6 ms·

$68B California bullet train project likely to overshoot budget and deadline

38 points by chambo622 11y ago

mickgardner 11y ago
Not surprised. But not hugely important in the scheme of things. The fact that the project exists and is being worked on seems a win to me given public transit history in the USA.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Building more trains and other fixed-location transit systems that will be finished right around the time autonomous road vehicles start to become viable seems like a bad idea. Public transit planners need to get a clue, seriously. The cars of 2050 are not going to be their father's Oldsmobile. This is more of an issue in urban environments than for cross-country transit, of course, but still... if trains are the answer, then we're asking the wrong question.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    I'd never previously considered the question of what sort of speed a self-driving car could reach on an intercity freeway. No reason why it would need to be significantly slower than a high-speed train. Think individual cars are inefficient? Not compared to a train, and especially not compared to a train that is anything other than 100% full.
    - adrianN 11y ago
      A high speed train goes 300km/h, some can do 400. You'd need a huge tank in your car to make it go that speed for any amount of time. Cars need to go slower because they have worse air resistance than trains and the tires get hot and wear out quickly.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        You could conceivably space cars closely enough when they're automated that the aerodynamic drag would be considerably reduced for every car except the front one. You're still going to have to deal with rolling resistance and going up-hill you'd have to limit the speed of such a convoy to the speed the slowest car can attain. But for most distances that a car will normally travel the difference between 150 and 300 Km/h will not translate into meaningful changes in time spent on the road and probably you're still going to beat high-speed rail in door-to-door scenarios.
      - CamperBob2 11y ago
        Airplanes are even faster... yet it's possible to drive from LA to SF in less time than it would take to fly, even if you never break the present-day speed limits. Remember, it's not fair if you count the distance from one city limit to another. You have to consider the time it takes a given passenger to get from their home or business to their end destination. Also, all it will take is one (un)lucky 9/11-style terrorist attack, and everything we've come to know and love about air travel and the TSA will instantly apply to the train station. This is a matter of "when," not "if." Finally, there's also a hidden economic cost associated with fixed tracks, similar to the costs/risks borne by someone who buys a house. They're stuck there. A homeowner might like to move to a nearby city to take a better job, but oops, they're still underwater on their mortgage. Likewise, locations and other trends in urban economic development shouldn't be biased by a decision made 50 years earlier regarding where to put the train tracks. It's better to stay agile, and trains are perhaps the least agile things humanity has ever built.
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    One train is like 500 autonomous vechicles on one road, and more comfortable. It will still win energy-wise. That you can hop on robotaxi after arriving makes it even more desirable.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      No, you're not thinking of it the right way. 500 autonomous vehicles on the road are a train. Only without expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks that make it much more efficient for the whole vehicle to travel. 500 autonomous vehicles all carry engines, batteries, lights and a lot of stuff that is not needed when those car are all traveling together, but wastes energy anyway. Also, the price tag of those single-purpose tracks is amortized by all the millions of "cars" that travel on them.
        CamperBob2 11y ago
        Something you're missing is that autonomous cars can bring an end to the era where everyone feels compelled to own at least one car, if not two. Most cars spend 1-2 hours per day on the road and 22-23 hours parked somewhere. With appropriate resource planning, a network of autonomous cars can probably serve as many people as our current urban highway systems do with 10% of the vehicles. And you can rest assured none of them are going to be burning gasoline. People don't understand just how insanely different things are going to look in another couple of decades. Trains make sense if, and only if, everything stays exactly the same.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I am first to hope for the autonomous cars and ending car ownership, because IMO the current road situation is absolutely ridiculous (In the meantime, someone would please train drivers like they do train airline pilots? I.e. beat the stupidity out of them with enough training.). A PRT network made out of autonomous electric cars would be something absolutely wonderful... in a city. But between the cities, you still have tons of cars going together, in a line, all the time. There is no flexibility here, almost everyone is going the same direction for most of the way. I don't see how even autonomous electric cars could beat trains on that. I think that the best way for the future is bullet trains/hyperloop connecting the large cities, and PRT within the city. I'm open to math that shows otherwise though.
  - Tinyyy 11y ago
    Trains are still faster and more efficient than cars, autonomous or not.
  - Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
    Relying on something you might have in the future seems like a bad idea to me. Infrasturcture needs constant improvements if you don'T do anything for years you might end up in a unresolveable mess.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      I know one thing we definitely won't have in the future, if we build this boondoggle: 68 billion dollars.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    It seems a really good idea, to me. The autonomous autos are good local connectors to high speed rail or transit systems optimized for lnger-range travel, but not much better than existing autos add long-range travel options.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  heavy rail, whether in city or between them always cost more than any alternative. this is a pure political project, it will not benefit any significant number of people other than those connected with the powers that be. as another pointed out, automated vehicles will likely negate any purpose to this train. just automating buses alone will negate the need for any heavy rail people transport because unlike trains, bus routes are flexible.
hugh4 11y ago
For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times. And that's before it starts going over budget. But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.
- apsec112 11y ago
