I really hope this project gets built. It will be such a huge boost for California. In the longer term it will be completely essential and people will wonder how the state functioned without it.
It would massively increased the bay area's effective commuting area too.
How is it essential? It does nothing for the real transit issues in California, which is urban/suburban commuter traffic. There is no particular need for high speed rail between SF and LA - that need is served by air travel and the 5.
I love public transit, but there is no doubt that this is in fact a boondoggle that shouldn't be built. That money should be used to expand commuter rail in LA and SF, or better yet, implementing BRT. When we have driverless cars on the horizon, and the possibility that the hyperloop could work out, sinking what will likely turn out to be $100 billion into yesterday's technology makes absolutely no sense.
Hyperloop, if it ever gets built, will be at least 10 times more expensive than this. Building a 500 mile vacuum tube is not easy. The hyperloop hype is very unfortunate because it will prevent us from having a proper functioning train in the hope of some pie in the sky project that will probably not happen with the present technology.
Worse yet, Hyperloop would move 1/20th the passengers, to the tune of only 1000 people an hour. Hyperloop is horribly inefficent, and has worse right of way needs & engineering costs compared to High Speed Rail, not to mention the lack of existing talent to build it.
That money is being used to improve commuter rail. The first bits of spending are to electrify CalTrain and make grade separation improvements which will increase capacity.
That sounds a lot more tangible and useful than an imaginary hyper loop or putting more "self driving" cars on the road.
I'm pretty sure the people calling it a boondoggle are correct. Obama included $3B in the 2009 stimulus package for it back in 2009. Not a single yard of track has been laid.
The project is hoped to finish in 2029, which is 12 years from now.
For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent.
Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track, or what it costs NYC to build 1-2 miles of track.
If we are serious about transit, we will figure out how to get the costs under control. Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
If we want transit in the US we need to fix the insane cost problem. Anything else is sheer folly.
(Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)
Construction workers in the U.S. are decently paid (compared to the foreign counter-parts) and there are a lot of lawyers and consultants who all need a cookie out of the government contract cookie jar.
What is the cost breakdown to build it? Equipment, labor, land? My understanding is that buying the land is extremely expensive. The original path of the train was changed so it could run through cheaper land but it's still expensive.
Maybe it's best that this doesn't happen because it will just turn into a boondoggle and the tax payers will be on the hook for it.
It would make sense hiring a European or Asian country to come in and build it for us with 1/5 of the resources and in 1/3 the time. If a country like Switzerland can dig through solid granite for 35 miles under a mountain (Gotthard Base Tunnel) someone out there other than a US company should be able to lay a few hundred miles of track.
Uhh, they cut corners on their train cars. Where we allow 1 inch of crush when an impact happens and limited twist, they allow a foot & change, with significantly more twist allowed. There are other safety standards they are not bound to too, unlike rail in the US.
There's a fundamentally different approach to rail safety in Europe. The US mandates rail cars built like a tank, but has tons of open grade crossings and simple signaling systems. Europe builds lighter (== faster, cheaper, less track-damaging, more fuel-efficient) cars and invests a ton of time and money making sure they don't crash in the first place.
Even given that, the survivability of a crash in a modern European train is very good. The Grayrigg derailment in the UK, for example, had an Italian-built express train jump the rails at 95mph and jackknife down an embankment. One death (she was 84).
UK railways carried 64.4 billion passenger kilometers last year. The Grayrigg derailment was the last accident involving the death of a passenger. It was in 2007. How many road traffic accidents avoided by rail travel since then?
The French already said they could build the California high speed train for half the current estimate, or something like that. As mentioned in other comments, it's the popular opinion and government fragmentation in the US that makes this impossible. In France, the train builders and operators are nationalized (roughly) and the central government is much more powerful (not in terms of absolute power but rather in public acceptance). So in France, where high speed trains have been successful for years, the state run constructors can get eminent domain, lay track and run trains with only a few nimbys that most people ignore. Another way to see it is if Parisians want to take a high speed train through your back yard to get to the ski or sun, too bad for you. That doesn't happen in the US with weaker central government and stronger property rights (for corporations too). Japan and China are the same way (centralized command-based government).
Sure, if we restricted eminent domain litigation and returned environmental impact statements to being under 75 pages (as they are legally required to be already) we could build rail much cheaper, but Trump has not said jack in regard to getting that cleaned up.
I know we all want fast trains, but if we're going through major cities we likely won't get that fast (unless we do like the Shinkansen and build the entire train on a 3-story platform).
If we're willing to spend $50 billion, let's spend that on some slower trains that connect cities anyways. Maybe you don't do LA-SF, but giving higher inter-connectivity is good.
What happens in Japan is that train stations get built, and then the surrounding area is simultaneously developped with stores and other developments. So you build a train station in the middle of nowhere, but then build an IKEA + a mall. Suddenly people have a reason to take the train! And it helps the local economies too.
One of the problems is that the corridor in question is underserved in passenger rail right now. The only way to get between the two cities right now involves taking a train and a bus or two, because the rail company that owns the trackage between LA and Bakersfield doesn't want passenger trains running on it, and the rail company that owns the track between Ventura and San Jose would love to see passenger trains on that section of track halted as well. With such a hostile environment, it's difficult to build the interconnections that are needed for a modern rail system. Opening the Tehachapi Loop to passenger rail would be an alternative to a full passenger buildout, but you're never going to see BNSF agree to it.
Freight is easy, a few hour delay while you repair some trackage, move another 100 car train, etc. is far from the end of the world. Comparatively, getting BNSF or UP to switch gears and be timely for passenger rail service is very expensive, esp. since they do not have an internal culture that supports that.
California is an international trade, manufacturing, and agricultural powerhouse with several of the biggest ports in the western hemisphere that supply the entire country. I don't think it's unreasonable for the private rail owners to reject a much less predictable revenue stream. It's not on them to provide the capital for public transit and I'm not sure the benefits of forcing them would outweigh the economic cost.
What also happens in Japan is that the train company owns that land, the mall, and maybe a couple apartment buildings nearby, so that they have an interest both in people riding the train and shopping at the mall (so e.g. the train company has an incentive to keep fares low enough to keep shoppers coming).
A significant portion of Japanese train companies' income comes from retail real estate.
According to this blog post[0] the same used to be true in the U.S.---light rail was payed for by property developers.
Interestingly, he says this eventually led to the collapse of the Los Angeles street car system, because it was financed by the the increase in land value, and once the development was complete there was no longer a cash stream to pay for operating costs.
Yeah, in China they lease the land out to the developments, so there is a constant revenue stream. That is illegal to do in nearly any other country though, the US included.
This is slightly different from what Japanese companies do. Japanese train companies actually run the retail operations next to the stations in many cases, renting out store space to high-margin businesses like high-end clothing or other luxury goods. This also leaks into side businesses like credit cards (to support retail spending).
They did that in Portland (I used to live there). They built the MAX line out to the airport, and put an Ikea and an outdoor shopping center there, and it was frickin awesome. People would even haul stuff from Ikea on the MAX!
Everywhere they built the MAX line, shops and commerce would spring up around it.
Of course, there's still a small, incredibly vocal contingent who opposes public transit no matter what.
Happily, they were able to keep extending the MAX in different directions despite that small, vocal opposition.
Portland got a lot wrong, especially with the homeless, but their public transit is just great.
They quote an operational farebox recovery rate of less than 28%, so taxpayers are subsidizing almost 3/4 of the operational cost plus all of the fixed costs and construction.
(As disappointing as that it, it's still over 8 times better than VTA in the San Jose area!)
In 2015, TriMet's farebox recovery ratio was 39.1%.
