basically just working remote. You arrive at the train station 10 minutes before your train instead of an hour because there is no baggage check, no security, no massive walk, no slow boarding, and no taxiing. There is no climb to 10,000 feet where you can’t use your computer, no cramped seat that makes it hard to use a big laptop, no descent where you can’t use your computer, no taxi to the gate, no slow deplaning, no second long walk, and no wait for your bags. You can buy your way out of a lot of this on the plane, but it is expensive, and everyone gets it on the train. You just get on, sit down, and relax or work for a few hours.
California government is completely unable to run these types of projects effectively because the primary emphasis is on political benefits. The Oroville Dam debacle is another recent example. For another, look at the history of the 680/280/101 interchange, known as the "freeway to nowhere" for the many years it stood partially complete.
I'm a quite puzzled by the cost. I'm still scratching my head as to why it's so expensive. In France or Spain, countries with similar population density but arguably less difficult terrain (Spain terrain is not so nice actually), the cost per km of a highs speed railway is around 20M$, with a very difficult terrain, Italy or Japan, with denser populations and difficult terrains, manage a cost of around 40 to 50M$.
With the Californian project, the cost is nearly 80M$, and it's only the budgeted cost, not the cost after all the inevitable delay and unforeseen spending.
As someone living in France, I've no idea as to what can explain this x2 or even x4 in cost. Is there a rational explanation?
Spain terrain is actually a total nightmare, despite the cliché. In Europe, only Switzerland is on average (much) harder.
But Spain has also areas that are even worse than Switzerland, where high speed train is being deployed. And Spanish companies have built the Mecca - Medina line, which is a little engineering marvel.
CA HSR cost estimates aren't real (inflation adjusted) dollars, or current prices, its year of construction dollars. So future nominal price inflation over the anticipated timeline is built into the cost figures, as are future real increases including of right-of-way acquisition in places where that will be necessary which have increasing real estate values.
Assuming USD 65K for a Tesla 3, that is 1,184,615 cars. Not quite enough, but the prices of self driving cars is going to go down, and the cost of the HSR is only going to go up.
Of course, you could just build a restricted access freeway, instrument the heck out of it to help the self driving cars, and put the self driving cars on it as a kind of track...
Edit: It is 1275 km from SF to LA om I-5. If we put these cars, evenly spaced on that road, both ways, they are about 2.2 m apart from back bumper to back bumper.
Nothing quite embodies the utter failure of the US and CA in particular as this embarrassing high-speed rail project. This is something that has been pioneered, developed, and commoditized in other countries, both in Europe and Asia.
The CA project had incredibly modest ambitions: a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds, using completely standard technology. This isn't a hyperloop, a maglev, a hyperfast train, a dense network, or anything else that can fail because of technology risk. It's purely a failure at execution, pretty much entirely because of politics and corruption. In the US, the process for infrastructure construction is entirely broken, and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development.
> a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds,
None of this is true, or remarkable.
Almost all high-speed rail lines are a single line.
This line would have been 520 miles, or about 800km. That's longer than almost every high speed rail line in the world. For point of reference, all high speed rail in the UK put together is 1,377km. All high speed rail in Japan is 2,760km. While this single line would not be close to the world's longest (China has a single high speed rail line of nearly 2300km), it's about 30% of the total length of all Japanese high-speed lines put together.
This line was planned to have a max speed of 220mph, which is faster than all but one system in the world.
Indeed, which I alluded to in my comment. There are longer rail lines, mostly in China, and mostly built over the past decade.
However, the commenter I replied to claimed that California High Speed Rail would be a short line, when in reality it would have been longer than all but a small handful of high-speed lines, almost all in China.
It’s also easier to get people to agree. In the US, people have been fighting the building of high-speed rail in California since the 1970’s, when Jerry Brown tried to build it the first time.
50 years later there are millions more people in California and infrastructure costs are astronomical.
China will have 30,000 miles of high-speed rail before we have any.
It’ll be interesting to see the benefits in China. Something to think about as your self-driving car navigates the congestion on US highways.
Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes, minimal usable electrical infrastructure, sensitive environments to protect, and seismic fault lines right where you would want to tunnel. The insane cost and complexity of the Pacheco and Tehachapi passes is the main thing that stopped the project in its tracks.
Granted, the Swiss and the Japanese have pulled off significant projects in similarly challenging terrain, but that's a testament to their competence, rather than evidence that the terrain isn't challenging.
Not pointing fingers or blaming you, this just feels like apologist rhetoric. When did America stop doing 'hard' things? Whelp, there's a hill in between here and LA, and at some points, there's not enough power lines -- let's just not bother. I watched a great special about the trains heading up the mountains in Switzerland. They designed hybrid rail and rack trackage to handle inclines of up to 25% (!!). They built corkscrew tunnels inside mountainsides to reduce the incline. I thought America in general and California specifically had the world's best engineers. [1] It's sad how paralyzed the nation has become.
All the best minds in America are devoted to either getting people to click on ads or fleecing them out of their retirement savings. There's nobody left to plan out infrastructure work or make the government function.
How many of those lines are high speed rail? I’d venture to guess that the answer is a big fat zero.
There are freight lines that go through these mountains, but they do so at very low velocities. The passes through these ranges are higher than about half the lines on that list.
The speed of the line isn't the tricky part in these Swiss tunnel projects. Switzerland's trains aren't as fast simply because Switzerland is too small and too dense to require it. The fastest Swiss trains are still pretty fast though at 200km/h.
Much more relevant are the insane projects achieved. The Gotthard Tunnel project is probably one of the hardest things humanity has ever achieved (on par with the moon landing).
>I thought America in general and California specifically had the world's best engineers.
Where on earth did you get that idea? Japan and Germany have long been known to have the world's best engineers. The only engineering that Americans have really proven themselves to be the best in the world at is software. There were times in the distant past when they were best in the world at other things, but those times are gone. There might be an exception for military technology though; no one builds aircraft carriers like the USA still.
Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?
As for when America stopped doing "hard" things, I think it was somewhere in the 80s or 90s maybe, though from what I can tell, the really big turning point in this country was 2001, but things were falling apart before that too.
No, they lost because, even with better engineering (at least for the Germans), they couldn't match America's industrial production capability. American tanks (esp. the Sherman) were total crap compared to German tanks, but they could pump them out at many times the volume the Germans could. Quantity over quality.
In addition, America was protected by two large oceans, so its industrial production capabilities were never affected by the enemy. Germany's factories were constantly being bombed.
And finally, on top of all that, America entered the war late, and by that time Germany was already softened a lot from fighting with France, Britain, Russia, etc. If they hadn't been stupid enough to invade Russia, we might not be having this exchange.
The US has by far the best engineers in the world. It also has the best scientists by a wide margin. Its top 50 universities embarrass the rest of the world in research output, save for a few foreign universities. The US tech industry, biotech, pharma, farming, aerospace and manufacturing segments are either the best in the world or among the best. The US also still has by far the leading semi conductor industry, you can't do anything in that segment without utilizing US companies.
Intel, nVidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple, Micron, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, LAM Research, Analog Devices - the US has the best hardware and semi engineers of any nation. What do Germany and Japan have that competes that small list?
There is no other country that could enable SpaceX, NASA, Blue Origin, et al. to exist.
