U.S. cancels $929M in California high speed rail funds after appeal rejected
reuters.com
reuters.com
What we need is a willingness to do major, expensive projects (high-speed rail is just not going to cheap in California, or anywhere), and ruthless commitment to making them happen efficiently. When a project like this fails in this way, all it does it play into the hands bad-faith actors who will never support major infrastructure projects. Then, people who are acting in good faith oppose them too, because there aren't enough counter-examples of successful projects.
/sarcasm/
FWIW, Trump proposed $1.5T in funding over a decade [1], but as of yet Congress still hasn't taken that up.
2019 State of the Union:
"Both parties should be able to unite for a great rebuilding of America’s crumbling infrastructure. I know that Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill, and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/trump-to-call-for-a-great-re...
They shouldn't.
If it's important to CA, they'll fund it and get it done.
This project was $10B over projections before we even finished voting to fund it a decade ago, let alone now.
I want an actual high speed train from the new downtown SF transit station to Union Station LA in two hours or less.
I would like a high speed train that won't be obsolete the day it is opened.
What was being (haltingly) built was a ridiculous route-by-committee with time consuming (and sprawl inducing) stops in whichever districts had an assertive rep willing to sacrifice a project of national importance for their little town.
All you needed to know about CA HSR could be learned by seeing it was not built on the I-5 corridor. Fresno and Palmdale should be spurs - not route benders.
The systems include (counter clockwise from east bay):
Bart, Amtrak Capitol Corridor, ACE, VTA, the old valley <-> Santa Cruz line, Caltrain, and Muni.
The only part missing commuter rail stops is Marin county, and they have a nice ferry to SF (they intentionally blocked BART).
Sure, it could be faster (and quieter, and more comfortable) but it's not slow.
If they started that dam today, they'd spend 20 years and twice the money the dam actually cost just on lawsuits and papers and have nothing to show for it decades later.
That's a lot of deaths.
For comparison, only 147 total coalition deaths as a result of combat with the enemy [2] in the 1991 Gulf war, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, the liberation of Kuwait and the overrunning of most of Iraq.
And that's saying nothing of the comp, overtime and other externalized issues.
Of course, the failure of rail is pretty bad and we need to learn, but we can't hold the Hoover Dam up as 'the example'.
[1] https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fatal.html
If we built this project at the cost of 100 lives, but got it done on time and on budget, and as a result we save 500+ traffic fatalities, and 500+ early deaths as a result of pollution, while improving the quality of life of all of California… I would call it a resounding success. And yet, most people would just focus on the 100 lives paid upfront and call it an unmitigated disaster.
What dollar value should we put on your life? $10,000? $200,000? $2,000,000? Should we encourage your boss telling you to do something stupidly dangerous, because the project's behind, and he doesn't want to pay your team overtime?
1000 people died building the Trans-Canada railway. In the early 20th century, 70 people died building a minor tunnel, used to construct a tiny hydro power plant in the greater Vancouver area. Any pre-WWII infrastructure project was built atop a literal graveyard.
And people do die all the time in construction etc. - there are already risks, but they are low.
There are zero construction projects going on planet earth today that need to increase the level of risk such that 100 people die trying.
Not even China is putting people down in those numbers for any reason.
It's basically a non-starter - there's no reason for anyone to die these days building pretty much anything, other than in the most precarious situations.
The points is, even if people die building a big project, it's quite possible that that's for the greater good and more people are saved as a result.
A bunch of people died in the Apollo missions. Does that mean we should have never attempted it and let the Russians figure out how to get to the moon? There's no way it would fly politically these days.
How many people die on Chinese infastructure projects?
1. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/06/13/china.t... 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age...
Ironically, the son of the first construction worker to die on the job was the last to die on the job.
If we doubled the population, it would be pretty OK, and we have the job market for it, but that would require constructing housing, and California doesn't do that.
Then again the fact that there isn't much need for this train due to the low potential ridership makes it so the heart of the state was never in the project, and no one was really committed to it.
Meanwhile in the US we spend nearly 700 billion annually on the military (roughly 75% of the Japanese government's entire budget). Get what you pay for (in our case, missiles).
That’s an ironic comparison. Japan is not allowed to have a military, just a small self defense force. Japan is okay with that state of affairs because the United States has tacitly committed to defend Japan from its belligerent neighbors. Your example illustrates in the same breath why US military spending is so high while it is so low in other countries.
Also, the new bullet train lines mostly are built with private money so there is that too.
That's kind of my point. Japan just has a small self defense force and has instead focused its energies on education and infrastructure. Whether that is by choice or not is irrelevant.
On the other hand, it was definitely a choice by the US to spend our money on military involvement in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria instead of using it on schools and trains.
> Japan is okay with that state of affairs because the United States has tacitly committed to defend Japan from its belligerent neighbors. Your example illustrates in the same breath why US military spending is so high while it is so low in other countries.
Yes, I understand the reason the US has such a big military budget is because we insist on stationing submarines, aircraft carriers, and ground troops in every corner of the world to "keep the peace."
