California high-speed rail price tag jumps to $231B, nearly 7x 2008 estimate
kmph.com
kmph.com
The hope is that the high speed rail would allow way more trips between the two cities, as well as the central valley cities in between, bolstering the economy, compared to the current amount of flights. I will keep my fingers crossed for the next 30 years.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...
The $20 I spend on feeding myself a healthy dinner could buy 10 sundaes at McDonald's, that doesn't mean I should eat 10 sundaes.
Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
I agree. Flights would also be much faster and more flexible.
You also can't be productive on a flight packed in like sardines and being required to put away your laptop for for a large portion of the flight time.
From an engineering and planning perspective HSR makes sense anyway you look at it. The problem is our inability to build major infrastructure projects. Even highway construction and expansion in these regions is becoming absurdly expensive, along with all other forms of development. Completely independent from HSR, we need to fix our regulatory policies. The ballooning price tag for CAHSR shouldn't inspire ire against HSR, it should inspire ire against our regulatory policies and governance.
That analysis may be biased, but it does a decent job sketching out how to compare modes and capacities. Also, regulatory obstruction and cost inflation apply just as much to airport and highway expansion as it does to HSR. In some ways it's much worse. SFO should build a new runway, and it'd be incredibly cost effective, but NIMBY opposition was so intense SFO repudiated the idea years ago and dare not even speak of it, now.
It gives number for how much airport (gates and runways) and highway expansion would be needed to meet future demands without the HSR. And it does so apportioning traffic across the 3 major Bay Area airports and 5 LA airports.
The OAK situation only drives home the point. It's not as convenient, at least relative to the segment of people flying. Location matters. If you want to optimally utilize existing airports, we need more infrastructure, including better mass transit systems. OAK is connected to BaRT, but it's yet another transfer with about an extra 15 minutes of travel time, not including walking through the stations. And BaRT itself isn't an effective mass transit system; it's more commuter train than subway.
I'm traveling to LA next month from SF and still haven't decided whether to fly or drive. With CAHSR point-to-point the decision would be easier--take the train and rent a car.
As for getting a birth certificate, I googled how to get a birth certificate from XX state, followed the directions, and got a birth certificate in the mail.
Spoken like a true software engineer
Besides, WONTFIX are for problems that are not worth fixing. INVALID are for irreproducible problems.
Given California's extreme susceptibility to climate related disasters, avoiding flights is a great idea.
Never seeing a good public transport project everyone assumes that it’s not possible. It is possible when the goal is to provide transportation services, not resource extraction from masses to limited (in the grand scheme of things) number of individuals.
Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.
You also can’t power planes with renewables like solar.
It's a question of what gets the most bang for the buck. Suppose you spent $230 billion on replacing fossil fuel with renewables for electricity generation, on switching to EVs from gasoline powered cars, on insulating houses? I think you get a lot more bang for the buck from these or lots of other activities.
In the end we’re working for creating a form of transportation that could move people from point A to point B. However, everything from land use to infrastructure development costs a lot of money and nobody has any reason to lower their prices either.
I bet a brand new fully sustainable city could be created with that amount of money. But nimby will make it impossible, because (I believe) it’s about resource extraction and not service delivery.
Don’t forget unions. The big large union networks (like SEIU, teachers unions, etc) corrupt politics but also benefit from that corruption.
At some point the state has to say, "our requirements are making it insanely expensive. We need to consider a different route, or a lower speed."
China builds high speed rail at half the cost of the US.
European countries of comparable size and GDP to California do not experience own-goals of this magnitude.
The state in China, is competent.
A better route can lower costs, but there are places in the world that build on much worse land for less.
Lower speed is unlikely to change anything, you can have a few sharper corners, but nothing that is a big deal. Meanwhile lower speed makes this much less useful vs flying. (and starts to make driving competitive - at least you have your car when you get there)
CA (and the US) has issues, and I don't know what they are. Every time someone suggests something they feel like a drop in the bucket, and all the different drops don't add up to much.
It has nothing (or very very little) to do with how difficult the terrain is to navigate, it has everything to do with who owns the land, and how much they want to charge for it.
Often these "owners" only purchase the land once informed that it is a potential high speed rail route.
