California's $68 Billion Bullet Train Project Faces Major Hurdles (latimes.com) 342
New submitter willworkforbeer writes: The proposed US$68B high speed rail project in California faces extraordinary hurdles, both in terms of budget and timeframe. Even Einstein (no, not that one; Herbert Einstein, an MIT civil engineer and top tunneling expert) says the schedule is probably not possible. "Having looked at a number of these long tunnels, [the California] plan is aggressive," said Einstein, who has consulted on a 35-mile-long tunnel under the Swiss Alps. "From a civil engineering perspective it is very, very ambitious — to put it mildly."
New York's 11-mile East Side Access tunnel project is 14 years late and about 2.5x its original budget. If California's 72 miles of tunnels (twin tunnels of 36 miles) go like New York's, that would be over US$160B spent, with an opening date sometime in the 2030s. The article goes through a number of complicating factors for the tunnels, from the major faults they must cross to the melange of rock types they must drill through.
New York's 11-mile East Side Access tunnel project is 14 years late and about 2.5x its original budget. If California's 72 miles of tunnels (twin tunnels of 36 miles) go like New York's, that would be over US$160B spent, with an opening date sometime in the 2030s. The article goes through a number of complicating factors for the tunnels, from the major faults they must cross to the melange of rock types they must drill through.
People still don't know? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who didn't know this was a giant fucking scam before it even got off the ground has to be a fucking idiot.
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The graft and corruption is the purpose of such mega government projects. The bigger it is, the more skimming you can hide.
All the prime drivers need is some True Believers to offer meme rationale. Most other politicians, if they think of it at all, think "Cool! Lots of union construction jobs!"
Re:People still don't know? (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of an infrastructure job shouldn't be the construction jobs that will result from creating it. The purpose should be to reduce cost (in time or resources) of transportation of people and goods to points within the covered area.
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It will also stimulate construction jobs around the junctions or spurs that connect to that infrastructure. If you have two points A and B that are 100 miles away and connected by a new freeway, then every point between these two is now also connected. Just like between SF and SJ.
Re:People still don't know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right...... Because the private sector will always allocate resources into areas that are needed for society to function.
Seriously even the most crazy anti-government person has to admit that there are places where the needs of a community and the needs of corporations don't align and hence a government is required to divert funds towards projects that the private sector would not have built.
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Seriously even the most crazy anti-government person has to admit that there are places where the needs of a community and the needs of corporations don't align and hence a government is required to divert funds towards projects that the private sector would not have built.
I shall defeat your claim with a card of +5 summon Roman Mir
PS you must be new here.
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Not new here and I knew it was a pointless comment but still......
That said I must be kinda new as I don't get your reference to Roman Mir.
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Including the military?
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Or enough weapons to defend yourself from another nation state either.
Or public education so that your future generations can be better off.
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Similarly, without an efficient way to move passengers, the state will end up spending more than the cost of the railroad on airport and highway expansion.
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The last time California tried to propose such a train system, every small town and city in between LA and SF would only grant permission for the tracks to be laid on their land if they got their own train station with guaranteed stops.
I can't help but wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:4, Funny)
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It would be nice to see socialists actually build something for a change, the way they did in the Thirties.
The rare subtle Godwin. (Score:2)
nt
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Ah, the all-too-common Godwin-baiter who sees Godwin everywhere. The poster you are replying to is very likely talking about FDR. "Almost every community in the United States had a new park, bridge or school constructed by [FDR's WPA] [wikipedia.org]". The WPA provided paid jobs for 3 million unemployed at its peak. Most of the facilities constructed are still in use.
Or he might have been talking about the magnificent Moscow Metro, and the USSR's collossal program of dam and railway building. There is no tie-in to the fear
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Once upon a time, socialists built Hoover Dam and the TVA, including a lot of projects that conservatives of the time opposed as being unnecessary spending. But during the Seventies, the political positions switched, with the children of the New Dealers relentlessly opposing every energy and transportation project proposed. California high-speed rail is just the latest.
Today, even pure scientific research is under attack. Now astronomy, the least polluting of the sciences, is being driven out of our country
Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
The point of HSR is to make valuable real estate less concentrated. Build the 'home' stations in areas where land will appreciate and the 'work' stations in areas with high-paying jobs. The commuters using HSR daily/weekly will be the people who work in the expensive cities and who have the money to buy housing close to their home station.
