The hunt for dollars to build the $64B bullet train
latimes.com
latimes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-ca...
http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-high-s...
The project is hoped to finish in 2029, which is 12 years from now.
For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinhuangdao%E2%80%93Shenyang_H...
Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track, or what it costs NYC to build 1-2 miles of track.
If we are serious about transit, we will figure out how to get the costs under control. Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
If we want transit in the US we need to fix the insane cost problem. Anything else is sheer folly.
(Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)
It would make sense hiring a European or Asian country to come in and build it for us with 1/5 of the resources and in 1/3 the time. If a country like Switzerland can dig through solid granite for 35 miles under a mountain (Gotthard Base Tunnel) someone out there other than a US company should be able to lay a few hundred miles of track.
Even given that, the survivability of a crash in a modern European train is very good. The Grayrigg derailment in the UK, for example, had an Italian-built express train jump the rails at 95mph and jackknife down an embankment. One death (she was 84).
UK railways carried 64.4 billion passenger kilometers last year. The Grayrigg derailment was the last accident involving the death of a passenger. It was in 2007. How many road traffic accidents avoided by rail travel since then?
Edited to add: there are many ways for government and economies to function.
I know we all want fast trains, but if we're going through major cities we likely won't get that fast (unless we do like the Shinkansen and build the entire train on a 3-story platform).
If we're willing to spend $50 billion, let's spend that on some slower trains that connect cities anyways. Maybe you don't do LA-SF, but giving higher inter-connectivity is good.
What happens in Japan is that train stations get built, and then the surrounding area is simultaneously developped with stores and other developments. So you build a train station in the middle of nowhere, but then build an IKEA + a mall. Suddenly people have a reason to take the train! And it helps the local economies too.
doesn't want passenger trains running on it
A significant portion of Japanese train companies' income comes from retail real estate.
Interestingly, he says this eventually led to the collapse of the Los Angeles street car system, because it was financed by the the increase in land value, and once the development was complete there was no longer a cash stream to pay for operating costs.
[0] http://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/144726791758/was-thin...
These businesses are true conglomerates
Everywhere they built the MAX line, shops and commerce would spring up around it.
Of course, there's still a small, incredibly vocal contingent who opposes public transit no matter what.
Happily, they were able to keep extending the MAX in different directions despite that small, vocal opposition.
Portland got a lot wrong, especially with the homeless, but their public transit is just great.
http://skytrainforsurrey.org/2012/05/28/portland-or-lrt-is-c...
They quote an operational farebox recovery rate of less than 28%, so taxpayers are subsidizing almost 3/4 of the operational cost plus all of the fixed costs and construction.
(As disappointing as that it, it's still over 8 times better than VTA in the San Jose area!)
Funnily enough, that blog post seems to have made up the numbers out of thin air. They quote a 2011 FRR of 27.8%, while TriMet's published numbers are 35.9%.
Regardless, it's a public good. I simply wouldn't expect public transportation to make money, just like I wouldn't expect the court system or the DMV to make money. These things exist to benefit the city or state as a whole. I'm happy to pitch in.
How much it should be subsidized is a fair question, but that it should be at all, not even a concern for me.
(Source, TriMet's operations data: https://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/trimetridership.pdf)
In regards to headways, unless you are fully grade separated you can only go so tight with scheduling (fuckin' cars man, fuckin' up my mass transit!), also the number you cited appears to be made up, please cite sources.
How is the farebox recovery rate on roadways in Oregon State?
Not all of Portland's transit ideas are smart or successful.
Here's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WES_Commuter_Rail a $166 million fiasco. Only 2,000 riders a day (and they may be lying about that number; I watch many trains go by with only a handful of people on them).
Additionally, there's a huge political element. A vocal minority of people have done everything they can to try to keep the project from taking off for various reasons. As such, there have been a rather insane amount of lawsuits filed which divert money to lawyers and time that would better be served by actually putting shovels in the ground. There are people who want it to fail for the sake of failing, because they want to bang their "government doesn't work drum" to the detriment of the taxpayers who are stuck paying for lawyers to fight their silliness.
After the Army Corps of Engineers built the Panama Canal in 1914, it was not all smooth sailing to build the Chittenden Locks in Seattle, between dropping the lake 10ft, reversing the course of/eliminating multiple rivers and streams and dealing with the fallout of that it was and still is quite an engineering marvel.
People only shut their mouths when they get threatened into a fearful silence, and/or sometimes if they get bribed enough.