There's a reason why it was Tesla of California that pushed the auto industry forward, not Germany or Japan.
Nearly every piece of modern technology that you use today was invented by US engineers. There are few exceptions. From the lithium battery, to modern solar cells, to the smartphone or cellphone, to the microprocessor, to the LED & LCD, to the router, computer networks, and everything inbetween. The modern laser, fiber optics, PDAs, spreadsheets, the relational database, a dozen major programming languages, ethernet, ram/dram, the personal computer, streaming media, DPS, the cable modem, the hard drive, SSD, the GUI, the mouse, email, 3D graphics, the digital camera, the optical disc, and dozens of other critical elements the modern world has relied upon.
The modern world hardly exists save for what US engineers invented.
Most of the tech related to the satellite industry - including GPS - was invented by US engineers, by a fat margin. There's a reason it's SpaceX that is going to lead in global Internet access via satellite, not a company from Russia, China, Germany or Japan. The US has by far the best satellite tech and engineers.
The entire AI industry has been trailblazed by US engineers.
The US is so far ahead on autonomous driving tech that every foreign auto company has had to set up shop in Silicon Valley, because none of them can compete. That includes China, Japan and Germany. Auto Germany's biggest fear is being turned into a cheap box commodity, while Silicon Valley takes over the industry via software - their fear is valid, that's exactly what is going to happen.
Europe is so far behind in biotech, they constantly have to buy US companies to try to keep up. All of their best biotech products and companies have been acquired from the US. Asia isn't remotely competitive in pharma or biotech, they're 20 years behind on most things. Japan has one or two relevant companies there, China is only just now starting to make a dent.
The US has been far ahead on genomics tech for decades. It's US companies like Illumina that lead the way, not hardware from Japan. How about robotic surgery? That has been dominated by another US company for two decades, Intuitive Surgical.
It was the US - Broad and Berkeley in particular - that was responsible for about 3/4 of all progress on CRISPR, which China has aggressively copied from. Once again, elite US engineers and scientists blazing the way.
> Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?
That's dramatically false. Slander in fact. Apollo involved thousands of engineers. It was not largely made up of Nazi engineers.
And Japan? The country that hasn't done anything of consequence in 25 years in engineering or technology. Not only did they entirely lose their hardware industry to South Korea, Taiwan and China, but they can't do software at all. There's a reason their economy hasn't expanded since the early 1990s.
Germany, the country that can't do software, can barely do hardware, can't do mobile, has mediocre military tech, rarely invents anything of consequence, and whose last great remaining industry - the auto business - is about to implode. Yeah sure. Germany certainly used to have vaunted engineers, decades ago. There's nothing special about a BMW or Volkswagen today, and it shows in their stagnation. The future of the auto industry is cheap boxes from China and American software.
Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon. At Marshall, the group continued work on the Redstone-Mercury, the rocket that sent the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. Shortly after Shepard’s successful flight, President John F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. With the July 20, 1969 moon landing, the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled both Kennedy’s mission and Dr. Von Braun’s lifelong dream.
> Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes,
The project scaled back its goals significantly. There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield, where the elevation changes consist primarily of overpass abutments. Everything else is placed on definite hold. This is the equivalent of trying to put a man on the moon and settling for watching Star Wars on Netflix.
And connecting Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield by train is not a billion dollar priority. These towns are already connected by train, and nobody uses it. The reason the California HSR project was interesting is because it replaces the bus route which currently connects the Bay Area to the LA metro area, not because it upgrades the current rail system which already connects these much, much smaller Central Valley towns. Merced has a population of 80k people. Bakersfield is 380k. Who cares?
> There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield
No, the only place construction is actively underway is Merced-Bakersfield. The whole SF-LA line is just as much actively doing planning and environmental clearance and seeking funding for actual construction as ever.
> "Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were," he said. "However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield."
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think most of the difficulty in the CAHSR project didn't come from technical challenges. It came from mismanagement and NIMBYs, in particular NIMBYs in Atherton, Palo Alto, the Tehachapi pass, and other segments that blocked construction and put the project into a death spiral.
We've warned you before about personal attacks in comments here. We ban accounts that post like this, and I don't want to ban you. Would you please review the site guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart?
It's in your interest to do so, because preventing this place from destroying itself is the only way to keep it interesting. Also, when your comment is flagged because of a guidelines violation, it sucks that most users don't get to know that there is an aqueduct under Pacheco Pass that was built in the 1950s.
You can prove that your OP was not aware of the existence of the aquaduct?
And what is the purpose of pointing this out? "I was stating facts" seems a flimsy defense. Do you thus claim that the statement of facts is morally acceptable, in all circumstances, at all times? I hope you'd find this suggestion as absurd as I do - imagine walking up to someone at a funeral and saying, "in two months your mother will be wormfood." Facts? Yes. Necessary? I wonder.
> This is something that has been pioneered, developed, and commoditized in other countries, both in Europe and Asia.
Not this length directly along a highly active earthquake fault line and including a massive tunnel underneath an entire mountain range that is exceptionally tectonically active.
> incredibly modest ambitions
I would describe it as hopelessly arrogant ambitions, bordering on technically impossible, and definitely technically impossible within two orders of magnitude of the originally proposed funding.
Exactly. I just rode the Shinkansen in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto. The train peaks at 185mph, and a significant portion of the route is straight through mountains, in tunnels. And don't forget just how prone to earthquakes Japan is. Finally, this line was first built in the 1960s!
California is just pathetic if they can't build something that's much less ambitious than that in the 2010s/20s through terrain that's much easier.
Oh, and that's just one Shinkansen line (and the most heavily-used one). They have them all across the country. I rode another one to the west coast, and saw yet another line under construction; that one was elevated.
Finally, about Japan in general from what I saw there: there was lots of construction of all kinds going on. New buildings, renovated buildings, new train lines, construction on subway stations, etc. When they need something, they just seem to build it. Over here, we just argue about stuff and then never get any kind of public-works projects done.
While I'm not going to dispute Japanese engineering prowess, I do have to note that a lot of the construction going on in Japan is pure pork-barrel politics. The Chuo Maglev under construction from Tokyo to Nagoya is never expected to recoup its exorbitant construction costs, and all new Shinkansen lines & expressways under construction or opened in the last 20 years are bleeding red ink.
>The Chuo Maglev under construction from Tokyo to Nagoya is never expected to recoup its exorbitant construction costs, and all new Shinkansen lines & expressways under construction or opened in the last 20 years are bleeding red ink.
Exactly how profitable is the American Interstate highway system? How much money does America's highways earn per year in fares?
Tell that to the Swiss who built railways to handle 25% inclines, or the Japanese who are also on fault lines. The California ambitions were absolutely modest. Nothing proposed hasn't been done before, in worse conditions, crazier terrain, longer distances -- all of it.
It's now a single-party rule state. For most of the history of the HSR, it was a dual-party state where the minority Republicans exercised veto power over various attempts to speed up the HSR, make fundamental changes, etc. It's crazy, but the HSR is actually in better shape now than when the Republicans were vetoing everything just to make sure it failed.
Also, the HSR as planned goes through 90% Republican territory, and it has been the local Republicans and their former counterparts in the CA legislature that fucked things up.
