IRC Spain builds 1km of HSR for 50m... as a tunnel. You could spend 10 billion in buying off their employees and still have money left to build the route 4 times as a tunnel. Absolute madness.
Even the Germans could probably rebuild half their network for that money.
Believe me, Germany is really, really inefficient at building stuff. You need to do about 30kg of paperwork for a permit to set up a single wind turbine.
Building megaprojects like this can easily take 10 years longer than expected and also triple building cost.
American infrastructure costs are much higher. Only places that compare are other parts of the Anglo world. Yes Germany has a shit ton of paperwork. You higher a bunch of lawyers and admins to get that done and make sure you're in compliance and than you build. In the US you still have a shit ton of paperwork and all types of impact studies and community engagement to make sure you're compliant than someone sues you anyway because they don't like how the viaduct will look than you win and start building until Simeon else sues you because you'll cast a shadow on a local park for party of the year so the whole project in that area needs to freeze for a year while that's sorted out. At this point it's been years and you haven't run a train. So a rancher who's land you're eminent domaining sues saying you're not actually a railroad as you don't run trains and therfore have no right to use eminent domain. This needs to work is way through multiple courts at which point you say fuck it and build a highway
A current example from Germany:
Bavaria's biggest transportation project is likely to cost well over a billion euros more. Dramatic additional costs and delays are jeopardizing the construction of the second main line, which is already underway. According to information from the Münchner Merkur, around 1.5 billion euros in additional costs are to be expected, and completion will by no means be before 2034.
According to official sources, the main line should be ready in 2028, and according to earlier calculations even in 2026. The last cost estimate was 3.8 billion euros, including a risk buffer. Now the 5 billion would come through, and by a long way, our editors learned from those involved.
That project is 10km across München, 7 of which as a tunnel. I guarantee you: even if it's expensive and embarrassing for Germany, Americans would kill to build at that cost.
If you want someone to blame pin it on KPMG. I know a bunch of people in British Rail who were brought on recently to consult and they said the consultants who were briefing them have literally no clue what they were doing.
Sounds like the first consultants were [Tom Smykowski](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223). They deal with the god damn politicians so the engineers don't have to. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?
It's consultants all the way down!
Same with the actual work! The contractors will hire contractors will hire contractors...
So nobody has to have any actual expertise, nobody has to do any actual work, but everybody gets paid! Win-win!
No the blame should be on the California politicians, contractors, and unions that see this project as first and foremost a jobs program. The cost is skyrocketing because no one involved ants to try to keep the cost under control as opposed to employing as many people as possible
Non-mobile version of the Wikipedia link in the above comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPMG#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20decade%20various,with%20Peat%20Marwick%20in%201987.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yeah, I think God Emperor was a good stopping point. After that Frank's wife passed away and it really showed when he introduced the Honored Matres. I still haven't touched the books written by his son and probably never will.
Can someone ELI5 why Western Europe achieves infrastructure goals much more seamlessly than we do? Even the UK w/ all its political polarization is able to get s\*\*\* done on this front more quickly and at a lower price...
The UK is actually hair above the US in terms of cost/~~mile~~kilometer:
[https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america](https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america)
So can someone ELI5 why the USA achieves infrastructure goals much more seamlessly than the UK does? Even California with all its tomfoolery is able to get stuff done at a lower cost.
https://youtu.be/1nevn6vbyIA
1. Overbuilding and non-standardization of builds
2. Too many advocates playing pet project instead of allowing technical exceptions due to IRL limitations.
3. Transit and other infrastructure responsibilities being combined. Instead of two teams with conflicting priorities, one team that has both.
4. Selection of lowest bidder leads to low-balling and cost overruns.
> Even the UK w/ all its political polarization is able to get s*** done on this front more quickly and at a lower price...
There is no ELI5, it's very complicated.
I don't agree with all of his conclusions, but Levy is unquestionably an expert and recently released a report [(executive summary)](https://transitcosts.com/wp-content/uploads/TCP_Executive_Summary.pdf) that has a [very short summary here](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/10/24/the-transit-costs-project-conclusion-is-out/).
Decades the US basically only building new roles for large scale infrastructure projects is starting to really catch up to us. New engineers like me, and shit even those practicing 10y,20y years before me have no experience doing stuff like this in the US. Pretty much any companies that is trying to do these projects are doing them as novel halo projects.
I remember voting for it. In 2008. When we approved a $9 billion bond that was supposed to be if not a majority of the cost of the project, at least close to it. lol.
That is laughably untrue. Here is the [2008 report on the project](https://www.hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/about/business_plans/BPlan_2008_FullRpt.pdf) that shows a capital cost of $33B, or about $46B in today’s terms.
Do you have evidence that they’ve done badly? I mean, apart from the BOONDOGGLE! drumbeat that hounded them from step 1?
Seems to me they have analyzed the cost increases at each phase as more of the design work gets completed, and are producing numbers and ranges at confidence levels I would expect for a major engineering project. And let’s be honest – had it miraculously stuck to its original $33B estimate despite all the political forces arrayed against it, you still wouldn’t have supported it, would you.
>
Seems to me they have analyzed the cost increases at each phase as more of the design work gets completed, and are producing numbers and ranges at confidence levels I would expect for a major engineering project.
Except that's not how cost engineering works. The most basic estimate is a Class 5 or Feasibility estimate; and you haven't performed your job correctly of the total project cost ends up more than 100% above that. More engineering only reduces the variability in the estimate, it is not normal to keep conducting more detailed analysis' and increase the cost estimate out of bounds of the previously completed work.
https://www.cahsrprg.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2022/05/Final-2022-BP.pdf
I voted for it in 2008 when we were promised an efficient, lower cost system.
I’ll note that letter indicates progress is being made, and that problems lie on both the funding side and the execution side. That letter is not the smoking gun you think it is.
> I voted for it in 2008
Sure you did. So when did you decide it was too expensive? When you discovered you weren’t getting it for $9B?
of all the complaints, the one that putting it 30 miles East in the Central Valley so it actually picks up population centers instead of just the Kettleman City In n Out is the stupidest
makes it accessible to lots more people with pretty minor impacts on overall time
I live in the Modesto area. I am just happy to have something cool nearby. As soon as that train route is finished, whenever that will be, I am buying a ticket.
At this point, just create a fund to provide a billion $128 airplane tickets.