Funnily enough, that blog post seems to have made up the numbers out of thin air. They quote a 2011 FRR of 27.8%, while TriMet's published numbers are 35.9%.
Regardless, it's a public good. I simply wouldn't expect public transportation to make money, just like I wouldn't expect the court system or the DMV to make money. These things exist to benefit the city or state as a whole. I'm happy to pitch in.
How much it should be subsidized is a fair question, but that it should be at all, not even a concern for me.
Another factor to consider is the self fulfilling prophecy. Fiscal conservatives who are opposed to subsidizing public transportation throw up obstacle after obstacle, which drives up the cost and all but guarantees that the system will need to be subsidized, especially with underground mass transit. A single injunction stopping work for a few weeks while a judge reviews the case can cost an insane amount because you can't move the highly customized and now unutilized drill to an active work site or stop paying the highly specialized crew while they sit on their hands and maintain an imobile megamachine.
Needless to say when it comes to roads they're opposed to tolling, and aren't willing to staunch the bleeding when it comes to maintenance or roadway construction.
How is the farebox recovery rate on roadways in Oregon State? Wait, I forgot, those operate as a massive money bleed.
In regards to headways, unless you are fully grade separated you can only go so tight with scheduling (fuckin' cars man, fuckin' up my mass transit!), also the number you cited appears to be made up, please cite sources.
Not all of Portland's transit ideas are smart or successful.
Here's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WES_Commuter_Rail a $166 million fiasco. Only 2,000 riders a day (and they may be lying about that number; I watch many trains go by with only a handful of people on them).
There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California that the train in China didn't have to consider. For example, the high speed train in California also has to cross notoriously rugged mountain ranges. The Diablo Range has a smattering of two-lane roads winding through it because it's so difficult to build through the gnarled hills. In the south, the Sierra Pelona and Tehachapi ranges almost caused California to be split in two separate before some rather remarkable feats in roadbuilding connected the two halves of the state. As such, there is an immense amount of planning, engineering studies, etc that need to take place before construction can start.
Additionally, there's a huge political element. A vocal minority of people have done everything they can to try to keep the project from taking off for various reasons. As such, there have been a rather insane amount of lawsuits filed which divert money to lawyers and time that would better be served by actually putting shovels in the ground. There are people who want it to fail for the sake of failing, because they want to bang their "government doesn't work drum" to the detriment of the taxpayers who are stuck paying for lawyers to fight their silliness.
That's a single 35 mile tunnel, in a comparably geographically stable area. The high speed rail project would need essentially two of those, each of which would need to cross the San Andreas fault. Additionally, a substantial amount of the remaining amount of track would need to be newly laid, because the existing rail infrastructure in the area is already near capacity, and the freight companies are hostile to any sort of improvements to passenger infrastructure. Yes, some of the issue is political, but it is an immensely challenging engineering problem to work through.
Relative to past engineering challenges, this represents a drop in the bucket. There is sufficient precedent to be able to emulate existing solutions for all portions of the track. Compare that to engineering accomplishments of the 20th century that had to be designed from scratch: the Itaipu dam, Panama canal or the US highway system.
Damn, way to demean someone's work. Just cause a similarly impressive feat of engineering was recently completed doesn't mean building twice more in a much different environment, with multiple active fault lines and through varied soil/types of rock is going to be smooth sailing.
After the Army Corps of Engineers built the Panama Canal in 1914, it was not all smooth sailing to build the Chittenden Locks in Seattle, between dropping the lake 10ft, reversing the course of/eliminating multiple rivers and streams and dealing with the fallout of that it was and still is quite an engineering marvel.
Political quagmires like this only get untangled by terrifying psychos, unfortunately.
People only shut their mouths when they get threatened into a fearful silence, and/or sometimes if they get bribed enough.
Otherwise, you'll always have a substantially sized group of complainers dragging down a project this big, and the complainers leech into operations and mysterious expensive mistakes erode the budget of an already expensive operation.
There's just enough shrug factor here for people to not care about how much gas they burn driving to places that might not be very exciting to begin with.
Many would just as soon not have to travel at all, and even more would prefer to not be taxed so as to pay for trips they personally don't want to take to begin with. Most people just want their actual lives to be generally easier.
Without confrontational intimidation, bribery is probably the only other political lever to press in the United States.
The issue isn't engineering, it's the cost and amount of labor. It can be significantly cheaper to tunnel through a mountain range in an almost straight line than to build on top of one. Once you've started digging into the mountain, you just keep digging and building the tunnel. Barring any maintenance and additional surveys, there is little interruption and the overhead costs can be amortized over the entire length. You will have to swap out drilling equipment as you hit different types and densities of rock but you can often go miles without doing so.
To build on top of a mountain range, there is a smaller overhead cost to survey, do an engineering/environmental study, cut earth, and lay down road but you literally have to pay that overhead for every few hundred feet because as the terrain changes, the equipment and other infrastructure you require also changes drastically. To build a highway you have to have strong ground to build on, which is why US freeways largely bob and weave all over the place instead of just going in a straight line, and civil engineers avoid weak ground where soil stabilization will be most expensive. On mountain roads, not only are the options for soil stabilization limited to very labor intensive methods, but you also often have no choice but to take a bad (expensive) route because you have to design safe turns and gradients. The problem isn't that the engineering is harder, there's just a lot more of it to do.
Also, United States property rights are pretty unique as far as Western countries go. To build a tunnel you'd have to get the mineral rights from every single property owner in your path whereas in most European countries, mineral rights are owned by the government. If you're going to compare a Swiss tunnel to any US road projects, you have to account for the massive differences in legal fees and land acquisition because whether you build above or below ground in the US, you have to deal with the property rights of private owners and all of the extra safety/environmental/etc regulations that come as a consequence.
I do not think US mineral rights are much of an issue. Australia has similar, or perhaps worse problems with high cost intercity high speed rail. Every time a Sydney to Melbourne fast train is investigated, cost estimates are among the highest in the world per kilometer, without the challenging geography of California.
I suspect some form of rent seeking (or likely multiple layers of rent seeking) is part of the problem.
They're not an issue if you're not building a tunnel. My point is that in Switzerland and most European countries they're not a problem even if you are. Although all infrastructure projects in western countries are subject to rent seeking and NIMBYism that drive up their costs, the degree of rent seeking depends on the state/province/country and project complexity.
Much of the relevant land in the mountainous parts of the Western US is owned by the federal government so I'm talking mostly about the actual construction costs. Unfortunately, the high speed rail is useless without tracks to and from the mountain sections so the cost of obtaining right of way still matters. From my understanding, the Swiss tunnel is an extension of an existing network, so the 36 miles of tunnel didn't depend on lots of new above ground construction and the risk that comes with it.
For example, the interstate 70 expansion through the Rocky mountains that connected the western and eastern halves of Colorado cost $800 million per mile for 12 miles, even though all of the land was already owned by state and federal governments. There was little opposition, it was badly needed, and the project went very well (winning several awards) but it still cost over 40 times more than initially predicted because it turned out that building a massive highway through the Rockies was a lot harder than anyone had thought.
While I agree that comparing China to California in terms of large scale engineering works is comparing apples to oranges (guess which is which). I disagree (kind of) on the following:
> There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California
Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out. The biggest problem geography-wise is probably all the NIMBY complaints. To be fair, they are really loud trains that would kill property values, and the complaints are valid. I think thats where a lot of those lawsuits are coming from.
"Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out."
Japan's high-speed trains also cost a hell of a lot more than the OP is talking about. The Chuo Shinkansen will cost around $51 billion for a 286km train (i.e. half the distance from SF to LA). The Hokuriku Shinkansen was much cheaper, but still 10x more expensive ($18 billion) than the Chinese line. [1] Both make the LA-SF line look reasonable, if not exactly cheap.
