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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central Valley would have to wait for branches to be built.

SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.

Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.

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this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.

Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.

Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)

The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.

Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.

The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership.

The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)

Cars employ more people.

A lot of the opposition you hear from EVs comes from the fact that they require less maintenance and upkeep and so they employ fewer people.

Make-work is not a virtue - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window . People want transportation, not necessarily cars.

Cars also contribute to an immense amount of misery in society - the financial burden, being stuck in traffic, road expansions demolishing houses, noise and pollution, injuries.

I wasn't saying it was good, just pointing out a reason politicians support them. Jobs and tax base gets politicians elected.

A lot of being "car brained" is because even the best transit sucks compared to a Taxi.

People objectively don't want to share space with the masses. Even in Singapore or Japan, the stress of being in crowds is simply not worth it. Its slower, requires far more mental energy to plan your route, and requires a lot of physical movement which is hard for fatass americans.

Especially when America has quite cheap, awesomely fast and fun cars (your local C8 Corvette can be had for 15% off MSRP from the factory right now).

Cars are freedom. Mass transit is biopolitics/biopower. Big ass off road capable trucks literally don't even need roads.

If gasoline was sold for a fair price, cars would be reduced to a novelty within a generation

Is it so wrong that we elect politicians to preserve our desired lifestyle?

The amount of conversation around this is testament it's not everyone's desired lifestyle.

You should go to the third world and see how much cheaper gas is there.

A lot of third world countries exist almost entierly off of gas subsidies from the government. Go look at what Libyans paid per liter of gas during the Gadaffi years.

Americans already pay a "fair price". No, no one in the world properly accounts for "externalities" of consumption.

How does 'stress of being in crowds' in big cities indicate all those people would prefer to drive? Is stuck in traffic not the 'stress of being in crowds'?

The stress of 2 ton machines flying around at 120 km/hr and operated by the angry and impatient-- that is simply not worth it. You think automated trains with 2 minute headways in a network covering 85% of local journeys at $3/ride would be worse than a Taxi at $1/minute with traffic?!!

A lot of being "car brained" is not realizing that even decent transit by global standards would be far far better than the subsidized freeway only-if-you-can-drive $8,000/year horrorshow of the US/Canada. No one's going to take away your fun cars, but a system maximizing freedom needs to account for the young, old, disabled, drunk, poor, and motivated to read instead of drive. Mass transit is freedom. Cars are consumption-politics/corporate-power.

>requires more mental energy to plan your route

It’s unarguable that driving requires more mental energy. Which is exactly why we have licensing, sobriety requirements, age floors and limits, etc.

Route planning itself is a mostly solved problem for an average pedestrian in any developed city. You type in your destination in maps and go.

Cars are only freedom to able bodied people of a certain financial means and age. Or when you live rurally. To everyone else in a city, they make it harder to get around.

I’m sorry I don’t really see the problem with this, connecting Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec city seems like a pretty reasonable route

The problem is it doesn't get built.

Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."

But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.

Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.

A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.

At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route.

Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.

That will come round again in the future.

> passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.

Roads generally don't pay for themselves

I know this is super late and nobody will likely see it, but the population of Quebec + Ottawa together is 18% of the population of Montreal + Toronto.

And the amount of track to connect the 4 cities together is double the simple Montreal-Toronto route -- on paper. In reality it's much larger, because most of the track along the Montreal-Toronto corridor is useable for HSR, but the proposed Ottawa-Toronto stretch is the one that needs a lot of new track.

There already are trains connecting to all of these cities, so HSR would still benefit people trying to get from, say, Toronto to Quebec City (the current rail service has a ~30 min stop in Montreal anyway, a transfer wouldn't add any real delay in that respect, and you'd cut down several hours of the journey with HSR service for the first leg). I'm simply saying that it would be great to just lay the damn track for HSR between the two largest Canadian cities, and deal with the smaller ones down the road.

Spending money on projects that never get built is the kind of job that never ends.

Great for former government employees who want to be a consultant.

No one is accountable for the waste so politicians can just promise to spend more next time.