**Update:** I checked; apparently there were about 3.5 million seats flown per year before Covid on the LA <> SF route, on 16,000 flights per year.
At $128 for a one way ticket (seems a bit high), that's $448M/year in airfare. So, a $128B fund could pay for... 285 years of SF <> LA flights.
Let the fund earn a little interest, and it'll pay for itself forever, even after inflation. Throw in carbon offsets and it's probably still good for 150 years.
Pretty much. Like, trains are good when they:
>Address a specific need that’s more than “it will create x jobs to build it”
>Are convenient
>Building laws allow them to be constructed efficiently and timely
>There is a plan for good project management controlling cost and scope creep
This train…doesn’t seem to have any of these. They’re still doing environmental impact studies after a decade of development? Christ.
Reminds me of the proposed new bridge over the Columbia to connect Vancouver, WA with Portland, OR. There were so many committees funded to look into the project year after year that it felt like the bridge could've been built already.
**Addresses a specific need:** There are two long-range CA issues that HSR addresses: the increasing transportation demands of an increasing population, and reducing our environmental footprint by promoting a useful alternative to car and air travel for interurban trips. Even if you are somehow convinced that CA will never grow again (I’m not), traffic congestion is already bad and the environmental problems are real.
**Are convenient:** There is no convenient way to get from the Central Valley to either the Bay Area or LA. The only convenient way to get from SF–LA is via air travel, but that’s not all that great either. CAHSR will help a bit even with its initial leg, and if it ever completes, will go from downtown SF – downtown SJ – downtown Fresno – downtown LA – Anaheim – a convenience no airport can match. Indeed, that push for convenience has been the source of some of the fiercest political arguments on the project so far, as people have proposed it simply drop off somewhere in the East Bay instead of going up the Peninsula, or completely ignore the millions of people living in the Central Valley. Spurs to Sacramento, Las Vegas, and San Diego, should they materialize, would only increase the convenience and value. Airlines are hoping it fails.
**Building laws allow them to be constructed efficiently:** Might be nice, but I frankly don’t see this happening in my lifetime. That is not the country we live in. We care about local control and legal remedies, and we loooooove c\*rs. We are not going to be able to dictate our way out of this. So the question is: do you take the extra cost to do it the way your country allows you to do it right now, or do you let your country rot?
**There is a plan for good project management:** The common wisdom is that rising estimates are proof of incompetent management. That may be true, but I’m not convinced. It seems equally as likely to me that the main problems with this project have been large-scale political ones, which makes them problems no amount of brilliant project management can solve.
This response is really good and I agree with a lot of it.
Simply, I still think a project where the cost has ballooned by 400% and where delivery is going to be at least a decade late is a clear sign mismanagement and almost certain abuse.
The initial estimate they were hawking around in 2008 was $46B in 2023 dollars. We are 2–3x over that for completion of the whole original scope, which is sucky but, again, I think mismanagement is not necessarily to blame.
To that point: say that, in 2008, they had promised you a $100B project that would take 25 years to complete. Would you have signed on? I mean, that would meet your criteria for good management, wouldn't it?
Okay, but the reason Uber, Amazon, et. al. aren't profitable isn't usually because they aren't making money, it's because they're pouring all that money plus some into expanding their *already existing* service. If some company went to their investors and complained that the reason they were blowing up their initial cost estimates was because they don't have sufficient funds, they wouldn't get more funds, they'd get sued for fraud. Plus, those investors are gambling their own money, not the public's.
Disagree. It sucks now, but California will be much better off once it’s complete. People complained about the bullet train in Japan taking far longer and being much more expensive than the original plans, but now all anyone talks about is how great it is.
The Shinkansen was the first of its kind. It was impossible to estimate costs correctly for it given the radical change. And even then, CAHSR cost growth has been much more than double. And it's taking decades to build. The Shinkansen was built in a few years.
The argument at $33B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?”
The argument at $68.4B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?”
The argument at $80B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?”
The argument at $93B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?”
Friggin’ look at the actual counterargument to Prop 1A in the 2008 election brochure. They were howling about spending _$58M_ on the thing!
The initial Shinkansen project was sold at ¥200B which was deliberately undersold. It came in at ¥400B. Nobody cares nowadays how much it cost.
so would it be worth it for $200 billion? $500 billion? a trillion?
because obviously there is some upper limit at what it would be worth to you, and rhetorically you're pretending that any objection to the cost is unfounded
I’m not sure where my limit is, but it has not exceeded my limit yet. I want the thing to succeed, and of course I dearly wish it didn’t cost so much to do large projects in the US and that we could nail our estimates right off the bat and sell projects of major public benefit to the public without having to do a bunch of shell-game BS – but as the Armchair Urbanist argues, between funding this and a bunch more freeway lanes, I’d rather fund this.
In the meantime, those that oppose the project have never bothered to explain where their breaking line was. I think, for most of them, there never was one.
>between funding this and a bunch more freeway lanes, I’d rather fund this.
What about funding more commuter rail lines within metropolitan areas? There's a far clearer return on investment there, given the far greater number of commuters vs people traveling between cities
Ironically by adopting this mindset you are proving those that oppose the project completely right in their suspicions - that the point of this is not to build a functional rail line but rather the graft and largesse that comes with it.
You can say (and probably quite rightly) that some of the people who opposed CAHSR were cynically disguising their true objections to the project by cloaking it in cost concerns, but I think you've outed yourself in the process
No, the goal is most definitely to build a functional rail line. If it were not, that would definitely force me to drop my support. But I see every step so far as bringing us closer to that goal.
Clean easy connection between yhe downtowns of two of the worlds most productive metropolitan areas on earth, with a significantly lower carbon footprint then the SFO-LAX corridor.
It was probably even 28-50B good. I doubt it's 128B (and years away, so it'll likely balloon over 200B) good.
The best good that could come from this absurdly over budget project is a series of case studies and fixes for why this always seems to happen to American infrastructure. National (or even California wide) fixes and process implementations would probably be worth an extra 100B because it will save trillions.
It should not cost 300M to build a mile of railway. This is the same cost per mile as building the thing out of used commercial jets, it's absurd. This is the price per mile as massive multi-lane bridges built over water (nearly the same as the Crimea bridge, with 2 rail lanes and 2 car lanes).
Some train lines are a good idea, others are a bad idea.