I generally agree that the SF-LA line is too expensive, but the OP's reasoning is just completely wrong. India and China are cheaper because everything in India and China is cheaper than the US.
The Chuo Shinkansen is a very special kind of expensive, since something like 80% of that 268 km is going to be tunnels they have to drill. It works well to illustrate the point that you need some more nuance to compare costs.
Yes, granted. But again, the Hokuriku line was "normal", and was still 10x the cost of the Chinese line.
The point of citing both was definitely to show that you can have a pretty large variance in costs, even if you're the world expert in building these things in earthquake-prone areas.
Chuo Shinkansen hasn't been completed yet so at best that's the minimum bar for what it will actually cost. Until they know for sure that they won't find any underground surprises, that estimate will continue going up.
The reality is that estimating underground rail construction costs is significantly harder and riskier than above ground [1]. According to the AACE's classification system for cost estimates, the current number is a borderline class 2/3 estimate which means the estimate could be off as little as 5% or as much as 600%. Historically tunneling projects have ended up in the upper half of that range.
Tunneling estimates can go both ways... in Sweden the Citytunneln project ended up under cost and under time due to the tunneling being less complicated than expected. The Japanese certainly have experience, all their mountains are swiss cheese of highways and shinkansen tracks. I'm not sure how much American studies apply here since there's a different culture of trying to underbid to win the contract there.
And yet the example of Japan still neatly invalidates the argument that California is inherently an especially challenging engineering project. Japan's rail projects are the platinum standard and every rich country should be trading war machine budgets to build similar transportation services for the overall good of their people. Instead, America is lost in a can't-do loop in large part because it has made personal individual liberty the indivisible unit of its society. With that choice come consequences, the most obvious of which is that people rarely work well together because they're forced to abide those among them who put their own interests above the group's.
By the way, this is also the reason that California will never be able maintain and operate HSR to the same level as Japan. It requires a hell of a team effort to do what JR does every day.
"Our government used to get things done [..]
Our newest fighter jet has already been under development for more than 15 years and it costs more than 15 times as much as the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), but last year it lost a dogfight to a plane from the 1970s [..]
Instead of spending a fortune, Trump won the primaries by saying things that made sense to voters. His greatest heresy was to declare that government health care can work [..]
Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government [..]
I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more."
That's the problem. There has been so much propaganda about the impossibility of government to do anything right that people don't even try to run an efficient government. But they also don't try to shrink it so money just gets wasted. This happens with healthcare, defense and infrastructure.
I think this may get even worse with Trump. During Bush's the Republicans just cut taxes while spending a lot of money on war so I would expect the same to happen again. People like Paul Ryan only turned into deficit hawks when Obama became president. They will probably forget the deficit now that they are in power.
I once heard a comment from a (George W Bush) White House staffer who said something to the effect of: 'there is no point trying to save money while we are in power, because the democrats will just come in and spend it; we should just spend it on our favorite programs.' This is somewhat aligned with Bruce Buena de Mesquita's theories on how politicians act to retain power.
I think that the Bush administration's largest impact on the budget was definitely Medicare Part D, which is not as obvious as the war in Iraq, but is much more expensive (>> $100 billion/year), and will probably last much longer (10 years so far).
Medicare Part D is actually an example of a good social program, even for those on the right side of the spectrum. The only thing the gov't does is define the parameters of the benfits and then has private insurers bid on providing benefits.
It's come in well under budget projections and seniors are generally happy with how they can shop around for the right plan for them.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it a pretty successful social program? I'd say so.
Part D costs twice as much as it would if run like Medicare. So, no it's a boondoggle worse than the Big Dig which had some difficult problems to solve beyond making campaign donors richer.
That's fair, but something like Medicare Part D was essentially inevitable. Even if you think a better-structured program could provide more value / $, you're still talking thousands per senior per year for those drugs.
It is simple really, it has gotten to large to work. Worse, far too much of it is not accountable to anyone. Look at the VA, how can this have gone on for so long and how is it even going on now?
Yes, I think the biggest reason for that happening, as well as the obstructionism in general is the extreme partisanship that has come from the FPTP voting system.
Republicans say big government doesn't work, for which they are partly right, but they usually say it for the wrong reasons - wanting to cut some services so they can cut taxes for corporations or spend that money for Defense, not because they want to make the gov more efficient.
Then to oppose them in a partisan way, the Democrats come and say "you're wrong! big government does work! and the people need it!" So they just end up wasting a lot of money not trying to make things more efficient, because doing so would "prove the Republicans right" or something.
Same issue with electoral rigging. Republicans yell about it but mainly referring to "voter fraud" (probably a non-issue for the most part, but I haven't looked at the data), while real electoral fraud issues do exist, voter suppression being included in that. But for the most part Democrats don't call for audits and such either, because "voter fraud is not real" (even if other type of fraud is) and they think they might be helping Republicans by admitting it.
This toxic partisanship is what's ruining politics in the U.S. Everything has to be black or white, red or blue. This is why I said it before when I criticized Sam Altman here for "simply encouraging young people to vote" as an obvious political ploy to get the Democrats to win.
If Altman and others here are actually serious about democracy and fairness of the political process in the U.S., then they should be supporting stuff like removing electoral processes that don't work anymore and aren't democratic. Processes like the FPTP voting system for Congress as well as primaries and other elections (to proportional representation or RCV/approval voting for single-winner elections), as well as removing the electoral college, and the caucus system from primaries.
They should also fight to make the "money vote" equal, just like the real vote is, and fight to limit individual political campaign donations. A rich person shouldn't have a "1,000 times stronger voice" than a regular or poorer person that can donate to a campaign.
There are other real issues they can fix as well, such as fighting to eliminate electronic voting machines. Even when they aren't hacked to steal the elections have a ton of other issues like not working properly, and thus making a lot of people's vote not count, which should be a crime in itself.
Fix the fundamental problems in the U.S. electoral process and everything else take care of itself in time, including climate change, and all the other important issues. As Elon Musk says, go at the problem from a "first principles" angle, rather than try to fix the symptoms (get more young people to vote so the "bad" Republicans don't win - the point is to make it so there aren't any "bad" Republicans anymore, at least not any worse than the typical right-wing party in Europe).
Yes! This FPTP game is the kernel of many frustrating struggles. It weeds out cooperative leadership, effectively dividing and conquering our government.
Imagine a community meeting where decision-makers were chosen in a game of Monopoly. Anyone who lost the Monopoly game didn't get to make any decisions. The winners, by virtue of their excellent Monopoly skills/luck, got the power to make decisions.
Not only would this process be entirely unfair, it would poison peoples' desire to participate in the first place. Monopoly is a nasty game, as is FPTP. Neither of these have any business being arbiters of power.
>>Instead of spending a fortune, Trump won the primaries by saying things that made sense to voters.
I'm afraid Peter is misinformed. Trump did spend a fortune to win the primaries. $63.3 million, to be exact. Only Ted Cruz spent more than him, at $85.8 million. You can look at the numbers by the Federal Elections Commission here: http://www.fec.gov/press/summaries/2016/tables/presidential/...
He isn't talking about only the republicans. Clinton spent something like 3x Trump to win the Democratic primary. She also spent twice as much as Trump in the general election.
Right... because the billionaire who is friends with dozens of billionaires, media owners and personalities, and rich politicians- who represents the interests of these monied connections- won the presidency? Trump is the definition of "money and connections"- all he has that and a particularly low-brow form of salesmanship. The only things this election proved is that things like truth and tact don't count for nearly as much as money and connections.
