This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central Valley would have to wait for branches to be built.
SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.
Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.
this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.
Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.
Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)
The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day.
The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.
Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.
The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership.
The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)
Cars also contribute to an immense amount of misery in society - the financial burden, being stuck in traffic, road expansions demolishing houses, noise and pollution, injuries.
A lot of being "car brained" is because even the best transit sucks compared to a Taxi.
People objectively don't want to share space with the masses. Even in Singapore or Japan, the stress of being in crowds is simply not worth it. Its slower, requires far more mental energy to plan your route, and requires a lot of physical movement which is hard for fatass americans.
Especially when America has quite cheap, awesomely fast and fun cars (your local C8 Corvette can be had for 15% off MSRP from the factory right now).
Cars are freedom. Mass transit is biopolitics/biopower. Big ass off road capable trucks literally don't even need roads.
How does 'stress of being in crowds' in big cities indicate all those people would prefer to drive? Is stuck in traffic not the 'stress of being in crowds'?
The stress of 2 ton machines flying around at 120 km/hr and operated by the angry and impatient-- that is simply not worth it. You think automated trains with 2 minute headways in a network covering 85% of local journeys at $3/ride would be worse than a Taxi at $1/minute with traffic?!!
A lot of being "car brained" is not realizing that even decent transit by global standards would be far far better than the subsidized freeway only-if-you-can-drive $8,000/year horrorshow of the US/Canada. No one's going to take away your fun cars, but a system maximizing freedom needs to account for the young, old, disabled, drunk, poor, and motivated to read instead of drive. Mass transit is freedom. Cars are consumption-politics/corporate-power.
It’s unarguable that driving requires more mental energy. Which is exactly why we have licensing, sobriety requirements, age floors and limits, etc.
Route planning itself is a mostly solved problem for an average pedestrian in any developed city. You type in your destination in maps and go.
Cars are only freedom to able bodied people of a certain financial means and age. Or when you live rurally. To everyone else in a city, they make it harder to get around.
You should go to the third world and see how much cheaper gas is there.
A lot of third world countries exist almost entierly off of gas subsidies from the government. Go look at what Libyans paid per liter of gas during the Gadaffi years.
Americans already pay a "fair price". No, no one in the world properly accounts for "externalities" of consumption.
This is every attempt to improve a software project in a corporation ever… Small QoL fix gets pushed off because “the big rewrite work will fix it anyway” and five years later the small fix still hasn’t been done.
Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."
But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.
Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.
A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.
At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route.
Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.
SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018.
Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.
I had a chuckle at these two subsequent paragraphs.
> One regular snipe is that it’s “easier to build rail in Morocco than in California.”
> Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.
So, uh... it is easier to build rail in Morocco than in California. And California is part of the cause. It's not even a "snipe", it's just the truth.
Yeah it happens a lot here as well. It goes into contractors pocket who dig/drill/build -> stop -> dig/drill/build -> stop and get their $$ on partially completed work and milk the system for all it will give them. Quite often they are friends/relatives of the politicians.
California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systematic underbidding + cost overruns is the rule, and is expected by all parties except the naive public.
Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted", 'Cheems mindset' failures of liberalism, and high-pressure demands from a federal government whose legislators are eager to sabotage projects outside of purple states.
Here in the UK all Gov tenders are on a combination of price and quality - typically 40-60% quality. If you want a long term relationship as a Gov supplier, you need to demonstrate quality and bid the pricing fairly, without chronic underpinning.
Here in the EU, we usually consider Italy and Spain somewhat more corrupt than the Western average, but high-speed rail in both countries got built reliably and without major delays.
Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.
Idk about Canada, but what you usually see in the UK is that tens of millions of pounds get spend before a single brick is laid.
Money disappears into consultations, reviews, studies and reports of dubious value, the paperwork keeps piling up and it takes years before the public sees anything tangible, if the project ever gets built at all.
Someone somewhere is getting very rich off this, but it ain't the taxpayer.
> likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded
Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera.)
To fund a long-term capital project? No, for a number of reasons. First, at that time, the CA legislature couldn't practically fund anything reliably (budget process is Constitutionally mandated to be annual, and at that time required a 2/3 supermajority to pass, which caused regular budget crises.) Second, and more importantly, structurally, to fund major capital projects, debt financing is required, and California cannot, Constitutionally, issue bonds without voter approval. Prop 1A was a legislative initiative amendment -- that is, the legislature had to pass a bill to put it on the ballot -- to secure that approval.
Tax increases and bond measures have to go through the voters. The alternative is to get enough of the legislature, including probably some in Central Valley, to agree to cut a bunch of other more popular programs in order to fund it out of the general fund.
I dug into this a bit since these comments were just confusing, but apparently Prop 13 required tax increases to get a 2/3 majority of the legislature.
Correct. What is the point of having a representative government with a legislature if you just forcibly remove the lynchpin of power for that type of government?
That's the point. Props 13 and 8 were part of the republican anti-government movement often memorialized by Norquist's remark about making government small enough to drown.
The motivations and rhetoric are before my time. What’s leftover is just this stupid counterproductive set of laws undermining the legislature’s ability to legislate.
Highly recommend Paradise Lost by Peter Schrag. Raising revenue requires supermajority voter approval in most cases. A huge chunk of the budget is already allocated by voter mandates and the legislature fights over the scraps.
Same shit. Different State. Maybe a little extra compared to a Red State or a smaller State, and on a larger scale. You can dig into it here: https://ebudget.ca.gov/
As the article points out, the difference in cost between these two routes is pretty small in the grand scheme of things; more than two-thirds of the costs associated with the project are at either end getting in and out of Los Angeles/the SF Bay Area. On the other hand, as the author points out, building the route through the Central Valley population centers has a number of advantages (political support, having a useful rail line before the entire project is complete, etc. etc.)
If you use google maps to find the distance between Los Banos and Tehachapi. Via I5 is 210 miles. Via HWY99 is 223 miles. So a 13 mile difference. That's 5-7 minutes at high speed rail speeds.
And you are right the extra cost is minimal. It's probably $10-15 billion.
My thought about the grade separation costs and my beef is. One is those grade separation projects need to be done anyways. The beef is why is the high speed rail project paying for road infrastructure. That should come out of gas taxes or something.
Even if you insist on going through the cities in the valley they chose a construction sequence that takes the longest time to show any process. If they fast tracked LA-Bakersfield they could have extended the Amtrak San Joaquin service to LA by now. Concentrat on the SF-Merced section next and then you can work on the Merced-Bakersfield piece meal.
I thought they were unclear if LA-Bakerfield is even possible.
My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the monkey there is no point in making the music box (something you know can be made).
Her point was people delude themselves into thinking they're making progress on a project by starting with the easy stuff. But the easy stuff is pointless if the hard stuff is impossible.
She gave the example of the California high-speed rail. They're building the flat easy part first but engineers have not figured out how they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains. Until they've figured that out the flat part is a waste of time and a false example of progress.
Depending on the depth of the tunnel and the construction of the structure, you can get vibrations through the ground and foundations of the structure transmitted such that they are noticeable.
e.g. If you live above a tube line in London (London Underground) then you may hear/feel rumbling every time a train passes under you.
which is used at 300kph by electric multiple units like the german Inter City Expres.
I've rode over this at about 330kph shortly after opening, it's slightly noticable, but not like a roller-coaster at all, as one might think.
Meanwhile this is also used by more conventional electrical engines for passenger trains up to 250kph, also in 'pusher' mode,
and short freight trains, no longer than 700m, at anything between 160 to 200kph during nights.
According to Wikipedia 'the Bakersfield–Palmdale section of the line will cross Tehachapi Pass, roughly parallelling the Union Pacific Railroad's Mojave Subdivision. Due to its heavy freight traffic and sharp curves (including the famous Tehachapi Loop), there is no current passenger service through the pass. While the proposed high-speed rail alignment will not include any long tunnels comparable to those in Pacheco Pass, it has nine shorter tunnels and several viaducts more than 200 feet (61 m) high. The maximum grade through the pass would be - 2.8 - percent, making it the steepest portion of the Phase 1 route.'
Okay, but the I-5 doesn't bother with loops and tunnels. It just barrels right over the top of the mountains, including a 5-mile section of 6% grade according to the sign (https://www.crashforensics.com/tejonpass.cfm). Trucks struggle to crawl over the top at like 30 mph, with tires. It's not exactly a roller coaster hill to be overcome with inertia.
They have distributed traction, meaning powered bogies in every second wagon for the current variants. There is no 'engine/locomotive' in the classical sense. All of these also have electronic anti-slip/traction control.
Edit: Even if a quarter of the powered bogies are defect for whichever reason, the remaining ones still suffice to accelerate from full stop at 4% grade. By design. For current variants. It's a variable platform. They could use more powered bogies. Stronger motors. Whatever.
After living in California for a while and observing its urban planning culture more up close, I came away with the distinct impression that this is all by design.
California is owned by boomer homeowners, real estate speculators, and the auto industry, and the first commandment of all California planning is "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 1972." In the event that the first commandment fails, the second is "make anything new as expensive as possible so there's as much potential for graft as possible, and so existing home values aren't threatened."
Maybe things will change when there's a generational transition, but unfortunately it may just pass power on to the SV neoreactionary VC set who will proceed to implement their own different set of bizarre schemes that don't work like planned charter cities in the middle of nowhere. Or they might just turn into fuddy-duddies in their old age and change it to "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 2003 when I moved here and got rich."
California is the fourth largest economy, so clearly something is working, but I don't think California's urban planning culture is it. Places, companies, and people can all be extremely successful in spite of massive dysfunction.
Not sure what specifically is “california” about this - There is very little support from either side of the aisle in continuing this project, which of course, the article states because it is an unavoidable truth. The criticisms offered by both sides are valid and the few proponents that still hold water for this dismiss these arguments with very bad or incomplete reasoning as written here.
For instance, brushing over the “possible original sin” of the project was way underestimating cost. Yea, no shit, that’s like 95% of the problem voters have with it, that and how long it’s taken with very little usable progress. Author spends very little time on this.
It later says that taking the more direct route along the I-5, and then connecting the bypassed areas with branch/stub lines would lead to the same costs.
> But by then 25M would have access to the main trunk of the train generating massive revenues.
No, they wouldn't. Because Prop 1A funds are a tiny drop in the system funding requirements, and choosing the I-5 alignment would not have sped up any of the issues that make the things around the termini more time consuming, and not having a ready-to-work initial construction segment that actually formed part of an initial operating segment that actually connects populated areas (even if they are much smaller than the termini) would have meant no federal ARRA funding (not to mention the weaker in-state political support), so what actually would have happened is that the project would take longer and, in the year-of-expenditure way CA HSR costs are always estimated and quoted, cost much more before anything got built or operational.
The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.
California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to name them. At the same time, it should've been completely federally funded.
> The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.
What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, followed by a sparsely populated mountain range and then a very large amount of farmland.
The nearest city to California with more than a million people is Phoenix, AZ which is "only" a couple hours from the California border. The next nearest is San Antonio, TX. The distance between Phoenix and San Antonio is about a thousand miles. Neither of those cities themselves have a functional mass transit system for anyone to use even if you put a rail stop there.
California itself constitutes more than half the population of the entire western US, which is otherwise enormous with a very low population density. It doesn't make sense to put high speed rail anywhere in the western US outside of California because there aren't enough people there to use it.
The federal government isn't going to make the stuff. They'd just buy it from the existing companies that make rolling stock etc., as could any state government in the same way.
Partially correct. A private group is building high speed rail to connect Vegas to the Inland Empire. Construction has started and expected to be complete in 2028.
Las Vegas is basically on the California border and exists mainly because it's on the California border, so all the people in Southern California can go to the place where gambling is legal. It's an outlier that both doesn't get you a national high speed rail network and evidently doesn't require federal involvement to happen regardless.
It's reflective of the imbalance of political power in the state and the corruption this power base now suborns. They don't care about the rail project. They're the least likely people to need or use it. They either want it to not happen or if it does at least it provides them with ample opportunities for creating further graft and corruption.
It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.
If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.
>It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why.
Because the biggest threat to any rail project in Cali is political protest and "environmental" lawsuits ("this construction will destroy my view of the landscape!") and the second biggest threat is being forced to buy land from a bunch of people who've had years to collude in only offering ludicrously high prices.
Any sensible project will do its level best to avoid any developed rural land; it's the only way to avoid the massive delays and cost overruns you're complaining about. And besides, once it's built, the land around it will be developed because of the HSR line itself.
Washington state decided to have light rail. But instead of using off-the-shelf rail cars, they just had to have them "custom designed" for the Pacific Northwest. Nobody was ever able to identify what about the PNW needed custom rail cars, but they sure cost a lot!
The only light rail operating in Washington State is LINK Light Rail, which Sound Transit operates using Siemens Mobility’s S700 model (although some older train sets are still used on the same tracks).
Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe, too.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70
From what I can tell, these train sets are as off-the-shelf as can be reasonably expected, although apparently LINK has ordered their trains to run on 1500 volts as that’s what their catenaries use. Perhaps you’re thinking of BART?
All light rail cars are custom in the same way that every airplane is custom but we wouldn’t say that a 737 is expensive because of the seat and entertainment choices.
Sound Transit operates LINK (what gp was talking about) and Sounder (not light rail, operates on BNSF tracks, coaches are made by Bombardier and seem to be in use by many commuter rail systems). Not sure what you're referring to.
That's LINK light rail, operated by Sound Transit. Here's an article about the (new) cars they use: https://www.soundtransit.org/blog/platform/new-link-light-ra... -- I get the impression all light rail cars in general are made to order per specifications, rather than off-the-shelf.
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge. Although I did read a report saying they did it to make the trains both lighter and also able to withstand wind shear in certain parts of the system.
To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway
Mainline BART. e-BART uses standard gauge diesel trains and the half billion dollar Oakland Airport shuttle is a completely bespoke cable car monstrosity.
withstand wind shear
Specifically on the Golden Gate Bridge. Which may or may not be true. The track gauge is perhaps the most standard thing about BART cars.
This was both a very good read and thoroughly depressing.
It makes a lot of sense to connect San Diego/LA/Sacramento/San Francisco.
It makes a lot less sense to try to connect Merced, Bakersfield, Fresno, et al. People there like to have cars, like to drive, there isn't a lot of traffic. Once you arrive in those places, there is very little transit infrastructure. You basically need a car. And they're far more centred around ag or industry, so more reason to have commercial / truck traffic and a lot less for just passenger cars.
Meanwhile, there are over 100 flights a day between LA area and SF. Meanwhile, Merced has 2 flights a day to LA on a tiny prop, Bakersfield has 2 to SF, and Fresno around 5 a day. There aren't any flights at all between Bakersfield/Sacramento/Fresno/Merced.
Whereas SF/LA/San Diego make complete sense to have a train station with plenty of transit options to get around once you arrive.
(To get an idea of what I'm talking about - traffic on I-5 is so heavy, we would often take 99 instead, when going between SD/LA and Sacramento. 99 is 2 miles farther than I-5.)
San Diego/LA/SF/Sacramento is one of the few markets in America that could reasonably support high speed rail. And it's sad to see it being strangled in the crib.
I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.
Well, Bakersfield at al is not exactly a "future region" - it's been there for a long time with a giant freeway into it (and railroads, too, including rail service from Bakersfield all the way to Stockton with connections to San Francisco and Sacramento) and it has remained a sleepy agricultural corridor. The weather is awful and it's just not where most people in California want to live.
Exactly, as people are priced out of the cities, having good HSR connections to SF and LA would be able to spur a lot of regional growth.
This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!
Transit to... Bakersfield? It's 112 miles from Los Angeles. Dumping high-speed rail (which in the current plan won't be high speed at all between Bakersfield and LA, but is going to be a slow, circuitous route going through Palmdale and Lancaster) is not really going to be realistic for any kind of commuting to LA.
There is a reason these cities never got developed more than they are. It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer. People would rather live in LA. California has huge swathes of land with very, very low population density because nobody wants to live there.
> It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer.
Several decades ago, you could have levied the same criticisms against South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and so on. But people now want to live here.
There are basically two ways to sustain the growth in California. One is to greatly densify places like the SF Bay Area, another is to improve the infrastructure elsewhere. And I don't expect see residential high rises in Palo Alto any time soon.
Up north, there's plenty of places that are more desirable in terms of weather, but they're not gonna get developed for environmental reasons. So what's left?
Agreed. We should be striving for to build where it makes sense. It would be great to build for the future but let’s be real, America does not have the appetite.
SD - LA - SF makes a lot of sense both from a business and tourism perspective. Build along the I5 and figure out the rest later.
One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed".
We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF <-> LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved:
"California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1]
The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is the spine of California and should be leveraged for all additional infrastructure build-out ... which would yield economies of scale and network effects for rail, network lines, water transmission, electrical distribution and (eventually) autonomous trucking.
Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.
The operating speed on the fast stretch is actually one of the fastest in the world at 350 km/h, it's just that it has to waste half an hour on the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to Gilroy and from Burbank to Anaheim. It's kinda like how the TGV from Paris to Nice goes from Paris to Marseille super fast but then has to spend hours to go from Marseille to Nice even though the latter part is a small fraction of the distance.
And yes, I agree that this "blended" design that has a lengthy slow section is very lame and bad. If only Caltrain could be quad tracked elevated viaducts.
This is actually a very common operating pattern, particularly for new services. It took years after initial service opened for the Korean KTX to run all the way from Seoul to Busan, and both France and Japan have a number of TGV/Shinkansen services where part of the line is regular track running at regular speed:
CA should've just bitten the bullet and built the whole SF-SJ section underground. It's about 50 miles, about the length of one mid-sized subway line in many part of the world, and it would've simplified the issue of acquiring prime suburban land.
Besides, I just don't see how HSR and Caltrain can share the same railway and avoid major service capacity issues. I think Caltrain is close to capacity as is, and at least a few years ago, major (an hour or more) delays were common.
South Korea built its second branch of HSR reaching Seoul almost entirely underground, with a single 31-mile tunnel [1]. I guess it was faster than trying to acquire land on top of it.
The geology of the Bay Area would make that difficult. The Peninsula flats are mostly loosely-consolidated sediment, and in some areas you have less than half a mile between the mountains and the Bay. And it's less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault. You'd likely have significant problems with flooding [1], and all the difficulties that the Pacheco Pass segment is having tunneling through an active fault would be multiplied by the 4x as long, geologically varied segment from SJ-SF.
[1] This is a significant issue for the NYC subway, even though you don't really think of NYC as being on top of a bay.
(The part of BART that extends through the Peninsula runs aboveground from Daly City to Millbrae. For that matter, the part of BART that runs through the East Bay goes along the former Western Pacific right-of-way, aboveground. And the Transbay Tube was constructed with the "immersed tube" technique, built on land, towed out to sea, and submerged. Where BART runs underground and was built with TBMs, it's usually in bedrock under the cities of SF and Oakland.)
I mean, the Seikan tunnel was pretty difficult too:
> Following several decades of planning and construction, the tunnel opened on 13 March 1988.
> The construction cost of the tunnel itself was 538.4 billion yen at the planning stage, but it actually cost 745.5 billion yen. The construction cost of the strait line, including the attachment line, was 689 billion yen at the planning stage, but ended up costing 900 billion yen. During the construction, 34 workers were killed in the Seikan Tunnel, mostly in transportation accidents
> In addition, the tunnel faced criticism for its high maintenance costs, the need to pump a large amount of spring water even after completion, and that the large investment to build it is regarded as a sunk cost, and it is said that it is more economical to abandon it. It was ridiculed variously as "Showa's Three Idiots Assessment", "useless long things", and "quagmire tunnel".
We're complaining about CAHSR being decades in the making and billions over budget, but this does not seem to be unique to CAHSR. At least nobody's died during construction yet.
It's good evidence that all civil engineering projects are failures right up until they're done and everybody uses them, and then they just become critical infrastructure.
That's still something that wouldn't be that difficult to change in the future. Probably easier to fund once the initial system is operational and the case for the extra expenditure is clearly demonstrable.
Having it connect into Caltrain is probably something that is nice to have anyway (like if there's maintenance required in the hypothetical tunnel or whatever kind of direct bypass, so you can still run services on the slower route) so it's not a waste to have both.
The distance from LA to SF is about 665 km (following the planned HSR route). A travel time of 2:40 means the train has an average (not top) speed of 250 km/h, which is very competitive internationally. Even if we use the shorter I-5 route as the baseline, the average speed is still 230 km/h.
That's competitive with the fastest French TGV lines, and much faster than most European HSR lines. For reference, the fastest lines in the world run at an average speed of about 290 km/h (e.g., Beijing - Shanghai).
Calling this a "slow, circuitous route" is really not accurate at all. If CA HSR gets built as originally planned, it will be one of the faster systems in the world, and nearly as good as the best systems in Europe.
>Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.
Because with a big project like this, everyone wants to claim some slice for themselves. The optimal route crosses counties like Fresno, which means they can veto the project (or at least delay it). They use that as leverage to extract benefits for themselves, like changing the route so it passes through their county seat.
It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what they do with airports. Throw in a LRT while you're at it.
But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.
Having HSR stops inside cities is one of the things that make it far better than flying for certain distances. Put the station outside the city and you're killing a lot of your benefits...
Ten miles from Fresno might be too far. I just picked a distance out of thin air.
But when you have a minor stop, it's less important to build the perfect configuration. Even if you have to go outside of Fresno to get on the train, you're still in downtown SF or LA when you get off. And the traffic in Fresno is not as bad as the traffic in SF. And the flights from Fresno airport are probably not as cheap, since it's a lower-volume airport (capex per flight is larger), so you have more of a cost advantage.
So I'm pointing out a false dilemma. You don't have to choose between downtown Fresno and no Fresno. You can have a worse-is-better Fresno without sacrificing the goals of HSR for the really big cities.
Fresno / Central Valley is not the circuitous route, which is quite close to the I-5 near Bakersfield. The true circuitous detour is between Bakersfield and LA, where the route is planned to go East through the Antelope Valley with a station at Palmdale.
It's utterly asinine, and will result in "low speed rail". Which already exists... you can take the Coastal Starlight if you aren't in a hurry. There is no market (none) for rail service between LA and Bakersfield.
Once you count airport time, 2:40 is about on par with what it’d take to fly from SF to LA. It’s about half what it takes to drive between them, even without traffic.
> One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed"
Not really an issue. The problem is first and foremost it hasn't been built. If it had been built, by now, it would have worked, even if that success were only measured in the Bay Area and greater LA area.
Article states that I-5 corridor skips all major towns in central valley which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA
"... which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA ..."
Yes, that's exactly right.
The original - and highest value - purpose was a high speed rail route between SF and LA.
The meandering route through Fresno (and the new, ex post facto "purpose" the article refers to) is the result of political machinations that happened after the fact and traded utility for brief, local (and trivial) political gains.
there is no need to connect SF to LA only, there are many airports in each town that connect these large metro areas.
the purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.
China's HSR connects large metro areas into one giant megalopolis with up to 250+ mln population that totally changes the ballgame in terms of economic output
You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.
>The purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.
Bakersfield has a dozen reasons ever preventing it from becoming another SF/LA/SD.
Besides, China didn't build its rail all at once. A direct route would prove value when making future splinter routes. Instead, we chase 2 rabbits and get none.
> You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.
So your estimate is 270 minutes.
Where's the train stop supposed to be in LA? Downtown, right? What's the commute for that like? Sure, no 90 minute TSA process (big doubt if that's typical) but now the 90 minute flight turns into 160 minutes (which is the target they're aiming for and it's not likely). Add on how long it takes to get downtown and... not much time savings, is there?
Depends on the stops and route. The secret to LAX is to not take LAX if you can avoid it. BUR has a lot of destinations and is a lot less of a toll on sanity. If it is truly a direct LA to SF with minimal stops, then sure. There's not too much lag removed.
A 90 minute commute to simply downtown instead of LAX becomes a 60-70 minute commute simply because you're not spending 20 minutes trying to navigate LAX. Not enter the airport, be stuck in its own brand of LAX traffic.
That will be a relief. Though if I may rant a bit to a bikeshed:
I really hate that thr naming scheme of "people mover" was probably part of the reason this project is coming next year and not 2035. The phrase itself just oozes this sentiment that no one politically involved was allowed to say "train" or "rail" so it doesn't scare off investors.
