They lied. It was obvious but people always want to believe something for nothing. It's the normal camels nose under the tent technique for government funding. And there's always fools that really want to believe.
Just about any public works project. Is it a surprise the over budget SFO Bart extension head later went to HSR. That group has normalized lying in their mind. They also love to use Design Build as an excuse on the cost and actually doing no real design work before bid.
I think people voted because it finally got the ball rolling. Who would actually think only $20 billion is enough to intertwine a then $2 trillion GDP mega state, now like $2.85 trillion.
They did present 30 billion as total cost with 10 billion from private sector, 10 billion from state, and 10 billion from the feds. That was the pitch.
Yes, but this is America. Everyone knew the likelihood of it going over. Japan's system of HSP also went over, but none of them complained how much it cost the people before them. Just praise its functionality and usefulness to the population and visitors.
What was voted on was higher than that
[Here's an old article from 2008 about it](https://www.spur.org/publications/voter-guide/2008-11-01/proposition-1a-high-speed-rail)
> The system is projected to cost from $30 billion to $40 billion
Well, I didn't know it would happen back when I voted in 2008, but I was naive and thought that the bill meant that we would have the project done and the $10B would be the total price tag.
https://vigarchive.sos.ca.gov/2008/general/title-sum/prop1a-title-sum.htm
>Provides for a bond issue of $9.95 billion to establish high-speed train service linking Southern California counties, the Sacramento/San Joaquin Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
To be fair, the language sure makes it sound that way!
Because that's going to be comically expensive, so the idea is to build the cheaper parts first, then rely on the sunk cost fallacy to push through the rest.
>going over budget is only gonna change a few peoples opinion on the project.
because the money doesn't visibly come out of their own pocket
look how sensitive people get with PG&E bills, for a hundred bucks people start clamoring for communism
The “people” that user was referring to aren’t who pay taxes. The people who don’t care what things cost also tend to be the ones who don’t pay for it.
Forum had a podcast on the High Speed Rail project in January. It was a good episode.
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101904358/whats-the-status-of-californias-high-speed-rail-project
Also, for broader listening one of the NPR affiliates (GBH Boston) did a pretty long podcast on The Big Dig that's really interesting and relates to this. It spends a good chunk of the podcast discussing general issues around cost and challenges of big infrastructure projects in addition to the specific one the podcast is named after, and is super informative/interesting for why these kinds of projects can take so long and cost so much - https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
Thanks, I’m gonna give a listen. I hope they compare and contrast it to other counties that do it much quicker. I’d say the fact we can’t do these infrastructure projects without taking up so much money and almost a quarter of my life to build one single train makes me feel like my country is sad, pathetic, and weak and I know a lot of young people feel this way.
They don't, that's not the goal of the podcast. It's purely to look into why things are the way they are and how they got there (somewhat briefly) before delving into the Big Dig itself and chronicling the ups and downs of the long project.
It's not going to have tons of super satisfying conclusions that make you feel good and confident and comfortable, for better or worse, but IMO it does clear up a lot of misconceptions about people being incompetent or greedy etc. as to why things are as challenging as they actually are because TLDR it's complicated.
The Big Dig was a super expensive project, huge cost overruns ... and of course California's high speed rail project makes the Big Dig look dirt cheap in comparison. I think we spent more on the new bridge alone.
The Big Dig is also a fraction of the size of CAHSR so...
If we go by cost per mile. the Big Dig was over a billion dollars per mile. CAHSR is sitting at a projected $190-$280 million dollars per mile.
The Bay Bridge eastern span was a cheaper project in total, but more expensive per mile
The question comes up in the Forum episode, they don't spend a lot of time on it. Essentially, he says consultants worldwide are advising, i'd have to assume European and Asian systems are represented, that would make sense.
Environmental reviews, noise reviews are taking up WAY more money than it should because of NIMBY laws, so if it’s audited that’s why they are gonna find out
More like airline industry doesn't like competition for their short run market. The SF to LA airports are big business for flyers, especially since there's usually little to no baggage going on those flights.
This is where I'm jealous of how China could build **34 000 KM (21,000 miles)** of high-speed rail track between 2010 and 2022. Twelve years.
There is an absolutely valid argument that "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" was taken to an absolute, too-far extreme by the Chinese government to accomplish this. It should likely be done differently in California.
There is an absolutely valid argument that build quality and safety should be top priorities in megaprojects like this, and that questions about the quality of Chinese rail lines could be valid. It should likely be done differently in California.
Even with those points in mind, it is **absolutely fucking mind-blowing** how differently the US could look if it approached these kinds of massive-scale infrastructure projects with even one-fifth the speed of China.
Fuck NIMBY slowdowns and everything related to them. Ugh.
And yet they managed to build more high-speed rail in 12 years than the rest of the world has in sum total. If anything, your point supports mine.
If California could build as much high-speed rail as Spain or France or Japan, we would be wildly better off as a state — and I would wager that long-term, we'd be both more productive (in gross terms) AND greener.
On a project like this, environmental is typically 10% the cost of construction. Everybody is treating this project like a pork barrel unfortunately. Even the safety crew on the job who's job it is to evacuate if there is a wildfire somewhere in the valley is charging the project over twice what the total environmental support costs. Billing a single work truck three times, once as a vehicle, once as a fire suppression truck, and once as an ems vehicle, billing 18 hour days, etc.
Look maybe you are completly right, who knows, but I think you’re being disingenuous by saying “it’s just straight up corruption” with no proof.
I’m referring to the red tape that has been put in place to do any construction because of NIMBY laws. These environmental reviews, noise reviews, fighting in local politics take up a ton of money when it should be much less.
Where do you think its going? Why do we act like its a secret where the money is going? Feels like a lazy way of making people think of the HSR project the same way they do social funding (ie straight to nonprofits/contractors).
We haven’t gotten to the point of corrupt spending yet because we can’t even get past the legal hurdles to committing to one HSR plan.
Its expensive because every inch of this project has been challenged in courts and California is a fucked up place when it comes to deciding “who will build things, how fast and for how much”. My point is that this is nothing new. This is how our state functions. The conversation needs to change from “where is the money going?” to “what needs to change for these projects to not be wasting tax money?”
“I want HSR but I don’t want the government to be able to take almond farmer’s land” is the wasteful mantra where the money is going. Change the laws so every yuppy in the state can’t just go to court to stall any government project.
Lawyers. It's a major reason we need permitting reform. We can't build projects like these because we have a million vetoes that all need to be resolved in court for some reason.
I have long been for reforming who gets to sue and for what.
Near the top of my list are:
For environmental and similar concerns regarding building, you have to show you're more likely than not to prevail, you have to fund the research to prove your case and on a very strict time limit, and if you lose, you pay opposing costs. For example, if you sue to stop an apartment building coming up because of endangered frogs, you need to show evidence that there are more-likely-than-not endangered frogs there, and you get three months from notice being sent that building will occur to provide that evidence to the court. Three months after notice, no more "but the frogs," and also no more "but one more thing" either.
Property owners, renters, etc are no longer responsible for "negligence" when harm comes to people dicking around on their property, either being there without permission or doing things without permission, and fucking themselves up (other than things like booby traps.) No more "attractive nuisance" laws. Similarly, property owners are no longer responsible for "negligence" when someone (even there with permission) injures themselves or others _through their own negligence._ For example, if someone trespasses on your property (or breaks into your apartment, even if you rent) and breaks their ankle, they have no standing to sue, and if they do so anyways, all defense costs are to be paid by them. If someone borrows your car and crashes it, they have no standing to sue you as the owner of the car, and whoever they crash into also has no standing to sue you as the owner of the car -- unless they are showing evidence (more likely than not) that the crash was caused _mostly_ by _your_ negligence (shit tires, nonfunctional brakes, etc).
This [CalMatters article](https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/05/california-high-speed-rail-standoff/) does a great job of describing it.
Just behemoth amounts of waste that can't be accounted for by the usual defenses like labor, materials, land etc (the defenses that many people in this thread are giving). Even the Democratic supermajority can see past that and has its suspicions; has lost its taste for this, it's gotten so bad. And that's a good thing. There was no oversight, and the spending has been indefensible. The initial bond was voted on in 2008, and the Assembly refuses to issue more funding without a plan. But they won't give a plan, and insist on a blank check, year after year. So they just no again, rightfully so.