You are comparing California labor construction costs to the costs of third world laborers. What's the cost difference here; 10 to 1? Surely 5 to 1 at the least?
Then you gotta figure the cost of compliance with all the different bureaus and regulations that don't exist in China or India to make something like this happen in California.
And then there's the litigious cost amplifier that is another distinctly American feature.
You're missing one of the biggest costs, which is obtaining the right of way from existing property holders. There's plenty of prime real estate in California that the route would need to pass through, and every local community is going to try to negotiate the best deal along the route.
We actually did this with the Chinese and Irish immigrants [1], and some rail lines would kill off workers to avoid paying them once a rail line was complete.
That being said, American labor isn't the issue, Chinese already cost $4/hr and importing them costs quite a bit, whereas the labor market stateside is pretty soft in that segment. It likely would not make sense unless your good with mass executions to cut costs.
China and India do not currently execute their train construction crews, so I don't see why we would need to.
If we can hire American labor for cheap (i.e. less than Davis Bacon wages) let's do that - but then don't use labor costs as an excuse why CA rail costs > 10x what Chinese rail does.
It is part of the reason why it'd cost more, we also have much higher safety standards (our rail cars are only allowed to crush in 1 inch, as compared to over a foot of crush allowed in Europe), an expensive right of way acquisition process, massive environmental impact statements ("Lets quantify the impact on the average person in this area"), and much more community involvement in the design process.
Unless we can steal land and cut corners when building, the costs are unlikely to drop much.
The most expensive line under construction is the Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line, at $50 billion for only 286km. It's maglev at 500km/hr, and it's 90% in tunnels. They're going straight through the Japanese Alps. Under construction since 2013, opening scheduled for 2027.
43km of track is already in operation as a test track. Here's a ride video.[1]
That is an early cost estimate and tunneling estimates are by far some of the most innacurate in civil engineering because you never know how much the geology will differ from what the estimate assumed. Construction on the first tunnel segment started a year ago and won't be complete until the 2020s so it'll take a while before the developer knows how bad the overrun will be on that section, let alone for the whole line.
Sooo crunchy there, jeez! Tunneling isn't as unpredictable as you suggest, rail lines are often completed on time and under budget[1]. When you do crazy stuff like try and build the largest tunnel ever built with cutting edge technology and don't plan for failure[2], that is when things go bad.
Luckily, rail doesn't need giant tunnels, tunnel boring machines for that size tunnel are a known quantity.
True but misleading. Actually laying track is the cheap and easy final part of construction; building the viaducts, grade separations, etc., and doing the other construction which prepares the route for track to be laid.is the time consuming, expensive part, and plenty of that has been done and is being done in the initial segment.
> Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B.
Which is a very different problem than a regional transit system. And, in any case, acquiring right of way is cheaper in India, due to land prices.
> That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track
California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction.
> Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
The right of way, design, and labor differences are the main differentiator, besides the fact that this is high speed rail over a few hundred miles, not a few dozen mile light rail alignment.
That being said, here in Seattle we approved nearly as much money to build out our light rail network, and in the context of the US and what it costs to build bridges, freeways and rail here, that cost isn't far out of line. Considering the state of our region currently, even if the economy imploded tomorrow it'd still be a sound investment to do, especially since we are connecting all the way from Tacoma to Everett, with 116 miles of rail.
> California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction.
That's irrelevant. There is no planned path, just patches and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree (or sold off, which is basically the same thing).
> Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years (procedurally discussed, not legislatively enforced).
Much like Federal budgets and projects, anything extended beyond the current administration's term limits means it's someone else's problem. Putting people on Mars and this project, should become a reality about the same time.
Yes, there is a planned alignment for the entire system (and not just the LA to SF "Phase I" for which most of the cost estimates and timelines usually discussed apply, but also the Sacramento to San Diego "Phase 2".)
> just patches
No, even if you are referring to the context of the initial construction, that's not true; it's directed with a clear plan of a specific segment for initial operations between Silicon valley and the Central Valley.
> and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree
Pure speculation; it's true that there is uncertainty, largely political in nature, about funding for the portion beyond the part that is supposed to be operational in 2025. But there's also plenty of time to resolve that.
> The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years
It was a $10 billion conditional bond authorization (one of the funding challenges has been meeting the conditions in that bond authorization) which was very explicitly not expected to cover full construction cost of the system (nor was there ever a 10 year timeline.)
Good luck with that, our safety standards for train cars in the US are head and shoulders above Europe, and in a whole different universe than India & China. Add to that that it is illegal to buy up all the land around rail lines and lease it out to subsidize the rail company, and its no wonder we have to spend more!
This is before we even talk about fault lines, soil conditions, land cost, lawsuits, etc. that are involved in building High Speed Rail. You need a dead straight alignment for HSR, and as it stands there are businesses and homes in the way right now, which means a large legal mess to even start to clear up, before we even get into preliminary system design.
We do have rail currently, passenger rail is a thing all over the US, whether it be commuter rail, light rail, or Amtrak. Its a common misconception, I had to explain to a MS exec the other day that passenger rail service from Seattle to Portland already exists, and her plans she was going to go push had been implemented a decade ago already.
Re: Trump's infrastructure plan, I highly doubt we'll see any rail improvements, whether it be light rail or heavy gauge rail in West Virgina to unbottleneck their coal exports. He is very happy to walk back on promises he made on the campaign trail it seems, which is quite sad.
> (Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)
You think Paris has worker costs closer to India than the US? I think you might be the one who doesn't know what you're talking about.
The minimum wage in France is $10.11 per hour (at the exchange rate right now), compared with $7.25 for the US. It is at at best 50% more than China or India (where minimum wage varies by location), and labour in France is highly unionized so workers are on more than the minimum as-is. The current Paris - Lyon HSR link in France is budgeted at $12.5 billion [1].
Your idea that a California HSR project could be done for $2-4 billion is simply unreasonable. It can't be done. You're off by an order of magnitude. Is $64 billion a lot of money? Yes. Is it too much? Probably. Can it be done for $2 billion? Absolutely not. Go look at comparable mega-projects in western Europe. Crossrail in London is about $18 billion. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was $12 billion. The Moscow-Kazan HSR railway is going to cost at least $29 billion, and that's being built with Chinese assistance.
I don't have the study readily at hand, but per-kilometer costs for rail infrastructure are 5-10 times higher in the US than in developed countries like Spain and Germany, and 20-40 times higher than in developing countries like China and India.
Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US.
That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal.
Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors".
Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough.
So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree.
(FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)
I dont think the comparison with China is fair. A big chunk of that $64b is due to permitting and land acquisition costs; China's solution when building the Three Gorges Dam was to forcibly relocate over a million people. Totalitarian states have options that are not available to a functioning democracy when it comes to constructing huge infrastructure projects.
I think you are a bit off for the average price of this kind of project in developed countries.
Let's take France which have a strong history in HSL (thus a lot of experience, which helps reducing the costs): the new Tours-Bordeaux line (302km) will cost 8B euros, for a line which is "simple" on an engineering point of view (no mountains, no urbanized area) for 6 years of work.
Considering the length and difficulty of the HSL in California, you can multiply the cost at least 3 times, so something around $30B. You add the fact that the US labor is more expensive than France (contrary to common knowledge), the fact that it's the first HSL in the US..etc.. and the $64B figure is not too crazy anymore.
Your estimate of $2-4B in 4 years is imho absolutely unrealistic.
> For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent.
In looking at a relief map, the terrain between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang is flat, or mostly so.
Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains. The easiest route between LA & Bakersfield requires traversing a mountain range where the pass elevation is 4000+ feet. In itself that wouldn't be bad (e.g. out east to Riverside and Palm Springs the elevation change is similar), but Grapevine is also twisty as all get out.
