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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> Newsom said the state will complete a 110-mile (177 km) high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield.

Wow. Merced to Bakersfield. I mean, why not light the money on fire instead?

The point of something like this is to essentially warp the topology regarding what constitutes "nearby" between smaller cities and large metro areas. If you can do that, you've massively changed how both labor costs, real estate prices, and even tourism/recreation work.

OK, "light the money on fire" is probably overstating the case -- there's probably some multiplying effect in making the central valley more connected, and maybe it's also the easiest segment to actually get built. But the magnitude of positive effects is also probably an order down.

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Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties have a combined population of ~2.9 million. For the $77 billion price tag, you could buy a Toyota Prius for every single resident of the entire area served by HSR (including children), and still have ~$8 billion left over.

8 billion is probably not enough to pay for all the added parking needed, cover higher accidents rates, more roads, etc.

How much would it cost to increase highway capacity to support all the traffic?

This is the wrong comparison. They are paring down to the Merced-Bakersfield line to avoid spending the full $77B.

> Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties have a combined population of ~2.9 million. For the $77 billion price tag, you could buy a Toyota Prius for every single resident of the entire area served by HSR (including children), and still have ~$8 billion left over.

The $77 billion price tag was the most recent year-of-expenditure estimate (which kept going up,in no small part because the year of expenditures kept getting later) for the whole originally planned system (well, the SF to LA part, not including the Sacramento and San Diego connections that were to be done afterwards.)

The small segment Newsome refers to isn't anywhere close to $77B.

Good catch, I misread. I would be interested to see the projected cost of the de-scoped project.

Operating & maintenance costs would also be critical to determining whether this actually makes any sense.

Another way of thinking about it is, if we assume roughly 1M households with an average land price of $100K and the HSR increases that to 1.2M households with an average land price of $150K, then you've created $80B worth of value from scratch and justified the cost. That doesn't happen via buying everyone a Prius.

> For the $77 billion price tag, you could buy a Toyota Prius for every single resident of the entire area served by HSR (including children), and still have ~$8 billion left over.

How much do the roadways cost?

I mean, the Prius isn't an all-terrain vehicle. You need nice roads to run, and freeways to go somewhere fast. Without them you can't go anywhere in your Prius.

So how much do the roads you need to exist to drive around in those Prius cost?

"there's probably some multiplying effect in making the central valley more connected"

There is no law of the universe that says a multiplier must be greater than 1.0. It is entirely possible, and indeed, easy to build a piece of infrastructure that will never pay back.

> There is no law of the universe that says a multiplier must be greater than 1.0. It is entirely possible, and indeed, easy to build a piece of infrastructure that will never pay back.

Just because there’s no law of the universe that prevents you from throwing money down the drain, doesn’t mean you ought to do so.

That's a non-sequitor to my post.

Well, it's at least better than a multiplier of "0", which would be the result of "lighting money on fire".

Even after such infrastructure is built, a > 0 multiplier assumes the economic impact of the project would be greater than the lifetime costs of upkeep and maintenance of the infrastructure (and current and future taxes to support such infrastructure + interest on debt payments used in its initial construction). And excludes the opportunity cost of allocating that future capital to other projects. Ex. NY still throws money into the canal project, even though the canal has long since been economically unviable (but politically it is still viable and so it remains...).

Lighting $10 on fire is a lot better than spending $100 and getting $50 back. You take a bigger net loss with the latter move.

> Lighting $10 on fire is a lot better than spending $100 and getting $50 back.

That's not how the math works with infrastructure projects.

With infrastructure projects there is the upfront cost and immediate returns, but there are also all other externalities and savings from shift in consumer demand and, for example, urban renewal and requalification.

For instance, how much would you save if you cut on the number of cars entering a urban center? This means less pollution, less traffic, less commutting times, etc etc etc

Does that have no value?

There's no guarantee the multiplier has to be positive, either. And that's before you consider opportunity cost.

Why not complete it to San Jose at least. People headed to SF could catch a train into the city.

But the real advantage would be home buyers. Instead of saving up for a 800 sq foot house without a garage that cost $1.2 million they could ride the train a half hour where the same house would cost what $400K in Fresno?

