California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-28/california-hits-the-brakes-on-high-speed-rail-fiasco

by HillaryBriss • 10 years ago

42 106 10 years ago

apostacy• 10 years ago

It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure.

One thing that bothers me, is that there is this narrative that high speed rail just somehow cannot work, and is a pipe dream, and not right for America.

We cannot afford /not/ to have high speed rail. We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere. And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state.

Not building this line because of some NIMBY rich people in California is the sign of a crumbling civilization, where the elites are too concerned about their own comfort to prevent us from being left behind, technologically.

seanp2k2• 10 years ago

Yeah, this makes me super upset. I honestly have no problem subsidizing it with my tax dollars. I would honestly use the LA <-> SF route, even though that wouldn't be built until I'm middle-aged.

It's also ridiculous that we never built out BART to the original plans, since that could have done so much to improve the traffic situation, the housing situation, and increase property values. I never understood why wealthy land owners don't want trains; in every case I've seen, land by a train station goes up hugely in value.

jclulow• 10 years ago

Trains allow more people from a more diverse spectrum of socio-economic conditions to work or live in and around an area. If you're a keen isolationist, whether for more or less discriminatory reasons, you almost certainly will vote to avoid useful public transport.

Besides, wealthy land owners have drivers on staff. Or don't have to commute to work on a schedule, so an occasional small ferry is good enough (cough... Marin).

It's all pretty awful, but not that hard to understand once you look at the more tacit end of public behavior.

x0x02• 10 years ago

My problem with this project is:

1 - if you want to spend $80B on public transport infrastructure, there are productive places in CA to do that. This project is not in the top 20. You could, alternatively, build out bart/muni/caltrain/vta/LA metro. I'm sure San Diego also has transit projects available.

2 - the ridership numbers for this project are created in what can only be described as a crack-aided manner. It's already $80/pp, up from $50/pp. By the time it's actually built, I'd guess tickets will be well over $100/pp. If you have even two people, you may as well drive. How many people need to commute between LA and SF? The HSR estimates are between 18m and 31m passengers annually [1] which seems unlikely. Also note the $86 far comes to about 20c/mi, while amtrak on the east coast charges 50c/mi and most european long haul trains charge 45+c/mi [1]. Which should make you suspicious that tickets will cost far more than $86, or the ridership numbers are farcical.

3 - when these projects are sold with transparently fake numbers, it poisons public support for all transport infrastructure projects. Currently the part of the project under construction is pure bait and switch rail construction for amtrak, which will use the track until at some unnamed date HSR starts using it.

4 - the local transit projects in sfbay, san jose, LA, or probably san diego have much less risk: we can reasonably project usage.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...

cjensen3• 10 years ago

"last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state". The linked article says that only 3 of the 111 systems worldwide run without subsidies. That claim comes from the construction company which benefits if HSR goes forward.

ojbyrne2• 10 years ago

How many highways run without subsidies?

Decade2• 10 years ago

I haven’t looked at those numbers, but I would expect a rail system to increase revenue from activities near the stations.

Especially since we really do need to transition to a post-carbon future. Effective transit would allow us to increase housing density and commercial activity while decreasing per-capita use of fuel, water, and other resources. Leading to higher revenue from income tax, property tax, and sales tax, that does not show up on the train’s own profit/loss statement.

We just have to be realistic about it. A problem of the California HSR is that the officials have been coy with the actual numbers. Perhaps they are spooked by the disaster that has been Amtrak: Slow, expensive to ride, yet still losing money. We need to recognize that a good rail system can be subsidized, and still give a net benefit to the community and the government.

namlem2• 10 years ago

I think high speed rail is a bad investment for most of America. Instead, we should focus on accelerating the development of self-driving car fast lanes. Autonomous cars could easily form convoys that go 120 mph or more, drastically cutting down commute times while costing only a tiny fraction of what high speed rail costs. Yes, it would be significantly slower than high speed rail, but it would still be a lot faster than currently available transportation.

akshayn2• 10 years ago

This would encourage sprawl-y and inefficient land use.

