I'm actually a big fan of high speed rail in America for routes that make sense, but this project is going to be such an embarrassment for rail in America that it's going to hurt future projects.
Every high speed rail in history has come in way over budget
The biggest problem with CAHSR though is that the rich suburban fucks (especially on the SF peninsula) are trying to kill HSR with death from a thousand paper cuts^W^W lawsuits. That's how you get things like cities (coughathertoncoughbelmontcough) wanting underground sections built on someone else's dime. They'll cite things like noise while ignoring that a.) electric trains are quieter than diesels and b.) grade separation eliminates the need to sound the horn.
It's a really nasty self-fulfilling prophecy.
Other European countries have similar costs. California is the outlier.
Imagine what great and useful things could be done with 105 BILLION dollars. Homelessness, Traffic in urban centers (LA, SF, etc.), healthcare...
What California really needs is adding more lanes to fix traffic.
There are way to better spend money, but fixing traffic is literally the last thing anybody should try to do. Unless fixing traffic means public transport and bike infrastructure.
From a European perspective American cities already look like a bunch of highways with to occasional development of identical looking single family homes sitting between the highways. The idea that putting down even more road infrastructure is gone improve anything is bonkers.
The amount of road, water pipe and other utilizes the city has to support per citizen has exploded to an absurd degree and is a big reason why most US towns can't maintain their infrastructure. Actually utilizing existing infrastructure in a better way would be far more useful building new one.
$105 billion is about the size of California's current (and growing) surplus. Or about a fifth of how much California spent in 2021 ($512.8 billion). Yes it could be used to do more important things in the immediate sense but projects like these pay off tenfold in the long term
Yes, he's complaining about the abject failure of trains (and I have too). The project won't pay off if the same corruption that cost $105 billions results in an impractical project and that's the common result.
The US can't create an alternative to fossil fuels unless it solves it's inability to create public transit projects problem.
And if that money is not invested in trains, they only other suggestion practically speaking is, lets make highways bigger.
So yeah, I agree, you the US needs to get better at public infrastructure projects, but doing so while also working on trains, is better then doing so and building insane Texas highway cloverleaf interchanges.
If a nation pays a lot for a given infrastructure project because the nation is developing the means to produce it, then that nation would likely be able to produce the thing better later. Maybe that's Japan.
If a nation pays a lot for a given infrastructure project because corrupt interests have positioned themselves to soak up a lion's share of the money, there's no reason to think that won't happen the next time. That's what happens in the US. Further, thing about the US is that failed public transit project have become normal and accepted. Something is needed to change this but uncritically throwing money at them obviously won't be it.
Citation needed. “People really like it” doesn’t mean it paid off.
But, it’s in a state I rarely visit, and I’d probably never even ride it more than a couple times. If you think the money is better spent adding half a dozen more lanes to 405, I won’t argue. No matter what, I’ll be living somewhere that doesn’t require me to waste my life sitting in a car, and that will probably never be somewhere in California, train or no train.
Uhh... isn't this is a good reason to vote against them?
Definitely don't think it's a waste though. Hopefully this can make clear what legislation needs to be passed to get stuff like this through. I mean, should we also just give up on nuclear? Nuclear power plant projects across the US have been famous for double or tripling the initial expenses and timelines
This seems like first-order analysis: people fly between SFO and LA so let's build a railway between them.
Second-order analysis: people actually want to go from downtown SF to downtown LA, so build a railway between those places directly.
There are formal partnerships between rail providers and airlines around the world, where your train ride is treated like a leg of your flight. You have a guaranteed connection, and often your bag is transferred from the train to your airplane.
Why would you connect the two airports if the point is supposed to be that you don’t have to use the airports?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Pha...
There are, however, stations in downtown San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.
Edit: And just to throw a bone to the anti-HSR folks: the downtown SF situation is still a clusterfuck the net result of which is a billion dollar bus station and a poorly connected (4th/King) rail station. There's a ton of related stuff that needs to be fixed, but needs to be fixed is still better than never going to happen.
BART's kind of remedied the situation, but for a while their operational costs were so high that there was no direct SFO-Millbrae service during the day. You had to backtrack all the way to San Bruno. By 2019 there was a "shuttle", and now the red (but not yellow!) line serves SFO and Millbrae.
In addition the Caltrain/BART connection at Millbrae requires a lot of walking. It's tedious and poorly designed.
The BART connection does suck, but I dont know how it look 2 hours to get to the Caltrain Station.
So it could potentially replace a lot of short-haul connecting flights.
Pulling up a map of Australia, this is the equivalent of setting out to improve transport from Canberra to Melbourne, and the first sections to be built will connect Leeton to Echuca.
The people who quibble over the alignment want it to go straight down I-5, bypassing millions of people but only shortening the route by about 50 miles.
Look at any HSR map in Europe and you'll see the same thing, the major city service is great, but it's the smaller regional service that makes the system and drives ridership. With remote work on the rise, people already are moving to smaller towns in between SF and LA, this gives them an alternative to driving when they need to go into the office. Once SJ to Merced service is operating, you could even reasonably do a daily commute, <1 hour.
a great idea, ruined by the transit industrial complex
building pacheco instead of altamont is going to go down in history as the greatest failure of all time in bay area transit, surpassing even the impressively cursed BART SFO extension
[1] see richard mlynarik's writing on this
Skipping all the Central Valley cities and running out along I-5 is kind of pointless though.
Unfortunately this decision has a lot of bad consequences for the main corridor. First, the easterly direction that the train has to take after it gets out of the south bay adds around 20 minutes to the overall trip, which is a substantial fraction of the SF-LA travel time.
The bigger issue is that coming out of Bakersfield, the route is now too far east to make it through the Grapevine. Instead they will have to build a 15 mile tunnel through the San Gabriel mountains which will add more time to the route and cost tens of billions of dollars.
In effect, the choice of route added 25 minutes of travel time at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
I do believe that Central Valley cities should have rail service, but the main SF-LA route should have been built out first and then spurs or additional lines could have been added to that core.
The Central Valley is sparsely populated at the moment, but it doesn't have to remain so. Expanding the cities there by 5 or 10 million people might actually make the high-speed rail project sensible.
But it doesn’t. It hits up the southern coast through Shizuoka and a bunch of small cities.
They're now building the Chuo maglev, which does take the shortest path and is currently projected at $65 billion and climbing.
Maybe they could solve it with clever engineering. However, I don't think 20 minutes is a big deal, especially considering that the Japanese have put up with the humiliation of spending 2:21 instead of 1:07 to go from Tokyo to Osaka for the last few decades. I think focusing on only SF-LA also ignores long-term goals, like connecting with the Brightline from Victorville to Las Vegas. If you live in Fresno or Bakersfield and want to go to Las Vegas, your options are pretty ridiculously long bus rides, or long multi-legged flights. If both the CA HSR and Brightline succeed (I know, I'm hopeless optimistic), then it can be a pretty killer app.
* [1] https://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/usa/4366-tejon-... * [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_steepest_gradients_on_... * [3] [Note that the gradient here is listed as per-mille] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanning%E2%80%93Kunming_high-s...
Mandating Positive Train Control and adding in track to allow better multiplexing of traffic could be done for a fraction of the HSR budget.
I think this should be done at a national level (nationalize the rail lines and invest in infrastructure to better utilize a very constrained resource). Yeah, crazy talk.