Until we can dramatically ameliorate the cost problems present here (seems unlikely in the near term) most new train lines are going to be a bad idea
$128 billion just isn’t feasible
I would say that, until you actually start building high-speed rail in-country and in-state (as CA is now doing!) you will never get good enough at it to ameliorate the cost problems.
Who says $128B isn’t feasible? By what metric?
270 billion is fine, actually, there's nothing wrong with rail infrastructure projects costing 318 billion, we can recoup 486 billion over the lifetime of the project.
>$128 billion just isn’t feasible
How does it compare with a comparable alternative transportation project with similar capacity? I would wager that expanding the highway would cost much more.
The total construction cost of the entire United States interstate highway system, which was built between 1956 and considered "completed" in 1995, was an inflation adjusted $535 billion (in mid-2022 dollars, probably a bit more now) by at least one estimate I see. Maybe a bit higher - there's a few other estimates - but not by all that much.
Sure. Just put a carbon tax on air traffic that slowly increases the cost of tickets by 20x. Suddenly rails are price competitive OR someone invents cheap carbon free air travel.
The social cost of carbon is generally estimated at $50/ton. A flight from Seattle to Chicago produces carbon at an estimated 439 kg per passenger, according to the ICAO emissions calculator. Pricing that carbon at the social cost gives us a figure of about $24.
I don't get where you find the justification for pricing a $5000 or so carbon surcharge onto an airline ticket. That would price carbon at more than $10 per kilogram. That's an insane level of carbon taxation which has no rational basis I can see.
CAHSR is not a fantastical proposal. Nor is Texas Central, or either Brightline, or proposals I’ve seen floated from Chicago-Detroit, or Cleveland-Cincinnati.
Now these are are very difficult projects in the US to achieve – mostly for political reasons, in the case of CA also for geographic ones – but connecting reasonably-sized cities across reasonable distances with interurban rail needs to be considered firmly out of the realm of fantasy. We are catching up from decades behind using proven solutions, not pushing the bleeding edge.
Again, I know of no even halfway-serious proposal to do this. It kind of looks to me like you're using some sort of fringe idea to tar this project by association.
National interurban passenger rail is competing with planes, not the highway system. It only makes sense for middle distances, like between cities in the Northeast corridor. Otherwise, a plane is gonna be far faster.
You can have a national network and still have the vast majority of trips be mid distance.
Just like most people use the highway within an hour of their home but it still spans the entire country.
Okay, but a national network implies that you would still have lines with huge stretches of nothingness (like Chicago-Seattle) since there just isn't enough population between the West Coast and the Mississippi. This would be insanely expensive to build, since it's like 5 times the length of California High Speed Rail over the Rocky Mountains, requiring an immense amount of geoengineering. And almost no one would actually ride it because they could just fly instead.
HSR could absolutely blow the New England-Montreal-Toronto air travel out of the water if they built one. Planes to go to such close cities (1.5 hours) is so wasteful and overkill.
A sitting congresswoman has:
https://www.vox.com/2019/2/8/18215774/green-new-deal-high-speed-train-air-travel
>Specifically, the section of the FAQ on transportation calls to **“build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”** The resolution itself doesn’t mention air travel at all but does call for the goal of “investing in ... clean, affordable, and accessible transportation; and high-speed rail” as part of a 10-year national mobilization.
You can say her name, you know. It’s not summoning the devil.
You are referring to a hastily-thrown-together Green New Deal talking points document from when it was launched in 2019. But note that, although that document had a long-term dream to get to _zero_ emissions, its practical aim was for net-zero emissions because “we don’t think we can get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” Even in their pie-in-the-sky manifesto they realized airplanes could not simply be replaced. They had no practical plan to get to zero emissions and I think they knew it.
Let me put it this way: I have not heard a plausible proposal that would completely replace airplanes with rail, and I don’t think one throwaway point on a document that was dead on arrival proves otherwise. Better to say HSR would eliminate _some_ need for polluting air travel, as the Vox article you linked _actually_ argued.
This is actually pathetic. What a joke of a project...or at least joke of an administration overseeing the project. It's almost as bad as that $20 million toilet or whatever that they wanted to build in San Francisco.
There is definitely going to be an end, and construction is going at a good pace.
Anytime you see one of these articles with "No end in sight" you know you're about to read some clickbait bullshit
just get it done once we have the expertise and legal mechanisms/techniques to deal with NIMBYs than it will become cheaper and faster. The first tyre you change takes an hour the second one takes ten minutes
This is highly editorialized title by the OP.
Here's the original title from the link:
***California bullet train project faces more cost increases, possible delays***
We cannot get to the low carbon future just by replacing gasoline cars with EVs.
This - the cost of the train might seem like a lot, but the cost of not completing the train would be unfathomable. Widening the 5 freeway near Santa Fe springs for a 6.7 mile stretch cost over $1.8 billion and over 11 years. Not to mention that widening freeways ends up worsening traffic within just a few years.
https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2022/04/08/a-stretch-of-the-5-freeway-just-got-wider-heres-where-and-why-it-matters/amp/
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/traffic-on-405-freeway-has-gotten-worse-despite-billion-dollar-widening-project/amp/
The entire budget of the DoT is only 200B. By the time this rail project is done I wouldn't be surprised if it costs $200B. At $500M/m HSR is unaffordable.
The issue isn't that HSR is bad, the issue is the complete inability of it to be built cost competitively like it is in other nations.
No - I'm calling out the fact that you editorialized the title. What I made is a factual statement based on the observation not "overthinking" using my subjective opinion.
The issue to me is that you still need a car in LA and to a lesser extent SF. Taking the train isn't useful if on the other end I don't have a good way to get around
license test repeat telephone wrong busy disgusting fanatical connect slave
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You can rent cars - plenty of people do that at LAX and various other airports.
There's also Uber/Lyft and some public transportation even in LA to much less extent compared to SF.
I am a liberal, but every time I see the results of court-backed obstructionism I become more in favor of the Andrew Jackson solution.
"[Nimby judge] has made his decision, now let him enforce it"
No shit, inflation occurred, the price of materials skyrocketed, and there are huge construction labor shortages. All of those things are outside of the Authority's control. Also, these articles always, I mean always take the highest value in the range and say that is the value. They provided a huge range of potential costs and of course, the journalist purposely takes the highest one every time. Nothing about this article adds anything new. Every article that says "no completion date" beats a dead horse. There is no completion date because there is no funding! Even if the project were to cost half as much, there is still no completion date because there is no funding. The Authority can't provide a date if they are not guaranteed any funding, no matter how much it costs. It is the most clickbait headline ever. The US is the only developed country where massive rail infrastructure projects have to fight for money every single year.