We (Republicans) are often opposed to this stuff not because we are against infrastructure, but $200 billion being spent on a 500 mile train. If it were cost efficient and managed correctly, more of us would be on board. We watch as massive infrastructure projects such as the Second Avenue subway and other similar projects turn into boondoggles. If a private company can build rockets and go to space, why can’t a private company build trains? XpressWest and Virgin have been interested in an LA-Vegas line. We in California were told that this train would be profitable: if that’s the case, then why the need for hundreds of billions in taxpayer money? My California taxes are high enough and they can’t even fix potholes in the freeways, and they expect us to trust them with an ultra-expensive train? My dad just visited and was amazed at how bad the freeways were compared to Texas. What does California spend all those tax dollars on?
California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003 and from 2011 until now. So in the last 8 years of Democrat control, the train problems are somehow Republican? That’s nonsense. The rail project wasn’t even approved by voters until 2008 and construction didn’t begin until 2015 — years after Republicans had any say in state government. The project has been in an almost continual “environmental review” — certainly not at the behest of the Republicans. The rail debacle isn’t Republican: they haven’t had any power since 2011. And Gavin Newsome was the one that postponed everything except the Merced-Bakersfield line. If Republicans ran the state, taxpayers would be billions richer and we have exactly the same amount of train we have now.
> California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003 and from 2011 until now.
No, it didn't, by any reasonable definition: Democrats, without Republican votes, couldn't pass the required annual budget, so they did not have complete control, from 1999-2003.
> And Gavin Newsome was the one that postponed everything except the Merced-Bakersfield line
Newsome didn't postpone a thing; he restated the status quo that the things for which funding had not been secured for construction would not be constructed until funding was secured as if it were a new development.
> If Republicans ran the state, taxpayers would be billions richer
No, they wouldn't, since the construction spending was largely federal and bond funding (so money not from current taxpayers), and much of it has gone to people who happen to be state taxpayers.
CA doesn't have a Second Avenue Subway...that's an entirely different state...
The LA-Vegas line has never been built because the private companies that would build it modeled their financials on the assumption of getting billions of dollars of free land or easements so they could build it and tax breaks on their first few decades of operation. Without the free government incentives worth billions...incidentally, roughly the same value as it would cost the government to build an HSR to Vegas...the private companies have gotten nowhere.
Texas' freeways are just as bad as California's freeways. The difference is that our freeways are used about 10x-100x as much, so there's a reason that our freeways have potholes for a few days. What's Texas' excuse? They ran out of budget to fix their basic infrastructure again?
CA has not had total Democratic control during the time periods listed. The Republicans maintained enough seats in the Legislature to block tax and spending bills, effectively a legislative veto. They only lost those seats in the most recent elections.
If Republicans ran the state, then CA would be deeply in the red like it was the last time a Republican governor ran the state...namely, Pete Wilson, who did such a bad job that he effectively turned CA from a a red-leaning state into one of the bluest states in the nation. (Schwarzenegger was governor during the recession so that won't be held against him, but notably CA was also in the red during most of his tenure, including the time when Republicans actually had enough Legislative seats to enact legislation and not just veto Democratic bills.)
California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003
Technically, Republicans controlled the Assembly for parts of 1995-6. Willie Brown bought off three different Assembly members to try to keep control, but each was recalled by his/her district.
CA has a 2/3rd threshold for passing many bills, especially bills affecting taxes, and until recently Republicans had just enough seats to block such bills. They only fell below that threshold within the past few years.
So yes, until recently CA was a dual-party state in the way that actually matters.
The Boston tunnel was a pretty great example of the massive weight politics and hiring/mismanaging bad gov contractors puts on every infrastructure project (it "started" in 1982, broke ground in 1991, and finished 2007 at 200% over budget):
> The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the US, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $14.6 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006.
OTOH, it was eventually completed and it is a big improvement for a variety of reasons (including the elimination of an ugly deteriorating elevated highway) even though Boston traffic is mostly as bad as it's ever been.
even though Boston traffic is mostly as bad as it's ever been
Boston traffic is not even close to being as bad as it was during the mid-to-late '90s. Back in those days, Medford to Dorchester would a 60-to-90 minute odyssey between 6am to 10am and 3pm too 7pm. Yeah, there is stop-and-go traffic at peak hours, but back in the day, it was often faster to take 128 to travel between the northern and southern burbs, right now it's just normal rush hour traffic.
Fair enough. I'm more familiar with East-West driving than North-South on 93. My perception is that the morning commute into Cambridge/Boston (and the reverse commute) via either the Pike or Route 2 is worse than it was ten years ago. But that may just reflect how relatively built-up Cambridge has become. TBH, the issue is mostly how long it takes to move on surface streets within the city.
2 is worse than ever because the density of rich people from Littleton on east is too high for the state to steamroll them which is what would need to happen for those lights to turn into overpasses and additional lanes to appear.
90 is terrible but that has more to do with the fact that Worcester is a much cheaper place to live.
Traffic may be as bad as it’s ever been, but the areas that formerly were elevated roads are now wonderful green spaces. So thankful they did it, and wish it could be done more both in Boston and elsewhere, but the gigantic cost must make it overwhelming for anywhere to consider doing that again.
At least Boston is finally digging that green line extension!
Absolutely. I'm sure that traffic would be even worse without it having been done. Certainly getting to the airport is more straightforward than it used to be. But the green spaces are such a huge improvement over traversing the dirty underbelly of the elevated road to get between parts of the city.
(Now if they could only tear down City Hall and do something useful with the space.)
Only twice the over run is not bad these days. Nuclear is a fantastic idea on paper. Then that paper gets shredded.
"In the United States, the cost of Georgia Power’s newest twin Vogtle reactors may top initial estimates of $14 billion and reach $21 billion, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission testimony. Of course, the first two Vogtle Units begun in 1971 took 18 years to build (a decade over schedule) at a final price of $9 billion — ten times the original price tag. BloombergBusiness wrote last fall, “Even as sympathetic an observer as John Rowe [former chair of the U.S.’s largest nuclear utility] warns that the new units at Vogtle will be uneconomical when — or if — they’re completed.”
And New York, where the Second Avenue subway cost 5-7x as much per mile as systems in London or Paris. And DC, where a well funded Metro system had to be taken into federal oversight because deferred maintenance caused it to kill people.
In California it is caused by enabling local municipalities to have a say and pretending you will ever get a consensus, instead of just saying "hey, we are the state, we're doin it, tough crap".
(the NIMBY lawsuits part is separate from this)
That failure mode definitely exists in other states.
This. Looking at the route through the SF peninsula, it seemed like every other city wanted a completely different system. Palo Alto wants a trench! Menlo Park wants it elevated! Burlingame wants it at grade! Hell, the damn thing would have had more hills than a rollercoaster.
Exactly what LA dealt with regarding the expo line. Parts are elevated through LA past USC and you zip through with a beautiful view of the hills, then back at grade in santa monica and the train has to sit in traffic because it doesn't have priority. The purple line extension almost didn't happen because the brilliant citizen-scientists of beverly hills were convinced there would be too much underground vibration or the city would explode or something, hard to say what particular grievance they are on these days.