I was surprised to find out it was going the Peterborough route. Didn't make a lot of sense.

This is every attempt to improve a software project in a corporation ever… Small QoL fix gets pushed off because “the big rewrite work will fix it anyway” and five years later the small fix still hasn’t been done.

SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018.

Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF#Modern_era

This is discussed in the article.

That’s why we are discussing it here.

yeah and the author of the article totally misses the point

I had a chuckle at these two subsequent paragraphs.

> One regular snipe is that it’s “easier to build rail in Morocco than in California.”

> Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.

So, uh... it is easier to build rail in Morocco than in California. And California is part of the cause. It's not even a "snipe", it's just the truth.

In my region (Latin America) when a "boondoggle" of such high monetary cost happens, we call it for what it usually is— corruption.

All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.

Yeah it happens a lot here as well. It goes into contractors pocket who dig/drill/build -> stop -> dig/drill/build -> stop and get their $$ on partially completed work and milk the system for all it will give them. Quite often they are friends/relatives of the politicians.

Well, in this case, the problem is more so that money wasn’t spent on large swaths of the project.

Idk about Canada, but what you usually see in the UK is that tens of millions of pounds get spend before a single brick is laid.

Money disappears into consultations, reviews, studies and reports of dubious value, the paperwork keeps piling up and it takes years before the public sees anything tangible, if the project ever gets built at all.

Someone somewhere is getting very rich off this, but it ain't the taxpayer.

Tens of millions?

£1.2 BILLION before a single spade in the ground for the lower thames crossing

https://www.ft.com/content/917d4b7f-318e-46fe-ba44-664551ebc...

The planning document alone was 350,000 pages long, and cost about £1000 per page (£350m).

What western countries lack is someone empowered enough to just say "fuck it, make it happen", and be held accountable once it's built.

How did France and Spain build their high speed rail?

I would guess less institutionalised corruption and less weight put on planning objections.

The term in the 20th century was honest graft.

Here in the EU, we usually consider Italy and Spain somewhat more corrupt than the Western average, but high-speed rail in both countries got built reliably and without major delays.

Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.

I wonder if low level corruption on €1m projects means there's no room in the market for high level corruption.

California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systematic underbidding + cost overruns is the rule, and is expected by all parties except the naive public.

Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted", 'Cheems mindset' failures of liberalism, and high-pressure demands from a federal government whose legislators are eager to sabotage projects outside of purple states.

https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo

Here in the UK all Gov tenders are on a combination of price and quality - typically 40-60% quality. If you want a long term relationship as a Gov supplier, you need to demonstrate quality and bid the pricing fairly, without chronic underpinning.

Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

> likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded

Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera.)

> Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent...

...only literally anything else!

That money did literally improve urban metro and regional rail–Caltrain electrification came out of it.

> That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail.

CA HSR was the political lever to get funding to improve urban metro and regional rail, so, in a sense, the money was spent doing that.

Did it have to be funded by a proposition? Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?

Tax increases and bond measures have to go through the voters. The alternative is to get enough of the legislature, including probably some in Central Valley, to agree to cut a bunch of other more popular programs in order to fund it out of the general fund.

What does California do with all its income?

Same shit. Different State. Maybe a little extra compared to a Red State or a smaller State, and on a larger scale. You can dig into it here: https://ebudget.ca.gov/

Props 13 and 8.

Highly recommend Paradise Lost by Peter Schrag. Raising revenue requires supermajority voter approval in most cases. A huge chunk of the budget is already allocated by voter mandates and the legislature fights over the scraps.

I dug into this a bit since these comments were just confusing, but apparently Prop 13 required tax increases to get a 2/3 majority of the legislature.

So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.

Correct. What is the point of having a representative government with a legislature if you just forcibly remove the lynchpin of power for that type of government?

That's the point. Props 13 and 8 were part of the republican anti-government movement often memorialized by Norquist's remark about making government small enough to drown.

The motivations and rhetoric are before my time. What’s leftover is just this stupid counterproductive set of laws undermining the legislature’s ability to legislate.