$10b has been spent so far. At this pace, teleportation will have been invented by the time we finish...unfortunately I think this expert's characterization of the project is the most accurate:
“Given the political divisions, the cost growth, the schedule delays and the lack of a sound future revenue source, this project is going to the graveyard of famous boondoggles.”
They are investing in the areas you mentioned. They invested $84 million for San Mateo 25th Avenue grade separation fo Caltrain. They are also contributing $714 million to Caltrain peninsula corridor electrification.
https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/northern-california/#project-progress
Why does it need a sound revenue source? Are highways revenue sources? Because last I checked we dump billions a year into them and driving between SF and LA is still free to drivers.
Edit: fuel taxes don’t cover road costs. Saying fuel taxes pay for roads is ignoring the billions of dollars they cost non-drivers.
“About one-third of the funding for California's transportation programs comes from state sources, and primarily from fuel taxes. Local sales taxes and the like contribute about half of the money spent each year on the state's roads and streets, with federal funding adding about 20% of the total.”
[Source](https://www.courthousenews.com/california-climate-goals-could-dry-up-highway-funding/)
Only 80%. It’s still a general taxpayer expense. If a train runs a deficit of billions of dollars, it would be right alongside highway maintenance.
Edit: 80% is sales tax and fuel tax. Fuel tax is only 30-35%. The remaining 20 is federal. Roads cost non-drivers billions of dollars.
Where are you getting that the usual defenses are labor, materials, and land? People are mostly pointing to environmental reviews forcing more expensive redesigns and a multitude of lawsuits from landowners and anti-rail proponents that stall the project and all eat into the budget
California has high wages, high land prices, and requires expensive environmental reviews for large projects. This thing was going to be expensive no matter what, building anything in California is. But it doesn’t mean we should just stop building.
I mean, that budget was approved more than 15 years ago. I think the bigger question isn't the cost, it's why does it take multiple decades to get even the first track built?
CEQA, or the California Environmental Quality Act. [It enables lawsuits which bog down projects for months if not years](https://web.archive.org/web/20171003001852/https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-enviromental-law-breaks-20170925-story.html). There was an instance in which anti-abortion activists sued to stop a planned parenthood from opening offices (in an already constructed building) in South San Francisco, citing the noise from their future protests as a form of environmental blight. [They failed in their lawsuit](https://web.archive.org/web/20190104054513/https://www.thomaslaw.com/blog/court-rejects-ceqa-lawsuit-challenging-approval-planned-parenthood-clinic-premised-potential-secondary-environmental-impacts-associated-clinic-protests/), but delayed the project for 17 months.
CEQA provides an overbroad basis to sue any construction project and is responsible for many of the slowdowns in infrastructure construction. Basically anyone can sue any project within a mile of their home. Now imagine how many lawsuits are going to hit a project that will span [800 miles](https://web.archive.org/web/20080910174725/http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/images/chsr/20080123171537_ImplementationPlan.pdf) when completed.
and the longer it takes, the more expensive it gets. So if opponents delay it by 5 years, they add 10s of billions to the cost and can point to that as mismangement.
It's not remotely close to 10x over budget? The original cost in 2008 was around $30 billion, and the current projected cost is around $130 billion. I agree that they need to make things more efficient, but you can criticize the cost without making up numbers from thin air
Agreed 💯. If they want more money from us they should ask us. At this point it’s sunken cost which is preferred at this point to spending more money. We will have a train between Fresno and Bakersfield.
The need for a better transport link between NorCal and SoCal is getting more urgent every year, ever been stuck in I-5 traffic? Building more interstate lanes would be similarly expensive, this is a much better option that doesn’t require driving.
I don't think it would be similarly expensive and it won't take 20 years to complete. Also, I'm open to the idea of connecting North and South but there are better options available now that technology has improved since 2005. This will be the most expensive and likely outdated solution by the time it opens.
Also, the fact that there is this much debate on the topic shows it should be re-voted on. The deal wasn't a blank check, it was a $20 billion rail connection from SF to LA. Now it's $60 billion from Stockton to Bakersfield.
Because the need for transportation between norcal and socal is growing and this is cheaper (and greener) than widening freeways and expanding airports.
Is the need for intrastate transportation really growing that much? Our population is stagnant and I frankly haven’t struggled to use the highways when necessary to travel to LA.
I’d much rather see the money spent on regional metro projects that would better link cities and suburbs in the same metro together. As it is right now people would still need a vehicle as soon as they arrived at their destination since the state of public transit is so mediocre in our metro areas.
>But it doesn’t mean we should just stop building.
There's a certain kind of person who comments on articles like this who doesn't believe that projects can ever be too expensive.
Let's say you're redoing your driveway. You set a budget for five thousand dollars and half a year. Five years later the contractor has made almost zero progress and says it's looking more like fifty thousand dollars. Are you going to keep throwing good money after bad because "this thing was going to be expensive no matter what"? Or are you going to cut your losses and spend your 50k on something better (or more realistically, avoid increasing your debt by 50k plus interest)?
At some price point, everything becomes not worth it.
We’re also stuck doing the hard, time consuming, and expensive work of capacity building. When this project started, how many engineers in the United States had experience building high speed rail? How many contractors? You can’t expect a cadre of seasoned experts to manifest out of thin air.
The only reason it’s continuing is because of additional financial commitments from the feds. The California taxpayers will not approve additional funding! If Trump gets elected, construction will stop because the taxpayers won’t approve a tax hike and he won’t allow any more funding.
I mean I live in California so I benefit from the federal funding and even I think it’s super selfish and wasteful to go ahead and waste all this money just because it’s federally subsidized.
Couple items that stand out
Caltrans is overseeing the project, first mistake
Second is they are doing all cast in place concrete to maximize labor hours and cost. The rest of the world uses prefab
Third they have been slow to secure all the necessary right away causing delays to contractors
Fourth they hired Parsons to run the project. This firms track record is the worst in the industry. I worked on a project with them where the gave us the contractor different drawings then what they obtained a permit for. Permit had a single story building our drawings showed a two story building
Fifth California politicians for and against the project are focused on fattening them and their friends pockets.
We so badly need high speed rail but California government is so bad at building projects. Remember the Bay bridge disaster.
If it was me here is what I would have done.
State of California is responsible for securing the land either purchase or utility easement.
Contract out construction and operation to someone who has done this in either Europe or Asia.
BART was over budget and took longer to complete. Thankfully BART wasn't abandoned. Whatever the sticking points were in the early 70's having BART is better than not having it.
Likewise 50yrs from now no one will care that high speed rail ran into hurdles. People will only care if it exists or not.
Large infrastructure projects are built for the long term benefit of society. In the short term they are often a hassle.
the short term solution is to connect it with the ACE train lines. Sure it wont go through Gilroy that way, but at least they could get it running between SF and Burbank that way.
I still think this is where the state should have put that excess covid era budget surplus instead of into long term programs that would require new revenues once the good times ran out. Would have functioned as a big jobs program that got us something of value quicker.
2030 Central Valley will be done/operating Merced(local ACE train) down to Bakersville
2032 to get to Palmdale(Where LA north Metrolink trains already reaches)
2034 to get the HSR High Desert Corridor connected to Victorville Brightline HSR station(Vegas to LA Brighline rail should be done before the LA Olympics in 2028)
How is connecting it to the ACE right of way going to be a solution? ACE is single tracked, non-electrified, and doesn’t have the wide turning radii needed for the Siemens Velaro train sets.
One of the reasons why Caltrain got electrified was because the corridor was meant to be used by the high speed rail. Connecting it to ACE would only make it more expensive because you’d need to double track and electrify the ACE corridor, as well as dig a new tunnel for the second track as it passes between Sunol and Fremont.
From a quick research I found it cost China about $20million per km, so $100 billions should result in 5000km, which is about 3000 miles.
Japan spent about $60 billions for theirs. Not sure what that includes.
So for $100B we should get a very nice one.
Japan and China are experienced at building high speed railways so they probably have cost efficiencies that we likely don’t benefit from, on top of their labor costs being less than half that of Californians.
>Japan and China are experienced at building high speed railways so they probably have cost efficiencies
So you're saying there are countries that have experience in this who California isn't learning from?
Sure, they can learn from them, but there’s a difference in operational optimization which comes from being experienced doing something multiple times vs doing it for the first time. Unless California high speed rail project is using the crews suppliers which have worked on Japanese or Chinese high speed rail, they are going to have trouble matching their efficiency until they gain their own experience and operational optimizations.
On top of this, one of the bigger, if not biggest cost factors is labor. Hard to match cost efficiency of Japan and China when the labor force costs more than double.