Actually a "people mover" is a term of art [1]. I had the same reaction when I heard the term (or thought it was some other political gloss to get the thing approved faster), but it's actually a somewhat well-defined term.
>The term 'people mover' was used by Walt Disney, when he and his Imagineers were working on the new 1967 Tomorrowland at Disneyland. The name was used as a working title for a new attraction, the PeopleMover. According to Imagineer Bob Gurr, "the name got stuck," and it was no longer a working title.
Huh. Thinking about it does sound like a very "Disney" term. Interesting to think it spread from a resort park to professional transportation. Never would have guessed.
The reasoning is all too relatable as well. "working names" no one works on and suddenly it's your final product name. Such anti-bikeshedding would be very rare these days.
It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time.
The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d open vast tracts of land in the Central Valley to housing. It might actually be practical to work in the Bay Area on something non-tech, live in a SFH, and commute less than an hour again.
They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.
This really depends on how it ends up being priced.
In Germany, you can pay for a year-long high-speed rail all-you-can-ride pass. It costs just under 5000 Euros, which is very reasonable if you're using it every workday.
This is a bit like AWS pricing. If you book an entire year of usage up-front, you get a much lower price. Casual users pay much more per use.
the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
> HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
Wrong. It's most definitely a thing in quite a few mid-sized Japanese cities. Here's a compilation video taken at Fukushima Station (https://youtu.be/K-wkX3vFU_A?t=403) on the fastest 320 km/h line for example. You can check for yourself that the station is dead smack downtown in a city of 275,000.
At the world level it doesn't tend to happen because existing developments in cities usually strongly inhibit the construction of straight rail alignments that can support high-speed operations. But that's not a problem in the Central Valley – they're blessed with excellent existing rights-of-way.
As I wrote elsewhere, the average speed of CA HSR (as planned) is 250 km/h, which is very competitive, internationally. It's about as fast as the fastest French TGV routes. It only really lags behind the fastest Chinese routes, which run at average speeds of about 290 km/h.
If CA HSR can go through the cities in the Central Valley and still achieve an average speed of 250 km/h, that's well worth it.
SF-LA ~380mi is actually a real sweet spot for HSR.
Flight time of 90 minutes but the hassle of getting out to airport, check-in, boarding.. and then the opposite on the other end makes your all-in travel time about 4~5 hours. With HSR you are generally going city center to city center, and 380mi is achievable in 2~2.5 hours all-in.
I took a 700mi HSR in Japan that was probably on the very far end of being competitive time wise with flying and was still great. 5hr train vs 2hr plane segment, but all-in door-to-door travel times were comparable (5h45m vs 5hr).
Train 5hr45m door to door with majority of time sat in a comfy quiet train with big comfy seats and high speed internet. A flight which is 5hr door to door is mostly a ton of hurry-up-and-wait with small blocks of 30-90min here or there you can read a book.
I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.
Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
> I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.
“Eminent domain”, and the SF to SJ run for CA HSR uses almost entirely existing rail right-ot-way shared with Caltrain.
> Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
You are right that doing Central Valley first was political, but you have the wrong political motivation. The political motivation was (1) to mitigate partisan political resistance to the project by prividing the most immediate benefit to the Republican districts in the Central Valley, and (2) to secure federal funding under ARRA, which prioritized shovel-ready projects, because the issues that needed cleared to reach an approximation of that state for the termini were more time consuming.
Who's shedding a tear for some farmer getting paid above market rates (presumably) for their land? California is probably the last place I'd expect people to think using eminent domain in this case is a slipper slope to communism or whatever.
Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.
At that point, you're going to have to start using imminent domain.
Putting it off until after you have billions of dollars in sunk costs in the Central Valley doesn't change that.
That's why they went with the blended system with Caltrain. Caltrain already owns a suitable right-of-way; they just needed to electrify it. Which they've already done. The SF-to-SJ part of CAHSR is effectively done; they just need to built acquire the SJ-to-Gilroy right of way and tunnel under the Pacheco Pass to connect with the rest of CAHSR.
>Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.
why can't you have it run slowly in built up areas? As another commenter mentioned that's how it works in France.
The current plan actually accounts for this; the 2:40 includes the amount of time it takes to run on the current Caltrain tracks from San Jose to SF which will not be running at the highest speeds.
Said another way, that SF/San Jose stretch accounts for 25-30% of the total time. That’s similarly true for the last stretch of LA meaning a truly engineering driven design could have done it within ~1h50. And note that the 2h40 goal is admitted as a pipe dream by everyone involved, particularly because of the last mile issues and the circuitous route.
IIRC the last stretch in LA is actually planned to be new build with Palmdale to Los Angeles taking about twenty minutes.
Engineering is about optimizing and updating where you can. There aren't really high speed rail lines anywhere that go into the center of their major cities at full speed. In Europe and Japan the city-center sections are slower; China solved this problem mostly by having high speed trains skirt around built up areas.
> China solved this problem mostly by having high speed trains skirt around built up areas.
Which is what we should have done. Follow the 5 and build out high speed spokes to the other cities. And really unfuck the rail system in the Bay Area instead of travelling at Caltrain speeds for San Jose -> SF.
Upgraded signaling along the Caltrain ROW is in the works, but again you've got to balance the egos of the three big stakeholders. Caltrain is a far smaller problem to CAHSR than e..g Metro North is to Acela. The big issue is going to be the approach to downtown SF — which is still a ridiculous political football.
Disagree. Waiting for San Francisco to get its act together would potentially doom CAHSR. Building something now even if it means no downtown SF service could still reap benefits. Even Millbrae to LA would be very useful.
Giving operating HSR to the Valley first, even though this isn't historically the reason for it, is probably a very good way to motivate a solution to any political problems in the urban areas around the termini.
China would have likely just stopped the rail line at San Jose, the same way the Shanghai HSR stops at Hongqiao 50 minutes away from the actual city center.
Yeah, I don't think people in LA or SF are worried about competing with airlines over a few dozen city miles not being 200+ mph. Avoiding the LAX is reward in and of itself.
the state can manage that expense over time, for example by refusing to enforce laws, spiking crime rates, turning into dystopia and chaos, thus lowering property values.
after land is acquired, the property and law enforcement will bring up values
FWIW a train I've taken a few times in China (Hangzhou to Shanghai) would do San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than 2 hours (possibly 1 hour 45 minutes). This would be an express with no extra stops.
With a handful of stops and the corresponding loss of speed (I'm extrapolating as it hits speeds of 350/kph but still takes about 45+ minutes to go roughly 186km) it would probably realistically take more like 2.5 hours.
The CAHSR "peer group" which issued that quote is a political commission full of axe-grinding losers, specifically created by state politicians who want to kill the project. Nobody with a clue thinks that the 2h40m target is unattainable.
LOL I bet in 2010 if someone said that by 2025 the project would be grossly over budget and only have a short segment between nowhere and nowhere to show for 17 years of work you’d have called that propaganda by axe-grinding losers (paid off by big oil, naturally).
Just admit it, it’s a boondoggle just like everyone said it would be.
Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project.
A better way would have been to build it out from the city into the suburbs first as a commuter rail project. There isn't a ton of intercity demand for this rail, but there is tons of traffic in and out of each singular city to justify even medium speed rail.
"Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project."
I will stipulate that that is correct at this very moment.
However, it is my contention that a truly high speed rail link (sub two hour) between SF and LA would have manufactured demand as an entirely new set of trips, activities and lifestyles would have been enabled by the ability to step on a train in LA and step off at the salesforce tower 1:55 later ...
It's not just speed that's critical, it's frequency. I believe that they're only proposing one train per hour, or 18 per day? Feels low for such a long piece of dedicated track.
In the UK the existing West Coast mainline has about 170 trains a day on the fast lines (between Milton Keynes and Rugby avoiding Northampton), the longest of which run about the same distance (London-Glasgow) as LA to San Francisco - albeit a 4.5 hour journey.
The original plans for HS2 were I think 18 per hour between London and Birmingham.
Fresno has a population of 500k, and is about 180 miles from LA from and 180 miles from San Francisco.
Liverpool has a similar population and is a similar distance from London and currently gets an hourly train, with arguments for 2 trains per hour. that's in addition to the more local services (Liverpool-Birmingham for example).
London frequencies on the fast non-stop trains are currently
Birmingham: 3tph
Manchester: 3tph
Glasgow: 1tph
Liverpool: 1tph
Trent Valley: 1tph (fast for the first 80 miles then local stopper at towns of upto 100k, like Tamworth, Lichfield, Rugeley
And typically
Lancashire (Blackpool): 1tph
North Wales: 1tph
Looking at cities like San Francisco an environms, Sacremento, Bakersfield, Fresno etc I don't see why you wouldn't send 2tph from LA to SF, and another 1tph to each of those locations, meaning 6-10tph heading north out of LA, and probably 3tph out of San Francisco, based on the population and distances. Not all services would stop at every station (you don't need a 3tph service from Bakersfield to Fresno, just 1tph would be fine)
I guess the lack of local public transport limits the benefit though, if you need a car to get to/from the station (especially if it's at both ends) then you might as well drive the whole way.
This could be absolutely true if people adapt to it, but that wouldn't happen overnight.
I would also strongly doubt that even after full adoption, Bakersfield to LA in 30 minutes is going to be much more useful and heavily trafficked on a daily basis than SF to LA in 2 hours would.
Even in Europe, their marquee city-to-city rail routes contribute a small share of overall rail traffic compared to their daily commuters.
Nothing happens overnight. Except governmental upheaval, I suppose.
And yes, SF to LA would be in much more demand. Not as a commuting option, but it'd make for some great weekend commerce. In a world of increasing work from home, I don't think many people would care for commuting to LA from Bakersfield.
LA to Bakersfield is 110 miles. That's about an hour, certainly plenty of people do that journey in the UK multiple times a week. Tamworth for example is exactly 110 miles from Euston. In peak times the fast trains stop there for the commuter traffic and it takes 67 minutes. Peterborough, Gratham, Newark (100-140 miles) are all common commuter places,
If we ever got HSR I'm not saying the is unviable. People commuting from suburbs to downtown LA have a 60-79 minute commute, a commute they can't sleep or be productive through. That's no issue.
I'm just saying the hubs are completely incompatible in both culture and market. Bakersfield is an energy/agriculture hub and LA is an entertainment hub. The utility here isn't exactly efficient if people are traveling that far every day to work as a cashier. Probably wouldn't stimulate much in that regsrd
Likewise, there's not going to be a lot of people in LA who willingly want to go to Bakersfield if given an option. At worst they are forced there as another suburban option if the city prices them out.
You don't need HSR, just a normal 125mph train line.
Imagine you are born in Bakersfield, your family is from Bakersfield, perhaps they are agricultural workers, but you don't want to be a farmer, you want a job in a big city, perhaps an accountant, or a civil engineer, or a whatever. It's a typical modern desk job, for whatever reason you need to be in an office a few times a week, maybe not 5 since covid, but certainly 2-3.
You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs. Or you can do both - stay living close to family so you can pop round in 10 minutes for a chat, but also have an increased choice of jobs and careers that a large city provides.
Nobody is commuting 100 miles a day for a minimum wage job sure, but there's far more jobs than cashiers - I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.
>You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs.
Is there enough people with that mindset in Bakersfield?the population is 400k, and the opposite narrative of commuting out the city to work the oil rigs probably isn't as common.
From a political point of view, LA doesn't exactly in need of even more starry-eyed youth to compete with trying to make some career in the entertainment sector.
>I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.
Definitely not in 2025. I guess we'll see if we're still in one piece in a decade.
I'm not convinced. The train is not competing with driving to SF, the train is competing with flying to SF. LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours. There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station so the customer has to be convinced that the train is a time savings.
Plus, of course, SWA has 4 direct flights to SFO, 6 to Oakland, 4 to San Jose. If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
Sounds like you've never taken a train. Time through security? There's basically no security in American train stations (or French TGV stations). I've only experienced Chinese train stations with security but with wait times far less than American airports. Time to the airport? Well yes because the airports are inconveniently located. Train stations are right there in the downtown.
International HSTs with passport required border crossings (ie Schengen-UK) have passport control and security - I think the security checks are to minimise the risk of terror attacks in the channel tunnel though.
But yeah, for intra-Schengen you just go to the platform a few minutes before departure, find where your carriage will be, and step in once the train comes to a stop.
So much less faff than air travel, and I’ve noticed better pubs at major stations meaning waiting for your train isn’t as boring as it used to be…
Security theatre. What's the point of metal detecting you on eurostar? You going to hijack the train with your knife?
Cars and vans in the tunnel don't go through metal detecters, and you can smuggle a far larger bomb that you can in a suitcase.
But eurostar is the exception to the rule with security. I tend to aim to arrive at my mainline station about 5 minutes before the train leaves incase I get delayed on-route, but that's because I live in a small town which only has 1 train per hour. When I take a route with 3tph I don't bother looking at the times, just go when I'm ready and accept on average I have to wait for 10 minutes.
I agree. But I just looked at Le Shuttle’s pages on security and they claim to put 100% of trucks through millimeter wavelength scanners (presumably to detect unauthorised travellers) and x-ray systems that are supposed to detect arms and explosives.
The SF one would apparently be near union square. Having been there, that seems easy enough to get to, insofar as anywhere is easy to get to in SF (it does not exactly have the greatest public transport in the world).
The train stations have connections to other transit - hard to see them as any less convenient than airports (LA's famously had no train connection until recently).
Station location of course plays a role (i.e. if it gets stuffed somewhere out of town with crappy transport links its no good, and rail links into the middle of an existing city are expensive), but I don't know a major airport where people would routinely trust less than 45 mins for checkin and passing security. Whereas for a train station its 10 mins.
> If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
Why would you bother to build a fancy new HSR line and then not run trains every hour, or more if demand is there? Running trains is not that expensive once you've got the infrastructure.
Forget security; I used SFO last week and just going from long term parking to where security is took 20 min, and the reverse (around midnight) took 30+ min. A train starting in downtown SF could as well be past San Jose at that point.
To be fair long-term parking at a train station would also be inconvenient (although at least in this case you'd not share facilities with all the international travelers), and honestly didn't even register as an option to me, so I was assuming local train/shuttle bus/cab/uber dropping off in a convenient central location.
I think the differentiating factor is that a rail station is more likely to be in the city center, where you can get to by other means (bus, BART, whatever), while going to SFO is much less convenient.
After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.
>there's going to be similar issues at the train station
I suppose it will vary on popularity, but train parking lots tend to be relatively empty compared to navigating LAX and the lag time of the worst case scenario of "buying a new train pass" was 10 minutes, after maybe a 5 minute walk from parking lot to station.
Airlines are simply too politically charged to ever be more efficient than a potential high speed rail. Even if it takes an extra hour, it's a time save taking the train.
> After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.
HSR stations are no different.
45-60 minute uber from Berkeley or Cupertino to the SF HSR station? Then another 45-90 minutes on the LA end?
You’d rather just fly SFO (or SJC, OAK) nonstop to Orange County or Ontario or Burbank or Palm Springs or Long Beach or …
Not to mention if you are an experienced flyer, it’s not unreasonable to arrive at the airport curbside 15-30 minutes before your flight boarding door closes and comfortably make the flight. Fuck the lounges.
I've been on multiple other kinds of subways and trains across the state, and I can't say there's ever been more than the 10 minute lag needed to purchase a tram pass (a one time act). I don't know how even the strictest HSR would compare to the TSA process and the sluggish seating process of a plane.
The commute may not be different in the long term, but as of now LAX's traffic is legendarily bad, even by LA traffic standards.
> There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station
... Eh? You get to the station (generally well-located), you walk through a turnstile or similar, you get on the train. There's no check-in or security on most intercity trains. Or walking for miles in sprawling airports, for that matter. In a big intercity station, you go in the door, there are some shops, there are a row of platforms, you go to your platform, you get on your train. That is it. Also, you probably get there on public transport which goes either into the station itself, outside the door, or to the local station beside the intercity station, depending on local taste (this really does seem to be a very regional thing).
I can't help feeling that a lot of the people who object to this concept have never actually been on an intercity train at all. Or, er, seen a film or TV show where someone goes on a train. It's kind of bizarre, really.
With Amtrak, you just show up at the train station a few minutes before departure time.
I took Amtrak from Richmond VA (well, Ashland, VA) to NYC once precisely to avoid the song and dance with getting around NYC airports. I showed up a few minutes before departure at the Ashland station (saving a drive to Richmond), relaxed on the train for 5 hours, arrived in Penn Station, and then took a short walk to the Roosevelt Hotel where my business meeting was.
High-speed rail can have multiple trains per day. If you miss one, you get on the next one.
I think it's actually the opposite. The latent demand is only present in LA and SF. Fresno and Bakersfield are not car-less cities. Taking a train between them makes no sense (you're gonna have to rent a car on either end).
While connecting the LA Metro and SF BART with a high speed rail line makes the most sense. Regardless of the construction inefficiencies this is really the original sin beating at the heart of this project.
It's hard to know for sure, but the majority of these flights are probably going to be transfers. I've never set foot in LA but I've taken that flight several times.
Even so, there are only ~20k daily seats between the two cities. The ridership on successful high speed rail lines elsewhere in the world are measured in the hundreds of thousands per day.
Why couldn't one part of the journey be by rail, and the other by air? There is a already a lot of shared planning to allow this to happen, with some railway stations even having IATA codes.
I agree this is the ideal situation, but as it stands CAHSR is planned to terminate at union station in LA, quite far from LAX. Ideally LA metro or metrolink would build a direct connection between union station and LAX, but that hasn't begun to be planned and unfortunately it's very difficult to get transit built in LA. For instance the Sepulveda line— one of the most important lines for LA— is at risk of being killed because ticket master's ex-CEO doesn't want a train line running under his house.
I don't agree. There are around 145 flights a day between metro LA airports and metro SF airports (based on a quick Google Flights search for a random Friday). Assuming there's 75 seats on each plane, that's 10,000 seats a day. That's a lot of trains. A typical TGV is 500 seats. (If I add San Diego to SF, that's another 50 flights or 3,700 seats...)
The market is there and exists, and that's with the gigantic hassle of having to get to and from the airports, as opposed to a convenient downtown train station
Commuter rail is also a good idea but it's not the same thing as high speed rail. And commuter rail already exists: COASTER in San Diego, MetroLink in LA.
Currently you either have an almost 11-hour trip on Amtrak, a 6 ½ hour drive, or a flight between LA and SF. The ridership is clearly there. (Believe it or not the Amtrak trains are often sold out.)
I mention it elsewhere, but it looks like about 20k people fly each way between the Bay Area and LA every day. That's enough, and if this thing actually existed very few people would fly.
This claim is unfounded based on the amount of direct flights alone, and then on top of that you have to add the car traffic going between the cities as well, and trips that now become viable when the travel time is faster and more convenient.
Outside of work reasons I don't know many people who actually travel between these cities on a regular basis. Maybe once or twice a year for that?
I would argue the east coast works much differently. The traffic patterns are not so much between NYC and DC, but most people moving in and out of dense areas. Much of the Acela is M-F commuter traffic.
If it actually worked like Japan (and China?) maybe? In Japan, if I want to go from Tokyo to Osaka, I just take a local train/subway to the station and buy a ticket for the next bullet train. I can get the tickets on my phone as I'm on the subway (or buy them at the machine at the station). There is always a train within 5-10 minutes. There are trains pretty much every 5 minutes, some are express (5 stops to Osaka), some less express (~12 stops), and some go all they way to Kyushu. The only time this isn't true is the 3-4 weeks a year when everyone travels and the trains are full. On those weeks you need to get tickets in advance.
The point being, it's so convienent I can decide to visit my friends for a picnic and come back the same day (yes I have done this) with no pre-planning. I have not pre-purchased a ticket in years.
I don't expect California to have trains every 5 to 10 minutes. I also expect they might fuck it up like Spain and require baggage inspection. I do expect that if they finish building it (I don't think they will) that by the time they do, Waymo and similar services will be ubiquitous and so it might actually be useful.
It's absolutely critical that a country with California's GDP learns how to rearchitect itself to build again -- literally critical for America's progression. Nothing in this article makes me feel any better about the prospects of that happening.
It’s structurally impossible. The half of the political coalition that contains virtually all the people who want to build any sort of urban infrastructure is too fractured into groups that each have their own distinct priorities unrelated to infrastructure or good governance. And of course the other half of the polity hates the government.
If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?
Here in Maryland, we’ve been building a 16 mile above ground, mostly non-grade-separated light rail for a decade already and it’s nowhere near done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland). I don’t know a single person other than myself who is motivated to make it happen. Nobody is agitating to get our miserable commuter rail system to run more timely. Road construction is the only thing that ever penetrates into the public consciousness. Making anything better is very low on everyone’s list of priorities.
> If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?
As of now, nothing because everything takes forever to build. The authors of Abundance talk about how rural broadband is gummed up in bureaucratic processes. Same with CHIPS. Biden couldn’t point to it as an accomplishment because…it wasn’t accomplished yet.
Right but to waive environmental review, pass laws which push back against frivolous lawsuits, and allow city and state budgets to allocate money to transit you need a coalition that cares. rayiner is very right here, the problem is very few coalitions care. Urbanist/YIMBY groups are coming up that do care and they've taken politics by storm over the last 10 years, but they're still a small coalition.
I do transit and multimodal advocacy in the Bay Area and transit is just a ball that everyone passes one. Low income advocacy groups want stops in low income areas, high income homeowners want high frequency routes, some riders want more police presence, anti-policing advocates hate the police, some residents think it's ableist to have a bike lane take up what could be a bus priority lane, anyone who uses any parking spot that will be decreased protests, disability advocates want transit to have level boarding and pro-accessiblity options on the bus, some folks want free fares, other folks want to meter by distance; I could go on and on. I have talked to activists and members of the public each with these positions.
Getting the actual thing built is the last priority on everyone's list. Sure they all want it. But they only want it if their pet concession is on the list. That's the problem.
This seems like self-perpetuating dysfunction. If people knew that the government would eventually meet everyone's needs, then it would be more sensible to not have to meet everyone's needs right away. But as it is, we build nothing, which meets nobodies needs, and creates a kind of zero-sum game of thrones for anything that has the potential to be built.
"Nowhere near done" seems like a bit of an exaggeration, given that the link at the top of your linked page suggests that it's over 3/4ths done[1].
It's also, to my understanding, not grade-separated in various important places. I was in College Park two weeks ago and saw lots of at-grade development on the line, which presumably gets bogged down by Route 1 and the other high-traffic roads nearby.
(This isn't to imply that the construction isn't slow or inefficient; it's almost certainly both of those things.)
Other countries can build entire rail lines entirely on viaducts for the same cost as it takes to grade separate a single Caltrain station. For example it was recently estimated that grade separating Broadway Station with a center platform would take $889 million and 5-5.5 years [1]. This is mind boggling.
Japan, sure. But Japan deals with it by going in the opposite direction: most new structures are intended to be temporary, replaced with a few decades.
Most of Europe? No, just the southern part near the tectonic plate boundaries. Which also just happen to be the most expensive parts to build in Europe...so thanks for helping to prove my point.
California will need to hit Rock Bottom hard more than once before replacing CEQA with something sane becomes possible. And that's just one of several wet moldy blankets blocking progress.
The problem is that they have the option to own a house to begin with. Cali cities need to be all high rise apartment buildings.
Once the government starts raising property taxes, people will start selling off their homes, and then developers can buy the land and build apartments.
Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.
It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.
If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.
You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.
California has a massive ecosystem advantage in terms of the tech industry, no other state comes close. If California can't build, America can't build.
Well, let's not get too pessimistic. Brightline built rail from Tampa/Orlando to Miami, and it seems to be pretty popular, although it's not high speed rail.
If we're not talking about high speed rail, Amtrak provides service from Oakland to Seattle and Oakland to LA already. The best part is that Amtrak has a dramatically lower fatality rate than Brightline.
> claim that the relative failure of the California High-Speed Rail “boondoggle” represents the political dysfunction of either California
> This criticism also misunderstands one of the main challenges that CAHSR has faced. Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.
That just sounds like describing dysfunctional government using more words. Either the government can get it done or they can’t. Allowing endless vetos and delays to gum up the process is a political decision.
There are some really good details in the article. But, to quote:
> Despite more than a decade of predictions of its failure, the project has persevered — even if its completion is in limbo.