LanceH• 10 years ago

I imagine light rail that with smart cars that can combine/merge/release so that they can run on a web rather than a mere lines.

astrange• 10 years ago

It would only be twice as fast as current transportation, and if it succeeds it'll still get stuck in traffic, because a 5 person car with 1 person in it is a total waste of space.

npunt2• 10 years ago

Exactly. HSR was a great idea for the second half of the 20th century in relatively dense countries like Japan, France, and Germany that already had good local rail infrastructure. It fills a gap for travel between dense population areas 100-500km(?) away, where road travel is too slow and air has too much overhead with last mile. The benefit was that train stations could be built directly in population centers and connected to local rail, cutting down on last mile travel times of air.

The US is more spread out, tilting in favor of air, and local rail is less abundant + our interstate highway system is more mature + gas is much cheaper, tilting in favor of cars. The value of rail is squeezed from both sides.

Now comes along a great technology that can bootstrap off existing infrastructure (road), offers the same benefit of time not wasted focusing on the road, whose cost burden is shouldered by those that use it (purchasing cars), and can incrementally be improved over time (higher speeds, drafting, separate lanes, etc). That further puts the squeeze on travel between shorter distances, which can make the promised SF-LA trip in <6 hours (instead of 4* via air) that can be reduced to 4 over time with faster speeds.

Driverless tech doesn't even need to work in places outside the controlled environment of a highway for these benefits to appear. Politicians could make it happen a few years sooner by making it more appealing (much as they did with hybrid carpool stickers) by creating a special driverless car lane on highways, separated by cement barriers. Although I think that's not as elegant as just bootstrapping on carpool lanes, it is possible now and would definitely spur car companies to upgrade their driverless systems to whatever requirements would be needed for that environment.

Certain parts of the US (east coast corridor) seem to me to be the only places in the US that could actually benefit from the HSR equation, but they have big right-of-way issues and there's a lot of political coordination that needs to happen. Amtrak's been trying for decades.

* Air calculation: 1.5h pre-flight, 1.5h flight, 1h post-flight

ocschwar3• 10 years ago

Self driving car lanes still means rubber wheels on a blacktop car lane.

Blacktop does not last. The maintenance costs for our road system far outstrip our commitment to maintain them even today.

HSR, though expensive to install, has an advantage in longevity.

foolfoolz• 10 years ago

we have the best roads in the world. go to any other country, you will not find 4, 5, 6+ lane freeways that are free, have excellent signage, interconnect without stoplights or city streets, that extend for thousands of miles. i can drive to any region in the country for free on uninterrupted highway. if i drive to go skiing, i know the roads will be plowed, i can even check on the status before i drive. our roads have dividers in the middle, we have shoulders on the side, we have lines and botts dots between lanes. many larger freeways in cities now have lights.

this country has modern infrastructure

twblalock4• 10 years ago

The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.

yequalsx• 10 years ago

With low internet speeds, lack of underground power lines, lack of public transportation, lack of walkable neighborhoods, and roads that have a lot more potholes/bumps than roads in other rich countries this makes me think we don't have modern infrastructure. We do have 6+ lane highways but....

igk• 10 years ago

German here, what did you just say?!/s

blocktuw• 10 years ago

The problem with roads is induced demand. The increasing trend towards urban density requires moving more people around increasingly denser urban areas. Freeways were great in the 50s and 60s but have proven their limitations in sprawled, urbanized areas like Atlanta, DC, and Southern California.

Rail moves more people over time than freeways in urban areas, but with less flexibility for destinations. Urban planning should prioritize building transit-oriented development around these rail corridors allowing for more people to live within a reasonable commute time to jobs.

Freeways should not continue to be built and expanded in urban areas. Wrong tool for the job.

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

Have you ever been to another first world country?

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

I've lived all over the country, have driven it end-to-end several times and up-and-down even more, and I can assure you that many of these things are not anywhere close to universal.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

In all the world there are only three high speed rail systems which pay for themselves. All the rest are subsidized and some heavily.

with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? it was air travel that did them in the US simply because it started here faster and there weren't borders to worry about for the majority of travelers.

