7 ms·

California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail

42 points by HillaryBriss 10y ago

apostacy 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
  - x0x0 10y 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-20150510-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...
    - npunt 10y ago
      Spot on. Local travel is where majority of need is, and in most places in CA it's sorely lacking and could benefit a great deal from state funds. Time waste there FAR exceeds that between HSR stops. HSR is a bet on people commuting more between city centers, which - if true - would only increase the local transport problem that city centers have today (as people arrive sans cars), and if false, would remain underutilized. Isn't a win either way.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      On #1, part of the HSR program of making improvements to local and regional mass transit networks connecting to HSR. They aren't competing alternatives.
      - 10y ago
- cjensen 10y 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.
  - ojbyrne 10y ago
    How many highways run without subsidies?
    - mudetroit 10y ago
      High speed rail cannot come close to replacing highways though. It deals with a fraction of the overall traffic that the highway system supports without near the flexibility. This is why even the countries that are making extensive use of high speed rail still have extensive highway systems. Please note, I am in no way trying to imply that our current highway system works well, but that is a far different discussion.
      - Symbiote 10y ago
        The proposed high speed line north from London is supposedly the alternative to building a new motorway. The high speed live won't carry freight, but it will free up space on the slower railway, and the motorway.
      - ojbyrne 10y ago
        Fair point in the first paragraph. It's the "far different discussion" I'm more interested in though. Starting with the loss of life caused by driving.
    - cjensen 10y ago
      I was not stating an opinion on whether it is reasonable to subsidize HSR; rather I was just pointing out the discrepancy between the claim in the comment here versus the multiply-sourced claims in the article. Additionally, the HSR proposal explicitly promised not to require ongoing subsidies. I think that was foolish: HSR would have passed without making silly promises.
- namlem 10y 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.
  - akshayn 10y ago
    This would encourage sprawl-y and inefficient land use.
    - baq 10y ago
      the problem is that's already the case and the reason why HSR won't work that well in the first place. imagine though that there's a fleet of self-driving cars ready to take you to HSR stops. best of both worlds?
      - akshayn 10y ago
        Fair enough. Ultimately, HSR has far higher bandwidth than self-driving cars - density could be achieved either by efficient land use or by a feeder network (local transit or self-driving cars). Presenting self-driving cars and HSR as mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - LanceH 10y 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 10y 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.
- foolfoolz 10y 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
  - twblalock 10y ago
    The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Was just coming here to post that, there was an article recently about the new MB E-Class'(I think) lane keeping that wouldn't work on the majority of US roads since it was trained on better European roads.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        The road builders there know how to paint straight lines and place the reflectors on the lines, unlike ours, who seem to have been drunk on the job.
    - adventured 10y ago
      > The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe. That's incorrect. You mean a select few countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden and Switzerland != Europe). You're very clearly ignoring that Europe also consists of Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania, Hungary, Poland etc. 3/4 of Europe has a lower living standard than the poorest US states do and they have terrible infrastructure to go along with it. Greek and Italian infrastructure is piss poor as well. The Eurozone for example is now spending significantly less on infrastructure than the US (how long will those roads hold up as infrastructure spending continues to decline?): "Infrastructure spending in the euro zone has dropped to an average of 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.4 percent of GDP for the U.S. and 3.6 percent for Japan." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-has-squandered-its-savings-now-is-the-time-to-invest https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-ha... And: "The dilapidated state of infrastructure in Belgium, home to the European Union’s main institutions, has become emblematic of a lack of investment that blights the whole continent and, according to the EU itself, is creating 'lasting bottlenecks that undermine productivity growth.'" "Anyone taking even a short trip to Brussels would see evidence of this. Due to lack of maintenance over the last 20 years, all the city’s major tunnels have been closed on public safety grounds, creating the biggest traffic jams the city has ever experienced." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-needs-new-rules-for-investment-spending https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-ne...
- Shivetya 10y 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 10y 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.
    - crzwdjk 10y ago
      Unfortunately, Amtrak is desperately trying to give away its advantage on point 2. At many stations, passengers are not allowed to just wait on the platform and are instead funneled through a ticket check one at a time. This results in the predictable long lines, though the actual boarding process is still somewhat more efficient than on a plane.
- flubert 10y 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"?
  - niftich 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - ubernostrum 10y 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.
- protomyth 10y 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 10y ago
    Paris-Cancun?
    - HillaryBriss 10y ago
      must have meant: Paris - Cannes
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Autocorrect at least stayed with a resort town theme - thanks
    - WildUtah 10y ago
      "On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris" http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics
- mr_tyzic 10y ago
  > It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o 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 10y 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 10y 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.
  - dragonwriter 10y 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 10y 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_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- WildUtah 10y 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/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...
bubbleRefuge 10y 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 10y 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.
ocschwar 10y 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.
- crusso 10y ago
  I didn't realize that California politics was controlled by the GOP.
  - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
    Highways are federally funded. California's politics don't enter into that very much.
    - crusso 10y ago
      State funding of transportation makes up a larger portion of the budget than federal. http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.shepherd/document/download/069A0000001EOGZIA4 http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.shepherd/document/download/06... Additionally, this measure was kicked off with a voter-approved bond measure.
mtgx 10y ago
Are they considering the hyperloop then? http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-is-10x-cheaper-than-hsr-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-is-10x-ch...
- mozumder 10y ago
  No, since it would be much more expensive.
jkot 10y ago
30 years old TGV is not possible, but somehow Hyperloop will materialize :-(
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mozumder 10y ago
How much subsidies do public roads get? Are they profitable?
- HillaryBriss 10y 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-maintenance-is-now-urgent-and-expensive/ 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.
  - spinlock 10y 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.
baq 10y 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?
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  That's decades from being a substitute, and throwing more money at the problem seems unlikely to alter that fact.
  - ghughes 10y ago
    Many major car manufacturers expect to be shipping autonomous vehicles by 2021 or earlier: http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384 http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      Which level of autonomy? Hint: It won't Lvl 6.
rosstex 10y ago
Bring on the hyperloop!
cjensen 10y 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.
- spinlock 10y 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 :)
  - niftich 10y 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-spar-over-station/article_da10f700-210a-11e1-aa4f-001871e3ce6c.html http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/kings-tulare-counties-... [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/california-high-speed-rail/ci_24889156/tale-two-bullet-train-cities-hanford-visalia-spar http://www.mercurynews.com/california-high-speed-rail/ci_248... [3] http://www.cahsrblog.com/tag/visalia/ http://www.cahsrblog.com/tag/visalia/
niftich 10y 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 10y 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.
  - niftich 10y 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?
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      I imagine there's perception of issues similar to what plagues the bay area transit systems: in order to pass through an area you have to win the approval of every political unit of every size along the way (this is why BART ends where it does, for example, because San Mateo county refused to allow or participate in BART).
    - mjevans 10y ago
      My guess would be lack of eminent domain to force buyouts at reasonable market rates, or a lack of political will to make use of that ability.
- coredog64 10y 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.
matt_holden 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
twblalock 10y 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 10y 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.
DorintheFlora 10y 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.html 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 10y 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.
glup 10y 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 10y ago
Clearly the author of the article doesn't like the project, but what is the actual news here?
dragonwriter 10y 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.
DorintheFlora 10y 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 http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article84917817.html

