California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B
latimes.com
latimes.com
Before you say that it's ridiculous, consider how else $64 billion (current official estimated total construction cost of the project -- not counting operating cost)[0] could be spent:
- Commercial air travel costs around $0.10 per passenger-mile if you buy in bulk[1]. That means $64 billion could buy 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel. If allocated to the 11 million people who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, the state could buy each resident 58,000 air miles of travel -- equivalent to about 88 round-trips between LAX and SFO.
- If the LAX-SFO air corridor becomes too busy, that $64 billion could also be spent upgrading existing fleets by buying 147 brand new A380s at an average list price of $435 million each. [2]
- If the environmental impact is a concern (not that laying tracks and punching holes through the Central Valley is free of impact), then buy new Teslas instead. Lots of them. At $35,000 per Model 3, you could buy 1.8 million new Teslas using that money. Add some solar panels to each purchase and you could still buy more than a million -- more than enough for every San Franciscan to get a brand new Tesla.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-c...
[1] http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-air...
[2] http://www.airbus.com/content/dam/corporate-topics/publicati...
(Edit: added citation for $64 billion official estimate)
The train will stop at SFO and BUR -- if the train's last-mile delivery is better then we should focus on that last-mile rather than the stretch in the middle that is already well-solved.
The high-speed rail project is a shit show, but more cars is not the answer either.
Only rich people and people in and out of a car all day (full time parents, car-based workers, etc) will buy them.
If the cost of the ride is less than the cost of gas, how is the operator making a profit? Especially since they have to cover more than just the cost of gas.
(an Uber-style "use VC money to subsidize below-cost services" model is not sustainable in the long term, by the way)
LA is so spread out that departing from LAX or Union Station doesn't make a big difference. Most people are going to have to fight traffic to get to either location.
Make sure you put a winged pony on the shopping list too. They're a great fashionable match any time you're making fantasies of acquiring things that don't exist.
I've already invested into making flying comfortable. Lounge-access credit cards, Global Entry (which grants TSA Pre-check), upgrade-giving status, et cetera. I'd need trip time or cost cut in half relative to air travel to make switching worth it.
I'm not the median consumer. But weighted by likely usage, I'm closer to the average.
Anecdotally: people where I work do a lot of traveling between our NYC and DC offices. Only one person flies rather than taking Amtrak...
Train is easy, consistent and comfortable. Always power, Wi-Fi and cell signal too.
Fair enough. I'm an infrequent NYC-DC commuter. And my preferred mode to JFK from the city is via the LIRR, a rail route. It takes longer, most of the time, but less time on average. Most importantly: it's consistent.
* How often you travel
* How much you will be able to take advantage of perks
* How close you are to various terminals/airports
* How far you regularly need to go
* How you like to travel (fast & cramped, slow & spacious)
etc.
Additionally there's the problem of airport expansion. There aren't a lot of palatable options as filling in the bay is (rightfully) a non-starter for most people. High speed rail wouldn't replace air travel but it would complement it (especially with the related regional improvements like electrifying Caltrain).
The secret? TSA precheck and the Global Entry program.
Also I do not check in any luggage.
"His prints were ... taken ... when he joined the military. He became the prime suspect because of his conversion to Islam and because he had represented one of the Portland Seven...
The FBI described the fingerprint match as "100% verified". According to the court documents in judge Ann Aiken's decision, this information was largely "fabricated and concocted by the FBI and DOJ".
This is why I'm reluctant to give the govt. my fingerprints, but my friends think I'm overreacting.
$2M in taxpayer money is nothing to them. Just like the expense of incarceration didn’t bring down jail terms for minor offenses. Or settlements for police brutality haven’t affected that one iota either.
I try to be there about 30 minutes before the flight now, but with boarding pass ready on my phone. The only reason I give 30 minutes is in case of traffic or if I want to grab a quick bite. If I could guarantee my arrival time at the airport it would be even less.
Granted this rail project does not really allow for high speed either, but it's still going to be reasonable.
Regardless, I'm not talking about what's ideal or perfect; even if HSR could get me there in 2-3 hours, that's not a meaningful enough improvement over 3-3.75 hours to justify a $64B+ price tag in my book.
I doubt they are going to succeed, but in other areas it has worked.
For me it's ~20 mins driving SF to SFO, ~10 mins for TSA junk and walking to the gate, ~30 mins for waiting and boarding, then the 90 minute flight, ~15 minutes for deplaning, walking, and getting a ride, and then then anywhere from 15-60 minutes depending on where I'm going.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/The-Great-Race-car-vs-pla...
Jeez! You know Tesla batteries and you don't know that high speed trains are electric?? WTH
I'm in NYC and would never, ever fly to Boston or DC. For what that's worth.
1. I'm not sure how that affects my point.
2. In my experience the price difference for last minute on Amtrak has been at most about 20% (though I'm not a frequent Amtrak traveler).
What's worse is that French, German and Dutch national rail operators have subsidiaries running rail contracts in the UK. So in a way we help fund the fantastic continental rail services...
But I understand that rail services on the continent are also heavily subsidised.
More airplanes doesn't increase capacity to the extent it's limited by airports. You'll need to add expanding the airports and maybe building new ones. Also, what about the stations between SF and LA?
Or, if you use cars, then you need to include widening the highways in congested areas.
Of course bus lines would be much cheaper, if we can convince people to use them. How often do you take a bus between SF and LA?
Pretty easy - electric buses with seats that resemble business class instead of Ryanair.
Sorry but I'm super confused... 147 planes that cost $435 million each, would total 64 Billion dollars. And that appears to be 64 Billion on top of the 64 Billion you already plan on spending from above.
That cost of the project in the article has jumped to 10 Billion. Where are you getting your number from?
The total cost SF-LA is $64 billion: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/confidential-report-c...
That money could be so much better spent in ways that have an actual impact on lower income people.
HSR is not "public transit." Public transit helps lower-income people commute to their jobs. Lower income people don't travel regularly between SF and LA--they have no need to. They might do it occasionally, but they don't do it often enough where the convenience of a train is going to mean much if the train isn't any cheaper than flying.[1]
The folks who really benefit from HSR are business travelers. They're the ones who need to travel city center to city center regularly. They're the ones who really have a reason to prefer taking a train, because they can work more comfortably en route.
[1] Also, the target price ($86 one way) is a completely fantasy. At that price, it would be one of the cheapest HSR trips per mile in the world. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/fare-cost-ride-california-b.... There is no way California is going to run the cheapest anything.
I don't know that we're making the right trade from atmospheric pollution co2 vs the pollution of throwing away batteries.
Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty, one hundred, or more years. Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting.
This type of short term thinking is why infrastructure spending in the US is at an all time low. Instead of spending for tens of years into the future, we only evaluate the costs relative to the next five years and therefore make decisions more valuable to tomorrow than next week.
Once CA buys this route, they own this route forever. And in a state gaining more and more people every day, cutting out land for infrastructure is only going to get more painful in time.
Critical qualifier: in the United States. The British rail system, as I understand it, runs with significantly lower variable costs than e.g. Amtrak or BART.
Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility.