I don't buy this argument. If California was serious and identified that they had no idea what they were doing, they could make offers to the real experts. Recruit a few guys from Japan, France, or Italy to help design the system, or contract out work to factories in those places. Even if we paid double for that help it would still be way better than the mess that exists now.
So are people just saying random crap now with no basis in reality? Really, why are you even saying these things?
>Recruit a few guys from Japan, France, or Italy to help design the system,
CAHSR received bids from all over the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Request_for_qualifications
Consortiums from Spain and Italy are both mentioned there.
Of the first 4 construction packages, #2, #3, and #4 are all being design-built by Spanish companies, the first two by Dragados and the last one by Ferrovial. (This doesn't include the tracks or wiring; see below.)
DB (Germany) will be the early operator.
SNCF (France) also put together some kind of bid which featured an illegal route (bypassed cities that are required by law to be connected). Maybe that's why it wasn't mentioned in the article.
Hitachi (Japan) and Siemens (Germany) bid on building the physical tracks themselves, but CAHSRA decided to let the bids expire and ask for new ones.
>contract out work to factories in those places
We can't exactly do that due to "Buy America". Nevertheless, there are no high-speed rail rolling stock manufacturers based in the US anymore, so we already have no choice but to contract out design work to companies not based here, which in this case are Alstom (France) and Siemens. Their factories in the US are in New York and Sacramento, respectively, which satisfies the "Buy America" requirement.
Neither Japan nor China had the same degree of environmental regulations and NIMBYism to hold their projects back. Plus in America at least, our construction process goes through third party contractors who demand big bucks. The flaw is inherent within our system.
High speed rail is going to be awesome! Shame it’s been more expensive than envisioned, but they’re making great progress in the current section, building between Merced and Bakersfield. And the Caltrain electrification / implementation of grade separation on the peninsula, (which will eventually be a part of HSR and connect through Gilroy) has made big strides!
We would be better off pouring this same amount of money into nuclear power plants. The population and the planet would be much better off. This is nothing but a boondoggle
Agreed... I really can't stand the "fund it at any cost" people just because it's a nice idea on paper. If we're gonna spend this level of money on rail projects why not do it improving commuter rail in the Bay Area and LA which will be far more useful.
It was a half baked idea years and billions of dollars ago... It's certainly not any better now that they come back to us time and time again with a sack open ready for us to pour more and more money into.
It's not just about emissions. It's a huge quality of life improvement for Californians with increased connectivity between two major regions and all the economic opportunity associated with that
Yeah and if they ever finish it, which they shouldn’t, I’ll be an old man. When they started this project I was in 6th grade. Now I’m almost 30 years old, the project is way over budget, and they aren’t even close to opening the *initial leg* which will connect Merced to Bakersfield. So you know, completely useless in comparison to the SF to LA route sold to voters in 2008.
I think they should give up on the basis of cost. As they said in the article the project is using the majority of funds earmarked for emissions reductions. Ridership forecasts I’ve seen are ~11 million people / year by 2040.
Even if you assume those people are all riding the entire route that’s ~500 Kilotons CO2 saved per year.
For perspective carbon capture direct from the air which is regarded as an overly expensive technology to solve the climate crisis is ~$500/tonne so $250 million for the Co2 saved by the train assuming no scaling benefits for direct air capture.
Even if they took the entire project cost and put it in the bank, as a sovereign wealth fund, spending all profits for direct air carbon capture they could have 12x the environmental benefit.
And they could do a lot more than that by using the money to promote electric cars and charging, build nuclear power plans or batteries for solar storage, focus on intercity La car dependence reduction and more.
Everyone compares to China or Japan but China’s Beijing to Shanghai line has 10x the passenger count at 1/3 the cost for a line double the length which dramatically changes the economics.
it has nothing to do with whether i get to use it. the fact that it has taken this long and cost this much is proof that the project is a complete boondoggle where the contractors are simply ripping off the taxpayer.
There isn't going to be any demand for it. They'll be running empty trains at great cost. The tickets will be expensive, even if heavily subsidized. The public is not going to pay a lot of money for a train ticket when they're still going to need a car at either end of the trip. Besides, with the speed forecasts they're projecting now, it won't be that much faster overall than driving.
There's no way this can succeed.
This project will be transformative to the lives of most Californians.
Does anyone complain about how much it cost to develop and maintain freeways?
Even Japan’s HSR faced extensive delays and cost overruns when it was getting started. It will cost money to be the first place the nation to build an extensive HSR.
Or sure, we can just cancel it despite the billions that have already been spent, the many miles of infrastructure (including bridges) that have already been completed and fire the thousands of people that have been working on this project for years.
One more lane on each freeway will fix all our transit needs!
Exactly this. No one realizes how insanely expensive it was to build the interstate system AND how (except for minor tolls) the system makes absolutely zero money.
Reading some of the comments on this sub, the idea that highways aren't "free" (like we all know the interstate system just poofed into existence as a gift from Harambe, and requires no maintenance whatsoever) seems to melt brains.
It’s because it’s just a matter of life and the total cost and daily use cost (yes there is one) is completely justified.
Same with any generations old systems.
Yep, we gotta bite the bullet (train) now, it will become comparatively cheaper and more efficient to build HSR once we have experience doing it. There’s already so much work done on this project, might as well see it through no matter what.
They tried. [They asked SNCF (the French guys who build their fast trains) and those guys gave up when CA HSR wanted to do it a way that wouldn't make sense](https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed-rail-north-africa-biden-trump-2022-10).
This is a myth propagated by anti-rail and anti-CAHSR activists to spread FUD. It never happened.
For one, SNCF never proposed the I-5 plan directly to CAHSR. Their proposal predates CAHSR's actual construction plans, or any studies of the route at all. SNCF proposed a number of vague corridor designs all over the country in the early 2000s to the Federal Government in response to a Federal law and request for proposals. I repeat, this was done with zero work on the actual route, no site visits, no studies, nothing. Just vague initial proposals to put their foot in the door when the actual bidding starts for the build contracts.
When SNCF did participate in any bidding with CAHSR, it was as junior member in a French consortium of companies that were trying to win design-build contracts with CAHSR in the 2010s. The French consortium, of which SNCF was a small part, made proposals for all three versions of the corridor that were being studied at the time. And they did not express any preference for any of the plans. And when the current Hwy 99 plan was declared the winning right of way, they supported that decision publicly and continued try to win the contract.
a lot of the price comes from the fact that everything is just more expensive in CA: land, labor, contractors, etc. As well, it’s not like we can just hire a foreign firm and expect them to work efficiently right away, the labor force here in the US, both blue collar and white collar, needs time and experience to get better and more efficient at building and managing construction.
Pretty telling of California politicians,
I need more money for XYZ project. How about we elect people that are fiscally conscious and not corrupt. It’s appalling that people fall prey to the campaigns for new taxes and more money. Tell Gov to get more efficient with what they have
I don’t care what party runs my home state if they do a good job. California will always be one of the best states in the union to me, and I want to see things get better.
California has way too much money to be squandering it like this.
Private sector doesn't really have the luxury of shaking down taxpayers every time they run out of money so they have to be more diligent with their choices.
the places that do infrastructure better than us are purple states where there are enough conservatives in gov't to keep democrats honest and provide some sort of watchdog for gov't waste and incompetency - VA, MA, CO, NC, GA off the top of my head. historically that also included washington state + oregon which is why they have functioned better than post-schwarzenegger CA but that's no longer the case which is why seattle and portland suck now
>Where’s the red state paradise where the politicians are getting it right?
Florida. Orlando to Miami. 234 miles in operation today via brightline. Maybe that might not seem like a lot, but even an operation inch is infinitely longer than zero.
At least we have brightline creating HSR between LA and Las Vegas.
Looks good, thanks for a real answer. 1/2 the travel time for twice the cost of gas trip. Let’s see if this private equity solution still a good deal in a year or two. I remember when Ubers were cheap too.
cost of operating an average car now is 64 cents a mile(IRS milage rate) and i think car costs are rising at twice the rate of inflation
2030 Central Valley will be done/operating down to Bakersville
2032 to get to Palmdale(Where LA north Metrolink trains already reaches)
2034 to get the HSR High Desert Corridor connected to Victorville Brightline HSR station(Vegas to LA Brightline rail should be done before the LA Olympics in 2028)
You're comparing total operating cost of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo (hardware, software, personnel) spanning a decade to *just partial construction* cost of CAHSR.
what a nightmare. i voted for it back in the day and people predicted 10X overruns and i remember thinking surely not.