  The $68 billion figure includes the full length of the line from downtown LA to downtown SF. The segment from Burbank to Merced is just the first one to be built. There are already tracks (albeit not high speed ones) from Burbank to LA and from Merced to Oakland, so when that section finishes you'd still have a one seat ride except for the last five miles crossing San Francisco Bay (for which you'd have to transfer to BART).
- chambo622 11y ago
  That's a really eye-opening comparison
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
apsec112 11y ago
The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars; rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.
ChuckFrank 11y ago
Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving important infrastructure projects. What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate. If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient. Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum. Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should. The Swiss seem to be able to do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel On time and on budget.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  I suspect there's more than a little graft in that price tag as well.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I heard rumours once that graft is actually accounted for in price tags for big projects, just not labelled explicitly.
- andreasley 11y ago
  The initial budget for the Gotthard Base Tunnel was CHF 8 billion; the actual costs are now up to about CHF 12 billion. So not exactly on budget either. :) The increased costs were because of geology (4.5%), changed requirements (6.3%), environmental enhancements (1.3%) and upgrades for rail technology and safety (8.5%).
  - 11y ago
djcapelis 11y ago
The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an optional alignment that is being studied by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in affected areas. It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)
staunch 11y ago
Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. It should be canceled, or maybe turned into a new kind of highway designed for 100% autonomous cars. I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a busy public train.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. No, they aren't. One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support. Autonomous cars don't address either of those concerns.
  - staunch 11y ago
    It does address both. Electric cars eliminates emissions and highly efficient routing of car pods will be more efficient than any train.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support. This is absurd. The cars are going to get much more efficient, and the roads are already there.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      The road capacity is not already there, and to meet the increased capacity needed will be quite expensive. The cost avoided in terms of road load was a major justification for HSR.
      - 11y ago
fijal 11y ago
I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h. That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.
- Lazare 11y ago
  The original plan called for a LA to San Fran trip time of less than 2 hours or 40 minutes, which would have required peak speeds of over 350 km/h (faster than any other train in the world), and average speeds of 320 km/h. This would be difficult to achieve anywhere, but it's especially hard (read: utterly impossible) to achieve on that route, since for regulatory reasons the train will be limited to 160 km/h for significant portions of the route. Since then, the plan has changed repeatedly, and not for the better. It currently looks like average trip times will be in the 4-6 hour range. That is hopefully achievable (although they haven't built it yet), but one thing it isn't is high speed. (They're hoping to work in some "express" trains which will do better, but it's an open question whether they're manage it, and even if they do, they won't be remotely as fast as Europe, China, or Japan.) You're talking about trains going 300 km/h, but California is looking to build a train that will be doing literally half that. By many common definitions, it's not even "high speed rail". > I have a question to all the naysayers I love high speed rail, and I hope maybe one day California will try and build a high speed rail network. :) Naysaying what they're actually building doesn't mean I don't like rail.
  - jvzr 11y ago
    Curious as to what the regulatory reasons are?
    - jrockway 11y ago
      I assume the issues are related to sharing the tracks with Caltrain. I'm not sure if they are going to fully grade-separate the line from San Jose to San Francisco, so that harms top speed as well. It's too bad too because 350km/h from San Francisco to Mountain View would mean you could make the trip in 11 minutes.
vishnuks 11y ago
The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” California’s high-speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk
- JDDunn9 11y ago
  To be fair, experts said that $6-$10 billion estimate was not realistic. First time projects always overshoot their budget. Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land (by far the biggest expense of the project).
  - abritinthebay 11y ago
    > Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land Which is a good idea and should be done. In fact any scheme that doesn't include this should be by definition classed as a unnecessary money-sink.
- apsec112 11y ago
  Hyperloop has plenty of its own problems: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loop...
melling 11y ago
From the submission yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702 America seems to be unfixable: "The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14 years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8 billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."
- hga 11y ago
  Blue state America, at least. Around here we routinely do projects on time and budget. Might be as much a scale problem, are there any Red state America projects being done on vaguely similar scales, with, say, a billion dollars as a minimum baseline?
  - MLR 11y ago
    Can't say much for America, but in the UK our own HS2 high speed rail line, which probably won't be too far longer than 200 miles of track in total is projected to cost £40bn, with some suggestions that the true cost will be closer to £80bn. Conversely we're also building a new west-east railway across/beneath London that seems to be going fairly well for about £15bn. High speed rail is just a hugely expensive thing to get built in the developed world it seems.
    - melling 11y ago
      The question is why? If China can build 10,000 miles of HSR and the developed world can't build 400 miles, won't there be an infrastructure penalty at some future time? Spain has built 1500 miles of HSR so it seems that the extreme high cost is avoidable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#Spain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#Sp...
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        Two major drivers of the cost, as I understand it, are geography and geology of the region and existing land values, especially near the termini (eminent domain, in the US, requiring fair compensation to existing landholders.)