My argument is that doing so is a catastrophic misallocation of resources.
> Also, the new bullet train lines mostly are built with private money so there is that too.
The Shinkansen was mostly built by private companies, mainly JNR, but public money played a huge role. JNR racked up nearly $300 billion in today's USD of debt, and that debt was taken on by the government when JNR was disbanded and reorganized (again by the government). I don't think the railways in Japan can be thought of as being completely privatized or completely nationalized. Even when officially managed by private companies, the government continues to play a role in planning and funding.
Correction - 77B for a train that will be relatively slow when it was scheduled to be unveiled in 2033.
My generation never took Amtrak seriously because it was relatively slower than other transportation modes. In 2033 and beyond, those generations will ignore CA HSR for the same reasons.
SF -> LA in <= 120 minutes or GTFO.
You could buy a lot of self-driving vehicles for that price.
Of course, you could just build a restricted access freeway, instrument the heck out of it to help the self driving cars, and put the self driving cars on it as a kind of track...
Edit: It is 1275 km from SF to LA om I-5. If we put these cars, evenly spaced on that road, both ways, they are about 2.2 m apart from back bumper to back bumper.
With the Californian project, the cost is nearly 80M$, and it's only the budgeted cost, not the cost after all the inevitable delay and unforeseen spending.
As someone living in France, I've no idea as to what can explain this x2 or even x4 in cost. Is there a rational explanation?
But Spain has also areas that are even worse than Switzerland, where high speed train is being deployed. And Spanish companies have built the Mecca - Medina line, which is a little engineering marvel.
The CA project had incredibly modest ambitions: a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds, using completely standard technology. This isn't a hyperloop, a maglev, a hyperfast train, a dense network, or anything else that can fail because of technology risk. It's purely a failure at execution, pretty much entirely because of politics and corruption. In the US, the process for infrastructure construction is entirely broken, and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development.
This is distinctly a CA problem.
> The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the US, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $14.6 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006.
At least Boston is finally digging that green line extension!
(Now if they could only tear down City Hall and do something useful with the space.)
Going full killdozer on beacon hill with 0 advance notice given would probably be more beneficial to the state and society in general.
Boston traffic is not even close to being as bad as it was during the mid-to-late '90s. Back in those days, Medford to Dorchester would a 60-to-90 minute odyssey between 6am to 10am and 3pm too 7pm. Yeah, there is stop-and-go traffic at peak hours, but back in the day, it was often faster to take 128 to travel between the northern and southern burbs, right now it's just normal rush hour traffic.
All the "hurr durr the old one was ugly" crap is totally overblown though. If it was me making the decisions they would have built more decks.
90 is terrible but that has more to do with the fact that Worcester is a much cheaper place to live.
"In the United States, the cost of Georgia Power’s newest twin Vogtle reactors may top initial estimates of $14 billion and reach $21 billion, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission testimony. Of course, the first two Vogtle Units begun in 1971 took 18 years to build (a decade over schedule) at a final price of $9 billion — ten times the original price tag. BloombergBusiness wrote last fall, “Even as sympathetic an observer as John Rowe [former chair of the U.S.’s largest nuclear utility] warns that the new units at Vogtle will be uneconomical when — or if — they’re completed.”
https://thinkprogress.org/the-nuclear-industry-prices-itself...
(the NIMBY lawsuits part is separate from this)
That failure mode definitely exists in other states.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central...
I mean given all the adversity and polarization in current US culture we still haven't escalated to the armed siege of government buildings, yet those guys have already done that twice this decade over fucking cows
Also, the HSR as planned goes through 90% Republican territory, and it has been the local Republicans and their former counterparts in the CA legislature that fucked things up.
California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003 and from 2011 until now. So in the last 8 years of Democrat control, the train problems are somehow Republican? That’s nonsense. The rail project wasn’t even approved by voters until 2008 and construction didn’t begin until 2015 — years after Republicans had any say in state government. The project has been in an almost continual “environmental review” — certainly not at the behest of the Republicans. The rail debacle isn’t Republican: they haven’t had any power since 2011. And Gavin Newsome was the one that postponed everything except the Merced-Bakersfield line. If Republicans ran the state, taxpayers would be billions richer and we have exactly the same amount of train we have now.
No, it didn't, by any reasonable definition: Democrats, without Republican votes, couldn't pass the required annual budget, so they did not have complete control, from 1999-2003.
> And Gavin Newsome was the one that postponed everything except the Merced-Bakersfield line
Newsome didn't postpone a thing; he restated the status quo that the things for which funding had not been secured for construction would not be constructed until funding was secured as if it were a new development.
> If Republicans ran the state, taxpayers would be billions richer
No, they wouldn't, since the construction spending was largely federal and bond funding (so money not from current taxpayers), and much of it has gone to people who happen to be state taxpayers.
Taxpayers would be poorer, not richer.