Rail is a romance that too many people never look past the haze to see the truth. Sadly even light rail is a boondoggle and the tens of billions if not a hundred or more in deferred maintenance is going to bite a lot of local transit authorities in the butt (it already smacks the Washington DC Metro)

What is really sad is this warning appeared on cato awhile back about the change to the contract presentation and most places blew it off because of the source

rayiner• 10 years ago

with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA?

1) You can't build airports in downtown cores, which unavoidably adds 30 minutes at each end.

2) Boarding an airplane with one door is intrinsically slower than boarding a train with many doors. Again, that adds time at embark/disembark.

3) Extra weight on an airplane inherently costs a lot of money, which means that trains will always be more spacious and comfortable.

flubert• 10 years ago

We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere.

Can you expound upon this, or give examples of taxpayer dollars subsidizing flights to "nowhere"?

niftich6• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service

ubernostrum4• 10 years ago

Essential Air Service is the usual thing meant here.

In a country with the size/spread/population density of the US, it's generally not possible to have a single-mode transportation network which reaches everybody (or to within reasonable distance of everybody) without subsidizing some routes that would be unprofitable due to low demand.

protomyth2• 10 years ago

And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state.

There are only two HSR lines that are profitable (one line into Tokyo and the Paris - [edit]Cannes line). The rest are all subsidized include the Acela Express (search for all the references on HN throughout the years).

The US decided to build cargo rail which has given us part of an amazing logistic infrastructure. In other words, the US picked cargo over humans.

kgwgk• 10 years ago

Paris-Cancun?

mr_tyzic• 10 years ago

It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o is a survey of American domestic and foreign policy that goes into this question. The speaker is a distinguished US diplomat of the post-war era, who also served as Nixon's Mandarin interpreter when he first went to China. His short answer is that for interlocking reasons that make it hard to change, military spending is the only kind of stimulus spending that's politically feasible in the US, and infrastructure spending hasn't yet been able to break that lock, though it needs to.

pzone• 10 years ago

The article and data flatly contradict what you're saying. HSR often loses money. In this case, any reasonable belief that it will run without subdies has completely vanished. The data say it will not be used, it will cost too much, and is a waste of everyone's money. You want to pay 68 billion dollars for some symbolic money pits just because you want to beat Japan and China? This isn't about elites beating down everyone else. Elites, like the HN crew here, are the people who care the most about regularly traveling back and forth between SF and LA. Everyone else would just be subsidizing them.

bradleyjg• 10 years ago

I'd love if we had some high speed inter-city rail in the US. Acela is a joke and it's the best we have. But building decent intra-city integrated mass transit systems in our major metropolitan areas ought to be a higher priority. Right now we have only one in a country with fifty-three metropolitan areas with more than one million people in them.

Of course one needn't preclude the other, but give that both ends of the mooted HSR line would terminate in cities with terrible and barely mediocre mass transit systems respectively, it is pretty clear that there are higher priority needs which those dollars should be allocated towards.

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

Improving local and regional mas transit throughout the state, especially around all four of the long term proposed termini (SF, LA, Sacramento, and San Diego.)

gameofdrones• 10 years ago

It's ludicrous that it can't be something like Hyperloop, not for hundreds of billions and not take 50 years.

PS: I'm from Silicon Valley, and I've heard about the mythology high-speed rail for over 25 years during the construction of the marginal-utility Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which is demonstrably worse and far more inflation-adjusted expensive per mile than the municipal trains of the turn of the century that were ripped up previously.

Tangentially interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

WildUtah2• 10 years ago

The USA is an extremely expensive place to build infrastructure. [0] Building subways and high speed rail costs about ten times as much as it does in first world countries with the best constructions practices, particularly Spain and Korea.

And HSR at 10x the market price is never going to be a viable transportation option for California. It's best either to accept that HSR will never work there or to try to change the procurement and construction culture on smaller projects before trying to build.

The reasons for high prices in the USA are myriad and complicated. Spain and Korea have high wages for workers and stronger labor unions. Neither country is known for particularly effective anti-corruption practices. The simple answers people reach for first are not the key drivers of cost difference.