> Did it have to be funded by a proposition?

Yes.

> Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?

To fund a long-term capital project? No, for a number of reasons. First, at that time, the CA legislature couldn't practically fund anything reliably (budget process is Constitutionally mandated to be annual, and at that time required a 2/3 supermajority to pass, which caused regular budget crises.) Second, and more importantly, structurally, to fund major capital projects, debt financing is required, and California cannot, Constitutionally, issue bonds without voter approval. Prop 1A was a legislative initiative amendment -- that is, the legislature had to pass a bill to put it on the ballot -- to secure that approval.

As the article points out, the difference in cost between these two routes is pretty small in the grand scheme of things; more than two-thirds of the costs associated with the project are at either end getting in and out of Los Angeles/the SF Bay Area. On the other hand, as the author points out, building the route through the Central Valley population centers has a number of advantages (political support, having a useful rail line before the entire project is complete, etc. etc.)

If you use google maps to find the distance between Los Banos and Tehachapi. Via I5 is 210 miles. Via HWY99 is 223 miles. So a 13 mile difference. That's 5-7 minutes at high speed rail speeds.

And you are right the extra cost is minimal. It's probably $10-15 billion.

My thought about the grade separation costs and my beef is. One is those grade separation projects need to be done anyways. The beef is why is the high speed rail project paying for road infrastructure. That should come out of gas taxes or something.

Even if you insist on going through the cities in the valley they chose a construction sequence that takes the longest time to show any process. If they fast tracked LA-Bakersfield they could have extended the Amtrak San Joaquin service to LA by now. Concentrat on the SF-Merced section next and then you can work on the Merced-Bakersfield piece meal.

I thought they were unclear if LA-Bakerfield is even possible.

My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the monkey there is no point in making the music box (something you know can be made).

Her point was people delude themselves into thinking they're making progress on a project by starting with the easy stuff. But the easy stuff is pointless if the hard stuff is impossible.

She gave the example of the California high-speed rail. They're building the flat easy part first but engineers have not figured out how they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains. Until they've figured that out the flat part is a waste of time and a false example of progress.

Unless, of course, the flat easy part has value anyway.

note: I'm not arguing whether it does or does not.

But neither would have to be the first step.

Making the route from San Diego to LA high-speed is perfectly doable (the route exists already), and would be a great stepping stone.

Even if it turns out the Tehachapi is basically the mountains of Mordor and the project ends, you'd still have a valuable high-speed corridor.

You'd think. But efforts long underway to incrementally improve the SD-LA section are now caught in a deep mire of NIMBYism:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/new-study-...

These people are objecting to…a train running under them? Why?

Because of disruption during drilling, apparently, but mostly because they’re rich and can complain.

Depending on the depth of the tunnel and the construction of the structure, you can get vibrations through the ground and foundations of the structure transmitted such that they are noticeable.

e.g. If you live above a tube line in London (London Underground) then you may hear/feel rumbling every time a train passes under you.

The Basque Y high speed rail project in Spain, currently being built, goes through some very challenging mountainous terrain.

If Spain, with 33 500 USD GDP per capita, can do it, then so should California, whose GDP per capita exceeds 100 000 USD.

But yeah, better private sector does not necessarily buy better public sector.

"they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains."

OMG, just join the I-5 after Bakersfield. It's right there. Why are we barreling through the mountains?

You mean the train? I don't think they do well with steep grades [1].

[1] https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/23106/what-d...

Depends on how steep. 4% is no problem for modern traction.

Just look at this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wiedtalbrücke_Blickricht...

which is used at 300kph by electric multiple units like the german Inter City Expres.

I've rode over this at about 330kph shortly after opening, it's slightly noticable, but not like a roller-coaster at all, as one might think.

Meanwhile this is also used by more conventional electrical engines for passenger trains up to 250kph, also in 'pusher' mode,

and short freight trains, no longer than 700m, at anything between 160 to 200kph during nights.

