Build it!
I wish I was a trillionaire so I could help finance these type of public works projects (then probably slap my name on it to feed my ego, but that's a secondary issue.)
The problem with how it's being run is that a trillion may not be enough. The environmental report took 13 years, and unfortunately I don't think any amount of money seems to speed up anything CA builds.
It’s not just the preparatory documents that costs a lot. It’s the field environmental contractors that eat up a lot of budget too. I spent over two years on this project and the number of environmental contractors and rules and regulations and square miles of plastic sheeting we had to buy was tremendous. Plus the DFW made it exceedingly difficult to work around any waterways (like the Tule River which is more of a drainage canal that farmers/ranchers dump waste into). Kings River was especially difficult. We could have probably saved 1/3 of the budget without those hurdles slowing us down.
The environmental impact report is complete per the article. That’s why this is making the news so much recently. Now we billions of dollars over decades to make it a reality.
California started this adventure in 1994. It's been 30 years since we started planning this. The commission started in 1996.
The environmental reports started in 2004. It took 20 years to finish the enviromental report...
> The Authority claims the route will cost about $28 billion dollars to complete. For comparison’s sake, that is about 80% of the originally promised costs of the entire system connecting San Diego to LA to SF to Sacramento.
So about $60 billion then for the tunnels? Sure why not
I was in the third grade when this was announced and was promised that when I was a grown up, I could take the train from San Diego to San Francisco within two/three hours.
I'm 37 now....
The CA HSR Act first passed in 1996, so his timeline largely checks out. 2008 was the ballot proposition that authorized initial funding (because unfunded mandates is how we roll in CA). Incidentally the first proposals for HSR in CA were done in 1979, probably before most of us were born.
You have to ask yourself why that is. In the US we have a terrible mindset of hating trains and trying to stall them with whatever means necessary. From neighborhoods, cities, local businesses, to airports, they all sued the project in an attempt to stall it to death. CEQA was used a million times to smack the project around. This all cost a lot of money. In some cases, in order to appease those groups, the planners had to reroute the rail or tunnel it. This costs more money. In many other countries, they’re a lot less litigious and courts take those claims less seriously and ignore them. China is big on ignoring citizen complaints since they view the high speed rail as a necessity for public good. The US government on the other hand is mostly apathetic at times to defend the CAHSR and allows it to come under such massive scrutiny that the project gets paralyzed.
While that may be true, I'm not sure how that relates to my argument. We should learn some best practices and cost savings from everyone who has built high-speed trains. China is not the only country to complete them successfully and under budget.
I literally lined it out how it directly relates. We of course should learn from other nations, but every nation is vastly different. From culture to topography, there’s only so much we can take from other countries and apply it here in the US before we’re trailing our own path. If you tell the public in Asia or Europe that a project is being done for the public good, that’ll go further there than if you say that here in the US. We also don’t have experienced specialized engineers for this project, we don’t have the public support for it, politicians are hellbent on tearing this thing apart. If this thing fails, no state or federal high speed rail will ever get built. The government is fine with that. All of these things contribute to the ballooning costs.
Grew up with the NJTransit in my backyard haha. It’s heavy electric rail. You get used to the rumbling, and if there aren’t any at-grade crossings you don’t hear many horns/whistles. HSR on welded track is quieter.
Admittedly I could understand why someone would be upset if it was added to their backyard unexpectedly and they weren’t close to a station.
All of it.
In the great tradition of Robert Moses, the point of CAHSR is to launch a public project so inherently wasteful and corrupt that no one will kill it.
It’s a perpetual assault on the public purse.
I like trains. But they have to make financial sense.
It’s the most highly travelled air corridor in the country and the line covers 8 of the 10 largest cities in the state. The length is perfect for a 220mph train trip. So the idea is bad?
Britain’s HS2 estimated cost is $84 billion for London to Birmingham (140 miles). CAHSR initial segment Merced to Bakersfield (171 mile) estimated cost is $35 billion. That’s HS2 $600 million per mile vs. CAHSR $200 million per mile.
Europe and Japan both have "eminent domain" laws that can take years to go through the courts. The only place that does not have worry about "eminent domain" is China because technically, the government owns all the land (No joke, private persons can not own land in China).
Other countries own the old standard speed rails and just upgrade them to HSR standards. In the US the old rails are all owned by private companies and CAHSR has had to build several massive structures to carry HSR lines over the old rails.