Instead, at every level of operation the USA system fails to use its resources wisely and there is no responsible party that drives efficient construction and operation. Agencies and governments work at cross purposes impeding each other's progress and everyone with authority in the system uses it to extract concessions by blocking the others instead of cooperating. Until that changes, trying to build HSR in the USA is foolhardy.

[0] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...

bubbleRefuge• 10 years ago

Fed-really fund it . The Fed can issue new currency to fund it. It is off the books as fed balance sheet is not counted against the deficit. Jobs jobs jobs.

williamscales• 10 years ago

This is just disappointing. There's nothing wrong with a large project requiring government subsidies. If you leave people to their own devices obviously they will self-organize to the best of their abilities---they will put their money towards automobile based transportation. If we, the voters of California, decide that it is worth pursuing this project then at the same time we should decide that it is worth funding it.

ocschwar3• 10 years ago

We can thank the GOP for having a political system that will happily spend far more money on far worse infrastructure: blacktop highways that have nowhere near the longevity of train tracks.

crusso2• 10 years ago

I didn't realize that California politics was controlled by the GOP.

MaulingMonkey• 10 years ago

Highways are federally funded. California's politics don't enter into that very much.

mtgx• 10 years ago

Are they considering the hyperloop then?

http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-is-10x-ch...

mozumder2• 10 years ago

No, since it would be much more expensive.

jkot• 10 years ago

30 years old TGV is not possible, but somehow Hyperloop will materialize :-(

mozumder2• 10 years ago

How much subsidies do public roads get?

Are they profitable?

HillaryBriss4• 10 years ago

"Transportation officials have identified about $57 billion in repairs needed for state roads in the coming decade ..."

https://calmatters.org/articles/long-neglected-road-maintena...

But, though the dollar amounts are similar, this comparison is not direct, because the HSR would not cover anywhere near as many miles as all California state roads.

spinlock2• 10 years ago

I would put the difference at military spending vs. everything else. The highway system was funded so that troops could be deployed quickly in the case we were attacked. You don't get that from HSR.

baq2• 10 years ago

i'm all for mass transit, but maybe HSR just isn't the right place to spend the money in 2016? perhaps spending all this money on making self driving cars working, legalized and a common thing would be a better choice?

Aelinsaar2• 10 years ago

That's decades from being a substitute, and throwing more money at the problem seems unlikely to alter that fact.

ghughes• 10 years ago

Many major car manufacturers expect to be shipping autonomous vehicles by 2021 or earlier: http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384

rosstex• 10 years ago

Bring on the hyperloop!

cjensen3• 10 years ago

HSR makes a lot of sense to me in general, but...

LA->SF is a terrible route because of geography. SF is northwest of LA, but the first thing the train does is head 50 miles East.

The quoted fares were laughable. The proponents were claiming the fare would be somewhere around $50 when existing San Jose->Sacramento service (a much shorter route) cost $40.

The insistence on running HSR all the way into SF is a bad idea as part of the initial plan. San Jose makes a better terminus: San Jose is served by Caltrain, Amtrak Capitol Corridor, and ACE, which provide connections to most of the Bay Area.

The plan should have started with an MVP and gone from there. "Merced to Bakersfield" is not useful. I would have gone with Los Baños to San Jose which could have served commuters. Then extend it to Merced and the rest of the Eastern Central Valley to help solve the Bay Area housing price problem.

spinlock2• 10 years ago

The route is a pretty poor outcome of special interests. I recall reading that the best engineering firms in the world said that we should essentially have a hub and spoke approach (i.e. you have a very straight high-speed line from LA to SF and then you have spurs that connect all of the small towns to that main pipe). Instead, the route curves around to get to every small town that wanted a whistle-stop.

I would personally love to see high-speed rail. SF->LA feels better to me but your observation that San Jose is connected to the bay area already and makes a great terminus is really good. Plus, I live in Oakland so I'd like it even more if it came right into my backyard :)

niftich6• 10 years ago

This is mostly inaccurate. The final route chosen is mostly a straight-line path (as in no undue detours) through the Central Valley, and in fact attempts by the city of Visalia to get a station were rebuked [1][2][3], as it was out of the way. Instead, it was routed through neighboring Kings county which opposed HSR from the beginning.

