Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

It's a Western problem. China just moves people out of the way. In the West, you have go around, under, or over. Labour costs are low. The CCP answers to itself. Can I build this? Of course you can!

In the UK, there's archaeological surveys, bio-diversity/green considerations, carbon impact, political lobbying. The list just goes on and on and on.

The US, at least, is largely an empty continent. You can probably draw a line between cities and not hit many things. Plus the US love-affair with cars means you could, if you wanted to, build terminals outside major cities and rent a car to drive the last part and still conceivably run a profitable service.

In the UK, we must have our terminals in the city centres which adds so much more to the cost as we have to tunnel under and into the cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2

View on HN

Even in the US the government needs to buy/take land from every individual in the way. In my experience that maybe wouldn’t be a problem but they try to get it for a ridiculously low amount, so then people (understandably) fight. That leads to delays and more costs until that’s finally settled. When the county replaced a road that ran next to my parent’s property, they wanted to move it up, taking half of their 60 acres. They did this because they wanted to expand the county park (for RVers) that’s across the road.

They offered $500 an acre. That land is easily worth $10,000 an acre, and that would have also reduced the value of the rest of their land and house. Their house is on a hill and the view is wonderful, and the county also tried to put a water tower up right in front of their house.

Long story short after a long fight a man with some pull got involved on my parents behalf, and the county ended up with some extra land (sold at a reasonable price) and the water tower was put behind a woods (from their perspective) instead, all of a few hundred feet away. It was years of stress for my parents.

> It's a Western problem

It's more accurately a common law problem. European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral.

> You can probably draw a line between cities and not hit many things

The empty parts are away from cities. The California and Capitol corridors are (a) prime rail routes and (b) almost contiguous megalopolises.

> It's more accurately a common law problem. European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral.

Asking out of genuine interest - do you have any ideas as to why this might be?

Could also be that first past the post systems leading to less competent administrations than proportional representation and coalitions. Common law and first past the post seems to go hand in hand.

> European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral.

At least not in France. The "SNCF" had to be rescued by the French state three times since it was created in 1937. And it was created because the private companies it replaced were bankrupt. [0] (in French)

Each year the French state gives ~16 Billion Euros to the company [1] (in French)

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2018/03/19/cinq...

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_nationale_de...

Each and every country loves to complain about their railway services. I bet you're selling the French railways short here. I'd assume you're doing better than UK, and definitely an order of magnitude better than US.

I did not complained, I replied to:

"European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral."

Do you have any hint of other European states with Napoleonic law that avoided cost spiral?

Right, I misunderstood your comment. I agree that costs have increased in continental Europe too, don't have any numbers.

> It's more accurately a common law problem. European states with Napoleonic law appear to avoid the cost spiral.

Germany alone has like 3 major extremely over-budget infrastructure projects I can think of.

> Germany alone has like 3 major extremely over-budget infrastructure projects I can think of

I'm going off cost per mile to build rail and road. Even when European projects go over budget, they still clock in below the U.K.–on average–which clocks in way below the U.S. (The latter gap is best explained by institutional ineptitude.)

Corruption also plays a big part in rising the cost.

Technically speaking, the US has eminent domain laws which allow it to force people out of the way (generally by paying fair market price for the land).

The problem isn't legal, but entirely one of political will.

We have compulsory purchase orders in the UK that are often used on large infrastructure projects such as high speed rail to clear the route, but they’re politically unpopular and not used as often as they perhaps should be. And politicians are nothing if not about self interest and popularity.

IOW high speed rail is not popular.

The UK's HS2 is really about freeing up more commuter capacity on the existing lines into London - currently both the express and stopping services use the same line requiring large gaps. By separating the fast and slow trains they'll be able to schedule more trains. If you're going to build a new line might as well make it high speed.

If you've ever been on a London commuter service you'll see they're pretty packed.

If the system requires a charismatic politician vocal about high speed rail he/she either doesn't exist or not enough people care for it?

I don't think people particularly care about high speed rail in Britain since the vast majority of the population live within 200 miles of London and our existing trains go up to 125mph on the mainlines so get you to London in a couple of hours or so.

Edinburgh or Glasgow to London is a similar distance as LA to SF. Those trains take about 4 hours right now versus 8 hours on Amtrak, about the same as the 8 1/2 hours the Flying Scotsman took from Edinburgh to London in 1888.

It’s not that simple, people can and will legally fight it. Even if they’re given fair market price for the land (big if), the rest of their land’s/home’s value will be reduced. Nobody wants a train going right next to their house for nuisance and danger reasons, it might split their land, etc.

Some people will have an emotional attachment to their land/homes as well. The only way for something like this to work is to spend so far above market rate that people come out ahead.