Unless we develop technology that cancels out inertia, that track is speed limited for much of its route. Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more [2].
[1] http://www.ushsr.com/images/632_CA_HSR_Phasing_632.jpg
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Can you elaborate why you believe the comparison is misguided?
It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth.
I linked to a New York Times article [1] that analyses the issue well. For a shorter, bloggier read try this CityLab piece [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruc...
That doesn't explain why you believe a non-US comparison is misguided, rather it supports the notion of a non-US comparison.
US infrastructure projects cost more because the US isn't Japan or Europe would be a neat summary.
So you skimmed one article and didn't read the other. Here:
"The Times observed construction on site in Paris, which is building a project similar to the Second Avenue subway at one-sixth the cost."
Most of the factors in the CityLab piece are uniquely American. We pay more for the same infrastructure. Something that makes economic sense for one country may not for America, just as a tractor may make sense for a farmer at $100,000 but not at $10 million. Our inflated costs throw out of whack the balance of costs and benefits that makes certain infrastructure value adding abroad.
TL; DR We can't automatically assume infrastructure that works abroad works here.
I’m not interested in starting a union/anti-union fight. Please.
The issue is in the absence of effective controls on corruption, it's in the self-interest of those holding the reigns to buy a $3 billion tunnel for $12 billion if the latter nets them $10 million in "campaign contributions"
I'm not taking issue with the fact that similar infrastructure projects have different costs in different countries, nor that there are reasons as to why this is.
I'm trying to understand why you think the comparison is misguided.
Only by way of comparison are we able to ascertain that the US is, probably, paying too much for infrastructure.
I mean, this whole conversation is predicated on the comparison.
It's not that the similar infrastructure can't work in the US; it's that for reasons-known similar infrastructure may be untenable. If the infrastructure was built anyway, say by an Act Of God, it would probably still function as expected.
It did feel like this to me at the time (and was widely discussed as such) but having used the HSR Japan and Germany I reflected and realized they really helped the smaller cities to thrive. Tying Fresno and Bakersfield into the economies of LA and the Bay Area will be great for all concerned, relieving pressure on the megalopolises and expanding he economic opportunities of the Central Valley.
Can you explain why? For example comparing NYC's subway to Paris' subway. Why would one be more expensive than the other, since I don't think the base cost are that different
(I'm not from the US, I'm just trying to understand your point)
Good point. The government may not run all the trains[0], but the rail companies help with congestion and up-keep as well. And that is just the trains running on the National Rail, not including private rail lines.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...
That could be the reason why flying is 4x cheaper than trains there.
Most of Europe pays less for a superior experience. Reasons: Europeans literally rebuilt their networks from scratch post-WWII, and used the chance to electrify and modernise most of them - whereas Britain, that was bombed much less, just kept using very old lines (most of them are STILL not electric, in 2018, which is absurd). That's investment failure #1, driven by short-sightedness.
Then you have the privatisation shenanigans from the 90s onward. This is investment failure #2: in order to reduce running costs and avoid having to deal with running trains, every few years taxpayers end up paying huge one-off sums that basically offset any potential savings. In the rest of Europe, despite attempts at privatisation, the old state-funded companies still dominate, achieving economies of scale and efficiencies that private competitors will never be able to match.
So maybe it would be worse with one or more private companies, but public companies are no silver bullet and will fail sometime.
Where did you get your info about train production? I would be interested how the figures vary from country to country.
But then there is some local knowledge to add, like the fact that pretty much all factories left are just tweakers for the internal market (narrow-gauging and so on), afaik the only one with significant production and occasional export is Bombardier in Derby - which got very close to shutting down around year 2000 and is basically run from Berlin anyway. Most European factories, despite some consolidation after the EU common market reached full gear, still pump out trains sold around the world - and then you have Japan and China that play on a different level.
Afaik the best trains in the UK are all bought from abroad at the moment. Things might change with the HS2 (high-speed) project that should be tendered out this year [1], but note how the main candidates are basically just reselling Japanese tech.
You're right that short term thinking and underinvestment in infrastructure is a problem. But you have to choose your projects intelligently: things like revamping BART and New York's MTA, and taking better care of the most-used roads and bridges are far far better uses of public money.
Part of the reason we underinvest in infrastructure is that people see these pointless multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and cry out their money is being wasted. If you really want more spending on infrastructure, give up on your dream projects and spend on things that will actually make a big difference in people's lives.
This desperately needs the support of at least one such “well thought out” cost/benefit analysis.
Traveling from city center to city center is also a far less stressful way to travel, and you can do things like work on a train that make TAXI -> AIRPORT LINES -> TERMINAL WAITING -> PLANE -> BAGGAGE CLAIM -> TAXI annoying.
But if you built a major infrastructure that could make SF or LA a morning commute, it'd sure do some interesting things to population distributions and land prices.
This is what we are competing with: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KM7B_auaBgE/UNr_iYv1v-I/AAAAAAAAAY... This is unlikely to get us there: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Fresno_C...
The market size for SF to LA and back is not large enough to justify rail with no stops. Its not even close, even assuming monopolistic market shares. And airlines have shown extreme willingness to compete with rail on price grounds, and they could take half that market easily even with trains going top speed.
Sorry if that burns your dreams of fast rail to the ground, but it is objectively the most financially responsible way to build. It can actually pay for itself that way, whereas it would be America's biggest boondoggle if they took your advice.
https://traintimes.org.uk/KGX/EDB
These are high speed trains, but Britain hasn't upgraded the tracks, so they run at less than full speed. But the door design and number of passengers is what matters for the duration of a stop at a station, and as you can see, it's around 1-3 minutes.
It's certainly a factor, but it's not like the long distance Amtrack train I once used, which stopped for 5-15 minutes at most stops.
Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka is the busiest rail line in the world and there are a lot of stations between these two cities. The fastest train, Nozomi only has 6 stops and runs every 15 minutes.
Why not spend (a small fraction of) that money to improve Caltrain and service between Caltrain and the central valley in a different manner?
I'm not convinced that the current HSR project is the best way to do it, but I'm also not aware of any serious counterproposal -- and it's hard to even imagine one that wouldn't also be a huge, expensive undertaking with limitless opportunity for missed schedules, cost overruns and undue optimism.
Most criticism boils down to a "perfect is the enemy of the good" problem. Anything that isn't the most perfect possible solution from a given critic's viewpoint is attacked as a "boondoggle" while ignoring that opening up the corridor and making it easier to travel between SF, LA, and smaller cities in between will be a good thing (and that there's plenty of evidence for it in similar rail lines elsewhere).
(hint: some of the money is going to be used to improve existing transit systems!)
And even if it does, this doesn't improve VTA, BART, SF Muni, etc.
This doesn't improve the situation for travel between NorCal and SoCal, but I think this is already pretty well-served by air travel, as you point out.
This also doesn't help people who live in, say, Modesto or Fresno get to SoCal (they'd have to train up to SJ and fly down to LA or SD, or drive), but is fixing that really a high priority need when compared to the rest?
The main justification for HSR is reducing freeway construction and maintenance costs that will be needed to keep up with expected travel without it that will be reduced by it.