Otherwise, you'll always have a substantially sized group of complainers dragging down a project this big, and the complainers leech into operations and mysterious expensive mistakes erode the budget of an already expensive operation.
There's just enough shrug factor here for people to not care about how much gas they burn driving to places that might not be very exciting to begin with.
Many would just as soon not have to travel at all, and even more would prefer to not be taxed so as to pay for trips they personally don't want to take to begin with. Most people just want their actual lives to be generally easier.
Without confrontational intimidation, bribery is probably the only other political lever to press in the United States.
To build on top of a mountain range, there is a smaller overhead cost to survey, do an engineering/environmental study, cut earth, and lay down road but you literally have to pay that overhead for every few hundred feet because as the terrain changes, the equipment and other infrastructure you require also changes drastically. To build a highway you have to have strong ground to build on, which is why US freeways largely bob and weave all over the place instead of just going in a straight line, and civil engineers avoid weak ground where soil stabilization will be most expensive. On mountain roads, not only are the options for soil stabilization limited to very labor intensive methods, but you also often have no choice but to take a bad (expensive) route because you have to design safe turns and gradients. The problem isn't that the engineering is harder, there's just a lot more of it to do.
Also, United States property rights are pretty unique as far as Western countries go. To build a tunnel you'd have to get the mineral rights from every single property owner in your path whereas in most European countries, mineral rights are owned by the government. If you're going to compare a Swiss tunnel to any US road projects, you have to account for the massive differences in legal fees and land acquisition because whether you build above or below ground in the US, you have to deal with the property rights of private owners and all of the extra safety/environmental/etc regulations that come as a consequence.
I suspect some form of rent seeking (or likely multiple layers of rent seeking) is part of the problem.
Much of the relevant land in the mountainous parts of the Western US is owned by the federal government so I'm talking mostly about the actual construction costs. Unfortunately, the high speed rail is useless without tracks to and from the mountain sections so the cost of obtaining right of way still matters. From my understanding, the Swiss tunnel is an extension of an existing network, so the 36 miles of tunnel didn't depend on lots of new above ground construction and the risk that comes with it.
For example, the interstate 70 expansion through the Rocky mountains that connected the western and eastern halves of Colorado cost $800 million per mile for 12 miles, even though all of the land was already owned by state and federal governments. There was little opposition, it was badly needed, and the project went very well (winning several awards) but it still cost over 40 times more than initially predicted because it turned out that building a massive highway through the Rockies was a lot harder than anyone had thought.
> There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California
Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out. The biggest problem geography-wise is probably all the NIMBY complaints. To be fair, they are really loud trains that would kill property values, and the complaints are valid. I think thats where a lot of those lawsuits are coming from.
Japan's high-speed trains also cost a hell of a lot more than the OP is talking about. The Chuo Shinkansen will cost around $51 billion for a 286km train (i.e. half the distance from SF to LA). The Hokuriku Shinkansen was much cheaper, but still 10x more expensive ($18 billion) than the Chinese line. [1] Both make the LA-SF line look reasonable, if not exactly cheap.
I generally agree that the SF-LA line is too expensive, but the OP's reasoning is just completely wrong. India and China are cheaper because everything in India and China is cheaper than the US.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-cost-differences-between-...
The point of citing both was definitely to show that you can have a pretty large variance in costs, even if you're the world expert in building these things in earthquake-prone areas.
Chinese HSR had a fatal one within three years of the line opening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision
The reality is that estimating underground rail construction costs is significantly harder and riskier than above ground [1]. According to the AACE's classification system for cost estimates, the current number is a borderline class 2/3 estimate which means the estimate could be off as little as 5% or as much as 600%. Historically tunneling projects have ended up in the upper half of that range.
[1] http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/umrcourses/ge441/Too_Dangerous_...
By the way, this is also the reason that California will never be able maintain and operate HSR to the same level as Japan. It requires a hell of a team effort to do what JR does every day.
"Our government used to get things done [..] Our newest fighter jet has already been under development for more than 15 years and it costs more than 15 times as much as the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), but last year it lost a dogfight to a plane from the 1970s [..] Instead of spending a fortune, Trump won the primaries by saying things that made sense to voters. His greatest heresy was to declare that government health care can work [..] Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government [..] I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more."
I think this may get even worse with Trump. During Bush's the Republicans just cut taxes while spending a lot of money on war so I would expect the same to happen again. People like Paul Ryan only turned into deficit hawks when Obama became president. They will probably forget the deficit now that they are in power.