That $400k house will immediately go up in price. You see this in Chinese cities.

New train station? Congrats. Now you're finding a new place because your landlord is selling.

Right now critics will label it the ghost train to nowhere. At least if it connected to San Jose it would prove somewhat useful.

Perhaps its better to never buy the rolling stock or hire staff? Otherwise there will be stories in the press about trains running where the staff outnumbers the passengers?

Alternatively now someone in Fresno who makes $25/hour doing something blue collar has access to a market where that same job may pay $40/hour. There is a huge amount of pent up demand for blue collar jobs in the Bay area that is being stifled due to the lack of appropriate living arrangements for people making non-six-figure incomes (especially for families).

> New train station? Congrats. Now you're finding a new place because your landlord is selling.

And that's ok because you can get onto that same train and look for affordable appartments anywhere in the train's catchment area, which now is far larger than when you first started looking for a rental.

They would have to build new track across the California Coast Ranges[1]. Mountain crossings are expensive and difficult, and mountain crossings that need to maintain the curve and grade requirements of HSR are even more so. The crazy cost overruns for mountain crossings (this one and the Tehachapi Pass) are what killed the project.

This new de-scoped HSR project is basically "the part of HSR phase 1 that doesn't require us to cross any mountains". In California that's obviously very limiting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coast_Ranges

  ride the train a half hour

For Fresno to SJ, that would mean averaging 300mph. There was no planned segment that would have made anything near that speed.

Someone PLEASE explain to me WHY the governing bodies on this project decided to start with Merced -> Bakersfield.

I'm seriously dumfounded. I have lost a ton of faith, what little I already had, with this government.

Does ANYONE have a reasonable explanation?

Who owned the land that was purchased or acquired for the project? Which campaigns do they donate to? Are the areas of concern toxic waste dumps, old gas stations, or contain old pipelines that would be expensive to remediate?

Yes, these are the questions to ask, related [0].

In the article they mention the number of parcels needed grew by 500, did owners subdivide in order to increase returns?

[0] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html

excellent, thanks. I was not cynical enough, I see

That region is flat and has few physical obstacles to a rail line (like mountains, major inclines, major declines etc)

Getting a rail line between a major city (LA/San Jose/San Diego/SF etc) requires going through pretty serious mountain ranges. There is already rail line between them in their own geographical pockets (LA-San Diego, SF-San Jose-Oakland)

The number of physical obstacles is less important than the number of legal obstacles.

If it has to go somewhere, everyone wants the high speed rail to go through someone else's house, preferably a long ways away.

For land rights issues it is easy enough to create stations that are sufficiently distanced from the city centers but close enough to tap into local Bus/Uber-ish/car rental options. Most Californian metropolis' have an area distanced enough but accessible where land is still relatively cheap, the exception being LA which has sprawled into Orange County and completely enveloped other regions.

However going through mountain in an environmentally conscious way gets radically expensive in very short order. Additionally this style of construction tends to have its own legally contentious issues. (Dam construction for water management being comparative)

I disbelieve in your "easy enough". Certainly it is a problem that the plans for high speed rail never solved.

You already pointed out that Los Angeles was a problem. For San Francisco the route chosen ran into problems 30 miles south of San Jose, where they were planning to use existing rails (at slower speeds). And once you're in San Jose, you still have a long ways to go to get into San Francisco.

See https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... for verification.

They could build a train in central Nevada too. That’s “easy” — doesn’t mean it actually useful. I’d be happy with a Maglev replacing Caltrain to get from Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes. More people could use that than a train to Bakersfield.

  Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes

That would be awesome for the 3 people looking to go specifically from Mountain View to SFO at a given time... but not so awesome for the 300 people wanting to get on or off somewhere in between.

Probably easiest to get right of way and eminent domain through, and environment studies and yadda yadda yadda.

In a word, NIMBYs.

In many places in California, the people already living their have both the inclination and the means to tie up the construction project in court until 2145. They don't want the construction, or they don't want the influx of commuters, or whatever. To a first approximation, the places that will accept the project happening are the ones looking for a train that goes somewhere else.