The Central Valley portion isn't too bad, but then you've still got to get over the southern coast range that separates the Central Valley from the Bay Area.
On top of that, you have to do it in an environment where all the easiest routes are already taken by the rich and powerful and you're building on/near/around a major earthquake fault that regularly sees large earthquakes.
I kinda agree with you that we should rethink the cost of infrastructure projects in the US relative to European countries. But I find the China and India comparisons disingenuous. Construction is cheap in those countries because human labor there lives at the edge. Construction laborers in America have a standard of living that rivals that of the top 5% of Indians. They are commensurately more expensive. That's a good thing.
Then let's have Indians and Chinese build our transit for cheap.
We can separately debate whether we should funnel tens of billion$ to unions if that's so important to you. But if we insist on tying the two policies together, that's evidence of disastrously bad governance and a good reason to do neither.
There's a mix of ineptitude, poor/non-planning and some shady deals. With larger projects, more waste is essentially inevitable because of the number of moving parts and limited communication paths.
It's a pity that the United States didn't embark on a concerted effort to build a high speed rail system back in the 1950s and 1960s, when we had more money and a smaller population. And fewer lawyers. Instead we wasted a couple trillion (adjusted for inflation) on Vietnam. Think what we could have done with that money not to mention thousands of lives saved.
It seems to me that California's highway problem is one of simple over crowding. Even if they built ten high speed rails between SF and LA, it would probably not make much of a difference, and I'm not even talking about the issue of needing a vehicle once you arrive at LA central terminus. Trains carry hundreds of people; let us say, a few thousand at any given time might be carried on high speed rail cars, but this is a tiny fraction of the millions of motorists clogging the highways 24x7 all up and down the coast.
I see no solution to California's clogged highways other than to siphon some of the population off to neighboring states that are vastly less populous. Perhaps this will happen naturally as technology makes it easier to disperse workers over broader geographical areas. It seems to me that huge cities are a legacy thing anyway.
Probably the next big thing will not be speeded up 18th century iron horses, but electric long range buses and self-driving cars that will safely and quickly negotiate the computerized traffic grids of the future.
California ought to spend a few billion on embedded markers and sensors in its roads that self-driving vehicles can access; probably this will be a much better investment in the long run.
Although I agree with your conclusions it's worth considering that Japan's bullet trains run 2000 passenger trains both directions every 3-5 minutes (<<1min delay) on their high traffic corridor.
That is very conservatively (2 passengers/car) 1000 cars every 5 miles with on 125ft spacing equivalent to a perfectly functioning 10 lane freeway.
More realistically (1 passenger/car) 2000 cars every 3 miles on 250ft spacing is equivalent to a 60 lane normal freeway.
For the air travel equivalent (much lower latency, but higher cost) you would need 1000 full 737-900 every hour (8000/day) compared to the total number of flights on California on a busy day, 3000.
While that density is impressive, Japan is the only place where that density happens. Here in Korea, we generously run a train only every twenty minutes on the Seoul-Busan corridor. I would argue that this is much higher than what is likely to be attained in California, as both Seoul and Busan have well-developed public transit infrastructure and a comparatively low rate of car ownership, which reduces the burden on riders at both ends.
(Even ignoring the TSA, 6B in ridership fees to be made up, and general messiness of American commuters.)
So now your 1300 passengers, generously, are spread out over 20 miles of freeway, instead of three.
Now, that was assuming one passenger per car. Add a single bus per mile-lane (seated passengers only) and this drops to four lanes. With self-driving cars and more busses, you could safely add only a single dedicated self-driving car lane and a sigle dedicated bus lane in each direction, and still have room to increase "ridership". For the price, I think that is ridiculous.
Undoubtedly if built it will get used. However: it's a nice fantasy; but in an over-committed region of a debtor nation, the implementation requires beggaring other vital programs or putting the country another couple hundred billion in debt for a public works project that employs a few thousand people to build, a thousand or so to run, and will deliver questionable economic value in a state that is already overcommitted in so many ways.
The problem with this California idea is that its proponents evoke the Bullet Train but it will never be the Bullet Train. The Japanese built that thing in 1964, which is when we should have started modernizing our own railways but didn't because GM decreed that its buses and trucks should replace railroads, which they largely succeeded. The resources for a huge project existed then; they don't exist today.
It's also worth pointing out that California is in the political dog house post-2016 elections. They backed the wrong horse, their dominant party is in the minority nationally, and they are not going to get a lot of sympathy in the Congress or from most other states who are going to be asked to foot the bill for this turkey. If the people of California want to build this thing, go right ahead; no one's stopping you. Just don't ask the rest of the country to pay for it.
California is less densliy populated than a lot of quite pleasant, developed countries. Not just the dense Japan and the UK (which are actually quite nice too) but also France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and even the bucolic Austria.
There is plenty of room even without population transfers to neighboring states.
Israel has 4 times the population density of California. The water shortage is because California is growing fruits and nuts for the whole country, not because of the population living there.
As a California usually in favor of all sorts of new technologies and futuristic projects, I am totally opposed to building this train system. The air travel infrastructure is already in place and could work even better with an investment of a fraction of the $64B. Airplanes don't need expensive rails to ride on in the sky. What's better about getting into a coach of a train and rolling on the ground over getting in the coach of a plane and flying through the sky? Let's stick with what is and what works and spend the money on desalination plants, wind farms, solar plants and a smart electrical grid.
If you think the existing air travel infrastructure was built in its entirety for "a fraction" of $64B (in 2016 dollars), I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Most of the cost of air travel is hidden in places you don't think about, and might surprise you if you knew how much it added up to (or how much tax money -- in the US, around $300 million per year currently, and around $9m/year of it in California -- goes into subsidizing unprofitable air routes in order to keep airlines flying them, for sake of maintaining connectivity).
Per your numbers 64B / 9m per year = 7 thousand years California could continue subsidizing those air routes for the cost of the track. Can't you see the disparity in cost?
That's to keep service on a few routes that get direct subsidies. That's not the cost of running the entire airport and air-travel infrastructure in the state, which also runs on a lot of direct or indirect taxes. And it's not the cost of building out that infrastructure in the first place.
And I suspect that when you add it up you'll find that $64B is not much money compared to what having a well-developed air-travel network costs, and in fact this sort of argument is precisely the point people make when they argue for building out better rail service along major corridors: the cost seems steep when someone presents you with the bill up-front, but we routinely pay and have paid bills just as high or higher for things that we'd now yell and scream about if they got taken away.
I didn't say it could be built in it's entirety for a fraction of the cost, I said the existing air travel infrastructure could be improved and made more efficient for a fraction of the cost.
One problem with domestic air travel in the U.S. in particular is all the dead time in getting to the airport, security, boarding. In comparison, here in Japan you can show up at the airport 20 minutes before your departure time with no problems. If you didn't book a ticket in advance, make it 30 minutes to get a ticket from a vending machine. It really is an air-BUS.
The question is what kind of security theater will end up applied to high-speed rail in the U.S.
I'm afraid the same kind of security theater would apply to a high speed train, though the chances of it being driven into a building are low, it still would be a choice target. I would take a few billion out of that 64B price tag and improve air travel security to make the checkin process take less time and be less intrusive.
well, the good thing about that staggering out-of-your-mind price tag (which, trusting to and believing in the process, i suppose will grow even more in the coming years :) is that it provides an opportunity for the R&D for alternative transportation options. That has potential to make CA and specifically Silicon Valley a leader in the transportation innovation too. By efficiently building such railroads at $4B a piece China effectively stripped its own innovation houses of such an opportunity :)
"Texas Central will deploy Central Japan Railway Company’s (JRC) “N700-I Bullet” high-speed rail system based on their “Shinkansen” system that has been refined over more than 50 years of operation into the most reliable, comfortable and safe high-speed rail system in the world."