California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003
The LA-Vegas line has never been built because the private companies that would build it modeled their financials on the assumption of getting billions of dollars of free land or easements so they could build it and tax breaks on their first few decades of operation. Without the free government incentives worth billions...incidentally, roughly the same value as it would cost the government to build an HSR to Vegas...the private companies have gotten nowhere.
Texas' freeways are just as bad as California's freeways. The difference is that our freeways are used about 10x-100x as much, so there's a reason that our freeways have potholes for a few days. What's Texas' excuse? They ran out of budget to fix their basic infrastructure again?
CA has not had total Democratic control during the time periods listed. The Republicans maintained enough seats in the Legislature to block tax and spending bills, effectively a legislative veto. They only lost those seats in the most recent elections.
If Republicans ran the state, then CA would be deeply in the red like it was the last time a Republican governor ran the state...namely, Pete Wilson, who did such a bad job that he effectively turned CA from a a red-leaning state into one of the bluest states in the nation. (Schwarzenegger was governor during the recession so that won't be held against him, but notably CA was also in the red during most of his tenure, including the time when Republicans actually had enough Legislative seats to enact legislation and not just veto Democratic bills.)
Republicans were almost always in the minority in both houses (often, Democrat supermajorities), and you call that a "dual-party" state?
So yes, until recently CA was a dual-party state in the way that actually matters.
Politically, that is.
Places where it doesn't is through Pacheco Pass and the San Gabriels. Pacheco Pass already has a aqueduct tunnel. Boring a tunnel through that just costs money.
San Gabriels are trickier, really depends engineering vs money vs how fast do you want to go vs surface disruption.
The ECA's new report [2] shows that it suffers from cost over runs, little inter connectivity, and has issues achieving the speeds promised. Can it be fixed, not without a lot of time, money, and cooperation between competing groups. That last is probably impossible.
Yet we must understand that is the smaller areas needed to travel it is far more suited to Europe than America except in very narrow corridors and even that is stretching the truth. Where it works is where the population numbers are large enough to support and other travel options are highly limited. However in the US and EU it servers mostly well to do people. higher middle income and up and rarely if ever the lower ends of society who don't have the means for travel. It is a political toy that results in lots of press opportunities and largess spread among supporters, both in the US and EU
[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...
[2] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/SR18_19/SR_HIGH...
California HSR, by contrast, would have been a CO2 disaster: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... It would need to have 10 million riders per year to break even in terms of CO2 footprint. The SF-LA flight traffic is just a third of that.
Currently those ultra fine particles are not regulated at all, so I guess yes we are in legal limits until regulation catches up with the science.
The SF to LA flight path is also only 20k passengers short of being the most trafficked air route out of any U.S. airport.
There is 7 and 20 million people living in NorCal/SoCal, that’s much more than people living between Paris and Bordeaux on that line.
We know all that because we have inter-city rail on the east coast. It’s an alternative to air travel, not driving. Normal people can’t afford $500+ round trip for a family trip from NYC to DC.
"In short, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the California line will eventually offset the environmental damage caused by its construction, and then some."
The damage from air traffic isn't just from the greenhouse gasses they emit, but from the ultrafine particulate pollution that is currently unregulated. This pollution is too fine to be blocked by your lungs, enters your bloodstream, and are shown to be more toxic than large particulate in animal and cellular models.
https://news.usc.edu/63466/new-concerns-raised-about-air-pol...
The umbrella of the CA HSR project has involved, and continues to involve, considerable spending on local transit improvements for exactly that reason.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/10/from-250-million-to-6...
Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes, minimal usable electrical infrastructure, sensitive environments to protect, and seismic fault lines right where you would want to tunnel. The insane cost and complexity of the Pacheco and Tehachapi passes is the main thing that stopped the project in its tracks.
Granted, the Swiss and the Japanese have pulled off significant projects in similarly challenging terrain, but that's a testament to their competence, rather than evidence that the terrain isn't challenging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountain_railways_in_S...
Where on earth did you get that idea? Japan and Germany have long been known to have the world's best engineers. The only engineering that Americans have really proven themselves to be the best in the world at is software. There were times in the distant past when they were best in the world at other things, but those times are gone. There might be an exception for military technology though; no one builds aircraft carriers like the USA still.
Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?
As for when America stopped doing "hard" things, I think it was somewhere in the 80s or 90s maybe, though from what I can tell, the really big turning point in this country was 2001, but things were falling apart before that too.
Intel, nVidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple, Micron, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, LAM Research, Analog Devices - the US has the best hardware and semi engineers of any nation. What do Germany and Japan have that competes that small list?
There is no other country that could enable SpaceX, NASA, Blue Origin, et al. to exist.
There's a reason why it was Tesla of California that pushed the auto industry forward, not Germany or Japan.
Nearly every piece of modern technology that you use today was invented by US engineers. There are few exceptions. From the lithium battery, to modern solar cells, to the smartphone or cellphone, to the microprocessor, to the LED & LCD, to the router, computer networks, and everything inbetween. The modern laser, fiber optics, PDAs, spreadsheets, the relational database, a dozen major programming languages, ethernet, ram/dram, the personal computer, streaming media, DPS, the cable modem, the hard drive, SSD, the GUI, the mouse, email, 3D graphics, the digital camera, the optical disc, and dozens of other critical elements the modern world has relied upon.