38 points by chambo622 11y ago

Not surprised. But not hugely important in the scheme of things. The fact that the project exists and is being worked on seems a win to me given public transit history in the USA.

CamperBob2 11y ago
Building more trains and other fixed-location transit systems that will be finished right around the time autonomous road vehicles start to become viable seems like a bad idea. Public transit planners need to get a clue, seriously. The cars of 2050 are not going to be their father's Oldsmobile. This is more of an issue in urban environments than for cross-country transit, of course, but still... if trains are the answer, then we're asking the wrong question.
- hugh4 11y ago
  I'd never previously considered the question of what sort of speed a self-driving car could reach on an intercity freeway. No reason why it would need to be significantly slower than a high-speed train. Think individual cars are inefficient? Not compared to a train, and especially not compared to a train that is anything other than 100% full.
  - adrianN 11y ago
    A high speed train goes 300km/h, some can do 400. You'd need a huge tank in your car to make it go that speed for any amount of time. Cars need to go slower because they have worse air resistance than trains and the tires get hot and wear out quickly.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      You could conceivably space cars closely enough when they're automated that the aerodynamic drag would be considerably reduced for every car except the front one. You're still going to have to deal with rolling resistance and going up-hill you'd have to limit the speed of such a convoy to the speed the slowest car can attain. But for most distances that a car will normally travel the difference between 150 and 300 Km/h will not translate into meaningful changes in time spent on the road and probably you're still going to beat high-speed rail in door-to-door scenarios.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Airplanes are even faster... yet it's possible to drive from LA to SF in less time than it would take to fly, even if you never break the present-day speed limits. Remember, it's not fair if you count the distance from one city limit to another. You have to consider the time it takes a given passenger to get from their home or business to their end destination. Also, all it will take is one (un)lucky 9/11-style terrorist attack, and everything we've come to know and love about air travel and the TSA will instantly apply to the train station. This is a matter of "when," not "if." Finally, there's also a hidden economic cost associated with fixed tracks, similar to the costs/risks borne by someone who buys a house. They're stuck there. A homeowner might like to move to a nearby city to take a better job, but oops, they're still underwater on their mortgage. Likewise, locations and other trends in urban economic development shouldn't be biased by a decision made 50 years earlier regarding where to put the train tracks. It's better to stay agile, and trains are perhaps the least agile things humanity has ever built.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  One train is like 500 autonomous vechicles on one road, and more comfortable. It will still win energy-wise. That you can hop on robotaxi after arriving makes it even more desirable.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    No, you're not thinking of it the right way. 500 autonomous vehicles on the road are a train. Only without expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks that make it much more efficient for the whole vehicle to travel. 500 autonomous vehicles all carry engines, batteries, lights and a lot of stuff that is not needed when those car are all traveling together, but wastes energy anyway. Also, the price tag of those single-purpose tracks is amortized by all the millions of "cars" that travel on them.
      - CamperBob2 11y ago