Oh please, just stop with the romanticism of high speed rail. It has little viability outside of very select areas and even the EU isn't exactly being well served by it. This loss of funds is probably the best result for California because now they can blame Trump for its collapse. The sheer audacity of continuing the project with a limited route between two small cities shows just how much political weight is invested in this. [1]
The ECA's new report [2] shows that it suffers from cost over runs, little inter connectivity, and has issues achieving the speeds promised. Can it be fixed, not without a lot of time, money, and cooperation between competing groups. That last is probably impossible.
Yet we must understand that is the smaller areas needed to travel it is far more suited to Europe than America except in very narrow corridors and even that is stretching the truth. Where it works is where the population numbers are large enough to support and other travel options are highly limited. However in the US and EU it servers mostly well to do people. higher middle income and up and rarely if ever the lower ends of society who don't have the means for travel. It is a political toy that results in lots of press opportunities and largess spread among supporters, both in the US and EU
The cost of HSR would make it an alternative to flying, not driving. SF to LA is a $50 of gas. HSR tickets would be at least $100, and maybe $50 of Uber’s. For a family of four, a $50 trip turns into a $500 trip.
We know all that because we have inter-city rail on the east coast. It’s an alternative to air travel, not driving. Normal people can’t afford $500+ round trip for a family trip from NYC to DC.
SF to LA is the second most trafficked air route in the U.S. carrying 3,507,702 in 2017, only roughly 20,000 flyers fewer than JFK to LA which is number one. This is very much supposed to be an alternative to flying and the resulting pollution.
3.5 million passengers per year isn’t enough to overcome the carbon footprint of building HSR in the first place. To just break even in that front, HSR has to replace every SF-LA flight, and also seven million car trips a year on top of that: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig...
Have you read your own article that you've been promoting all over this thread? They are projecting carrying between 30-40m people by 2040, the buck doesn't stop at 10m a year at all. A nice quote:
"In short, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the California line will eventually offset the environmental damage caused by its construction, and then some."
The damage from air traffic isn't just from the greenhouse gasses they emit, but from the ultrafine particulate pollution that is currently unregulated. This pollution is too fine to be blocked by your lungs, enters your bloodstream, and are shown to be more toxic than large particulate in animal and cellular models.
The article makes two points. One, it presents the results of a study that shows HSR requires 10 million passengers per year to break even in terms of CO2 emissions. The second is to reiterate California’s projection that HSR will have 30-40 million riders by 2040. The former is a mathematical analysis. The latter is speculation, and completely unrealistic speculation. It is completely unreasonable to conclude that HSR will have more riders than the Northeast Corridor, which connects the densest and most transit rich corridor in the entire country. It’s completely unreasonable to assume it will have triple the passengers annually of all flights between SF and LA, given that the estimated ticket price would be just a little lower than airfare. (Transit projections are routinely completely wrong. The Silver Line projections in DC were way too high, even though that was a relatively easy calculation since Metro had existing suburban lines to base the estimate on.)
> And almost none of those people have decent public transit to get to a rail station in the city.
The umbrella of the CA HSR project has involved, and continues to involve, considerable spending on local transit improvements for exactly that reason.
SF to LA is probably one of the most traveled domestic air routes and airport pollution is devastating for cities. It's not sustainable environmentally and in terms of public health.
Airport pollution is not “devastating” for cities. Studies show that particulates, etc., are higher near airports but still within legal limits.
California HSR, by contrast, would have been a CO2 disaster: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... It would need to have 10 million riders per year to break even in terms of CO2 footprint. The SF-LA flight traffic is just a third of that.
Normally transportation projects seek to complement existing mode of transport. CA HSR was doomed to fail it was envision as an alternative to driving and flying. The lack of synergy means benefits would come at too high a cost and to too few people.
If the money had been spent on a mag-lev line connecting SF and SJ instead, I imagine it'd be close to completion already.
I basically agree, but one thing I've begun to wonder about is the "through terrain that isn't too challenging" part, given that the Central Valley has been sinking in parts because of aquifer depletion.
Most of the system follows 150 year old rail right of ways.
Places where it doesn't is through Pacheco Pass and the San Gabriels. Pacheco Pass already has a aqueduct tunnel. Boring a tunnel through that just costs money.
San Gabriels are trickier, really depends engineering vs money vs how fast do you want to go vs surface disruption.
Yeah... this is a CA problem not a US problem. Had a similar amount of money been given to say... ND or MT to build some other structure it would have been done before the money was ever divided out.
To be honest I would be surprised if any land-intensive project gets completed in the Texas/NMexico/Arizona area; those ranchers are really territoral
I mean given all the adversity and polarization in current US culture we still haven't escalated to the armed siege of government buildings, yet those guys have already done that twice this decade over fucking cows
Au contraire, the biggest issue that HSR faced was landowners fighting it every step of the way. Between fighting eminent domain and fighting with CEQA (California environmental quality act) it's surprising anything got done.
Could ND or MT allocate 30-100bn in state funds for this? The federal grant was a huge loss but a drop in the bucket for how much this project has derailed due to the use of private contractors instead of public engineering.
How is that even remotely the same? If anything that proves my point. Despite massive setbacks that were 100% out of their control the company building that pipeline still got it built in time and under budget...
Even for people who hate the "green" aspect, high volume mass transit is important for enabling the vision where autonomous taxis actually serve last mile rather than just sitting in traffic jams for hours like you do in your regular car.
Yes exactly. Another aspect of this is that as soon as we can actually start completing these projects successfully, their benefits will be incredibly obvious and people will want more. As you said, not even for political reasons or whatever, but just because they're better.
I feel like a big part of the reason America fails at this is jumping from high speed rail (proven tech since the 1960s) to flying autonomous taxis (coming any day now, right after flying pigs).
Airplanes are busses; they rarely tow another plane.
Technically I suppose if you tow a sailplane into the sky then the powered aircraft is a locomotive with the sailplane in train. So yes, there can be and are flying trains.
Technically I suppose they are in train, like a column os soldiers, sure, but I think by ‘train’ in this context the idea was the one in front pulls the others. The closes you could get with flying in formation would be drafting in a V as birds do — quite dangerous for planes! (Consider the XB-70). Wingtip coupling isn’t “in train” plus has always been fatal
It's really shitty if this is a selective action against California and not large projects overrunning costs in other states. At the same time, when the project costs 10x what was promised, saying no seems like a good thing. If this kind of cancellation was applied to all projects going as poorly as this, it'd be a really fair decision.
The issue isn't the cost but rather that California decided not to build it but take the money anyway. The money was set aside for a train between LA and San Francisco, two of the most important economic hubs in the States. The State of California decided to instead squander the money on a rail line between Bakersfield and Fresno, two cities that half the country have never heard of.
Perhaps a different administration would have let things slide, but the state of CA is pretty clearly in the wrong on this one. All of that federal money was tied to specific parts of the high speed rail project. For example a lot of it was intended for connecting the HSR to Union Station in Los Angeles. If the state has no intention of doing that, it really doesn't deserve that money.
For the Central Valley HSR that is still supposedly being built, the federal money was supposed to be used as matching funds for the state's own money. Even after getting the HSIPR agreement amended to let CA spend its own money more slowly, the state didn't spend anywhere close to what it was supposed to have spent to match the federal funding.