The modern world hardly exists save for what US engineers invented.
Most of the tech related to the satellite industry - including GPS - was invented by US engineers, by a fat margin. There's a reason it's SpaceX that is going to lead in global Internet access via satellite, not a company from Russia, China, Germany or Japan. The US has by far the best satellite tech and engineers.
The entire AI industry has been trailblazed by US engineers.
The US is so far ahead on autonomous driving tech that every foreign auto company has had to set up shop in Silicon Valley, because none of them can compete. That includes China, Japan and Germany. Auto Germany's biggest fear is being turned into a cheap box commodity, while Silicon Valley takes over the industry via software - their fear is valid, that's exactly what is going to happen.
Europe is so far behind in biotech, they constantly have to buy US companies to try to keep up. All of their best biotech products and companies have been acquired from the US. Asia isn't remotely competitive in pharma or biotech, they're 20 years behind on most things. Japan has one or two relevant companies there, China is only just now starting to make a dent.
The US has been far ahead on genomics tech for decades. It's US companies like Illumina that lead the way, not hardware from Japan. How about robotic surgery? That has been dominated by another US company for two decades, Intuitive Surgical.
It was the US - Broad and Berkeley in particular - that was responsible for about 3/4 of all progress on CRISPR, which China has aggressively copied from. Once again, elite US engineers and scientists blazing the way.
> Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?
That's dramatically false. Slander in fact. Apollo involved thousands of engineers. It was not largely made up of Nazi engineers.
And Japan? The country that hasn't done anything of consequence in 25 years in engineering or technology. Not only did they entirely lose their hardware industry to South Korea, Taiwan and China, but they can't do software at all. There's a reason their economy hasn't expanded since the early 1990s.
Germany, the country that can't do software, can barely do hardware, can't do mobile, has mediocre military tech, rarely invents anything of consequence, and whose last great remaining industry - the auto business - is about to implode. Yeah sure. Germany certainly used to have vaunted engineers, decades ago. There's nothing special about a BMW or Volkswagen today, and it shows in their stagnation. The future of the auto industry is cheap boxes from China and American software.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/vonbraun/bio.h...
Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon. At Marshall, the group continued work on the Redstone-Mercury, the rocket that sent the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. Shortly after Shepard’s successful flight, President John F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. With the July 20, 1969 moon landing, the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled both Kennedy’s mission and Dr. Von Braun’s lifelong dream.
Japan and Germany have long been known to have the world's best engineers.
In addition, America was protected by two large oceans, so its industrial production capabilities were never affected by the enemy. Germany's factories were constantly being bombed.
And finally, on top of all that, America entered the war late, and by that time Germany was already softened a lot from fighting with France, Britain, Russia, etc. If they hadn't been stupid enough to invade Russia, we might not be having this exchange.
/haha-only-serious
Basically the 70s. We never really recovered, even if the economy did.
There are freight lines that go through these mountains, but they do so at very low velocities. The passes through these ranges are higher than about half the lines on that list.
Much more relevant are the insane projects achieved. The Gotthard Tunnel project is probably one of the hardest things humanity has ever achieved (on par with the moon landing).
The project scaled back its goals significantly. There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield, where the elevation changes consist primarily of overpass abutments. Everything else is placed on definite hold. This is the equivalent of trying to put a man on the moon and settling for watching Star Wars on Netflix.
And connecting Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield by train is not a billion dollar priority. These towns are already connected by train, and nobody uses it. The reason the California HSR project was interesting is because it replaces the bus route which currently connects the Bay Area to the LA metro area, not because it upgrades the current rail system which already connects these much, much smaller Central Valley towns. Merced has a population of 80k people. Bakersfield is 380k. Who cares?
No, the only place construction is actively underway is Merced-Bakersfield. The whole SF-LA line is just as much actively doing planning and environmental clearance and seeking funding for actual construction as ever.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/california-bulle...
> "Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were," he said. "However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield."
Not this length directly along a highly active earthquake fault line and including a massive tunnel underneath an entire mountain range that is exceptionally tectonically active.
> incredibly modest ambitions
I would describe it as hopelessly arrogant ambitions, bordering on technically impossible, and definitely technically impossible within two orders of magnitude of the originally proposed funding.
California is just pathetic if they can't build something that's much less ambitious than that in the 2010s/20s through terrain that's much easier.
Oh, and that's just one Shinkansen line (and the most heavily-used one). They have them all across the country. I rode another one to the west coast, and saw yet another line under construction; that one was elevated.
Finally, about Japan in general from what I saw there: there was lots of construction of all kinds going on. New buildings, renovated buildings, new train lines, construction on subway stations, etc. When they need something, they just seem to build it. Over here, we just argue about stuff and then never get any kind of public-works projects done.
Exactly how profitable is the American Interstate highway system? How much money does America's highways earn per year in fares?