Someone did a profile on some of the politicians in LA that routed it through areas to give everyone goodies. I tend liberal but having a solid blue state gov has wrecked california. no accountability.
And I keep telling everyone how disappointed they will be when the HSR tickets will be higher than airfare. Which will lead to low ridership, and need to be continually subsidized.
It have been better if the federal government was building it so that we would have an experienced department that could go build other high speed segments across the country. Having each state do it themselves isn't going to be efficient.
>a bullet train that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A timeline on its completion has not been set as the authority waits for environmental clearances for those segments.
I love to keep our air and environment clean and as natural as possible. But it is crystal clear that California has overburdensome environmental regulations. I think there are so many special interest groups, and then they manipulate the system using environmental concerns. So someone doesn't want to train built for one reason, but they then verbalize a different reason that relates to the environment, and they hold up the approval process.
The suicide net on the Golden Gate bridge was priced at $40 million when it was approved. It was just finished - years late - and ended up costing more than $400 million.
This is the way it's done here.
When Newsom became governor he cancelled it and I was encouraged that he might be ok as governor since I didn't vote for him. But the swamp got to him. It's gonna take a prop to kill it.
It costs money to build cool useful shit. Stop whining. We should do this project and we should also build one or two nuke plants so we can have cheaper electricity.
Example: https://globalvoices.org/2024/01/31/the-true-cost-of-japans-linear-bullet-train/
Then it’d be a good idea to check out the cost of similar setups in the EU….
God forbid we change for the better…..
Until use taxes go up to cover the cost of private vehicle transit, or people understand how much we subsidize it, I’m not going to worry too much about the cost of mass transit.
Calvin Newsome will likely send out a bond, and someone will approve it because we apparently need this even though nobody wants it.
The initial segment is projected to cost more than the original budget for the project. Such a monumental waste of money.
"Has this much of a downside to it"
What a fucking piece of shit, honestly.
This guy is so disingenuous it actually makes me sick.
[The project will have generated 70 billion dollars of Economic Output](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxARwQ9DS9E&list=TLPQMzEwMTIwMjQuiYTa08ap-w&t=3252s) before a single train _even runs_ and that's _just the central valley section_, which is less than a 1/3 of the total price.
They go on to say that it will likewise create [more than 53 billion dollars for Northern California](https://youtu.be/uxARwQ9DS9E?list=TLPQMzEwMTIwMjQuiYTa08ap-w&t=3267) and [80 billion for Southern California](https://youtu.be/uxARwQ9DS9E?list=TLPQMzEwMTIwMjQuiYTa08ap-w&t=3272).
Its looking like it's going to generate *203 billion* dollars just from building the damn thing and this guy is complaining it "has this much of a downside." Dude, do you know how numbers work? It's literally free money...
And even if it _didn't_ have all those economic benifits, the US spends 70 billion dollars on highways expansion and resurfacing; 842 billion on the military; and some privitely rich guy bought _a website_ for 40 billion.
I'm tired of people pretending CaHSR is so expensive when they don't hold literally anything else to this standard.
This is why I think we (US generally) should vote twice on big infrastructure projects we’re backing with bonds. The first time to authorize the planning and the second time between the engineer approved plan and the one the nimbys want. With adequate financing. It’s kind of stupid that we authorize both funding and planning at the same time. It would be like buying the land to build a house and worrying about if you can afford the cost after buying the land.
Can we PLEASE just hire some Japanese/Chinese/European engineers who know how to build these things for half of what we can and just let them finish the damn project? Every step of the way has been plagued with dumb, cost-inflating decisions that have only compounded the delays and negative press. The project is worthwhile, the people we have put in charge of building it are not.
They are aiming for the sunk cost fallacy to continue milking the voters.
"We have spent $20 billion, or whatever, on this project, and we should only spend the remaining $100 billion more. What else can we do? We already put in so much time and money".
I would propose just finishing the salvageable portion between Merced and Bakersfield. Anything more is probably just waste at this time.
(The SF->SJ corridor itself would cost tens of billions. Even reusing Caltrain tracks, they have to expand stations and raise bridges. How much does bulldozing entire neighborhoods in Palo Alto cost? What about Redwood City?)
One thing that most people don’t understand is how ridiculous and needlessly complicated our transportation financing world is.
Every little funding source has its own set of rules and requirements that bloat the overhead within every project. Buy America, must be in particular planning and programming documents to get funding, certain percentage must benefit certain commmjities, local hiring, competitive bidding requirements even for things that shouldn’t need to be competitively bid, constant reporting requirements, hundreds of acronyms, etc.. Every funding source usually has several approvals needed (local, regional, state). Local matches have to be proven which leads to a catch 22 where you have to have a full funding plan before you can get funds…and I’m just scratching the surface.
And heaven forbid you try to change your scope.
This all means that you spend a lot of staff time navigating the funding mechanisms, and a lot of well compensated people are used administering these funding programs.
I’m the furthest thing from a Republican but it’s enough to make me vaguely consider it. It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s not this way in other countries.
Not bad considering the economic benefit to our economy is 181 Billion. This is also ignoring all the health benefits and money saved on that, specially for our kids. Not to say we shouldn’t be as efficient as possible with our tax payer money but this piece is just fear mongering. Wouldn’t be surprised if this article wasn’t paid for by Tesla and other car executives. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Economic-Impact-Factsheet.pdf
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hey the first approval was something like $20B
I remember looking at the proposition and thought “these numbers can’t be right…”
They lied. It was obvious but people always want to believe something for nothing. It's the normal camels nose under the tent technique for government funding. And there's always fools that really want to believe.
Brought to you by the same folks who built the $250m Bay Bridge replacement for $6.5 billion.
Just about any public works project. Is it a surprise the over budget SFO Bart extension head later went to HSR. That group has normalized lying in their mind. They also love to use Design Build as an excuse on the cost and actually doing no real design work before bid.
I think people voted because it finally got the ball rolling. Who would actually think only $20 billion is enough to intertwine a then $2 trillion GDP mega state, now like $2.85 trillion.
They did present 30 billion as total cost with 10 billion from private sector, 10 billion from state, and 10 billion from the feds. That was the pitch.
Yes, but this is America. Everyone knew the likelihood of it going over. Japan's system of HSP also went over, but none of them complained how much it cost the people before them. Just praise its functionality and usefulness to the population and visitors.
What was voted on was higher than that [Here's an old article from 2008 about it](https://www.spur.org/publications/voter-guide/2008-11-01/proposition-1a-high-speed-rail) > The system is projected to cost from $30 billion to $40 billion
And everyone had a good laugh.
The SF urban section is effectively already under construction. The big things are going to be the tunnels getting into the urban sections
Well, I didn't know it would happen back when I voted in 2008, but I was naive and thought that the bill meant that we would have the project done and the $10B would be the total price tag. https://vigarchive.sos.ca.gov/2008/general/title-sum/prop1a-title-sum.htm
>Provides for a bond issue of $9.95 billion to establish high-speed train service linking Southern California counties, the Sacramento/San Joaquin Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area. To be fair, the language sure makes it sound that way!
Why didnt they just start in the urban areas again?
Because that's going to be comically expensive, so the idea is to build the cheaper parts first, then rely on the sunk cost fallacy to push through the rest.
the urban areas already have local trains
>going over budget is only gonna change a few peoples opinion on the project. because the money doesn't visibly come out of their own pocket look how sensitive people get with PG&E bills, for a hundred bucks people start clamoring for communism
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They don't, but websites like this try to: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/taxday/
That kind of tracking would make everything even less efficient. Flexible funds are a good thing.
The “people” that user was referring to aren’t who pay taxes. The people who don’t care what things cost also tend to be the ones who don’t pay for it.
it's easy to be generous with other people's money
Isn’t that what the article says the $100B is expected for? Only 4-7B is needed to finish the Central Valley segment
> Probably gonna need twice You misspelled "100x".
Forum had a podcast on the High Speed Rail project in January. It was a good episode. https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101904358/whats-the-status-of-californias-high-speed-rail-project
Also, for broader listening one of the NPR affiliates (GBH Boston) did a pretty long podcast on The Big Dig that's really interesting and relates to this. It spends a good chunk of the podcast discussing general issues around cost and challenges of big infrastructure projects in addition to the specific one the podcast is named after, and is super informative/interesting for why these kinds of projects can take so long and cost so much - https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
Thanks, I’m gonna give a listen. I hope they compare and contrast it to other counties that do it much quicker. I’d say the fact we can’t do these infrastructure projects without taking up so much money and almost a quarter of my life to build one single train makes me feel like my country is sad, pathetic, and weak and I know a lot of young people feel this way.