Not dealing with pollution impacts of travel or buying cars for the freeway travel, but reducing the freeway construction and maintenance costs.
Buying a bunch of Teslas doesn't address that at all. (Actually, the state buying more cars increases the problem.)
* Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.
* Unions and legacy salaries further add to those personnel costs. The average Amtrak employee ($75K/yr) nearly makes as much as the average commercial pilot ($77K/yr).
* Since train journeys take longer, the labor cost per trip is considerably higher, especially for long haul routes. When you're doing a long trip like Chicago to Los Angeles, a train takes a lot longer than a plane, so you're paying for yet more labor for that trip. 44 hours of labor for the train versus 4 hours for the plane.
There's a good video that breaks down the costs that make up your train ticket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA&t=29s
Err, why? I've taken my share of commuter and Acela rides in the Northeast and there is nowhere near that level of staffing.
Amtrak employs ~20,000 people. When you get to the number of annual passengers, and how many trips they operate a year, it breaks down to ~4 passengers per employee per trip.
Maybe in the US. In Europe, a train with 500-750 people capacity has one train driver and maybe 3-4 staff (plus on-board restaurant but that's run at a profit). No staff at smaller train stations and only minimal staff at many larger ones.
Maintenance needs staff but that's the same at airports.
The author has some other really interesting (with cited sources) videos about many other transit topics, including how hub-and-spoke/direct played out in the aircraft marketplace, how budget airlines have such great profit margins, long haul aircraft economics, airline schedule methodology, etc.
Mythbusters already tried this experiment, and they were able drive from SF to LA door to door in the same time it took to fly, end to end, 5 - 6 hrs.
If you've ever traveled between cities in France or Japan on high speed rail you know its infinitely better than an airport. I can arrive at an Shinkansen 5 minutes before departure, travel a similar distance between SF->LA in 2.5hrs or less, in a super comfortable train, that I'm free to walk around it. At my destination, getting to/from the high speed rail is also super-convenient, hassle free, doesn't require driving, and overall, is cheap.
Short distance air travel is majorly annoying no matter the cost. I hate the airport in/out experience.
This doesn't make a lot of sense in LA; you're going to a need a car wherever you end up -- it's huge sprawl; and most people aren't visiting to go to downtown LA, so they probably need a car. Can I rent a car at Union Station? Maybe (if I get there before 5pm), but do they have room to accommodate a larger facility needed if the volume increases? I can rent one at LAX, LGB, SNA, BUR, or any of the other LA area airports I forgot about.
If only someone had thought to include regional transit improvements alongside and coordinated with HSR.
Oh, wait, wait, they did.
I expect HSR money is going to get Caltrain grade separation and electrification done, which seemed like it would take 30-50 years otherwise, even though it was planned to finish in 10 years for the last 20 years.
I typically show up roughly 60-45 minutes prior to flight time, so 15-30 minutes before boarding. By the time I get through security the plane is typically just starting to board and I walk right on.
I have gotten my door to door times between MSP and ORD to just over (sometimes under if I get lucky on train to city) 3 hours including a 20 minute Uber on one end and a 40 minute train ride into the city on the other. Pretty similar distances involved. That's basically 2 hours from dropoff and pickup at the airports for an hour flight.
> going through onerous security
I imagine that in the US, this will be much the same. Or will be the moment after the first attack on a train. I don't see any long-term security gains here, the US is simply not Europe.
Not that I think air travel is a decent replacement for high speed rail though, it's not. The security and time delays related to that I simply think are a long-term red herring within the US. Mostly because I remember air travel prior to 9/11.
I also think comparing a single high speed rail line built in isolation to Europe or Japan isn't all that great of a comparison. In Japan or Europe I arrive in a train terminal and transfer to the local rapid transit that pretty much covers every city and every neighborhood I'd ever want to go to in a reasonable manner. The US... doesn't.
Even in Israel you don't have that kind of security check before boarding a train.
- You always know how much the ticket will cost, no matter if you buy it the same day.
- If you had a reserved seat but you missed your train, just take the next one and go to the free seat area. Also, if you didn't have reserved seat and the free seat area is full, wait 15 minutes and take the next train.
(And yes, you can fly Tokyo - Osaka for cheaper than a Shinkansen ride, but the convenience of the Shinkansen is really higher than any flight.)
- While it's completely acceptable to eat fermented fish out of a bento box using your phone to make calls is a comlete no!no!
That leads to a very quiet, peaceful and smooth train experience.
Also, if you visit Japan as a foreigner look at JR Rail Pass. A three week pass for the green car (1st class) will cost ~80'000 yen ($720) and is a comperative bargain if you make use of it.
For example: Tokyo to Sapporo [which is Shinkansen to Hakodate only] and back is more than 92K.
OMG I regret so much that I didn't take advantage of that when I was on a tourist visa... :'/
Southwest airlines does not solve the problem, because it does not give politicians or public sector unions or public sector unions' pensioners control over money. Only a train project can do that for them.
Highspeed rail was projected to cost less than expanding highways and airports. Not sure what it looks like with the increases. OTOH, the budgets for those other modes also tend to balloon over time.
the travel time listed is 1:30 compared to 2:30 (from numbers I heard) so you do chop off one hour of ride time.
however, air port security checks, being kicked from your seat, sf airport not directly in the city, the one hour starts to mean a whole lot less
HSR doesn't just serve the endpoints, and the passenger volume from that Cartesian set of city pairings vastly exceeds the passenger volume from the endpoints. It's not even in the same ballpark.
First, you have to deal with the security boondoggle. Add 30 minutes for that, because you never know what you are going to get.
Because of how SFO was built and the fact that they can't use both runways simultaneously with even a hint of bad weather, good luck leaving on time. Pad at least 30 minutes to your destination arrival time to be safe (but I've had plenty of early morning flights get delayed an hour or two waiting for fog to lift).
And then when you get into LAX… good luck getting out. Add an hour just to get out of the airport traffic. Unless you want to go north, you are better off flying into SNA… but tickets into SNA cost $175.
On a good day you can do it in 3 hours. On a bad day it's 6. The cost is $50-$200, and it's always a stressful and shitty experience.
I just recently took the Amtrak all the way down. I took 12 hours and cost $93 for a business class ticket. Yeah, it took forever. But it was really pleasant. It just takes forever. It be nice to have something in-between.
Last time I was in Japan, a typhoon hit, and was working its way up the islands. My flight up to Tokyo was already cancelled due to high winds, but I was able to get a Shinkansen ticket and arrive in time to catch my flight before Narita was affected by the Typhoon.
The flight would have been 90 minutes (not including travel time to the airport), and the train was 5 hours, but still, it was a comfortable journey and I'd do it again. If I were traveling from downtown to downtown, the airplane time would be more like 4 hours (60 minutes to get to airport with padding to get to gate on time, 90 minute flight (scheduled time is over 2 hours, but usually the flight is around 90 minutes gate to gate), then at least 90 minutes to get off the plan and catch an express bus to Tokyo.
http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Boa...
http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
As long as you're still alive in 2022 (and there are no more funding issues caused by the tie-in to HSR), it will happen within your lifetime.