My thinking is it is because California property taxes are capped to a fixed percentage, so they either need property values to grow faster than inflation or to scale-out the building of properties of the same value since they can't all be in SF.
This is the way it was done in Japan. This is the way it was done in Taiwan. I don't know if the other HSR projects around the world were done with the same land-value development in mind.
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The point of HSR is to make valuable real estate less concentrated.
That's not what this pork project will do. It is not a commuter railway. And besides, what you describe only moves the valuable real estate to some other location (near the train stops), it doesn't solve any problems.
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Just curious: Where do you think disabled and poor folks live now? Why do you think they need a huge amount of new housing?
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And how many of these people do you think are living under bridges? What number of housing units should be built for people living under bridges?
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Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
It's for the people who come after us, for the next couple hundred years, either until Earth becomes uninhabitable or we build a better more comfortable transport technology. I know it's hard to think more than 15 years in to the future, but the first rail lines from the 1850s are still in continuous use 170 years later, NOW, and I don't hear anyone talking about the death knell of rail. We gave highways a whirl and while they're super convenient, it's obvious that they don't scale nearly as well as we had imagined they would. And also we realized that most people are too dumb for flying cars, so we're back to rail. Unless you come up with something else, a long term transportation solution needs to be put in place. Right now it's looking like high speed electric rail between population centers, and then self driving uber/google/apple cars between the high speed rail and your final destination. But first we need that high speed rail. It works pretty fantastically over in Europe, you should try it some time.
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It's for the people who come after us
The people who come after us (and those with a clue today) realize that video conferencing makes most business travel unnecessary. So now you're left with vacationers going from SF to LA - no need for this train to service that crowd.
Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
This may shock you, but most people aren't robots, and you still can't replace human interaction with video conferencing. Most people would frown at the idea of eating thanksgiving dinner around a table surrounded by glowing screens. Video conferencing only exists as a bandaid that fixes the problem that existing transportation methods suck. Fix the root issue and the need for video conferencing goes away. Your argument still doesn't solve the problem that college students will want to go home on some weekends, holidays will not evaporate, and not all problems can be fixed remotely.
Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:5, Informative)
I addressed his point and covered additional issues. I don't think it's destined to go the way of Amtrak, which shares lines with Freight. Dedicated commuter rail is fast and on time. More astute way of putting it would be to say it's like European high speed rail, or Uber, where the convienience of it drives further adoption. Everywhere high speed rail is installed, it drives adoption. People said what you said about the DART rail system in Dallas, and it beat is ridership projections by 5x in the first year.
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When the rail lines opened in the UK they blew estimates out of the water. People would ride them, multiple times per day, just to ride them. They put in a huge, deep, tunnel that the press said was going to kill people and, yet, people went and rode that train multiple times just to experience the tunnel.
If they put the train in - I'd probably take it for a spin just to cross it off my list of things that I've done. I'm not exceptional in these regards. I'd not make a special trip t do it but I'd certainly
Meanwhile back in 1968 (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a bit annoying that the last time a train did 100MpH near where I live was a century ago - on steam FFS.
Re:They don't always come if you build it (Score:4, Insightful)
I found the schedule: http://riometro.org/rio-metro-... [riometro.org]
That's a joke of a service. Fewer than one train an hour and a huge gap during the day — I'm not surprised hardly anyone uses it. The top speed is 79mph, so presumably (including stops) it's slower or similar to driving. Europeans wouldn't use a service like this, and I think we're often used as a comparison for projects like this.
If they want people to use it, make it at least every 30 minutes (preferably 20), throughout the day. Then you don't need to worry about missing a train, and aren't stuck if plans change.
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Highways have problems scaling to very high traffic densities. Railways don't scale to very low traffic densities, or allow servicing geographical tree distributions. They are for hubs.
The two are complementary.
Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
By the sound of it It's going to be so expensive that if I could afford to take it I'd just take a plane instead.