It's probably the cheapest and easiest section to build, so they could at least get the easiest part up and running the quickest... find flaws, make changes where it's cheap before starting on the very expensive sections.

It's also probably the section of the track where the train can go the fastest, which would give them impressive numbers that might help keep the project rolling.

Because that is the part of the track that doesn't have significant geographic/tunneling requirements, nor does it require seizure via eminent domain of significant amounts of urban property to cut new tracks through LA/SF, nor does it require building hundreds of overpasses/tunnels through cities to eliminate level crossings. You can't run a train at 210 mph through a city at the level of the road. There's too much risk of collision. Instead you have to tunnel under or bridge over every single road. All of those things take time to design, negotiate, fight legal challenges, etc. The idea was to start building in the empty central valley now, while they work through non-building work in the urban and mountainous areas.

This project is already grade-separated in the sense that there are no level crossings: even though they're in the "empty" central valley, there's still hundreds of grade-separated crossings that need to be built, not just through the cities, but also rural roads as well.

So while it's cheaper out in the Valley than in LA or SF, it's still significantly more expensive than a non-grade-separated, say, ~75-100 mph-rated track would entail, the sorts of which are common in Europe and do a decent job moving people around cities spaced at such distances.

I think your comment serves as great proof why building large public works projects in the US is now impossible.

Rationally speaking, you're 100% right. Those are all true impediments. From a realpolitik perspective, it makes total sense to start building where it's not controversial so that parallel non-engineering work can be undertaken. There are rational reasons why labor is so expensive, why planning committees take so much time, and why things take as much time as they do.

But this isn't how large public works can get done quickly. Any sufficiently large project is less technocratic and more political. Allowing large projects to be governed entirely technocratically has shown that timelines stretch so far out as to render the project impossibly expensive to finance and too limited in scope by project's end. There needs to be a single authority (with checks on it...) that can get things done, governed by a politician who can ensure that the authority's efforts are directed to popular projects. An agency with a planning body that makes community-approved blueprints ready before funding comes in, and with the authority to exercise eminent domain on approved plans and start work quickly and immediately.

I suspect the EPA paperwork, which can't be bypassed at the State level, will kill your single authority proposal dead in its tracks, so to speak.

Because Moonbeam's buddies could buy 1000's of acres of worthless desert for pennies and then sell it back for a nice little profit[1].

[1] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html

For those who don't know (I didn't) - Governor Moonbeam is a nickname for Jerry Brown, former governor of California:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...

How Jerry Brown Became ‘Governor Moonbeam’? [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...

For those without the time to read - there is literally nothing in this article suggesting or alleging any corrupt dealings on the part of former governor Jerry Brown or anyone else. It is about the difficulty and expensive of purchasing all the parcels needed for the right of way, but, again, literally nothing in the article that ties into the parent comments assertion

> Because Moonbeam's buddies could buy 1000's of acres of worthless desert for pennies and then sell it back for a nice little profit

IIRC, the valley-first alignment was part of the application for federal funds made when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, so it's unlikely it was motivated by concern for friends of the (at the time) once-and-future Governor Brown.

I honestly think they may have felt that if they built part of it, it would be easier to convince everyone to finish it.

There might be some validity to this thinking:

(1) If you build part of it and show that it works, it makes it more of a concrete reality. Instead of asking people in urban areas to give up precious right-of-way to build something hypothetical, you're asking them to give it up to build something they can see.

(2) You're also asking the urban areas to wait less time between when they give up the right-of-way and when the system is built. By pushing the rural areas to the earlier part of the schedule, you can move the urban areas to the later part of it.

(3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it.

(4) While the sunk cost fallacy isn't rational, "we've spent this much and we're half done already" will still convince some people.

I'm not saying that overall this was a good strategy, but I can see some advantages. In any case, it seems like the main issue was massive cost overruns.

> (3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it.

Hah, do you live in the Bay Area? With the amount of NIMBYism, I don't think peer pressure would help with getting it built to connect the SF/SJ connections. It's why we do not have BART going for a full loop around the bay. Santa Clara county voted it down.

Oh yeah, I used to live there and am well acquainted with the NIMBY craziness. I was approaching it more from the other side, which is that you need every weapon you can possibly get that will help twist their arms.