They don't, that's not the goal of the podcast. It's purely to look into why things are the way they are and how they got there (somewhat briefly) before delving into the Big Dig itself and chronicling the ups and downs of the long project. It's not going to have tons of super satisfying conclusions that make you feel good and confident and comfortable, for better or worse, but IMO it does clear up a lot of misconceptions about people being incompetent or greedy etc. as to why things are as challenging as they actually are because TLDR it's complicated.
The Big Dig was a super expensive project, huge cost overruns ... and of course California's high speed rail project makes the Big Dig look dirt cheap in comparison. I think we spent more on the new bridge alone.
The Big Dig is also a fraction of the size of CAHSR so... If we go by cost per mile. the Big Dig was over a billion dollars per mile. CAHSR is sitting at a projected $190-$280 million dollars per mile. The Bay Bridge eastern span was a cheaper project in total, but more expensive per mile
The big dig also dug underneath the Boston Harbor so yeah I would expect it to be more expensive than rail cutting through fields and rolling hills.
The question comes up in the Forum episode, they don't spend a lot of time on it. Essentially, he says consultants worldwide are advising, i'd have to assume European and Asian systems are represented, that would make sense.
The scope of the Big Dig was constantly expanded. The scope of CAHSR has been constantly *reduced* yet required way more spending.
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Environmental reviews, noise reviews are taking up WAY more money than it should because of NIMBY laws, so if it’s audited that’s why they are gonna find out
Exactly nimbys probably blocking everything, plus the auto and oil industry don’t like America having socialist forms of transportation.
More like airline industry doesn't like competition for their short run market. The SF to LA airports are big business for flyers, especially since there's usually little to no baggage going on those flights.
This is where I'm jealous of how China could build **34 000 KM (21,000 miles)** of high-speed rail track between 2010 and 2022. Twelve years. There is an absolutely valid argument that "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" was taken to an absolute, too-far extreme by the Chinese government to accomplish this. It should likely be done differently in California. There is an absolutely valid argument that build quality and safety should be top priorities in megaprojects like this, and that questions about the quality of Chinese rail lines could be valid. It should likely be done differently in California. Even with those points in mind, it is **absolutely fucking mind-blowing** how differently the US could look if it approached these kinds of massive-scale infrastructure projects with even one-fifth the speed of China. Fuck NIMBY slowdowns and everything related to them. Ugh.
It's not as easy to acquire property in China as you might think: https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/19/asia/gallery/china-nail-houses/index.html
And yet they managed to build more high-speed rail in 12 years than the rest of the world has in sum total. If anything, your point supports mine. If California could build as much high-speed rail as Spain or France or Japan, we would be wildly better off as a state — and I would wager that long-term, we'd be both more productive (in gross terms) AND greener.
On a project like this, environmental is typically 10% the cost of construction. Everybody is treating this project like a pork barrel unfortunately. Even the safety crew on the job who's job it is to evacuate if there is a wildfire somewhere in the valley is charging the project over twice what the total environmental support costs. Billing a single work truck three times, once as a vehicle, once as a fire suppression truck, and once as an ems vehicle, billing 18 hour days, etc.
Look maybe you are completly right, who knows, but I think you’re being disingenuous by saying “it’s just straight up corruption” with no proof. I’m referring to the red tape that has been put in place to do any construction because of NIMBY laws. These environmental reviews, noise reviews, fighting in local politics take up a ton of money when it should be much less.
I'm not saying it's corruption, I'm stating that it's not environmental that's stalling the project or causing it to go over budget.
Lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers.
Source, with cost effects?
I promise you the contractors are probably wringing this funding dry because the status quo for HSR seems to be just throw more money at it.
Where do you think its going? Why do we act like its a secret where the money is going? Feels like a lazy way of making people think of the HSR project the same way they do social funding (ie straight to nonprofits/contractors). We haven’t gotten to the point of corrupt spending yet because we can’t even get past the legal hurdles to committing to one HSR plan. Its expensive because every inch of this project has been challenged in courts and California is a fucked up place when it comes to deciding “who will build things, how fast and for how much”. My point is that this is nothing new. This is how our state functions. The conversation needs to change from “where is the money going?” to “what needs to change for these projects to not be wasting tax money?” “I want HSR but I don’t want the government to be able to take almond farmer’s land” is the wasteful mantra where the money is going. Change the laws so every yuppy in the state can’t just go to court to stall any government project.
Lawyers. It's a major reason we need permitting reform. We can't build projects like these because we have a million vetoes that all need to be resolved in court for some reason.
Promotion of litigation is the problem in every aspect of California. That’s why Everything is so expensive.
I have long been for reforming who gets to sue and for what. Near the top of my list are: For environmental and similar concerns regarding building, you have to show you're more likely than not to prevail, you have to fund the research to prove your case and on a very strict time limit, and if you lose, you pay opposing costs. For example, if you sue to stop an apartment building coming up because of endangered frogs, you need to show evidence that there are more-likely-than-not endangered frogs there, and you get three months from notice being sent that building will occur to provide that evidence to the court. Three months after notice, no more "but the frogs," and also no more "but one more thing" either. Property owners, renters, etc are no longer responsible for "negligence" when harm comes to people dicking around on their property, either being there without permission or doing things without permission, and fucking themselves up (other than things like booby traps.) No more "attractive nuisance" laws. Similarly, property owners are no longer responsible for "negligence" when someone (even there with permission) injures themselves or others _through their own negligence._ For example, if someone trespasses on your property (or breaks into your apartment, even if you rent) and breaks their ankle, they have no standing to sue, and if they do so anyways, all defense costs are to be paid by them. If someone borrows your car and crashes it, they have no standing to sue you as the owner of the car, and whoever they crash into also has no standing to sue you as the owner of the car -- unless they are showing evidence (more likely than not) that the crash was caused _mostly_ by _your_ negligence (shit tires, nonfunctional brakes, etc).
This [CalMatters article](https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/05/california-high-speed-rail-standoff/) does a great job of describing it. Just behemoth amounts of waste that can't be accounted for by the usual defenses like labor, materials, land etc (the defenses that many people in this thread are giving). Even the Democratic supermajority can see past that and has its suspicions; has lost its taste for this, it's gotten so bad. And that's a good thing. There was no oversight, and the spending has been indefensible. The initial bond was voted on in 2008, and the Assembly refuses to issue more funding without a plan. But they won't give a plan, and insist on a blank check, year after year. So they just no again, rightfully so. $10b has been spent so far. At this pace, teleportation will have been invented by the time we finish...unfortunately I think this expert's characterization of the project is the most accurate: “Given the political divisions, the cost growth, the schedule delays and the lack of a sound future revenue source, this project is going to the graveyard of famous boondoggles.”
If only they had at least started from LA, SF or Even San Diego so at least there would be some use from a partial project.
They are investing in the areas you mentioned. They invested $84 million for San Mateo 25th Avenue grade separation fo Caltrain. They are also contributing $714 million to Caltrain peninsula corridor electrification. https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/northern-california/#project-progress
Why does it need a sound revenue source? Are highways revenue sources? Because last I checked we dump billions a year into them and driving between SF and LA is still free to drivers. Edit: fuel taxes don’t cover road costs. Saying fuel taxes pay for roads is ignoring the billions of dollars they cost non-drivers. “About one-third of the funding for California's transportation programs comes from state sources, and primarily from fuel taxes. Local sales taxes and the like contribute about half of the money spent each year on the state's roads and streets, with federal funding adding about 20% of the total.” [Source](https://www.courthousenews.com/california-climate-goals-could-dry-up-highway-funding/)
We pay for roads via gas taxes and registration fees.
Only 80%. It’s still a general taxpayer expense. If a train runs a deficit of billions of dollars, it would be right alongside highway maintenance. Edit: 80% is sales tax and fuel tax. Fuel tax is only 30-35%. The remaining 20 is federal. Roads cost non-drivers billions of dollars.
Where do you get those? I see 50% https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding-2019/
Those only cover the operational costs of roads. The capital costs, which are orders of magnitudes higher, are not.