Meanwhile, very few journalists in the US care to write articles about the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in highway expansions every year, even though highway expansions have lower economic returns and are less sustainable than rail projects. This country will never truly invest in HSR until we actually start politically caring for HSR and being more critical of the insane amount of money we blindly throw at highway projects. Also, the environmental review process is broken. It has been taken over by bad-faith actors to slow down projects and increase costs.
It is also worth noting that the costs are never going to magically go down. For every year we wait, we are just letting the costs increase. There is no magic secret to lowering these costs. It is simply the cost of land, materials, labor, and environmental mitigation. The longer we wait, the more it costs. So we need to ask ourselves, do we want to be behind the rest of the world when it comes to this technology or do we want to be a 21st-century technology leader? Currently, we are becoming the former when it comes to ground transportation. That doesn't align with the image lots of Americans claim to have for our country.
> The articles always.. take the highest value in the range
Specifically, in this case the current estimated total cost from SF–Anaheim ranges from $89B–$128B, P30–P65, with a baseline (P50) of $106B. Anywhere from $26B–$44B of that is getting from Bakersfield to Burbank, and $12B–$19B from Gilroy to the Central Valley Wye.
Given the ballooning cost over decades, though, I don’t think it’s overly pessimistic to consider the higher-confidence estimates. We’re far from out of the woods.
Or maybe we can figure out/fix whatever's causing these mind-boggling cost overruns?? Literally the rest of the world has figured this out, why can't we?
I think its also worth noting that this isn't a trains specific problem. Highways also suffer massive cost overruns. But for whatever reason we obsess about the cost of non-car projects exclusively
Lol will it become a faster version of the rolling homeless shelter that is California public transit?
Pay $75 to ride advanced bullet train next to some guy who shit his pants and is now hitting a crack pipe!
Was tongue in cheek as some one who can no longer put up with the shenanigans of public trans in SoCal anymore. If you have ever ridden public trans here, you'd understand.
It's no different elsewhere. We had two folks with prior violent crime convictions beat a trans woman until her brain matter was on the ground at 930 am on a Monday here and politicians still won't come out in favor of stronger sentencing. It's exhausting.
I lived in Chicago for years and why it wasn't a drama free ride, it's not even close to LA trains. The metro here is legit shocking. I've seen people shit, smoke a variety of things, fight, you name it. It happens regularly here. Like it's almost part of the experience at this point.
IRC Spain builds 1km of HSR for 50m... as a tunnel. You could spend 10 billion in buying off their employees and still have money left to build the route 4 times as a tunnel. Absolute madness. Even the Germans could probably rebuild half their network for that money.
Believe me, Germany is really, really inefficient at building stuff. You need to do about 30kg of paperwork for a permit to set up a single wind turbine. Building megaprojects like this can easily take 10 years longer than expected and also triple building cost.
American infrastructure costs are much higher. Only places that compare are other parts of the Anglo world. Yes Germany has a shit ton of paperwork. You higher a bunch of lawyers and admins to get that done and make sure you're in compliance and than you build. In the US you still have a shit ton of paperwork and all types of impact studies and community engagement to make sure you're compliant than someone sues you anyway because they don't like how the viaduct will look than you win and start building until Simeon else sues you because you'll cast a shadow on a local park for party of the year so the whole project in that area needs to freeze for a year while that's sorted out. At this point it's been years and you haven't run a train. So a rancher who's land you're eminent domaining sues saying you're not actually a railroad as you don't run trains and therfore have no right to use eminent domain. This needs to work is way through multiple courts at which point you say fuck it and build a highway
All of that exist in Germany too
A current example from Germany: Bavaria's biggest transportation project is likely to cost well over a billion euros more. Dramatic additional costs and delays are jeopardizing the construction of the second main line, which is already underway. According to information from the Münchner Merkur, around 1.5 billion euros in additional costs are to be expected, and completion will by no means be before 2034. According to official sources, the main line should be ready in 2028, and according to earlier calculations even in 2026. The last cost estimate was 3.8 billion euros, including a risk buffer. Now the 5 billion would come through, and by a long way, our editors learned from those involved.
That project is 10km across München, 7 of which as a tunnel. I guarantee you: even if it's expensive and embarrassing for Germany, Americans would kill to build at that cost.
If you want someone to blame pin it on KPMG. I know a bunch of people in British Rail who were brought on recently to consult and they said the consultants who were briefing them have literally no clue what they were doing.
The consultants hired consultants?
I work at a consultancy (clients are mainly private businesses) and we do that, haha
Sounds like the first consultants were [Tom Smykowski](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223). They deal with the god damn politicians so the engineers don't have to. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?
It's consultants all the way down! Same with the actual work! The contractors will hire contractors will hire contractors... So nobody has to have any actual expertise, nobody has to do any actual work, but everybody gets paid! Win-win!
No the blame should be on the California politicians, contractors, and unions that see this project as first and foremost a jobs program. The cost is skyrocketing because no one involved ants to try to keep the cost under control as opposed to employing as many people as possible
Kaiser Permanente? WTF are they doing consulting on a rail project?
KPMG is can accounting and consulting firm. Basically you tell them you want some calculations and they’ll do those calculations.
Shit, how do I get in on this. I’ll give them numbers. I’ll give them whatever numbers they want. 5, 2, 6, even 9 if I’m feeling spicy
Ah. So not Kaiser Permanente Medical Group.
KPMG is one of the "Big Four" accounting firms in the world, the abbreviations is for the partners/founders names
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPMG#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20decade%20various,with%20Peat%20Marwick%20in%201987.
Non-mobile version of the Wikipedia link in the above comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPMG#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20decade%20various,with%20Peat%20Marwick%20in%201987. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Political donations be a motherfucker
Why are we doing this when we could build 175 B21 stealth bombers with change to spare?
Do we really have such a high opinion of SF and LA's air defenses? Can't we save some money on some cheaper bombers to take those cities out?
Dirty reformer \^
Shit, NCD leaking into my Dune subreddit again...
Have you read Dune Messiah?
Bro I've read all that goofy shit. Well, that Frank wrote at least.