As I read through this, I got the distinct impression that the author mainly intends to complain about people describing the cause of failures as "political dysfunction", but then describes actual causes that I would absolutely summarize as being forms of political dysfunction.
Critics: wow this is a great example of government dysfunction through excessive regulations and political steering of a engineering project.
Author: Actually, you are entirely wrong. Let me explain to you in 3000 words how this project failed due to political interference and excessive regulations in California while pretending this is somehow not CAHSR fault and also not providing any path forward to fix it.
???
While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route.
This author isn't evaluating this project fairly, this author seems to be in first stage of grief: denial.
Critics: CAHSR is a bad idea and should be killed.
Author: Here's the story of how hard it is to build this novel type of large scale infrastructure, especially when people don't strongly support it.
The dysfunction is real, but the actual point was, "How much of this dysfunction and how much was just what you get with half-assed support?"
You're interpretation of that "no track has been laid" quote betrays that you aren't evaluating this fairly. You really don't understand that laying rocks and steel on a path is easier than building whole bridges and viaducts.
I remember when BART was first built and San Mateo county opted out of BART. You couldn't take BART to SFO or even South San Francisco. Now they are talking about extending it to San Jose? This may sound very Californian, but I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away and eventually you get more that makes the train even more useful.
Why? If we stop CAHSR midway, there is zero chance Sacramento will keep subsidising a Bakersfield-Merced line. And once shut down the land is more productive doing something else.
That's not true in the slightest. In the context of BART, we've lost the Key System. We've lost quite a bit of SamTrans bus service too because BART is expensive to run. Plenty of small towns in the northeast lost rail service since the inception of Amtrak.
It probably helps when you can simply take the land you need. One major issue with the California project has been the difficulty in securing land rights. Additionally, California’s strict environmental laws have made construction even more challenging. In contrast, China can largely ignore these obstacles.
> helps when you can simply take the land you need
When America built, this is exactly what we did. CAHSR should have been exempted from CEQA. Its commission should have been delegated eminent-domain powers vetoable only by the Governor or a majority of the legislature.
But the goal wasn't to build a train. It was to dole out the dough. And the dough be doleth. Just to litigators, union bosses and Central Valley landowners.
Even if untrue (there is plenty of reason to believe it's true), making claims about the government of a country is not "racist". To "lie" also requires intent (there is every reason to believe GP is writing in good faith). Your source is a few pictures taken 11 years ago and doesn't even really demonstrate "respect for personal property" anyway.
In San Francisco they did a 1 mile extension of the subway and it cost 1 billion dollars. That's 10x what it would cost in any other major city anywhere in the world, but a whole bunch of middle management surplus elites found a way to get at all the tech company tax revenue, so the tunnel served it's purpose and nobody is upset.
The high speed rail project is serving a similar redistributive purpose to act as middle class welfare for people who work from home, go to zoom meetings and produce and review reports. Living in California is already as good as it gets, nothing needs to improve, but it sure is expensive so the governments job is to take tech money and dig and fill up holes in the ground and use homeless crackheads who randomly attack people and are never put in prison to terrorize the normies into continuing to pay for it all. If any of these projects got finished or there was a reasonable resolution to the homeless issue, all those middle class liberal arts degree meeting attenders would be out of a job and couldn't afford to live here.
Not prioritizing the linking of two major cities (SF <-> LA <-> SD - take your pick) is a major mistake. If this project does end up cancelled then we will end up with a "High[sic]-Speed-Rail" that only joins California's interior cities with a ridership level that will never justify the cost.
To everyone saying SF-LA already has plenty of flights, consider the following benefits of trains:
- No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one
- Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually
- Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition)
- Less security theatre and less worrying about what I can and can't carry
- You can still have good internet access
This is in addition to the environmental benefits of trains.
Perfect is the enemy of good. More sections and branches can be added. Piecemeal is how transportation infrastructure grows everywhere. It does not come to fulfill everyone's needs all at once.
You know most of these are business travelers right?
The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling.
Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination.
Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose and Oakland. LA is a hellhole when it comes to getting to an airport regardless of where you are in that sprawl. LAX is a nightmare unless you’re already working in El Segundo. Otherwise you’ll fly out of Burbank or the other one I forget the name now depending on where you are.
Once you have flown like 4-5 weeks in a row you learn how to board your flight just-in-time. I’d almost always arrive at the gate like 5-10 minutes before departure and never missed a single flight.
The train is slow AF and from experience riding Amtrack (daily for over a year) if it’s anywhere similar to that the train will be delayed more often than the flight.
I’m sure Europe has nice trains. I’ve rode the best trains in the world in Japan.
America is a completely different dynamic and is not at all comparable to Europe nor Japan.
The culture here has always revolved around cars (objectively better IMO for ME, I don’t like tiny cramped cities like in EU or Japan), and our roads are big and our buildings are large and really nice. New builds especially in cities like SF or LA.
SF to LA is about 400 miles. Going from LA to SD is another 120 miles. Spain by itself is like 150 miles wide and 500 miles long. It’s about the same distance, sure, but totally different dynamics. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been here.
Besides, nobody really has a need to travel between LA and SF that regularly unless it’s for business. People might visit their families every month or two. But most of the travel is for business.
Comparing Europe and America is apples to oranges.
I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains.
I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane.
Driving 6-10 hours is pretty miserable. I would much rather take a train or fly unless there are specific reasons why I need to drive.
It may be like comparing apples and oranges, but some people prefer apples. The good thing is that you can still eat oranges if you like.
Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF.
My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.
I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.
I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.
Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.
I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.
To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.
> Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country
You can replicate the experience between Caltrain and BART.
To my knowledge, the HSR will share tracks with other trains. That makes the sort of scheduling problems that make Amtrak a pain more of a possibility. Not a reason to shoot down the project. But a decent reason to take OP's concerns seriously.
Caltrain and BART are rarely delayed by a significant amount, and they run frequently enough. Not as much as I'd like, but frequently enough that you're not ever going to be waiting more than 30 minutes. I don't think it's comparable at all to a cross-country journey that may require switching trains and different jurisdictions. Heck, Caltrain shares its own track already and it does just fine, and HSR will mostly have its own track except when it needs to share with Caltrain.
30 minutes is a lot between just the Bay Area when the entire flight between LA and SF takes 90 minutes.
Not to mention, you have to get to and from the train station or airport.
For example from where I live in SF, it takes about 20 minutes (depending on traffic) to get to King St station. It takes about 30 minutes to get to SFO. If I was taking MUNI to king street, looking at like 40+ minutes plus walking.
I’m a seasoned traveler so I’ll get there JIT for my flight.
In LA, if I’m going to El Segundo or Santa Monica, it’s like 10-30 minutes uber. If I was going to Pasadena or La Canada I’d fly to Burbank.
So yes the train is a silly idea to start with, unless it would be direct from heart of LA to SF, going like 300 mph (it is not). Not to mention once you’re in LA you have to get to your final destination which might take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more. And LA has horrible public transit
This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX, and I think SFO and SJC are two of my favorite airports, but even then it's a bunch of walking to get to your terminal, and you're still going to be going through security. They're nothing like LAX, which is miserable in comparison, but an airport can only be so good.
But if we're going to talk about time: I don't agree with your numbers. SFO to LAX is like 50-60 minutes in the air. I feel like your 90 is a reasonable number for gate-to-gate. Arriving 30 minutes before departure at SFO will probably just get you to do your gate on time for last call on boarding. Add another 15 minutes to get out of LAX. Then, on both sides, whatever transportation you need to get to and from the airports, which I think is reasonable to cancel out when compared to the train.
For a train they're targeting a little over 2.5 hours for the journey. I can be outside in 5 minutes, and I can also feel comfortable arriving five minutes early. Let's be generous and say it takes 3 hours, curb to curb. The plane does the same in like 2-2.5 hours. I don't really see this being significantly different.
The train will use shared tracks. I will bet one million dollars it will run into scheduling issues and when you’re stuck on land it will suck. Source: former Amtrack customer. Same story, and I doubt a project that’s been mismanaged so far will fare any better if actually realized.
I take the Caltrain to work almost every day and it's on shared tracks (in fact it will the same shared tracks that HSR uses). It's rarely late by more than a few minutes.
Reading the article I think CAHSR is using agile method of delivering value.
Electrification of caltrain in sfbay, removing rr crossings in LA, finishing overall plan and acquisitions, laying relatively low cost and easy central valley track, while putting the most costly activities to the end: boring an actual tunnels in mountain ranges
this statement has little bearing on how this project is actually playing out, but if it were true - why would we want to manage massive infrastructure projects in the same way bad software projects are managed? via a method regarded by everyone except middle managers with a massive eye roll and a sigh
ok? my point was that you have projected your notions of project management on to the actions of CAHSR. there was nothing intentional or "agile" about the way the project was executed so far. that caltrain electrification has already been completed (at an exorbitant cost relative to the developed world) is more a consequence of how poorly things are going in the valley than anything
This piece seems to concede all of the problems critics of CAHSR (notably Ezra Klein) bring up, and then argues they never should have been problems in the first place or begs their underlying questions. For instance, yes, it took forever for funding to get secured. That's part of the state capacity critique of CAHSR!
Or, for another example, yes, the current Central Valley routing is practically just as hard (per mile) as a direct I5 route which would actually serve the largest population centers in CA. But, the piece argues, this would leave "more than a million people" in the Central Valley underserved. Uh... and? The I5 route would have served over twenty million people.
Yeah, I had the exact same reaction to this that you did. One of Klein and Thompson’s primary arguments is that we are failing by letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This article’s thesis seems to be ‘yeah but perfect is better than good, so we should do that.’
CAHSR was killed decades ago by politics and corruption. whether or not choosing the valley route over I5 doomed the project is debatable, but choosing pacheco and tehachapi over altamont and tejon certainly did.
your guess is as good as mine as to why things like water infrastructure and telecoms are quietly built to requirements in the background while rail infrastructure is opened to the public forum, but the inability or unwillingness of the state government to go full climate stalin on this project and design it without compromise killed it.
> the expectation was that the $9.95 billion in state bonds voters approved would be matched or exceeded by federal funding (as is normally the case for highway projects)
Where is that fourth biggest economy of the world talk now? The fifth biggest economy of the world can build things without federal funding.
Reading stuff like this is so tiresome. Is the fate of living in the United States just watching China casually lap us in every possible major infrastructural project, completing everything faster, cheaper, and at a much higher quality?
It feels almost humiliating at this point reading any story about a public works/transportation project in the US, just endless delays, comically high costs, and a strangely small focus on the actual material realities of the matter and a failure to deliver promises on time.
The reality is for every government constraint, there are even more difficult economic constraints that it has to work against.
A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price.
I get it that there are niche reasons some individuals would prefer a train. But the economies of scale that they need to achieve here is ridiculous.
It's a similar distance to Paris to Marseille, a 3 hour journey. Price for that seems to vary between 29 and 80 EUR depending on time of day.
That's "get on the train, get off the train three hours later", so in practice is much faster than a 90 minute flight, which is "get to airport, go through security, walk seemingly endlessly to gate, fly, walk seemingly endlessly through baggage claim etc etc, get out of airport". The train is, of course, also _far_ more comfortable than a plane. Personally, I'd opt for the train...
I suspect if the damn thing ever gets built, flying between SF and LA will more or less become a thing of the past. Like, why would you?
I love trains! And I agree that they are superior in comfort and ease than flying. But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.
Eh, ICE journeys of similar distance seem to be in the same general price range.
> But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.
There are apparently about 130 SF Bay Area to LA flights daily. Let's say on average 200 person planes, at 80% occupancy, so 20,000 people. The biggest high speed trains have a capacity on the order of 1300, though those are very long trains; 800 or less is more common. Assuming an 18 hour day, that's a train every 45 minutes or so. That seems... fine? You'd also expect some traffic to the intermediate destinations, and possibly some increase in travel because, really, it is so much less bloody awful than flying (anyone who tells you otherwise has either never been on an intercity train or never been on a plane).
One weird aspect of American exceptionalism is that it is not _just_ Americans saying "we're the best"; sometimes it is Americans saying "we can't have the nice things that all other large rich countries have because [whatever]". The US can manage a high speed rail line or two.
That's 90 minutes in the air, not total trip time.
The HSR is 160 minutes from downtown to downtown. There's no check-in, no security check, no arriving 1-2 hours early, no travel to and from the airport. When you count all of that, HSR will be faster than flying. It's also far, far more comfortable - there's no comparison there.
I arrive 30 minutes before boarding, sail through security, and work on the internet on a plane. I don’t check a bag, either, so I’m out in twenty reliably enough that I can call a car when I deplane. Unless you live in San Francisco or LA, loyalty programmes probably mean you’ll default to taking a flight between cities.
(Saying this as someone who likes flying, loves trains and dislikes driving.)
You can do that in the air if you're willing to pay out the nose! That's another reason we need rail like this: air carriers won't be able to get away with quite as much bullshit as they do with the added competition.
I've done LA-SF many times for work, and I was able to be in the rental car in LA only 2 hr after being dropped off at SFO. Luckily both airports are pretty easy to navigate.
Having a high-speed train be less expensive to operate than a bus isn’t unrealistic, as long as the train is packed. You have to pay the bus driver, while the train amortizes operational salaries over many more people.
All civil engineering projects are failures until people forget what it cost to build them and just start taking the infrastructure for granted. Eleven people died constructing the Golden Gate Bridge, 96 for the Hoover dam, thousands for the Panama Canal. Do we remember them, or think that these projects were failures for killing people? No. We just think of how convenient they are.
I grew up contemporaneous with the Big Dig in Boston. People called that a massive failure too, even though it only killed one person instead of thousands. 15 years after completion, it’s a big success.
For the golden gate bridge, that's not a particularly large impact of deaths. Even if you don't like assigning a monetary value to lives, bad infrastructure causes its own deaths in the people using it. But it's simpler to say lives are worth ten million dollars and then calculate that those deaths were about 4% of the cost.
For the other two, the death toll was much more significant.
When a wikipedia page has a whole section dedicated to how massive of a issue construction was then it's result may still be good even if the project was a big failure
I doubt it. People were literally gaslighting people into thinking the Big Dig was a good deal for the money as the roof panels were falling on cars. This will be a "failure" for 20yr, tops.
I simply cannot see HSR sharing track with Caltrain between San Jose and SF working at all. There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more. So it would seem that no high speed rail could go faster than caltrain on that segment and could not achieve the target travel time.
What I wish- although it may not be feasible- was a straight shot from Burbank to San Jose- as a single tunnel.
Caltrain has passing tracks at Sunnyvale and Brisbane. There are joint plans with CAHSR to add 4-track segments at Millbrae, San Mateo (between Hayward Park and Hillsdale), Redwood City, and Palo Alto (California Ave).
The Millbrae tracks are part of the new station design: they are removing one of the 3 BART tracks (superfluous because BART terminates at Millbrae) and using the space to construct two dedicated HSR tracks on the inside of Caltrain, as well as a HSR platform.
The San Mateo area is relatively straightforward: Caltrain already owns the land, it is currently surface parking lots for the Hillsdale station as well as the land used for the old station (which was moved a few years ago).
Redwood City is elevating the entire Caltrain/HSR track above the city as part of their grade separation strategy. The new viaduct will be built with 4 tracks instead of 2.
The only major sticking point is Cal Ave, where there is limited space and an unfriendly city.
5-6 passing track sections should be plenty for running blended service.
Ah, thanks for the reminder there are passing tracks already.
Are passing tracks really practical? Wouldn't they have to be extremely long to accomodate high speed trains mixed with local Caltrains? I have a hard time picturing this all working out even under ideal circumstances.
Usually they pass when the local train is at the station. This doesn't take all that much space; speed delta is 80mph (125mph once they grade-separate everything). Everything is computer controlled.
It occurs to me that this might be why they've chosen those particular areas. Sunnyvale, Redwood City, Hillsdale, Millbrae, and South San Francisco (just south of Brisbane) are all baby bullet stops, where all of the local, limited, and express trains stop, and so you can reliably count on every Caltrain stopping there and letting a HSR train pass. Cal Ave is the odd one out, but it still has local + limited service.
Caltrain has sections with four tracks. At these sections express trains overtake local trains. They did this improvement long time ago and called the service "baby bullet" back then.
It is an advantage that HSR uses Caltrain track to get to SF. It would be super expensive to build a separate high speed line, and it wouldn't be worth the time savings. Caltrain should spend money grade separating the whole line, adding passing lines where possible, and increasing the speed to 125mph or 150mph since it would be good for Caltrain service. At 125mph, HSR (250mph) would save 10 minutes, and 150mph would save 6 minutes.
> There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more.
The SP/Caltrain/Bayshore-Cutoff line into SF used to be partially quad-tracked. It's easiest to see at Tunnel 2 just south of 22nd Street Station. The current two-track main uses one tunnel and there's a second tunnel portal blocked off next to it.
Ironically the Caltrain electrification project blocked it off even further by putting the supports for the overhead wires right where the other tracks used to be.
CAHSR was opined years before SR 85 and 87 and before VTA light rail.
It's the perpetually never-happening, chicken-vs-egg aspirational project for mass transit in an area dominated by urban sprawl and car-first infrastructure that would need massive investment in local mass transit like Japan first.
LA has been investing very heavily in mass transit for decades, fwiw. If the terminals (SF and LA) can be navigated by transit, then leaving the car at home and taking the train becomes a plausible option for most people.
It always made more sense for me to leave the car at home and take the train to Chicago than deal with the traffic and parking in the city, it's hard to imagine SF being that different in that regard but i haven't been.
20 years ago, parking in SF was hell. I remember driving around and around for like 45 minutes to find a spot and the fun of parking on a hill with a racing clutch in a spot only a valet could fit into.
Article is deeply misleading, pretending that Brightline West has proceeded many times faster than CA HSR, when that is not at all true. While the particular operator and name are relatively recent, that project has been through many names and operators, each of which has built on the progress done by the previous one, and, despite being much simpler project than CA HSR, is also older than CA HSR, starting as Desert Xpress in 2005 (the ballot measure which set up the California High Speed Rail Authority and outlined the basic concept of the project was passed in 2008.)
So as far as I can tell, the article isn't satire. Am I the only one that came away with a great explanation of why California High-Speed rail is indeed dead?
A long storied boondogle. As both a SoCal and NorCal resident for my whole life, this initiative has gotten more interesting as the years have passed. There are so many deeply embeded issues with this infratructure project that I dont feel confident it'll ever come to fruition. Land fights, local and regional politics..
If this administration really wanted to turn the US into a manufacturing powerhouse on the level of China then it would HAVE to steamroll over NIMBYs and red tape, and would plan to lay 1000x more track year on year. Without rail there is 0 chance the US ever becomes competitive there is no magic innovation to be had here.
Convincing a car obsessed populace will be the clincher. What will you do at your destination? Rent a car? Stroll through quaint medieval environs of cosmopolitan downtown Los Angeles?
The Florida Brightline is limited to 125 mph. Also no grade separation which is needed for higher speeds. Generally countries use grade separation when speeds exceed 110-120 mph. California really needs the 200-220 mph to make the trip worthwhile so it needs to be grade separated. A lot of the work done so far in California is the overpasses over freeways and roads its crossing.
Brightline has had a lot of fatalities due to lack of grade separation.
It's actually doing really well but it has not much to do with them being a red state and everything to do with them having an aging or tourist transit population that needs to get between cruise lines and theme parks.
Besides those cases there are not a lot of reasons to be transiting that route, or at least not nearly compared to the number of folks that would want to transit SF <-> LA. Totally different needs that are easier to address, and less pressure to prove out value / fewer digestible alternatives.
The California HSR reveals pretty much every problem with building anything in the US: private property, local interests and grift.
It also shows that mandating the speed in the amendment was probably a bad idea as it's greatly increased the cost projections.
China has a command economy so simply doesn't have to deal with eminent domain (and challenges thereto), environmental challenges (as much as environmental protection is a nobel goal, laws in California like CEQA have really been weaponized and the sole purpose is to stop any development whatsoever by local property interests), etc.
The route is being changed so include towns of 30,000 in the Central Valley. It's running down the I-5 corridor last I heard because that's where these small towns are vs the faster route to the west.
Just build connecting lines if connections to small communities are important. The primary purpose should be LA to SF&SJ.
If the HSR runs a train from LA to SF before 2050 I'll be shocked.
Brightline West will probably have more success primarily because the private property issues will be largely avoided.
> The project aims to transform transportation in the region with fully electric trains capable of reaching speeds up to 186 miles per hour, enabling the 218-mile trip between Rancho Cucamonga, California and the Las Vegas, Nevada to be completed in approximately two hours. Brightline has secured all key rights-of-way necessary to construct the railroad under long-term agreements, including leases, licenses and easements, with the states of Nevada and California and the federal government for passenger rail access to the existing I-15 corridor.
I don't really have a huge problem with the route. Branch lines to individual towns don't really make sense - you lay even more track, need more trains, complicate operations, and the value proposition for potential customers in those towns drops substantially vs a one seat ride to any destination.
Honestly given the once in a lifetime scale of the project, too, if they run a train from LA to SF by 2050 it even 2060 I'll actually be quite happy. There's no reason it couldn't keep operating for a hundred years after that. I mean I'm skeptical of that happening as well lol I'm just saying, projects like these will serve many generations and will only get more expensive in the future, so i support biting the bullet on doing them now despite our inefficient, backwards way of doing them.
The problem with local infrastructure projects is their responsibility and execution fall to local community leaders (in this case local = state of California). These leaders are far less efficient and impactful than the federal government, a bar which is already way too low. Nearly every city in the US has had recent collisions with corruption, blatant mismanagement, ideological forces co-opting process, etc. and so most local infrastructure projects are doomed from the start.
The problem with high speed rail, then, is that it is always going to be a local (=state) infrastructure project. America is far, far, far too large for high speed rail to be feasible at a national level, and so we have invested in airports. This is largely a success; much of the year you can travel from NYC to Miami (~1200 mi, roughly UK -> Spain) for $100-200 in a few hours. There are, of course, many issues with air travel that we are still working on, but unless there is a breakthrough to make supersonic land travel affordable, we are stuck with air travel at a national level.
But where do we go from here? We know the federal process is too bloated to succeed with infrastructure projects, and when it is forced to it ends up being prohibitively expensive. We know the state process is doomed to fail and similarly be very expensive. We have already tried privatizing it and failed, and even when subsidizing private industry we get subpar results at best. What options are even left at this point?
We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees, allow them to build careers (and raise families), and stop contracting out everything. This would also increase competition for such roles.
How we got here is ultimately, especially for CA, land and legal cost, cost of living, and public employee salary relative to private salaries. That’s endemic to major metro areas in the US, with some small exceptions, but especially true in CA.
Before it was shut down, we did see a real reversal with 18F in getting things through, for software projects. Of course, they weren’t even being paid industry wages there.
> We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees
When their pensions are taken into account, government employees are ridiculously overcompensated already. They’re basically minor nobility at this point.
I have done the numbers for myself, and even taking pension and treating an extra week of vacation as a 1/52 pay raise, doing a software job for the government would be a huge step down for me financially. Basically gives me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live
> me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live
The housing crisis is the Everything Crisis. It’s destroying competence of government services, as no one ambitious will accept this fate.
It destroyed competitiveness of our industry because you can’t pay a worker less than it costs to rent.
It’s causing apathy and rise in extremist views among younger population as they realise they have no path to dignified future.
I am hoping that China does well for itself and one day we can just consider them as an example of competent and coherent governance and sort out our shit.
I guess we'll see how I'm doing in 20 years to compare, but as of now, my dad is a former California public employee on a pension who had to move to the middle of the desert to stay within his budget, does all domestic work himself, and regularly needs to ask me for money. "Minor nobility" is a laughable characterization of his status in life.
For what it's worth, it's also quite illuminating these days to compare injury history with him. We've had a lot of the same stuff happen, but when it happens to me, he always overestimates the effect because he's still suffering from never recovering properly thanks to a lifetime of no-premium but shitty Kaiser HMO treatment that used the lowest-cost option for literally everything, whereas I had to pay for stuff but at least got the latest available surgical procedures and proper supervised rehab, so my injuries actually healed and I'm not just suffering for the rest of my life like he does.
Then you would have two retirees for every three working age people. And given that only ~70% of working age Americans are actually working, it would mean three non-working adults for every two adults with jobs. Either the retirees would have a really low standard of living, or workers would get much smaller share of the value they create than they currently do.