I think that the Bush administration's largest impact on the budget was definitely Medicare Part D, which is not as obvious as the war in Iraq, but is much more expensive (>> $100 billion/year), and will probably last much longer (10 years so far).
It's come in well under budget projections and seniors are generally happy with how they can shop around for the right plan for them.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it a pretty successful social program? I'd say so.
Not sure what you mean, Part D is Medicare.
Republicans say big government doesn't work, for which they are partly right, but they usually say it for the wrong reasons - wanting to cut some services so they can cut taxes for corporations or spend that money for Defense, not because they want to make the gov more efficient.
Then to oppose them in a partisan way, the Democrats come and say "you're wrong! big government does work! and the people need it!" So they just end up wasting a lot of money not trying to make things more efficient, because doing so would "prove the Republicans right" or something.
Same issue with electoral rigging. Republicans yell about it but mainly referring to "voter fraud" (probably a non-issue for the most part, but I haven't looked at the data), while real electoral fraud issues do exist, voter suppression being included in that. But for the most part Democrats don't call for audits and such either, because "voter fraud is not real" (even if other type of fraud is) and they think they might be helping Republicans by admitting it.
This toxic partisanship is what's ruining politics in the U.S. Everything has to be black or white, red or blue. This is why I said it before when I criticized Sam Altman here for "simply encouraging young people to vote" as an obvious political ploy to get the Democrats to win.
If Altman and others here are actually serious about democracy and fairness of the political process in the U.S., then they should be supporting stuff like removing electoral processes that don't work anymore and aren't democratic. Processes like the FPTP voting system for Congress as well as primaries and other elections (to proportional representation or RCV/approval voting for single-winner elections), as well as removing the electoral college, and the caucus system from primaries.
They should also fight to make the "money vote" equal, just like the real vote is, and fight to limit individual political campaign donations. A rich person shouldn't have a "1,000 times stronger voice" than a regular or poorer person that can donate to a campaign.
There are other real issues they can fix as well, such as fighting to eliminate electronic voting machines. Even when they aren't hacked to steal the elections have a ton of other issues like not working properly, and thus making a lot of people's vote not count, which should be a crime in itself.
Fix the fundamental problems in the U.S. electoral process and everything else take care of itself in time, including climate change, and all the other important issues. As Elon Musk says, go at the problem from a "first principles" angle, rather than try to fix the symptoms (get more young people to vote so the "bad" Republicans don't win - the point is to make it so there aren't any "bad" Republicans anymore, at least not any worse than the typical right-wing party in Europe).
Imagine a community meeting where decision-makers were chosen in a game of Monopoly. Anyone who lost the Monopoly game didn't get to make any decisions. The winners, by virtue of their excellent Monopoly skills/luck, got the power to make decisions.
Not only would this process be entirely unfair, it would poison peoples' desire to participate in the first place. Monopoly is a nasty game, as is FPTP. Neither of these have any business being arbiters of power.
I'm afraid Peter is misinformed. Trump did spend a fortune to win the primaries. $63.3 million, to be exact. Only Ted Cruz spent more than him, at $85.8 million. You can look at the numbers by the Federal Elections Commission here: http://www.fec.gov/press/summaries/2016/tables/presidential/...
http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clinton-spent-three-t...
Then you gotta figure the cost of compliance with all the different bureaus and regulations that don't exist in China or India to make something like this happen in California.
And then there's the litigious cost amplifier that is another distinctly American feature.
This is the reality we live in.
Edit: original Parent post was taking about $100:$10, I'm agreeing and saying even less, more like $4/hr in Beijing.
The goal is getting train service rather than funneling money to unions, right?
That being said, American labor isn't the issue, Chinese already cost $4/hr and importing them costs quite a bit, whereas the labor market stateside is pretty soft in that segment. It likely would not make sense unless your good with mass executions to cut costs.
1 - http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpr...
Edit: dmoy states labor is $4/hr in China, not $3/hr.
If we can hire American labor for cheap (i.e. less than Davis Bacon wages) let's do that - but then don't use labor costs as an excuse why CA rail costs > 10x what Chinese rail does.
Unless we can steal land and cut corners when building, the costs are unlikely to drop much.
43km of track is already in operation as a test track. Here's a ride video.[1]
JR expects it to be profitable.
Luckily, rail doesn't need giant tunnels, tunnel boring machines for that size tunnel are a known quantity.
1 - https://www.ch2m.com/newsroom/news/new-seattle-light-rail-li...
2 - http://q13fox.com/2016/07/21/bertha-seattle-tunnel-project-2...