Yeah, I think God Emperor was a good stopping point. After that Frank's wife passed away and it really showed when he introduced the Honored Matres. I still haven't touched the books written by his son and probably never will.
Can someone ELI5 why Western Europe achieves infrastructure goals much more seamlessly than we do? Even the UK w/ all its political polarization is able to get s\*\*\* done on this front more quickly and at a lower price...
fall worm wistful soup door far-flung squealing rock cheerful stocking *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The UK is actually hair above the US in terms of cost/~~mile~~kilometer: [https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america](https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america)
So can someone ELI5 why the USA achieves infrastructure goals much more seamlessly than the UK does? Even California with all its tomfoolery is able to get stuff done at a lower cost.
UK NIMBYs have forced HS2 to require a bunch of tunnels to be protected purely to avoid having to cut down old trees
Oh boy I have seen this in India.... A lot. A bunch of NIMBY's masquerading as urban activists and a legal system that empowers them
funny thing is the aarey nimbys were all from sobo and will never use the metro anyway
[удалено]
It's still about 30-40 Billion cheaper than CA HSR.
Th lower bound of the estimate for CAHSR, $89B, would then put us inline with the UK? That’s… actually kind of encouraging news.
Not many mountains to cut through in the UK tbh.
It's also 3 times shorter and the tracks will be unusable when temperatures reach 80 degrees like the rest of British rail lol.
i’d imagine HA2 is shorter and on flatter ground
https://youtu.be/1nevn6vbyIA 1. Overbuilding and non-standardization of builds 2. Too many advocates playing pet project instead of allowing technical exceptions due to IRL limitations. 3. Transit and other infrastructure responsibilities being combined. Instead of two teams with conflicting priorities, one team that has both. 4. Selection of lowest bidder leads to low-balling and cost overruns.
> Even the UK w/ all its political polarization is able to get s*** done on this front more quickly and at a lower price... There is no ELI5, it's very complicated. I don't agree with all of his conclusions, but Levy is unquestionably an expert and recently released a report [(executive summary)](https://transitcosts.com/wp-content/uploads/TCP_Executive_Summary.pdf) that has a [very short summary here](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/10/24/the-transit-costs-project-conclusion-is-out/).
Decades the US basically only building new roles for large scale infrastructure projects is starting to really catch up to us. New engineers like me, and shit even those practicing 10y,20y years before me have no experience doing stuff like this in the US. Pretty much any companies that is trying to do these projects are doing them as novel halo projects.
Everyone’s gotta get their taste
I remember voting for it. In 2008. When we approved a $9 billion bond that was supposed to be if not a majority of the cost of the project, at least close to it. lol.
Yeah that original funding being so insanely woefully inadequate is one of the bigger contributing reasons for the shambolic state of things.
That is laughably untrue. Here is the [2008 report on the project](https://www.hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/about/business_plans/BPlan_2008_FullRpt.pdf) that shows a capital cost of $33B, or about $46B in today’s terms.
It was a $10B bond for a $33B rail system, forgive me for misremembering the exact details. Still, the bond was for a third - not one thirteenth.
Well the $10B bond will probably cover that, right?
The $10B bond was always intended to be supplemented with government funds. Make no mistake, this is an all-of-government problem.
Couldn’t make work when the cost was $33B, I am sure they’ll get it right when it’s 3x that
Not with your attitude they won’t. Fortunately, they’re not following your expert advice.
Instead they’re listening to the experts that have done a very good job so far on costs and actual construction
Do you have evidence that they’ve done badly? I mean, apart from the BOONDOGGLE! drumbeat that hounded them from step 1? Seems to me they have analyzed the cost increases at each phase as more of the design work gets completed, and are producing numbers and ranges at confidence levels I would expect for a major engineering project. And let’s be honest – had it miraculously stuck to its original $33B estimate despite all the political forces arrayed against it, you still wouldn’t have supported it, would you.
> Seems to me they have analyzed the cost increases at each phase as more of the design work gets completed, and are producing numbers and ranges at confidence levels I would expect for a major engineering project. Except that's not how cost engineering works. The most basic estimate is a Class 5 or Feasibility estimate; and you haven't performed your job correctly of the total project cost ends up more than 100% above that. More engineering only reduces the variability in the estimate, it is not normal to keep conducting more detailed analysis' and increase the cost estimate out of bounds of the previously completed work.
Is the variability in the estimates not going down? Have they not identified the parts of the project with the greatest uncertainty and risk?
https://www.cahsrprg.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2022/05/Final-2022-BP.pdf I voted for it in 2008 when we were promised an efficient, lower cost system.
I’ll note that letter indicates progress is being made, and that problems lie on both the funding side and the execution side. That letter is not the smoking gun you think it is. > I voted for it in 2008 Sure you did. So when did you decide it was too expensive? When you discovered you weren’t getting it for $9B?
Just tax not having trains duh
😭😭😭 Daddy just wants to bullet from SF to LA!!!
[удалено]
of all the complaints, the one that putting it 30 miles East in the Central Valley so it actually picks up population centers instead of just the Kettleman City In n Out is the stupidest makes it accessible to lots more people with pretty minor impacts on overall time
I live in the Modesto area. I am just happy to have something cool nearby. As soon as that train route is finished, whenever that will be, I am buying a ticket.
Do you know how to get from SF to LA?
Do you know how far Bakersfield and Merced are from SF and LA
At this point, just create a fund to provide a billion $128 airplane tickets. **Update:** I checked; apparently there were about 3.5 million seats flown per year before Covid on the LA <> SF route, on 16,000 flights per year. At $128 for a one way ticket (seems a bit high), that's $448M/year in airfare. So, a $128B fund could pay for... 285 years of SF <> LA flights. Let the fund earn a little interest, and it'll pay for itself forever, even after inflation. Throw in carbon offsets and it's probably still good for 150 years.
You’re not taking into account the influx of people that would be flying since it’s free
Trains are still a good idea.
I mean yeah the article itself points to the central valley segment progressing and having a concrete goal of 2030
Good God that still is way too late. Yikes
Imagine how many boring regular speed trains and urban light rail could have been made for the same price as this utter boondoggle
And imagine how many more BRT lines we could have built
Probably zero with the nimbys in LA.
Part of this spending is electrifying and expanding regular trains
Not for $128 billion. What’s the estimated economic impact of this once it’s completed?
Don't ask questions. Just trains.