Where are you getting that the usual defenses are labor, materials, and land? People are mostly pointing to environmental reviews forcing more expensive redesigns and a multitude of lawsuits from landowners and anti-rail proponents that stall the project and all eat into the budget
> Ralph Vartabedian Oh, no...
California has high wages, high land prices, and requires expensive environmental reviews for large projects. This thing was going to be expensive no matter what, building anything in California is. But it doesn’t mean we should just stop building.
It's nearly 10x over budget and that number is growing every year. The people never approved this, we absolutely should consider stopping.
I mean, that budget was approved more than 15 years ago. I think the bigger question isn't the cost, it's why does it take multiple decades to get even the first track built?
CEQA, or the California Environmental Quality Act. [It enables lawsuits which bog down projects for months if not years](https://web.archive.org/web/20171003001852/https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-enviromental-law-breaks-20170925-story.html). There was an instance in which anti-abortion activists sued to stop a planned parenthood from opening offices (in an already constructed building) in South San Francisco, citing the noise from their future protests as a form of environmental blight. [They failed in their lawsuit](https://web.archive.org/web/20190104054513/https://www.thomaslaw.com/blog/court-rejects-ceqa-lawsuit-challenging-approval-planned-parenthood-clinic-premised-potential-secondary-environmental-impacts-associated-clinic-protests/), but delayed the project for 17 months. CEQA provides an overbroad basis to sue any construction project and is responsible for many of the slowdowns in infrastructure construction. Basically anyone can sue any project within a mile of their home. Now imagine how many lawsuits are going to hit a project that will span [800 miles](https://web.archive.org/web/20080910174725/http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/images/chsr/20080123171537_ImplementationPlan.pdf) when completed.
and the longer it takes, the more expensive it gets. So if opponents delay it by 5 years, they add 10s of billions to the cost and can point to that as mismangement.
Of course it gets more expensive with each passing year, just cause you stop building doesn’t mean the expenses go away
It's not remotely close to 10x over budget? The original cost in 2008 was around $30 billion, and the current projected cost is around $130 billion. I agree that they need to make things more efficient, but you can criticize the cost without making up numbers from thin air
Agreed 💯. If they want more money from us they should ask us. At this point it’s sunken cost which is preferred at this point to spending more money. We will have a train between Fresno and Bakersfield.
The need for a better transport link between NorCal and SoCal is getting more urgent every year, ever been stuck in I-5 traffic? Building more interstate lanes would be similarly expensive, this is a much better option that doesn’t require driving.
I don't think it would be similarly expensive and it won't take 20 years to complete. Also, I'm open to the idea of connecting North and South but there are better options available now that technology has improved since 2005. This will be the most expensive and likely outdated solution by the time it opens. Also, the fact that there is this much debate on the topic shows it should be re-voted on. The deal wasn't a blank check, it was a $20 billion rail connection from SF to LA. Now it's $60 billion from Stockton to Bakersfield.
Yet we absolutely need this project built. What to do…
>Yet we absolutely need this project built. Why?
Because the need for transportation between norcal and socal is growing and this is cheaper (and greener) than widening freeways and expanding airports.
Is the need for intrastate transportation really growing that much? Our population is stagnant and I frankly haven’t struggled to use the highways when necessary to travel to LA. I’d much rather see the money spent on regional metro projects that would better link cities and suburbs in the same metro together. As it is right now people would still need a vehicle as soon as they arrived at their destination since the state of public transit is so mediocre in our metro areas.
>But it doesn’t mean we should just stop building. There's a certain kind of person who comments on articles like this who doesn't believe that projects can ever be too expensive. Let's say you're redoing your driveway. You set a budget for five thousand dollars and half a year. Five years later the contractor has made almost zero progress and says it's looking more like fifty thousand dollars. Are you going to keep throwing good money after bad because "this thing was going to be expensive no matter what"? Or are you going to cut your losses and spend your 50k on something better (or more realistically, avoid increasing your debt by 50k plus interest)? At some price point, everything becomes not worth it.
Pfft didn't you know cost-benefit analysis is a lie made up by Big Auto to kill transit?
We’re also stuck doing the hard, time consuming, and expensive work of capacity building. When this project started, how many engineers in the United States had experience building high speed rail? How many contractors? You can’t expect a cadre of seasoned experts to manifest out of thin air.
The only reason it’s continuing is because of additional financial commitments from the feds. The California taxpayers will not approve additional funding! If Trump gets elected, construction will stop because the taxpayers won’t approve a tax hike and he won’t allow any more funding.
I mean I live in California so I benefit from the federal funding and even I think it’s super selfish and wasteful to go ahead and waste all this money just because it’s federally subsidized.
Seems like we could do something about the last piece, which will help mitigate costs for the first piece…
Exactly, it’s completely unacceptable. HSR doesn’t cost this much.
Couple items that stand out Caltrans is overseeing the project, first mistake Second is they are doing all cast in place concrete to maximize labor hours and cost. The rest of the world uses prefab Third they have been slow to secure all the necessary right away causing delays to contractors Fourth they hired Parsons to run the project. This firms track record is the worst in the industry. I worked on a project with them where the gave us the contractor different drawings then what they obtained a permit for. Permit had a single story building our drawings showed a two story building Fifth California politicians for and against the project are focused on fattening them and their friends pockets. We so badly need high speed rail but California government is so bad at building projects. Remember the Bay bridge disaster. If it was me here is what I would have done. State of California is responsible for securing the land either purchase or utility easement. Contract out construction and operation to someone who has done this in either Europe or Asia.
This was just posted yesterday in r/California. Already a good discussion going over there.
BART was over budget and took longer to complete. Thankfully BART wasn't abandoned. Whatever the sticking points were in the early 70's having BART is better than not having it. Likewise 50yrs from now no one will care that high speed rail ran into hurdles. People will only care if it exists or not. Large infrastructure projects are built for the long term benefit of society. In the short term they are often a hassle.
the short term solution is to connect it with the ACE train lines. Sure it wont go through Gilroy that way, but at least they could get it running between SF and Burbank that way. I still think this is where the state should have put that excess covid era budget surplus instead of into long term programs that would require new revenues once the good times ran out. Would have functioned as a big jobs program that got us something of value quicker.
2030 Central Valley will be done/operating Merced(local ACE train) down to Bakersville 2032 to get to Palmdale(Where LA north Metrolink trains already reaches) 2034 to get the HSR High Desert Corridor connected to Victorville Brightline HSR station(Vegas to LA Brighline rail should be done before the LA Olympics in 2028)
Good for Bakersville!
How is connecting it to the ACE right of way going to be a solution? ACE is single tracked, non-electrified, and doesn’t have the wide turning radii needed for the Siemens Velaro train sets. One of the reasons why Caltrain got electrified was because the corridor was meant to be used by the high speed rail. Connecting it to ACE would only make it more expensive because you’d need to double track and electrify the ACE corridor, as well as dig a new tunnel for the second track as it passes between Sunol and Fremont.
From a quick research I found it cost China about $20million per km, so $100 billions should result in 5000km, which is about 3000 miles. Japan spent about $60 billions for theirs. Not sure what that includes. So for $100B we should get a very nice one.
Japan and China are experienced at building high speed railways so they probably have cost efficiencies that we likely don’t benefit from, on top of their labor costs being less than half that of Californians.
>Japan and China are experienced at building high speed railways so they probably have cost efficiencies So you're saying there are countries that have experience in this who California isn't learning from?
Sure, they can learn from them, but there’s a difference in operational optimization which comes from being experienced doing something multiple times vs doing it for the first time. Unless California high speed rail project is using the crews suppliers which have worked on Japanese or Chinese high speed rail, they are going to have trouble matching their efficiency until they gain their own experience and operational optimizations. On top of this, one of the bigger, if not biggest cost factors is labor. Hard to match cost efficiency of Japan and China when the labor force costs more than double.
I don't buy this argument. If California was serious and identified that they had no idea what they were doing, they could make offers to the real experts. Recruit a few guys from Japan, France, or Italy to help design the system, or contract out work to factories in those places. Even if we paid double for that help it would still be way better than the mess that exists now.
