$68B California bullet train project likely to overshoot budget and deadline
latimes.com
latimes.com
That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.
Since then, the plan has changed repeatedly, and not for the better. It currently looks like average trip times will be in the 4-6 hour range. That is hopefully achievable (although they haven't built it yet), but one thing it isn't is high speed. (They're hoping to work in some "express" trains which will do better, but it's an open question whether they're manage it, and even if they do, they won't be remotely as fast as Europe, China, or Japan.)
You're talking about trains going 300 km/h, but California is looking to build a train that will be doing literally half that. By many common definitions, it's not even "high speed rail".
> I have a question to all the naysayers
I love high speed rail, and I hope maybe one day California will try and build a high speed rail network. :) Naysaying what they're actually building doesn't mean I don't like rail.
It's too bad too because 350km/h from San Francisco to Mountain View would mean you could make the trip in 11 minutes.
Is this what you are referring to? 90 km at "half-speed" out of 770 km doesn't sound too bad.
(It also costs around $50 currently but obviously don't expect that)
An autonomous car lets me get work done while I travel just like the train. Only it actually gets me from one stop to the next. Taking a train 90% of the way there, then spending an hour walking or finding a taxi to get the last 10% is borderline useless. Great if you sit at a desk all day I suppose.
You're lucky; many of us get terribly motion sickness from reading anything in a car. For me, train is fine, though.
Taking a train 90% of the way there, then spending an hour walking or finding a taxi to get the last 10% is borderline useless.
Why would you take an hour? If we're assuming autonomous cars, then reliable and cheap taxi service for the last mile should be fairly common.
And, for long distances, trains will probably be both faster and more reliable than cars, automated or otherwise.
Trains are going to start to seem really quaint and retro-chic, right around the time this one is finished.
Also, California isn't Europe.
From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk
Which is a good idea and should be done. In fact any scheme that doesn't include this should be by definition classed as a unnecessary money-sink.
What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate.
If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient.
Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum.
Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should.
The Swiss seem to be able to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
On time and on budget.
Anyway, the point of these large project is, we will need them. We can build them easier now, than later as congestion and land prices go up even more. When calculating overruns, I'd like to compare the ultimate cost with, what would it cost if we hadn't? Congestion, choked commerce, slowed economic growth all cost something.
Sometimes you have to buckle down and actually build the brave new world. "Skate toward the puck" is how its sometimes called - build the thing we will need to be a functional, thriving society in 100 years.
Of course, no-one will actually know if the costing was accurate until it's finished. Does being accurate really pay off for a politician?
His conclusion was that 9/10 projects of this size run over budget, 9/10 run over time and 9/10 have benefits that are oversold.
Rail projects are particularly bad. The average traffic on them was 61% of that forecast and some are as low as 25%.
His homepage: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/bent-flyvbjerg
An interview with him : http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/bent_flyvbjerg.html
One of his books that is very readable: http://www.amazon.com/Megaprojects-Risk-An-Anatomy-Ambition/...
This isn't to say that such projects should not be built, just that those selected should be the ones with the best realistic cost benefit, not those where the backers have made up the numbers most creatively.
I hope someone does a detailed comparison between the two projects!
It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)
America seems to be unfixable:
"The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14 years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8 billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."
Might be as much a scale problem, are there any Red state America projects being done on vaguely similar scales, with, say, a billion dollars as a minimum baseline?
Conversely we're also building a new west-east railway across/beneath London that seems to be going fairly well for about £15bn.
High speed rail is just a hugely expensive thing to get built in the developed world it seems.
Spain has built 1500 miles of HSR so it seems that the extreme high cost is avoidable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#Sp...
Public transit planners need to get a clue, seriously. The cars of 2050 are not going to be their father's Oldsmobile. This is more of an issue in urban environments than for cross-country transit, of course, but still... if trains are the answer, then we're asking the wrong question.
Think individual cars are inefficient? Not compared to a train, and especially not compared to a train that is anything other than 100% full.
Cars need to go slower because they have worse air resistance than trains and the tires get hot and wear out quickly.
You're still going to have to deal with rolling resistance and going up-hill you'd have to limit the speed of such a convoy to the speed the slowest car can attain.
But for most distances that a car will normally travel the difference between 150 and 300 Km/h will not translate into meaningful changes in time spent on the road and probably you're still going to beat high-speed rail in door-to-door scenarios.