This project will take decades to complete. By then there will be self-driving battery powered buses on I-5, for 1/3 the price of a ticket on this train. If you divide the likely cost of this train by the number of seats, it will cost about $500,000 PER SEAT. That is just the construction and capital cost. The operating cost will add even more. Nobody will be able to afford it without big on-going subsidies. Meanwhile, for the cost of a single train seat, you could buy several buses with over a hundred seats in total.
The solution is obvious: We need to ban the buses.
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Just how much is the capital cost per seat of the planes that are the real competition for this train?
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Just how much is the capital cost per seat of the planes that are the real competition for this train?
Irrelevant. Those are either sunk costs (airports) or paid for by the private sector (planes). If it isn't going to be paid for with my future taxes, I don't care what it costs.
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It's worse still. At $50/ticket you need 274k daily riders.
If you assume a modest 5% maintenance cost, and $100b price tag. You need revenue of $5b/year to operate and maintain this abomination.
So, 5,000,000,000 / 365 = $13.7m/day in revenue required
at even $50/ticket that's 274k riders per day.
And this is i'm confident way below what the actual costs will be. tax payers will subsidizing this thing forever.
population LA : 3.9m
population SF: 837k
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It's quite relevant because it is an indication of whether the high-speed rail is economically viable.
Re:I can't help but wonder (Score:5, Informative)
It is common for government to tax the hell out of things that compete effectively with their overpriced, boobdoggle, unionized government employee-loaded Peoples' Great Works.
So watch out for that. Detroit Metro airport built a giant parking structure and long-term parking lot that could not compete with private lots miles away that had to shuttle people in, so they slapped a 30% surcharge on those lots.
They also made it illegal for local hotels to let customers leave their cars in their hotel lots. Lots of outstate people would drive in and spend the night before flying out the next morning, and free parking was a service the hotels gladly provided. Now that is illegal.
The People's hatred and fear of government is well-earned.
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Get a room you two.
Get a fucking comma, dumbass!
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In Japan the rail company builds large shopping centres around each station. The rent it gets subsidises the fares.
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In Japan the rail company builds large shopping centres around each station. The rent it gets subsidises the fares.
In America, we build huge parking lots around the train stations. The assumption is that everyone will drive to and from the train station at each end of their journey.
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The current governor's father [wikipedia.org] was also governor and is favorably known for his efforts in building the state's infrastructure. You can figure it from there. The special interests and Brown's reputation as a 'moderate' (in a heavily Democratic state) trump common sense diluted by the state's other issues.
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This is for the Silicon Valley and Hollywood elites to go back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It's currently a 5+ hour car ride in moderate traffic and taking a plane, even a private jet back and forth would take just as long due to traffic and air clearance. I think the project is a huge waste of money as our roads and bridges are backlogged with $21 billion dollars in repairs and maintenance but, the 1% doesn't care what anyone else thinks.
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Elites? SF LA is the 2nd busiest domestic air route in the US with roughly 10,000 passengers/day.
Emissions per capita of taking planes out of the sky and cars off the road?
As for your backlog of maintenance, that's surely simply a matter of neglect for a wealthy state with a GDP greater than Canada...
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Does it matter? It puts people at work and it adds value to the state, it is basically money that prints itself. The problem sits obviously in the corporations levying their taxes on it. But it is a better investment than 'defense'.
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Are you high? It's for politicians to get massive kickbacks and "financing".
Right. Add who will be paying those kickbacks? The unions.
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If all they waste money on is "fat" wages they'll be way lucky. I'd bet there are a lot of contractors who've made big political donations that will siphon off the biggest rewards.
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It's for the millions of people on the no-fly list.
Ridiculous claim in summary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is absurd (and not an argument presented in the article, because the author isn't a moron). You can't just act like all tunnel building costs are the same per mile, they vary by orders of magnitude. The East Side Access project is to go through some of the most valuable, infrastructure-heavy, densely populated real estate in the US and to merge into Grand Central Terminal.
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Then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding. Perhaps they're multiply 68*2,5 and getting $170B and rounding that to $160B? But the cost of the tunnels isn't $68B, that's the cost of the entire project - even things like building the trains are included in that figure. Yet they're acting like purely tunnels are to blame.
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This is absurd (and not an argument presented in the article, because the author isn't a moron). You can't just act like all tunnel building costs are the same per mile, they vary by orders of magnitude. The East Side Access project is to go through some of the most valuable, infrastructure-heavy, densely populated real estate in the US and to merge into Grand Central Terminal.