Other strange 'curves' in the path are for cost reasons: it's cheaper to crest the Tehachapi mountains southeast of Bakersfield than to follow I-5 up the Grapevine through Tejon Pass and through difficult terrain down to Santa Clarita. Similarly, both the Altamont and Pacheco passes were considered to cross from the Central Valley into the greater Bay Area, with the Pacheco Pass (Gilroy - Los Banos) having won out because it was a more direct path between LA and SF.

[1] http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/kings-tulare-counties-... [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/california-high-speed-rail/ci_248... [3] http://www.cahsrblog.com/tag/visalia/

ultimoo• 10 years ago

Agreed. MVP would have definitely been the way to go.

However, getting anywhere from San Jose to the rest of the Bay Area is pretty slow. Yes, a considerable number of jobs do exist in the San Jose & Santa Clara valley area, but commuting to the peninsula, city, or east bay is slow.

Frankly, it is insane that the Caltrain takes more than an hour to go from San Jose to San Francisco in 2016 and only runs a handful of times during the day.

I wonder how the HSR MVP would have looked local to the Bay Area travel from Stockton/Tracy to either SF or SJ would be in less than 30 minutes, opening up San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties for housing.

ubernostrum4• 10 years ago

Also worth noting: I believe Caltrain was counting on some of the HSR money helping with its modernization project, bringing its section of the line up to spec for high-speed operation.

Which is a pressing issue, since Caltrain needs to replace its equipment at the very least, and probably straight-up needs to electrify its entire line.

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

The insistence on running HSR all the way into SF is a bad idea as part of the initial plan.

The "initial plan" covers a lot beyond what is planned for the first operational segments. Notably, neither of the proposed initial operation segments extend to SF.

San Jose makes a better terminus

San Jose is the proposed northern terminus of one of the two proposed Initial Operating Segments for CalHSR (IOS-North, San Jose to Bakersfield -- the other is IOS-South, Merced to Burbank.)

"Merced to Bakersfield" is not useful.

Merced to Bakersfield isn't an operating segment, it (well, not-quite-Merced on the North end) is the initial construction segment and test track, its also the overlap between the proposed IOS-North and IOS-South segments, so that the track laid for that is used for either Initial Operating Segment.

niftich6• 10 years ago

HSR is California was always a bit of a gamble because there's three mountain chains to cross between LA and SF, which makes for expensive mountain crossings. But I'm perplexed as to why they're having cost overruns in the flat Central Valley.

After the NE Corridor, a Chicago hub network would make the most sense for high speed rail. The Northeast Corridor is already profitable (in isolation), but is also the best spot for HSR, so for another network one shouldn't expect profitability from day one.

wcfields• 10 years ago

I'm perplexed as to why they're having cost overruns in the flat Central Valley.

The land is extremely valuable farmland, plus the Central Valley leans fairly right politically.

niftich6• 10 years ago

It's valuable farmland, but most of the right-of-way is next to existing railroads and the surface area of the track is small. But how does the second point relate to cost?

coredog64• 10 years ago

This times one million. I get the sense that most people who are in love with HSR have never actually driven between LA & SF or LA and Las Vegas.

fps• 10 years ago

I've lived in New York or Boston my entire life, and travel from Boston to NY and back again about 6 times a year. I've only ever ridden on Amtrak once (from Albany to NY) and it was slow, uncomfortable and expensive. To drive from Boston to NY in a 15 mpg pickup truck costs about $50 in gas and tolls, and takes a little over 4 hours under normal traffic conditions. My car is comfortable and has all my stuff in it, and it costs the same if I travel by myself or with my family of 5. The same trip by high speed rail is 4 hours 11 minutes, and costs $200 per person, and I have to get to the train station early so I don't miss my train. HSR in the northeast corridor is terrible.

niftich6• 10 years ago

'under normal traffic conditions' -- this is the problem, you never know if your trip up and down I-95 will take 4 hours or 6+, because of some traffic incident. Acela has a dedicated right-of-way and a (more so than automobiles) predicable timetable, enabling citycenter-to-citycenter travel for business folks. You don't fit the target market. I don't either. But for the usecase that it's for, it works very well.

glup3• 10 years ago

Acela isn't really HSR for most of the route: average speed NY-Boston is ~70 mph (>150 mph is just in southern Rhode Island, IRC). Averages on most TGV and Eurostar lines are at least twice as fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express

matt_holden• 10 years ago

The 2015 federal transportation bill allocates $48B to transit over 5 years and $205B to highways.