        Something you're missing is that autonomous cars can bring an end to the era where everyone feels compelled to own at least one car, if not two. Most cars spend 1-2 hours per day on the road and 22-23 hours parked somewhere. With appropriate resource planning, a network of autonomous cars can probably serve as many people as our current urban highway systems do with 10% of the vehicles. And you can rest assured none of them are going to be burning gasoline. People don't understand just how insanely different things are going to look in another couple of decades. Trains make sense if, and only if, everything stays exactly the same.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I am first to hope for the autonomous cars and ending car ownership, because IMO the current road situation is absolutely ridiculous (In the meantime, someone would please train drivers like they do train airline pilots? I.e. beat the stupidity out of them with enough training.). A PRT network made out of autonomous electric cars would be something absolutely wonderful... in a city. But between the cities, you still have tons of cars going together, in a line, all the time. There is no flexibility here, almost everyone is going the same direction for most of the way. I don't see how even autonomous electric cars could beat trains on that. I think that the best way for the future is bullet trains/hyperloop connecting the large cities, and PRT within the city. I'm open to math that shows otherwise though.
- Tinyyy 11y ago
  Trains are still faster and more efficient than cars, autonomous or not.
- Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
  Relying on something you might have in the future seems like a bad idea to me. Infrasturcture needs constant improvements if you don'T do anything for years you might end up in a unresolveable mess.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    I know one thing we definitely won't have in the future, if we build this boondoggle: 68 billion dollars.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  It seems a really good idea, to me. The autonomous autos are good local connectors to high speed rail or transit systems optimized for lnger-range travel, but not much better than existing autos add long-range travel options.
Shivetya 11y ago
heavy rail, whether in city or between them always cost more than any alternative. this is a pure political project, it will not benefit any significant number of people other than those connected with the powers that be. as another pointed out, automated vehicles will likely negate any purpose to this train. just automating buses alone will negate the need for any heavy rail people transport because unlike trains, bus routes are flexible.

hugh4 11y ago

For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times. And that's before it starts going over budget. But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.

apsec112 11y ago
The $68 billion figure includes the full length of the line from downtown LA to downtown SF. The segment from Burbank to Merced is just the first one to be built. There are already tracks (albeit not high speed ones) from Burbank to LA and from Merced to Oakland, so when that section finishes you'd still have a one seat ride except for the last five miles crossing San Francisco Bay (for which you'd have to transfer to BART).
chambo622 11y ago
That's a really eye-opening comparison
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

apsec112 11y ago

The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars; rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.

ChuckFrank 11y ago

Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving important infrastructure projects. What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate. If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient. Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum. Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should. The Swiss seem to be able to do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel On time and on budget.

crdoconnor 11y ago
I suspect there's more than a little graft in that price tag as well.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I heard rumours once that graft is actually accounted for in price tags for big projects, just not labelled explicitly.
andreasley 11y ago
The initial budget for the Gotthard Base Tunnel was CHF 8 billion; the actual costs are now up to about CHF 12 billion. So not exactly on budget either. :) The increased costs were because of geology (4.5%), changed requirements (6.3%), environmental enhancements (1.3%) and upgrades for rail technology and safety (8.5%).
- 11y ago

djcapelis 11y ago

The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an optional alignment that is being studied by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in affected areas. It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)