If you are not already retired or close to retirement, you should assume that the normal retirement age is ~70 years. Anything lower cannot be sustained with the current demographic structure.
You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more.
Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to procurement of software and recently boasted about their collective organization answering a whopping 1200 emails in a month.
I suspect we're dealing with the fallout of the loss of an American nomos (shared values, traditions, and moral principles formalized into law, custom, and convention) -- the very issue John Adams wrote about in a 1798 letter:
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is working diligently under the cover of these pleasing appearances and employing the most insidious and base artifices, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
When moral virtue is not valued, who will rise to the top and be elected to public office but non-virtuous people?
Failing the development of something like what John Adams is referring to, I fear that the only way "forward" (if it can be called that) is a different form of government, in which individual liberties will be greatly reduced or denied altogether.
My personal opinion -- it's a spiritual problem that needs a spiritual solution. Pray for the nation.
Or we can just keep trying to run through molasses :)
>But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is working diligently under the cover of these pleasing appearances and employing the most insidious and base artifices
It's always amazing to me that slave owning men on stolen land could not see the hypocrisy of such a statement
John Adams in particular was not a slave owner, and he called slavery an "evil of colossal magnitude." So he and those like him (and there were many) shouldn't be condemned in any sense along that line.
I agree that slavery and ill treatment of Native Americans were egregious problems. But on both issues, there were prominent voices speaking out in favor of what was right, including among the founding fathers -- Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, etc. Also, William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) was an awesome example of someone who insisted on honest, fair dealings with Native Americans, and he won their respect in a big way.
It is hypocrisy to preach about freedom and the equality of man while also owning slaves and believing some men to be unequal. It's not that this was unknown at the time either. Abolitionism was not a new idea in 1798.
Well sure, Adams in particular maybe not, but for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes is still something i can find a bit ridiculous.
> for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes
Well why wouldn't he? See something, say something.
I'm sure he saw direct reasons to be worried about people becoming ungovernably immoral, and I bet slavery was one of those reasons -- after all, he did believe it to be a colossal evil.
That's a misquote - that phrase doesn't appear in the letter. I don't think that idea was present either. Could you clarify which phrase(s) conveyed that to you?
If anything, I think he felt compelled to write what he did (not only in this letter) because he felt a sense of imminent danger -- that if the people individually and collectively failed to rise to the high calling of good moral character, the new republic would not last. Remember, the longevity of the United States was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time -- the US Constitution had been ratified a mere 10 years before he wrote this letter, and Adams himself had just been elected as the second president the year before.
(All of which doesn't make his thoughts inapplicable to our time.)
So I think the best argument against this is that the US has done massive infrastructure projects in the past. Some cities had (and some still have) decent public transportation and we've done large canals and even the interstate highway project. I've also seen local infrastructure (and I mean actually local, on the city/county level) be very impactful in the community.
My experience is that unless the community really wants the infrastructure it won't get done and I've seen a lot of opposition to forms of transport that aren't just roads (with the most extreme case of a vocal group in a town not wanting a rail line into the city because they were worried people from the city would come out to their town. They literally didn't want too easy of transportation into/out of the city).
Your theory does not explain why the state of California is capable of discharging $25 billion into freeway construction annually. It obviously cannot be the case that US states are incapable of executing public works projects.
It is so, so, so much easier to build freeways, roads, and highways than rail systems.
It is also absolutely necessary to have roads to move people and goods as not everyone and everything can be transported on rail or even is near rail (even post-HSR).
This is not really the point. Again, your hypothesis lacks explanatory powers. Virtually all of the works undertaken so far on the "rail" project have been roads: bridges, trenches, and relocations of car stuff. So if California can spend tens of billions every year on car stuff through the caltrans budget, it should be more than capable of moving a few of those dollars over the get the HSR project finished. It's a matter of political leadership.
> It is also an income center. California _makes_ money from spending on roads because of job creation (=tax revenue), taxes on vehicle sales, taxes on fuel, tolls, freight fees, and more: https://www.calbike.org/there-is-no-deficit-in-californias-t...
Please provide a reference for CA making money by building roads. Road building is foundational to other economic activity, but AFAIK, it's not turning a profit (nor should it be expected to). Unfortunately, we have a double standard where we consider public transport to be a failure if it doesn't generate a profit.
CA has built tens of miles, probably hundreds, maybe even into the thousands of miles of tracked transit in the time HSR has been building. CA can certainly do what it wants - or maybe do what it needs.
That doesn’t make sense. California is bigger and richer than all but the largest European countries. It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?
> It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?
Many officials in the current administration who are wreaking havoc on the US economy went to the top universities, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. Attending those universities doesn't imply responsibility or sense of duty to public service at all.
CA does have "high caliber" public officials, but it also produces very corrupt ones. As everyone knows, CA has exported many from both categories to the national stage.
CA is not like Denmark in many ways. California has huge wealth inequality, and its economy and governance are heavily influenced by plutocrats from industries that grow via massive scaling properties, like tech, entertainment, and agriculture.
Two of those industries have a history of labor exploitation, and the other has been actively trying to snuff out the power and leverage it mistakenly gave to its workers over the past several decades.
Without a doubt, Denmark has problems also, and it has plutocrats, but its politicians hold them more accountable to the populace that CA does.
Singapore and Denmark are far more similar to each other than either is to California. Not only are they far smaller, but both countries socially invest heavily in their citizens' quality of life, and by American standards both are egalitarian.
Singapore carefully manages housing, with the majority of the population living in public housing. Of course, both countries also have excellent public transportation.
Why are the politicians in California different than the ones in Denmark? And are those reasons related to it being a sub-national entity, which seems to have been the argument being made above.
> Why are the politicians in California different than the ones in Denmark?
> And are those reasons related to it being a sub-national entity, which seems to have been the argument being made above.
I'm sure it plays a role, but there are tons of convolved factors? They're different places, and your question is too non-specific to have a single answer.
Calling the leaders of the State of California, the 4th largest economy in the world, "local" and less efficient than the federal government is interesting.
Additionally the U.S. Government requires that the states have balanced budgets, a requirement that is not stipulated for federal national spending. Unfunded spending obligations are not a problem, the federal government just raises the debt ceiling.
HSR is perfectly viable for the east. decades of steady investment could have built a massive network out through chicago by now, and with a few more we could be closing in on the last gap in the network between kansas city and las vegas.
This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.
I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure). Unfortunately it operates much more like Thailand or El Salvador pre-"throw everyone in jail".
> This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.
Which is circular; there's less attention because we don't.
> I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure).
About 1/4th the land area of California and much more .. "square". The long line in South Korea is 275 miles long; versus roughly 800 miles for the California HSR system. And California's system is facing a public that's much less accustomed to and receptive to rail, and endpoints that basically require you to have a car anyways.
We should have spent all this money on making local rail awesome. It'd make a much bigger difference in day to day life, would pay off quicker, and would prepare the ground for doing HSR.
they have more efficient central planning, less red tape, and they don't let people like Elon Musk come in and derail the project with dubious and irrelevant alternatives
It really all comes down to civil vs. common law. In America, anyone can hold you over a barrel in court, indefinitely, for any or no reason, until you agree to their extortion.
unfortunately it is worse than that.. a basic and non-trivial State of California project was being done in an office near me, and I knew some of the people. So I saw a bit about how it progressed.. lots of requirements, lots of people from multiple unrelated and slightly competitive groups. The work was mostly intellectual assesment and evaluations with a lot of reports. The thing was funded at professional values.
About six months of work with lots of progress meetings with State of California bureaucrats to "keep them informed" .. and lo-and-behold.. as the required deadlines started getting closer, the State reps changed requirements, made amendments to deliverables.. the last three weeks, even MORE change orders "non-negotiable" .. I have never in my life seen major requirements changed on a multi-party project in the last weeks of a deadline like that. It was like the bureaucrats drank a lot of something, felt the "excitement" and HAD to change things to be "involved and hands on" .. it was STUPID and caused DAMAGE. There was no choice -- the State was paying.
That is how they do things in "infinite income" Sacramento ?
What does that have to do with civil vs. common law? There isn't anything inherent in rule of law based on cases and precedent that should restrict infrastructure projects.
I get so tired of hearing that HSR doesn't make sense federally.
The entire country east of the Mississippi has comparable population and density to western Europe. Plus the sheer size and lack of people sure doesn't stop the federal government from maintaining thousands of miles of interstate through vast swaths of nowhere.
If you look at it by map there's not much more interstate highway than railway.
Interstate highway is also far cheaper to build and maintain than you would imagine. It took around $114 billion to build interstate across the entire country, while the high speed rail project in just California is already upwards of $128 billion.
On Europe that is kind of exactly my point, high speed rail in Europe is built and maintained by federal governments with high levels of participation, interest and oversight from their population. This can never happen in the US because our federal government has to oversee a very wide amount of area and states are not so autonomous and self-governed that their populations primarily interest themselves with their state governments.
Cancel the the HSR and put the funding into improving regional rail in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. (Sacramento can come too.)
The model shouldn't be the TGV. It should be the New York metro area's Metro-North and LIRR. I'd also argue for a significant amount of motorail [1] stock, but that offends the train purists.
> While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route
Right, that's the problem. Invisible work gobbles up time and money due to a broken process that prorioritises bullshit over tangible results.
> The project has sufficient California funds only to last through the Trump administration, complete and electrify the existing 120 miles, purchase train sets, and begin construction of the Merced and Bakersfield extensions — but not fully complete them
Don't start shit you can't finish. Electrify and expand the regional rail and pause work in the Central Valley. Because you know who could catch the Trump administration's sympathy? Central Valley farmers.
As the piece points out, the lack of rail is pretty much irrelevant. Once all the guideways are in place, there is a machine that you just drive along that poops out perfect rails at ~1km/hr. It is the most trivial part of the project.
That's kinda like saying a car is easy to build because they have automated painting robots.
Fundamentally the problem is that most of the land they want to use is owned by someone else, and that means every single parcel is a potential, and often actual, legal fight. In theory this is what eminent domain is supposed to accomplish, but people dislike eminent domain more than they like high speed rail. Well meaning but onerous environmental regulations don't make it any quicker either. When your rail plan goes through the nesting site of an endangered bird species or something that's another big legal fight.
Even though the measure passed with a majority of the population, you have a situation where thousands of people have effectively a personal veto over it. Either their rights get trampled or the project doesn't happen.
The point is that people who talk about the lack of literal rails are doing that because they have no idea how a railroad is built, or they are intentionally misleading you.
That would be the Plasser & Theurer SVM1000 new-track construction machine.[1]
Incidentally, Caltrain is now up to high-speed rail standards except for grade crossing elimination. All welded rail on concrete ties, 25KV electrification, and the new commuter trains are capable of 125MPH, although they are not run that fast.
I’ve heard so many business guys running startups say the same thing about their brilliant idea. Once the plan is in place you just do daily standups and your engineers poop out perfect features at the rate of 1 ticket/day.
Alright, but one of the central findings of software engineering of the 80s is that software engineering cannot be driven rigidly, unlike other engineering fields.. Such as railways.
Think about it, rail is an eminently standardized piece of infrastructure that has existed for more than a century and millions of kilometers have been laid out. Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable?
Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable? Here is a (french) example
This really underscores Klein and Thompson's argument: this infrastructure sclerosis seems to be a uniquely American problem.
This review of Klein and Thompson's book sums it up pretty well:
Adding a kilometre of subway track in the United States now costs twice what it does in Japan or Canada, and six times what it does in Portugal; in the past fifty years, the inflation-adjusted cost of a mile of interstate highway has tripled
False equivalence - railways are things we know how to build pretty well by now. The hard bit is building a corridor straight and level enough to lay the rails. Once you have that, the sleepers are literally just dropped on, rails fed out and then it's all clipped in and welded, and ballast dropped on and tamped with machines.
This is a normal thing done every day around the world, since track has to be periodically re-ballasted and sleepers eventually upgraded and rails renewed as normal maintenance. It truly is the easy bit.
Rail overhead line equipment and signalling systems are much more tricky work, but the rail laying itself is easy. The vast majority of the work though is building cuttings, embankments, bridges, viaducts and stations.
The whole point of building the grade separated guideway is to make the track maintenance (and installation) as predictable and reliable as possible. Once the guideway is there, laying the track really is the easy part.
Hundreds of tons of concrete is no longer a "brilliant idea," it's physical infrastructure designed for the purpose of installing rails.
Be careful citing the Brightline as a success. It is expensive, doesn't go to many places, has low ridership, regularly kills pedestrians and drivers, and is hemorrhaging money.
But, importantly, it actually exists and you can buy a ticket and ride on it. That's the bar we're talking about here. Not "did they make the best train line ever" -- just did they make a train line.
"Regularly kills pedestrians and drivers" doesn't seem like the train's fault. Railroad crossings aren't hard to understand. If you're a driver or pedestrian, best to make sure you heed the lights, gate, loud sounds.
Sounds like you haven't ridden it. It's the best train in the country. Sure makes you realize what train travel could be.
Ah yes, the train that seeks you out and kills. Much like all the free-soloists who are killed by the ground. Come on man. Expecting people to stay behind barriers and rail lines is a basic expectation.
Brightline has killed zero people. If anything, it has reduced ~150 deaths by guiding people to a safer mode of transport. Ridership has tripled in 3 years. Brightline is a private company, so you can be sure that they are charging a decent price for each ticket, and the demand is still there.
Brightline aims to make money by developing properties around this new value add (the train stations). They are making massive profits off their first few developments. The housing developments are owned by Brightline's parent company, so they don't show up on Brightline's balance sheets.
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest, two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
Oof. Dublin to Cork is 66mph average, and that one's considered kind of embarrassing, and is currently being upgraded to ~85mph average. (There's separately a proposal to build a real high speed line, but it seems unlikely to happen; it'd have to be a whole new line.)
California "high-speed" rail is failing because it doesn't make sense. For all the billions already spent and planning to be spent, the delivered product is severely underwhelming. Trains go few of the places people want to go on the schedule they want to go.
Planes, by comparison, are an absolute bargain. Travel between almost any two cities quickly and affordably. By most calculations, planes also have less environmental impact because you don't need to build hundreds of miles of concrete and steel tracks.
Trains are great for bulk freight, but have very few sensible applications in the US. California would be better off with bus service if they really want a public option.
This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central Valley would have to wait for branches to be built.
SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.
Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.
this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.
Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.
Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)
The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.
Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.
The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership.
The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)
Cars employ more people.
A lot of the opposition you hear from EVs comes from the fact that they require less maintenance and upkeep and so they employ fewer people.
Make-work is not a virtue - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window . People want transportation, not necessarily cars.
Cars also contribute to an immense amount of misery in society - the financial burden, being stuck in traffic, road expansions demolishing houses, noise and pollution, injuries.
I wasn't saying it was good, just pointing out a reason politicians support them. Jobs and tax base gets politicians elected.
A lot of being "car brained" is because even the best transit sucks compared to a Taxi.
People objectively don't want to share space with the masses. Even in Singapore or Japan, the stress of being in crowds is simply not worth it. Its slower, requires far more mental energy to plan your route, and requires a lot of physical movement which is hard for fatass americans.
Especially when America has quite cheap, awesomely fast and fun cars (your local C8 Corvette can be had for 15% off MSRP from the factory right now).
Cars are freedom. Mass transit is biopolitics/biopower. Big ass off road capable trucks literally don't even need roads.
How does 'stress of being in crowds' in big cities indicate all those people would prefer to drive? Is stuck in traffic not the 'stress of being in crowds'?
The stress of 2 ton machines flying around at 120 km/hr and operated by the angry and impatient-- that is simply not worth it. You think automated trains with 2 minute headways in a network covering 85% of local journeys at $3/ride would be worse than a Taxi at $1/minute with traffic?!!
A lot of being "car brained" is not realizing that even decent transit by global standards would be far far better than the subsidized freeway only-if-you-can-drive $8,000/year horrorshow of the US/Canada. No one's going to take away your fun cars, but a system maximizing freedom needs to account for the young, old, disabled, drunk, poor, and motivated to read instead of drive. Mass transit is freedom. Cars are consumption-politics/corporate-power.
>requires more mental energy to plan your route
It’s unarguable that driving requires more mental energy. Which is exactly why we have licensing, sobriety requirements, age floors and limits, etc.
Route planning itself is a mostly solved problem for an average pedestrian in any developed city. You type in your destination in maps and go.
Cars are only freedom to able bodied people of a certain financial means and age. Or when you live rurally. To everyone else in a city, they make it harder to get around.
If gasoline was sold for a fair price, cars would be reduced to a novelty within a generation
You should go to the third world and see how much cheaper gas is there.
A lot of third world countries exist almost entierly off of gas subsidies from the government. Go look at what Libyans paid per liter of gas during the Gadaffi years.
Americans already pay a "fair price". No, no one in the world properly accounts for "externalities" of consumption.
Is it so wrong that we elect politicians to preserve our desired lifestyle?
The amount of conversation around this is testament it's not everyone's desired lifestyle.
This is every attempt to improve a software project in a corporation ever… Small QoL fix gets pushed off because “the big rewrite work will fix it anyway” and five years later the small fix still hasn’t been done.
I’m sorry I don’t really see the problem with this, connecting Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec city seems like a pretty reasonable route
The problem is it doesn't get built.
Exactly. A huge part of these projects is proving to the public the value. So even a short, direct line is useful - as some will start to use it and then extending it becomes a simple "this thing we have is good, it should be good more."
But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.
Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.
A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.
At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route.
Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.
That will come round again in the future.
> passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs.
Roads generally don't pay for themselves
Spending money on projects that never get built is the kind of job that never ends.
Great for former government employees who want to be a consultant.
No one is accountable for the waste so politicians can just promise to spend more next time.
I was surprised to find out it was going the Peterborough route. Didn't make a lot of sense.
SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018.
Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF#Modern_era
This is discussed in the article.
I had a chuckle at these two subsequent paragraphs.
> One regular snipe is that it’s “easier to build rail in Morocco than in California.”
> Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.
So, uh... it is easier to build rail in Morocco than in California. And California is part of the cause. It's not even a "snipe", it's just the truth.
That’s why we are discussing it here.
yeah and the author of the article totally misses the point
In my region (Latin America) when a "boondoggle" of such high monetary cost happens, we call it for what it usually is— corruption.
All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.
Yeah it happens a lot here as well. It goes into contractors pocket who dig/drill/build -> stop -> dig/drill/build -> stop and get their $$ on partially completed work and milk the system for all it will give them. Quite often they are friends/relatives of the politicians.
California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systematic underbidding + cost overruns is the rule, and is expected by all parties except the naive public.
Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted", 'Cheems mindset' failures of liberalism, and high-pressure demands from a federal government whose legislators are eager to sabotage projects outside of purple states.
https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo
Here in the UK all Gov tenders are on a combination of price and quality - typically 40-60% quality. If you want a long term relationship as a Gov supplier, you need to demonstrate quality and bid the pricing fairly, without chronic underpinning.
Here in the EU, we usually consider Italy and Spain somewhat more corrupt than the Western average, but high-speed rail in both countries got built reliably and without major delays.
Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.
I wonder if low level corruption on €1m projects means there's no room in the market for high level corruption.
The term in the 20th century was honest graft.
Well, in this case, the problem is more so that money wasn’t spent on large swaths of the project.
Idk about Canada, but what you usually see in the UK is that tens of millions of pounds get spend before a single brick is laid.
Money disappears into consultations, reviews, studies and reports of dubious value, the paperwork keeps piling up and it takes years before the public sees anything tangible, if the project ever gets built at all.
Someone somewhere is getting very rich off this, but it ain't the taxpayer.
Tens of millions?
£1.2 BILLION before a single spade in the ground for the lower thames crossing
https://www.ft.com/content/917d4b7f-318e-46fe-ba44-664551ebc...
The planning document alone was 350,000 pages long, and cost about £1000 per page (£350m).
What western countries lack is someone empowered enough to just say "fuck it, make it happen", and be held accountable once it's built.
How did France and Spain build their high speed rail?
I would guess less institutionalised corruption and less weight put on planning objections.
Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...
> likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded
Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera.)
That money did literally improve urban metro and regional rail–Caltrain electrification came out of it.
> That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail.
CA HSR was the political lever to get funding to improve urban metro and regional rail, so, in a sense, the money was spent doing that.
> Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent...
...only literally anything else!
Did it have to be funded by a proposition? Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?
> Did it have to be funded by a proposition?
Yes.
> Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?
To fund a long-term capital project? No, for a number of reasons. First, at that time, the CA legislature couldn't practically fund anything reliably (budget process is Constitutionally mandated to be annual, and at that time required a 2/3 supermajority to pass, which caused regular budget crises.) Second, and more importantly, structurally, to fund major capital projects, debt financing is required, and California cannot, Constitutionally, issue bonds without voter approval. Prop 1A was a legislative initiative amendment -- that is, the legislature had to pass a bill to put it on the ballot -- to secure that approval.
Tax increases and bond measures have to go through the voters. The alternative is to get enough of the legislature, including probably some in Central Valley, to agree to cut a bunch of other more popular programs in order to fund it out of the general fund.
I dug into this a bit since these comments were just confusing, but apparently Prop 13 required tax increases to get a 2/3 majority of the legislature.
So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.
Correct. What is the point of having a representative government with a legislature if you just forcibly remove the lynchpin of power for that type of government?
That's the point. Props 13 and 8 were part of the republican anti-government movement often memorialized by Norquist's remark about making government small enough to drown.
The motivations and rhetoric are before my time. What’s leftover is just this stupid counterproductive set of laws undermining the legislature’s ability to legislate.
What does California do with all its income?
Props 13 and 8.
Highly recommend Paradise Lost by Peter Schrag. Raising revenue requires supermajority voter approval in most cases. A huge chunk of the budget is already allocated by voter mandates and the legislature fights over the scraps.
Same shit. Different State. Maybe a little extra compared to a Red State or a smaller State, and on a larger scale. You can dig into it here: https://ebudget.ca.gov/
As the article points out, the difference in cost between these two routes is pretty small in the grand scheme of things; more than two-thirds of the costs associated with the project are at either end getting in and out of Los Angeles/the SF Bay Area. On the other hand, as the author points out, building the route through the Central Valley population centers has a number of advantages (political support, having a useful rail line before the entire project is complete, etc. etc.)
If you use google maps to find the distance between Los Banos and Tehachapi. Via I5 is 210 miles. Via HWY99 is 223 miles. So a 13 mile difference. That's 5-7 minutes at high speed rail speeds.
And you are right the extra cost is minimal. It's probably $10-15 billion.
My thought about the grade separation costs and my beef is. One is those grade separation projects need to be done anyways. The beef is why is the high speed rail project paying for road infrastructure. That should come out of gas taxes or something.
Even if you insist on going through the cities in the valley they chose a construction sequence that takes the longest time to show any process. If they fast tracked LA-Bakersfield they could have extended the Amtrak San Joaquin service to LA by now. Concentrat on the SF-Merced section next and then you can work on the Merced-Bakersfield piece meal.
I thought they were unclear if LA-Bakerfield is even possible.
My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the monkey there is no point in making the music box (something you know can be made).
Her point was people delude themselves into thinking they're making progress on a project by starting with the easy stuff. But the easy stuff is pointless if the hard stuff is impossible.
She gave the example of the California high-speed rail. They're building the flat easy part first but engineers have not figured out how they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains. Until they've figured that out the flat part is a waste of time and a false example of progress.
But neither would have to be the first step.
Making the route from San Diego to LA high-speed is perfectly doable (the route exists already), and would be a great stepping stone.
Even if it turns out the Tehachapi is basically the mountains of Mordor and the project ends, you'd still have a valuable high-speed corridor.
You'd think. But efforts long underway to incrementally improve the SD-LA section are now caught in a deep mire of NIMBYism:
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/new-study-...
These people are objecting to…a train running under them? Why?
Depending on the depth of the tunnel and the construction of the structure, you can get vibrations through the ground and foundations of the structure transmitted such that they are noticeable.
e.g. If you live above a tube line in London (London Underground) then you may hear/feel rumbling every time a train passes under you.
Because of disruption during drilling, apparently, but mostly because they’re rich and can complain.
The Basque Y high speed rail project in Spain, currently being built, goes through some very challenging mountainous terrain.
If Spain, with 33 500 USD GDP per capita, can do it, then so should California, whose GDP per capita exceeds 100 000 USD.