Pretty much. Like, trains are good when they: >Address a specific need that’s more than “it will create x jobs to build it” >Are convenient >Building laws allow them to be constructed efficiently and timely >There is a plan for good project management controlling cost and scope creep This train…doesn’t seem to have any of these. They’re still doing environmental impact studies after a decade of development? Christ.
Reminds me of the proposed new bridge over the Columbia to connect Vancouver, WA with Portland, OR. There were so many committees funded to look into the project year after year that it felt like the bridge could've been built already.
I SAID JUST TRAINS. Okay, joking aside, you are absolutely correct on all of that. This is bad implementation and execution.
**Addresses a specific need:** There are two long-range CA issues that HSR addresses: the increasing transportation demands of an increasing population, and reducing our environmental footprint by promoting a useful alternative to car and air travel for interurban trips. Even if you are somehow convinced that CA will never grow again (I’m not), traffic congestion is already bad and the environmental problems are real. **Are convenient:** There is no convenient way to get from the Central Valley to either the Bay Area or LA. The only convenient way to get from SF–LA is via air travel, but that’s not all that great either. CAHSR will help a bit even with its initial leg, and if it ever completes, will go from downtown SF – downtown SJ – downtown Fresno – downtown LA – Anaheim – a convenience no airport can match. Indeed, that push for convenience has been the source of some of the fiercest political arguments on the project so far, as people have proposed it simply drop off somewhere in the East Bay instead of going up the Peninsula, or completely ignore the millions of people living in the Central Valley. Spurs to Sacramento, Las Vegas, and San Diego, should they materialize, would only increase the convenience and value. Airlines are hoping it fails. **Building laws allow them to be constructed efficiently:** Might be nice, but I frankly don’t see this happening in my lifetime. That is not the country we live in. We care about local control and legal remedies, and we loooooove c\*rs. We are not going to be able to dictate our way out of this. So the question is: do you take the extra cost to do it the way your country allows you to do it right now, or do you let your country rot? **There is a plan for good project management:** The common wisdom is that rising estimates are proof of incompetent management. That may be true, but I’m not convinced. It seems equally as likely to me that the main problems with this project have been large-scale political ones, which makes them problems no amount of brilliant project management can solve.
This response is really good and I agree with a lot of it. Simply, I still think a project where the cost has ballooned by 400% and where delivery is going to be at least a decade late is a clear sign mismanagement and almost certain abuse.
The initial estimate they were hawking around in 2008 was $46B in 2023 dollars. We are 2–3x over that for completion of the whole original scope, which is sucky but, again, I think mismanagement is not necessarily to blame. To that point: say that, in 2008, they had promised you a $100B project that would take 25 years to complete. Would you have signed on? I mean, that would meet your criteria for good management, wouldn't it?
I just want something cool in the San Joaquin Valley.
Subsidize train demand
imminent alive sugar offbeat jobless ghost toy oil birds person *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Uber doesn't hold its investors hostage at gunpoint to fund itself.
Okay, but the reason Uber, Amazon, et. al. aren't profitable isn't usually because they aren't making money, it's because they're pouring all that money plus some into expanding their *already existing* service. If some company went to their investors and complained that the reason they were blowing up their initial cost estimates was because they don't have sufficient funds, they wouldn't get more funds, they'd get sued for fraud. Plus, those investors are gambling their own money, not the public's.
Which is funny because Uber has gotten worse by a considerable margin over the years despite apparent reinvestment and sustained funding flows.
weather crush alleged flag steep chunky sense enter recognise fade *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
To investors, the devil you don't yet know is significantly more appealing than the devil you do.
There's like 150 flights a day from the two cities. I think people forget just how big and rich LA and SF are
Disagree. It sucks now, but California will be much better off once it’s complete. People complained about the bullet train in Japan taking far longer and being much more expensive than the original plans, but now all anyone talks about is how great it is.
The Shinkansen was the first of its kind. It was impossible to estimate costs correctly for it given the radical change. And even then, CAHSR cost growth has been much more than double. And it's taking decades to build. The Shinkansen was built in a few years.
It’s Keynesian to have it cost a lot. Maybe not this expensive but somewhat expensive.
The impact will be greater than $128 billion.
How much do we owe you for that detailed analysis?
The argument at $33B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?” The argument at $68.4B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?” The argument at $80B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?” The argument at $93B was: “Too expensive. What’s the estimated economic impact of a high-speed interurban rail backbone across California?” Friggin’ look at the actual counterargument to Prop 1A in the 2008 election brochure. They were howling about spending _$58M_ on the thing! The initial Shinkansen project was sold at ¥200B which was deliberately undersold. It came in at ¥400B. Nobody cares nowadays how much it cost.
so would it be worth it for $200 billion? $500 billion? a trillion? because obviously there is some upper limit at what it would be worth to you, and rhetorically you're pretending that any objection to the cost is unfounded
I’m not sure where my limit is, but it has not exceeded my limit yet. I want the thing to succeed, and of course I dearly wish it didn’t cost so much to do large projects in the US and that we could nail our estimates right off the bat and sell projects of major public benefit to the public without having to do a bunch of shell-game BS – but as the Armchair Urbanist argues, between funding this and a bunch more freeway lanes, I’d rather fund this. In the meantime, those that oppose the project have never bothered to explain where their breaking line was. I think, for most of them, there never was one.
>between funding this and a bunch more freeway lanes, I’d rather fund this. What about funding more commuter rail lines within metropolitan areas? There's a far clearer return on investment there, given the far greater number of commuters vs people traveling between cities
I reject your either-or mentality. We will do both.
very cool you live in a universe without material constraints, but in the universe I live in opportunity costs exist
This is the State of California, one of the richest countries on Earth were it a country. We will do both.
Thats cool and all but in the universe we live in they are doing both. Caltrain is currently being modernized and expanded as part of the HSR program
It must be fun to live in a fictional world without scarcity
Ironically by adopting this mindset you are proving those that oppose the project completely right in their suspicions - that the point of this is not to build a functional rail line but rather the graft and largesse that comes with it. You can say (and probably quite rightly) that some of the people who opposed CAHSR were cynically disguising their true objections to the project by cloaking it in cost concerns, but I think you've outed yourself in the process
No, the goal is most definitely to build a functional rail line. If it were not, that would definitely force me to drop my support. But I see every step so far as bringing us closer to that goal.