Perhaps that's the problem.
None of this is true, or remarkable.
Almost all high-speed rail lines are a single line.
This line would have been 520 miles, or about 800km. That's longer than almost every high speed rail line in the world. For point of reference, all high speed rail in the UK put together is 1,377km. All high speed rail in Japan is 2,760km. While this single line would not be close to the world's longest (China has a single high speed rail line of nearly 2300km), it's about 30% of the total length of all Japanese high-speed lines put together.
This line was planned to have a max speed of 220mph, which is faster than all but one system in the world.
Beijing to Hong Kong is 1500 miles.
10 billion people have used it and it’s now at 2 billion passengers a year.
50 years later there are millions more people in California and infrastructure costs are astronomical.
China will have 30,000 miles of high-speed rail before we have any.
It’ll be interesting to see the benefits in China. Something to think about as your self-driving car navigates the congestion on US highways.
Jerry Brown tried to build it the first time
Not to be too technical here but... 10 billion individuals surely have not used it. Maybe 10 billion fares have been sold or trips made.
That would be 10 billion fares.
So, the 2 billion yearly passengers probably include some repeated people.
You are being pedantic, not technical
However, the commenter I replied to claimed that California High Speed Rail would be a short line, when in reality it would have been longer than all but a small handful of high-speed lines, almost all in China.
This article is six years old but it makes it sound like a 500 mile HSR line is not that big of a deal:
https://www.railway-technology.com/features/featurethe-world...
China built most of its 19,000 miles in the last 15 years. Not sure why you discount that.
If the money had been spent on a mag-lev line connecting SF and SJ instead, I imagine it'd be close to completion already.
Aren't those called airplanes?
Technically I suppose if you tow a sailplane into the sky then the powered aircraft is a locomotive with the sailplane in train. So yes, there can be and are flying trains.
It followed the trajectory of basically every progressive pet project:
“We need to do X! It’ll only cost $Y!”
>Yeah right, it’s gonna cost 10 times that and be 20 years late.
“Typical Republican fear mongering! Ignore them!”
Years later on HN:
“It was obvious from the beginning that project X could never be done for $Y. How come no one realized that at the time?”
For the Central Valley HSR that is still supposedly being built, the federal money was supposed to be used as matching funds for the state's own money. Even after getting the HSIPR agreement amended to let CA spend its own money more slowly, the state didn't spend anywhere close to what it was supposed to have spent to match the federal funding.
This[0] piece is relevant.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
Also, it's not a dictatorship, it's really a cabal, which is probably why they've avoided the problems that eventually take down dictatorships.
Time to fix how we organize our societies.
edit: I am __not__ advocating for authoritarianism
China is able to do this because they trample rights.
Imagine living in a country where media filters all about the US down to Japanese internment camps just barely over half a century ago, NSA spying, GitMo waterboarding, homeless-packed cities, and kids getting shot in schools routinely. It's probably what happens in North Korea.
China provides evidence (if we really needed it) that it is possible to organize more effectively.
I am not insinuating any causal relationship between the authoritarianism and the more efficient organization.
I think that as a species we can absolutely do better than all of that, engineer an organizational system that is both efficient and above all _actually_ humane and democratic.
China may have come close to that over the last decade. The question is whether it can maintain that, or whether the power of the authoritarian regime will eventually lead to corruption and decisions that are counter to the overall interest of the people.
Perhaps a more direct leadership but with faster election and potential recall cycle would improve the situation.
I suggest there's a way to build a train in CA without having to have Chinese style operating environments.
It's sad though; right on the doorsteps of the Valley itself.
The idea of an SF to LA HSR matching the Northeast Corridor’s passenger volume is completely laughable. You can ride the train all the way from the mountains north of NYC to exurban VA. Neither SF nor LA have the massive transit infrastructure connecting to the intercity rail that you have in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and DC.
https://news.usc.edu/63466/new-concerns-raised-about-air-pol...
We have to admit that CalHSR is a failure, and building a train between Bakersfield and Merced is stupid.
The United States has some systematic problems when it comes to infrastructure. We see it at both the micro and macro level.
At the micro level, it takes four guys more than a month to fix an escalator at a BART station. Months to paint lanes on a street in San Jose.
At the macro level, $13B becomes $98B.
CityLab ran a story about why NYC stopped building subways.[0] In it, it plotted the cost subway construction cost per mile at different times in constant 2017 dollars. First line cost $125M/mile in 1904. In 1944 it went up to <$500M, and even in 1988, it was just above $500M. Not bad for 44 years. Then cost go exponential in 2017 and 2019, ending at $4000M/mile! This is stupid.
Another article (which I have sadly lost) compared the cost of construction in the US to France. I think they compared a Boston subway line to a Parisian one. The Boston one costs twice as much, and requires twice as many people for “safety”. I’m sorry, but this is grift.
Then of course there’s all the environmental and neighborhood reviews that cost more, and stymie everything.