According to Wikipedia 'the Bakersfield–Palmdale section of the line will cross Tehachapi Pass, roughly parallelling the Union Pacific Railroad's Mojave Subdivision. Due to its heavy freight traffic and sharp curves (including the famous Tehachapi Loop), there is no current passenger service through the pass. While the proposed high-speed rail alignment will not include any long tunnels comparable to those in Pacheco Pass, it has nine shorter tunnels and several viaducts more than 200 feet (61 m) high. The maximum grade through the pass would be - 2.8 - percent, making it the steepest portion of the Phase 1 route.'

Easy peasy.

Edit: TL;DR? All of this is explained here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline_West

Okay, but the I-5 doesn't bother with loops and tunnels. It just barrels right over the top of the mountains, including a 5-mile section of 6% grade according to the sign (https://www.crashforensics.com/tejonpass.cfm). Trucks struggle to crawl over the top at like 30 mph, with tires. It's not exactly a roller coaster hill to be overcome with inertia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro#Velaro_Novo

They have distributed traction, meaning powered bogies in every second wagon for the current variants. There is no 'engine/locomotive' in the classical sense. All of these also have electronic anti-slip/traction control.

Edit: Even if a quarter of the powered bogies are defect for whichever reason, the remaining ones still suffice to accelerate from full stop at 4% grade. By design. For current variants. It's a variable platform. They could use more powered bogies. Stronger motors. Whatever.

After living in California for a while and observing its urban planning culture more up close, I came away with the distinct impression that this is all by design.

California is owned by boomer homeowners, real estate speculators, and the auto industry, and the first commandment of all California planning is "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 1972." In the event that the first commandment fails, the second is "make anything new as expensive as possible so there's as much potential for graft as possible, and so existing home values aren't threatened."

Maybe things will change when there's a generational transition, but unfortunately it may just pass power on to the SV neoreactionary VC set who will proceed to implement their own different set of bizarre schemes that don't work like planned charter cities in the middle of nowhere. Or they might just turn into fuddy-duddies in their old age and change it to "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 2003 when I moved here and got rich."

California is the fourth largest economy, so clearly something is working, but I don't think California's urban planning culture is it. Places, companies, and people can all be extremely successful in spite of massive dysfunction.

- plan is presented

- (the many) stakeholders issue critiques

- new plan is presented that includes all the worst elements of said stakeholders but achieves unity across teams

- stakeholders toast and have an expensive dinner at achievement of unified plan

This is not a California or public sector thing, it's applies across all big organisations.

Not sure what specifically is “california” about this - There is very little support from either side of the aisle in continuing this project, which of course, the article states because it is an unavoidable truth. The criticisms offered by both sides are valid and the few proponents that still hold water for this dismiss these arguments with very bad or incomplete reasoning as written here.

For instance, brushing over the “possible original sin” of the project was way underestimating cost. Yea, no shit, that’s like 95% of the problem voters have with it, that and how long it’s taken with very little usable progress. Author spends very little time on this.

It later says that taking the more direct route along the I-5, and then connecting the bypassed areas with branch/stub lines would lead to the same costs.

But by then 25M would have access to the main trunk of the train generating massive revenues. That's the point.

Holding up 25M people to try and include 1M more while bloating costs and showing no progress is the essence of how you kill a project.

> But by then 25M would have access to the main trunk of the train generating massive revenues.

No, they wouldn't. Because Prop 1A funds are a tiny drop in the system funding requirements, and choosing the I-5 alignment would not have sped up any of the issues that make the things around the termini more time consuming, and not having a ready-to-work initial construction segment that actually formed part of an initial operating segment that actually connects populated areas (even if they are much smaller than the termini) would have meant no federal ARRA funding (not to mention the weaker in-state political support), so what actually would have happened is that the project would take longer and, in the year-of-expenditure way CA HSR costs are always estimated and quoted, cost much more before anything got built or operational.

The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.

California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to name them. At the same time, it should've been completely federally funded.

If you don't try and reinvent everything, you can get economies of scale by doing what the rest of the world is already doing.