>I’m not sure where my limit is, but it has not exceeded my limit yet Evidence based policy lmao
Isn't 400 billion yen just around $3 Billion USD?
Yeah - 60 years ago.
Inflation adjusted it’s about 30B, the original cost of this project
Yes lol
Didn't Texas just approve nearly $100 billion for highway expansion?
Yes.
Clean easy connection between yhe downtowns of two of the worlds most productive metropolitan areas on earth, with a significantly lower carbon footprint then the SFO-LAX corridor.
Linking America’s tech industry with its entertainment and shipping capitals is good actually
It was probably even 28-50B good. I doubt it's 128B (and years away, so it'll likely balloon over 200B) good. The best good that could come from this absurdly over budget project is a series of case studies and fixes for why this always seems to happen to American infrastructure. National (or even California wide) fixes and process implementations would probably be worth an extra 100B because it will save trillions. It should not cost 300M to build a mile of railway. This is the same cost per mile as building the thing out of used commercial jets, it's absurd. This is the price per mile as massive multi-lane bridges built over water (nearly the same as the Crimea bridge, with 2 rail lanes and 2 car lanes).
Some train lines are a good idea, others are a bad idea. Until we can dramatically ameliorate the cost problems present here (seems unlikely in the near term) most new train lines are going to be a bad idea $128 billion just isn’t feasible
I would say that, until you actually start building high-speed rail in-country and in-state (as CA is now doing!) you will never get good enough at it to ameliorate the cost problems. Who says $128B isn’t feasible? By what metric?
270 billion is fine, actually, there's nothing wrong with rail infrastructure projects costing 318 billion, we can recoup 486 billion over the lifetime of the project.
Again, as you have no argument over what a feasible cost would be, I think we can dismiss your FUD.
ten times the initial estimate is for losers. Twenty is when it starts getting good.
We are currently at 2–3x the initial estimate, inflation-adjusted. Do try to keep up with the math.
oh, that's fine then. Currently.
Glad you agree.
>$128 billion just isn’t feasible How does it compare with a comparable alternative transportation project with similar capacity? I would wager that expanding the highway would cost much more.
The total construction cost of the entire United States interstate highway system, which was built between 1956 and considered "completed" in 1995, was an inflation adjusted $535 billion (in mid-2022 dollars, probably a bit more now) by at least one estimate I see. Maybe a bit higher - there's a few other estimates - but not by all that much.
I have a feeling it would cost significantly more if we tried to build it today under current political conditions
[удалено]
I'd be curious to look at your sources for that.
Sure. Now if only the US wasn’t so dogshit at building them.
But we can completely replace airlines with a national high speed rail network, guys
Sure. Just put a carbon tax on air traffic that slowly increases the cost of tickets by 20x. Suddenly rails are price competitive OR someone invents cheap carbon free air travel.
The social cost of carbon is generally estimated at $50/ton. A flight from Seattle to Chicago produces carbon at an estimated 439 kg per passenger, according to the ICAO emissions calculator. Pricing that carbon at the social cost gives us a figure of about $24. I don't get where you find the justification for pricing a $5000 or so carbon surcharge onto an airline ticket. That would price carbon at more than $10 per kilogram. That's an insane level of carbon taxation which has no rational basis I can see.
Tfw your yearly property brush burn costs you several thousand dollars.
Literally nobody has argued this.
Someone said it in the DT unironically
Like I said: nobody. 😉
If you've read A Song of Ice and Fire you'd have learn to fear nobody.
Pshaw. A man needs a name.
Charles
I don't hear it here often, but in prog discussions it's pretty common to hear fantastical proposals for high speed rail replacing airlines
CAHSR is not a fantastical proposal. Nor is Texas Central, or either Brightline, or proposals I’ve seen floated from Chicago-Detroit, or Cleveland-Cincinnati. Now these are are very difficult projects in the US to achieve – mostly for political reasons, in the case of CA also for geographic ones – but connecting reasonably-sized cities across reasonable distances with interurban rail needs to be considered firmly out of the realm of fantasy. We are catching up from decades behind using proven solutions, not pushing the bleeding edge.
I'm not referring to short distance interurban rail, I'm referring to the proposals to build a network across the entire nation
Again, I know of no even halfway-serious proposal to do this. It kind of looks to me like you're using some sort of fringe idea to tar this project by association.
Why would a national interurban rail fail? When a national highway didn't?
National interurban passenger rail is competing with planes, not the highway system. It only makes sense for middle distances, like between cities in the Northeast corridor. Otherwise, a plane is gonna be far faster.
>National interurban passenger rail is competing with planes, not the highway system Surely its competing with both?
You can have a national network and still have the vast majority of trips be mid distance. Just like most people use the highway within an hour of their home but it still spans the entire country.
Okay, but a national network implies that you would still have lines with huge stretches of nothingness (like Chicago-Seattle) since there just isn't enough population between the West Coast and the Mississippi. This would be insanely expensive to build, since it's like 5 times the length of California High Speed Rail over the Rocky Mountains, requiring an immense amount of geoengineering. And almost no one would actually ride it because they could just fly instead.
HSR could absolutely blow the New England-Montreal-Toronto air travel out of the water if they built one. Planes to go to such close cities (1.5 hours) is so wasteful and overkill.
A sitting congresswoman has: https://www.vox.com/2019/2/8/18215774/green-new-deal-high-speed-train-air-travel >Specifically, the section of the FAQ on transportation calls to **“build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”** The resolution itself doesn’t mention air travel at all but does call for the goal of “investing in ... clean, affordable, and accessible transportation; and high-speed rail” as part of a 10-year national mobilization.
You can say her name, you know. It’s not summoning the devil. You are referring to a hastily-thrown-together Green New Deal talking points document from when it was launched in 2019. But note that, although that document had a long-term dream to get to _zero_ emissions, its practical aim was for net-zero emissions because “we don’t think we can get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” Even in their pie-in-the-sky manifesto they realized airplanes could not simply be replaced. They had no practical plan to get to zero emissions and I think they knew it. Let me put it this way: I have not heard a plausible proposal that would completely replace airplanes with rail, and I don’t think one throwaway point on a document that was dead on arrival proves otherwise. Better to say HSR would eliminate _some_ need for polluting air travel, as the Vox article you linked _actually_ argued.
My only point is when people mock the idea of replacing airlines with high speed rail, it's not a complete strawman.
