Scaled-Down California Bullet Train Project $10B over Budget
timesofsandiego.com
timesofsandiego.com
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2023/02/15/legislative-analyst-s...
So yes, the upfront cost of a high speed rail line will always be higher simply because of the type of infrastructure being built. But the running costs will be much lower, both to the state and to the individual users.
This train was originally intended to connect norcal and socal (now it's only doing Merced to Bakersfield), so an apt comparison would be e.g. I-5 not all highways everywhere.
Also, I did look at your article which cited ~5B a year, so that's cheaper than a $100B+ rail that comes out in a few decades? That's not to even mention that we can drive on the highway today and it's used to transports commerical goods.
It is obviously corruption. All project "management" was turned over to private consultants. The longer the project drag out, the more money they earn. Failure is its own reward.
This is why there have been so many "questionable" decisions. All those pergolas, trenches, moving entire highways, building aerials through Bakersfield seem like batshit insane decisions -- until you realize who profits from all this.
However, there's some big differences: this new line is going to be a 500km/h maglev line with a ~50-minute travel time, not a normal rail line like California's, and 90% of it is underground since there's a bunch of mountains in the way.
Somehow, America these days always manages to spend absurd amounts of money on infrastructure, far more than peer nations.
Another big factor is profitability: will California's system actually pay for itself? The shinkansen bullet trains in Japan are profitable, and have been for a long time. During a normal day, one train leaves Tokyo station every few minutes on the Tokaido line towards Nagoya and Osaka. So while the new maglev train looks horrifically expensive for initial costs, with the huge ridership the existing trains already have, it's a very sound investment and is sure to be profitable before too long because Japanese are used to taking trains for traveling between cities. I can't say the same for Americans, especially when this California line is taking some long, meandering route to a bunch of unimportant towns instead of just going straight from LA to SanFran like it should, which means it won't even be that fast.
It’s probably because the bribes are compounding at each level.
I just found it funny as a number because 35 bil is such a ridiculous amount for a 171 mile train.
The American Society of Civil Engineers annual report card reports that over 43% of our existing road system is in either poor or mediocre condition as of 2021, and an over $435 billion backlog for repairing existing roads and $125 billion for bridge repairs.[0] Worse yet, as existing infrastructure reaches its planned lifespans, we have to dump more money into repairing, extending, and replacing it.
Adding more cars only makes the existing challenges worse, and accelerates infrastructure aging due to increased wear-and-tear. Those added cars also means increased congestion, and we have decades of solid empirical evidence to show that increasing capacity through road widening only creates induced demand. You literally cannot build your way out of congestion.
The mess that defines California's HSR project is an international embarrassment. We need to fix the legal and institutional roadblocks that have helped its costs balloon and schedule disintegrate, because the alternatives are terrible.
0. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastr...
Based on a model y being 187"
So that’s 700k * 2 trips * 365 days = 511 million rides annually. Even more if people bring passengers.
This is interesting. An extremely powerful politician taking a stance against a project that would bring pork to his own district. The project must be indeed quite awful.
The other thing the press is incapable of is putting the project into context. The context is that Catrans has a $22b budget per year to build freeways, and unlike Caltrans CAHSR has a business plan, ridership projections, and so forth. $100b on a statewide high-speed rail is a much, much better use of my money than any Caltrans project in my lifetime.
I get out and use Caltrans-maintained roads every single day of my life, but have a need to go to LA maybe once a year tops, so would really have to disagree with this. That is, if this train ever gets past Bakersfield, which i think is not even planned anymore?
If it’s $100b or nothing I’ll take the $100b but it seems like we could probably have paid less. At these costs it makes HSR a hard sell in the rest of the country except the NoVa-Boston corridor
This rail line has been proposed since 1949 in various forms with public support, and to kill this better option because people keep putting up roadblocks is a waste of resources larger than can be justified but still lesser than what goes into maintaining the rat's nest of highways.