Should have happened a decade or more ago, but Caltrain is the underfunded stepchild with the bulk of transit dollars going to BART.
It's not particularly feasible in the US to convert freight-dominated lines to electric. Modern freight generally uses the double-stacked container as its loading gauge, and electric catenaries would sit several feet below the top of the double-stack container--the standard height for a bilevel in the US is 14.5 ft, but the double-stacked container runs to 20 ft.
It would be... unpopular... to have an electrified third rail, at ground level, that you have to step directly over at a station or running directly through a city street. Somebody would surely trip on it or it could get touched by a little kid.
Third rail systems are usually only used when the tracks are physically inaccessible to passengers or other pedestrians.
Currently not feasible because of high battery prices but realistic in 1-2 decades. And losses are lower than for electrified rail.
Busy routes are still better electrified but the huge US freight rail network would likely be cheaper to convert that way.
http://testplant.blogspot.dk/2013/09/electrification-clearan...
That one does certainly depend on the amount of money the rail operator(s) invest in maintenance and upkeep, as well as how much area on the sides of the track they bought. In Germany, rail has three major issues with weather:
- during cold times, railroad switches freeze because they lack heatings and so they become stuck, and special maintenance teams have to be at standby across the country (source: was part of such a team for one season, well paid but shit that was cold)
- during storms, stuff gets blown onto the rail. Mostly dead trees, the problem is when the area next to the rails didn't get cleaned up (trees so high that they could fall into the rails are cut to a safe height or removed altogether). This can be caused either by a lack of upkeep - or because the surrounding area is not owned by the train operator
- during hot periods, the running gag in Germany is "how many trains will fuck up today?". The trains are either not properly maintained (due to a lack of funds) or simply have not been ordered with strong enough air conditioners.
tl;dr: getting rail immune from weather-related influences takes serious money. The Swiss and Japanese railroads did the proper investments and thus have next to zero weather related problems, the German railroads are seen as a cash cow ready to be milked by the politicians, consequences be damned.
Yeah we get these too, but that's just delays, not the complete shutdown of the entire country's railroad system for sometimes days like last autumn after storm Xavier.
I think I was lucky since I avoided the worst of the latest storm. I just had a lot of delays on my first day of work this year: they had a tree fallen on the tracks, but they had managed to keep a few trains rolling.
But the German experience is that lack of funding is usually exaggerated as a reason. It's caused by many things, but mostly underappreciated is zoning, eminent domain (or lack thereof) as well as just basic technology.
The three main reasons for delays in Germany are:
1) suicides (up to two per day in the whole of Germany)
2) trees/branches falling on cables/tracks
3) train system overheating
Also rail is affected by
4) catastrophes that are happening next to the tracks: As rail tracks usually are next to industrial areas a burning industrial plant usually brings all train traffic to halt.
5) Germany being densely populated: Cars get stuck on crossings and trucks get stuck under rail bridges constantly.
6) forced interruptions, e.g. by people who steal power lines.
(4), (5) and (6) have nothing to do with rail funding. (1) Suicides are not caused by a lack of funding. (3) System collapses are caused by money restraints, but those trains were designed decades ago and the Bahn usually manages heating issues pretty well by shutting off single wagons.
On 2 (wood interrupting trains): A problem that would disappear if the Bahn could enforce a buffer zone around its tracks, where trees are to be cut off. But due to environmentalists, noise and zoning restrictions, the Bahn has to play gardener and spend millions on cutting trees each day.
Oh yes they do. There is a total lack of redundancy in the German network, which was only recently shown when that Rheintalbahn tunnel caved in during construction and took out the major traffic artery above for months.
1) Suicides: they can be prevented by walling off the tracks, which is thankfully done for the new high speed routes and as rework to existing routes. In addition to preventing suicides these also prevent wildlife accidents (a herd of sheep, for example, caused an ICE to derail in a tunnel once).
Ad 5) this could be solved by removing at-level crossings (and remotely supervising those which cannot be removed) and by reworking those bridges that get often hit by cars. This is a lack of funding.
Ad 6) walling off the tracks would help there too. Or providing enough rail service even at nighttimes...
Absolutely -- IMHO for mid-distance (200 mi to 500 mi or so) trips, Amtrak is a really underrated option. I travel semi-often from Pittsburgh to NYC (450 mi) and choose train over flights because it's actually not that much slower (consider to/from airport, security, and (de)boarding, as you say) and it's much more comfortable: I can walk up and down the whole train, with no fasten-seatbelt sign to stop me; there's a cafe car; I have about 2 feet of legroom; there is reliable AC power and functional wifi. I just make it a work-from-train day and all's well.
That's assuming euro-style cities where you probably want to go from one urban center to an other though: plane requires going outside the city (to the airport) in advance due to security procedure, waiting for security and boarding, then at the destination going from airport to city center.
With HSRs, the stations are in or relatively close to city centers (usually easily accessible through public transportation), you can arrive 5mn (or less) before departure, delays may be somewhat less common (though the justification differs e.g. suicides on the track is not an issue for planes) and you arrive at the city center with better travel comfort. Especially for people sensitive to air pressure.
The only downside is that it's on a once-per-day schedule (Pgh->NYC at 7:30am and NYC->Pgh at 10:50am). It's 8-9 hr downtown-to-downtown (vs. ~5-6 when flying) so you'd really want to do Fri/Mon for a weekend. FWIW, there are three or four Megabuses per day too, including an overnight bus in each direction, for when the train schedule doesn't work.
Also, flying to NYC from Pgh is oddly expensive, like $400 roundtrip expensive. Amtrak is about $150 RT if far enough in advance.
Anyway, welcome to Pittsburgh! I hope you're surviving the snow...
If you want to spice it up, check out Southern Airways Express[0]. You can fly between Pittsburgh and Lancaster for as little as $30 on a tiny little 8-to-10-seat plane, which is a really unique and scenic experience. Catch a ride to the Lancaster Amtrak where there are a lot more options for getting to NYC.
I've done Megabus and Greyhound on return trips. You get what you pay for. But if you happen to live in the North Hills, the bus depot for Megabus is in Ohio Township and if you ask nicely they'll let you ride up there.
Boston to DC doesn't really make sense though unless I've just decided to work on the train for the day so I don't need to deal with the airport (and probably pay more to do so).
Other than that, it's hard to justify train from Boston. I looked at it once to Chicago and it made utterly no sense either in terms of time or cost given that I'm going to get a sleeper on a trip like that.
In all fairness, how many incidents will it take before boarding a train means 30 minutes of security theater?
In fairness, I believe there's no indication the TSA will appear anywhere but airports anytime soon.
That lasted like two days.
But I don't know about high speed trains. The first and last coaches are often first class, I'm not sure I've seen them on the inside.
But, much like I am not a lawyer, I am also not a train engineer. Or even a railfan. So I am probably completely wrong.
I do appreciate Amtrak keeping TSA out, in any case.
I have found the term for the more modern type: "Multiple Unit" [0]. Smaller motors are installed on many axles, the same as a metro train. It seems they're more reliable and cheaper to run (less wear on the track due to a better distribution of weight), but I agree with the noise issue — I prefer it when I travel on a locomotive-hauled train, since the interior is close to silent.