If we want to make any progress, I’m thinking we’re going to just have to bust all of this up. Cut the red tape, and go with closed price bids. Hell, use foreign contractors. The French are apparently half the cost, faster, and high quality. Just hire them and be done with it.
[0] http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-...
Federal fund restrictions meant CA has to pay for SF->SJ (which is being done under the caltrain modernization project) and Bakersfield to LA (which is completely unfunded) as this is AFIAK considered 'commuter rail' so is not eligible for federal funding.
Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield initial construction segment, other than the environmental clearance and planning work that was explicitly stated to be continuing in Newsome's State of the State address, was never actually scheduled because funding had not been secured; the state was actively seeking funding before the address, and all the address said was that the State would continue seeking funding and would not do work until it had secured it. The address literally was waving around the status quo as news. It didn't do anything (which it wouldn't even if it had announced a policy change, because actual policy is made by laws, regulations, executive orders, and a number of other vehicles, the State of the State address not being one of them.)
> The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless.
The Merced to Bakersfield segment is the one for which the federal government had specifically designated funding. Cancelling the funding on the basis that the state was, as always explicitly planned, building only the funded part until securing additional funding is beyond ludicrous.
(Of course, Newsome's statement in the State of the State address which was clearly designed to appear to be announcing significant policy while actually announcing the status quo was also beyond ludicrous, and politically played into opponents of the project and opponents of the state as a whole -- and the Trump Administration may or may not be the former, but has pretty openly shown itself to be the latter.)
is beyond ludicrous
There is no court ruling here; the “appeal” is an internal administrative appeal, not an appeal to a court, which is why the article explicitly notes it wad the Trump Administration (which is not a court) that had rejected the appeal, and why it said that the state is expected to sue over the action (which would not be an option if a court had already ruled on the issue.)
Hence this part is being funded as part of the caltrain modernization project, which is literally under construction as we speak. It will turn the existing 2-3tph corridor into at least 10tph each way with all the standard features of a European/Japanese/Chinese train line.
>Bakersfield's population is around 380,000,[10] making it the 9th-most populous city in California and the 52nd-most populous city in the nation.[0]
Gee, I wonder why some folks have the idea that SV/SF/Software people are disconnected from the rest of the world.
I don't want to have a reason to go to Bakersfield, but maybe it's a bit aloof to pretend like it's some tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere; it's a CA freeway hub that's connected to the entire rest of the state by a slew of highway arteries that facilitate easy travel from SoCal/NorCal/Central. It's literally the intersection of 5 or 6 highways from all over the state.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a mass transit hub there; it leads to anywhere you want to go in California via highway.
If not, it's a distinction without a difference.
I grew up in the central valley. Nice place in many ways, but all that matters for this discussion is whether that route is useful. And I highly doubt it is.
A lot of the traffic on that route is trucking, which isn't helped by high-speed rail. You say it's connected by highways, but if you are riding the train you don't have a car. A bus? Kind of makes the train speed irrelevant if you are trying out a bus route from Bakersfield to somewhere else.
Not seeing the user story for this project.
San Francisco, the 13th largest city in America? And San Jose, the 10th largest city in America?
If they were serious, they should have done New York to Los Angeles where the dollars spent would actually be useful rather than moving people from Nowhere to Nowhere Else.
The project did spend money there on electrification and other improvements to existing CalTrain and other service and infrastructure; Merced to Bakersfield was a new track segment that was in a position to compete favorably for federal funding then on offer for that specific purpose, and as the whole system always relied on getting additional federal and private funds, that's what got prioritized for new rail construction.
The initial construction segment was never even imagined as the initial operation segment (which was SJ to Bakersfield, which is very much not nowhere to nowhere else, but are two significant population centers with poor existing linkages, unlike SF to SJ which, while significant population centers, have much better existing linkages.)
This would reduce a lot of the population pressure on the SF Bay, lowering real estate prices and knitting the state more tightly together.
Yes, they were. There was confusion caused by Newsome's restatement of the status quo (that the outside funding sought for construction outside of the initial construction segment had not yet been secured, and until it was, that construction wouldn't happen), but the plan was always to continue environmental clearances and work on lining up funding for the entire Phase 1 SF-LA project, with focus on first finishing the SJ-Bakersfield initial operating segment (of which the Merced to Bakersfield initial construction segment included a large part.)
Unfortunately, many of these cities seem to already suffer from sprawl which might limit their potential. Going from SV through farmland just to eventually end at a tiny station, with little public transport and low rise buildings would be a little bit too ironic.
It is almost like it would make sense to build the stations between the towns, or at least at one end of them.
It’s completely unsurprising that the Department of Transportation wants the funding back after the state downsized the project from nationally-significant to regionally-significant.
We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that.
Of course, FAA grant money is available to expand SFO, OAK and LAX... no questions asked.
Because the initial operating segment needed to be near one of the endpoints (San Jose to Bakersfield was the plan) in order to maximize ridership, meaning the initial construction segment should be, at least largely, part of such a segment (the ICS was Bakersfield to Merced), and the ICS was specifically select because of relative ease of construction and federal funding being available for work that could start relatively soon at the time with a priority to economically hard hit areas for economic development purposes, which the valley end of the planned IOS fit.