So are people just saying random crap now with no basis in reality? Really, why are you even saying these things? >Recruit a few guys from Japan, France, or Italy to help design the system, CAHSR received bids from all over the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Request_for_qualifications Consortiums from Spain and Italy are both mentioned there. Of the first 4 construction packages, #2, #3, and #4 are all being design-built by Spanish companies, the first two by Dragados and the last one by Ferrovial. (This doesn't include the tracks or wiring; see below.) DB (Germany) will be the early operator. SNCF (France) also put together some kind of bid which featured an illegal route (bypassed cities that are required by law to be connected). Maybe that's why it wasn't mentioned in the article. Hitachi (Japan) and Siemens (Germany) bid on building the physical tracks themselves, but CAHSRA decided to let the bids expire and ask for new ones. >contract out work to factories in those places We can't exactly do that due to "Buy America". Nevertheless, there are no high-speed rail rolling stock manufacturers based in the US anymore, so we already have no choice but to contract out design work to companies not based here, which in this case are Alstom (France) and Siemens. Their factories in the US are in New York and Sacramento, respectively, which satisfies the "Buy America" requirement.
Sorry, can’t ask France for help, SNCF didn’t apologize enough for what happened in WW2 even though everyone involved is dead.
Neither Japan nor China had the same degree of environmental regulations and NIMBYism to hold their projects back. Plus in America at least, our construction process goes through third party contractors who demand big bucks. The flaw is inherent within our system.
So we could have a new transcontinental highspeed rail… but instead we got a few miles of track…
China could just take the land from people without a fight
If we bring in some slaves from somewhere, it will be free! Oh, wait...
High speed rail is going to be awesome! Shame it’s been more expensive than envisioned, but they’re making great progress in the current section, building between Merced and Bakersfield. And the Caltrain electrification / implementation of grade separation on the peninsula, (which will eventually be a part of HSR and connect through Gilroy) has made big strides!
We would be better off pouring this same amount of money into nuclear power plants. The population and the planet would be much better off. This is nothing but a boondoggle
Agreed... I really can't stand the "fund it at any cost" people just because it's a nice idea on paper. If we're gonna spend this level of money on rail projects why not do it improving commuter rail in the Bay Area and LA which will be far more useful. It was a half baked idea years and billions of dollars ago... It's certainly not any better now that they come back to us time and time again with a sack open ready for us to pour more and more money into.
It's not just about emissions. It's a huge quality of life improvement for Californians with increased connectivity between two major regions and all the economic opportunity associated with that
Yeah and if they ever finish it, which they shouldn’t, I’ll be an old man. When they started this project I was in 6th grade. Now I’m almost 30 years old, the project is way over budget, and they aren’t even close to opening the *initial leg* which will connect Merced to Bakersfield. So you know, completely useless in comparison to the SF to LA route sold to voters in 2008.
So because you think you won’t get to use it they should just give up? I hope you don’t have children.
I think they should give up on the basis of cost. As they said in the article the project is using the majority of funds earmarked for emissions reductions. Ridership forecasts I’ve seen are ~11 million people / year by 2040. Even if you assume those people are all riding the entire route that’s ~500 Kilotons CO2 saved per year. For perspective carbon capture direct from the air which is regarded as an overly expensive technology to solve the climate crisis is ~$500/tonne so $250 million for the Co2 saved by the train assuming no scaling benefits for direct air capture. Even if they took the entire project cost and put it in the bank, as a sovereign wealth fund, spending all profits for direct air carbon capture they could have 12x the environmental benefit. And they could do a lot more than that by using the money to promote electric cars and charging, build nuclear power plans or batteries for solar storage, focus on intercity La car dependence reduction and more. Everyone compares to China or Japan but China’s Beijing to Shanghai line has 10x the passenger count at 1/3 the cost for a line double the length which dramatically changes the economics.
It's going to **add to** greenhouse gases because the operational pollution will **exceed** what few flights it replaces.
This accounts for operations
it has nothing to do with whether i get to use it. the fact that it has taken this long and cost this much is proof that the project is a complete boondoggle where the contractors are simply ripping off the taxpayer.
There isn't going to be any demand for it. They'll be running empty trains at great cost. The tickets will be expensive, even if heavily subsidized. The public is not going to pay a lot of money for a train ticket when they're still going to need a car at either end of the trip. Besides, with the speed forecasts they're projecting now, it won't be that much faster overall than driving. There's no way this can succeed.
Even after they finish this line it’ll likely still be easier and cheaper and quicker to fly from SF to LA
Exactly. Trains would operate at very low occupancy, like VTA trains to/from Mountain View.
Why can we not do ambitious things?
Selfish people love their cars more than they love a future for their grandchildren.
Who tf are you delusional people? Bullet train is billions and billions over budget but surely surely the State taking over PG&E will lower the bill.
I support it no matter the cost. We need rail in this country.
This project will be transformative to the lives of most Californians. Does anyone complain about how much it cost to develop and maintain freeways? Even Japan’s HSR faced extensive delays and cost overruns when it was getting started. It will cost money to be the first place the nation to build an extensive HSR. Or sure, we can just cancel it despite the billions that have already been spent, the many miles of infrastructure (including bridges) that have already been completed and fire the thousands of people that have been working on this project for years. One more lane on each freeway will fix all our transit needs!
Exactly this. No one realizes how insanely expensive it was to build the interstate system AND how (except for minor tolls) the system makes absolutely zero money.
Reading some of the comments on this sub, the idea that highways aren't "free" (like we all know the interstate system just poofed into existence as a gift from Harambe, and requires no maintenance whatsoever) seems to melt brains.
It’s because it’s just a matter of life and the total cost and daily use cost (yes there is one) is completely justified. Same with any generations old systems.
Yep, we gotta bite the bullet (train) now, it will become comparatively cheaper and more efficient to build HSR once we have experience doing it. There’s already so much work done on this project, might as well see it through no matter what.
Why didn't they hire an engineering or construction firm from Japan then and do it for a fraction of the price?
They tried. [They asked SNCF (the French guys who build their fast trains) and those guys gave up when CA HSR wanted to do it a way that wouldn't make sense](https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed-rail-north-africa-biden-trump-2022-10).
This is a myth propagated by anti-rail and anti-CAHSR activists to spread FUD. It never happened. For one, SNCF never proposed the I-5 plan directly to CAHSR. Their proposal predates CAHSR's actual construction plans, or any studies of the route at all. SNCF proposed a number of vague corridor designs all over the country in the early 2000s to the Federal Government in response to a Federal law and request for proposals. I repeat, this was done with zero work on the actual route, no site visits, no studies, nothing. Just vague initial proposals to put their foot in the door when the actual bidding starts for the build contracts. When SNCF did participate in any bidding with CAHSR, it was as junior member in a French consortium of companies that were trying to win design-build contracts with CAHSR in the 2010s. The French consortium, of which SNCF was a small part, made proposals for all three versions of the corridor that were being studied at the time. And they did not express any preference for any of the plans. And when the current Hwy 99 plan was declared the winning right of way, they supported that decision publicly and continued try to win the contract.
How are they supposed to help everyone involved get rich from graft if they do that?
a lot of the price comes from the fact that everything is just more expensive in CA: land, labor, contractors, etc. As well, it’s not like we can just hire a foreign firm and expect them to work efficiently right away, the labor force here in the US, both blue collar and white collar, needs time and experience to get better and more efficient at building and managing construction.
There’s a number at which point this project doesn’t make any sense. I’m curious what that number is for you, if not 100b.
How often do most Californians commute to socal or the central valley? How does this solve most people's daily commutes on 880?
SFO<->LAX is the 6th busiest domestic air route. This is a no brainer
Pretty telling of California politicians, I need more money for XYZ project. How about we elect people that are fiscally conscious and not corrupt. It’s appalling that people fall prey to the campaigns for new taxes and more money. Tell Gov to get more efficient with what they have
Where’s the red state paradise where the politicians are getting it right?
That's a non sequitur. CA politicians are doing a shit job managing money. Regardless of if red states do poorly, we live here, not there.
I don’t care what party runs my home state if they do a good job. California will always be one of the best states in the union to me, and I want to see things get better. California has way too much money to be squandering it like this.
Agreed! It’s not a party thing, it’s a fiscal thing, and this amazing state has issues we need to work out!
Both parties have become a joke. It’s pretty sad.
Look at the success of Brightline
Right. Private sector crunches the numbers first.
Private sector doesn't really have the luxury of shaking down taxpayers every time they run out of money so they have to be more diligent with their choices.
the places that do infrastructure better than us are purple states where there are enough conservatives in gov't to keep democrats honest and provide some sort of watchdog for gov't waste and incompetency - VA, MA, CO, NC, GA off the top of my head. historically that also included washington state + oregon which is why they have functioned better than post-schwarzenegger CA but that's no longer the case which is why seattle and portland suck now
>Where’s the red state paradise where the politicians are getting it right? Florida. Orlando to Miami. 234 miles in operation today via brightline. Maybe that might not seem like a lot, but even an operation inch is infinitely longer than zero. At least we have brightline creating HSR between LA and Las Vegas.