It was well pointed out before it started that it would cost multiple times the estimates the state was claiming. It should never had made it this far.
Honestly glad. Highspeed rail is not going to work in America if it takes 77B and and over 10 years to complete one line. About 10 years ago China had only 1 high speed rail line, now look.
You think a small town in China could possibly ever say no to Beijing? Would a tiny community in an American city in the 40s or 50s be able to stand up to an interstate highway project? Absolutely not, but these small towns along the rail route have been screwing over this project for years to score cheap votes from an ignorant electorate. That's the political climate we live in now, same reason why SB50 has been tabled until 2020, NIMBYs (who unfortunately vote very reliably) plugging their ears and ignoring solutions to the inevitable. It has to work eventually, airports are a huge source of pollution and resulting health problems.
At the end of the day, and this is a tough pill for many progressive types to swallow, the enemy to changes that would benefit most of us isn't just the so called 1% (or 0.1%, etc), it is the upper middle class.
China can do massive infrastructure projects because it has a very efficient authoritarian government. They make a decision and get it done, for better or worse.
With that authoritarianism comes a whole set of externalities: wages, pollution, imminent domain, risk tolerances, disregard for other things etc. none of which would be palatable anywhere in the world.
I suggest there's a way to build a train in CA without having to have Chinese style operating environments.
It's sad though; right on the doorsteps of the Valley itself.
Those are terrible, but realize that the only news that makes it out from China to the US are the negative, and heavily paints China as evil. Everyone I talk to have never been to China, yet think everyone there is brainwashed. People realize a lot of things are terrible about the government, just like in any other country. China has been on an economic boom and radically changing the last half century reaching Western levels of QoL...although Jinping is taking it down a notch.
Imagine living in a country where media filters all about the US down to Japanese internment camps just barely over half a century ago, NSA spying, GitMo waterboarding, homeless-packed cities, and kids getting shot in schools routinely. It's probably what happens in North Korea.
China provides evidence (if we really needed it) that it is possible to organize more effectively.
I am not insinuating any causal relationship between the authoritarianism and the more efficient organization.
I think that as a species we can absolutely do better than all of that, engineer an organizational system that is both efficient and above all _actually_ humane and democratic.
There's a strong argument to be made that a truly benevolent dictator is by far the best form of government. Efficient decisions that are in the best interest of the overall population.
China may have come close to that over the last decade. The question is whether it can maintain that, or whether the power of the authoritarian regime will eventually lead to corruption and decisions that are counter to the overall interest of the people.
That “efficient organization” is done at the risk of being sent to a camp. The Nazi’s were incredibly efficient as well. I’d rather have messy freedom than perfectly efficient government.
Would you look at that! Looks like the proposed rail is going through your property! You have a week to get the fuck out before the dozers begin clearing.
China is able to do this because they trample rights.
Probably better for the environment that this failed. Construction would release so much CO2 that the California HSR would have to be as busy as the entire Northeast corridor to break even in terms of carbon impact. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... That is basically a fantasy given that the northeast corridor passes through the densest megalopolis in the country, and connects seven major population/business centers, while the California HSR would pass through nothing.
Have you seen the number of flights daily between LAX and SFO, not to mention the other nearby airports. HSR planned to run trains every 5-12 minutes during peak hours.
LA to SF is 3.5 million flights (edit: passengers) per year. It’s one of the busiest routes, but just 1/3 of what it would take to make HSR a net win in terms of CO2 footprint.
The idea of an SF to LA HSR matching the Northeast Corridor’s passenger volume is completely laughable. You can ride the train all the way from the mountains north of NYC to exurban VA. Neither SF nor LA have the massive transit infrastructure connecting to the intercity rail that you have in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and DC.
Pollution from LAX litters South LA with small particulate with every takeoff. Rampant air travel is probably even more unsustainable than personal car use, and that's saying a lot.
As someone who voted for the the $10B bond, and would love to see HSR, all I have to say is: Good.
We have to admit that CalHSR is a failure, and building a train between Bakersfield and Merced is stupid.
The United States has some systematic problems when it comes to infrastructure. We see it at both the micro and macro level.
At the micro level, it takes four guys more than a month to fix an escalator at a BART station. Months to paint lanes on a street in San Jose.
At the macro level, $13B becomes $98B.
CityLab ran a story about why NYC stopped building subways.[0] In it, it plotted the cost subway construction cost per mile at different times in constant 2017 dollars. First line cost $125M/mile in 1904. In 1944 it went up to <$500M, and even in 1988, it was just above $500M. Not bad for 44 years. Then cost go exponential in 2017 and 2019, ending at $4000M/mile! This is stupid.
Another article (which I have sadly lost) compared the cost of construction in the US to France. I think they compared a Boston subway line to a Parisian one. The Boston one costs twice as much, and requires twice as many people for “safety”. I’m sorry, but this is grift.
Then of course there’s all the environmental and neighborhood reviews that cost more, and stymie everything.
If we want to make any progress, I’m thinking we’re going to just have to bust all of this up. Cut the red tape, and go with closed price bids. Hell, use foreign contractors. The French are apparently half the cost, faster, and high quality. Just hire them and be done with it.
Contractors have been hobbling this project, the last thing we need is to bring in more piranhas but that might now be inevitable unfortunately. Caltrans should have had complete control over this project and plowed through the engineering and construction in house. Instead a new agency was created with nearly zero staff, and was forced to buddy up with a private sector all to eager to milk every public dollar possible out of this project and give the littlest return possible, as in their eyes doing anything short of that is leaving money on the table.
This project didn't make sense from the start - look at where the construction is and what's been done. It should be SF to LA not all this other nonsense.
That "other nonsense" would tie the Central Valley (probably the third largest economic region in the state?) into the two largest economies of the state (SF Bay and LA Basin), making it possible for people to live out there and still participate in the booming regions. Not as a daily commute but it makes it feasible to live and work out there, with a commute from SF-Bakersfield about as long as SF-Livermore is by car today.
This would reduce a lot of the population pressure on the SF Bay, lowering real estate prices and knitting the state more tightly together.
I agree in theory. The connection has a lot more value than the trips themselves. You could locate a company in these regions and access the talent and funding pool of the larger cities, and so could the employees.
Unfortunately, many of these cities seem to already suffer from sprawl which might limit their potential. Going from SV through farmland just to eventually end at a tiny station, with little public transport and low rise buildings would be a little bit too ironic.
It is almost like it would make sense to build the stations between the towns, or at least at one end of them.
But they weren't going to connect either end to anything. It was just a boondoggle railroad through nowhere. If at least one end had been in the Bay or in LA, it might have made a little sense.
> But they weren't going to connect either end to anything.
Yes, they were. There was confusion caused by Newsome's restatement of the status quo (that the outside funding sought for construction outside of the initial construction segment had not yet been secured, and until it was, that construction wouldn't happen), but the plan was always to continue environmental clearances and work on lining up funding for the entire Phase 1 SF-LA project, with focus on first finishing the SJ-Bakersfield initial operating segment (of which the Merced to Bakersfield initial construction segment included a large part.)
Federal fund restrictions meant CA has to pay for SF->SJ (which is being done under the caltrain modernization project) and Bakersfield to LA (which is completely unfunded) as this is AFIAK considered 'commuter rail' so is not eligible for federal funding.
Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield section was indefinitely postponed by Newsom's last State of the State address. The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless.
> Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield section was indefinitely postponed by Newsom's last State of the State address.
Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield initial construction segment, other than the environmental clearance and planning work that was explicitly stated to be continuing in Newsome's State of the State address, was never actually scheduled because funding had not been secured; the state was actively seeking funding before the address, and all the address said was that the State would continue seeking funding and would not do work until it had secured it. The address literally was waving around the status quo as news. It didn't do anything (which it wouldn't even if it had announced a policy change, because actual policy is made by laws, regulations, executive orders, and a number of other vehicles, the State of the State address not being one of them.)
> The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless.
The Merced to Bakersfield segment is the one for which the federal government had specifically designated funding. Cancelling the funding on the basis that the state was, as always explicitly planned, building only the funded part until securing additional funding is beyond ludicrous.
(Of course, Newsome's statement in the State of the State address which was clearly designed to appear to be announcing significant policy while actually announcing the status quo was also beyond ludicrous, and politically played into opponents of the project and opponents of the state as a whole -- and the Trump Administration may or may not be the former, but has pretty openly shown itself to be the latter.)
There is no court ruling here; the “appeal” is an internal administrative appeal, not an appeal to a court, which is why the article explicitly notes it wad the Trump Administration (which is not a court) that had rejected the appeal, and why it said that the state is expected to sue over the action (which would not be an option if a court had already ruled on the issue.)
San Fran to LA via Merced and Bakersfield? If they were serious, they would have done San Fran to San Jose where the dollars spent would actually be useful rather than moving people from Nowhere to Nowhere Else.
>Bakersfield's population is around 380,000,[10] making it the 9th-most populous city in California and the 52nd-most populous city in the nation.[0]
Gee, I wonder why some folks have the idea that SV/SF/Software people are disconnected from the rest of the world.
I don't want to have a reason to go to Bakersfield, but maybe it's a bit aloof to pretend like it's some tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere; it's a CA freeway hub that's connected to the entire rest of the state by a slew of highway arteries that facilitate easy travel from SoCal/NorCal/Central. It's literally the intersection of 5 or 6 highways from all over the state.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a mass transit hub there; it leads to anywhere you want to go in California via highway.
Are you predicting that people will actually ride this train in any significant numbers and create real economic activity?
If not, it's a distinction without a difference.
I grew up in the central valley. Nice place in many ways, but all that matters for this discussion is whether that route is useful. And I highly doubt it is.
A lot of the traffic on that route is trucking, which isn't helped by high-speed rail. You say it's connected by highways, but if you are riding the train you don't have a car. A bus? Kind of makes the train speed irrelevant if you are trying out a bus route from Bakersfield to somewhere else.
Federal 'new start' grant money cannot be used on existing rail corridors.
Hence this part is being funded as part of the caltrain modernization project, which is literally under construction as we speak. It will turn the existing 2-3tph corridor into at least 10tph each way with all the standard features of a European/Japanese/Chinese train line.
> If they were serious, they would have done San Fran to San Jose where the dollars spent would actually be useful
The project did spend money there on electrification and other improvements to existing CalTrain and other service and infrastructure; Merced to Bakersfield was a new track segment that was in a position to compete favorably for federal funding then on offer for that specific purpose, and as the whole system always relied on getting additional federal and private funds, that's what got prioritized for new rail construction.
The initial construction segment was never even imagined as the initial operation segment (which was SJ to Bakersfield, which is very much not nowhere to nowhere else, but are two significant population centers with poor existing linkages, unlike SF to SJ which, while significant population centers, have much better existing linkages.)
If there was viable transportation, maybe Merced and Bakersfield would have a chance to become involved beyond the conversation-fodder of “nowhere” and “nowhere-else”.
If they were serious, they would have done San Fran to San Jose where the dollars spent would actually be useful rather than moving people from Nowhere to Nowhere Else.
San Francisco, the 13th largest city in America? And San Jose, the 10th largest city in America?
If they were serious, they should have done New York to Los Angeles where the dollars spent would actually be useful rather than moving people from Nowhere to Nowhere Else.
Can't say I'm surprised. While in general the USA has had a very hard time with new infrastructure projects California has always taken it to the next level.
Merced to Bakersfield will probably be the fastest-growing corridor in the state for the foreseeable future, however, the state received HSR funding contingent on the development of a San Francisco to Los Angeles route.
It’s completely unsurprising that the Department of Transportation wants the funding back after the state downsized the project from nationally-significant to regionally-significant.
Good. It was a huge waste of money anyway. It was being built in the wrong order (why would you build the parts that would get the least ridership first?!), it was going to the wrong places, and at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA.
We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that.
It was built in the "wrong order" because the areas near cities had existing commuter rail, and therefore weren't eligible for federal "new start" grants.
Of course, FAA grant money is available to expand SFO, OAK and LAX... no questions asked.
> It was being built in the wrong order (why would you build the parts that would get the least ridership first?!)
Because the initial operating segment needed to be near one of the endpoints (San Jose to Bakersfield was the plan) in order to maximize ridership, meaning the initial construction segment should be, at least largely, part of such a segment (the ICS was Bakersfield to Merced), and the ICS was specifically select because of relative ease of construction and federal funding being available for work that could start relatively soon at the time with a priority to economically hard hit areas for economic development purposes, which the valley end of the planned IOS fit.
> at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA.
Yes, it would have.
> We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that.
The economic case for the train was made on the bases of expected displaced road traffic and reduced funds dedicated to highway construction and maintenance with it versus without it, not replacing air travel.
> it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA.
Just curious, but how does a high speed train help the poor? A local train maybe, but not too many poor people have a pressing need for a weekend in San Francisco.
It seems that every major American infrastructure project is dominated by concerns other than building a practical, efficient forms of transportation.
Transportation projects are dominated by politics, handouts, corruption and excessive opposition to transportation even existing, while ignoring practical and common sense ideas.
The Cal High speed rail is a perfect example. Routes that don't serve major population centers, fights over land use, fights over whether a rail line should even exist, circuitous routes to reward political supporters, lack of transparency and auditing tools, cost overruns and corruption...
That really does embody the spirit of US infrastructure projects: "I'm here to make some money, and if {$infrastructure} gets built along the way, that's fine too, but by no means a deal-breaker."
When people think "political power at the highest levels" we rarely think about public works projects but that's a mistake. Public works shape our lives, and require flows of truly titanic amounts of capital to build and maintain.
I'm halfway through Robert Caro's fantastic biography of Robert Moses, who had an iron grip on New York public works for nearly half a century. It's eye-opening just how much power and influence arises from being able to control these types of projects. Yet this authority flies under the radar because it's all soft power with little public accountability. Politicians vie in the public arena over relatively insubstantial things while the real significant decisions for the future of the state take place in never-attended hearings far from press scrutiny. Activists (admirably) fight tooth and nail for every inch of progress on the issue du jour but vote ambivalently on massive multibillion-dollar bond issues.
Really? In Europe, take a look at Berlin's Brandenburg airport. It took 15 years to design, was supposed to open 5 years after that and now may not open until 2021, 15 years after construction started.