  Santa Clara county voted it down.

San Mateo and Marin counties already weren't participating anyway, so that circumnavigation dream was DOA.

> Someone PLEASE explain to me WHY the governing bodies on this project decided to start with Merced -> Bakersfield.

A couple reasons; pragmatically, there were issues toward both termini, but an initial route in the Valley would be useful to connect to either terminus and start getting real benefit (the valley stretch alone is of very little, though non-zero, utility)

Politically, the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans, and putting the initial construction and operation, with associated jobs and benefits in one of the more Republican areas of the route was a mechanism to mitigate that.

  the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans

Republicans have had no power in the CA legislature for many years. Democrats had not only control of all committees but also constant supermajorities for much of Brown's term (except for the timeframe where three Democrats were ousted in the same term for criminal activity).

Except for single-vote majorities in 1969-70 and of just the Assembly for just part of 1995-6, the Republicans haven't had a majority in either house in the past sixty years.

> Republicans have had no power in the CA legislature for many years.

They had, and used as a lever on every other issue, a veto pretty much forever on the budget up until Prop 25 in 2010 dropped the 2/3 supermajority for passing the budget. (Despite the current situation, 2/3 supermajority for either party in either house, much less both houses, of the legislature is historically extremely uncommon.)

They also had and used a similar power with regard to tax realignment since there was (and remains) a similar requirement for tax increases, but that's been a weaker power both since Dems went around them to the voters on tax increases in 2012 and because the Dems have actually had 2/3 supermajorities in the legislature at some times recently, including right now.

But, both of those powers were in full bloom when the funding application to the federal government (which needed budgeted state funds) was made (by, it must be noted, a Republican administration in Sacramento, with whom legislative Republicans had more pull than their hard power in the legislature would suggest, though given the quirkiness of the Schwarzenegger adminstration, probably less than would be typical of a Republican governor.)

That is the part that is already under construction. The money cannot be lit on fire because it has already been spent.

nono, the money is already on fire, and they have to give it to somebody.

Not $3.5B of it. It sounds like the governor really would like to light it on fire rather than give it back:

> “Abandoning high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it,” he said. “And by the way, I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump.”

If you'll end up with a product that can't get sufficient fare return to cover all operating costs (let alone debt service), you're better off shutting it down in place, like Brazil's Transnordestina.

I don't think New York City's MTA even covers its operating costs out of revenue.

Untrue.

Transportation systems rarely deliver the bulk of their benefits to direct users. The indirect effects of increased activity, commerce, industry, trade, opportunities, etc., accrue to the entire region, and not just the users of the system.

This is why, historically, transit projects have tended to be heavily funded by indirect beneficiaries. In cities: merchants and employers, both of whom benefit by increased customer and worker populations.

The case of Denver, Colorado shows the impacts improved transport can have on an otherwise remote city. Prior to the construction a connecting line to the Transcontinental Railroad, the city had fewer than 5,000 residents. A decade later, that rose to over 35,000. Mind, at the time, this was the best, cheapest, and fastest transport option available, but improved mobility can have tremendous impacts on growth and activity patterns.

https://www.uncovercolorado.com/historic-colorado-railroad-d...

Similarly, automobile drivers pay only a relatively small fraction of the direct costs of highway transport, with much else provided through general funds, property taxes (for state/local construction), income, and fuel taxes (the latter at least an indirect contribution).

Imposing a 100% farebox recovery obligation is highly flawed policy.

I live close to LA but if I have to drive to Bakersfield for the train I may just as well keep driving. This makes no sense and I bet in typical US fashion they will stop there and people will say that public transit doesn't work.

You can't just build a train in the middle of nowhere. You need some level of connection to population centers.

I think the idea is reading more into it that they complete this bit first and the expand to SF and LA when they can figure out funding for it.

A lot of stuff is already built on this route, many viaducts and bridges etc.

Yea, once you get one segment build and demand starts coming in, it will be easier to push for completing it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read some time ago that there is no plausible path to send a rail into SF.

It runs up the existing Caltrain route to King St. and later to the new inconceivably badly conceived bus station they built downtown via a curvy slow tunnel under the streets.