True but misleading. Actually laying track is the cheap and easy final part of construction; building the viaducts, grade separations, etc., and doing the other construction which prepares the route for track to be laid.is the time consuming, expensive part, and plenty of that has been done and is being done in the initial segment.
> Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B.
Which is a very different problem than a regional transit system. And, in any case, acquiring right of way is cheaper in India, due to land prices.
> That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track
California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction.
> Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
That being said, here in Seattle we approved nearly as much money to build out our light rail network, and in the context of the US and what it costs to build bridges, freeways and rail here, that cost isn't far out of line. Considering the state of our region currently, even if the economy imploded tomorrow it'd still be a sound investment to do, especially since we are connecting all the way from Tacoma to Everett, with 116 miles of rail.
That's irrelevant. There is no planned path, just patches and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree (or sold off, which is basically the same thing).
> Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years (procedurally discussed, not legislatively enforced).
Much like Federal budgets and projects, anything extended beyond the current administration's term limits means it's someone else's problem. Putting people on Mars and this project, should become a reality about the same time.
Yes, there is a planned alignment for the entire system (and not just the LA to SF "Phase I" for which most of the cost estimates and timelines usually discussed apply, but also the Sacramento to San Diego "Phase 2".)
> just patches
No, even if you are referring to the context of the initial construction, that's not true; it's directed with a clear plan of a specific segment for initial operations between Silicon valley and the Central Valley.
> and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree
Pure speculation; it's true that there is uncertainty, largely political in nature, about funding for the portion beyond the part that is supposed to be operational in 2025. But there's also plenty of time to resolve that.
> The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years
It was a $10 billion conditional bond authorization (one of the funding challenges has been meeting the conditions in that bond authorization) which was very explicitly not expected to cover full construction cost of the system (nor was there ever a 10 year timeline.)
This is before we even talk about fault lines, soil conditions, land cost, lawsuits, etc. that are involved in building High Speed Rail. You need a dead straight alignment for HSR, and as it stands there are businesses and homes in the way right now, which means a large legal mess to even start to clear up, before we even get into preliminary system design.
It's strange to regulate something you don't have. Maybe Europe has learned from actual experience with trains what standards are needed?
Lets see what President Trump does with these sorts of things in his $1tn infrastructure package.
Re: Trump's infrastructure plan, I highly doubt we'll see any rail improvements, whether it be light rail or heavy gauge rail in West Virgina to unbottleneck their coal exports. He is very happy to walk back on promises he made on the campaign trail it seems, which is quite sad.
You think Paris has worker costs closer to India than the US? I think you might be the one who doesn't know what you're talking about.
The minimum wage in France is $10.11 per hour (at the exchange rate right now), compared with $7.25 for the US. It is at at best 50% more than China or India (where minimum wage varies by location), and labour in France is highly unionized so workers are on more than the minimum as-is. The current Paris - Lyon HSR link in France is budgeted at $12.5 billion [1].
Your idea that a California HSR project could be done for $2-4 billion is simply unreasonable. It can't be done. You're off by an order of magnitude. Is $64 billion a lot of money? Yes. Is it too much? Probably. Can it be done for $2 billion? Absolutely not. Go look at comparable mega-projects in western Europe. Crossrail in London is about $18 billion. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was $12 billion. The Moscow-Kazan HSR railway is going to cost at least $29 billion, and that's being built with Chinese assistance.
[1] http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-mak... [2] https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-bil...
Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US.
That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal.
Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors".
Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough.
So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree.
(FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)
Considering the length and difficulty of the HSL in California, you can multiply the cost at least 3 times, so something around $30B. You add the fact that the US labor is more expensive than France (contrary to common knowledge), the fact that it's the first HSL in the US..etc.. and the $64B figure is not too crazy anymore.
Your estimate of $2-4B in 4 years is imho absolutely unrealistic.
In looking at a relief map, the terrain between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang is flat, or mostly so.
Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains. The easiest route between LA & Bakersfield requires traversing a mountain range where the pass elevation is 4000+ feet. In itself that wouldn't be bad (e.g. out east to Riverside and Palm Springs the elevation change is similar), but Grapevine is also twisty as all get out.
The Central Valley portion isn't too bad, but then you've still got to get over the southern coast range that separates the Central Valley from the Bay Area.
On top of that, you have to do it in an environment where all the easiest routes are already taken by the rich and powerful and you're building on/near/around a major earthquake fault that regularly sees large earthquakes.