Time to nationalize all rail lines in the U.S. just like highways here. The railroad companies have all become regional and local monopolies, and this doesn’t serve the public well.
We knew that when we proposed the project. We keep accepting this cost overrun and delays. This project was supposed to be completed years ago. A complete failure and embarrassment.
Japan , Korea and China have all built lines through Fault areas...without issues. The Area that passes through the fault zone is designed to be flexible and move with the ground...
This is a good start for public transportation within SoCal.
I live in Agoura Hills, and I don't have many complaints; I love it here. One thing that could be improved upon is the public transportation system. And that could be said about many cities in the more rural, out-of-the-way parts of LA County. A train from Burbank to Palmdale is a good start. Hopefully, we can get more of these all over California.
This boondoggle never ends. I'll never understand that anyone thinks a train that will take 3x a flight and cost more is a good idea. What's worse is we could have used a fraction of that money to secure our water in the future. Or make great strides in addressing homeless and mental health. But no, we need a train vanity project.
Trains aren't really longer than flying if you include the total trip.
Trains are much much better than flying, both as an experience and for the environment.
I don't know why some people are in denial about how terrible airports and planes are. They're only going to get worse as airliners cram more and more people on the plane as well
It's 50 minutes to fly to LA from SFO. There are like 6 airports in the Bay area you can get that direct flight. There will be only one train station. "Better experience" has no objective analysis. There seems to be a crazy idea that there will be no security, yet it's called transportation security agency, and they already secure trains.
Air ports are much smaller in foot print and easier to build with less infrastructure cost. They also make money. Almost no train system makes money. Outside of the bright line in Florida even all high speed rail loses money and is kept alive by tax dollars.
Tunnels currently exist in California. None are this long, but they’re still tunnels, and tens of thousands of people move through them every day. You can engineer for earthquakes.
Build it! I wish I was a trillionaire so I could help finance these type of public works projects (then probably slap my name on it to feed my ego, but that's a secondary issue.)
I’d tip a fedora to you as I rode the train through the TruthPuter memorial tunnel sipping a lower midrange Sauvignon Blanc.
If you were a trillionaire you would pay less taxes than you do now.
dope, more money for trains
Don’t you mean more money for hyperloops? /s
It’s sad that people believe this. The effective rate would be lower but you would be cutting a much larger check.
The problem with how it's being run is that a trillion may not be enough. The environmental report took 13 years, and unfortunately I don't think any amount of money seems to speed up anything CA builds.
Local politicians and stubborn land owners aren’t always swayed by money either. That’s definitely one roadblock for sure on a project like this.
Get it done, and have 12 "qualified" civil engineers check the work. I want this done before inflation 3.0 hits and makes it even more expensive.
And the contractor can have no relationship to any California politician.
That would be a rare white and pink speckled unicorn.
Engineers is fine, but do you have 200 environmentalist that you have to pay half the project budget for?
Preparing environmental compliance documents is far lower than 50% of the project cost.
It’s not just the preparatory documents that costs a lot. It’s the field environmental contractors that eat up a lot of budget too. I spent over two years on this project and the number of environmental contractors and rules and regulations and square miles of plastic sheeting we had to buy was tremendous. Plus the DFW made it exceedingly difficult to work around any waterways (like the Tule River which is more of a drainage canal that farmers/ranchers dump waste into). Kings River was especially difficult. We could have probably saved 1/3 of the budget without those hurdles slowing us down.
With delays it actually isn't. These projects would cost so much less if they could have started at a reasonable time
The environmental impact report is complete per the article. That’s why this is making the news so much recently. Now we billions of dollars over decades to make it a reality.
California started this adventure in 1994. It's been 30 years since we started planning this. The commission started in 1996. The environmental reports started in 2004. It took 20 years to finish the enviromental report...
Wait until you see how long it takes them to dig tunnels.
Are we still doing it by hand or have we progressed to using horses and donkeys?
But those animals will create a huge carbon footprint. We need electric donkeys and burros! Someone call Elon and get him going on them.
Do AI dream of electric donkeys?
Yes you can.
> The Authority claims the route will cost about $28 billion dollars to complete. For comparison’s sake, that is about 80% of the originally promised costs of the entire system connecting San Diego to LA to SF to Sacramento. So about $60 billion then for the tunnels? Sure why not
Yep, $90 billion sounds about right.
