Work Begins on California Bullet Train, Locals Angry
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
By comparison, it took about 7 years in the mid 19th century to build the nearly-2000-mile First Transcontinental Railroad [0].
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad
The principle challenges of California's HSR project are that it does connect and pass through developed areas.
In the case of the French and German HSR projects, development times from inception to first lines being opened were on the order of 10-15 years, and this in countries with large extant conventional passenger rail networks.
In the case of the US, passenger rail has been relegated to second-citizen status on the nation's freight railroad network (itself world class). HSR necessitates additional rights of way, and securing the land for this is in fact a major factor in development. This article and your response actually highlight the problem: small but focused individual increments of pain vs. large (but individually smaller) social benefits. It's a classic instance of the Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson):
It's amazing what you can do when a) the government grants you the land [1]), b) you can exploit a class of workers [2], and c) (as pointed out by dredmorbius) you don't have to worry about appeasing existing property owners.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts
[2] According to http://cprr.org/Museum/FAQs.html#Died 100-150 Chinese workers died constructing the 1907-mile transcontinental railroad which corresponds to 12-19 worker deaths per mile. The CA HSR project is 800 miles in length, at TCRR fatality rate, CA HSR would be expected to lose 42 to 67 workers during the life of construction which would not be tolerated. There are also inequities in pay, etc to consider. I couldn't find non-fatal injury numbers
This misses the point that a trans-continenatl railroad was <actually a good idea>. It was the latter point that allowed for the footnotes in your snark answer to even be relevant. A train from 2 hours outside LA to 2 hours outside SF is not doing any CA taxpayers any favours, regardless of its speed. [1]
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/St...
Good think no one (who isn't named "Elon Musk" that is) is talking about building a high-speed transportation system that doesn't go into the heart of SF or LA.
As for what you refer to as "snark" - it's the cold reality of capital projects in the modern age. Governments and companies can't just ram projects through the countryside with little regard to abutters the environment, and workers as they did in the olden days. There are welfare and environmental requirements that must be met and they tend to slow things down. That's reality.
Look at London's linnk to pairs with Eurotunnel. That is a successful HSR because it drops into Waterloo. If it dropped into Heathrow/Gatwick/Cambridge or something else two hours away, it wouldn't be nearly as useful. It would be a more interesting project to see an HSR from Berkeley to Palo Alto or SF to Monterey, or something that actualy opened up new areas to one another. Right now the Bay Area is hamstrung by these types of regional bottlenecks, which the HSR is not going to solve.
I don't disagree with you on the fact that these bottlenecks exist for the reasons your mention. But that is also my point: there is no consensus on them, so special interests are able to leverage legitimate differences of opinion. The eralier example of trans-continental was exactly the opposite. The consesnsus and political will was so strong, all barriers were basically steamrolled out of the way (legal, ethical, etc).
I watched an immensely useful project in my own town get hosed the same way--light rail expansion running east-west along the north side of the inner loop in Houston (along Richmond). The fact that a few shop owners bitched enough caused the thing to be put on hold, and thus a few SMBs fucked it up for the 4th largest city in the US.
Similarly, major road repairs take so long because they can't just shut down a road and fix it all in one fell swoop--they instead have to carefully start and stop work in little stubby sections, and deal with the overhead (and danger!) of angry drivers zooming by work sites.
Guess what? These happy little SMBs? They don't understand or care about civic matters, and will gleefully fuck over everyone else in their city to try and make an extra few bucks. Fuck. Them.
Europe has been well linked by rail for how long now? Com on USA, it's time to catch up.
1) There's absolutely nothing train specific. My elderly grandmother's house was in the line of fire for a state highway redesign for about a decade, until they FINALLY decided on a route that didn't pass thru her house. Although the article only calls out delays in train construction its more of a generic "DOT is slow" story. I'm quite sure if they were building irrigation canals or dirt roads they'd still cause confusion and delay for a good part of a decade. There is probably a startup idea revolving around investing... Informally people know the DOT overpays so there were offers to pay 20% over prevailing prices on the goal of making instant 20% profit if the DOT selected that route... diversification, etc. There should be some way to create a REIT or social network or matching service for people who like to speculate like this. I don't think thehousingbubbleblog.com is quite the real estate social network they're looking for LOL, although it would probably be extremely informative for them.
2) The article claims its necessary because of a population of 46 million. Why does a population need transit, if they don't have jobs? Luckily the project will create hundreds of temp jobs. I'm sure that will be wonderful for increasing sales of $1M houses. I'm not sure the optimism is well placed. The big city I live in built a rather elaborate interstate freeway spur in the 50s to handle the obvious massive growth predicted, just in time for white flight to cut city population by about 25%, and recently was unable to afford to simply maintain the spur so they got fed funds to demolish it and replace with surface roads, the PR campaign was all "new urbanism" BS but fundamentally they were too poor after decline to maintain it. Its kind of an empty slum area about a decade after the demolition. The point of this anecdote is to point out that investing enormous amounts of money using a "build it and they will come" strategy is not necessarily wise. With startups you can scale in the cloud, doesn't work so well with real estate. In 1970 high speed rail in CA would have been brilliant before all the growth... now that the peak is past and decline has started, why build for growth now? Put that train track in Austin, or Colorado, or Madison, or ... well pretty much anywhere else? The startup lesson here is obvious, if dogfood delivery over the internet was the place to be in early 2000, in 2013 finally getting around to building your dream dog food delivery website isn't exactly forward thinking.
3) Depending on local levels of corruption, the only story you can tell about eminent domain is moral / ethical or implications of corruption, because the DOT usually reimburses people locally about 50% above prevailing prices usually with a secrecy clause. I've met several people who have done very well financially via eminent domain. The whiny restaurateurs in the article must rent their space... A 150% offer windfall in a field where biz failure is the norm is not to be ignored. I believe this is the "startup" connection, where if someone offers you millions or billions for something worth far less, you'd be an idiot not to take the deal or to complain about it.