But yeah, better private sector does not necessarily buy better public sector.
Unless, of course, the flat easy part has value anyway.
note: I'm not arguing whether it does or does not.
"they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains."
OMG, just join the I-5 after Bakersfield. It's right there. Why are we barreling through the mountains?
You mean the train? I don't think they do well with steep grades [1].
[1] https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/23106/what-d...
Depends on how steep. 4% is no problem for modern traction.
Just look at this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wiedtalbrücke_Blickricht...
which is used at 300kph by electric multiple units like the german Inter City Expres.
I've rode over this at about 330kph shortly after opening, it's slightly noticable, but not like a roller-coaster at all, as one might think.
Meanwhile this is also used by more conventional electrical engines for passenger trains up to 250kph, also in 'pusher' mode,
and short freight trains, no longer than 700m, at anything between 160 to 200kph during nights.
According to Wikipedia 'the Bakersfield–Palmdale section of the line will cross Tehachapi Pass, roughly parallelling the Union Pacific Railroad's Mojave Subdivision. Due to its heavy freight traffic and sharp curves (including the famous Tehachapi Loop), there is no current passenger service through the pass. While the proposed high-speed rail alignment will not include any long tunnels comparable to those in Pacheco Pass, it has nine shorter tunnels and several viaducts more than 200 feet (61 m) high. The maximum grade through the pass would be - 2.8 - percent, making it the steepest portion of the Phase 1 route.'
Easy peasy.
Edit: TL;DR? All of this is explained here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline_West
Okay, but the I-5 doesn't bother with loops and tunnels. It just barrels right over the top of the mountains, including a 5-mile section of 6% grade according to the sign (https://www.crashforensics.com/tejonpass.cfm). Trucks struggle to crawl over the top at like 30 mph, with tires. It's not exactly a roller coaster hill to be overcome with inertia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro#Velaro_Novo
They have distributed traction, meaning powered bogies in every second wagon for the current variants. There is no 'engine/locomotive' in the classical sense. All of these also have electronic anti-slip/traction control.
Edit: Even if a quarter of the powered bogies are defect for whichever reason, the remaining ones still suffice to accelerate from full stop at 4% grade. By design. For current variants. It's a variable platform. They could use more powered bogies. Stronger motors. Whatever.
After living in California for a while and observing its urban planning culture more up close, I came away with the distinct impression that this is all by design.
California is owned by boomer homeowners, real estate speculators, and the auto industry, and the first commandment of all California planning is "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 1972." In the event that the first commandment fails, the second is "make anything new as expensive as possible so there's as much potential for graft as possible, and so existing home values aren't threatened."
Maybe things will change when there's a generational transition, but unfortunately it may just pass power on to the SV neoreactionary VC set who will proceed to implement their own different set of bizarre schemes that don't work like planned charter cities in the middle of nowhere. Or they might just turn into fuddy-duddies in their old age and change it to "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 2003 when I moved here and got rich."
California is the fourth largest economy, so clearly something is working, but I don't think California's urban planning culture is it. Places, companies, and people can all be extremely successful in spite of massive dysfunction.
- plan is presented
- (the many) stakeholders issue critiques
- new plan is presented that includes all the worst elements of said stakeholders but achieves unity across teams
- stakeholders toast and have an expensive dinner at achievement of unified plan
This is not a California or public sector thing, it's applies across all big organisations.
Not sure what specifically is “california” about this - There is very little support from either side of the aisle in continuing this project, which of course, the article states because it is an unavoidable truth. The criticisms offered by both sides are valid and the few proponents that still hold water for this dismiss these arguments with very bad or incomplete reasoning as written here.
For instance, brushing over the “possible original sin” of the project was way underestimating cost. Yea, no shit, that’s like 95% of the problem voters have with it, that and how long it’s taken with very little usable progress. Author spends very little time on this.
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It later says that taking the more direct route along the I-5, and then connecting the bypassed areas with branch/stub lines would lead to the same costs.
But by then 25M would have access to the main trunk of the train generating massive revenues. That's the point.
Holding up 25M people to try and include 1M more while bloating costs and showing no progress is the essence of how you kill a project.
> But by then 25M would have access to the main trunk of the train generating massive revenues.
No, they wouldn't. Because Prop 1A funds are a tiny drop in the system funding requirements, and choosing the I-5 alignment would not have sped up any of the issues that make the things around the termini more time consuming, and not having a ready-to-work initial construction segment that actually formed part of an initial operating segment that actually connects populated areas (even if they are much smaller than the termini) would have meant no federal ARRA funding (not to mention the weaker in-state political support), so what actually would have happened is that the project would take longer and, in the year-of-expenditure way CA HSR costs are always estimated and quoted, cost much more before anything got built or operational.
The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.
California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to name them. At the same time, it should've been completely federally funded.
> The problem is that this should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide. Doing it nationwide would give economies of scale that wouldn't be possible with these local half-measures.
What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, followed by a sparsely populated mountain range and then a very large amount of farmland.
The nearest city to California with more than a million people is Phoenix, AZ which is "only" a couple hours from the California border. The next nearest is San Antonio, TX. The distance between Phoenix and San Antonio is about a thousand miles. Neither of those cities themselves have a functional mass transit system for anyone to use even if you put a rail stop there.
California itself constitutes more than half the population of the entire western US, which is otherwise enormous with a very low population density. It doesn't make sense to put high speed rail anywhere in the western US outside of California because there aren't enough people there to use it.
When referring to scale they probably meant resources and planning, not actually connecting all the projects.
It's cheaper to make more of stuff, even if it's not in the same place
The federal government isn't going to make the stuff. They'd just buy it from the existing companies that make rolling stock etc., as could any state government in the same way.
Partially correct. A private group is building high speed rail to connect Vegas to the Inland Empire. Construction has started and expected to be complete in 2028.
https://www.dot.nv.gov/projects-programs/transportation-proj...
https://www.brightlinewest/
Las Vegas is basically on the California border and exists mainly because it's on the California border, so all the people in Southern California can go to the place where gambling is legal. It's an outlier that both doesn't get you a national high speed rail network and evidently doesn't require federal involvement to happen regardless.
It's reflective of the imbalance of political power in the state and the corruption this power base now suborns. They don't care about the rail project. They're the least likely people to need or use it. They either want it to not happen or if it does at least it provides them with ample opportunities for creating further graft and corruption.
It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.
If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/J15pDPG
>It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why.
Because the biggest threat to any rail project in Cali is political protest and "environmental" lawsuits ("this construction will destroy my view of the landscape!") and the second biggest threat is being forced to buy land from a bunch of people who've had years to collude in only offering ludicrously high prices.
Any sensible project will do its level best to avoid any developed rural land; it's the only way to avoid the massive delays and cost overruns you're complaining about. And besides, once it's built, the land around it will be developed because of the HSR line itself.
If you don't try and reinvent everything, you can get economies of scale by doing what the rest of the world is already doing.
Washington state decided to have light rail. But instead of using off-the-shelf rail cars, they just had to have them "custom designed" for the Pacific Northwest. Nobody was ever able to identify what about the PNW needed custom rail cars, but they sure cost a lot!
The only light rail operating in Washington State is LINK Light Rail, which Sound Transit operates using Siemens Mobility’s S700 model (although some older train sets are still used on the same tracks).
Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe, too. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70
From what I can tell, these train sets are as off-the-shelf as can be reasonably expected, although apparently LINK has ordered their trains to run on 1500 volts as that’s what their catenaries use. Perhaps you’re thinking of BART?
-An occasional S700 passenger
No, I am thinking the Sound Transit light rail. I wouldn't be surprised if they canceled the "design for the PNW" cars and bought off the shelf ones.
Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.
All light rail cars are custom in the same way that every airplane is custom but we wouldn’t say that a 737 is expensive because of the seat and entertainment choices.
Sound Transit operates LINK (what gp was talking about) and Sounder (not light rail, operates on BNSF tracks, coaches are made by Bombardier and seem to be in use by many commuter rail systems). Not sure what you're referring to.
The train that runs from downtown to Seatac.
That's LINK light rail, operated by Sound Transit. Here's an article about the (new) cars they use: https://www.soundtransit.org/blog/platform/new-link-light-ra... -- I get the impression all light rail cars in general are made to order per specifications, rather than off-the-shelf.
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge. Although I did read a report saying they did it to make the trains both lighter and also able to withstand wind shear in certain parts of the system.
To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway
> Specifically on the Golden Gate Bridge
BART never operated on the Golden Gate Bridge (or any of the other Bay Area bridges).
Light rail is almost always some sort of bespoke system.
>should've been a federal project from the start, one of many running concurrently nationwide.
With Congress Gridlocked over issues that really should he bipartisan, it'd unironically take less time for the States to figure it out instead.
This was both a very good read and thoroughly depressing.
It makes a lot of sense to connect San Diego/LA/Sacramento/San Francisco.
It makes a lot less sense to try to connect Merced, Bakersfield, Fresno, et al. People there like to have cars, like to drive, there isn't a lot of traffic. Once you arrive in those places, there is very little transit infrastructure. You basically need a car. And they're far more centred around ag or industry, so more reason to have commercial / truck traffic and a lot less for just passenger cars.
Meanwhile, there are over 100 flights a day between LA area and SF. Meanwhile, Merced has 2 flights a day to LA on a tiny prop, Bakersfield has 2 to SF, and Fresno around 5 a day. There aren't any flights at all between Bakersfield/Sacramento/Fresno/Merced.
Whereas SF/LA/San Diego make complete sense to have a train station with plenty of transit options to get around once you arrive.
(To get an idea of what I'm talking about - traffic on I-5 is so heavy, we would often take 99 instead, when going between SD/LA and Sacramento. 99 is 2 miles farther than I-5.)
San Diego/LA/SF/Sacramento is one of the few markets in America that could reasonably support high speed rail. And it's sad to see it being strangled in the crib.
I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.
Well, Bakersfield at al is not exactly a "future region" - it's been there for a long time with a giant freeway into it (and railroads, too, including rail service from Bakersfield all the way to Stockton with connections to San Francisco and Sacramento) and it has remained a sleepy agricultural corridor. The weather is awful and it's just not where most people in California want to live.
Only a California resident could call Bakersfield's weather "awful".
If you (read NIMBYs) shut down all public policy designed to turn your sleepy town into a thriving one then it's just a self fulfilling prophecy.
Meth-heads seem to love it.
Exactly, as people are priced out of the cities, having good HSR connections to SF and LA would be able to spur a lot of regional growth.
This is a pretty common kind of blindspot for people to have, talking about how crazy it is to build transit to places with or lower populations or less population density, but forget that a lot of well-connected, dense places with good transit weren't very dense before good transit was built!
Transit to... Bakersfield? It's 112 miles from Los Angeles. Dumping high-speed rail (which in the current plan won't be high speed at all between Bakersfield and LA, but is going to be a slow, circuitous route going through Palmdale and Lancaster) is not really going to be realistic for any kind of commuting to LA.
There is a reason these cities never got developed more than they are. It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer. People would rather live in LA. California has huge swathes of land with very, very low population density because nobody wants to live there.
> It's kind of flat, unappealing scenery and it's boiling hot in the summer.
Several decades ago, you could have levied the same criticisms against South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and so on. But people now want to live here.
There are basically two ways to sustain the growth in California. One is to greatly densify places like the SF Bay Area, another is to improve the infrastructure elsewhere. And I don't expect see residential high rises in Palo Alto any time soon.
Up north, there's plenty of places that are more desirable in terms of weather, but they're not gonna get developed for environmental reasons. So what's left?
112 miles at 200 mph?
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Agreed. We should be striving for to build where it makes sense. It would be great to build for the future but let’s be real, America does not have the appetite.
SD - LA - SF makes a lot of sense both from a business and tourism perspective. Build along the I5 and figure out the rest later.
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One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed".
We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF <-> LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved:
"California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1]
The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is the spine of California and should be leveraged for all additional infrastructure build-out ... which would yield economies of scale and network effects for rail, network lines, water transmission, electrical distribution and (eventually) autonomous trucking.
Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
The operating speed on the fast stretch is actually one of the fastest in the world at 350 km/h, it's just that it has to waste half an hour on the Caltrain tracks from San Francisco to Gilroy and from Burbank to Anaheim. It's kinda like how the TGV from Paris to Nice goes from Paris to Marseille super fast but then has to spend hours to go from Marseille to Nice even though the latter part is a small fraction of the distance.
And yes, I agree that this "blended" design that has a lengthy slow section is very lame and bad. If only Caltrain could be quad tracked elevated viaducts.
This is actually a very common operating pattern, particularly for new services. It took years after initial service opened for the Korean KTX to run all the way from Seoul to Busan, and both France and Japan have a number of TGV/Shinkansen services where part of the line is regular track running at regular speed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-shinkansen
CA should've just bitten the bullet and built the whole SF-SJ section underground. It's about 50 miles, about the length of one mid-sized subway line in many part of the world, and it would've simplified the issue of acquiring prime suburban land.
Besides, I just don't see how HSR and Caltrain can share the same railway and avoid major service capacity issues. I think Caltrain is close to capacity as is, and at least a few years ago, major (an hour or more) delays were common.
South Korea built its second branch of HSR reaching Seoul almost entirely underground, with a single 31-mile tunnel [1]. I guess it was faster than trying to acquire land on top of it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulhyeon_Tunnel
The geology of the Bay Area would make that difficult. The Peninsula flats are mostly loosely-consolidated sediment, and in some areas you have less than half a mile between the mountains and the Bay. And it's less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault. You'd likely have significant problems with flooding [1], and all the difficulties that the Pacheco Pass segment is having tunneling through an active fault would be multiplied by the 4x as long, geologically varied segment from SJ-SF.
[1] This is a significant issue for the NYC subway, even though you don't really think of NYC as being on top of a bay.
Then how did BART get built ?
Not under the Peninsula.
(The part of BART that extends through the Peninsula runs aboveground from Daly City to Millbrae. For that matter, the part of BART that runs through the East Bay goes along the former Western Pacific right-of-way, aboveground. And the Transbay Tube was constructed with the "immersed tube" technique, built on land, towed out to sea, and submerged. Where BART runs underground and was built with TBMs, it's usually in bedrock under the cities of SF and Oakland.)
The Japanese would probably say 'Hold my beer.' to that.
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel
I mean, the Seikan tunnel was pretty difficult too:
> Following several decades of planning and construction, the tunnel opened on 13 March 1988.
> The construction cost of the tunnel itself was 538.4 billion yen at the planning stage, but it actually cost 745.5 billion yen. The construction cost of the strait line, including the attachment line, was 689 billion yen at the planning stage, but ended up costing 900 billion yen. During the construction, 34 workers were killed in the Seikan Tunnel, mostly in transportation accidents
> In addition, the tunnel faced criticism for its high maintenance costs, the need to pump a large amount of spring water even after completion, and that the large investment to build it is regarded as a sunk cost, and it is said that it is more economical to abandon it. It was ridiculed variously as "Showa's Three Idiots Assessment", "useless long things", and "quagmire tunnel".
We're complaining about CAHSR being decades in the making and billions over budget, but this does not seem to be unique to CAHSR. At least nobody's died during construction yet.
It's good evidence that all civil engineering projects are failures right up until they're done and everybody uses them, and then they just become critical infrastructure.
That's still something that wouldn't be that difficult to change in the future. Probably easier to fund once the initial system is operational and the case for the extra expenditure is clearly demonstrable.
Having it connect into Caltrain is probably something that is nice to have anyway (like if there's maintenance required in the hypothetical tunnel or whatever kind of direct bypass, so you can still run services on the slower route) so it's not a waste to have both.
CA HSR actually is "high speed."
The distance from LA to SF is about 665 km (following the planned HSR route). A travel time of 2:40 means the train has an average (not top) speed of 250 km/h, which is very competitive internationally. Even if we use the shorter I-5 route as the baseline, the average speed is still 230 km/h.
That's competitive with the fastest French TGV lines, and much faster than most European HSR lines. For reference, the fastest lines in the world run at an average speed of about 290 km/h (e.g., Beijing - Shanghai).
Calling this a "slow, circuitous route" is really not accurate at all. If CA HSR gets built as originally planned, it will be one of the faster systems in the world, and nearly as good as the best systems in Europe.
>Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.
Because with a big project like this, everyone wants to claim some slice for themselves. The optimal route crosses counties like Fresno, which means they can veto the project (or at least delay it). They use that as leverage to extract benefits for themselves, like changing the route so it passes through their county seat.
It would be one thing if they were just going to Fresno. There are three major cities in the Central Valley: Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento. You get Bakersfield for free; Sacramento is north of SF and has existing commuter rail. Fresno is big enough to justify a stop; it has room to grow, too. You could put a stop that's ten miles outside of Fresno, and you don't have to cut through the city too much. That's what they do with airports. Throw in a LRT while you're at it.
But the plan also calls for Tulare and Madera to have stops. Now you're doing three times the work for a 20-40% increase in the population served. Then they want a line to Sacramento that goes through Merced and Visalia At this point it looks silly. Fresno is larger than Tulare, Madera, Merced and Visalia combined. Stockton already has the Altamont Commuter Express line to San Jose.
Having HSR stops inside cities is one of the things that make it far better than flying for certain distances. Put the station outside the city and you're killing a lot of your benefits...
Ten miles from Fresno might be too far. I just picked a distance out of thin air.
But when you have a minor stop, it's less important to build the perfect configuration. Even if you have to go outside of Fresno to get on the train, you're still in downtown SF or LA when you get off. And the traffic in Fresno is not as bad as the traffic in SF. And the flights from Fresno airport are probably not as cheap, since it's a lower-volume airport (capex per flight is larger), so you have more of a cost advantage.
So I'm pointing out a false dilemma. You don't have to choose between downtown Fresno and no Fresno. You can have a worse-is-better Fresno without sacrificing the goals of HSR for the really big cities.
Stops in Tulare and Visalia... they're 12 miles apart!
Fresno / Central Valley is not the circuitous route, which is quite close to the I-5 near Bakersfield. The true circuitous detour is between Bakersfield and LA, where the route is planned to go East through the Antelope Valley with a station at Palmdale.
It's utterly asinine, and will result in "low speed rail". Which already exists... you can take the Coastal Starlight if you aren't in a hurry. There is no market (none) for rail service between LA and Bakersfield.
Once you count airport time, 2:40 is about on par with what it’d take to fly from SF to LA. It’s about half what it takes to drive between them, even without traffic.
> One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed"
Not really an issue. The problem is first and foremost it hasn't been built. If it had been built, by now, it would have worked, even if that success were only measured in the Bay Area and greater LA area.
Article states that I-5 corridor skips all major towns in central valley which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA
"... which kinda kills the purpose of HSR connecting SF to central valley towns to LA ..."
Yes, that's exactly right.
The original - and highest value - purpose was a high speed rail route between SF and LA.
The meandering route through Fresno (and the new, ex post facto "purpose" the article refers to) is the result of political machinations that happened after the fact and traded utility for brief, local (and trivial) political gains.
there is no need to connect SF to LA only, there are many airports in each town that connect these large metro areas.
the purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.
China's HSR connects large metro areas into one giant megalopolis with up to 250+ mln population that totally changes the ballgame in terms of economic output
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopolises_in_China
You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.
>The purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.
Bakersfield has a dozen reasons ever preventing it from becoming another SF/LA/SD.
Besides, China didn't build its rail all at once. A direct route would prove value when making future splinter routes. Instead, we chase 2 rabbits and get none.
> You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.
So your estimate is 270 minutes.
Where's the train stop supposed to be in LA? Downtown, right? What's the commute for that like? Sure, no 90 minute TSA process (big doubt if that's typical) but now the 90 minute flight turns into 160 minutes (which is the target they're aiming for and it's not likely). Add on how long it takes to get downtown and... not much time savings, is there?
Depends on the stops and route. The secret to LAX is to not take LAX if you can avoid it. BUR has a lot of destinations and is a lot less of a toll on sanity. If it is truly a direct LA to SF with minimal stops, then sure. There's not too much lag removed.
A 90 minute commute to simply downtown instead of LAX becomes a 60-70 minute commute simply because you're not spending 20 minutes trying to navigate LAX. Not enter the airport, be stuck in its own brand of LAX traffic.
FWIW at least the LAX Automated People Mover will be opening up next year and you can avoid the hell on Earth that is driving in/out of LAX.
That will be a relief. Though if I may rant a bit to a bikeshed:
I really hate that thr naming scheme of "people mover" was probably part of the reason this project is coming next year and not 2035. The phrase itself just oozes this sentiment that no one politically involved was allowed to say "train" or "rail" so it doesn't scare off investors.
Actually a "people mover" is a term of art [1]. I had the same reaction when I heard the term (or thought it was some other political gloss to get the thing approved faster), but it's actually a somewhat well-defined term.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_mover
>The term 'people mover' was used by Walt Disney, when he and his Imagineers were working on the new 1967 Tomorrowland at Disneyland. The name was used as a working title for a new attraction, the PeopleMover. According to Imagineer Bob Gurr, "the name got stuck," and it was no longer a working title.
Huh. Thinking about it does sound like a very "Disney" term. Interesting to think it spread from a resort park to professional transportation. Never would have guessed.
The reasoning is all too relatable as well. "working names" no one works on and suddenly it's your final product name. Such anti-bikeshedding would be very rare these days.
Doesn’t help the Detroit People Mover much sadly. It’s also a train.
The route through Fresno is only 50 km longer than the I-5 route. It's a difference of 7% in total length.
Going through the two biggest cities in the Central Valley is worth a 7% increase in track length.
It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time.
The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d open vast tracts of land in the Central Valley to housing. It might actually be practical to work in the Bay Area on something non-tech, live in a SFH, and commute less than an hour again.
CAHSR is almost certain to not be priced competitively for commuting. it is far more valuable to have that seat full all the way to LA.
OTOH had altamont been selected, it would have been extremely useful for commuting from sacramento to the bay (branch line, no seats to displace)
They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.
https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-BP-Servic...
This really depends on how it ends up being priced.
In Germany, you can pay for a year-long high-speed rail all-you-can-ride pass. It costs just under 5000 Euros, which is very reasonable if you're using it every workday.
This is a bit like AWS pricing. If you book an entire year of usage up-front, you get a much lower price. Casual users pay much more per use.
cashr doesnt go anywhere at any speed
the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
> HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.
Wrong. It's most definitely a thing in quite a few mid-sized Japanese cities. Here's a compilation video taken at Fukushima Station (https://youtu.be/K-wkX3vFU_A?t=403) on the fastest 320 km/h line for example. You can check for yourself that the station is dead smack downtown in a city of 275,000.
At the world level it doesn't tend to happen because existing developments in cities usually strongly inhibit the construction of straight rail alignments that can support high-speed operations. But that's not a problem in the Central Valley – they're blessed with excellent existing rights-of-way.
As I wrote elsewhere, the average speed of CA HSR (as planned) is 250 km/h, which is very competitive, internationally. It's about as fast as the fastest French TGV routes. It only really lags behind the fastest Chinese routes, which run at average speeds of about 290 km/h.
If CA HSR can go through the cities in the Central Valley and still achieve an average speed of 250 km/h, that's well worth it.
people who need to get from SF to LA as soon as possible are already served by the airplanes.
Your business class traveler from LA/orange county to SF bay is already well served by the many airports in both metro areas.
the HSR is about connecting the rest of the state to economic opportunities in these large metro areas
SF-LA ~380mi is actually a real sweet spot for HSR. Flight time of 90 minutes but the hassle of getting out to airport, check-in, boarding.. and then the opposite on the other end makes your all-in travel time about 4~5 hours. With HSR you are generally going city center to city center, and 380mi is achievable in 2~2.5 hours all-in.
I took a 700mi HSR in Japan that was probably on the very far end of being competitive time wise with flying and was still great. 5hr train vs 2hr plane segment, but all-in door-to-door travel times were comparable (5h45m vs 5hr).
Train 5hr45m door to door with majority of time sat in a comfy quiet train with big comfy seats and high speed internet. A flight which is 5hr door to door is mostly a ton of hurry-up-and-wait with small blocks of 30-90min here or there you can read a book.
If you want HSR you'd have at most one stop between LA and SF.
If you're going to stop throughout the rest of the state you just want normal rail running at 100-120mph.
I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.
Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
> I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.