OP here. And that's a fairish comment. But I balanced the density issues in the Northeast with the 7X longer California tunnel requirement and the crazy engineering through multiple seismic fault zones noted prominently in the article, then I added "IF".
I am kind of a moron though. I was just glad it did not start out with, "Noted Karma Whore and Unemployable Comic willworkforbeer writes:"
Re:Ridiculous claim in summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous claim in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Show me a tunnel project that finished ahead of schedule and under budget. For that matter show me a tunnel project that finished on time, and met it's budget. It's absurd to think this tunnel will be different than every tunnel ever built in human history.
Found it! http://www.cbsnews.com/picture... [cbsnews.com]
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cross rail is on time and on budget so far, with the most tricky work completed. That involved some serious guru level tunneling, needing to thread the tunnel between two existing ones with less than one meter of clearance.
Re: Ridiculous claim in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Here's another one, in the heart of Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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This is absurd
Nope. Three times over budget is typical for public works projects. It is how the game is played. The numbers are intentionally lowballed to get the project approved. The politicians play along because these boondoggles are always popular in the beginning. Once the schedules start to slip, costs start to mount, and public opinion starts to sour, it is too late. There is too much sunk cost to abandon the project, and the politicians that approved it are either no longer in office, or nobody remembers w
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The history of the
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America: Not allowed to dream big anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking build it. We excel at building giant projects. This is an infrastructure project that will pay off in spades over the next 200 years. It's not like the zombie apocalypse is going to come through and wipe out 2/3rds the population of California every 25 years. Long term this is absolutely needed. Just cough up the dough and move forward with it. Dig those tunnels, lay that track.
Big projects need big vision, and if we don't have that kind of vision in America anymore, I don't want to live here anymore, we're just any other country.
P.S. Even Morocco has high speed rail now. Let's try and keep up with Northern Africa perhaps? "Oh it's such a big project we can't handle that". Well fucking fire that guy let's put someone in place that actually believes they can do their own damn job. You don't hire a guy who's afraid of heights to do your balancing wire act at the circus.
Re:America: Not allowed to dream big anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
If they wanted to have a chance for this to work, and to have some reasonable number of passengers, they should have built it along the coast along the Coast Sub route connecting LA, Simi Valley, Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, up to Monterrey and into San Jose. There is splits to SF and Sacramento. There are already tracks there that used to be the main passenger route when trains were king. Today there is little freight or passenger traffic north of Santa Barbara. There are fewer and shorter tunnels so the work is probably orders of magnitude easier.
Additionally CA should be upgrading the Hwy 5 corridor in the SJ valley. It's two lanes each way but with the amount of commercial traffic it should be 4.
Finally, spending money on expanding the reservoir system should be the top priority. Often times we get a decent amount of rain but it just runs off into the ocean. Are main reserve is the snow pack in the Sierras but if global warming is true, there is going to be less and less each year.
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Shoot, if I had known about this I wouldn't have spent my last mod point elsewhere. I like the "dream big" gumption. Although seemingly in contradiction, I also like the fact that it's not really a dream anymore. High-speed rail is an existing technology deployed elsewhere to great success (i.e. at this point, "just good ol' ordinary plain old high speed rail"), and not some idea pulled out of Elon Musk's ass like the Hyperloop, which really is still a dream. Hyperloop could still happen mind you, but hig
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HSR won't get rid of the car problem because once you get to your terminus you'll still need a car to get around. San Francisco and Los Angeles metropolises are very large and destinations within each can take well over an hour to reach by car without traffic. Public transit is even worse with non-direct routes and frequent stops. BTW, commercial jets fly at 30,000 feet because that is where they are most fuel efficient even accounting for the extra burn to get at altitude.
Re:America: Not allowed to dream big anymore (Score:5, Informative)
High speed rail is built to such exacting standards, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to throw some LIDAR down by the wheels and flag anything that throws up a yellow flag for repairs. If they're not doing that already. Generally in Japan after an earthquake they will run the trains at reduced capacity, only 50-70% advertised speeds while repairs are made. As Mitch Hedberg famously said, "we apologize, your escalators are temporarily stairs"; high speed rail can still run at regular speeds without issue. Heck, if you're willing to slow down to 5mph you can run a train over some pretty gnarly looking rails that aren't particularly flat, and then speed back up once past.