I've never understood why people frequently describe transit spending as a "government subsidy" but would never say the same thing about the much larger highway spending.

If you don't insist on adding tolls everywhere to make highways break even, why hold transit to a higher standard?

strictnein• 10 years ago

The federal gov collects $30-$35 billion in taxes and fees for the Highway Trust Fund. 5x that number covers most of the $205B.

icodestuff• 10 years ago

Defense, repurposability, and capacity.

Eisenhower had two sources of inspiration when pushing the interstate highway system. The well-known one was seeing the autobahn in Germany, but the second one was an experiment he was put in charge of in 1919, to see, using the existing US highway system, how long it would take to get a military convoy from one side of the country to the other. The answer was 23 days, with many bridges broken and having to be repaired, with an average speed less than 6 mph. This was obviously inadequate for defense purposes, so even if the most common purpose today of the EIS is private car and commercial truck transport, it was worth building for its defensive role.

Repurposability: the EIS is useful in more ways than HSR would be. HSR is useful only for passenger trains. The EIS works with cars, cargo trucks, tanker trucks, buses, tanks, and in an emergency many parts can be used as runways. In addition, it's connected with the rest of the North American road network, something which would not be true of CA HSR. The best you could get would be intermodal stations, probably at the terminal stops. HSR can't carry freight of any type, and the tracks are meant to be grade separated from the existing freight rail network.

Capacity: At the peak hour, 12,000 people cross the bay bridge westbound vs 28,000 through the BART Transbay Tube westbound. Seems like a win for rail, right? That's with 2.5 minute headway on packed commuter trains feeding from 4 different lines. HSR trains won't have the capacity of BART trains, nor the frequency. Even if each individual's trip is faster, the total throughput is lower. CA HSR specifies 900 seats on a 12-car train (or rather, 450 seats on each of 2 6-car trains which can be joined together). Just to have the capacity of I-5, (which we'll take to be 2/5 of the Bay Bridge capacity for simplicity (2 lanes vs. 5)) there would need to be a train every 11 minutes 15 seconds. Worse, to meet the "expected" ridership of 33.1 million people/year, trains will have to run with an average of 708+ people, assuming the trains run 24/7 (which seems extraordinarily unlikely).

In terms of construction costs, a rough estimate puts the cost of the 375 miles of interstate freeway between SF and LA at $4B (assuming costs of the entire EIS were spread evenly over every mile, but they weren't; the actual cost was lower, excluding the bay bridge, which is tolled). HSR is currently trending towards $62B. Ongoing subsidies are, using the same metric, $321M/year vs. ??? The HSR group claims it will break even before phase 1 completion (they estimate millions of people/year want to go between San Jose and Bakersfield, which seems pretty ridiculous), and be operating-and-maintenance profitable throughout in 2029 when the SF-LA line is brought online. It's hard to find in the 2016 business plan, but the O&M estimates are there: ~$1.1B/year in 2029 (excluding trainset lifecycle cost averaging). The state is on the hook for all of that that doesn't get covered by fares.

So that's ultimately why we should hold transit to a higher standard - more uncertainty, less utility.

scandox• 10 years ago

Trains are are a commitment to the long term future. To me they are visionary in the sense that they show confidence in stability and continuity that extends over multiple generations. Whether big engineering of this kind is actually the right choice or not is another question that I cannot answer. But I would be sad to think that America (and I'm not American) didn't have that vision any more.

twblalock4• 10 years ago

If a state or national government in another first-world country had decided to build a high-speed rail system in 2008, when California did, they would have made significant progress by now -- they might even be operational on part of the line, or even all of it.

