Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

I think it's because in the U.S absolutely anyone can tie up this stuff in the court systems for years. There are a lot of environmentalists who have been working overtime to stop this thing. For example: https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/10/24/high-speed-rail-l... . There are seven environmental lawsuits against this thing. How much do you think the legal bills are? There will likely be many more.

Edit: There are a couple of regularly glitchy things about how American government works. They are:

#1 : Public Employees Unions who negotiate with themselves for sweet pension deals.

#2 : Suits against various government agencies by individuals that wind up being paid for by taxpayers. For example, school districts getting sued for something a janitor did and then taxpayers having to pay for it as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.

#3 : Environmental lawsuits to stop government infrastructure projects.

The California HSR has a lot of problems not matched in Taiwan.

Firstly, once you get from San Jose to Bakersfield, then what? We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end. What happens when you get to San Jose? You still need a car or another slow train.

If you want to get from San Francisco to Disneyland via HSR, the entire trip would probably take you about six hours with all the train changes and car rides and waiting. You could do the drive in six hours too and then have your car at the other end.

Even today, if I want to visit my parents in the suburbs of LA coming from the suburbs of San Jose, I can make the drive in five hours, or spend five hours getting there by plane, assuming someone picks me up at the other end. The only reason I fly is if I happen to be going somewhere right near the airport or it will be rush hour at one end or another when I arrive because I don't have scheduling flexibility.

Secondly, the original proposal was to build Stockton to Fresno first. That would be the least used section of the line. Not a lot of people move between Stockton and Fresno. The train would be bankrupt before it ever got to phase two. At least they finally changed their mind on that, but not for a much better route.

To be remotely viable, they need to build the most trafficked parts first -- San Jose to Stockton and Bakersfield to Los Angeles. But even those lines would still suffer from problem one unless/until the local transit was vastly improved.

I would love to see a viable HSR in California, but the current proposal is not that.

Let's build up our local transit first in LA and the Bay Area so that when we connect them with a high speed rail, the rail is actually useful.

HSR failed in California largely because building effective mass transit is a secondary goal. If you look at the route, and how the process unfolded, the focus was mostly on who was going to get paid, and helping out political friends. In the US, large transit projects are mostly about pork barrel politics and spending, and if something actually usable comes out of it, then that was a great but secondary effect. If you look at how other countries build transit, politics is more subdued and the goal is to actually build a functional system. Republicans block most transit projects as it is antithetical to their political views, and the Democrats uses it as a social spending policy and political handouts largely ignoring the needs of an actual transit system.

Basically, US politics just doesn't care to build things properly because the incentives are totally off.

Vox has a pretty good breakdown: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/c...

I think any talk about HSRs in the US should be able to explain US highways. American highway system is arguably one of the best in the world - it's also a gigantic government project, and it's constantly being extended.

So how come America, with its proven track record of great highways, is totally impotent with high speed rails? The answer can't be just "American government doesn't work" or "the country is too big." Irrational mistrust against railways?

For an article with quite a few numbers, it seems to be missing some basic ones:

* Taiwan, area 36,197 km^2, population density 651 / km^2 [1]

* California, area 403,932 km^2, population density 97 / km^2 [2]

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

Side observation, non-related but was brought up in the article:

"Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours — but still it managed to afford high-speed rail."

The author seems to be ignorant of some context when describing Taiwan in this way -- I learned recently that wages in Taiwan were artificially and structurally depressed in order to enable a competitive export economy. Taiwan is actually not a palpably poorer place except maybe in an absolute dollar sense. Taipei has top notch infrastructure, superior to every large U.S. city in my view (I've visited and seen for myself) The highways are beautiful. They don't skimp on infra spend.

Notwithstanding the fact that median household income is rarely good indication of how "poor" a place is, especially when comparing across countries because of local cost of living assumptions.

If we compare poverty rates, Taiwan's is 1.78% whereas California's is 18.2%.

Taiwan's GDP per capita (PPP) -- not household income -- was $53k in 2018. California's was $66k in 2016. Not that different.

Looks like the author was trying to use a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand there to make his point.

1. It resulted from the era of rapid economic growth.

2. East Asian countries generally value the greater good for all more.

3. There was no stereotype against train travel, and having HSRs was generally considered as a national pride.

Nowadays, it's also difficult to do any large scale infrastructure project in Taiwan, because the economy stagnates and the two-party political system is kinda gridlocked .

The real issue is that gas is too cheap in the US. Everywhere else, except oil rich middle east, gas is expensive enough to discourage people from driving everywhere. They end up taking public transport. In US driving almost always comes out cheaper unless the distance is too great to be convenient to drive.