“Eminent domain”, and the SF to SJ run for CA HSR uses almost entirely existing rail right-ot-way shared with Caltrain.
> Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
You are right that doing Central Valley first was political, but you have the wrong political motivation. The political motivation was (1) to mitigate partisan political resistance to the project by prividing the most immediate benefit to the Republican districts in the Central Valley, and (2) to secure federal funding under ARRA, which prioritized shovel-ready projects, because the issues that needed cleared to reach an approximation of that state for the termini were more time consuming.
>and extremely unpopular
Who's shedding a tear for some farmer getting paid above market rates (presumably) for their land? California is probably the last place I'd expect people to think using eminent domain in this case is a slipper slope to communism or whatever.
Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.
At that point, you're going to have to start using imminent domain.
Putting it off until after you have billions of dollars in sunk costs in the Central Valley doesn't change that.
*eminent domain, from a Latin-ish phrase "dominium eminens."
> Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA).
The SJ to SF run is on existing rail right of way.
> At that point, you're going to have to start using imminent domain.
They’ve been using eminent domain the whole time, they aren't going to have to start at some point in the future.
That's why they went with the blended system with Caltrain. Caltrain already owns a suitable right-of-way; they just needed to electrify it. Which they've already done. The SF-to-SJ part of CAHSR is effectively done; they just need to built acquire the SJ-to-Gilroy right of way and tunnel under the Pacheco Pass to connect with the rest of CAHSR.
>Eventually you will have to build out the rail line in densely populated areas (especially near San Francisco and LA). High speed rail requires that you to avoid unnecessary curves.
why can't you have it run slowly in built up areas? As another commenter mentioned that's how it works in France.
Because competing with the airlines requires some semblance of "high speed"?
California is fairly densely packed once you get away from the Central Valley and nearer to the coast where the people are.
The current plan actually accounts for this; the 2:40 includes the amount of time it takes to run on the current Caltrain tracks from San Jose to SF which will not be running at the highest speeds.
Said another way, that SF/San Jose stretch accounts for 25-30% of the total time. That’s similarly true for the last stretch of LA meaning a truly engineering driven design could have done it within ~1h50. And note that the 2h40 goal is admitted as a pipe dream by everyone involved, particularly because of the last mile issues and the circuitous route.
IIRC the last stretch in LA is actually planned to be new build with Palmdale to Los Angeles taking about twenty minutes.
Engineering is about optimizing and updating where you can. There aren't really high speed rail lines anywhere that go into the center of their major cities at full speed. In Europe and Japan the city-center sections are slower; China solved this problem mostly by having high speed trains skirt around built up areas.
> China solved this problem mostly by having high speed trains skirt around built up areas.
Which is what we should have done. Follow the 5 and build out high speed spokes to the other cities. And really unfuck the rail system in the Bay Area instead of travelling at Caltrain speeds for San Jose -> SF.
Upgraded signaling along the Caltrain ROW is in the works, but again you've got to balance the egos of the three big stakeholders. Caltrain is a far smaller problem to CAHSR than e..g Metro North is to Acela. The big issue is going to be the approach to downtown SF — which is still a ridiculous political football.
Something something something “solve the hard problems first”.
I agree.
Starting the build out from either SF or LA would have at least resulted in an initial segment that people could use.
Disagree. Waiting for San Francisco to get its act together would potentially doom CAHSR. Building something now even if it means no downtown SF service could still reap benefits. Even Millbrae to LA would be very useful.
Giving operating HSR to the Valley first, even though this isn't historically the reason for it, is probably a very good way to motivate a solution to any political problems in the urban areas around the termini.
China would have likely just stopped the rail line at San Jose, the same way the Shanghai HSR stops at Hongqiao 50 minutes away from the actual city center.
> a truly engineering driven design
If by “engineering-driven” you mean “focussed on speed alone and not the actual project goals”, but...
So ignore the "High Speed" part in addition to ignoring the part where you build the tracks in a location where there are people who can use them?
Yeah, I don't think people in LA or SF are worried about competing with airlines over a few dozen city miles not being 200+ mph. Avoiding the LAX is reward in and of itself.
Most of the run for CA HSR is in the Central Valley because most of the length of California between the Bay and LA is.
Americans tell me that public transport can't work in the America because it's not dense enough.
the state can manage that expense over time, for example by refusing to enforce laws, spiking crime rates, turning into dystopia and chaos, thus lowering property values.
after land is acquired, the property and law enforcement will bring up values
/s?
FWIW a train I've taken a few times in China (Hangzhou to Shanghai) would do San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than 2 hours (possibly 1 hour 45 minutes). This would be an express with no extra stops.
With a handful of stops and the corresponding loss of speed (I'm extrapolating as it hits speeds of 350/kph but still takes about 45+ minutes to go roughly 186km) it would probably realistically take more like 2.5 hours.
The CAHSR "peer group" which issued that quote is a political commission full of axe-grinding losers, specifically created by state politicians who want to kill the project. Nobody with a clue thinks that the 2h40m target is unattainable.
LOL I bet in 2010 if someone said that by 2025 the project would be grossly over budget and only have a short segment between nowhere and nowhere to show for 17 years of work you’d have called that propaganda by axe-grinding losers (paid off by big oil, naturally).
Just admit it, it’s a boondoggle just like everyone said it would be.
[flagged]
Sheesh
> First, the I-5 route avoids every major population center in the Central Valley, bypassing more than a million people who would be unserved
Who the hell is has been clamoring for a faster way to get to Fresno? What a pile of shit.
It's Fresno clamoring for more ways to get out of Fresno.
Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project.
A better way would have been to build it out from the city into the suburbs first as a commuter rail project. There isn't a ton of intercity demand for this rail, but there is tons of traffic in and out of each singular city to justify even medium speed rail.
"Unfortunately there simply isn't enough demand between SF and LA alone to justify the insanely long stretches of a direct rail project."
I will stipulate that that is correct at this very moment.
However, it is my contention that a truly high speed rail link (sub two hour) between SF and LA would have manufactured demand as an entirely new set of trips, activities and lifestyles would have been enabled by the ability to step on a train in LA and step off at the salesforce tower 1:55 later ...
It's not just speed that's critical, it's frequency. I believe that they're only proposing one train per hour, or 18 per day? Feels low for such a long piece of dedicated track.
In the UK the existing West Coast mainline has about 170 trains a day on the fast lines (between Milton Keynes and Rugby avoiding Northampton), the longest of which run about the same distance (London-Glasgow) as LA to San Francisco - albeit a 4.5 hour journey.
The original plans for HS2 were I think 18 per hour between London and Birmingham.
Fresno has a population of 500k, and is about 180 miles from LA from and 180 miles from San Francisco.
Liverpool has a similar population and is a similar distance from London and currently gets an hourly train, with arguments for 2 trains per hour. that's in addition to the more local services (Liverpool-Birmingham for example).
London frequencies on the fast non-stop trains are currently
Birmingham: 3tph
Manchester: 3tph
Glasgow: 1tph
Liverpool: 1tph
Trent Valley: 1tph (fast for the first 80 miles then local stopper at towns of upto 100k, like Tamworth, Lichfield, Rugeley
And typically
Lancashire (Blackpool): 1tph
North Wales: 1tph
Looking at cities like San Francisco an environms, Sacremento, Bakersfield, Fresno etc I don't see why you wouldn't send 2tph from LA to SF, and another 1tph to each of those locations, meaning 6-10tph heading north out of LA, and probably 3tph out of San Francisco, based on the population and distances. Not all services would stop at every station (you don't need a 3tph service from Bakersfield to Fresno, just 1tph would be fine)
I guess the lack of local public transport limits the benefit though, if you need a car to get to/from the station (especially if it's at both ends) then you might as well drive the whole way.
This could be absolutely true if people adapt to it, but that wouldn't happen overnight.
I would also strongly doubt that even after full adoption, Bakersfield to LA in 30 minutes is going to be much more useful and heavily trafficked on a daily basis than SF to LA in 2 hours would.
Even in Europe, their marquee city-to-city rail routes contribute a small share of overall rail traffic compared to their daily commuters.
Nothing happens overnight. Except governmental upheaval, I suppose.
And yes, SF to LA would be in much more demand. Not as a commuting option, but it'd make for some great weekend commerce. In a world of increasing work from home, I don't think many people would care for commuting to LA from Bakersfield.
LA to Bakersfield is 110 miles. That's about an hour, certainly plenty of people do that journey in the UK multiple times a week. Tamworth for example is exactly 110 miles from Euston. In peak times the fast trains stop there for the commuter traffic and it takes 67 minutes. Peterborough, Gratham, Newark (100-140 miles) are all common commuter places,
If we ever got HSR I'm not saying the is unviable. People commuting from suburbs to downtown LA have a 60-79 minute commute, a commute they can't sleep or be productive through. That's no issue.
I'm just saying the hubs are completely incompatible in both culture and market. Bakersfield is an energy/agriculture hub and LA is an entertainment hub. The utility here isn't exactly efficient if people are traveling that far every day to work as a cashier. Probably wouldn't stimulate much in that regsrd
Likewise, there's not going to be a lot of people in LA who willingly want to go to Bakersfield if given an option. At worst they are forced there as another suburban option if the city prices them out.
You don't need HSR, just a normal 125mph train line.
Imagine you are born in Bakersfield, your family is from Bakersfield, perhaps they are agricultural workers, but you don't want to be a farmer, you want a job in a big city, perhaps an accountant, or a civil engineer, or a whatever. It's a typical modern desk job, for whatever reason you need to be in an office a few times a week, maybe not 5 since covid, but certainly 2-3.
You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs. Or you can do both - stay living close to family so you can pop round in 10 minutes for a chat, but also have an increased choice of jobs and careers that a large city provides.
Nobody is commuting 100 miles a day for a minimum wage job sure, but there's far more jobs than cashiers - I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.
>You can either move a long way from your home, family, support network and live near your work, or you can maintain that community and support network but have a limited access to jobs.
Is there enough people with that mindset in Bakersfield?the population is 400k, and the opposite narrative of commuting out the city to work the oil rigs probably isn't as common.
From a political point of view, LA doesn't exactly in need of even more starry-eyed youth to compete with trying to make some career in the entertainment sector.
>I assume LA has decent jobs somewhere between the "Holywood A-Lister" and the "$10/hour cleaner" scale, and due to its size it likely has more opportunities than Bakersfield alone.
Definitely not in 2025. I guess we'll see if we're still in one piece in a decade.
I'm not convinced. The train is not competing with driving to SF, the train is competing with flying to SF. LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours. There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station so the customer has to be convinced that the train is a time savings.
Plus, of course, SWA has 4 direct flights to SFO, 6 to Oakland, 4 to San Jose. If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
Sounds like you've never taken a train. Time through security? There's basically no security in American train stations (or French TGV stations). I've only experienced Chinese train stations with security but with wait times far less than American airports. Time to the airport? Well yes because the airports are inconveniently located. Train stations are right there in the downtown.
International HSTs with passport required border crossings (ie Schengen-UK) have passport control and security - I think the security checks are to minimise the risk of terror attacks in the channel tunnel though.
But yeah, for intra-Schengen you just go to the platform a few minutes before departure, find where your carriage will be, and step in once the train comes to a stop.
So much less faff than air travel, and I’ve noticed better pubs at major stations meaning waiting for your train isn’t as boring as it used to be…
Security theatre. What's the point of metal detecting you on eurostar? You going to hijack the train with your knife?
Cars and vans in the tunnel don't go through metal detecters, and you can smuggle a far larger bomb that you can in a suitcase.
But eurostar is the exception to the rule with security. I tend to aim to arrive at my mainline station about 5 minutes before the train leaves incase I get delayed on-route, but that's because I live in a small town which only has 1 train per hour. When I take a route with 3tph I don't bother looking at the times, just go when I'm ready and accept on average I have to wait for 10 minutes.
I agree. But I just looked at Le Shuttle’s pages on security and they claim to put 100% of trucks through millimeter wavelength scanners (presumably to detect unauthorised travellers) and x-ray systems that are supposed to detect arms and explosives.
> Train stations are right there in the downtown.
A train station in downtown LA or SF would be inconveniently located for most people in these cities.
The SF one would apparently be near union square. Having been there, that seems easy enough to get to, insofar as anywhere is easy to get to in SF (it does not exactly have the greatest public transport in the world).
The train stations have connections to other transit - hard to see them as any less convenient than airports (LA's famously had no train connection until recently).
Station location of course plays a role (i.e. if it gets stuffed somewhere out of town with crappy transport links its no good, and rail links into the middle of an existing city are expensive), but I don't know a major airport where people would routinely trust less than 45 mins for checkin and passing security. Whereas for a train station its 10 mins.
> If you miss your flight you get on the next one. It is going to be really hard for a high speed train to complete with that.
Why would you bother to build a fancy new HSR line and then not run trains every hour, or more if demand is there? Running trains is not that expensive once you've got the infrastructure.
Forget security; I used SFO last week and just going from long term parking to where security is took 20 min, and the reverse (around midnight) took 30+ min. A train starting in downtown SF could as well be past San Jose at that point.
To be fair long-term parking at a train station would also be inconvenient (although at least in this case you'd not share facilities with all the international travelers), and honestly didn't even register as an option to me, so I was assuming local train/shuttle bus/cab/uber dropping off in a convenient central location.
I think the differentiating factor is that a rail station is more likely to be in the city center, where you can get to by other means (bus, BART, whatever), while going to SFO is much less convenient.
If you miss your high speed train in Tokyo, you get on the next one five minutes later. Sometimes just 3.5 minutes later.
> LAX -> SFO is 1.25 hours.
After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.
>there's going to be similar issues at the train station I suppose it will vary on popularity, but train parking lots tend to be relatively empty compared to navigating LAX and the lag time of the worst case scenario of "buying a new train pass" was 10 minutes, after maybe a 5 minute walk from parking lot to station.
Airlines are simply too politically charged to ever be more efficient than a potential high speed rail. Even if it takes an extra hour, it's a time save taking the train.
> After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.
HSR stations are no different.
45-60 minute uber from Berkeley or Cupertino to the SF HSR station? Then another 45-90 minutes on the LA end?
You’d rather just fly SFO (or SJC, OAK) nonstop to Orange County or Ontario or Burbank or Palm Springs or Long Beach or …
Not to mention if you are an experienced flyer, it’s not unreasonable to arrive at the airport curbside 15-30 minutes before your flight boarding door closes and comfortably make the flight. Fuck the lounges.
I've been on multiple other kinds of subways and trains across the state, and I can't say there's ever been more than the 10 minute lag needed to purchase a tram pass (a one time act). I don't know how even the strictest HSR would compare to the TSA process and the sluggish seating process of a plane.
The commute may not be different in the long term, but as of now LAX's traffic is legendarily bad, even by LA traffic standards.
There's a San Jose stop.
> There's time to the airport, time to check in, time through security of course, but there's going to be similar issues at the train station
... Eh? You get to the station (generally well-located), you walk through a turnstile or similar, you get on the train. There's no check-in or security on most intercity trains. Or walking for miles in sprawling airports, for that matter. In a big intercity station, you go in the door, there are some shops, there are a row of platforms, you go to your platform, you get on your train. That is it. Also, you probably get there on public transport which goes either into the station itself, outside the door, or to the local station beside the intercity station, depending on local taste (this really does seem to be a very regional thing).
I can't help feeling that a lot of the people who object to this concept have never actually been on an intercity train at all. Or, er, seen a film or TV show where someone goes on a train. It's kind of bizarre, really.
> seen a film or TV show
I've run through Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal a few times; does that count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code
... similar issues at the train station?
With Amtrak, you just show up at the train station a few minutes before departure time.
I took Amtrak from Richmond VA (well, Ashland, VA) to NYC once precisely to avoid the song and dance with getting around NYC airports. I showed up a few minutes before departure at the Ashland station (saving a drive to Richmond), relaxed on the train for 5 hours, arrived in Penn Station, and then took a short walk to the Roosevelt Hotel where my business meeting was.
High-speed rail can have multiple trains per day. If you miss one, you get on the next one.
I think it's actually the opposite. The latent demand is only present in LA and SF. Fresno and Bakersfield are not car-less cities. Taking a train between them makes no sense (you're gonna have to rent a car on either end).
While connecting the LA Metro and SF BART with a high speed rail line makes the most sense. Regardless of the construction inefficiencies this is really the original sin beating at the heart of this project.
> you're gonna have to rent a car on either end
BTW, this is one big reason HSR isn't a great fit for the US.
In most countries, you arrive to major city by train, and you then move around the city using the local train network.
This is only barely true for a few US cities, so even if HSR lines are built, they won't be as useful here.
I agree with you today, but by the time it's finished self driving car services like Waymo will be ubiqutous. I'm already addicted.
That's actually a decent point.
I also expect much of the SDR taxi era!
San Francisco is one of those cities.
That’s entirely unfounded. There are more than 100 daily flights between the Bay Area and LA metro.
That’s ridiculously high demand.
https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...
It's hard to know for sure, but the majority of these flights are probably going to be transfers. I've never set foot in LA but I've taken that flight several times.
Even so, there are only ~20k daily seats between the two cities. The ridership on successful high speed rail lines elsewhere in the world are measured in the hundreds of thousands per day.
Why couldn't one part of the journey be by rail, and the other by air? There is a already a lot of shared planning to allow this to happen, with some railway stations even having IATA codes.
I agree this is the ideal situation, but as it stands CAHSR is planned to terminate at union station in LA, quite far from LAX. Ideally LA metro or metrolink would build a direct connection between union station and LAX, but that hasn't begun to be planned and unfortunately it's very difficult to get transit built in LA. For instance the Sepulveda line— one of the most important lines for LA— is at risk of being killed because ticket master's ex-CEO doesn't want a train line running under his house.
Hundreds of thousands? A TGV holds 500 people, so you're saying a successful TGV line does... 400 trips a day?
The Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan carried 452,000 passengers per day on 365 daily services in 2016.
Sure. Gare du Nord handles thousands of train movements per day. Shinjuku Station is even busier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Station
I raise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Hauptbahnhof as 'also ran' with an average of 550,000 passengers a day.
I don't agree. There are around 145 flights a day between metro LA airports and metro SF airports (based on a quick Google Flights search for a random Friday). Assuming there's 75 seats on each plane, that's 10,000 seats a day. That's a lot of trains. A typical TGV is 500 seats. (If I add San Diego to SF, that's another 50 flights or 3,700 seats...)
The market is there and exists, and that's with the gigantic hassle of having to get to and from the airports, as opposed to a convenient downtown train station
Commuter rail is also a good idea but it's not the same thing as high speed rail. And commuter rail already exists: COASTER in San Diego, MetroLink in LA.
Currently you either have an almost 11-hour trip on Amtrak, a 6 ½ hour drive, or a flight between LA and SF. The ridership is clearly there. (Believe it or not the Amtrak trains are often sold out.)
I mention it elsewhere, but it looks like about 20k people fly each way between the Bay Area and LA every day. That's enough, and if this thing actually existed very few people would fly.
This claim is unfounded based on the amount of direct flights alone, and then on top of that you have to add the car traffic going between the cities as well, and trips that now become viable when the travel time is faster and more convenient.
there absolutely is, SF-LA is an ideal city pair
Do people actually travel between SF and LA?
It makes sense in the east coast: traveling from the seat of government in DC to the seat of finance in NYC. But does california have that dynamic?
> Do people actually travel between SF and LA?
Yes. The most obvious example of a company that's built around that corridor is Netflix: tech in the Bay Area, film production in L.A.
Outside of work reasons I don't know many people who actually travel between these cities on a regular basis. Maybe once or twice a year for that?
I would argue the east coast works much differently. The traffic patterns are not so much between NYC and DC, but most people moving in and out of dense areas. Much of the Acela is M-F commuter traffic.
If it actually worked like Japan (and China?) maybe? In Japan, if I want to go from Tokyo to Osaka, I just take a local train/subway to the station and buy a ticket for the next bullet train. I can get the tickets on my phone as I'm on the subway (or buy them at the machine at the station). There is always a train within 5-10 minutes. There are trains pretty much every 5 minutes, some are express (5 stops to Osaka), some less express (~12 stops), and some go all they way to Kyushu. The only time this isn't true is the 3-4 weeks a year when everyone travels and the trains are full. On those weeks you need to get tickets in advance.
The point being, it's so convienent I can decide to visit my friends for a picnic and come back the same day (yes I have done this) with no pre-planning. I have not pre-purchased a ticket in years.
I don't expect California to have trains every 5 to 10 minutes. I also expect they might fuck it up like Spain and require baggage inspection. I do expect that if they finish building it (I don't think they will) that by the time they do, Waymo and similar services will be ubiquitous and so it might actually be useful.
there are a ton of nonstop flights between SFO and LAX so i'm going with yes
Anecdotally, I know of someone who used to commute together with a group by private airplane from LA to SF.
Before he moved to Texas Musk used to commute between the Bay Area and LA almost daily.
A number of VCs are based out of the Bay Area but actually live in LA (or did, before the Palisades Fire).
Yes but they take Southwest Airlines which is already really convenient.
>Southwest Airlines
Is it though? My experience with Southwest is that its the worst airline I have ever used.
I have had great experiences with Alaska though. Always fast and efficient, and usually take off ahead of schedule
It's absolutely critical that a country with California's GDP learns how to rearchitect itself to build again -- literally critical for America's progression. Nothing in this article makes me feel any better about the prospects of that happening.
It’s structurally impossible. The half of the political coalition that contains virtually all the people who want to build any sort of urban infrastructure is too fractured into groups that each have their own distinct priorities unrelated to infrastructure or good governance. And of course the other half of the polity hates the government.
If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?
Here in Maryland, we’ve been building a 16 mile above ground, mostly non-grade-separated light rail for a decade already and it’s nowhere near done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland). I don’t know a single person other than myself who is motivated to make it happen. Nobody is agitating to get our miserable commuter rail system to run more timely. Road construction is the only thing that ever penetrates into the public consciousness. Making anything better is very low on everyone’s list of priorities.
> If you’re a democrat in california, where does infrastructure fall on your list of priorities? What big voting bloc does it get you?
As of now, nothing because everything takes forever to build. The authors of Abundance talk about how rural broadband is gummed up in bureaucratic processes. Same with CHIPS. Biden couldn’t point to it as an accomplishment because…it wasn’t accomplished yet.
Right but to waive environmental review, pass laws which push back against frivolous lawsuits, and allow city and state budgets to allocate money to transit you need a coalition that cares. rayiner is very right here, the problem is very few coalitions care. Urbanist/YIMBY groups are coming up that do care and they've taken politics by storm over the last 10 years, but they're still a small coalition.
I do transit and multimodal advocacy in the Bay Area and transit is just a ball that everyone passes one. Low income advocacy groups want stops in low income areas, high income homeowners want high frequency routes, some riders want more police presence, anti-policing advocates hate the police, some residents think it's ableist to have a bike lane take up what could be a bus priority lane, anyone who uses any parking spot that will be decreased protests, disability advocates want transit to have level boarding and pro-accessiblity options on the bus, some folks want free fares, other folks want to meter by distance; I could go on and on. I have talked to activists and members of the public each with these positions.
Getting the actual thing built is the last priority on everyone's list. Sure they all want it. But they only want it if their pet concession is on the list. That's the problem.
This seems like self-perpetuating dysfunction. If people knew that the government would eventually meet everyone's needs, then it would be more sensible to not have to meet everyone's needs right away. But as it is, we build nothing, which meets nobodies needs, and creates a kind of zero-sum game of thrones for anything that has the potential to be built.
"Nowhere near done" seems like a bit of an exaggeration, given that the link at the top of your linked page suggests that it's over 3/4ths done[1].
It's also, to my understanding, not grade-separated in various important places. I was in College Park two weeks ago and saw lots of at-grade development on the line, which presumably gets bogged down by Route 1 and the other high-traffic roads nearby.
(This isn't to imply that the construction isn't slow or inefficient; it's almost certainly both of those things.)
[1]: https://purplelinemd.com/media/jdwhz3kj/purple-line-press-re...
The last 10-20% of these projects always takes surprisingly long. The 2027 opening date is already looking questionable: https://wjla.com/news/local/purple-line-construction-project.... And it was supposed to open in 2022.
The 80/80 rule of project management: the first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time, and the other 20% takes the other 80% of the time.