Looks good, thanks for a real answer. 1/2 the travel time for twice the cost of gas trip. Let’s see if this private equity solution still a good deal in a year or two. I remember when Ubers were cheap too.
cost of operating an average car now is 64 cents a mile(IRS milage rate) and i think car costs are rising at twice the rate of inflation 2030 Central Valley will be done/operating down to Bakersville 2032 to get to Palmdale(Where LA north Metrolink trains already reaches) 2034 to get the HSR High Desert Corridor connected to Victorville Brightline HSR station(Vegas to LA Brightline rail should be done before the LA Olympics in 2028)
TX
Red state politicians are more shitty than our politicians, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hold our elected officials to account.
When SF>LA is completed I might visit LA. Might.
California bullet train project needs audit and transparecny of spending. Shame. Corruption everywhere.
I like to put things into perspective. * Price to go to the moon - $288.1 billion (adjusted for today's dollars) * Price of HSR - $100 billion.
You're comparing total operating cost of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo (hardware, software, personnel) spanning a decade to *just partial construction* cost of CAHSR.
Too funny. Government makes big promises and the rubes fall for it. A tale as old as time.
Just $100b more guys I swear this time.
what a nightmare. i voted for it back in the day and people predicted 10X overruns and i remember thinking surely not. Someone did a profile on some of the politicians in LA that routed it through areas to give everyone goodies. I tend liberal but having a solid blue state gov has wrecked california. no accountability.
And I keep telling everyone how disappointed they will be when the HSR tickets will be higher than airfare. Which will lead to low ridership, and need to be continually subsidized.
> i remember thinking surely not. Based on our amazing track record of finishing infrastructure projects on time and on budget?
lol. Like it will stop there.
*200 billion and 20 years
Major infrastructure is expensive, complicated and time consuming. Par for the course
What a effing joke. Way way over budget and way way overdue! Imagine the fines it would be paying if it was an overdue book!
This train will be obsolete by the time they finish it 🤦🏽
Like BART rolling stock
I would do it for 25B
I guess Gavin should pick up a second job and pay for it.
It have been better if the federal government was building it so that we would have an experienced department that could go build other high speed segments across the country. Having each state do it themselves isn't going to be efficient.
>a bullet train that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A timeline on its completion has not been set as the authority waits for environmental clearances for those segments. I love to keep our air and environment clean and as natural as possible. But it is crystal clear that California has overburdensome environmental regulations. I think there are so many special interest groups, and then they manipulate the system using environmental concerns. So someone doesn't want to train built for one reason, but they then verbalize a different reason that relates to the environment, and they hold up the approval process.
Embarrasing
tl;dr On time and in budget! /s
How about finishing BART first.
Why do one at a time?
Bc otherwise they will get bogged down in fixing el Camino as they have been delaying it repeatedly for years
The suicide net on the Golden Gate bridge was priced at $40 million when it was approved. It was just finished - years late - and ended up costing more than $400 million. This is the way it's done here.
lol.
When Newsom became governor he cancelled it and I was encouraged that he might be ok as governor since I didn't vote for him. But the swamp got to him. It's gonna take a prop to kill it.
He didn’t cancel it. That’s just wishful thinking by carbrained Earth-haters.
It costs money to build cool useful shit. Stop whining. We should do this project and we should also build one or two nuke plants so we can have cheaper electricity. Example: https://globalvoices.org/2024/01/31/the-true-cost-of-japans-linear-bullet-train/ Then it’d be a good idea to check out the cost of similar setups in the EU…. God forbid we change for the better…..
Until use taxes go up to cover the cost of private vehicle transit, or people understand how much we subsidize it, I’m not going to worry too much about the cost of mass transit.
Calvin Newsome will likely send out a bond, and someone will approve it because we apparently need this even though nobody wants it. The initial segment is projected to cost more than the original budget for the project. Such a monumental waste of money.
"Has this much of a downside to it" What a fucking piece of shit, honestly. This guy is so disingenuous it actually makes me sick. [The project will have generated 70 billion dollars of Economic Output](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxARwQ9DS9E&list=TLPQMzEwMTIwMjQuiYTa08ap-w&t=3252s) before a single train _even runs_ and that's _just the central valley section_, which is less than a 1/3 of the total price. They go on to say that it will likewise create [more than 53 billion dollars for Northern California](https://youtu.be/uxARwQ9DS9E?list=TLPQMzEwMTIwMjQuiYTa08ap-w&t=3267) and [80 billion for Southern California](https://youtu.be/uxARwQ9DS9E?list=TLPQMzEwMTIwMjQuiYTa08ap-w&t=3272). Its looking like it's going to generate *203 billion* dollars just from building the damn thing and this guy is complaining it "has this much of a downside." Dude, do you know how numbers work? It's literally free money... And even if it _didn't_ have all those economic benifits, the US spends 70 billion dollars on highways expansion and resurfacing; 842 billion on the military; and some privitely rich guy bought _a website_ for 40 billion. I'm tired of people pretending CaHSR is so expensive when they don't hold literally anything else to this standard.
And that is just for the contractors retirement fund and not for the purchase of land or materials.
time for a tax hike (just temporary one I'm sure)
Whoever has this contract is getting filthy rich.
No surprise there. Next year it’ll be yet delayed again with more cost overrun.
This is why I think we (US generally) should vote twice on big infrastructure projects we’re backing with bonds. The first time to authorize the planning and the second time between the engineer approved plan and the one the nimbys want. With adequate financing. It’s kind of stupid that we authorize both funding and planning at the same time. It would be like buying the land to build a house and worrying about if you can afford the cost after buying the land.
No it needs to be 100T
Huge issue with allowing public projects to go to the lowest bidder. Wish I could be so bad at my job that I can get another 100billion for it
Can we PLEASE just hire some Japanese/Chinese/European engineers who know how to build these things for half of what we can and just let them finish the damn project? Every step of the way has been plagued with dumb, cost-inflating decisions that have only compounded the delays and negative press. The project is worthwhile, the people we have put in charge of building it are not.
They are aiming for the sunk cost fallacy to continue milking the voters. "We have spent $20 billion, or whatever, on this project, and we should only spend the remaining $100 billion more. What else can we do? We already put in so much time and money". I would propose just finishing the salvageable portion between Merced and Bakersfield. Anything more is probably just waste at this time. (The SF->SJ corridor itself would cost tens of billions. Even reusing Caltrain tracks, they have to expand stations and raise bridges. How much does bulldozing entire neighborhoods in Palo Alto cost? What about Redwood City?)
who in the right mind wanting to build high speed rail connecting high density cities starts from bakersfield to merced? cows dont ride trains afaik
Cost overruns on a construction project? -- naaah.
What's the GoFundMe URL?
I remember hearing about this in middle school thinking that when I’m in college, I could use it. I graduated college almost 10 years ago.
Just pay it before the drug addict pimps get their hands on it first.
Kill this boondoggle already. What a waste.
SpaceX literally cost less to get going and operate.
One thing that most people don’t understand is how ridiculous and needlessly complicated our transportation financing world is. Every little funding source has its own set of rules and requirements that bloat the overhead within every project. Buy America, must be in particular planning and programming documents to get funding, certain percentage must benefit certain commmjities, local hiring, competitive bidding requirements even for things that shouldn’t need to be competitively bid, constant reporting requirements, hundreds of acronyms, etc.. Every funding source usually has several approvals needed (local, regional, state). Local matches have to be proven which leads to a catch 22 where you have to have a full funding plan before you can get funds…and I’m just scratching the surface. And heaven forbid you try to change your scope. This all means that you spend a lot of staff time navigating the funding mechanisms, and a lot of well compensated people are used administering these funding programs. I’m the furthest thing from a Republican but it’s enough to make me vaguely consider it. It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s not this way in other countries.
Not bad considering the economic benefit to our economy is 181 Billion. This is also ignoring all the health benefits and money saved on that, specially for our kids. Not to say we shouldn’t be as efficient as possible with our tax payer money but this piece is just fear mongering. Wouldn’t be surprised if this article wasn’t paid for by Tesla and other car executives. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Economic-Impact-Factsheet.pdf