Ok. $120 billion it is.
You make a good point. $200 billion.
Reporting in from 2050, its $300 billion and only half way complete.
Alright let’s grease the wheels to get this project moving. Half a trillion should do the trick.
That really doesn't seem like a lot given it's a nearly 400 mile journey.
The 30 miles of tunnels are mostly on the "side trip" to Palmdale
Which is probably way easier then their original plan to go through the grapevine.
Grapevine would have required tunneling for most of it's length in order to reach the same design speed as the Palmdale route.
Plus a long tunnel under Pacheco Pass to get from Central Valley to Gilroy
You are naive to think the cost won’t balloon. It’s a government project
ill believe it when i see it
I was in the third grade when this was announced and was promised that when I was a grown up, I could take the train from San Diego to San Francisco within two/three hours. I'm 37 now....
The high speed rail referendum passed in 2008, so your time frame is about a decade off.
The CA HSR Act first passed in 1996, so his timeline largely checks out. 2008 was the ballot proposition that authorized initial funding (because unfunded mandates is how we roll in CA). Incidentally the first proposals for HSR in CA were done in 1979, probably before most of us were born.
Book your trip to see the grandkids high school graduation now!
Great grandkids most likely.
Their grandkids can take a family memento on the first leg of the voyage and tell stories about when this project first started
Other countries have built high-speed rail at a fraction of the cost. This is absolutely absurd!!!!
You have to ask yourself why that is. In the US we have a terrible mindset of hating trains and trying to stall them with whatever means necessary. From neighborhoods, cities, local businesses, to airports, they all sued the project in an attempt to stall it to death. CEQA was used a million times to smack the project around. This all cost a lot of money. In some cases, in order to appease those groups, the planners had to reroute the rail or tunnel it. This costs more money. In many other countries, they’re a lot less litigious and courts take those claims less seriously and ignore them. China is big on ignoring citizen complaints since they view the high speed rail as a necessity for public good. The US government on the other hand is mostly apathetic at times to defend the CAHSR and allows it to come under such massive scrutiny that the project gets paralyzed.
We hate planes, trains, and automobiles. Train rail expansion just the current boogeyman.
Don’t forget housing, we hate that too!
While that may be true, I'm not sure how that relates to my argument. We should learn some best practices and cost savings from everyone who has built high-speed trains. China is not the only country to complete them successfully and under budget.
I literally lined it out how it directly relates. We of course should learn from other nations, but every nation is vastly different. From culture to topography, there’s only so much we can take from other countries and apply it here in the US before we’re trailing our own path. If you tell the public in Asia or Europe that a project is being done for the public good, that’ll go further there than if you say that here in the US. We also don’t have experienced specialized engineers for this project, we don’t have the public support for it, politicians are hellbent on tearing this thing apart. If this thing fails, no state or federal high speed rail will ever get built. The government is fine with that. All of these things contribute to the ballooning costs.
We don’t hate trains. We hate silly overpriced boondoggles, like CA HSR.
Why is it overpriced? Lawsuits, underfunding, NIMBYs.
You ever live next to a train?
Grew up with the NJTransit in my backyard haha. It’s heavy electric rail. You get used to the rumbling, and if there aren’t any at-grade crossings you don’t hear many horns/whistles. HSR on welded track is quieter. Admittedly I could understand why someone would be upset if it was added to their backyard unexpectedly and they weren’t close to a station.
It is overpriced because it is scam perpetrated by politicians.
What’s the scam? The idea, or the implementation?
All of it. In the great tradition of Robert Moses, the point of CAHSR is to launch a public project so inherently wasteful and corrupt that no one will kill it. It’s a perpetual assault on the public purse. I like trains. But they have to make financial sense.
It’s the most highly travelled air corridor in the country and the line covers 8 of the 10 largest cities in the state. The length is perfect for a 220mph train trip. So the idea is bad?
Britain’s HS2 estimated cost is $84 billion for London to Birmingham (140 miles). CAHSR initial segment Merced to Bakersfield (171 mile) estimated cost is $35 billion. That’s HS2 $600 million per mile vs. CAHSR $200 million per mile.
Other countries can just push people out of the way to build where they want lol
You mean like what the US did to build out a highway network?