Also, all it will take is one (un)lucky 9/11-style terrorist attack, and everything we've come to know and love about air travel and the TSA will instantly apply to the train station. This is a matter of "when," not "if."
Finally, there's also a hidden economic cost associated with fixed tracks, similar to the costs/risks borne by someone who buys a house. They're stuck there. A homeowner might like to move to a nearby city to take a better job, but oops, they're still underwater on their mortgage. Likewise, locations and other trends in urban economic development shouldn't be biased by a decision made 50 years earlier regarding where to put the train tracks.
It's better to stay agile, and trains are perhaps the least agile things humanity has ever built.
500 autonomous vehicles on the road are a train. Only without expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks.
People don't understand just how insanely different things are going to look in another couple of decades. Trains make sense if, and only if, everything stays exactly the same.
But between the cities, you still have tons of cars going together, in a line, all the time. There is no flexibility here, almost everyone is going the same direction for most of the way. I don't see how even autonomous electric cars could beat trains on that. I think that the best way for the future is bullet trains/hyperloop connecting the large cities, and PRT within the city. I'm open to math that shows otherwise though.
What are we basing that on? Let's look at some numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
Let's take the Eurostar trains as an example:
> The Three Capitals sets are 394 m (1,293 ft) long and have 766 seats, weighing 752 tonnes.
Most of the other trains seem similar. The mass is about one tonne per passenger. So in terms of mass of metal you need to drag around per passenger, a full train is very similar to a small car (say, the latest model Mazda Miata which weighs 1056 kg) occupied by a single passenger.
But of course trains are very rarely entirely full (and cars average more than one passenger). But the whole mass of the train needs to make the journey regardless of whether there's people onboard or not! The train I caught the other day was probably dragging around ten tons of metal for every passenger. This is what makes trains a horrendously energy-inefficient means of transport.
Aerodynamics? Self-driving cars could draft behind each other at high speed. Probably not a drag coefficient quite as low as the aerodynamically designed train, but it also has a colossally lower cross sectional area, because a train is ridiculously high and ridiculously wide (in the interests of not being ridiculously long, and also for historical reasons).
What else? Oh yes, the car doesn't have to stop 'til it reaches the destination, trains tend to have stops along the route.
For speed, I don't see any reason why, once self-driving is solved, you couldn't have cars cruising at 200mph+ in self-organised "trains" on the existing I-5. No present car is really optimised for that kind of thing, so it's difficult to say how hard it would be, you'd need different tyre compounds for a start.
As for comfort I'll take the privacy of my own little bubble over travelling in the close company of four hundred random strangers.
And not stuff like "trains are very rarely entire full". Of course they're not. But cars are almost always entirely empty.
Rolling resistance is the big issue that usually favours trains. On the other hand, could we design cars with an extra set of wheels or something?
For long distance/high speed aerodynamics is more important than weight.
And even that is very far away. Meanwhile trains just work. No high-speed connection between LA and SF is an anomaly by world standards given size, proximity and economical importance of two cities.
Also, modern high-speed trains don't have 4-person compartments (or have those at premium), they are rows of seats not unlike plane business class seats. You usually have power, sometimes wi-fi. You can get coffee and a newspaper.
I don't want to own it. I don't have to own it. The transit authority can own and operate it.
This will be so much better than fixed-track transit it's not even funny.
You fly at 500 MPH, I'll drive at 65-70 or whatever the speed limit on I-5 is these days.
I will win this bet, most likely. You will lose. A train won't help you much, if at all, because it's going to embark and disembark on its own fixed schedule, probably in some crappy/scary part of town miles away from where you need to go. (Here's another reason: eventually some terrorists are going to attack the train. The TSA will muscle its way in, and you'll have to arrive at the station an hour or two early, just like we do now when we fly.)
There's just too much hassle and overhead involved in multi-modal transit... which is why people who can afford to drive still do, even when they have alternatives.
as another pointed out, automated vehicles will likely negate any purpose to this train. just automating buses alone will negate the need for any heavy rail people transport because unlike trains, bus routes are flexible.
I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a busy public train.
No, they aren't. One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support.
Autonomous cars don't address either of those concerns.
This is absurd. The cars are going to get much more efficient, and the roads are already there.
But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.