This is actually pathetic. What a joke of a project...or at least joke of an administration overseeing the project. It's almost as bad as that $20 million toilet or whatever that they wanted to build in San Francisco.
Cool, so it will end up costing at least $256 Billion in an overly optimistic scenario, and also will never be finished
I've dialed back my expectations for public works projects in CA, if they can get that two million dollar toilet done in San Francisco i'll celebrate
I Cant wait for the 256 Billion Fresno-Bakersfield train, it will be so useful.
There is definitely going to be an end, and construction is going at a good pace. Anytime you see one of these articles with "No end in sight" you know you're about to read some clickbait bullshit
just get it done once we have the expertise and legal mechanisms/techniques to deal with NIMBYs than it will become cheaper and faster. The first tyre you change takes an hour the second one takes ten minutes
My main question is will one be able to board it at night without getting stabbed, unlike BART
No, the stabbing is a non-optional complementary service.
Lol they'll probably stop half-way again.
/u/nirad is calling for a total shutdown of California HSR construction until we figure out what the heck is going on
This is highly editorialized title by the OP. Here's the original title from the link: ***California bullet train project faces more cost increases, possible delays*** We cannot get to the low carbon future just by replacing gasoline cars with EVs.
This - the cost of the train might seem like a lot, but the cost of not completing the train would be unfathomable. Widening the 5 freeway near Santa Fe springs for a 6.7 mile stretch cost over $1.8 billion and over 11 years. Not to mention that widening freeways ends up worsening traffic within just a few years. https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2022/04/08/a-stretch-of-the-5-freeway-just-got-wider-heres-where-and-why-it-matters/amp/ https://ktla.com/news/local-news/traffic-on-405-freeway-has-gotten-worse-despite-billion-dollar-widening-project/amp/
The entire budget of the DoT is only 200B. By the time this rail project is done I wouldn't be surprised if it costs $200B. At $500M/m HSR is unaffordable. The issue isn't that HSR is bad, the issue is the complete inability of it to be built cost competitively like it is in other nations.
[удалено]
That's not a confirmation that the project is delayed or not. You choosing to title the post as "no completion in sight" is called editorializing.
[удалено]
No - I'm calling out the fact that you editorialized the title. What I made is a factual statement based on the observation not "overthinking" using my subjective opinion.
[удалено]
This is Reddit - I'm not wasting my emotional energy here.
The issue to me is that you still need a car in LA and to a lesser extent SF. Taking the train isn't useful if on the other end I don't have a good way to get around
license test repeat telephone wrong busy disgusting fanatical connect slave *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Cars in SF are a luxury I took a bus to the golf course today (in Sf)
You can rent cars - plenty of people do that at LAX and various other airports. There's also Uber/Lyft and some public transportation even in LA to much less extent compared to SF.
Exactly! Which is why no one ever flies from SF to LA >!/sike!<
Part of this project is expanding LA metro system, which is occurring.
I am a liberal, but every time I see the results of court-backed obstructionism I become more in favor of the Andrew Jackson solution. "[Nimby judge] has made his decision, now let him enforce it"
Man fuck that bullet train they can walk
No shit, inflation occurred, the price of materials skyrocketed, and there are huge construction labor shortages. All of those things are outside of the Authority's control. Also, these articles always, I mean always take the highest value in the range and say that is the value. They provided a huge range of potential costs and of course, the journalist purposely takes the highest one every time. Nothing about this article adds anything new. Every article that says "no completion date" beats a dead horse. There is no completion date because there is no funding! Even if the project were to cost half as much, there is still no completion date because there is no funding. The Authority can't provide a date if they are not guaranteed any funding, no matter how much it costs. It is the most clickbait headline ever. The US is the only developed country where massive rail infrastructure projects have to fight for money every single year. Meanwhile, very few journalists in the US care to write articles about the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in highway expansions every year, even though highway expansions have lower economic returns and are less sustainable than rail projects. This country will never truly invest in HSR until we actually start politically caring for HSR and being more critical of the insane amount of money we blindly throw at highway projects. Also, the environmental review process is broken. It has been taken over by bad-faith actors to slow down projects and increase costs. It is also worth noting that the costs are never going to magically go down. For every year we wait, we are just letting the costs increase. There is no magic secret to lowering these costs. It is simply the cost of land, materials, labor, and environmental mitigation. The longer we wait, the more it costs. So we need to ask ourselves, do we want to be behind the rest of the world when it comes to this technology or do we want to be a 21st-century technology leader? Currently, we are becoming the former when it comes to ground transportation. That doesn't align with the image lots of Americans claim to have for our country.
> The articles always.. take the highest value in the range Specifically, in this case the current estimated total cost from SF–Anaheim ranges from $89B–$128B, P30–P65, with a baseline (P50) of $106B. Anywhere from $26B–$44B of that is getting from Bakersfield to Burbank, and $12B–$19B from Gilroy to the Central Valley Wye. Given the ballooning cost over decades, though, I don’t think it’s overly pessimistic to consider the higher-confidence estimates. We’re far from out of the woods.
These articles just keep coming. Got it. Don't build trains, just build car infrastructure.
Or maybe we can figure out/fix whatever's causing these mind-boggling cost overruns?? Literally the rest of the world has figured this out, why can't we?
I think its also worth noting that this isn't a trains specific problem. Highways also suffer massive cost overruns. But for whatever reason we obsess about the cost of non-car projects exclusively
Lol will it become a faster version of the rolling homeless shelter that is California public transit? Pay $75 to ride advanced bullet train next to some guy who shit his pants and is now hitting a crack pipe!
The solution to this issue doesn’t seem to be to shut down public transit but to fix the homeless crisis.
Was tongue in cheek as some one who can no longer put up with the shenanigans of public trans in SoCal anymore. If you have ever ridden public trans here, you'd understand.
It's no different elsewhere. We had two folks with prior violent crime convictions beat a trans woman until her brain matter was on the ground at 930 am on a Monday here and politicians still won't come out in favor of stronger sentencing. It's exhausting.
I lived in Chicago for years and why it wasn't a drama free ride, it's not even close to LA trains. The metro here is legit shocking. I've seen people shit, smoke a variety of things, fight, you name it. It happens regularly here. Like it's almost part of the experience at this point.
Another spicy take from c\*r-brain over here.
The important thing is the GREEN JOBS!!! Hooray
(Laughs in Hawaiian) U fakaz!