When the richest country in the world can't get this kind of infrastructure project off the ground, it's a sign of serious dysfunction. There are way too many interest groups that are able to block development of infrastructure and housing projects in this country.

mikeash• 10 years ago

Can't say I'm surprised, nor disappointed. I'm a fan of high-speed rail, but this project is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with such projects in this country. A high-speed rail link between LA and SF seems like a great idea, but the plan is way too expensive ($70 billion! holy shit!) and the route is idiotic, veering out of the way to make far too many stops.

DorintheFlora2• 10 years ago

The officials who have to make the budget tradeoffs that weren’t on the ballot in 2008 are finally pushing back. The question now is when they’ll have the guts to pull the plug.

  We can do "The Innuendo"
  We can dance and sing
  When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing

Don Henley - Dirty Laundry

http://www.metrolyrics.com/dirty-laundry-lyrics-don-henley.h...

It is an editorial -- in other words, opinion not news -- and the strongly worded title really does not fit with the content. This should not be getting taken so seriously here.

VLM• 10 years ago

Its politically unacceptable to state any public opinion about HSR other than fawning endless praise. The painful truth of the situation cut and pasted from the article:

"The high-speed rail project is a classic example of how concentrated benefits and diffused costs shape public policy, even when the general public has a direct say."

Clearly the general public isn't doing enough to help our poor starving elites get even more elite.

This does show an interesting business model, try to find something blindly loved by social media signalling, then cash in with no intention of ever doing it. There are people making millions off the CA HSR phenomena.

glup3• 10 years ago

I just got back from 3 weeks travel in Europe, taking HSR from Rotterdam to Paris and Paris to Lausanne, fast commuter (max 170 mph / average 80 mpg but they don't consider that high-speed!) from Lausanne to Zurich and Berlin to Amsterdam, and several commuter trains. For trips under 300 miles, there's no contest with air travel... top speeds are lower but there's a lot less overhead and the experience is uniformly better. Some notes:

1) You can put a train station in the city center. Yes, getting the right of way is a huge pain but it simply isn't feasible to put an airport in the center of a city. This means minimal commute times to the airport—in contrast I have twice spent more time in traffic from LAX to downtown LA than on the plane from SFO to LAX.)

2) HSR requires far less security theater because, you know, a train isn't a deadly projectile (or if it is, it's got a pretty limited set of uses). Couple this 1) and it means that you can arrive at the central station ~10 minutes before departure. I budget 90 minutes these days when flying out of SFO.

3) Volume! A 10 car TGV Thalys train, for example, can carry 370 people. That's almost a 747-400 worth of people. And that's with seating arrangements in 2nd class that are more generous than US business class. With airplane-like density I think you could get 600-650 per 10-car train.

4) Trains are more robust to weather events: thunderstorms don't shut down train stations; snow and ice can be dealt with pretty easily.

5) Electrical outlets are standard in every seat. I know that US air carriers are trying to roll this out now, but this has been standard for a while in trains.

I find the comparison with self-driving cars odd: high speed rail is currently 20 times as efficient, but obviously it doesn't work for final-mile transportation. Maybe that will drop to 5 or 10 times with traffic control / convoying / etc., but really the right comparison for HSR in the transportation ecosystem is plane travel.

skybrian• 10 years ago

Clearly the author of the article doesn't like the project, but what is the actual news here?

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

The actual article has an even more shrill headline than the HN title, but doesn't support even the HN title. The only policy change in the article is a bill under consideration in the legislature (and so, not an action that California, per se, has taken) that would increase transparency of certain HSRA decisions.

So, California hasn't done anything yet, and the thing it is considering doing isn't anything remotely like hitting the brakes on HSR.

DorintheFlora2• 10 years ago

FYI: Existing train (Amtrak) service in the Central Valley is being expanded currently and they are looking to expand it further. The expansion, from 6 trips to 7, went into effect June 20th. Fresno is the same city where ground is being broken on the nation's first high speed rail.

This sort of contradicts this editorial claiming high speed rail makes no sense and will not fly.

http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article84917817.html

California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail

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