staunch 11y ago

Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. It should be canceled, or maybe turned into a new kind of highway designed for 100% autonomous cars. I'd feel much safer in a private car pod going 40 mph than a manually operated car going 80 mph. And I'd feel more comfortable in a private car pod than a busy public train.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Autonomous cars are about to make this entire project redundant. No, they aren't. One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support. Autonomous cars don't address either of those concerns.
- staunch 11y ago
  It does address both. Electric cars eliminates emissions and highly efficient routing of car pods will be more efficient than any train.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  One of the major motivations of the project is avoiding both the environmental cost of operating autos on the same route, and as an alternative to the infrastructure costs (including land lost from other uses) of adding the road capacity to handle volume growth on the routes the HSR will support. This is absurd. The cars are going to get much more efficient, and the roads are already there.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    The road capacity is not already there, and to meet the increased capacity needed will be quite expensive. The cost avoided in terms of road load was a major justification for HSR.
    - 11y ago

fijal 11y ago

I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h. That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.

Lazare 11y ago
The original plan called for a LA to San Fran trip time of less than 2 hours or 40 minutes, which would have required peak speeds of over 350 km/h (faster than any other train in the world), and average speeds of 320 km/h. This would be difficult to achieve anywhere, but it's especially hard (read: utterly impossible) to achieve on that route, since for regulatory reasons the train will be limited to 160 km/h for significant portions of the route. Since then, the plan has changed repeatedly, and not for the better. It currently looks like average trip times will be in the 4-6 hour range. That is hopefully achievable (although they haven't built it yet), but one thing it isn't is high speed. (They're hoping to work in some "express" trains which will do better, but it's an open question whether they're manage it, and even if they do, they won't be remotely as fast as Europe, China, or Japan.) You're talking about trains going 300 km/h, but California is looking to build a train that will be doing literally half that. By many common definitions, it's not even "high speed rail". > I have a question to all the naysayers I love high speed rail, and I hope maybe one day California will try and build a high speed rail network. :) Naysaying what they're actually building doesn't mean I don't like rail.
- jvzr 11y ago
  Curious as to what the regulatory reasons are?
  - jrockway 11y ago
    I assume the issues are related to sharing the tracks with Caltrain. I'm not sure if they are going to fully grade-separate the line from San Jose to San Francisco, so that harms top speed as well. It's too bad too because 350km/h from San Francisco to Mountain View would mean you could make the trip in 11 minutes.

vishnuks 11y ago

The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” California’s high-speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk

JDDunn9 11y ago
To be fair, experts said that $6-$10 billion estimate was not realistic. First time projects always overshoot their budget. Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land (by far the biggest expense of the project).
- abritinthebay 11y ago
  > Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land Which is a good idea and should be done. In fact any scheme that doesn't include this should be by definition classed as a unnecessary money-sink.
apsec112 11y ago
Hyperloop has plenty of its own problems: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loop...

melling 11y ago

From the submission yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448702 America seems to be unfixable: "The 11-mile East Side Access tunnel in New York City, for example, is 14 years behind schedule, and the tab has grown from $4.3 billion to $10.8 billion. Boston's 3.5-mile Big Dig was finished in 2007 — nine years behind schedule and at nearly triple the estimated cost."

hga 11y ago
Blue state America, at least. Around here we routinely do projects on time and budget. Might be as much a scale problem, are there any Red state America projects being done on vaguely similar scales, with, say, a billion dollars as a minimum baseline?
- MLR 11y ago
  Can't say much for America, but in the UK our own HS2 high speed rail line, which probably won't be too far longer than 200 miles of track in total is projected to cost £40bn, with some suggestions that the true cost will be closer to £80bn. Conversely we're also building a new west-east railway across/beneath London that seems to be going fairly well for about £15bn. High speed rail is just a hugely expensive thing to get built in the developed world it seems.
  - melling 11y ago
    The question is why? If China can build 10,000 miles of HSR and the developed world can't build 400 miles, won't there be an infrastructure penalty at some future time? Spain has built 1500 miles of HSR so it seems that the extreme high cost is avoidable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#Spain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#Sp...
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Two major drivers of the cost, as I understand it, are geography and geology of the region and existing land values, especially near the termini (eminent domain, in the US, requiring fair compensation to existing landholders.)