Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

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There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California that the train in China didn't have to consider. For example, the high speed train in California also has to cross notoriously rugged mountain ranges. The Diablo Range has a smattering of two-lane roads winding through it because it's so difficult to build through the gnarled hills. In the south, the Sierra Pelona and Tehachapi ranges almost caused California to be split in two separate before some rather remarkable feats in roadbuilding connected the two halves of the state. As such, there is an immense amount of planning, engineering studies, etc that need to take place before construction can start.

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.

While I agree that comparing China to California in terms of large scale engineering works is comparing apples to oranges (guess which is which). I disagree (kind of) on the following:

> 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 is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out."

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 Chuo Shinkansen is a very special kind of expensive, since something like 80% of that 268 km is going to be tunnels they have to drill. It works well to illustrate the point that you need some more nuance to compare costs.

Yes, granted. But again, the Hokuriku line was "normal", and was still 10x the cost of the Chinese line.

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.

Japanese HSR is engineered to a very high standard and has also never had a fatal accident in over 50 years of operation.

Chinese HSR had a fatal one within three years of the line opening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision

Chuo Shinkansen hasn't been completed yet so at best that's the minimum bar for what it will actually cost. Until they know for sure that they won't find any underground surprises, that estimate will continue going up.

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_...

Tunneling estimates can go both ways... in Sweden the Citytunneln project ended up under cost and under time due to the tunneling being less complicated than expected. The Japanese certainly have experience, all their mountains are swiss cheese of highways and shinkansen tracks. I'm not sure how much American studies apply here since there's a different culture of trying to underbid to win the contract there.

And yet the example of Japan still neatly invalidates the argument that California is inherently an especially challenging engineering project. Japan's rail projects are the platinum standard and every rich country should be trading war machine budgets to build similar transportation services for the overall good of their people. Instead, America is lost in a can't-do loop in large part because it has made personal individual liberty the indivisible unit of its society. With that choice come consequences, the most obvious of which is that people rarely work well together because they're forced to abide those among them who put their own interests above the group's.

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.

Switzerland tunneled through the alps for $12B. The issue isn't engineering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

That's a single 35 mile tunnel, in a comparably geographically stable area. The high speed rail project would need essentially two of those, each of which would need to cross the San Andreas fault. Additionally, a substantial amount of the remaining amount of track would need to be newly laid, because the existing rail infrastructure in the area is already near capacity, and the freight companies are hostile to any sort of improvements to passenger infrastructure. Yes, some of the issue is political, but it is an immensely challenging engineering problem to work through.

Relative to past engineering challenges, this represents a drop in the bucket. There is sufficient precedent to be able to emulate existing solutions for all portions of the track. Compare that to engineering accomplishments of the 20th century that had to be designed from scratch: the Itaipu dam, Panama canal or the US highway system.

Damn, way to demean someone's work. Just cause a similarly impressive feat of engineering was recently completed doesn't mean building twice more in a much different environment, with multiple active fault lines and through varied soil/types of rock is going to be smooth sailing.

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.

Political quagmires like this only get untangled by terrifying psychos, unfortunately.

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.

The issue isn't engineering, it's the cost and amount of labor. It can be significantly cheaper to tunnel through a mountain range in an almost straight line than to build on top of one. Once you've started digging into the mountain, you just keep digging and building the tunnel. Barring any maintenance and additional surveys, there is little interruption and the overhead costs can be amortized over the entire length. You will have to swap out drilling equipment as you hit different types and densities of rock but you can often go miles without doing so.

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 do not think US mineral rights are much of an issue. Australia has similar, or perhaps worse problems with high cost intercity high speed rail. Every time a Sydney to Melbourne fast train is investigated, cost estimates are among the highest in the world per kilometer, without the challenging geography of California.

I suspect some form of rent seeking (or likely multiple layers of rent seeking) is part of the problem.

They're not an issue if you're not building a tunnel. My point is that in Switzerland and most European countries they're not a problem even if you are. Although all infrastructure projects in western countries are subject to rent seeking and NIMBYism that drive up their costs, the degree of rent seeking depends on the state/province/country and project complexity.

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.

Yeah, infrastructure costs tons of money even when the land itself is free, unless you can get away with doing a substandard job.

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