Other countries can build entire rail lines entirely on viaducts for the same cost as it takes to grade separate a single Caltrain station. For example it was recently estimated that grade separating Broadway Station with a center platform would take $889 million and 5-5.5 years [1]. This is mind boggling.
[1] https://burlingameca.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=bu...
Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x. Ignoring private land rights also generally helps but costs.
> Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x
Japan. Most of Europe.
Japan, sure. But Japan deals with it by going in the opposite direction: most new structures are intended to be temporary, replaced with a few decades.
Most of Europe? No, just the southern part near the tectonic plate boundaries. Which also just happen to be the most expensive parts to build in Europe...so thanks for helping to prove my point.
The author covers this. Other countries build far more rail lines.
California will need to hit Rock Bottom hard more than once before replacing CEQA with something sane becomes possible. And that's just one of several wet moldy blankets blocking progress.
More young people need to actually start voting to get all the NIMBYism out of the government, and then change can happen.
If by NIMBY you mean litigation-mediated environmental regulation and union-optimized labor & wage rules, sure!
Porque no los dos?
Every one is anti-NIMBY until they own a backyard, then they don't want their house to be eminent domained or have a noisy train running near them.
If you put a stop nearby I'll let you run the tracks through my living room
The problem is that they have the option to own a house to begin with. Cali cities need to be all high rise apartment buildings.
Once the government starts raising property taxes, people will start selling off their homes, and then developers can buy the land and build apartments.
California can't raise property taxes unless Prop 13 is repealed and that's a very high bar to pass.
A lot of retired people would lose their houses so it would be a political disaster to remove it.
Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.
It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.
If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.
I mean, majority vote for a certain candidates should do it. If enough people bothered to vote, it could happen.
You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.
As Californians will tell you, local communities are more important than all that.
Why?
California has a massive ecosystem advantage in terms of the tech industry, no other state comes close. If California can't build, America can't build.
Well, let's not get too pessimistic. Brightline built rail from Tampa/Orlando to Miami, and it seems to be pretty popular, although it's not high speed rail.
If we're not talking about high speed rail, Amtrak provides service from Oakland to Seattle and Oakland to LA already. The best part is that Amtrak has a dramatically lower fatality rate than Brightline.
Unfortunately our country has no motion any longer and the crumbling infrastructure is a good sign of prolonged decay that has started.
I think this whole article/title is ragebait at best.
> claim that the relative failure of the California High-Speed Rail “boondoggle” represents the political dysfunction of either California
> This criticism also misunderstands one of the main challenges that CAHSR has faced. Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.
That just sounds like describing dysfunctional government using more words. Either the government can get it done or they can’t. Allowing endless vetos and delays to gum up the process is a political decision.
I think the argument is that the real issue is political will and not structural issues in government.
Personally, it seems fair to call that political dysfunction too, but it’s reasonable to try and make the distinction.
There are some really good details in the article. But, to quote: > Despite more than a decade of predictions of its failure, the project has persevered — even if its completion is in limbo.
I'm not sure that's much of an endorsement.
Yeah. Reports of its death may have been exaggerated, but reports of its life are a bit flimsy.
Once a project is measured in papal reigns instead of years … yeah.
It's taken longer than WW1 and WW2 combined. Time to kill it.
As I read through this, I got the distinct impression that the author mainly intends to complain about people describing the cause of failures as "political dysfunction", but then describes actual causes that I would absolutely summarize as being forms of political dysfunction.
Critics: wow this is a great example of government dysfunction through excessive regulations and political steering of a engineering project.
Author: Actually, you are entirely wrong. Let me explain to you in 3000 words how this project failed due to political interference and excessive regulations in California while pretending this is somehow not CAHSR fault and also not providing any path forward to fix it.
???
While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route.
This author isn't evaluating this project fairly, this author seems to be in first stage of grief: denial.
You totally missed the point.
Critics: CAHSR is a bad idea and should be killed.
Author: Here's the story of how hard it is to build this novel type of large scale infrastructure, especially when people don't strongly support it.
The dysfunction is real, but the actual point was, "How much of this dysfunction and how much was just what you get with half-assed support?"
You're interpretation of that "no track has been laid" quote betrays that you aren't evaluating this fairly. You really don't understand that laying rocks and steel on a path is easier than building whole bridges and viaducts.
I remember when BART was first built and San Mateo county opted out of BART. You couldn't take BART to SFO or even South San Francisco. Now they are talking about extending it to San Jose? This may sound very Californian, but I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away and eventually you get more that makes the train even more useful.
> I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away
Plenty of trains have gone away...
Likely few trains will ever go away again. The lesson of having to rebuild the damn things was far too expensive.
> few trains will ever go away again
Why? If we stop CAHSR midway, there is zero chance Sacramento will keep subsidising a Bakersfield-Merced line. And once shut down the land is more productive doing something else.
In the exact same amount of time, China has gone from 0 to 25,000 miles in high speed rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...
It probably helps when you can simply take the land you need. One major issue with the California project has been the difficulty in securing land rights. Additionally, California’s strict environmental laws have made construction even more challenging. In contrast, China can largely ignore these obstacles.
> helps when you can simply take the land you need
When America built, this is exactly what we did. CAHSR should have been exempted from CEQA. Its commission should have been delegated eminent-domain powers vetoable only by the Governor or a majority of the legislature.
But the goal wasn't to build a train. It was to dole out the dough. And the dough be doleth. Just to litigators, union bosses and Central Valley landowners.
do you have any data to back any of this up?
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Even if untrue (there is plenty of reason to believe it's true), making claims about the government of a country is not "racist". To "lie" also requires intent (there is every reason to believe GP is writing in good faith). Your source is a few pictures taken 11 years ago and doesn't even really demonstrate "respect for personal property" anyway.
Aren't most companies at least partially government owned in China? What is the chinese definition of personal property?
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they don't have billionaires bullying their way to cancelling projects for their personal fantasy tubes
Billionaires are not the reason CA HSR failing
In San Francisco they did a 1 mile extension of the subway and it cost 1 billion dollars. That's 10x what it would cost in any other major city anywhere in the world, but a whole bunch of middle management surplus elites found a way to get at all the tech company tax revenue, so the tunnel served it's purpose and nobody is upset.
The high speed rail project is serving a similar redistributive purpose to act as middle class welfare for people who work from home, go to zoom meetings and produce and review reports. Living in California is already as good as it gets, nothing needs to improve, but it sure is expensive so the governments job is to take tech money and dig and fill up holes in the ground and use homeless crackheads who randomly attack people and are never put in prison to terrorize the normies into continuing to pay for it all. If any of these projects got finished or there was a reasonable resolution to the homeless issue, all those middle class liberal arts degree meeting attenders would be out of a job and couldn't afford to live here.
> Only if the Central Valley alignment had been selected would CAHSR actually the “train to nowhere” that critics deride it as.
Can't wait to pay $400 per trip to visit all of these lovely places: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220427-Agend...
Not prioritizing the linking of two major cities (SF <-> LA <-> SD - take your pick) is a major mistake. If this project does end up cancelled then we will end up with a "High[sic]-Speed-Rail" that only joins California's interior cities with a ridership level that will never justify the cost.
Where are you getting $400 from?
The ironic thing is it probably will be an (extremely expensive) boon to Merced -> Bakersfield.
To everyone saying SF-LA already has plenty of flights, consider the following benefits of trains:
- No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one
- Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually
- Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition)
- Less security theatre and less worrying about what I can and can't carry
- You can still have good internet access
This is in addition to the environmental benefits of trains.
Perfect is the enemy of good. More sections and branches can be added. Piecemeal is how transportation infrastructure grows everywhere. It does not come to fulfill everyone's needs all at once.
You know most of these are business travelers right?
The last thing I want (as a former consultant who did like 400k plus miles flying) is to spend more time traveling.
Not to mention flights booked out in advance are like sub 200 bucks, or even 100-150. It takes like 2-3 hours from leaving home to arriving at destination.
Have you flown between SFO and LAX? SFO is easy to get to, no real headaches. So is San Jose and Oakland. LA is a hellhole when it comes to getting to an airport regardless of where you are in that sprawl. LAX is a nightmare unless you’re already working in El Segundo. Otherwise you’ll fly out of Burbank or the other one I forget the name now depending on where you are.
Once you have flown like 4-5 weeks in a row you learn how to board your flight just-in-time. I’d almost always arrive at the gate like 5-10 minutes before departure and never missed a single flight.
The train is slow AF and from experience riding Amtrack (daily for over a year) if it’s anywhere similar to that the train will be delayed more often than the flight.
You should try riding real HSR, like Madrid to Barcelona. Superior to flying in every way.
I live in America.
I’m sure Europe has nice trains. I’ve rode the best trains in the world in Japan.
America is a completely different dynamic and is not at all comparable to Europe nor Japan.
The culture here has always revolved around cars (objectively better IMO for ME, I don’t like tiny cramped cities like in EU or Japan), and our roads are big and our buildings are large and really nice. New builds especially in cities like SF or LA.
SF to LA is about 400 miles. Going from LA to SD is another 120 miles. Spain by itself is like 150 miles wide and 500 miles long. It’s about the same distance, sure, but totally different dynamics. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been here.
Besides, nobody really has a need to travel between LA and SF that regularly unless it’s for business. People might visit their families every month or two. But most of the travel is for business.
Comparing Europe and America is apples to oranges.
I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains.
I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane.
Driving 6-10 hours is pretty miserable. I would much rather take a train or fly unless there are specific reasons why I need to drive.
It may be like comparing apples and oranges, but some people prefer apples. The good thing is that you can still eat oranges if you like.
Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF.
My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.
I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.
I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.
Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.
I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.
To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.
> You should try riding real HSR, like Madrid to Barcelona
Within countries, yes. Between countries, never again. Italy <> France sort of worked, but the UK and Germany consistently ruined everything.
Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country.
> Thankfully California is, last I checked, in one country
You can replicate the experience between Caltrain and BART.
To my knowledge, the HSR will share tracks with other trains. That makes the sort of scheduling problems that make Amtrak a pain more of a possibility. Not a reason to shoot down the project. But a decent reason to take OP's concerns seriously.
Caltrain and BART are rarely delayed by a significant amount, and they run frequently enough. Not as much as I'd like, but frequently enough that you're not ever going to be waiting more than 30 minutes. I don't think it's comparable at all to a cross-country journey that may require switching trains and different jurisdictions. Heck, Caltrain shares its own track already and it does just fine, and HSR will mostly have its own track except when it needs to share with Caltrain.
30 minutes is a lot between just the Bay Area when the entire flight between LA and SF takes 90 minutes.
Not to mention, you have to get to and from the train station or airport.
For example from where I live in SF, it takes about 20 minutes (depending on traffic) to get to King St station. It takes about 30 minutes to get to SFO. If I was taking MUNI to king street, looking at like 40+ minutes plus walking.
I’m a seasoned traveler so I’ll get there JIT for my flight.
In LA, if I’m going to El Segundo or Santa Monica, it’s like 10-30 minutes uber. If I was going to Pasadena or La Canada I’d fly to Burbank.
So yes the train is a silly idea to start with, unless it would be direct from heart of LA to SF, going like 300 mph (it is not). Not to mention once you’re in LA you have to get to your final destination which might take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more. And LA has horrible public transit
It’s far more convenient to fly.
This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX, and I think SFO and SJC are two of my favorite airports, but even then it's a bunch of walking to get to your terminal, and you're still going to be going through security. They're nothing like LAX, which is miserable in comparison, but an airport can only be so good.
But if we're going to talk about time: I don't agree with your numbers. SFO to LAX is like 50-60 minutes in the air. I feel like your 90 is a reasonable number for gate-to-gate. Arriving 30 minutes before departure at SFO will probably just get you to do your gate on time for last call on boarding. Add another 15 minutes to get out of LAX. Then, on both sides, whatever transportation you need to get to and from the airports, which I think is reasonable to cancel out when compared to the train.
For a train they're targeting a little over 2.5 hours for the journey. I can be outside in 5 minutes, and I can also feel comfortable arriving five minutes early. Let's be generous and say it takes 3 hours, curb to curb. The plane does the same in like 2-2.5 hours. I don't really see this being significantly different.
The train will use shared tracks. I will bet one million dollars it will run into scheduling issues and when you’re stuck on land it will suck. Source: former Amtrack customer. Same story, and I doubt a project that’s been mismanaged so far will fare any better if actually realized.
I take the Caltrain to work almost every day and it's on shared tracks (in fact it will the same shared tracks that HSR uses). It's rarely late by more than a few minutes.
Reading the article I think CAHSR is using agile method of delivering value. Electrification of caltrain in sfbay, removing rr crossings in LA, finishing overall plan and acquisitions, laying relatively low cost and easy central valley track, while putting the most costly activities to the end: boring an actual tunnels in mountain ranges
If by agile you mean "exploiting sunk cost fallacy", sure
the real sunk cost would be the opposite approach: spending 60 blns on boring tunnels through mountains that nothing else connect to.
what would be the benefit of tunnel from LA across the mountain range? or a tunnel from SF across the diablo range???
keep in mind these ar elike half of the project cost
this statement has little bearing on how this project is actually playing out, but if it were true - why would we want to manage massive infrastructure projects in the same way bad software projects are managed? via a method regarded by everyone except middle managers with a massive eye roll and a sigh
imagine the opposite situation: boring tunnels costs like 60 blns+.
and taxpayer won't see a penny of the benefit from some tunnel somewhere in mountain ranges that nothing else connects to
ok? my point was that you have projected your notions of project management on to the actions of CAHSR. there was nothing intentional or "agile" about the way the project was executed so far. that caltrain electrification has already been completed (at an exorbitant cost relative to the developed world) is more a consequence of how poorly things are going in the valley than anything
The problem is that it takes a long time to bore tunnels. If anything they should have started that early.
This piece seems to concede all of the problems critics of CAHSR (notably Ezra Klein) bring up, and then argues they never should have been problems in the first place or begs their underlying questions. For instance, yes, it took forever for funding to get secured. That's part of the state capacity critique of CAHSR!
Or, for another example, yes, the current Central Valley routing is practically just as hard (per mile) as a direct I5 route which would actually serve the largest population centers in CA. But, the piece argues, this would leave "more than a million people" in the Central Valley underserved. Uh... and? The I5 route would have served over twenty million people.
Yeah, I had the exact same reaction to this that you did. One of Klein and Thompson’s primary arguments is that we are failing by letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This article’s thesis seems to be ‘yeah but perfect is better than good, so we should do that.’
CAHSR was killed decades ago by politics and corruption. whether or not choosing the valley route over I5 doomed the project is debatable, but choosing pacheco and tehachapi over altamont and tejon certainly did.
your guess is as good as mine as to why things like water infrastructure and telecoms are quietly built to requirements in the background while rail infrastructure is opened to the public forum, but the inability or unwillingness of the state government to go full climate stalin on this project and design it without compromise killed it.
> the expectation was that the $9.95 billion in state bonds voters approved would be matched or exceeded by federal funding (as is normally the case for highway projects)
Where is that fourth biggest economy of the world talk now? The fifth biggest economy of the world can build things without federal funding.
Reading stuff like this is so tiresome. Is the fate of living in the United States just watching China casually lap us in every possible major infrastructural project, completing everything faster, cheaper, and at a much higher quality?
It feels almost humiliating at this point reading any story about a public works/transportation project in the US, just endless delays, comically high costs, and a strangely small focus on the actual material realities of the matter and a failure to deliver promises on time.
The reality is for every government constraint, there are even more difficult economic constraints that it has to work against.
A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price.
I get it that there are niche reasons some individuals would prefer a train. But the economies of scale that they need to achieve here is ridiculous.
It's a similar distance to Paris to Marseille, a 3 hour journey. Price for that seems to vary between 29 and 80 EUR depending on time of day.
That's "get on the train, get off the train three hours later", so in practice is much faster than a 90 minute flight, which is "get to airport, go through security, walk seemingly endlessly to gate, fly, walk seemingly endlessly through baggage claim etc etc, get out of airport". The train is, of course, also _far_ more comfortable than a plane. Personally, I'd opt for the train...
I suspect if the damn thing ever gets built, flying between SF and LA will more or less become a thing of the past. Like, why would you?
I love trains! And I agree that they are superior in comfort and ease than flying. But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.
The TGV is something of an anomaly, and tough to compare against. It both beats all ridership estimates, and also comes in at half the price of even the Shinkansen: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/06/21/why-does-tgv-r...
Eh, ICE journeys of similar distance seem to be in the same general price range.
> But the train still has to generate massive amounts of new traffic that doesn't currently exist to justify its huge costs.
There are apparently about 130 SF Bay Area to LA flights daily. Let's say on average 200 person planes, at 80% occupancy, so 20,000 people. The biggest high speed trains have a capacity on the order of 1300, though those are very long trains; 800 or less is more common. Assuming an 18 hour day, that's a train every 45 minutes or so. That seems... fine? You'd also expect some traffic to the intermediate destinations, and possibly some increase in travel because, really, it is so much less bloody awful than flying (anyone who tells you otherwise has either never been on an intercity train or never been on a plane).
One weird aspect of American exceptionalism is that it is not _just_ Americans saying "we're the best"; sometimes it is Americans saying "we can't have the nice things that all other large rich countries have because [whatever]". The US can manage a high speed rail line or two.
Trains are routinely competitive with flights on corridors like this. Thats why its being built in this stretch
That's 90 minutes in the air, not total trip time.
The HSR is 160 minutes from downtown to downtown. There's no check-in, no security check, no arriving 1-2 hours early, no travel to and from the airport. When you count all of that, HSR will be faster than flying. It's also far, far more comfortable - there's no comparison there.
The flight doesn’t include the time to get to and from the airport plus TSA screening.
I greatly prefer taking a train because I can just show up and go.
90 minutes in the air + 1 hour on each end at the airport.
On a train I can work the entire time with internet.
I arrive 30 minutes before boarding, sail through security, and work on the internet on a plane. I don’t check a bag, either, so I’m out in twenty reliably enough that I can call a car when I deplane. Unless you live in San Francisco or LA, loyalty programmes probably mean you’ll default to taking a flight between cities.
(Saying this as someone who likes flying, loves trains and dislikes driving.)
You can do that in the air if you're willing to pay out the nose! That's another reason we need rail like this: air carriers won't be able to get away with quite as much bullshit as they do with the added competition.
I've done LA-SF many times for work, and I was able to be in the rental car in LA only 2 hr after being dropped off at SFO. Luckily both airports are pretty easy to navigate.
Having a high-speed train be less expensive to operate than a bus isn’t unrealistic, as long as the train is packed. You have to pay the bus driver, while the train amortizes operational salaries over many more people.
Even if it succeeds on its current trajectory, it will be studied for 100 years as a massive failure.
All civil engineering projects are failures until people forget what it cost to build them and just start taking the infrastructure for granted. Eleven people died constructing the Golden Gate Bridge, 96 for the Hoover dam, thousands for the Panama Canal. Do we remember them, or think that these projects were failures for killing people? No. We just think of how convenient they are.
I grew up contemporaneous with the Big Dig in Boston. People called that a massive failure too, even though it only killed one person instead of thousands. 15 years after completion, it’s a big success.
For the golden gate bridge, that's not a particularly large impact of deaths. Even if you don't like assigning a monetary value to lives, bad infrastructure causes its own deaths in the people using it. But it's simpler to say lives are worth ten million dollars and then calculate that those deaths were about 4% of the cost.
For the other two, the death toll was much more significant.
When a wikipedia page has a whole section dedicated to how massive of a issue construction was then it's result may still be good even if the project was a big failure
I doubt it. People were literally gaslighting people into thinking the Big Dig was a good deal for the money as the roof panels were falling on cars. This will be a "failure" for 20yr, tops.
I simply cannot see HSR sharing track with Caltrain between San Jose and SF working at all. There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more. So it would seem that no high speed rail could go faster than caltrain on that segment and could not achieve the target travel time.
What I wish- although it may not be feasible- was a straight shot from Burbank to San Jose- as a single tunnel.
Caltrain has passing tracks at Sunnyvale and Brisbane. There are joint plans with CAHSR to add 4-track segments at Millbrae, San Mateo (between Hayward Park and Hillsdale), Redwood City, and Palo Alto (California Ave).
The Millbrae tracks are part of the new station design: they are removing one of the 3 BART tracks (superfluous because BART terminates at Millbrae) and using the space to construct two dedicated HSR tracks on the inside of Caltrain, as well as a HSR platform.
The San Mateo area is relatively straightforward: Caltrain already owns the land, it is currently surface parking lots for the Hillsdale station as well as the land used for the old station (which was moved a few years ago).
Redwood City is elevating the entire Caltrain/HSR track above the city as part of their grade separation strategy. The new viaduct will be built with 4 tracks instead of 2.
The only major sticking point is Cal Ave, where there is limited space and an unfriendly city.
5-6 passing track sections should be plenty for running blended service.
Ah, thanks for the reminder there are passing tracks already.
Are passing tracks really practical? Wouldn't they have to be extremely long to accomodate high speed trains mixed with local Caltrains? I have a hard time picturing this all working out even under ideal circumstances.
Usually they pass when the local train is at the station. This doesn't take all that much space; speed delta is 80mph (125mph once they grade-separate everything). Everything is computer controlled.
It occurs to me that this might be why they've chosen those particular areas. Sunnyvale, Redwood City, Hillsdale, Millbrae, and South San Francisco (just south of Brisbane) are all baby bullet stops, where all of the local, limited, and express trains stop, and so you can reliably count on every Caltrain stopping there and letting a HSR train pass. Cal Ave is the odd one out, but it still has local + limited service.
Caltrain has sections with four tracks. At these sections express trains overtake local trains. They did this improvement long time ago and called the service "baby bullet" back then.
It is an advantage that HSR uses Caltrain track to get to SF. It would be super expensive to build a separate high speed line, and it wouldn't be worth the time savings. Caltrain should spend money grade separating the whole line, adding passing lines where possible, and increasing the speed to 125mph or 150mph since it would be good for Caltrain service. At 125mph, HSR (250mph) would save 10 minutes, and 150mph would save 6 minutes.
> There are only two tracks (North and South) and there is no room to build more.
The SP/Caltrain/Bayshore-Cutoff line into SF used to be partially quad-tracked. It's easiest to see at Tunnel 2 just south of 22nd Street Station. The current two-track main uses one tunnel and there's a second tunnel portal blocked off next to it.
Here are the north and south ends respectively:
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Tunnel_n...
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/South_po...
Ironically the Caltrain electrification project blocked it off even further by putting the supports for the overhead wires right where the other tracks used to be.
CAHSR was opined years before SR 85 and 87 and before VTA light rail.
It's the perpetually never-happening, chicken-vs-egg aspirational project for mass transit in an area dominated by urban sprawl and car-first infrastructure that would need massive investment in local mass transit like Japan first.
LA has been investing very heavily in mass transit for decades, fwiw. If the terminals (SF and LA) can be navigated by transit, then leaving the car at home and taking the train becomes a plausible option for most people.
It always made more sense for me to leave the car at home and take the train to Chicago than deal with the traffic and parking in the city, it's hard to imagine SF being that different in that regard but i haven't been.
20 years ago, parking in SF was hell. I remember driving around and around for like 45 minutes to find a spot and the fun of parking on a hill with a racing clutch in a spot only a valet could fit into.
Article is deeply misleading, pretending that Brightline West has proceeded many times faster than CA HSR, when that is not at all true. While the particular operator and name are relatively recent, that project has been through many names and operators, each of which has built on the progress done by the previous one, and, despite being much simpler project than CA HSR, is also older than CA HSR, starting as Desert Xpress in 2005 (the ballot measure which set up the California High Speed Rail Authority and outlined the basic concept of the project was passed in 2008.)
So as far as I can tell, the article isn't satire. Am I the only one that came away with a great explanation of why California High-Speed rail is indeed dead?
A long storied boondogle. As both a SoCal and NorCal resident for my whole life, this initiative has gotten more interesting as the years have passed. There are so many deeply embeded issues with this infratructure project that I dont feel confident it'll ever come to fruition. Land fights, local and regional politics..
If this administration really wanted to turn the US into a manufacturing powerhouse on the level of China then it would HAVE to steamroll over NIMBYs and red tape, and would plan to lay 1000x more track year on year. Without rail there is 0 chance the US ever becomes competitive there is no magic innovation to be had here.
Convincing a car obsessed populace will be the clincher. What will you do at your destination? Rent a car? Stroll through quaint medieval environs of cosmopolitan downtown Los Angeles?