A site like [1] has a few train interior (and exterior) photos aimed at foreign tourists in Europe, rather than railfans. [2] will get boring quickly, but shows a European view of modern intercity trains.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_unit
But yeah, planes have a nasty habit of offering to amplify an attack of a certain magnitude by falling out of the sky and killing everyone on board, and potentially quite a few not on board. Trains just doesn't do that. The 7/7 attacks in London (bombs on three trains and a bus) resulted in probably an order of magnitude less loss of life than the same bombs on planes would have.
Blowing up a train somewhere is not more dangerous than blowing up a car in the middle of a motorway.
If aircraft are any guide, until someone on the train drives a high-speed train off of a track into a skyscraper, national defense headquarters, and/or something similar causing massive non-passenger casualties and economic damages, it won't happen, even with lots of incidents, some of which result in complete loss of passengers.
You seem to be talking like the security theatre in airports is never going to come to rail? Have you ever been on the NY subway?
Have you ever been on the NYC subway? Has something changed recently?
But I like the train when I have the time. I took Amtrak when I moved to California. And I've taken it up to Portland and Seattle, but flew back, as it's much faster and cheaper.
It's fun to sleep on the train in your own cabin. Just very expensive. And that is subsidized by the government to a degree.
e.g. if you're in Silicon Valley, won't you still need 1 hour to drive to SF? Even if there's a station in, like, Mountain View, isn't it still 30 minutes from places like San Jose? Once you arrive in LA, isn't likely that you'll need a car again from the station to your destination? And also for eating, commuting and other daily necessities?
Which would be useless without the billions spent in maintenance every year for the roads and other maintenance. Its such a silly argument. If you include the full cost of airport construction it wouldn't be so pretty either. Having heterogeneous forms of transit is an intrinsic benefit as each are better under certain weather conditions and use cases.
You need to consider capital investment required for that air travel: How much does it cost to build the airports, repair centers, specialized land equipment, etc. to enable 640 billion passenger miles, and buy all the land required? Then you need to add airplane purchase costs - that's not optional either; before you even get to operating costs.
You need to of course include airports for each city on the trains' route. The train goes through a massive population corridor across dozens of towns and cities, not just SF and LA. What's the capital cost of connecting these people to air travel?
Personally I’d much rather take a form of transit where I can bring a water bottle and avoid being groped by security for literally no rational reason at all.
And how do I magically get from the airport to the city and city to the airport? Is it free? Is it instant?
Actually, the initial estimate was close to $100B. But when the public reacted with shock, they handwaived and said the cost would now be $68B. Just like that: poof! $32B knocked off the budget. Of course we all know that the initial cost was more accurate; and the final cost will be a lot more than $100B.
http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...
HSR between LA and SF would be able to handle 15+ million people per year, on top of providing routes between other cities in CA, some of which don't have anything except for bus/car routes, and it would also free up capacity for more long distance domestic and international flights.
Besides, sf to la has an additional hour+ wasted with Security and 1 hr travel time to the airport (if you live in SF).
The $6 billion price tag was ridiculous. That's as much as the D.C. Metro Silver Line cost, and that was only 22 miles long. This HSR segment is 119 miles long. Yeah, it's probably cheaper to build through the Central Valley rather than the D.C. exurbs, but that much cheaper?
> On the horizon are more difficult segments, such as the long underground passage through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains and the route into the urban San Francisco Bay Area.
Especially the latter segment. I live along the assumed route to SF and let me tell ya, there are any number of wealthy NIMBYs who are ready to fight any attempt at building a noisy, unsightly, and potentially dangerous rail line past their houses in any way possible.
It seems this project is exactly what eminent domain is for. Even though I hate taking peoples property this project is public and benefits all.
I do wonder about using bonds that are paying out from the Highway Fund. So if this fails the highway fund still has to pay and that will mean less future money for road maintenance.
They will. That's not the issue.
The issue is political/legal fights on other bases.
There are also opportunities for legal challenges on environmental grounds and other things that can slow things down.
The way less well-heeled NIMBYs hold up projects is through environmental review (California's CEQA makes this all too easy) and historic preservation laws.
Directly, sure, but there's plenty of ways of legally challenging the project itself, or politically challenging it, that don't rely directly on legal challenges to.the eminent domain action. But if you can legally challenge aspects of the projects central to the purpose for which they are using eminent domain, it's as good as a fire t challenge.
I looked up construction costs for European high speed rail lines earlier. The best estimate I could find state costs between 12 - 40 million euros per kilometer.
For the 119 miles of this train, that lands you between 2.3 to 5.7 billion euros. So the $6 billion doesn't sound that unreasonable.
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/20/texas-scrapped-toll-...
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/65298/bullet-tra...
0. https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-construct-a-k... 1. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
NO ONE will know the total cost of this project until years after it's done and forensic accountants/auditors go through everything.
That being said, I sympathize with the nigh-impossible pressures here: it's difficult to convince an entire, diverse state to contribute funds to a project that will take a long time to come to fruition, and whose benefits will be broad, but marginal, across a variety of metrics. So there's a pressure to deliver an ambitious project at prices that are scarcely realistic. Being able to lead this does invite a certain amount of cognitive dissonance; in the famous words of Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
- Trains are generally more comfortable
- Trains allow you to use your cell phone
- Trains can take you from city center to city center
- Trains don't have the same security requirements
- Trains are safer
- Trains are cheaper to operate (and so should actually be cheaper in the long run)
Planes are better over very long distances. But trains are better for regional travel.
However, where a train does make sense, is connecting other points along the route.
Air travel tends to be either hub-and-spoke between busy hubs and tiny spokes, or point-to-point between two busy points; rail travel, however, is always along a route that allows intermediate points to be served at similar levels-of-service as major destinations.
Whereas a Sacramento-Bakersfield journey would typically require at least one hop to SF or LA by air, train (and roads, for that matter) allow that journey to be taken without intervening hops, and serviced at a marginal cost, because the two lie along a route that a train would travel anyway. That ability to connect ancillary cities is where rail travel really shines, in ways that air travel can't currently mimic.
It has seen massive ridership growth over the past decade.
What metrics are you using to claim it is one of the worst transit projects in the world?
Ridership per mile or transit modeshare is often a better way to rank transit systems. In terms of ridership per mile, BART is the worst of the major systems in the US and Canada. Admittedly, it's somewhat misleading since BART is kind of a mixed commuter rail/inner city subway system, but it is still far less than the other major mixed system (Washington Metro).
Also, it's a chokepoint: there's not a lot of alternatives to crossing the bay, so it should also be driving a much higher numerator as well. And it's not like other systems don't have geographic barriers--consider the crossings of the East River or Boston Harbor.
For the length of BART, taking out the Transbay Tube doesn't reduce track mileage by all that much, and consider that BART is ⅔ the ridership of the Washington Metro by mile. That's not a small gap. Maybe you could say it's slightly better than MARTA, but it's far from Philly or Chicago's performance, let alone NYC or international statistics.