Other example projects that are delayed from starting or late from finishing thus pushing costs higher are:
a 3rd Heathrow runway,
a tunnel to bypass Stonehenge (planned for over 20 years and costs projected to balloon from £180M to over £1.6B),
the Paris Metro projected to be €12B over budget
The US has no monopoly on poor planning, NIMBYs and corruption.
I completely agree with this, and based on past research it seems it’s a highly cultural phenomenon. What it basically comes down to is that countries with strong public transportation infrastructure view public transportation as a basic human right, whereas the US views it as a social welfare program. It’s a bigger fight than just voting for better politicians, it’s deeply cultural.
A train between Merced and Bakersfield? The talks of Bridges to Nowhere dwarf the ridiculousness of this Train To and From Nowhere. Who the hell would use this to make it profitable enough to justify?
The plan is still to link SF and LA once a clearer funding situation materializes, the project has since been scaled back as work has already started between Merced and Bakersfield. If you want to blame someone, don't blame the politicians who are trying to make this happen, blame the local politicians along the route and private contractors who've been hobbling and sucking the blood out of this project since it was announced.
It's insane to think that this would actually be completed. It's more like the stealth fighter project that should never have gotten funding, or should have had its funding cut decades previous at this point.
I can't help but feel that the solution to overblown infrastructure costs would involve less contracting and more of construction directly with state employees and resources. Sure government is less efficient than the private sphere, but government contractors have awful incentives when it comes to cost effectiveness...bilking the state for more hours/supplies is more much profitable than doing a job quickly and cost-effectively, and contractors are very efficient at doing that.
Pretty massive blow to CA style politics / governance. This was a feather in the cap of the Democrat party and they turned it into an anchor. Complete failure to execute.
As a fain of rail travel, and someone who sometimes needs to travel this corridor, I was really looking forward to riding this line.
I noticed a lot of the California headlines about this have painted it along the lines of "Evil Trump administration killing California high speed rail!"
The reality is, though, that California botched this project. The Federal funding was contingent on California making progress, and the amount of funding was sized for the size of the project.
California has made little progress, and the size of the project has been reduced. It's only fiscally responsible for the feds to take back the money. Just like if you promise a VC a million users in the first year, but only deliver 10,000 they're going to look at you sideways.
FTA: Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said on Thursday it had canceled the funding awarded in a 2010 agreement after it said the state had “repeatedly failed to comply” and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”
Fortunately, high speed rail is making (slow) progress in other states like Florida, Illinois and Texas. Hopefully the money can do some good in those places.
>In March 2018, the state forecast project costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned costs could be as much as $98.1 billion.
I love train travel as well but that is an obscene amount of money. I wish they would upgrade the existing tracks so that traveling from Emeryville-LA Union station goes from 10 hours to 4-5hrs (and runs multiple times a day)
An Acela-like train probably wouldn't be that fast. On the Northeast Corridor, the Acela is only around an hour faster than the regional and part of that is just making fewer stops. My guess is you'd still be looking at 7+ hours in CA, at which point most people would just fly.
(Very few people actually take the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC because it's pretty much a full-day trip. But New York is in about the middle so there are two popular sub-sections--unlike the case with CA.)
The Acela is only that slow because the rail infrastructure can't support the maximum speed of the train's rolling stock. The purchase of the rolling stock was supposed to spur the redevelopment of the tracks, but that never happened.
My comment was mostly in the vein of wondering what a "cheap" (relatively) not-really HSR could have looked like and the answer is probably "not fast enough to get from Emeryville to LA in a timeframe where people would really use it."
And, of course, the rolling stock had various problems so I'm not sure what the theoretical top speed ended up being.
yes. exactly right. the first leg should have been somewhere near the Santa Ana Freeway from LA to Orange County -- or somewhere else near a large component of California's population.
I think the right of way/real estate issue is one of the things that makes it incredibly expensive, and why it's much easier and cheaper to build a useless line from nowhere to the outskirts of nowhere.
Maybe the rail line could somehow reuse the freeway right of way, but I'm not sure how that could work while retaining the roads for cars and trucks.
You could cut south through Iowa. The distance is longer, but for MN it means you can pick up some southern cities along the way (Minneapolis is so close to Wisconsin that you could put the MN end in Wisconsin and still get most of your riders from Minneapolis). I expect a couple of the tiny cities in Iowa along the way would like service.
Maybe, but I'd worry about more places to possibly stop would mean ... lots of requests for stops.
One thing watching folks talk about rail locally is that all these little towns that down't want it ... unless you're going to stop a 10 times a day at their town.
True, but having trains stop in Rochester MN and Waterloo IA makes sense if the track is already close. (Note I didn't say the same train - scheduling is more complex as is the track which now needs switches, but express trains that bypass the small towns make sense)
You wouldn't do the track across WI without looking that the bigger cities in the way and deciding where to stop. You wouldn't stop in every small town, but the bigger towns...
This project isn't economically viable in the first place. Unless engineering and real estate costs drop by an order of magnitude, there's not enough visitor travel or transit density or cost differential where this makes sense as planned. It was doomed from the start.
You're right about that being a plot for True Detective. Although the city of Vinci plot is very much based on the real Vernon, the high speed rail plot not so much (at least from what I understand): https://www.laweekly.com/news/just-how-ridiculous-is-true-de...
I agree. Merced to Bakersfield - really who cares? LA to SF is the only route that makes sense. Do that or do nothing. Who the heck needs high speed rail line between Merced and Bakersfield? That being said, this was very politicly motivated, of that I have no doubt.
Having lived for 6 years in the rail transport capital of the US (NYC / Philly / Northeast Corridor) and 4 years in SF, I can honestly say that I don't think there is a world where this was going to work.
Let me state for the record that I am a huge fan of rail and public transit in general, but the forces and timing working against this project were too large to be overcome even with $10B in backing.
Here are some of the reasons:
1. Lots of people here are comparing this project to projects in China. I think it's hard to overstate how one of the most expensive process (land acquisition by the government) is fundamentally different in China vs the US. The idea of "land ownership" in China is entirely different: Most private entities don't "own" land in the US sense, they may lease it for a long time (~99) years but ultimately its incredibly easy for local and national governments to execute eminent domain with little or no regard for land rights. Yes, this make public transport easier, but land rights are fundamental for the continuation of a democracy. It's not something we want to mess with.
2. Culturally, California is just not a train state. In the Northeast Corridor, trains and public transit are just more engrained in the culture. Kids learn at the age of 5 that NJ Transit, LIRR, or Metro North is the best way in and out of NYC. Most of my friends in NYC don't even have drivers licenses. Things are closer together, land is flatter, there aren't huge swaths of nature in between things, and there's such a high density of people and economic activity that trains have made sense for a long time. Yes, the NYC subway has its problems, but I can always bet that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I can get from Manhattan to JFK in an hour. In SF it's hard to even tell if I can get across the Bay past Midnight.
3. The small decisions made about stops, contracting, and procurement for the high speed rail were more about making the project politically palpable than actual need or engineering practicality. Taking a weird detour to Palmdale, as detailed in the Vox article below, is the best example of this [1]. The Palmdale route alone made the north-south trip 12 minutes slower while costing $5 billion in extra spending. If you're going to make that kind of decision over and over again and stack turtles until everyone's happy, you're going to make a great piece of paper but nothing that will ever turn on.