I remember when the $10 billion bond was passed in California and now over 10 years later, it seems like it was all spent on politics instead of progress.
One way to get the money is to enforce the law and send the illegal immigrants in California out of the country. Governments city and State and other governments spend billions of dollars for K-12 education, health care costs, and even college education for illegal immigrants.
Take the savings and invest it into bonds for the high speed railway.
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[ 13.4 ms ] story [ 3210 ms ] threadIt would massively increased the bay area's effective commuting area too.
That sounds a lot more tangible and useful than an imaginary hyper loop or putting more "self driving" cars on the road.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-ca...
http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-high-s...
The project is hoped to finish in 2029, which is 12 years from now.
For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinhuangdao%E2%80%93Shenyang_H...
Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track, or what it costs NYC to build 1-2 miles of track.
If we are serious about transit, we will figure out how to get the costs under control. Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
If we want transit in the US we need to fix the insane cost problem. Anything else is sheer folly.
(Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)
It would make sense hiring a European or Asian country to come in and build it for us with 1/5 of the resources and in 1/3 the time. If a country like Switzerland can dig through solid granite for 35 miles under a mountain (Gotthard Base Tunnel) someone out there other than a US company should be able to lay a few hundred miles of track.
Even given that, the survivability of a crash in a modern European train is very good. The Grayrigg derailment in the UK, for example, had an Italian-built express train jump the rails at 95mph and jackknife down an embankment. One death (she was 84).
UK railways carried 64.4 billion passenger kilometers last year. The Grayrigg derailment was the last accident involving the death of a passenger. It was in 2007. How many road traffic accidents avoided by rail travel since then?
Edited to add: there are many ways for government and economies to function.
I know we all want fast trains, but if we're going through major cities we likely won't get that fast (unless we do like the Shinkansen and build the entire train on a 3-story platform).
If we're willing to spend $50 billion, let's spend that on some slower trains that connect cities anyways. Maybe you don't do LA-SF, but giving higher inter-connectivity is good.
What happens in Japan is that train stations get built, and then the surrounding area is simultaneously developped with stores and other developments. So you build a train station in the middle of nowhere, but then build an IKEA + a mall. Suddenly people have a reason to take the train! And it helps the local economies too.
A significant portion of Japanese train companies' income comes from retail real estate.
Interestingly, he says this eventually led to the collapse of the Los Angeles street car system, because it was financed by the the increase in land value, and once the development was complete there was no longer a cash stream to pay for operating costs.
[0] http://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/144726791758/was-thin...
These businesses are true conglomerates
Everywhere they built the MAX line, shops and commerce would spring up around it.
Of course, there's still a small, incredibly vocal contingent who opposes public transit no matter what.
Happily, they were able to keep extending the MAX in different directions despite that small, vocal opposition.
Portland got a lot wrong, especially with the homeless, but their public transit is just great.
http://skytrainforsurrey.org/2012/05/28/portland-or-lrt-is-c...
They quote an operational farebox recovery rate of less than 28%, so taxpayers are subsidizing almost 3/4 of the operational cost plus all of the fixed costs and construction.
(As disappointing as that it, it's still over 8 times better than VTA in the San Jose area!)
Funnily enough, that blog post seems to have made up the numbers out of thin air. They quote a 2011 FRR of 27.8%, while TriMet's published numbers are 35.9%.
Regardless, it's a public good. I simply wouldn't expect public transportation to make money, just like I wouldn't expect the court system or the DMV to make money. These things exist to benefit the city or state as a whole. I'm happy to pitch in.
How much it should be subsidized is a fair question, but that it should be at all, not even a concern for me.
(Source, TriMet's operations data: https://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/trimetridership.pdf)
In regards to headways, unless you are fully grade separated you can only go so tight with scheduling (fuckin' cars man, fuckin' up my mass transit!), also the number you cited appears to be made up, please cite sources.
Not all of Portland's transit ideas are smart or successful.
Here's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WES_Commuter_Rail a $166 million fiasco. Only 2,000 riders a day (and they may be lying about that number; I watch many trains go by with only a handful of people on them).
Additionally, there's a huge political element. A vocal minority of people have done everything they can to try to keep the project from taking off for various reasons. As such, there have been a rather insane amount of lawsuits filed which divert money to lawyers and time that would better be served by actually putting shovels in the ground. There are people who want it to fail for the sake of failing, because they want to bang their "government doesn't work drum" to the detriment of the taxpayers who are stuck paying for lawyers to fight their silliness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
After the Army Corps of Engineers built the Panama Canal in 1914, it was not all smooth sailing to build the Chittenden Locks in Seattle, between dropping the lake 10ft, reversing the course of/eliminating multiple rivers and streams and dealing with the fallout of that it was and still is quite an engineering marvel.
People only shut their mouths when they get threatened into a fearful silence, and/or sometimes if they get bribed enough.
Otherwise, you'll always have a substantially sized group of complainers dragging down a project this big, and the complainers leech into operations and mysterious expensive mistakes erode the budget of an already expensive operation.
There's just enough shrug factor here for people to not care about how much gas they burn driving to places that might not be very exciting to begin with.
Many would just as soon not have to travel at all, and even more would prefer to not be taxed so as to pay for trips they personally don't want to take to begin with. Most people just want their actual lives to be generally easier.
Without confrontational intimidation, bribery is probably the only other political lever to press in the United States.
To build on top of a mountain range, there is a smaller overhead cost to survey, do an engineering/environmental study, cut earth, and lay down road but you literally have to pay that overhead for every few hundred feet because as the terrain changes, the equipment and other infrastructure you require also changes drastically. To build a highway you have to have strong ground to build on, which is why US freeways largely bob and weave all over the place instead of just going in a straight line, and civil engineers avoid weak ground where soil stabilization will be most expensive. On mountain roads, not only are the options for soil stabilization limited to very labor intensive methods, but you also often have no choice but to take a bad (expensive) route because you have to design safe turns and gradients. The problem isn't that the engineering is harder, there's just a lot more of it to do.
Also, United States property rights are pretty unique as far as Western countries go. To build a tunnel you'd have to get the mineral rights from every single property owner in your path whereas in most European countries, mineral rights are owned by the government. If you're going to compare a Swiss tunnel to any US road projects, you have to account for the massive differences in legal fees and land acquisition because whether you build above or below ground in the US, you have to deal with the property rights of private owners and all of the extra safety/environmental/etc regulations that come as a consequence.
I suspect some form of rent seeking (or likely multiple layers of rent seeking) is part of the problem.
Much of the relevant land in the mountainous parts of the Western US is owned by the federal government so I'm talking mostly about the actual construction costs. Unfortunately, the high speed rail is useless without tracks to and from the mountain sections so the cost of obtaining right of way still matters. From my understanding, the Swiss tunnel is an extension of an existing network, so the 36 miles of tunnel didn't depend on lots of new above ground construction and the risk that comes with it.
For example, the interstate 70 expansion through the Rocky mountains that connected the western and eastern halves of Colorado cost $800 million per mile for 12 miles, even though all of the land was already owned by state and federal governments. There was little opposition, it was badly needed, and the project went very well (winning several awards) but it still cost over 40 times more than initially predicted because it turned out that building a massive highway through the Rockies was a lot harder than anyone had thought.