> at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA.
Yes, it would have.
> We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that.
The economic case for the train was made on the bases of expected displaced road traffic and reduced funds dedicated to highway construction and maintenance with it versus without it, not replacing air travel.
The economic case for the train was made on the bases of expected displaced road traffic
Just curious, but how does a high speed train help the poor? A local train maybe, but not too many poor people have a pressing need for a weekend in San Francisco.
Transportation projects are dominated by politics, handouts, corruption and excessive opposition to transportation even existing, while ignoring practical and common sense ideas.
The Cal High speed rail is a perfect example. Routes that don't serve major population centers, fights over land use, fights over whether a rail line should even exist, circuitous routes to reward political supporters, lack of transparency and auditing tools, cost overruns and corruption...
There's a good write up here: https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-pro...
Europe and Asia just build transit to be transit. In the US at least, if something actually gets built and used it's just a nice side effect.
I'm halfway through Robert Caro's fantastic biography of Robert Moses, who had an iron grip on New York public works for nearly half a century. It's eye-opening just how much power and influence arises from being able to control these types of projects. Yet this authority flies under the radar because it's all soft power with little public accountability. Politicians vie in the public arena over relatively insubstantial things while the real significant decisions for the future of the state take place in never-attended hearings far from press scrutiny. Activists (admirably) fight tooth and nail for every inch of progress on the issue du jour but vote ambivalently on massive multibillion-dollar bond issues.
Other example projects that are delayed from starting or late from finishing thus pushing costs higher are:
a 3rd Heathrow runway,
a tunnel to bypass Stonehenge (planned for over 20 years and costs projected to balloon from £180M to over £1.6B),
the Paris Metro projected to be €12B over budget
The US has no monopoly on poor planning, NIMBYs and corruption.
It's insane to think that this would actually be completed. It's more like the stealth fighter project that should never have gotten funding, or should have had its funding cut decades previous at this point.
I noticed a lot of the California headlines about this have painted it along the lines of "Evil Trump administration killing California high speed rail!"
The reality is, though, that California botched this project. The Federal funding was contingent on California making progress, and the amount of funding was sized for the size of the project.
California has made little progress, and the size of the project has been reduced. It's only fiscally responsible for the feds to take back the money. Just like if you promise a VC a million users in the first year, but only deliver 10,000 they're going to look at you sideways.
FTA: Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said on Thursday it had canceled the funding awarded in a 2010 agreement after it said the state had “repeatedly failed to comply” and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”
Fortunately, high speed rail is making (slow) progress in other states like Florida, Illinois and Texas. Hopefully the money can do some good in those places.
It would be nice if in Minnesota we didn't have Wisconsin between us and Illinois so we could do something there.
One thing watching folks talk about rail locally is that all these little towns that down't want it ... unless you're going to stop a 10 times a day at their town.
At some point it all stops making sense then.
You wouldn't do the track across WI without looking that the bigger cities in the way and deciding where to stop. You wouldn't stop in every small town, but the bigger towns...
Isn't the majority of soul crushing traffic happening inside the LA and Bay Area regions?
Maybe the rail line could somehow reuse the freeway right of way, but I'm not sure how that could work while retaining the roads for cars and trucks.
I love train travel as well but that is an obscene amount of money. I wish they would upgrade the existing tracks so that traveling from Emeryville-LA Union station goes from 10 hours to 4-5hrs (and runs multiple times a day)
(Very few people actually take the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC because it's pretty much a full-day trip. But New York is in about the middle so there are two popular sub-sections--unlike the case with CA.)
And, of course, the rolling stock had various problems so I'm not sure what the theoretical top speed ended up being.
To the surprise of no one, things are going slower than expected: http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/February-2019/What-Happe...
Let me state for the record that I am a huge fan of rail and public transit in general, but the forces and timing working against this project were too large to be overcome even with $10B in backing.
Here are some of the reasons:
1. Lots of people here are comparing this project to projects in China. I think it's hard to overstate how one of the most expensive process (land acquisition by the government) is fundamentally different in China vs the US. The idea of "land ownership" in China is entirely different: Most private entities don't "own" land in the US sense, they may lease it for a long time (~99) years but ultimately its incredibly easy for local and national governments to execute eminent domain with little or no regard for land rights. Yes, this make public transport easier, but land rights are fundamental for the continuation of a democracy. It's not something we want to mess with.
2. Culturally, California is just not a train state. In the Northeast Corridor, trains and public transit are just more engrained in the culture. Kids learn at the age of 5 that NJ Transit, LIRR, or Metro North is the best way in and out of NYC. Most of my friends in NYC don't even have drivers licenses. Things are closer together, land is flatter, there aren't huge swaths of nature in between things, and there's such a high density of people and economic activity that trains have made sense for a long time. Yes, the NYC subway has its problems, but I can always bet that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I can get from Manhattan to JFK in an hour. In SF it's hard to even tell if I can get across the Bay past Midnight.