It sounds like CA needs some eminent domain reform. I don't live there, so I don't know (and don't are to look up) the law. In the US in general the constitution requires a fair price, if someone bought land we have evidence of the fair price. My general advice (though often not allowed by law) is that you should pay 10% more than fair if they sell now, but if they go to court we only pay fair price (thus if you disagree with the fair price by 5% you should sell now anyway)
Oh, never mind, that's obviously not going to happen...
The Why Nations Fail book pointed out this exact issue that institutions that doesn’t serve the people’s interests is the main culprit.
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
San Diego to San Fransisco
The state representative from San Diego was the original proposer of the high speed rail (after returning from Japan of course).
Once the crime and graft roulette wheel went into action, San Diego was almost immediately removed from "the route".
Not sure if you’ve read Abundance. But the basic idea is that rich, developed countries have onerous processes in place to satisfy many needs, which is antithetical to building stuff.
For example, CA requires strict analysis and studies. CA has myriad legislation to protect private property. It has restrictions on what can be purchased, from whom, and from whence labor can be sourced. Together, this vast web of limitations makes big projects like HSR extremely expensive and unwieldy.
It’s not that the scope or ambition of the project is a problem in itself. It’s that the mega project comes along with many requirements aside from just building it.
Effectively, CA is working at cross-purpose.
The resolution is actually very simple. You just exempt your mega-project from all the legislation constraining it.
If CA wanted to they could simply change the law. Skip labor-sourcing laws, skip community feedback, skip permitting and approval (aside from safety), skip domestic parts requirements, and apply eminent domain with no feedback process.
We don’t do that for political reasons. This isn’t a technical problem
We don't do that because of all the reasons those laws were put into place.
Like half of these ballooning budgets are things that Private Businesses brag about on the other side. "I got a $200B Private contract with the CA Gov't." Is a big win for the company, and a big loss for the taxpayer. To some extent I think CA should be able to reclaim a large portion of their contract (in some way) because costs ballooned.
The same for Military contractors. There needs to be better enforcement of "this is the budget that you bid, we won't increase that, and you still have to deliver."
Imagine if companies ended up having to sell part of their company to the gov't if they failed to deliver their contract.
Spain has so far spent about 60 billion Eur on its (much more extensive) HSR network. It has a lot of harsh terrain as well, crossing mountains and semi-deserts.
There are functional HSRs in Morocco and Uzbekistan, Egypt is building its first own HSR.
What's wrong with Californian governance?
Polish environmental law is quite notorious for being deliberately easy on developers (at least outside national parks), which translates into a lot of construction activity.
OTOH Californian CEQA is such a NIMBY/BANANA weapon of mass anti-construction that I have heard of it, despite being located a third of a world away.
Both sound like intent.
All you need is a few people who don't like it for any reason whatsoever and the other 99.99% of people who want it ... They no longer get a voice.
Only the blockers, the nimbys, the ideological naysayers, they get all the power - the podium, the press, and the ear of the court.
The yes people have effectively Zero political power
That's the American difference: we grant whiners sainthood
[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/europe8an-gian8t-be...
But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).
Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.
But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.
Europe and Japan are much more regulated than the US, and yet, they build rail just fine over there.
The US can't build anything efficiently. It's due to the massive mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense, environmental review, permitting and NIMBY lawsuits.
The real conspiracy is that "they" never wanted a train, "they" wanted an endless jobs project.
This is the only actual difference between the US and other places
Take Los Angeles, the Santa Monica train slows down around a stop called farmdale because some whiner ran a bogus fear mongering campaign in 2011. I was at those meetings nobody liked this guy.
15 years later every trip, every day is still delayed because of this one man's stupid bitchfest
For the $231B you ought to be able to get 2-3000 miles of tunnel done (3x what is proposed on the surface). Of course the stations are still a huge cost, because those have to be above ground, but you could choose where to put them. The bridges and aqueducts that have been built so far (Bakersfield to Merced) are intentionally where land costs are low and no one will ride them.
I agree, this isn't about figuring out how to build high-speed rail for riders. This is about figuring out how to extract maximum funds from tax/rate payers. It's just like PG&E. I'd go as far as to say that all the consultants and construction companies that have been paid should be banned from future public infrastructure builds unless the money spent is paid back.
And I WANT highspeed rail.