4. The decision to do this wasn't organic. If you take a look at regional transit needs in CA generally, no one was stack ranking high speed rail at the top. In LA you have basic problems with inaccessibility within most of the city, the most egregious being the lack of connectivity to LAX (which just started getting built last year). In SF you have gridlock where we can't add diesel trains to CalTrain because it needs to get Electrified first by law, but that process won't happen until 2022 [2]. If we can't upgrade a regional rail that serves 1/3rd of the economic activity of the state, what makes us think we can build a high speed rail that is (back of the envelope) 10x as long? At least in the northeast, trains systems were built where there was (1) incredible demand and (2) an understanding that it could be built where value would be opened up as it was happening. Which is why those rail lines start in major metro areas and extend outward, rather than building in the central valley and working backwards.
5. Air and car travel, despite its (obvious) climate change problems, just works. It's relatively cheap, it's well understood, and given the vast distance and significant nature features between population areas, it's a good solution to a hard problem. LAX sucks, but LA has 4 regional airports that can be used once you understand how. Flights are frequent, have lots of type options, and can be purchased for $50 one way. Roads and cars work better on mountain terrain than rail, and can better serve a dispersed population. Yes, we cannot run on gasoline forever if we want to save the planet, but right now it's easy to understand why California has stuck with this solution so long given its difference to other major areas that use trains.
Overall, I was rooting for this, but this end was inevitable. But it's not the end of the world. We will learn from this and find a way, and I'm convinced in the end it will be more economical and fit California's unique parameters better than a $90B train. The solution may be something we can't see now (self-driving battery-powered cars on isolated freeway lanes, anyone?), but we'll find it. I know we will
Yep, exactly. You know what works great? Airline service between SF and LA, with a matrix of three major Bay area airports to four major LA area airports, and a constellation of smaller airports being served by smaller companies such as Surf Air.
Let's get rapid public transit linked up to the airports much like public transit is linked up to the major rail stations of Europe. Let's save SJC and SMO. Let's get jet fuel refined with reduced carbon processes. Let's get electric airliners and hybrid electrics R&D funded. There's a lot we can do, and it'll cost way less than that ridiculous train.
Wasn’t part of the criteria of the original funding grant that the project could be scaled back to derive direct benefit from the funding without needing additional full construction of the high speed rail?
Newsom should have used the money to upgrade Caltrain and SF rail stations, and THEN cancel the project. At least then something useful would have gotten done.
I don't see for all the world how this isn't an utter failure for both the management for this project and the ultra combative style that the previous and current California gubernatorial administrations approach just about any and all dealing with the feds since Trump was elected. Have a feeling this might be where 'more red meat for the base' might have met it's match in terms of cognitive dissonance for at least some California voters.
UPDATE - : CA Governor Newsom this afternoon (via Sacbee): "The Trump Administration’s action is illegal and a direct assault on California, our green infrastructure, and the thousands of Central Valley workers who are building this project,” he said. “Just as we have seen from the Trump Administration’s attacks on our clean air standards, our immigrant communities and in countless other areas, the Trump Administration is trying to exact political retribution on our state. “This is California’s money, appropriated by Congress, and we will vigorously defend it in court"
Exactly the type of rhetoric, attitude, and threats that help push this situation in the first place (well, along with the gross mismanagement by the state for years) and he still can't quit digging.
I've seen several parts of the legs laid out already so I was wondering if they can just convert it to a highway. The current highway, route 99, which runs almost parallel to it is beginning to get congested quite often, so it could probably get repurposed for a highway, otherwise it will just be a symbol of failure.
> The ... state had [originally] planned to build a 520-mile (837 km) system ... from Los Angeles to San Francisco ... Newsom said in February the state would instead complete a 119-mile high-speed link between Merced and Bakersfield...
See, this is kinda my problem with the whole push for nationalized healthcare in the US; it's not the nationalized healthcare part that's the problem. The Germans can do national healthcare beautifully. The Swedes can do national healthcare beautifully. The UK can do national healthcare... competently. But if the current US bureaucracy was put up to the task, than in a year we'll end up having serious articles about the resurgence of the plaque in Kentucky. I'm not sure how, but we really need to fix the current bureaucratic situation before we give them any more responsibility in the manner
Medicare and Medicaid work pretty damn well. Why wouldn't nationalized care for everyone work the same? Your argument is irrational and overlooks two major healthcare systems that the US government is handling fairly well. Either could be expanded to cover everyone.
Hyperloop seriously has a better chance of building an SF-LA line than the state of CA, and also SpaceX has a better chance of reaching Mars before 2024 than NASA returning the moon in that time (in 2004, GWB announced NASA would return to the moon by 2020). Government just can't do big projects any more.
an idea has a better chance of building rail infrastructure than a nation-state? Dubious.
You seem to be drawing an impossibly broad conclusion. I have taken the liberty of editing your concluding statement by adding an appropriate amount of uncertainty and removing overly general statements.
An idea that Elon is actively implementing with The Boring Company. There was also the idea of reusable rockets and he believed it was possible as well - and that has been done too. I'm curious how much or little you know about The Boring Company's efforts so far?
musk is not implementing anything. I find the consistency with which the asshole figure heads (musk, jobs) are idolized deeply troubling.
cool yeah, new tech, wooh. very exciting.
but you know what's more important than that? being a good, kind person.
which you definitely are not if you are heading a large organization designed to systematically squeeeeeeeze everything it can get out of its peons while giving them as little as possible in return. and also definitely if you like to do things such as publicly call someone risking their life to save strangers a pedophile.
Well you're clearly being absurd, and it looks like you don't have a balanced view and you've bought into negative press that's heavily been propaganda generated by media for click views and by short sellers.
Would be a useful exercise, if you can manage, to make a list of positives of what Elon and his companies have accomplished so far. Maybe work on your negativity and emotional reactions so you can understand things more clearly, develop compassion by developing balanced logic which includes full perspective more than just hate.
> Hyperloop seriously has a better chance of building an SF-LA line
No, they don't, and in order to make it look much cheaper when they propose an "SF-LA" line it didn't actually come close to either SF or LA, thus creating an entirely new transit problem if any significant number of people were going to use it.
And, of course, Hyperloop could only do it with the State (and thus can't do it better than the State), because there is no way to build it without eminent domain.
Startups really do seem to be the best solution to problems like these. Elon Musk is leading teams that are solving some of the world's biggest problems. Those efforts greatly benefited from government subsidies, funding, etc.
Let's just admit finally that governments are really only good at writing checks, that they suck at managing projects, and then just work very hard figure out where those checks should go.
Our governments(s) should give a bunch of teams $10M to design projects, then a few teams $100M to prototype them, and then one or two teams the billions required to build them out. I bet there's a qualified and moral person on HN that could lead a successful high speed rail project with government backing.
What we need is a willingness to do major, expensive projects (high-speed rail is just not going to cheap in California, or anywhere), and ruthless commitment to making them happen efficiently. When a project like this fails in this way, all it does it play into the hands bad-faith actors who will never support major infrastructure projects. Then, people who are acting in good faith oppose them too, because there aren't enough counter-examples of successful projects.