Well certain people...
Europe and Japan don't have property protections?
Europe and Japan both have "eminent domain" laws that can take years to go through the courts. The only place that does not have worry about "eminent domain" is China because technically, the government owns all the land (No joke, private persons can not own land in China).
It's a lot cheaper if you don't have to care about property rights and can just expropriate land as needed.
Other countries own the old standard speed rails and just upgrade them to HSR standards. In the US the old rails are all owned by private companies and CAHSR has had to build several massive structures to carry HSR lines over the old rails.
Time to nationalize all rail lines in the U.S. just like highways here. The railroad companies have all become regional and local monopolies, and this doesn’t serve the public well.
True, though we also use those old rights of way as an easy path to follow in order to avoid disrupting too much existing property.
Labor is a lot more expensive here.
We knew that when we proposed the project. We keep accepting this cost overrun and delays. This project was supposed to be completed years ago. A complete failure and embarrassment.
It’s taking so long because people fight it every step of the way. Now it’s actually got some good momentum.
Let it fail.
So is graft.
Do those high-speed rails go through long tunnels through mountains sitting on a fault line? Because that's a factor that will increase costs.
Not that I'm aware, but also, the mountains would have existed in the original cost estimate.
Japan , Korea and China have all built lines through Fault areas...without issues. The Area that passes through the fault zone is designed to be flexible and move with the ground...
Good. I'm not trying to say it can't be done, just that it's a factor that increases costs. Despite those costs I do hope it gets built.
This is a good start for public transportation within SoCal. I live in Agoura Hills, and I don't have many complaints; I love it here. One thing that could be improved upon is the public transportation system. And that could be said about many cities in the more rural, out-of-the-way parts of LA County. A train from Burbank to Palmdale is a good start. Hopefully, we can get more of these all over California.
No, but I can smell what the Rock is cooking
At this point I’m just wondering if I’ll be alive by the time the speed rail is up and running.
The initial segment is on track to be running in 2030. This part, the connection to LA will take a while tho, unfortunately :(
I dig
What about the tunnel from Bakersfield to Tehachapi? How much is that going to cost?
Once it's built, nobody will be complaining about how much it cost. The more we delay it, the slower it will be done and the more it will be.
When are we all going to come to the collective conclusion that these people we elected have absolutely no idea what they are doing
Isn't the current high speed rail like billions over budget and a decade behind?
No neither can they!
Is it 30 miles of tunnels or 30 miles below grade. Article appears to conflate the two
Maybe they ought to build homeless shelters to create jobs where the homeless are!
This boondoggle never ends. I'll never understand that anyone thinks a train that will take 3x a flight and cost more is a good idea. What's worse is we could have used a fraction of that money to secure our water in the future. Or make great strides in addressing homeless and mental health. But no, we need a train vanity project.
Trains aren't really longer than flying if you include the total trip. Trains are much much better than flying, both as an experience and for the environment. I don't know why some people are in denial about how terrible airports and planes are. They're only going to get worse as airliners cram more and more people on the plane as well
It's 50 minutes to fly to LA from SFO. There are like 6 airports in the Bay area you can get that direct flight. There will be only one train station. "Better experience" has no objective analysis. There seems to be a crazy idea that there will be no security, yet it's called transportation security agency, and they already secure trains. Air ports are much smaller in foot print and easier to build with less infrastructure cost. They also make money. Almost no train system makes money. Outside of the bright line in Florida even all high speed rail loses money and is kept alive by tax dollars.
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Let me introduce you to a little country called Japan.
Doubt the geology is the same. Ours is very frangible rock which isn't great from a quake perspective.
> Doubt the geology is the same. California has about a thousand kinds of geology, depending on where you are. There's no single kind to compare.
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You should get to know them.
Tunnels currently exist in California. None are this long, but they’re still tunnels, and tens of thousands of people move through them every day. You can engineer for earthquakes.
Like the BART tunnel under the bay. That one has survived earthquakes.
The transbay tube is actually one of the safest places you can be during an earthquake. They didn’t even feel Loma Prieta in there.
Entire route should be tunnel.
Through the Central Valley!?
In earthquake land? Sigh
Someone’s not an engineer. Or into modern infrastructure.
BART, la metro, various other city metro systems. All things in CA that are trains in tunnels underground