I see a lot of speculation over how "it's expensive because of X" (e.g., unions, land owners, regulations, etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a detailed breakdown of the estimated costs which would support anyone's hypotheses as to why it's actually as expensive as it is.
For all I know, the high-speed rail project is going to cost $231B because it calls for using osmium rails in its tracks.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...
Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.
It basically had zero impact outside of the City of Boston.
(And it should have been spent on demolishing that highway, not burying it and not replacing it, then expanding regional rail and transit connectivity in the Boston metropolitan area.)
Or perhaps we should bring up military spending: https://irancost.com/
But you can't just get rid of 93
The idea that highways must cut through the city, especially one as geographically small as Boston, has been thoroughly debunked.
Is the rail made out of gold?
>Under current projections, assuming funding and construction proceed as planned, service between San Francisco and Bakersfield could begin around 2033, while the full Los Angeles to San Francisco connection could extend to 2040.
Brilliant stuff.
I predict the rail will never happen and only more and more money going "somewhere".
I don't think any profit-driven company would touch this. It's a massive money loser.
I’m not a railway engineer, but encrusting the tracks with “pillow cut” diamonds from “actual pirate hoards” seems like a security risk. And pirate hoards are only more rare over time.
California isn’t the only state with this problem though. Oregon and Washington and New York are just as bad. And the big cities in these states have the same problems at the city level.
How long can they go before they can no longer raise debt to do things?
I ride BART and Caltrain multiple times a week. Trains are delightful. And so are planes.
It typically costs about $100, and takes an hour to fly from SF to LA. The train will be slower and almost certainly more expensive. Where is the benefit?
Long distance trains work in Europe because they are supported by a rich network of public transit options stemming from city centers, and a population that uses transit frequently.
But California public transit is a mess. When you rock up at LA Union Central and want to get out to say, Newport Beach, it's another three hours of navigating buses and the metrolink.
The money would have been far better spent integrating agencies and building out high speed rail in our urban areas. BART should be running out to Sacto, Stockton, Silicon Valley, and Marin. Requisition the Amtrak line and build a highspeed rail from San Diego to Santa Barbara - now that'd be something.
But the main benefit will come from massive secondary economic growth. Cities along the line will experience dramatic increases in demand and economic activity. Cities at the terminus will have a massively increased share of workers in the commute threshold.
Further, the HSR line serves as a backbone for future lines, tying the state together.
The plan is very good on paper. It’s getting creamed in implementation because CA is not politically aligned on this project. Half the state doesn’t want it to succeed at all.
If you don't live in California, the lesson to take away here is to figure out what the transportation departments and highway lobby did to secure the space needed for highways, and copy those tactics, not to look at California's failure and believe that extrapolates to your state or area.
In Central Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to fund bus transit and dedicated lanes in high-density corridors in Columbus. Now the project is already being set back perhaps as long as a year and a half, because the Ohio Department of Transportation is concerned car traffic may be negatively affected and wants a new traffic study. Huge waste of time, the exact kind of thing you would have wanted a DOGE in its most idealized form to nuke. You have to imagine these kinds of tactics x1000 because once California and others see the success of rail the jobs programs that are most state DOTs are going to be in serious trouble.
We'll get there, it's just going to be a long battle against entrenched lobbying and special interest groups (highway departments, construction companies, auto manufacturers, &c.) which need to profit off of your requirement to have a car to participate in society.
By the way, I'm not "against" cars or anything. Have one and love it. But the primary mode of transportation in our more dense areas has to change.
Something about blue states make progress on basic things costly, time consuming, and difficult. Every stakeholder needs their say. Any NIMBY can veto. The loudest, most obnoxious snowflakes dominate public comment. And officials don’t tell them to STFU.
And I don’t see a lot of appetite for soul searching in these states. Just “let’s raise taxes”
You don’t have to convince me we have a broken society where the oligarchs have too much power+wealth. But I’m also not willing to pay more taxes without blue states removing veto points on these projects so can’t easily be derailed by every dumb special interest.
We’re all paying more so loudest amongst can derail and shape progress on important issues.
I wouldn't cite that as a success story, Brightline is going bankrupt: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark sarcasm"
This rail would displace a huge amount of air travel, thus, it's not "viable" in terms of airline industry losses...
NOTE: The above sentence is referred to as "dark reality"