With the addition of tracks to San Jose, this could change. We could start getting more flows of people where neither end is SF. That should boost ridership but of course they are adding a lot of miles.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/03/25/has-barts-cutting-edg...
The nonstandard track width may have had good intentions but I think was a mistake.
BART has the highest farebox recovery ratio of any public transit system in the US
[0] http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/55CF12C9-9D4E-4762-A27A...
I suspect it's a lot worse now. Turnstile-jumping is rampant, and fare evasion has been decriminalized altogether for minors.
The trains do not run often during the day. If you miss one, have fun waiting 20-40 minutes for the next one. They stop at midnight.
It takes a long time to get to your destination, and the destinations available are not a very large subset of where you actually want to go. Most of the time you will have to chain together another form of public transport on one or both ends, and the transfer time between different forms of transport is often long and pads out the length of a commute tremendously.
The stations and trains are unsafe, and people get attacked on them with some regularity.
On top of all these things, BART is very expensive!
I don't know how you could think BART was good unless you had never used any other comparable transport system.
Broader reach and faster travel times within those urban areas would go much farther to improve the quality of life of Californians than this high speed train project in the middle of nowhere.
I would really like California to have a high speed travel network from north to south at some point in the future - but I just don't think it's the right priority at this time - as air travel is good enough for now - and most people have to commute within their urban area every day. How often do you need to commute between SF and Los Angeles?
It's irritating that these kinds of stories don't put the numbers in context, so that it's possible to do a cost/benefit analysis.
(These are statements of fact! If you want to express a value judgement, do it in a comment. Don't just downvote because you don't like facts.)
[1] http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016-17/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/...
I doubt most state roads would fare well in that kind of analysis, frankly, but we still fund those...
It's not like all that reported "production" is distributed evenly. The costs surely will be, though.
So yeah, let's divide by the number of people who actually benefit.
It netted them ZERO economic growth over a quarter century, and ZERO improvement in their standard of living (which went backwards considerably between the late 1980s and today due to the debt they took on, which led to considerable destruction in their currency and savings rate).
Spending hundreds of billions on rail will not necessarily generate significant economic growth for the US. The US has a very efficient and productive economy, with among the world's highest GDP per capita. There's a high likelihood, in my opinion, that spending large sums on consumer rail will do absolutely nothing to boost GDP, and may harm the economy by drowning states like California in debt they can't afford.
Is it better for transportation purposes and the environment? Yes.
That's just total nonsense. Regardless of the performance of the broader economy (which depends on other factors) during the last few decades, it's obvious to anyone who looks that Japan's investment in the Shinkansen has played a huge positive role in the dramatic growth of their post-war economy.
You can certainly argue that the situation has changed, but arguing that high-speed rail never benefitted them is the economic equivalent of arguing that it snowed last week, therefore global warming is a hoax.
Which figures did you used for roads? I'm not familiar with gov-speak.
Not to mention that projecting tax cut "losses" is a game of prediction anyway. Taking that projection, and then backing out "how many HSRs will we have saved" makes even less sense than taking the projection itself as gospel, because the HSR is also a projection, and also paid out over time, and also subject to inflation, etc etc.
IOW this kind of analysis has the surface qualities of pointing out an interesting comparison but I don't feel it's conveying anything meaningful.
"Dishonest" is a massive overstatement at best.
It's completely reasonable to state that the government has lost $1.5 trillion in revenue, no matter what frame you choose. "Cost" would be one way to refer to that. I suppose I can imagine someone nitpicking that "cost" should refer to only expenditures, but that's an uphill battle against colloquial speech and even some formal usage (an opportunity cost is not an expenditure).
The general argument that taxation itself is theft is stronger than the argument that reduced revenue is only referred to as a cost dishonestly. And that's not saying much.
> Not to mention that projecting tax cut "losses" is a game of prediction anyway.
IIRC, the $1.5 trillion figure is among other things the prediction of the legislators who created the policy when playing by the required legislative rules.
Unless you don't really believe the state owns that money.
> materials and labor worth approximately X dollars are eliminated from the face of the earth
They aren't eliminated from the face of the earth. The materials exist, just in a new and more useful state state (as tracks, trains, etc.). The labor I suppose doesn't exist, but it never existed as it's not a physical object.
> When you give a tax break of X dollars nothing is removed from the face of the earth, the X dollars are now in the pockets of people who may save or spend them
Well sort of--those X dollars are presumably spent on something, either immediately or (if saved) some years in the future. When they're spent, the functionality is similar to government spending, in that resources are taken from the earth and transformed into some other good.
I'll grant that there's reasonable debate about whether a HSR is a better way to spend $100B than a tax cut, but I don't think "eliminating" things is a valid argument for/against either side.
Otherwise, we won't even know where this $64B went.
Then we'll have an grossly underestimated project with higher than "expected" costs with high ticket prices and no tangible benefits over the alternative - and likely faster - mode of travel.
And odds are, the system upgrades will need to start immediately so the ongoing maintenance will not be significantly cheaper than construction.
Yay?
Also, I don't know what the price model will be. In Italy, for instance, you buy a ticket reflecting the route you want to take and you can get on any train you want. Miss the 4:05? Take the 4:25. I wouldn't be surprised if this was similarly flexible. Most airlines, on the other hand, charge change fees unless you are a frequent flyer.
There could of been an entire article written about these issues. Instead we got a bunch of stuff about politics. What's the point of writing an article about problems with a major infrastructure project without any discussion of the problems?
Well as a German I can say that most road workplaces aren't even worked at during the day - you need to be lucky to see a worker there, and heaven forbid working on weekends or during night. In addition it's rare that politicians have the guts to say "okay we close $Autobahn totally for a year instead of having a 2-to-3 years halfway usable Autobahn", even though this mode of work is way more efficient. Something like the 48-hour sinkhole repair in Fukuoka/Japan or the Russians repaving a whole massive street in a single day (https://sploid.gizmodo.com/watch-a-huge-swarm-of-machines-pa...) would be unthinkable in Germany.
This is peanuts.
We need to strengthen eminent domain for transit projects so that we don't end up wasting tons of money appeasing corrupt landowners trying to hit the jackpot.
And you say "do you believe anything is made morally right when the State does it", but what you mean is "do you believe everything is morally right when the State does it". So you're turning bad phrasing into a bad argument. I can think that some things, even most things that the State does are good, without being universal. This includes eminent domain, which is a social good but must be applied carefully, on a case-by-case basis.
Absolutism is the second core failing of libertarianism, after the absurd ideas of "natural rights".
What the State does depends on which State. You would probably agree that what the State does in Venezuela is atrocious, but of course pales in comparison to what State has done historically in other countries.
So by what principle do you judge whether a particular thing the State does is good or bad?
States that behave atrociously toward their citizens tend to fall victim to revolution, sooner or later. Constitutional democracies, where "consent of the governed" has some real teeth, tend to be stable and avoid violent revolutions, because the need for social change can be handled via the ballot box.
But in terms of State injustice, we're talking about matters of degree, not absolutes. If you're saying that any injustice invalidates the State, you fail, because as long as the State is working pretty well for the majority (as it usually does), then the complaints of the few will just be seen as complaining, not cause for revolution.