Washington state decided to have light rail. But instead of using off-the-shelf rail cars, they just had to have them "custom designed" for the Pacific Northwest. Nobody was ever able to identify what about the PNW needed custom rail cars, but they sure cost a lot!

Light rail is almost always some sort of bespoke system.

The only light rail operating in Washington State is LINK Light Rail, which Sound Transit operates using Siemens Mobility’s S700 model (although some older train sets are still used on the same tracks).

Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe, too. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70

From what I can tell, these train sets are as off-the-shelf as can be reasonably expected, although apparently LINK has ordered their trains to run on 1500 volts as that’s what their catenaries use. Perhaps you’re thinking of BART?

-An occasional S700 passenger

No, I am thinking the Sound Transit light rail. I wouldn't be surprised if they canceled the "design for the PNW" cars and bought off the shelf ones.

Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.

Sound Transit operates LINK (what gp was talking about) and Sounder (not light rail, operates on BNSF tracks, coaches are made by Bombardier and seem to be in use by many commuter rail systems). Not sure what you're referring to.

The train that runs from downtown to Seatac.

That's LINK light rail, operated by Sound Transit. Here's an article about the (new) cars they use: https://www.soundtransit.org/blog/platform/new-link-light-ra... -- I get the impression all light rail cars in general are made to order per specifications, rather than off-the-shelf.

All light rail cars are custom in the same way that every airplane is custom but we wouldn’t say that a 737 is expensive because of the seat and entertainment choices.

Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge. Although I did read a report saying they did it to make the trains both lighter and also able to withstand wind shear in certain parts of the system.

To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway

  Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge

Mainline BART. e-BART uses standard gauge diesel trains and the half billion dollar Oakland Airport shuttle is a completely bespoke cable car monstrosity.

  withstand wind shear

Specifically on the Golden Gate Bridge. Which may or may not be true. The track gauge is perhaps the most standard thing about BART cars.

> Specifically on the Golden Gate Bridge

BART never operated on the Golden Gate Bridge (or any of the other Bay Area bridges).

> The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.

What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, followed by a sparsely populated mountain range and then a very large amount of farmland.

The nearest city to California with more than a million people is Phoenix, AZ which is "only" a couple hours from the California border. The next nearest is San Antonio, TX. The distance between Phoenix and San Antonio is about a thousand miles. Neither of those cities themselves have a functional mass transit system for anyone to use even if you put a rail stop there.

California itself constitutes more than half the population of the entire western US, which is otherwise enormous with a very low population density. It doesn't make sense to put high speed rail anywhere in the western US outside of California because there aren't enough people there to use it.

Partially correct. A private group is building high speed rail to connect Vegas to the Inland Empire. Construction has started and expected to be complete in 2028.

https://www.dot.nv.gov/projects-programs/transportation-proj...

https://www.brightlinewest/

Las Vegas is basically on the California border and exists mainly because it's on the California border, so all the people in Southern California can go to the place where gambling is legal. It's an outlier that both doesn't get you a national high speed rail network and evidently doesn't require federal involvement to happen regardless.

When referring to scale they probably meant resources and planning, not actually connecting all the projects.

It's cheaper to make more of stuff, even if it's not in the same place

The federal government isn't going to make the stuff. They'd just buy it from the existing companies that make rolling stock etc., as could any state government in the same way.

It's reflective of the imbalance of political power in the state and the corruption this power base now suborns. They don't care about the rail project. They're the least likely people to need or use it. They either want it to not happen or if it does at least it provides them with ample opportunities for creating further graft and corruption.

It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.

If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/J15pDPG

>It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why.

Because the biggest threat to any rail project in Cali is political protest and "environmental" lawsuits ("this construction will destroy my view of the landscape!") and the second biggest threat is being forced to buy land from a bunch of people who've had years to collude in only offering ludicrously high prices.

Any sensible project will do its level best to avoid any developed rural land; it's the only way to avoid the massive delays and cost overruns you're complaining about. And besides, once it's built, the land around it will be developed because of the HSR line itself.

>should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide.

With Congress Gridlocked over issues that really should he bipartisan, it'd unironically take less time for the States to figure it out instead.

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