3. The small decisions made about stops, contracting, and procurement for the high speed rail were more about making the project politically palpable than actual need or engineering practicality. Taking a weird detour to Palmdale, as detailed in the Vox article below, is the best example of this [1]. The Palmdale route alone made the north-south trip 12 minutes slower while costing $5 billion in extra spending. If you're going to make that kind of decision over and over again and stack turtles until everyone's happy, you're going to make a great piece of paper but nothing that will ever turn on.
4. The decision to do this wasn't organic. If you take a look at regional transit needs in CA generally, no one was stack ranking high speed rail at the top. In LA you have basic problems with inaccessibility within most of the city, the most egregious being the lack of connectivity to LAX (which just started getting built last year). In SF you have gridlock where we can't add diesel trains to CalTrain because it needs to get Electrified first by law, but that process won't happen until 2022 [2]. If we can't upgrade a regional rail that serves 1/3rd of the economic activity of the state, what makes us think we can build a high speed rail that is (back of the envelope) 10x as long? At least in the northeast, trains systems were built where there was (1) incredible demand and (2) an understanding that it could be built where value would be opened up as it was happening. Which is why those rail lines start in major metro areas and extend outward, rather than building in the central valley and working backwards.
5. Air and car travel, despite its (obvious) climate change problems, just works. It's relatively cheap, it's well understood, and given the vast distance and significant nature features between population areas, it's a good solution to a hard problem. LAX sucks, but LA has 4 regional airports that can be used once you understand how. Flights are frequent, have lots of type options, and can be purchased for $50 one way. Roads and cars work better on mountain terrain than rail, and can better serve a dispersed population. Yes, we cannot run on gasoline forever if we want to save the planet, but right now it's easy to understand why California has stuck with this solution so long given its difference to other major areas that use trains.
Overall, I was rooting for this, but this end was inevitable. But it's not the end of the world. We will learn from this and find a way, and I'm convinced in the end it will be more economical and fit California's unique parameters better than a $90B train. The solution may be something we can't see now (self-driving battery-powered cars on isolated freeway lanes, anyone?), but we'll find it. I know we will
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/c... [2] https://calmod.org/
Let's get rapid public transit linked up to the airports much like public transit is linked up to the major rail stations of Europe. Let's save SJC and SMO. Let's get jet fuel refined with reduced carbon processes. Let's get electric airliners and hybrid electrics R&D funded. There's a lot we can do, and it'll cost way less than that ridiculous train.
More seriously, the feds seem to be kind of right; it has been 9 years and California hasn't made much if any progress.
If newsom had taken funding for the statewide hsr and reappropriatied it to the regional Caltrain I imagine people would have been up in arms...
UPDATE - : CA Governor Newsom this afternoon (via Sacbee): "The Trump Administration’s action is illegal and a direct assault on California, our green infrastructure, and the thousands of Central Valley workers who are building this project,” he said. “Just as we have seen from the Trump Administration’s attacks on our clean air standards, our immigrant communities and in countless other areas, the Trump Administration is trying to exact political retribution on our state. “This is California’s money, appropriated by Congress, and we will vigorously defend it in court"
Exactly the type of rhetoric, attitude, and threats that help push this situation in the first place (well, along with the gross mismanagement by the state for years) and he still can't quit digging.
Um... That's not really gonna help.
Um..did we forget about Texas and Alaska?
California (39.5 MM) will likely be “larger” than Texas (28.7 MM) for some time, despite a much lower growth rate.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...
You seem to be drawing an impossibly broad conclusion. I have taken the liberty of editing your concluding statement by adding an appropriate amount of uncertainty and removing overly general statements.
Here's what it says: ''
cool yeah, new tech, wooh. very exciting.
but you know what's more important than that? being a good, kind person.
which you definitely are not if you are heading a large organization designed to systematically squeeeeeeeze everything it can get out of its peons while giving them as little as possible in return. and also definitely if you like to do things such as publicly call someone risking their life to save strangers a pedophile.
Would be a useful exercise, if you can manage, to make a list of positives of what Elon and his companies have accomplished so far. Maybe work on your negativity and emotional reactions so you can understand things more clearly, develop compassion by developing balanced logic which includes full perspective more than just hate.
No, they don't, and in order to make it look much cheaper when they propose an "SF-LA" line it didn't actually come close to either SF or LA, thus creating an entirely new transit problem if any significant number of people were going to use it.
And, of course, Hyperloop could only do it with the State (and thus can't do it better than the State), because there is no way to build it without eminent domain.
Let's just admit finally that governments are really only good at writing checks, that they suck at managing projects, and then just work very hard figure out where those checks should go.
Our governments(s) should give a bunch of teams $10M to design projects, then a few teams $100M to prototype them, and then one or two teams the billions required to build them out. I bet there's a qualified and moral person on HN that could lead a successful high speed rail project with government backing.
Lots of governemnts around the world do proper infrastructure projects.