42 points by HillaryBriss 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
- x0x0 10y 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-20150510-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...
  - npunt 10y ago
    Spot on. Local travel is where majority of need is, and in most places in CA it's sorely lacking and could benefit a great deal from state funds. Time waste there FAR exceeds that between HSR stops. HSR is a bet on people commuting more between city centers, which - if true - would only increase the local transport problem that city centers have today (as people arrive sans cars), and if false, would remain underutilized. Isn't a win either way.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    On #1, part of the HSR program of making improvements to local and regional mass transit networks connecting to HSR. They aren't competing alternatives.
    - 10y ago
cjensen 10y 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.
- ojbyrne 10y ago
  How many highways run without subsidies?
  - mudetroit 10y ago
    High speed rail cannot come close to replacing highways though. It deals with a fraction of the overall traffic that the highway system supports without near the flexibility. This is why even the countries that are making extensive use of high speed rail still have extensive highway systems. Please note, I am in no way trying to imply that our current highway system works well, but that is a far different discussion.
    - Symbiote 10y ago
      The proposed high speed line north from London is supposedly the alternative to building a new motorway. The high speed live won't carry freight, but it will free up space on the slower railway, and the motorway.
    - ojbyrne 10y ago
      Fair point in the first paragraph. It's the "far different discussion" I'm more interested in though. Starting with the loss of life caused by driving.
  - cjensen 10y ago
    I was not stating an opinion on whether it is reasonable to subsidize HSR; rather I was just pointing out the discrepancy between the claim in the comment here versus the multiply-sourced claims in the article. Additionally, the HSR proposal explicitly promised not to require ongoing subsidies. I think that was foolish: HSR would have passed without making silly promises.
namlem 10y 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.
- akshayn 10y ago
  This would encourage sprawl-y and inefficient land use.
  - baq 10y ago
    the problem is that's already the case and the reason why HSR won't work that well in the first place. imagine though that there's a fleet of self-driving cars ready to take you to HSR stops. best of both worlds?
    - akshayn 10y ago
      Fair enough. Ultimately, HSR has far higher bandwidth than self-driving cars - density could be achieved either by efficient land use or by a feeder network (local transit or self-driving cars). Presenting self-driving cars and HSR as mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- LanceH 10y 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 10y 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.
foolfoolz 10y 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
- twblalock 10y ago
  The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Was just coming here to post that, there was an article recently about the new MB E-Class'(I think) lane keeping that wouldn't work on the majority of US roads since it was trained on better European roads.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      The road builders there know how to paint straight lines and place the reflectors on the lines, unlike ours, who seem to have been drunk on the job.
  - adventured 10y ago
    > The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe. That's incorrect. You mean a select few countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden and Switzerland != Europe). You're very clearly ignoring that Europe also consists of Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania, Hungary, Poland etc. 3/4 of Europe has a lower living standard than the poorest US states do and they have terrible infrastructure to go along with it. Greek and Italian infrastructure is piss poor as well. The Eurozone for example is now spending significantly less on infrastructure than the US (how long will those roads hold up as infrastructure spending continues to decline?): "Infrastructure spending in the euro zone has dropped to an average of 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.4 percent of GDP for the U.S. and 3.6 percent for Japan." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-has-squandered-its-savings-now-is-the-time-to-invest https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-ha... And: "The dilapidated state of infrastructure in Belgium, home to the European Union’s main institutions, has become emblematic of a lack of investment that blights the whole continent and, according to the EU itself, is creating 'lasting bottlenecks that undermine productivity growth.'" "Anyone taking even a short trip to Brussels would see evidence of this. Due to lack of maintenance over the last 20 years, all the city’s major tunnels have been closed on public safety grounds, creating the biggest traffic jams the city has ever experienced." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-needs-new-rules-for-investment-spending https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-ne...
Shivetya 10y 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 10y 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.
  - crzwdjk 10y ago
    Unfortunately, Amtrak is desperately trying to give away its advantage on point 2. At many stations, passengers are not allowed to just wait on the platform and are instead funneled through a ticket check one at a time. This results in the predictable long lines, though the actual boarding process is still somewhat more efficient than on a plane.
flubert 10y 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"?
- niftich 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ubernostrum 10y 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.
protomyth 10y 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 10y ago
  Paris-Cancun?
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    must have meant: Paris - Cannes
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Autocorrect at least stayed with a resort town theme - thanks
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    "On that train all graphite and glitter Undersea by rail Ninety minutes from New York to Paris" http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics
mr_tyzic 10y ago
> It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o 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 10y 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 10y 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.
- dragonwriter 10y 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 10y 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_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
WildUtah 10y 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/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...