Re:America: Not allowed to dream big anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Nowadays, tracks are usually inspected with track inspection vehicles, which are fitted with a number of sensors and can inspect tracks at speeds of up to 50 km per hour (last time I checked).
High speed rail tracks may be inspected several times per week, during the night.
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from the 'TGV' french experience these last 20 y.. (Score:3, Interesting)
... I can state two things:
- it's buying the land that shifts the schedule. Definitely true, to the extent the south-east is not covered by our 'bullet-trains' 20 years after going operational elsewhere (TGV is for 'hi-speed-train' in french, over 300Km/h)
- when the rails are done, then, it's over for train/airplane competition. Definitely. 90% of the air traffic switches to rail.
Even when the rail stations are not close to cities.
When adding every delay, car/parking/x-ray/plane and the same at the other hand, generally the bullet train is at least as fast, and way less of a bother (no X-ray, you can take metallic objects, load your computer, walk and get decent coffee in a decent train bar...)
So, to me it's a matter of patience but the switch is unavoidable. The only thing is, for people in their fifties like me, one has to be aware this in some places is just an investment for our children, not for us.
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Moi aussi. Et les trains à grand vitesse japonaises!
Time to declassify... (Score:2)
Time to declassify those nuclear-powered tunnel-boring machines?
On the other hand (Score:5, Informative)
The article sounds remarkably like the articles written when the Anglo-French Channel Tunnel project was proposed. Various aspects of the project were allegedly impossible when digging began, including concerns about the nature of the rock under the Channel and that the air in the tunnels would overheat because of the absence of ventilation tunnels under the sea. The project did run over-budget, but it worked, and is still working, and has transformed the way people and freight travel along that route.
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"Did run over-budget" is a bit of an understatement, it almost doubled its construction cost estimates (80% over budget). It had to be "restructured" in 1998 to avoid going bankrupt. For most of its history it has ran at a loss and as such has payed off little of its construction costs, unless you count their "debt-for-equity" swap that made them look in better shape on paper without really doing anything to actually "pay" their debts.
Compare to the Cost of Highway Projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Atlanta, we are spending $1.1 Billion on widening just one highway interchange: Contractors vying to build $1.1 billion Ga. 400/I-285 interchange [ajc.com]
IMHO, that makes the $68 billion California is spending seem like a bargain since they'll be getting 36 miles of tunnels, plus "300 miles of track, dozens of bridges or viaducts, high-voltage electrical systems, a maintenance plant and as many as six stations".
Failure of nerve (Score:3)
Years ago, BART in San Francisco was able to tunnel through the same tectonic plate boundary - underwater. A century ago, Switzerland built high tunnels through the Alps like the ones being contemplated here to connect Germany, France and Italy. But because those tunnels required trains to spiral up into the mountains to reach one end and then spiral down from from the other end of the tunnel, It is now driving a series of straight "base tunnels" underneath the entire range. These will allow bullet trains to rip through as though the Alps didn't exist.
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If you are talking about the BART tunnels that span the Bay, they aren't underground. They are tubes that lay on the sea floor. If you seach Google you can see pictures of the tube sections being assembled at the water's edge.
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It's still a tunnel at the bottom of a bay crossing a tectonic boundary. That takes the kind of engineering chutzpah that Californians - even Democrats - used to be capable of.
Only the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost overruns they're noting here are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. It was originally only said to cost around $34 Billion, they've barely gotten started and its already ballooned to at least in the neighborhood of $70 Billion but even the Authority admits it "may" go up to almost $120 Billion suggesting it will probably hit that and quite possibly go even higher. Even at the ~$70 billion number it is almost double the cost per KM as similar European systems. At the same time the anticipated ticket prices will be below that of world counterparts (20%), specifically set to try to attract airline passengers. And even at that rate its not expected to compete very well with car/truck transportation costs.
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It would be cheaper just to setup a few new dedicated "local" airports and provide free flights to anyone who wanted one than it will be to build this train system.
This is America (Score:2)
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Mexicans.
