$100 billion for 463 miles of track is outrageous, and that's surely to double by the time it's completed. In 1964, Japan was able to build its 320 mile long Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka in just 5 years for less than $12B, inflation adjusted.
The other thing to think about is what is the alternative - road or airport construction in california is not cheap. Replacing 2 bridges on I-5 in stockton is going to cost nearly $1b alone.
And I think a lot of the benefit won't just come from the main SF LA route, it'll be intermediate stations to SF or LA too. It'll only take 19 minutes to go from Palmdale to LA for example - compared with 1hr+ now. In a way it would have been better to have the IOS be one of those routes, but they are also the most difficult geography.
Is there evidence that people will want to pay the high price of such a train ticket... And then what, once you're in LA? The last mile problem in LA and San Francisco (mind you HSR is not currently planned to enter the city, and BART is insanely expensive) is real.
The US does have some real problems though, the built in america stuff kills projects like this where there isn't a US supply chain in place. And the US tends to have very high standards for "safety" for rail especially.
Keep in mind that you can't compare all projects like this. CAHSR total price includes trains, stations and (probably?) operational costs for x years. You often can't compare two projects on a like for like basis.
Building rail is a nightmare here as well because nimbys reign supreme.
The second that I have seen is codified labor specialization. This leads to many more workers on a site, where each has a niche role, but low workload.
(Germany isn't much interested in the project.)
How did you come up with that? It seems that the tunnel is $450m euros per km, while SF to LA will be $80m per km.
Because let’s be serious - California doesn’t actually need high speed rail.
No one sane wants, or needs, to rock the boat - especially since doing so just gets a giant eye of Sauron pointed at them. Extra bonus? Turning the crank endlessly on this while everyone complains gets them rich.
Also HSR is something that a large contingent of people in CA have been kvetching about for decades, not sure your "everyone is afraid to say anything" holds water here.
Yeah but they don't want this bullshit route. They want to go from LA to SF and MAYBE go through Santa Barbara, or go to Las Vegas or San Diego.
Plus, Even with inflation, it's super cheap to fly from SF to LA. Who is going to pay more than airfare to go between those two cities in a longer amount of time?
Stopping burns a lot of energy and time.
I said folks are afraid to cut through the BS - by telling people with less important kvetching to sit down and shut up. Because if they do, the how dare they outrage will follow them around forever and make their life hell.
You know, so it can be built now, and actually solve a problem, instead of it costing 50x times more than is reasonable and be done decades from now.
Because let’s get real - people have been kvetching while driving their cars on I5 and flying for decades, and even with this approval will continue to do so for at least a decade more. And will likely kvetch about how it sucks and that is why they don’t use it later.
> No one sane wants, or needs, to rock the boat
That's generally what this idiom means. What did you mean?
In the introductory, "disruption" phase it will come in at about half the current cost. Then, once the current market and expertise has been destroyed, they can rack-in maximum profit by jacking up their prices, with added, predatory inconveniences, such as "cleaning costs".
The choice is never between "Pay what it costs for people to live good lives" and paying less than that. The choice is between paying what the company can afford or having no job at all.
I'd prefer everyone be making enough money to buy a 2000 sqft house and groceries with enough left over for leisure but that option isn't on the table.
In this scenario, you'd prefer Widgets not exist and Employee B not have a job.
Since you're going to say, "Raise the price of Widgets!". $20 is the ideal price point for product, any more or less and the volume sold * profit falls and the possible wage for Employee B will drop.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/former-los-angeles-depu...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-14/a-guide-...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/san-francisco-government-sy...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/city-hall-corruption-...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/san-francisco-deve...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_scandals_in...
These are just the ones who were both obvious and politically disfavored enough to get punished. Read about building in SF if you want to hear about the big boys.
So the costs manifest both as labor that shouldn’t exist, costs just because the project is extended so long (administrative salaries and interest on loans), and costs to buy land from entitled owners.
If it was down to cost of labor and everything else was the same, we’d just pay double and be done in the same amount of time.
Not only is 100 billion a bad deal, given CA’s track record they could easily spend $200 billion and never complete it
Another important factor here is the cost of construction: the California project will all be above-ground, AFAIK. However, a significant portion of the Tokaido line between Tokyo and Osaka is through tunnels, so the difficulty of construction was far greater.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison, Japan is currently building the [Chuo Shinkansen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen) line between Tokyo and Nagoya (286km/178mi), which will be a 505km/h maglev train that's 90% underground, as they have to tunnel through various mountains. It's projected to be finished in about a decade I think. Current costs have risen from the initial projection, and are at about 7 trillion yen for the first leg (Shinagawa to Nagoya), which at the current exchange rate is about USD$44B. But remember, that's about 160 miles of tunnels through mountains, plus all the rolling stock (which doesn't actually roll LOL), including the deepest tunnel in the country, and a line which isn't even conventional rail, it's a maglev track. By comparison, California is spending all that money on an above-ground train, in a place with excellent weather, using the same rail technology Japan was using 50+ years ago.
Not exactly what can be found on Wikipedia. [0]
The article reads: Orlando-Cocoa: 125 mph (200 km/h)
Orlando to Miami 236 miles. Time listed on Wikipedia 210min or 3.5hrs. 236/3.5=67mph.
Many previous articles complained of slow speeds but they are listing unloaded speeds or something.
Speeds to Miami:
West palm beach 54-60mph
Boca Raton: 60mph
Fort Lauderdale: 60mph
Aventura: 67mph
As an average speed, that is of course correct. But that includes 6 stops along the way, as well as the time needed to enter and exit the stations before being back on high-speed tracks, and the time needed to decelerate/accelerate.
So that doesn't preclude a top speed of 125 mph on some portions of the track.
Ideally you would want a high-speed train on dedicated track, with dedicated stations, and few stops, as done in France, for example. You can choose to have train connections from stations inside city centers, as done in Germany, but than you will loose a lot of time actually getting to these stations, and consequently have a substantial lower average traveling speed.
Your Japanese example comes in at about $23 million/km built.
I was recently looking at the costs of the Paris-Strasbourg line (opened in 2016), which cost €5.15B for 406 km of track, so about €13 million/km.
It’s simultaneously too much regulation, and too little government oversight.
https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...