Simply put, even if all the environmental / lobbying / no-car-at-the-destination issues were resolved, the distances of California (and population densities) would still make it economically challenging to have HSR a slam dunk compared to flying.

HSR breaks even with flying at about _200-300 miles_ journey. That is, if the planned journey is within that range, for similar pricing, people will choose 50-50 rail over flying (in aggregate, in Europe, Asia). New York to Washington/Boston distances. Greater than that, flying has the advantage. (People will incrementally choose flying the longer the distance). This takes into account typical traffic, getting to the airport, check-in, all that stuff.

San Francisco to Los Angeles is 380 miles. Add to that the destination rental car issues, etc. And we haven't even talked pricing yet.

Even if you got that all out of the way, flying is still often better than rail. Even on Tokyo-Osaka route, one of the pinnacles of HSR, there are almost comparable flights serving the route as shinkansen.

I know we all wish for high speed rail as a demonstration of our technological prowess. But in recent years even I've soured on it for California, given how incompetent we seem to be on top of rail's structural disadvantage in the state. The money would bring far more benefits if spent elsewhere to solve our traffic, commute, suburban issues.

The route chosen for CA high speed rail guaranteed failure. SF out to the Central Valley and then in to LA meant a really expensive project which would result in a slow train. This single route through everywhere was necessary for political, particularly Congressional, backing. I'm glad Gavin Newsom cancelled it and I still want HSR. They should start with SLO to San Diego and then a Central Valley line. Finally, connect SFO (yup, San Francisco International Airport) to SLO.

California is terrible at managing infrastructure projects.

Fund rail like we do highways. Establish an agency to incrementally purchase ROW or track rights and incrementally upgrade services. And to tie all these services together into a cohesive network.

This would mean first all the lines in NoCal and separately SoCal would reach speeds of 120mph, electrified, with regular high quality service. That first supports the massive need for transit within these separate mega regions. You’d have a fast enough train from Sacramento to San Jose. Or from San Diego to LA. So on. This already provides good economic benefits.

Second, starting a rail renaissance this way around means you have laid out everything you need to get support for the 180+ mph HSR line that would later link these two networks into one statewide network.

At that point you would not only have support from the public because it’s obvious what the benefits will be, but you also have all the construction and project management experience built up over the years of buying/fixing/upgrading lines in these northern and southern networks.

And instead of this inside out (outside in?), stand-alone plan we had with CAHSR. You now all the way through are making peoples lives better AS YOU GO with your capital investments.

The Central Valley construction right now for example is ridiculous as everyone knows. (We know it was done because there was federal money for it, but still.)

Imagine instead that same capital expenditure had gone to making the Sacramento to San Jose Capitol Corridor route a high quality electrified 120mph line? It would’ve had immediate economic benefits and people would ride the trains and be like holy shit give me more of this now!!

As an outsider from Europe: what I see that americans hate any publicly funded projects. "If it doesn't benefit me why should I pay taxes for that?" See the whole healthcare system. "I'm healthy, never sick why should I pay the cancer treatment of those who are obese and smoke all the time?" That's totally different in Europe. Not just in the nordic countries but generally everywhere. So the same applies for public transport and such as well. Also add on the top of that the lowest gas prices in the western world https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

The fact that taiwan is much poorer also means that the labor cost for construction is much lower

Answer: cars and highways. It's really hard to spend a lot of money replacing something that already works, even if it works really, really badly. High speed rail will only happen with a federal mandate.

California has 10 times as many lawyers as Taiwan.

http://www.twba.org.tw/en/Report.htm

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...

The key issue is this:

>While California established an underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses came together to create a private corporation.

It should be private.

I used to be more in favor of CA HSR, but I read an argument that said cities are congested, rural I-5 isn't, so we'd be better off building a second BART tunnel and electrifying Caltrain.

Is it just me, or is it a bit arrogant to assume that because X can do something, why can't Y do it?

High speed rail is a bad investment. Rail systematizes discrimination, typically loses money, and struggles to provide a last mile solution.

$60B can buy at least 600,000 electric vehicles with 3 million seats. Semi-autonomous vehicles are already capable of operating as a “train” in a dedicated freeway lane and autonomous operation is likely by 2033 (when California’s HSR would begin operation). This solution could be deployed incrementally, with a smaller fleet of human-driven, semi-autonomous EVs in the first phase.

600,000 vehicles may not sound like a lot, but the whole United States had 370,400 taxi & ride share drivers in 2018! [1].

We need to turn the HOV lane into an autonomous car lane & build the future we want instead of tying ourselves to a romanticized version of the past.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/m...

Edit: I failed to acknowledge that autonomous vehicles are not available today, so have updated my post. Note, high speed rail isn’t available either & won’t be until, at earliest, 2033.