> the rest of their land’s/home’s value will be reduced.

That's part of giving them fair value. It's not just the number of square inches you take, but what you did to the value of what they have left.

That's just calculating money. The real problem is time. They can tie you up in court for, probably, a decade. (IANAL, but I think a determined individual who was willing to spend money on lawyers could do something around that long.)

Maybe unpopular view, but another way is to just have stronger eminent domain. I don't think market price should be paid when land is assigned to infrastructure. I also think cities should use eminent domain (with nominal compensation) to acquire land before all zoning to be able to fund the urban infrastructure and control housing prices.

This just seems cruel. If someone bought a home for 500k and has a 400k loan, then the city forces them out and gives them 100k, then that person has a 300k loan and no home.

Eminent domain should be used for non-zoned land. I'm fine with full market price compensation for zoned land. It's a long term planning failure if it ever comes to that.

I live on non-zoned land. So do my parents and at least 2 of my friends. You're basically saying that nobody should live in rural areas or risk having their life's work wiped out (or worse) at the whim of the government.

So you'd be more than happy if the government showed up at your home and offered you pennies on the dollar for the latest pet project?

I don't see non-zoned land the same way as other property. It's more like spectrum, a limited resource.

So you want to get something for less than it is worth, at the expense of the owner? You can just nationalize their property, why bother paying something? Viva la revolucion, comrade Che.

Yep, that's what eminent domain basically is about. Land ownership comes with different strings attached compared to other kinds of wealth. No need to evoke communist imagery -- this is common practice in western countries, some pay the market price and some do not.

The stretch of California high speed rail currently under construction includes a costly grade separation roughly every one and two thirds miles. The result should be safe and robust, but the expense is evidence of something more than a largely empty continent. And that is in a largely wide open mostly agricultural area of the US.

I assume you're referring to the Caltrain upgrade. It was completely wild to me that a railway line through a major metropolitan area would have level crossings. They're usually a rural thing in other countries.

No, I'm talking about the current round of work in the Central Valley that just started. Currently all the big HSR works are going on there. I can't currently find the report with the oddly high grade separation count and it is possible that my read of that was mistaken, but I am pretty sure that if you look at the recent documents they just moved on from CP1 and started on either CP2 or CP4 in the south end of the Central Valley and it includes a very large number of grade separations. That report was posted somewhere on either https://hsr.ca.gov/ or https://www.buildhsr.com a month or two ago.

Fortunately these Central Valley grade separations are merely expensive while the CalTrain corridor work on the peninsula is experiencing explosive growth of costs from the the complexity of grade separations because of the very tricky maze of rights of way especially in and around Redwood City: https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-exploding-cost...

Everyone says that the party can just build infrastructure anywhere but then why are nail houses so common in China?

Not common at all. News reports give you false impression.

There shouldn't be any if the party has such absolute power and no concern for the people in the way of a project.

I don't see what's stopping the US from building elevated rail over interstate highways. They already own the rights of way, and the radii of curvature are already pretty large. As a conservative lower bound, they should at least be able to match automobile speeds.

Additionally, those highways typically enter cities, so stations could be built over them, often right in the city center. That does leave details about how those stations are accessed, but this seems minor since everything else has already been dealt with.

I wonder if an executive order could make it happen.

Wouldn't it also be much, much more expensive than building the line on the ground?

I don't know the cost in US, but in my country Euro prices are: highway at 6 million/km, rail at 10 million, viaducts over 15 and tunnels over 20 million. The elevated rail would be at least 50% more expensive, probably more than double because in case of viaducts there is no restriction on what is below the construction and you can put pylons anywhere, if it is above and existing highway there are many limitations.

So it is doable, maybe a good idea if you have the money, but I heard California is burning money like there is no tomorrow and there are no funds for such a project (maybe not true, it's just what I heard).

I'm not American, but I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't much appetite for building transport infrastructure above existing transport after the Oakland viaduct collapse in the 1989 SF earthquake. I'm old enough to remember it, and watching from abroad, it was pretty horrific.

The cost of building something like that is likely to be prohibitive because you'll need to dig support pylons by the road and each and every pylon would need a ground survey for existing utilities, and so on. It adds up really quickly, even with a concrete factory on site manufacturing identical parts (which they do for tunnel building for example).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake#Oa...

> carbon impact

I must be missing something here. Surely trains have a much lower carbon impact than cars and planes do, right?

Lower yes, but not zero. Concrete and steel for construction of the railways produces a lot of emissions. Even if the trains are electric, a lot of the U.S. grid is powered by fossil fuels (mainly coal plus some natural gas).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com