Expensive yes, breathtakingly no. The recent LGV Est (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Est) has a budget of 4b€ for 406km (252 miles) or about $20m/mile. London's M25 projects £6.5b for 117 miles, so urban motorways are not cheap either.
Completely urban stuff is very expensive, but usually HST is mostly out of urban systems, only getting in to land at a given stop and getting out just as soon.
French HS train lines are for passenger traffic only, they can be (and are) built adjacent to existing highways and so. And of course. They are built as whole new lines, instead of the (not only) German patchwork.
Btw. you are missing HS railways in Spain, where it is built in a similar manner to France, there are already complete operational routes, and the service seems to be very successful as well.
Not 100% correct, the postal service have a pair of trainsets they use for mail.
But yes, mostly the french HST is for people, not freight.
> Btw. you are missing HS railways in Spain, where it is built in a similar manner to France, there are already complete operational routes, and the service seems to be very successful as well.
Correct, the AVE (which is built in a similar manner to France because Alstom got the contract for the first generation "Class 100" AVE in fact the class 100 is basically a Eurostar) and the two network should be linked (so you could take HST from Madrid to Paris) by 2013.
For ~30 Billion you could build a DC to NY line that runs through Baltimore and Philadelphia.
"The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the U.S.[2] Although the project was estimated in 1985 at $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006[update]),[3] over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars)[3] had been spent in federal and state tax dollars as of 2006[update].[4] A July 17, 2008 article in The Boston Globe stated, "In all, the project will cost an additional $7 billion in interest, bringing the total to a staggering $22 billion, according to a Globe review of hundreds of pages of state documents. It will not be paid off until 2038." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
PS: It was probably not worth the cost: "The result was a 62% reduction in vehicle hours of travel on I-93, the airport tunnels, and the connection from Storrow Drive, from an average 38,200 hours per day before construction (1994–1995) to 14,800 hours per day in 2004–2005, after the project was largely complete.[28] The savings for travelers was estimated at $166 million annually in the same 2004–2005 time frame.[29] Travel times on the Central Artery northbound during the afternoon peak hour were reduced 85.6%.[30]"
It is 4x the cost of highway construction in a city.
In an urban environment, land acquisition is the most expensive part of the cost of large construction projects.
We've had one successful large construction project (T-REX) here in Denver that involved both highways and light rail. It was completed 4 years ago, on time and under budget. At that time, the light rail construction costs were about 20 megabucks/mile. The cost of construction materials have shot up since 2006 and the next large (FasTracks is almost all light rail) construction project is currently running about 50% over budget (official estimates) to 100% over budget (unofficial estimates). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_T-REX_Project_(TRanspo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTracks
Construction costs for rail go up sharply with the speed of the trains. Once one gets into "high speed rail" categories (which in the US means average speed > 90 mph between cities), grade crossings have to be replaced with overpasses, as the European experiences with HSR is that the time taken to stop a train is greater than the visible horizon for the train - so a "stuck" vehicle on the tracks will be hit as the train cannot possibly stop in time. To get some perspective on costs, rural freight lines run about 1 megabuck/mile, with passenger lines running about 2x that. Paving interstate highways runs about 1 megabuck/mile/lane.
Disclaimer: I ran for election in 2008 for an office related to this.
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I have to disagree - your postscript only looks at one aspect of the CA/T, there were other effects as well. For starters, the old elevated artery was way past it's useful life, and a replacement was absolutely needed. Once you realize that the elevated artery needed replacement, your options start to narrow very quickly: replacing the old elevated artery with a new elevated artery would have been more disruptive than the tunnel construction, and building a new highway in a separate location was feasible since there was no where else to put it. Digging an expensive tunnel was the least bad of a bunch of bad options, but frankly the city was paying for a bunch of stupid decisions that were made in the 1950's.
As for the positive effects of the Big Dig, it reconnected Boston with the water front, it freed up recreational land, it had a positive effect on Boston's air quality, and it significantly improved automobile traffic flow by separating out local traffic (which runs on the surface) from thru traffic (which runs in the tunnel) where before they all moved on the elevated highway which worsened congestion. Before the CA/T opened, this route:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=woburn%20to%20braintree%20ma
would take a minimum of 90 minutes; double that estimate if you were traveling during peak hour. Triple it if there was an accident in the area. Right now, it's a 20 minute drive in non-peak hours, and well under an hour during peak times. Not bad.
That said, it would have been nice to have had more expanded transit to go along with the Big Dig. The Silver Line and the Old Colony lines (which were required as mitigation for the Big Dig) was a good start, but we could have done better.
(ftr, I worked on the Big Dig as a consultant from 1998-2001. I've also worked on several dozen domestic passenger rail programs, include T-Rex, BART Silicon Valley Extension, and the Acela mentioned in this discussion)
Other options included reducing the number of cars large toll to get into the city which would for high quality and public bus system.
2% of 22billion is 440 million / year that pays for one hell of a public bus system. Heck, spend 22billion on an above ground mono rail network and you could build one hell of a system (~500 - 1500km). Most Boston traffic is just moving people from point A to B so public transportation is a real option. 13% of all commuting takes place by foot as it is, so even elevated bike paths could have significantly improved things.
The presumption is that the artery is only being used by Boston residents. It's used by Boston residents to get out the city, by other MA residents to get into the city, and by non-MA residents to get in & thru the city, as well as delivering goods received in Boston ports to points north, south and west. Freight rail can (and does, vis the huge CSX yard in Allston) move a huge portion of that load, but you're still going to have trucks for the last-mile delivery to the industrialized areas in EMass. (and where has it made congestion worse?)
But even if you want to put everyone on buses, those buses still have to drive on something - the old artery couldn't be that something because it was falling apart, and alternatives have the same problem as an alternative highway system does. IOW. you're still talking about a tunnel system.