Hence, eminent domain. It works pretty well for most people, who see direct benefit in terms of, say, new transportation systems.
Okay, so if the absense of State would prove to work for the majority of people (which seems to be your criterion), you would support a State-free society?
That said, a State-free society would necessarily be a property-free society. We need the State in order to have the records and the courts to resolve disputes over property ownership.
Paradoxically, I don’t believe an anarchist society could work without private property rights. And if you are familiar with anarchist thought, you are probably also aware of and have considered the arguments for privatizing courts and so on, so I won’t bore you with that.
It’s speculative, of course, but “well they voted for it” is not necessarily cause for “well we’ll force out landowners with a fair market value price”. These are often someone’s homes — places for families, their memories, and their sense of pride and security — for which fair market value does not fully appreciate.
I cannot fathom disagreeing with anything more than I disagree with your post.
It's a novel concept, really.
Obviously, if you like the idea of a powerful nation-state, you can try any number of other experiments, elsewhere. Those nations do not even try to veneer their actions with the consent of their populace.
I'm not laughing.
Neither are you, right?
When things become unacceptable, we can elect legislators to change the laws and make them acceptable again. I don't hear a cry to end eminent domain in our elections, or see anyone in Congress making any effort in that direction. That's consent of the governed.
Eminent domain nevertheless has not been "long okay," it has been hotly contested in every case.
That doesn't sound like "society is okay with it," unless you were on the take.
One could say society in general is "on the take". Which gets back to my contention that your "property" is yours only by the consent of everyone else.
I'm saying you are, which is why you contest that my property is not mine.
That's a pretty narrow, twisty way of defining property, and it's not upheld by US case law.
Acknowledge? Yes. We gave them all the guns.
Accept? Consent to? Absolutely not. I despise the status quo and want to see my children grow up in a more free society than what we're living in now. Unfortunately things have consistently gone in the wrong direction and I seem to be in the minority of people not okay with that, but I'll still do what I can as one man.
It doesn't mean take your land without compensation. It means take your land whether you like it or not, for fair market compensation.
Believing that the concept of owning property is inseparable from a government that defines property and resolves property disputes doesn't make me un-American. Sheesh.
Let's stop pretending that the 18th century understanding of society transcends time just because this nation happened to be founded at that particular era.
All you have shown is that we as people are flawed, even when the truth is right there in front of us.
Try not paying the taxes on it. See how long you "own" it.
Humans would do the same thing, except now we have outsourced the violence to the state. Instead of peeing on trees to mark our property, the state keeps a registry of property owners. Instead of physically fighting with intruders, we call the law enforcement arm of the state.
The concept of property or territory you control exists apart from the state.
I can shoot you, and then your land becomes mine, by "natural right". Is this really the hill you want to die on?
Feudal society, maybe.
Because again, that's what you're arguing.
To be honest, this would be easier to do if we had Land Value tax, making all california land be worth a fraction of what it is today.
If I have to put up fences, pay down a mortgage, file a deed at a title company, etc. then those requirements are disclosed beforehand.
After that the land is mine, I will defend it as mine. Various states have discovered how difficult eminent domain is to fully enforce. The "little old lady" is often tougher than anybody.
(I will ignore any arguments that start with "property taxes," because it distracts from the point.)
I reject that claim altogether because any land that the State gave you, the State took from someone else, or from nature. And who gave the State the authority to own nature?
> After that the land is mine, I will defend it as mine. Various states have discovered how difficult eminent domain is to fully enforce. The "little old lady" is often tougher than anybody.
Its hard to politically enforce domestically, but bear in mind that if it were a serious risk to the state, it would take very little effort to kill everyone and take the land. The capacity of the state to do that is beyond any doubt.
So far, right? If you're having trouble acquiring the land, you've still got plenty of hurdles before you've got something built.
If the actual problem is incompetence or inefficiency, this is just the first sign of more to come.
While it's possible that's the case, it's also entirely possible that the initial estimates for the cost of land purchases were simply inaccurate.
There's something I profoundly don't understand about someone who would seriously advocate for things like eminent domain or estate taxes.
China, for example, has almost 18,000 miles of high-speed rail, and they're on target 23,000 miles by 2025. They are going to finish another 2000 miles in 2018:
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2126548/full-...
China has hit been hit with delays in nuclear power, but they are nearing completion of their first AP1000 reactors:
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/UF-Chinese-plant-produces-...
Eminent domain compensation also tends to be very high for this kind of projects. People intentionally seek farmland that might be in the way of construction to get paid. Since it's all technically long-term "rent" in the communist regime, they usually get compensated on a yearly basis for as long as the rent stands, which may be as long as 5-15 years.
And for the environmental impact studies, if Western media and people can't read Chinese, it doesn't mean these studies do not exist. China is very serious about ecology in the last years, it's not there yet, but it's moving in the right direction.
Is that $500 billion? $1 trillion? $2 trillion?
I imagine $1 trillion in infrastructure, for example, will pay future dividends. Simply saying something wasn't cheap doesn't help us compare. For example, the US spent $1 trillion in the Iraq War and another $1 trillion in Afghanistan.
If China can build infrastructure at a fraction of the cost, and their economy passes the US by 2032, as predicted, it doesn't bode well for the United States.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/co...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/chinas-high-speed-rail...
So a little math - china has 22km of HSR ATM - well, that is a big number, $418 billion.
If you are a private investor and your bonds paid for this, whether it can make a profit is important. Unless the government is going to bail them out (and being SOEs, everyone expects they will!), then it is important to move that debt from private to public. China's debt numbers ATM assume that much of the SOE debt is private, which is dubious at best. China Railway's $6 trillion yuan debt is 6% of China's GDP.
I've ridden the Beijing-Guangzhou HSR a couple of times (my wife's hometown is on the route and it lacks an airpot), and the car we were traveling in was always very empty for much of the 8 hour trip.
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/chinas-rail-ambitions-run-a...
Where is the volume?
Shanghai - Beijing has a lot of people riding it, it is also the only line that is profitable (ticket sales > operating costs + debt interest, otherwise, only 6 lines pull in enough to cover operating costs). There are lots of short (relatively speaking) commuter jaunts also (from one HSR station to the next), as mentioned in the article you linked.
But then you have the rest of the track....
Don't get me wrong, HSR will be good for China. But someone is going to pay for it.
I used to travel between Shanghai and Hangzhou regularly on HSR and it is basically fully packed all the time. Same thing for Shanghai to Beijing and Beijing to Tianjin. Actually they are building a second line from SH to BJ.
Similar to Japan's Shinkansen, the only profitable line is Tokyo to Osaka.
You may see some under-capacity HSR lines, but they mean a lot to economy development. My hometown is a small city off trunk railways. 10 years ago the travel time to Beijing is 14 hours, now, with HSR, it's 5 hours. No one thinks Beijing is far away any more and people tend to travel farther and more frequently. After years in US, I think US government is not good at "generating" or "boosting" social needs. Moonshot in infra is really worth investing and sometimes you have to take the risk. US has been away from major infra (like interstate hwys) for years and I cannot believe economy growth without more infra.