> There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California
Japan is a mountainous, earthquake prone country, and they seem to have figured it out. The biggest problem geography-wise is probably all the NIMBY complaints. To be fair, they are really loud trains that would kill property values, and the complaints are valid. I think thats where a lot of those lawsuits are coming from.
Japan's high-speed trains also cost a hell of a lot more than the OP is talking about. The Chuo Shinkansen will cost around $51 billion for a 286km train (i.e. half the distance from SF to LA). The Hokuriku Shinkansen was much cheaper, but still 10x more expensive ($18 billion) than the Chinese line. [1] Both make the LA-SF line look reasonable, if not exactly cheap.
I generally agree that the SF-LA line is too expensive, but the OP's reasoning is just completely wrong. India and China are cheaper because everything in India and China is cheaper than the US.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-cost-differences-between-...
The point of citing both was definitely to show that you can have a pretty large variance in costs, even if you're the world expert in building these things in earthquake-prone areas.
Chinese HSR had a fatal one within three years of the line opening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision
The reality is that estimating underground rail construction costs is significantly harder and riskier than above ground [1]. According to the AACE's classification system for cost estimates, the current number is a borderline class 2/3 estimate which means the estimate could be off as little as 5% or as much as 600%. Historically tunneling projects have ended up in the upper half of that range.
[1] http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/umrcourses/ge441/Too_Dangerous_...
By the way, this is also the reason that California will never be able maintain and operate HSR to the same level as Japan. It requires a hell of a team effort to do what JR does every day.
"Our government used to get things done [..] Our newest fighter jet has already been under development for more than 15 years and it costs more than 15 times as much as the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), but last year it lost a dogfight to a plane from the 1970s [..] Instead of spending a fortune, Trump won the primaries by saying things that made sense to voters. His greatest heresy was to declare that government health care can work [..] Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government [..] I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more."
[0]: http://wapo.st/2ceA9DK
I think this may get even worse with Trump. During Bush's the Republicans just cut taxes while spending a lot of money on war so I would expect the same to happen again. People like Paul Ryan only turned into deficit hawks when Obama became president. They will probably forget the deficit now that they are in power.
I think that the Bush administration's largest impact on the budget was definitely Medicare Part D, which is not as obvious as the war in Iraq, but is much more expensive (>> $100 billion/year), and will probably last much longer (10 years so far).
It's come in well under budget projections and seniors are generally happy with how they can shop around for the right plan for them.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it a pretty successful social program? I'd say so.
Not sure what you mean, Part D is Medicare.
Republicans say big government doesn't work, for which they are partly right, but they usually say it for the wrong reasons - wanting to cut some services so they can cut taxes for corporations or spend that money for Defense, not because they want to make the gov more efficient.
Then to oppose them in a partisan way, the Democrats come and say "you're wrong! big government does work! and the people need it!" So they just end up wasting a lot of money not trying to make things more efficient, because doing so would "prove the Republicans right" or something.
Same issue with electoral rigging. Republicans yell about it but mainly referring to "voter fraud" (probably a non-issue for the most part, but I haven't looked at the data), while real electoral fraud issues do exist, voter suppression being included in that. But for the most part Democrats don't call for audits and such either, because "voter fraud is not real" (even if other type of fraud is) and they think they might be helping Republicans by admitting it.
This toxic partisanship is what's ruining politics in the U.S. Everything has to be black or white, red or blue. This is why I said it before when I criticized Sam Altman here for "simply encouraging young people to vote" as an obvious political ploy to get the Democrats to win.
If Altman and others here are actually serious about democracy and fairness of the political process in the U.S., then they should be supporting stuff like removing electoral processes that don't work anymore and aren't democratic. Processes like the FPTP voting system for Congress as well as primaries and other elections (to proportional representation or RCV/approval voting for single-winner elections), as well as removing the electoral college, and the caucus system from primaries.
They should also fight to make the "money vote" equal, just like the real vote is, and fight to limit individual political campaign donations. A rich person shouldn't have a "1,000 times stronger voice" than a regular or poorer person that can donate to a campaign.
There are other real issues they can fix as well, such as fighting to eliminate electronic voting machines. Even when they aren't hacked to steal the elections have a ton of other issues like not working properly, and thus making a lot of people's vote not count, which should be a crime in itself.
Fix the fundamental problems in the U.S. electoral process and everything else take care of itself in time, including climate change, and all the other important issues. As Elon Musk says, go at the problem from a "first principles" angle, rather than try to fix the symptoms (get more young people to vote so the "bad" Republicans don't win - the point is to make it so there aren't any "bad" Republicans anymore, at least not any worse than the typical right-wing party in Europe).
Imagine a community meeting where decision-makers were chosen in a game of Monopoly. Anyone who lost the Monopoly game didn't get to make any decisions. The winners, by virtue of their excellent Monopoly skills/luck, got the power to make decisions.
Not only would this process be entirely unfair, it would poison peoples' desire to participate in the first place. Monopoly is a nasty game, as is FPTP. Neither of these have any business being arbiters of power.
I'm afraid Peter is misinformed. Trump did spend a fortune to win the primaries. $63.3 million, to be exact. Only Ted Cruz spent more than him, at $85.8 million. You can look at the numbers by the Federal Elections Commission here: http://www.fec.gov/press/summaries/2016/tables/presidential/...
http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clinton-spent-three-t...
Then you gotta figure the cost of compliance with all the different bureaus and regulations that don't exist in China or India to make something like this happen in California.
And then there's the litigious cost amplifier that is another distinctly American feature.
This is the reality we live in.
Edit: original Parent post was taking about $100:$10, I'm agreeing and saying even less, more like $4/hr in Beijing.
The goal is getting train service rather than funneling money to unions, right?
That being said, American labor isn't the issue, Chinese already cost $4/hr and importing them costs quite a bit, whereas the labor market stateside is pretty soft in that segment. It likely would not make sense unless your good with mass executions to cut costs.
1 - http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpr...
Edit: dmoy states labor is $4/hr in China, not $3/hr.
If we can hire American labor for cheap (i.e. less than Davis Bacon wages) let's do that - but then don't use labor costs as an excuse why CA rail costs > 10x what Chinese rail does.
Unless we can steal land and cut corners when building, the costs are unlikely to drop much.
43km of track is already in operation as a test track. Here's a ride video.[1]
JR expects it to be profitable.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKwchJKTYU
Luckily, rail doesn't need giant tunnels, tunnel boring machines for that size tunnel are a known quantity.
1 - https://www.ch2m.com/newsroom/news/new-seattle-light-rail-li...
2 - http://q13fox.com/2016/07/21/bertha-seattle-tunnel-project-2...
True but misleading. Actually laying track is the cheap and easy final part of construction; building the viaducts, grade separations, etc., and doing the other construction which prepares the route for track to be laid.is the time consuming, expensive part, and plenty of that has been done and is being done in the initial segment.
> Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B.
Which is a very different problem than a regional transit system. And, in any case, acquiring right of way is cheaper in India, due to land prices.
> That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track
California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction.
> Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
That being said, here in Seattle we approved nearly as much money to build out our light rail network, and in the context of the US and what it costs to build bridges, freeways and rail here, that cost isn't far out of line. Considering the state of our region currently, even if the economy imploded tomorrow it'd still be a sound investment to do, especially since we are connecting all the way from Tacoma to Everett, with 116 miles of rail.
That's irrelevant. There is no planned path, just patches and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree (or sold off, which is basically the same thing).
> Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years (procedurally discussed, not legislatively enforced).
Much like Federal budgets and projects, anything extended beyond the current administration's term limits means it's someone else's problem. Putting people on Mars and this project, should become a reality about the same time.