LA actually has a fair bit of transit. Also taxis are a thing, you may have read about them here from time to time.
Given that it took them 17 years to lay the first piece of track, I'm not optimistic that it will be complete in my lifetime.
Does anyone know how Florida’s Miami–Orlando Brightline is doing? I believe that’s the only higher-speed rail route opened since Acela.
The Florida Brightline is limited to 125 mph. Also no grade separation which is needed for higher speeds. Generally countries use grade separation when speeds exceed 110-120 mph. California really needs the 200-220 mph to make the trip worthwhile so it needs to be grade separated. A lot of the work done so far in California is the overpasses over freeways and roads its crossing.
Brightline has had a lot of fatalities due to lack of grade separation.
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/death-train-a-timeline-of...
It's actually doing really well but it has not much to do with them being a red state and everything to do with them having an aging or tourist transit population that needs to get between cruise lines and theme parks.
Besides those cases there are not a lot of reasons to be transiting that route, or at least not nearly compared to the number of folks that would want to transit SF <-> LA. Totally different needs that are easier to address, and less pressure to prove out value / fewer digestible alternatives.
The California HSR reveals pretty much every problem with building anything in the US: private property, local interests and grift.
It also shows that mandating the speed in the amendment was probably a bad idea as it's greatly increased the cost projections.
China has a command economy so simply doesn't have to deal with eminent domain (and challenges thereto), environmental challenges (as much as environmental protection is a nobel goal, laws in California like CEQA have really been weaponized and the sole purpose is to stop any development whatsoever by local property interests), etc.
The route is being changed so include towns of 30,000 in the Central Valley. It's running down the I-5 corridor last I heard because that's where these small towns are vs the faster route to the west.
Just build connecting lines if connections to small communities are important. The primary purpose should be LA to SF&SJ.
If the HSR runs a train from LA to SF before 2050 I'll be shocked.
Brightline West will probably have more success primarily because the private property issues will be largely avoided.
> The project aims to transform transportation in the region with fully electric trains capable of reaching speeds up to 186 miles per hour, enabling the 218-mile trip between Rancho Cucamonga, California and the Las Vegas, Nevada to be completed in approximately two hours. Brightline has secured all key rights-of-way necessary to construct the railroad under long-term agreements, including leases, licenses and easements, with the states of Nevada and California and the federal government for passenger rail access to the existing I-15 corridor.
I don't really have a huge problem with the route. Branch lines to individual towns don't really make sense - you lay even more track, need more trains, complicate operations, and the value proposition for potential customers in those towns drops substantially vs a one seat ride to any destination.
Honestly given the once in a lifetime scale of the project, too, if they run a train from LA to SF by 2050 it even 2060 I'll actually be quite happy. There's no reason it couldn't keep operating for a hundred years after that. I mean I'm skeptical of that happening as well lol I'm just saying, projects like these will serve many generations and will only get more expensive in the future, so i support biting the bullet on doing them now despite our inefficient, backwards way of doing them.
The problem with local infrastructure projects is their responsibility and execution fall to local community leaders (in this case local = state of California). These leaders are far less efficient and impactful than the federal government, a bar which is already way too low. Nearly every city in the US has had recent collisions with corruption, blatant mismanagement, ideological forces co-opting process, etc. and so most local infrastructure projects are doomed from the start.
The problem with high speed rail, then, is that it is always going to be a local (=state) infrastructure project. America is far, far, far too large for high speed rail to be feasible at a national level, and so we have invested in airports. This is largely a success; much of the year you can travel from NYC to Miami (~1200 mi, roughly UK -> Spain) for $100-200 in a few hours. There are, of course, many issues with air travel that we are still working on, but unless there is a breakthrough to make supersonic land travel affordable, we are stuck with air travel at a national level.
But where do we go from here? We know the federal process is too bloated to succeed with infrastructure projects, and when it is forced to it ends up being prohibitively expensive. We know the state process is doomed to fail and similarly be very expensive. We have already tried privatizing it and failed, and even when subsidizing private industry we get subpar results at best. What options are even left at this point?
We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees, allow them to build careers (and raise families), and stop contracting out everything. This would also increase competition for such roles.
How we got here is ultimately, especially for CA, land and legal cost, cost of living, and public employee salary relative to private salaries. That’s endemic to major metro areas in the US, with some small exceptions, but especially true in CA.
Before it was shut down, we did see a real reversal with 18F in getting things through, for software projects. Of course, they weren’t even being paid industry wages there.
> We could actually just pay more money to public governmental employees
When their pensions are taken into account, government employees are ridiculously overcompensated already. They’re basically minor nobility at this point.
I have done the numbers for myself, and even taking pension and treating an extra week of vacation as a 1/52 pay raise, doing a software job for the government would be a huge step down for me financially. Basically gives me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live
For every underpaid government software engineer there's an overpaid paper pusher, and they're both paid the same amount.
> me 0% chance of ever buying a home where I currently live
The housing crisis is the Everything Crisis. It’s destroying competence of government services, as no one ambitious will accept this fate.
It destroyed competitiveness of our industry because you can’t pay a worker less than it costs to rent.
It’s causing apathy and rise in extremist views among younger population as they realise they have no path to dignified future.
I am hoping that China does well for itself and one day we can just consider them as an example of competent and coherent governance and sort out our shit.
I guess we'll see how I'm doing in 20 years to compare, but as of now, my dad is a former California public employee on a pension who had to move to the middle of the desert to stay within his budget, does all domestic work himself, and regularly needs to ask me for money. "Minor nobility" is a laughable characterization of his status in life.
For what it's worth, it's also quite illuminating these days to compare injury history with him. We've had a lot of the same stuff happen, but when it happens to me, he always overestimates the effect because he's still suffering from never recovering properly thanks to a lifetime of no-premium but shitty Kaiser HMO treatment that used the lowest-cost option for literally everything, whereas I had to pay for stuff but at least got the latest available surgical procedures and proper supervised rehab, so my injuries actually healed and I'm not just suffering for the rest of my life like he does.
To be fair, we should all work to normalize retiring at 55 - it’s eminently doable but the earlier you decide to the easier it is.
Then you would have two retirees for every three working age people. And given that only ~70% of working age Americans are actually working, it would mean three non-working adults for every two adults with jobs. Either the retirees would have a really low standard of living, or workers would get much smaller share of the value they create than they currently do.
If you are not already retired or close to retirement, you should assume that the normal retirement age is ~70 years. Anything lower cannot be sustained with the current demographic structure.
but nobody likes working even longer to pay for others to retire earlier.
You can do it entirely “yourself” if you adopt FIRE concepts early in your working career.
This is an absurd statement.
You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more.
Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to procurement of software and recently boasted about their collective organization answering a whopping 1200 emails in a month.
> Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA
No, 18F is gone. All of the staff were fired and the organization no longer exists within TTS.
> has been quietly shouting
That’s one hell of a contradiction
> What options are even left at this point?
I suspect we're dealing with the fallout of the loss of an American nomos (shared values, traditions, and moral principles formalized into law, custom, and convention) -- the very issue John Adams wrote about in a 1798 letter:
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is working diligently under the cover of these pleasing appearances and employing the most insidious and base artifices, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
When moral virtue is not valued, who will rise to the top and be elected to public office but non-virtuous people?
Failing the development of something like what John Adams is referring to, I fear that the only way "forward" (if it can be called that) is a different form of government, in which individual liberties will be greatly reduced or denied altogether.
My personal opinion -- it's a spiritual problem that needs a spiritual solution. Pray for the nation.
Or we can just keep trying to run through molasses :)
>But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is working diligently under the cover of these pleasing appearances and employing the most insidious and base artifices
It's always amazing to me that slave owning men on stolen land could not see the hypocrisy of such a statement
John Adams in particular was not a slave owner, and he called slavery an "evil of colossal magnitude." So he and those like him (and there were many) shouldn't be condemned in any sense along that line.
I agree that slavery and ill treatment of Native Americans were egregious problems. But on both issues, there were prominent voices speaking out in favor of what was right, including among the founding fathers -- Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, etc. Also, William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) was an awesome example of someone who insisted on honest, fair dealings with Native Americans, and he won their respect in a big way.
It is hypocrisy to preach about freedom and the equality of man while also owning slaves and believing some men to be unequal. It's not that this was unknown at the time either. Abolitionism was not a new idea in 1798.
edited my comment already before I saw your response. Yes, I agree.
Well sure, Adams in particular maybe not, but for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes is still something i can find a bit ridiculous.
> for him to warn about this hypothetical scenario while it was ostensibly unfolding in front of his eyes
Well why wouldn't he? See something, say something.
I'm sure he saw direct reasons to be worried about people becoming ungovernably immoral, and I bet slavery was one of those reasons -- after all, he did believe it to be a colossal evil.
So I'm not sure I understand your point.
Because he's talking about it as if it weren't happening. "Should the day ever come..." Well, sure seems like it already had
That's a misquote - that phrase doesn't appear in the letter. I don't think that idea was present either. Could you clarify which phrase(s) conveyed that to you?
Here's a link to the full text of the letter: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102
If anything, I think he felt compelled to write what he did (not only in this letter) because he felt a sense of imminent danger -- that if the people individually and collectively failed to rise to the high calling of good moral character, the new republic would not last. Remember, the longevity of the United States was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time -- the US Constitution had been ratified a mere 10 years before he wrote this letter, and Adams himself had just been elected as the second president the year before.
(All of which doesn't make his thoughts inapplicable to our time.)
So I think the best argument against this is that the US has done massive infrastructure projects in the past. Some cities had (and some still have) decent public transportation and we've done large canals and even the interstate highway project. I've also seen local infrastructure (and I mean actually local, on the city/county level) be very impactful in the community.
My experience is that unless the community really wants the infrastructure it won't get done and I've seen a lot of opposition to forms of transport that aren't just roads (with the most extreme case of a vocal group in a town not wanting a rail line into the city because they were worried people from the city would come out to their town. They literally didn't want too easy of transportation into/out of the city).
Some of the massive projects done by the USA involved tons of heartache and stress - but were deemed necessary.
When we want to, we move, and quickly. CA HSR is more indicative of people not really caring than of any major failure.
Your theory does not explain why the state of California is capable of discharging $25 billion into freeway construction annually. It obviously cannot be the case that US states are incapable of executing public works projects.
It is so, so, so much easier to build freeways, roads, and highways than rail systems.
It is also absolutely necessary to have roads to move people and goods as not everyone and everything can be transported on rail or even is near rail (even post-HSR).
It is also an income center. California _makes_ money from spending on roads because of job creation (=tax revenue), taxes on vehicle sales, taxes on fuel, tolls, freight fees, and more: https://www.calbike.org/there-is-no-deficit-in-californias-t...
This is not really the point. Again, your hypothesis lacks explanatory powers. Virtually all of the works undertaken so far on the "rail" project have been roads: bridges, trenches, and relocations of car stuff. So if California can spend tens of billions every year on car stuff through the caltrans budget, it should be more than capable of moving a few of those dollars over the get the HSR project finished. It's a matter of political leadership.
> It is also an income center. California _makes_ money from spending on roads because of job creation (=tax revenue), taxes on vehicle sales, taxes on fuel, tolls, freight fees, and more: https://www.calbike.org/there-is-no-deficit-in-californias-t...
Please provide a reference for CA making money by building roads. Road building is foundational to other economic activity, but AFAIK, it's not turning a profit (nor should it be expected to). Unfortunately, we have a double standard where we consider public transport to be a failure if it doesn't generate a profit.
CA has built tens of miles, probably hundreds, maybe even into the thousands of miles of tracked transit in the time HSR has been building. CA can certainly do what it wants - or maybe do what it needs.
That doesn’t make sense. California is bigger and richer than all but the largest European countries. It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?
> It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark?
Many officials in the current administration who are wreaking havoc on the US economy went to the top universities, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. Attending those universities doesn't imply responsibility or sense of duty to public service at all.
CA does have "high caliber" public officials, but it also produces very corrupt ones. As everyone knows, CA has exported many from both categories to the national stage.
CA is not like Denmark in many ways. California has huge wealth inequality, and its economy and governance are heavily influenced by plutocrats from industries that grow via massive scaling properties, like tech, entertainment, and agriculture.
Two of those industries have a history of labor exploitation, and the other has been actively trying to snuff out the power and leverage it mistakenly gave to its workers over the past several decades.
Without a doubt, Denmark has problems also, and it has plutocrats, but its politicians hold them more accountable to the populace that CA does.
Many of the same things could be said about Singapore, yet they have a public service that is ridiculously competent compared to western countries
I would rather California be a Singapore for high achievers than a more egalitarian Denmark
Singapore and Denmark are far more similar to each other than either is to California. Not only are they far smaller, but both countries socially invest heavily in their citizens' quality of life, and by American standards both are egalitarian.
Singapore carefully manages housing, with the majority of the population living in public housing. Of course, both countries also have excellent public transportation.
Why are the politicians in California different than the ones in Denmark? And are those reasons related to it being a sub-national entity, which seems to have been the argument being made above.
> Why are the politicians in California different than the ones in Denmark?
> And are those reasons related to it being a sub-national entity, which seems to have been the argument being made above.
I'm sure it plays a role, but there are tons of convolved factors? They're different places, and your question is too non-specific to have a single answer.
Calling the leaders of the State of California, the 4th largest economy in the world, "local" and less efficient than the federal government is interesting.
The main advantage the feds have is they can preempt the state. Versa vice doesn’t work.
Additionally the U.S. Government requires that the states have balanced budgets, a requirement that is not stipulated for federal national spending. Unfunded spending obligations are not a problem, the federal government just raises the debt ceiling.
HSR is perfectly viable for the east. decades of steady investment could have built a massive network out through chicago by now, and with a few more we could be closing in on the last gap in the network between kansas city and las vegas.
> What options are even left at this point?
Look at countries that do have high speed rail, which are of similar size to US states, and study what they are doing differently?
This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.
I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure). Unfortunately it operates much more like Thailand or El Salvador pre-"throw everyone in jail".
> This would work if we could run state governments like mini "countries" but there is not enough interest from the electorate and thus very little oversight so they end up in a bad way.
Which is circular; there's less attention because we don't.
> I would like very much for California's state legislature to be on par with, say, South Korea (similar population size & dispersion with great bullet train infrastructure).
About 1/4th the land area of California and much more .. "square". The long line in South Korea is 275 miles long; versus roughly 800 miles for the California HSR system. And California's system is facing a public that's much less accustomed to and receptive to rail, and endpoints that basically require you to have a car anyways.
We should have spent all this money on making local rail awesome. It'd make a much bigger difference in day to day life, would pay off quicker, and would prepare the ground for doing HSR.
The dictatorship part is on its way, but multiplying population by 5 might be a challenge
they have more efficient central planning, less red tape, and they don't let people like Elon Musk come in and derail the project with dubious and irrelevant alternatives
It really all comes down to civil vs. common law. In America, anyone can hold you over a barrel in court, indefinitely, for any or no reason, until you agree to their extortion.
unfortunately it is worse than that.. a basic and non-trivial State of California project was being done in an office near me, and I knew some of the people. So I saw a bit about how it progressed.. lots of requirements, lots of people from multiple unrelated and slightly competitive groups. The work was mostly intellectual assesment and evaluations with a lot of reports. The thing was funded at professional values.
About six months of work with lots of progress meetings with State of California bureaucrats to "keep them informed" .. and lo-and-behold.. as the required deadlines started getting closer, the State reps changed requirements, made amendments to deliverables.. the last three weeks, even MORE change orders "non-negotiable" .. I have never in my life seen major requirements changed on a multi-party project in the last weeks of a deadline like that. It was like the bureaucrats drank a lot of something, felt the "excitement" and HAD to change things to be "involved and hands on" .. it was STUPID and caused DAMAGE. There was no choice -- the State was paying.
That is how they do things in "infinite income" Sacramento ?
What does that have to do with civil vs. common law? There isn't anything inherent in rule of law based on cases and precedent that should restrict infrastructure projects.
I get so tired of hearing that HSR doesn't make sense federally.
The entire country east of the Mississippi has comparable population and density to western Europe. Plus the sheer size and lack of people sure doesn't stop the federal government from maintaining thousands of miles of interstate through vast swaths of nowhere.
If you look at it by map there's not much more interstate highway than railway.
Interstate highway is also far cheaper to build and maintain than you would imagine. It took around $114 billion to build interstate across the entire country, while the high speed rail project in just California is already upwards of $128 billion.
On Europe that is kind of exactly my point, high speed rail in Europe is built and maintained by federal governments with high levels of participation, interest and oversight from their population. This can never happen in the US because our federal government has to oversee a very wide amount of area and states are not so autonomous and self-governed that their populations primarily interest themselves with their state governments.
the inflation adjusted cost of the interstate system is closer to a trillion
There hasn't been that much inflation.
>The construction of the Interstate Highway System cost approximately $114 billion (equivalent to $618 billion in 2023).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#:~:t...
618B is indeed closer to a trillion
Those interstates move millions of pounds of goods - probably way more important than the people.
And the US freight rail system is the envy of the world.
I assure you, it is not, but union pacific repeats that line enough that everyone seems to believe it
It won't be killed. Too much grift.
Exactly, the contractors, lobbyists and politicians are lining their pockets. Why would they kill the golden goose?
Is this headline meant to be deliberately confusing?
Cancel the the HSR and put the funding into improving regional rail in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. (Sacramento can come too.)
The model shouldn't be the TGV. It should be the New York metro area's Metro-North and LIRR. I'd also argue for a significant amount of motorail [1] stock, but that offends the train purists.
> While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route
Right, that's the problem. Invisible work gobbles up time and money due to a broken process that prorioritises bullshit over tangible results.
> The project has sufficient California funds only to last through the Trump administration, complete and electrify the existing 120 miles, purchase train sets, and begin construction of the Merced and Bakersfield extensions — but not fully complete them
Don't start shit you can't finish. Electrify and expand the regional rail and pause work in the Central Valley. Because you know who could catch the Trump administration's sympathy? Central Valley farmers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorail
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Imagination: Another ~3,800 words worth of "opinion".
Reality: Zero miles of high-speed rail deployed.
Many such cases.
Edit: Downvote all you want, that still won't make the rails appear, lmao.
As the piece points out, the lack of rail is pretty much irrelevant. Once all the guideways are in place, there is a machine that you just drive along that poops out perfect rails at ~1km/hr. It is the most trivial part of the project.
That's kinda like saying a car is easy to build because they have automated painting robots.
Fundamentally the problem is that most of the land they want to use is owned by someone else, and that means every single parcel is a potential, and often actual, legal fight. In theory this is what eminent domain is supposed to accomplish, but people dislike eminent domain more than they like high speed rail. Well meaning but onerous environmental regulations don't make it any quicker either. When your rail plan goes through the nesting site of an endangered bird species or something that's another big legal fight.
Even though the measure passed with a majority of the population, you have a situation where thousands of people have effectively a personal veto over it. Either their rights get trampled or the project doesn't happen.
If the car just needs to be painted, then yeah it is easy to finish when you have automated painting robots.
The article doesn't make right of way seem like a major issue, are there areas where that is blocking construction?
The point is that people who talk about the lack of literal rails are doing that because they have no idea how a railroad is built, or they are intentionally misleading you.
That would be the Plasser & Theurer SVM1000 new-track construction machine.[1]
Incidentally, Caltrain is now up to high-speed rail standards except for grade crossing elimination. All welded rail on concrete ties, 25KV electrification, and the new commuter trains are capable of 125MPH, although they are not run that fast.
[1] https://youtu.be/XwiNaHmOscU?t=400
I’ve heard so many business guys running startups say the same thing about their brilliant idea. Once the plan is in place you just do daily standups and your engineers poop out perfect features at the rate of 1 ticket/day.
Alright, but one of the central findings of software engineering of the 80s is that software engineering cannot be driven rigidly, unlike other engineering fields.. Such as railways.
Think about it, rail is an eminently standardized piece of infrastructure that has existed for more than a century and millions of kilometers have been laid out. Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable?
Here is a (french) example of laying up to 2km of continuously-welded rail a day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o97SB8c7Ezk
Don't you think _some_ effort has gone into automating the process and making it predictable? Here is a (french) example
This really underscores Klein and Thompson's argument: this infrastructure sclerosis seems to be a uniquely American problem.
This review of Klein and Thompson's book sums it up pretty well:
Adding a kilometre of subway track in the United States now costs twice what it does in Japan or Canada, and six times what it does in Portugal; in the past fifty years, the inflation-adjusted cost of a mile of interstate highway has tripled
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/10/abundance-ezra...
False equivalence - railways are things we know how to build pretty well by now. The hard bit is building a corridor straight and level enough to lay the rails. Once you have that, the sleepers are literally just dropped on, rails fed out and then it's all clipped in and welded, and ballast dropped on and tamped with machines.
This is a normal thing done every day around the world, since track has to be periodically re-ballasted and sleepers eventually upgraded and rails renewed as normal maintenance. It truly is the easy bit.
Rail overhead line equipment and signalling systems are much more tricky work, but the rail laying itself is easy. The vast majority of the work though is building cuttings, embankments, bridges, viaducts and stations.
The whole point of building the grade separated guideway is to make the track maintenance (and installation) as predictable and reliable as possible. Once the guideway is there, laying the track really is the easy part.
Hundreds of tons of concrete is no longer a "brilliant idea," it's physical infrastructure designed for the purpose of installing rails.
Too bad CHSR, as described by CHSR, wouldn't entirely be grade separated. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/safety/grade-separation/
That won't stop them from laying hundreds of miles of rail at 1km/day
Can we please just kill this dumb project for good? Billions funneled into people's pockets for like a mile of rail.
Can you kill something that isn't, technically speaking, alive?
I think the biggest issue with CAHSR is that Florida just did it anyway.
Florida does have the advantage that the tallest mountain there is like 60 feet.
Be careful citing the Brightline as a success. It is expensive, doesn't go to many places, has low ridership, regularly kills pedestrians and drivers, and is hemorrhaging money.
But, importantly, it actually exists and you can buy a ticket and ride on it. That's the bar we're talking about here. Not "did they make the best train line ever" -- just did they make a train line.
This is basically it. MVP and you can ride it!
"Regularly kills pedestrians and drivers" doesn't seem like the train's fault. Railroad crossings aren't hard to understand. If you're a driver or pedestrian, best to make sure you heed the lights, gate, loud sounds.
Sounds like you haven't ridden it. It's the best train in the country. Sure makes you realize what train travel could be.
> regularly kills pedestrians and drivers
Ah yes, the train that seeks you out and kills. Much like all the free-soloists who are killed by the ground. Come on man. Expecting people to stay behind barriers and rail lines is a basic expectation.
Brightline has killed zero people. If anything, it has reduced ~150 deaths by guiding people to a safer mode of transport. Ridership has tripled in 3 years. Brightline is a private company, so you can be sure that they are charging a decent price for each ticket, and the demand is still there.
Brightline aims to make money by developing properties around this new value add (the train stations). They are making massive profits off their first few developments. The housing developments are owned by Brightline's parent company, so they don't show up on Brightline's balance sheets.
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest, two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
Still one of the best copypastas.
> Brightline's maximum operating speed is 125 mph (200 km/h)
I mean, you could call it high speed rail, I suppose, but it's not really the same sort of thing.
Average speed is 68 mph
Oof. Dublin to Cork is 66mph average, and that one's considered kind of embarrassing, and is currently being upgraded to ~85mph average. (There's separately a proposal to build a real high speed line, but it seems unlikely to happen; it'd have to be a whole new line.)
California "high-speed" rail is failing because it doesn't make sense. For all the billions already spent and planning to be spent, the delivered product is severely underwhelming. Trains go few of the places people want to go on the schedule they want to go.
Planes, by comparison, are an absolute bargain. Travel between almost any two cities quickly and affordably. By most calculations, planes also have less environmental impact because you don't need to build hundreds of miles of concrete and steel tracks.
Trains are great for bulk freight, but have very few sensible applications in the US. California would be better off with bus service if they really want a public option.
Travel more buddy because holy shit.
Also, stop spewing unresearched garbage about emissions. Its not 1990.
https://chatgpt.com/share/680fe50f-3cec-8009-bd5e-609bb1e485...
> Nationwide reach: Amtrak serves more than 500 stations, but only a minority of routes see multiple trains per day.
That's crazy