A Stupefying price tag... (Score:2)
...for a train that no one will ever ride in numbers significant enough to justify it at 1/100 the cost.
You know what cost $425 billion? (Score:2)
According to wiki the entire Interstate system [wikipedia.org] (in 2006 dollars).
If you vote me for governor, I promise to defund the rail, subject to any necessary propositions and/or legislative action. Furthermore, I will use the funds currently set aside for high speed rail to do two things:
1. Eliminate grade crossings at existing rail lines, starting with Caltrain from San Francisco to San Jose, or alternatively starting with those crossings that have killed the most people if the aforementioned route isn't actually
Hyperloop anyone? (Score:2)
Scrap this train and build that instead.
Legal authority? (Score:2)
If the voters voted to spend a certain amount of money for the bullet train, and if the actual cost is way more, and if the trains will be slower than a bullet train, then does CA have the legal authority to go ahead with the project?
The voters voted for X, and the state is doing Y. Seems to me that the state wouldn't have the authority to do Y, only to do X.
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Anyone who uses the word "melange" is a faggot.
I would have used, "melange" in the submission, if I spoke what my guidance counsellor called "High School Graduate Level English You Moron".
I think I used, "crazy messed up".
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Initial estimate - $68 billion and completed by 2022
Final bill - $250 billion, and completed by 2045.
Or, never...But they will spend that $250B.
If eastern span of SF Bay bridge is any indication,
they'll just press it into service anyways and make continuous "safety improvements" at additional cost.
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And while you whine about a 35 miles project, the Chinese are looking at building a similar one to connect Chine with the North American mainland. This project will have almost 9,000 miles of high speed track of which mor
Re:Final bill (Score:5, Insightful)
No environmental impact statements, no lawsuits from every NIMBY group along the way, no union problems, no Federal Railroad Administration applying 100-year-old rules, and no worry about worker safety. Relaxing the constraints make things much easier.
Of course this tunnel will never be built because the US isn't about to allow it (and it's a dumb idea anyway)
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Some eastern sea ports are trying to deepen themselves by 5 feet or so to accomodate "Superpanamax" ships, the next size up that the Panama Canal expansion can handle.
Best of luck with that [time.com]. Guess what? It's not just el nino. They've been having trouble with water in Panama, due to massive deforestation. Panama is perpetually on fire due to land clearing by the cheapest means possible. You go across the border between Panama and Costa Rica and the difference is dramatic.
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I live in NJ, that ship has sailed so I might as well get the benefits. (same goes for Silicon Valley BTW)
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The problem is that a lot of people have no faith in the state to perform this project. That's because they have a track record of graft and corruption when running these big money projects. Unfortunately nowadays no one is held responsible when government projects run 5 to 10 times over budget. Given a solution where there are actual consequences for incompetence, graft and corruption I think the support for this kind of project would increase by a large amount.
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Using his logic, we'd get HONEST estimates of time and budget before deciding to do things. Then we'd make our decisions.
As opposed to faking up a budget/time estimate that will be palatable to the voters even though pure fantasy otherwise, then letting every session of the legislature between the first vote and completion have a veto over the whole project (but not over the money already spent)....
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In my local area, we recently cranked up 'light rail'. Of course, making that light rail actually go across city lines to where it needs to go is a major clusterfuck. Why? Because it is a different 'city'. Norfolk VA + Virginia Beach. A major east cost resort destination. But that doesn't matter...it's a different city, so we need a whole new series of imp
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Using your logic, we should never do anything. What the hell, if might not come out perfect or on budget - so we shouldn't do it. And it's not like this project would create good paying jobs or that those people would be paying into our tax coffers, no, none of that makes any difference.
What annoys the hell out of me is that they were never honest -- the cost value they gave was a fraction of what it would take, because they needed voter approval... and the voters would not have approved if they'd been given valid figures for the project cost and what the project would eventually deliver. "$68b? Well, a bit pricy, but if we can get a high-speed corridor between Northern and Southern California, then maybe.."
All of this for a train which no one is interested in taking and will be too slow
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No one wants it but politicians and construction companies.
This is not true at all. I live in California, and most people I know think it is great idea. It is voter approved. The only people that are opposed to it, are those that can do math, and there aren't many of them left in California.