Yes, there is a planned alignment for the entire system (and not just the LA to SF "Phase I" for which most of the cost estimates and timelines usually discussed apply, but also the Sacramento to San Diego "Phase 2".)
> just patches
No, even if you are referring to the context of the initial construction, that's not true; it's directed with a clear plan of a specific segment for initial operations between Silicon valley and the Central Valley.
> and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree
Pure speculation; it's true that there is uncertainty, largely political in nature, about funding for the portion beyond the part that is supposed to be operational in 2025. But there's also plenty of time to resolve that.
> The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years
It was a $10 billion conditional bond authorization (one of the funding challenges has been meeting the conditions in that bond authorization) which was very explicitly not expected to cover full construction cost of the system (nor was there ever a 10 year timeline.)
This is before we even talk about fault lines, soil conditions, land cost, lawsuits, etc. that are involved in building High Speed Rail. You need a dead straight alignment for HSR, and as it stands there are businesses and homes in the way right now, which means a large legal mess to even start to clear up, before we even get into preliminary system design.
It's strange to regulate something you don't have. Maybe Europe has learned from actual experience with trains what standards are needed?
Lets see what President Trump does with these sorts of things in his $1tn infrastructure package.
Re: Trump's infrastructure plan, I highly doubt we'll see any rail improvements, whether it be light rail or heavy gauge rail in West Virgina to unbottleneck their coal exports. He is very happy to walk back on promises he made on the campaign trail it seems, which is quite sad.
You think Paris has worker costs closer to India than the US? I think you might be the one who doesn't know what you're talking about.
The minimum wage in France is $10.11 per hour (at the exchange rate right now), compared with $7.25 for the US. It is at at best 50% more than China or India (where minimum wage varies by location), and labour in France is highly unionized so workers are on more than the minimum as-is. The current Paris - Lyon HSR link in France is budgeted at $12.5 billion [1].
Your idea that a California HSR project could be done for $2-4 billion is simply unreasonable. It can't be done. You're off by an order of magnitude. Is $64 billion a lot of money? Yes. Is it too much? Probably. Can it be done for $2 billion? Absolutely not. Go look at comparable mega-projects in western Europe. Crossrail in London is about $18 billion. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was $12 billion. The Moscow-Kazan HSR railway is going to cost at least $29 billion, and that's being built with Chinese assistance.
[1] http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-mak... [2] https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-bil...
Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US.
That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal.
Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors".
Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough.
So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree.
(FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)
Considering the length and difficulty of the HSL in California, you can multiply the cost at least 3 times, so something around $30B. You add the fact that the US labor is more expensive than France (contrary to common knowledge), the fact that it's the first HSL in the US..etc.. and the $64B figure is not too crazy anymore.
Your estimate of $2-4B in 4 years is imho absolutely unrealistic.
In looking at a relief map, the terrain between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang is flat, or mostly so.
Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains. The easiest route between LA & Bakersfield requires traversing a mountain range where the pass elevation is 4000+ feet. In itself that wouldn't be bad (e.g. out east to Riverside and Palm Springs the elevation change is similar), but Grapevine is also twisty as all get out.
The Central Valley portion isn't too bad, but then you've still got to get over the southern coast range that separates the Central Valley from the Bay Area.
On top of that, you have to do it in an environment where all the easiest routes are already taken by the rich and powerful and you're building on/near/around a major earthquake fault that regularly sees large earthquakes.
We can separately debate whether we should funnel tens of billion$ to unions if that's so important to you. But if we insist on tying the two policies together, that's evidence of disastrously bad governance and a good reason to do neither.
http://bensommer.com/blog/big-dig-big-corruption/
There's a mix of ineptitude, poor/non-planning and some shady deals. With larger projects, more waste is essentially inevitable because of the number of moving parts and limited communication paths.
See also: taxation.
It seems to me that California's highway problem is one of simple over crowding. Even if they built ten high speed rails between SF and LA, it would probably not make much of a difference, and I'm not even talking about the issue of needing a vehicle once you arrive at LA central terminus. Trains carry hundreds of people; let us say, a few thousand at any given time might be carried on high speed rail cars, but this is a tiny fraction of the millions of motorists clogging the highways 24x7 all up and down the coast.
I see no solution to California's clogged highways other than to siphon some of the population off to neighboring states that are vastly less populous. Perhaps this will happen naturally as technology makes it easier to disperse workers over broader geographical areas. It seems to me that huge cities are a legacy thing anyway.
Probably the next big thing will not be speeded up 18th century iron horses, but electric long range buses and self-driving cars that will safely and quickly negotiate the computerized traffic grids of the future.
California ought to spend a few billion on embedded markers and sensors in its roads that self-driving vehicles can access; probably this will be a much better investment in the long run.
That is very conservatively (2 passengers/car) 1000 cars every 5 miles with on 125ft spacing equivalent to a perfectly functioning 10 lane freeway.
More realistically (1 passenger/car) 2000 cars every 3 miles on 250ft spacing is equivalent to a 60 lane normal freeway.
For the air travel equivalent (much lower latency, but higher cost) you would need 1000 full 737-900 every hour (8000/day) compared to the total number of flights on California on a busy day, 3000.
If you build it, will they come?
(Even ignoring the TSA, 6B in ridership fees to be made up, and general messiness of American commuters.)
So now your 1300 passengers, generously, are spread out over 20 miles of freeway, instead of three.
(2600 passengers/20 miles) * (1 car / passenger) * (250 lane-ft/car) * (1 mile/5280ft) = 6.1 lanes.
Now, that was assuming one passenger per car. Add a single bus per mile-lane (seated passengers only) and this drops to four lanes. With self-driving cars and more busses, you could safely add only a single dedicated self-driving car lane and a sigle dedicated bus lane in each direction, and still have room to increase "ridership". For the price, I think that is ridiculous.
The problem with this California idea is that its proponents evoke the Bullet Train but it will never be the Bullet Train. The Japanese built that thing in 1964, which is when we should have started modernizing our own railways but didn't because GM decreed that its buses and trucks should replace railroads, which they largely succeeded. The resources for a huge project existed then; they don't exist today.
It's also worth pointing out that California is in the political dog house post-2016 elections. They backed the wrong horse, their dominant party is in the minority nationally, and they are not going to get a lot of sympathy in the Congress or from most other states who are going to be asked to foot the bill for this turkey. If the people of California want to build this thing, go right ahead; no one's stopping you. Just don't ask the rest of the country to pay for it.
There is plenty of room even without population transfers to neighboring states.
Most of the cost of air travel is hidden in places you don't think about, and might surprise you if you knew how much it added up to (or how much tax money -- in the US, around $300 million per year currently, and around $9m/year of it in California -- goes into subsidizing unprofitable air routes in order to keep airlines flying them, for sake of maintaining connectivity).
And I suspect that when you add it up you'll find that $64B is not much money compared to what having a well-developed air-travel network costs, and in fact this sort of argument is precisely the point people make when they argue for building out better rail service along major corridors: the cost seems steep when someone presents you with the bill up-front, but we routinely pay and have paid bills just as high or higher for things that we'd now yell and scream about if they got taken away.
The question is what kind of security theater will end up applied to high-speed rail in the U.S.
That was a joke by the way.
Air travel security in the US isn't meant to be good, it's meant to be visible
http://www.texascentral.com
"Texas Central will deploy Central Japan Railway Company’s (JRC) “N700-I Bullet” high-speed rail system based on their “Shinkansen” system that has been refined over more than 50 years of operation into the most reliable, comfortable and safe high-speed rail system in the world."
I remember when the $10 billion bond was passed in California and now over 10 years later, it seems like it was all spent on politics instead of progress.
Take the savings and invest it into bonds for the high speed railway.