Yeah. Caltrain electrification is desperately needed regardless of HSR and I hope it goes ahead even with this. The current timetable is not frequent enough (I believe they were targeting 6 trains an hour each way with the electrification) and is very slow.

A desperate attempt to save the real estate value of the existing "downtown" from the general move of "downtown" southward to SOMA and Mission Bay.

BART exists. This isn't different.

Put a couple tunnels under the bay, one just north of the bay bridge and the other at SFO. Connect them, staying safely east of the San Andreas fault. Try to route the tunnel to allow stopping at at least one of the other airports in the area.

No, it isn't cheap.

Maybe they should figure out the whole thing before spending billions.

The simple truth is, heavy rail does not work. There is no where outside of Japan with its very high population density that it does work. Europe you say? On average a European resident will use urban and intercity trains only five hundred miles more than Americans will. It is romanticism, ribbon cutting, and not realism, that keeps this illusion that trains will solve transportation issues alive. In Europe driving and flying are growing far faster than trains except in limited parts of Britain and Switzerland

so with regards to American implementation, even the urban light rail systems are all follies outside of NYC simply because they are not where the people want to be but instead where planners want people to be. then to top it off they cannot be volume adjusted because you cannot just reroute a train. buses are by far more economical and flexible, they just aren't sexy for ribbon cutting whores that politicians are.

on a side note, one hole in California's budget is the same in every high tax state. The law change to the Federal Tax system to have the rich pay more of their share by not letting them deduct as much from the Federal Taxes. This did two things, for the rich to pay more of their money in taxes and keep high tax states from off loading their taxes indirectly to lower tax states.

California has a homeless problem that is incredible and needs to get its prison population numbers down. spending the money to help the poor is a far better solution than funding a rich man's train.

> then to top it off they cannot be volume adjusted because you cannot just reroute a train

That is not in any way how you plan trains. You don't build them for variable load. The baseline load becomes what the trains can supply, and the economy grows around that. I'd love to know where there is underutilized commuter rail in the US for cheap I can take advantage of by moving to for an unnaturally low cost of living - because that is what legitimately misplanned trains do. They self-correct by creating a cheap transit hub to pull people and business towards.

Progressive and developing economies the world over have reaped the benefits of high speed rail a thousand times over now. Saying "heavy rail doesn't work" is ignorant of how almost every first world nation and many others have a comprehensive commuter rail network outside the US and Canada.

> California has a homeless problem that is incredible and needs to get its prison population numbers down. spending the money to help the poor is a far better solution than funding a rich man's train.

State investment isn't a zero sum game, or one where you have a fixed absolute finite amount of money and can only allocate one central budget one way. There are absolutely limits to how much you can tax your economy, even selectively, without having negative consequences on your economy - and there are definitely plenty of arguments California is already past that threshold. But its way too simplistic to be in a discussion about state budgets and say "spend this money on X instead".

It’s just enough activity to get to keep the allocated federal money.

There's a wise saying--"never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing."

California high speed rail is a great idea if they commit to it and deliver the full product. If that would be prohibitively expensive, take a step back, figure out why this country can't build things anymore, and address the blockers you can while swallowing the cost of the blockers you can't address. Either that, or give up. There's no damn point building a multi-billion-dollar monument to the decline of American civilization.

Lighting the small amount of money already spent on fire is far preferable to spending the hundred billion or so that would be needed to complete hsr.

Build the central piece. If that succeeds, later expand to SF-LA?

How can it possibly succeed though? It looks for all the world like a boondoggle.

It looks like someone tried to make an actually useful SF<->LA route and couldn't figure out how to make it work near the city. While it would no doubt be way more expensive and difficult, getting this into the big cities would at least give it a reason to exist.

Where is the money already collected via taxes going to?

> Wow. Merced to Bakersfield. I mean, why not light the money on fire instead?

Newsom explains in a quote given in the article: not spending the money means "giving it back to Donald Trump."

But it's not Donald Trump's money, it's the federal government's money, which means it's OUR money...

So use the money to build and LA-SF system. Merced to Bakersfield is insanity.

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