bubbleRefuge 10y 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 10y 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.

ocschwar 10y 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.

crusso 10y ago
I didn't realize that California politics was controlled by the GOP.
- MaulingMonkey 10y ago
  Highways are federally funded. California's politics don't enter into that very much.
  - crusso 10y ago
    State funding of transportation makes up a larger portion of the budget than federal. http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.shepherd/document/download/069A0000001EOGZIA4 http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.shepherd/document/download/06... Additionally, this measure was kicked off with a voter-approved bond measure.

mtgx 10y ago

Are they considering the hyperloop then? http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-is-10x-cheaper-than-hsr-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-is-10x-ch...

mozumder 10y ago
No, since it would be much more expensive.

jkot 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mozumder 10y ago

How much subsidies do public roads get? Are they profitable?

HillaryBriss 10y 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-maintenance-is-now-urgent-and-expensive/ 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.
- spinlock 10y 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.

baq 10y 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?

Aelinsaar 10y ago
That's decades from being a substitute, and throwing more money at the problem seems unlikely to alter that fact.
- ghughes 10y ago
  Many major car manufacturers expect to be shipping autonomous vehicles by 2021 or earlier: http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384 http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Which level of autonomy? Hint: It won't Lvl 6.

rosstex 10y ago

Bring on the hyperloop!

cjensen 10y 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.

spinlock 10y 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 :)
- niftich 10y 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-spar-over-station/article_da10f700-210a-11e1-aa4f-001871e3ce6c.html http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/kings-tulare-counties-... [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/california-high-speed-rail/ci_24889156/tale-two-bullet-train-cities-hanford-visalia-spar http://www.mercurynews.com/california-high-speed-rail/ci_248... [3] http://www.cahsrblog.com/tag/visalia/ http://www.cahsrblog.com/tag/visalia/

niftich 10y 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 10y 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.
- niftich 10y 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?
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    I imagine there's perception of issues similar to what plagues the bay area transit systems: in order to pass through an area you have to win the approval of every political unit of every size along the way (this is why BART ends where it does, for example, because San Mateo county refused to allow or participate in BART).
  - mjevans 10y ago
    My guess would be lack of eminent domain to force buyouts at reasonable market rates, or a lack of political will to make use of that ability.
coredog64 10y 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.

matt_holden 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.

twblalock 10y 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 10y 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.

DorintheFlora 10y 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.html 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 10y 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.

glup 10y 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 10y ago

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

dragonwriter 10y 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.

DorintheFlora 10y 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 http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article84917817.html