Work Begins on California Bullet Train, Locals Angry

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/opposition-rises-calif-high-speed-rail-begins-20625748?singlePage=true

by protomyth • 13 years ago

28 21 13 years ago

abcnews.go.com

savvyraccoon• 13 years ago

Angry? This http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/19/us-italy-demonstra... angry!

jotm2• 13 years ago

A job and a house are basic rights? Well, they should be, but really never were, what the hell is that guy smoking...

mieses2• 13 years ago

I don't see where anyone wrote that a job, house, or spouse should be basic rights.

jotm2• 13 years ago

The worst kind of job creation... although if it ends up being a 2-3 decades project with a total cost north of $300 billion, then those workers are set for life :-)

jonomw• 13 years ago

If this project follows the same track record for other construction in this state, then this is more than likely.

angersock2• 13 years ago

Taking the interviewed at face value, we find a really solid argument for why people are miserable at long-term planning. "Wah wah wah my bidness wah wah wah the traffic during construction." Fuck it, let'em suffer--except that that 66 year old will be dead and rotted just as the next generation really can use that new rail.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

God forbid someone want to be paid the fair market value for their property instead of having it eminent domained by the state... how whiny. It's like people believe they have a right to the things they worked decades to purchase!

angersock2• 13 years ago

So, that's cool and all, but the fact remains that you are going to have to inconvenience somebody whenever building over land. The fact that they even mentioned political wrangling causing trains to have to merge into the same cities and whatnot and in turn making the whole thing not a high-speed rail and a boondoggle is pretty unfortunate.

I watched an immensely useful project in my own town get hosed the same way--light rail expansion running east-west along the north side of the inner loop in Houston (along Richmond). The fact that a few shop owners bitched enough caused the thing to be put on hold, and thus a few SMBs fucked it up for the 4th largest city in the US.

Similarly, major road repairs take so long because they can't just shut down a road and fix it all in one fell swoop--they instead have to carefully start and stop work in little stubby sections, and deal with the overhead (and danger!) of angry drivers zooming by work sites.

Guess what? These happy little SMBs? They don't understand or care about civic matters, and will gleefully fuck over everyone else in their city to try and make an extra few bucks. Fuck. Them.

VLM• 13 years ago

Three important points are missed in the article.

1) There's absolutely nothing train specific. My elderly grandmother's house was in the line of fire for a state highway redesign for about a decade, until they FINALLY decided on a route that didn't pass thru her house. Although the article only calls out delays in train construction its more of a generic "DOT is slow" story. I'm quite sure if they were building irrigation canals or dirt roads they'd still cause confusion and delay for a good part of a decade. There is probably a startup idea revolving around investing... Informally people know the DOT overpays so there were offers to pay 20% over prevailing prices on the goal of making instant 20% profit if the DOT selected that route... diversification, etc. There should be some way to create a REIT or social network or matching service for people who like to speculate like this. I don't think thehousingbubbleblog.com is quite the real estate social network they're looking for LOL, although it would probably be extremely informative for them.

2) The article claims its necessary because of a population of 46 million. Why does a population need transit, if they don't have jobs? Luckily the project will create hundreds of temp jobs. I'm sure that will be wonderful for increasing sales of $1M houses. I'm not sure the optimism is well placed. The big city I live in built a rather elaborate interstate freeway spur in the 50s to handle the obvious massive growth predicted, just in time for white flight to cut city population by about 25%, and recently was unable to afford to simply maintain the spur so they got fed funds to demolish it and replace with surface roads, the PR campaign was all "new urbanism" BS but fundamentally they were too poor after decline to maintain it. Its kind of an empty slum area about a decade after the demolition. The point of this anecdote is to point out that investing enormous amounts of money using a "build it and they will come" strategy is not necessarily wise. With startups you can scale in the cloud, doesn't work so well with real estate. In 1970 high speed rail in CA would have been brilliant before all the growth... now that the peak is past and decline has started, why build for growth now? Put that train track in Austin, or Colorado, or Madison, or ... well pretty much anywhere else? The startup lesson here is obvious, if dogfood delivery over the internet was the place to be in early 2000, in 2013 finally getting around to building your dream dog food delivery website isn't exactly forward thinking.

3) Depending on local levels of corruption, the only story you can tell about eminent domain is moral / ethical or implications of corruption, because the DOT usually reimburses people locally about 50% above prevailing prices usually with a secrecy clause. I've met several people who have done very well financially via eminent domain. The whiny restaurateurs in the article must rent their space... A 150% offer windfall in a field where biz failure is the norm is not to be ignored. I believe this is the "startup" connection, where if someone offers you millions or billions for something worth far less, you'd be an idiot not to take the deal or to complain about it.

adamb_2• 13 years ago

tl;dr: People being relocated because of the track's construction are annoyed. Elon Musk and his hyperloop are never mentioned.

maak2• 13 years ago

The hyperloop is just a concept. I don't see how it is relevant to this article.

adamb_2• 13 years ago

For many readers, especially internationally, the high speed rail in California is only relavent because of the hyperloop concept, which has been discussed at length on HN.

dionidium• 13 years ago

The high-speed rail business plan says trains will run between the greater Los Angeles area and the San Francisco Bay Area by 2029.

By comparison, it took about 7 years in the mid 19th century to build the nearly-2000-mile First Transcontinental Railroad [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

The transcontinental railroad wasn't routed through sprawling megalopolises and extant exurbs home to tens of millions of people. Rather, it enabled them.

The principle challenges of California's HSR project are that it does connect and pass through developed areas.

In the case of the French and German HSR projects, development times from inception to first lines being opened were on the order of 10-15 years, and this in countries with large extant conventional passenger rail networks.

In the case of the US, passenger rail has been relegated to second-citizen status on the nation's freight railroad network (itself world class). HSR necessitates additional rights of way, and securing the land for this is in fact a major factor in development. This article and your response actually highlight the problem: small but focused individual increments of pain vs. large (but individually smaller) social benefits. It's a classic instance of the Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson):

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

Anechoic2• 13 years ago

By comparison, it took about 7 years in the mid 19th century to build the nearly-2000-mile First Transcontinental Railroad

It's amazing what you can do when a) the government grants you the land [1]), b) you can exploit a class of workers [2], and c) (as pointed out by dredmorbius) you don't have to worry about appeasing existing property owners.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts

[2] According to http://cprr.org/Museum/FAQs.html#Died 100-150 Chinese workers died constructing the 1907-mile transcontinental railroad which corresponds to 12-19 worker deaths per mile. The CA HSR project is 800 miles in length, at TCRR fatality rate, CA HSR would be expected to lose 42 to 67 workers during the life of construction which would not be tolerated. There are also inequities in pay, etc to consider. I couldn't find non-fatal injury numbers

001sky2• 13 years ago

It's amazing what you can do when...

This misses the point that a trans-continenatl railroad was <actually a good idea>. It was the latter point that allowed for the footnotes in your snark answer to even be relevant. A train from 2 hours outside LA to 2 hours outside SF is not doing any CA taxpayers any favours, regardless of its speed. [1]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/St...

mieses2• 13 years ago

The Antiplanner is a great blog that questions whether rail makes any sense at all.

http://ti.org/antiplanner/

notatoad• 13 years ago

TL;TR summary: NIMBY

maak2• 13 years ago

These are unfortunate casualties of progress, but the benefits far outweigh the inconvenience.

Europe has been well linked by rail for how long now? Com on USA, it's time to catch up.

Work Begins on California Bullet Train, Locals Angry

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