I agree in principle, but my belief is that we (the US) need to focus a lot more on infra that serves local and regional needs before worrying so much about interstate infra (CA HSR is not technically interstate, but given the size of CA it's an interstate-scale project). We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion.
> We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional
> infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion.
There were extensively analyzed projections that showed investing in HSR was more sensible than doubling-down on the automobile. We can quibble over the calculus all day long, but that sort of quibbling is why we can never get sh*t done.
I live in the Richmond District of SF. We have one of the busiest bus lines in the country, and that's just one line out of 4+ parallel lines 2 blocks apart. Everybody here wants a subway, but the city is building BRT because of cost and as a compromise with local business owners (who don't want _anything_). Nobody wants BRT, but it's a done deal, and it irks me the amount of energy people put into killing BRT ostensibly in pursuit of a subway. It's idiotic. All it does is make BRT more costly without making a subway any more likely. If you want government to be more efficient, we need to come together as a community and learn how to compromise and _support_ infrastructure development. This stuff is costly because the opposition is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That sounds weird to me. HSR serves a different set of people and solves different problems than local/regional transit does.
As a simple example, I wouldn't see HSR reducing traffic on 101 or 280 between SJ and SF all that much. There are certainly some people who commute between SF (or very close by) and SJ (or very close by), but there are still plenty of people for whom driving to/from SF or SJ to catch the HSR to go to the other destination wouldn't make sense.
The major benefits of HSR are people traveling between NorCal, Central Valley, and SoCal. The most common type of commute pain is only minimally helped by HSR.
> [a bunch of stuff about BRT in SF]
That would seem to support my point: that we need better local transit options, including a subway, and we need to find a way to get what we actually want and need, not what interest groups like local business owners want. I see this as completely unrelated to whether or not we need HSR, though.
I’ll be shocked if it comes in under $15B.
$64billion is a rounding error for our government.
Seems like a better deal than paying to destabilize a region and create a lot of long-term enemies.
http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/ridership/ridership_revenue...
If you're putting stations into every major town, roughly 30 miles apart, it makes little sense to build things like curves with a radius of over 3.5 miles (~ 5.6 km) on a viaduct, comparable to open-line track radii in France for TGV lines, just outside of Fresno's station where you're going to slow down to 0 mph anyway.
This kind of silliness is why they're over budget. The most acute impediments to long-distance rail in California is the lack of dedicated, quality track along which a trainset could speed along between towns without regard to freight, so it would stand to reason to solve that part first, while leaving a bunch of expensive niceties for later, when enough appetite for them has been built up.
When France built the TGV, or Germany their equivalent, they didn't rebuild their downtowns to accommodate high-speed tracks; this is a uniquely American fetishism the same way the US took interstate highways into their downtowns in the 60s.
The spirit of your post stands nonetheless; the Prop 1 bill codified a bunch of ambitious requirements ahead of time, ignorant of local conditions or engineers' opinion.
[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_3001-3050/ab...
This is just a very, very expensive train. I'm not sure why anyone would think building something in a very expensive state would not itself be very expensive. Did we expect building major infrastructure in an expensive state to be surprisingly cheap?
It's also not a good use of money, as BART has an unusual track gauge, strange engineering decisions, and is operationally and mechanically incompatible with other commonly deployed rail systems. Not to mention, even with BART fulfilling a strange role between an in-city rapid transit and far-exurb commuter rail, extending lines further out from the operating core comes with issues around trainset supply and capacity allocations in congested areas, like the Oakland Wye, the Mission Street Subway, or the Transbay Tube. It's far more likely to "extend" fringes of the system with other modes that can then operate independently, like the eBART [1], ACE, or the Capitol Corridor, or even a bus line.
Extending the BART entirely around the western side of the bay won't happen, disproportionately due to the city of Atherton [2]. It's also silly, considering Caltrain fulfills a very similar role in transit to what BART would bring to the table, along the identical corridor.
I once wrote [3][4] about why the geography of the current transit options in the Bay are unfortunate, and single mode of transit completing the entire circle would do little to alleviate the problem that so much of transit around the Bay is already around this circle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eBART [2] http://sfist.com/2016/07/11/atherton_wealthy_will_still_mayb... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282756#12283335 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277421#14278045
Doubtful. Look at the cost per station (e.g. the half billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport) and cost per mile (e.g. Warm Springs extension). Then look at the mismanagement (they still haven't gotten the new cars to work right) and that BART train control is at capacity and can't handle additional system expansion. Or take a look at eBART -- even BART is self-aware enough to know how expensive it is and thus the BART board is going through with a diesel extension instead of bringing the mainline BART to the boonies.
Seems like they believed their own optimistic outlooks.
For example, electric bus technology has been getting better and cheaper and seems will continue to get better in the future. So for all the money we’ll be spending on this throughout the 2020’s, we could’ve been converting buses, where practical, to electric. And if electric buses don’t work that well (few US models have yet been in operation for a long time), we can always just upgrade many thousands of regular buses to cleaner and more comfortable modern models.
Incremental improvements are nice because they can be reversed and right-sized. It seems HSR is setting the size of its budget itself, as no one wants a half finished rail system. This wouldn’t be too bad except that there is a risk California will face pension problems in the future. The less money we tie up in debt now, the less chance there is for terrible cutbacks to critical services if a recession destroys tax revenues and pension assets.
...
> In Hill’s presentation to the board, he said intrusion barriers will cost an extra $450 million; land buys, $400 million, delays for not acquiring land, $325 million; satisfying issues raised by localities, $250 million; and relocating wires, pipes and cables used by utilities, $350 million.
These issues are all related to surface land acquisition and management (except piping/cabling relocation). Hopefully tunnel boring won't come up with new unexpected problems; they're far enough from built-up areas that there shouldn't be too much underground infrastructure to work around.
Regardless, part of the funding for the CA HSR project does come from the US federal government[0]. It's pretty common in the US for infra projects like this to have multiple funding sources.
If the state asked upfront for $2B/year for 15 years, I doubt it would have passed.
No, it was all Prop 1A in 2008 for ~$10 billion. Voters have not been asked for additional CA HSR bond funds since.
Presumably, given the level of other funding that has been secured, additional bonds will at some point be necessary, but the “every election” thing is not even remotely related to reality.
Great. Not only is this thing a waste of money, it's also sucking the air out of existing projects. Fuck this shit.
Imagine an LAX2 and LAX3 in different parts of the city with short high speed links between them.
Airports cost (only) about $10 billion to make. And each could be smaller with probably only 1 runway. https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-air....
Though, people in for eg. West LA would have fits over the idea of airplanes flying over their sacred lands.
LA's airspace is already crazy as is. And the metro lines they are trying to put in are just, well, cute. Putting an international airport somewhere in Santa Monica would be silly. It's 20 miles away from LAX as is.
Take a look at the air traffic as is here: https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html#
>Metro lines cute
Yes, that is also what OP was addressing. Faster lines between these theoretical airports, because metro is slow. These would double as public transportation for commuters. I'd love a straight shot with no stops from LAX to West LA to DTLA.
But most people seem not to mind: https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinCities/comments/2an5f1/redditor...