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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

$77B is outrageous. We have to fix infrastructure costs in this country.

California would be better establishing an agency that progressively acquires, upgrades, and runs rail throughout the state as a single integrated system. We've been planning CAHSR for over a decade, and yet we still haven't electrified Caltrain, or Capitol Corridor. Incremental upgrades like that and improving curves and so on would've yielded huge benefits for the state by now. HSR would be the natural product of this this down the line when you would simply go the next step of adding a dedicated passenger high speed line connecting the Northern and Southern systems.

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Look up how much it costs to build a mile of highway. On level ground, in undeveloped areas it's still amazingly expensive.

Now try to build something through developed areas, maybe not at grade, and dealing with traffic rerouting, other infrastructure interruptions, and NIMBYism.

>maybe not at grade...

I know I'm not from Cali or anything, but it's actually quite a bit worse than that. In California I'm almost positive it would require some tunneling. And not the easy kind of tunneling that you might see in, say, western North Carolina, asheville area. No. I'm talking about the hard kind that has to keep globally significant fault lines and seismic activity in mind.

Well, there's a tendency when lambasting big infrastructure projects like this to compare one city's efforts to those done elsewhere, and if Japan can keep trains on tracks through an earthquake then you have to dig into the numbers for both and ask if they had the same problem. And if so, should hindsight from the earlier project have informed the plans for later one.

There's also a tendency in big projects to be intentionally obtuse, come up with a number that the customers (tax payers) won't riot over, and then rely on sunk cost and other fallacies to let the project expand to its real size later on.

Does California have something like the following? It could explain some of the cost.

In Washington state we have laws that require workers to be paid Prevailing Wage, the premise of which is that working in a county pays the corresponding wage for a position based on the largest city in that county. The reality is often that the wage set is significantly higher than the true market wage, which causes costs to ramp up quickly. http://www.lni.wa.gov/TradesLicensing/PrevWage/WageRates/def...

For projects with federal funding, look at the Davis Bacon Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis–Bacon_Act_of_1931

Of course California has a prevailing wage law.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/Public-Works/Prevailing-Wage.html

That won't "ramp up" costs unless the initial estimate for the costs included wrong numbers for labor. Ramp up from what? An uninformed guess?

> The reality is often that the wage set is significantly higher than the true market wage, which causes costs to ramp up quickly.

Do you have a source for this assertion?

The major cost is land acquisition and infrastructure. Land is not cheap, and the US requires fair market compensation for such acquisition. And high speed rail and other infrastructure projects of this kind tend to need land in areas that are typically more expensive (urban areas, developed areas around existing transport networks, etc.)

Elevated railways still need land purchasing for the land you're building on top of. Tunnels are way too expensive to be an alternative to surface construction even with land acquisition considered. And you need to punch through two mountain ranges, to get from SF to the Central Valley and then back to LA.

IIRC JR and TGV both expressed interest in a privately funded CAHSR, but balked at the Central Valley alignment.

Caltrain is being electrified as part of this. This is an incremental project that costs $77B.

I’m aware. It still hasn’t been electrified a decade later. But hey they have built a viaduct in the middle of the Central Valley!

The usual peninsula (Palo Alto, Atherton) NIMBYs have been actively trying to block caltrain electrification because it will ostensibly hurt trees, amongst other things: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/07/caltrain-electrificat...

$77B was after they did severe "cost cutting". It used to be $100B. And, if the past is any indicator, it would have ballooned to $120B - $150B by the time it was done. At what point do you say it's not worth it?

Personally I think it’s still worth it at that price, even if the project would’ve been better done in the way I described. It’s better than the alternative. If we don’t spend $77b on rail we’ll still have to spend it expanding freeways and airports instead. and infrastructure costs are insane across all forms of infrastructure in the US.

How much would the train need to charge each passenger to earn enough money to pay both the interest (assuming normal cost-of-money) and the principle? Would this amount be less than the cost of an airplane ride?

The alternative is spending money on rail inside SF and LA. Connecting the cities is a solution to a non-problem.

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