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.
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 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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.
All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.
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.
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.
£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.
Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/new-study-...
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.
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.
OMG, just join the I-5 after Bakersfield. It's right there. Why are we barreling through the mountains?
[1] https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/23106/what-d...
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
note: I'm not arguing whether it does or does not.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge
withstand wind shear
Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.
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.
It's cheaper to make more of stuff, even if it's not in the same place
https://www.dot.nv.gov/projects-programs/transportation-proj...
With Congress Gridlocked over issues that really should he bipartisan, it'd unironically take less time for the States to figure it out instead.
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.
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.
- (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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[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.
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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?
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.
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.
Going through the two biggest cities in the Central Valley is worth a 7% increase in track length.
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.
OTOH had altamont been selected, it would have been extremely useful for commuting from sacramento to the bay (branch line, no seats to displace)
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.
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
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're going to stop throughout the rest of the state you just want normal rail running at 100-120mph.
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.
Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.
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.
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.
why can't you have it run slowly in built up areas? As another commenter mentioned that's how it works in France.
California is fairly densely packed once you get away from the Central Valley and nearer to the coast where the people are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just admit it, it’s a boondoggle just like everyone said it would be.
> 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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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…
A train station in downtown LA or SF would be inconveniently located for most people in these cities.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
I've run through Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal a few times; does that count?
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.
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.
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.
That’s ridiculously high demand.
https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
A number of VCs are based out of the Bay Area but actually live in LA (or did, before the Palisades Fire).
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.
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.
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.
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...
[1] https://burlingameca.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=bu...
Japan. Most of Europe.
Once the government starts raising property taxes, people will start selling off their homes, and then developers can buy the land and build apartments.
I think this whole article/title is ragebait at best.
> 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.
Personally, it seems fair to call that political dysfunction too, but it’s reasonable to try and make the distinction.
I'm not sure that's much of an endorsement.
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.
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.
- 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.
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 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.
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.
Within countries, yes. Between countries, never again. Italy <> France sort of worked, but the UK and Germany consistently ruined everything.
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.
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.
Plenty of trains have gone away...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...
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.
China respects personal property far more than any western country does
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...
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
and taxpayer won't see a penny of the benefit from some tunnel somewhere in mountain ranges that nothing else connects to
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.
Where is that fourth biggest economy of the world talk now? The fifth biggest economy of the world can build things without federal funding.
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.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
I greatly prefer taking a train because I can just show up and go.
On a train I can work the entire time with internet.
(Saying this as someone who likes flying, loves trains and dislikes driving.)
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 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 other two, the death toll was much more significant.
What I wish- although it may not be feasible- was a straight shot from Burbank to San Jose- as a single tunnel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
When their pensions are taken into account, government employees are ridiculously overcompensated already. They’re basically minor nobility at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
It's always amazing to me that slave owning men on stolen land could not see the hypocrisy of such a statement
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.
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.
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.)
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).
When we want to, we move, and quickly. CA HSR is more indicative of people not really caring than of any major failure.
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.
I would rather California be a Singapore for high achievers than a more egalitarian 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.
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...
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.
Look at countries that do have high speed rail, which are of similar size to US states, and study what they are doing differently?
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".
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.
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 ?
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.
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 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...
And the US freight rail system is the envy of the world.
Brightline has had a lot of fatalities due to lack of grade separation.
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/death-train-a-timeline-of...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 article doesn't make right of way seem like a major issue, are there areas where that is blocking construction?
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.
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
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...
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.
Hundreds of tons of concrete is no longer a "brilliant idea," it's physical infrastructure designed for the purpose of installing rails.
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.
Still one of the best copypastas.
Sounds like you haven't ridden it. It's the best train in the country. Sure makes you realize what train travel could be.
I mean, you could call it high speed rail, I suppose, but it's not really the same sort of thing.
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.
Also, stop spewing unresearched garbage about emissions. Its not 1990.
https://chatgpt.com/share/680fe50f-3cec-8009-bd5e-609bb1e485...
That's crazy