We can separately debate whether we should funnel tens of billion$ to unions if that's so important to you. But if we insist on tying the two policies together, that's evidence of disastrously bad governance and a good reason to do neither.
That sounds a lot more tangible and useful than an imaginary hyper loop or putting more "self driving" cars on the road.
It would massively increased the bay area's effective commuting area too.
http://bensommer.com/blog/big-dig-big-corruption/
There's a mix of ineptitude, poor/non-planning and some shady deals. With larger projects, more waste is essentially inevitable because of the number of moving parts and limited communication paths.
"Texas Central will deploy Central Japan Railway Company’s (JRC) “N700-I Bullet” high-speed rail system based on their “Shinkansen” system that has been refined over more than 50 years of operation into the most reliable, comfortable and safe high-speed rail system in the world."
I remember when the $10 billion bond was passed in California and now over 10 years later, it seems like it was all spent on politics instead of progress.
It seems to me that California's highway problem is one of simple over crowding. Even if they built ten high speed rails between SF and LA, it would probably not make much of a difference, and I'm not even talking about the issue of needing a vehicle once you arrive at LA central terminus. Trains carry hundreds of people; let us say, a few thousand at any given time might be carried on high speed rail cars, but this is a tiny fraction of the millions of motorists clogging the highways 24x7 all up and down the coast.
I see no solution to California's clogged highways other than to siphon some of the population off to neighboring states that are vastly less populous. Perhaps this will happen naturally as technology makes it easier to disperse workers over broader geographical areas. It seems to me that huge cities are a legacy thing anyway.
Probably the next big thing will not be speeded up 18th century iron horses, but electric long range buses and self-driving cars that will safely and quickly negotiate the computerized traffic grids of the future.
California ought to spend a few billion on embedded markers and sensors in its roads that self-driving vehicles can access; probably this will be a much better investment in the long run.
That is very conservatively (2 passengers/car) 1000 cars every 5 miles with on 125ft spacing equivalent to a perfectly functioning 10 lane freeway.
More realistically (1 passenger/car) 2000 cars every 3 miles on 250ft spacing is equivalent to a 60 lane normal freeway.
For the air travel equivalent (much lower latency, but higher cost) you would need 1000 full 737-900 every hour (8000/day) compared to the total number of flights on California on a busy day, 3000.
If you build it, will they come?
(Even ignoring the TSA, 6B in ridership fees to be made up, and general messiness of American commuters.)
So now your 1300 passengers, generously, are spread out over 20 miles of freeway, instead of three.
(2600 passengers/20 miles) * (1 car / passenger) * (250 lane-ft/car) * (1 mile/5280ft) = 6.1 lanes.
Now, that was assuming one passenger per car. Add a single bus per mile-lane (seated passengers only) and this drops to four lanes. With self-driving cars and more busses, you could safely add only a single dedicated self-driving car lane and a sigle dedicated bus lane in each direction, and still have room to increase "ridership". For the price, I think that is ridiculous.
The problem with this California idea is that its proponents evoke the Bullet Train but it will never be the Bullet Train. The Japanese built that thing in 1964, which is when we should have started modernizing our own railways but didn't because GM decreed that its buses and trucks should replace railroads, which they largely succeeded. The resources for a huge project existed then; they don't exist today.
It's also worth pointing out that California is in the political dog house post-2016 elections. They backed the wrong horse, their dominant party is in the minority nationally, and they are not going to get a lot of sympathy in the Congress or from most other states who are going to be asked to foot the bill for this turkey. If the people of California want to build this thing, go right ahead; no one's stopping you. Just don't ask the rest of the country to pay for it.
There is plenty of room even without population transfers to neighboring states.
Back in the day, you could get from Berlin to Moscow and back in less than five years.
Take the savings and invest it into bonds for the high speed railway.
Most of the cost of air travel is hidden in places you don't think about, and might surprise you if you knew how much it added up to (or how much tax money -- in the US, around $300 million per year currently, and around $9m/year of it in California -- goes into subsidizing unprofitable air routes in order to keep airlines flying them, for sake of maintaining connectivity).
And I suspect that when you add it up you'll find that $64B is not much money compared to what having a well-developed air-travel network costs, and in fact this sort of argument is precisely the point people make when they argue for building out better rail service along major corridors: the cost seems steep when someone presents you with the bill up-front, but we routinely pay and have paid bills just as high or higher for things that we'd now yell and scream about if they got taken away.
The question is what kind of security theater will end up applied to high-speed rail in the U.S.
That was a joke by the way.
Air travel security in the US isn't meant to be good, it's meant to be visible