8 ms·

I'm pretty sure the people calling it a boondoggle are correct. Obama included $3B in the 2009 stimulus package for it back in 2009. Not a single yard of track

I'm pretty sure the people calling it a boondoggle are correct. Obama included $3B in the 2009 stimulus package for it back in 2009. Not a single yard of track has been laid. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-california-is-caught-in-a-political-storm.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/high-speed-train-in-ca... http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-high-speed-rail-stuck-in-station http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/263782-obama-high-s... The project is hoped to finish in 2029, which is 12 years from now. For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinhuangdao%E2%80%93Shenyang_High-Speed_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinhuangdao%E2%80%93Shenyang_H... Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track, or what it costs NYC to build 1-2 miles of track. If we are serious about transit, we will figure out how to get the costs under control. Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious. If we want transit in the US we need to fix the insane cost problem. Anything else is sheer folly. (Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)

api 10y ago
What is this actually being spent on? Studies to study the feasibility of a feasibility study to begin a study?
- adrenalinelol 10y ago
  Construction workers in the U.S. are decently paid (compared to the foreign counter-parts) and there are a lot of lawyers and consultants who all need a cookie out of the government contract cookie jar.
  - api 10y ago
    Are construction workers paid 50X? I doubt it.
- woogiewonka 10y ago
  Probably eminent domain action. At California's real estate prices I don't imagine property will be cheap to acquire.
antimatter 10y ago
It is an embarrassment for the state and this country that we are unable to build something so trivial for other countries without such massive costs.
- hueving 10y ago
  Well most of the citizens in the US don't care about public transit. The lack of seriousness about it logically follows.
- melling 10y ago
  What is the cost breakdown to build it? Equipment, labor, land? My understanding is that buying the land is extremely expensive. The original path of the train was changed so it could run through cheaper land but it's still expensive.
- hourislate 10y ago
  Maybe it's best that this doesn't happen because it will just turn into a boondoggle and the tax payers will be on the hook for it. It would make sense hiring a European or Asian country to come in and build it for us with 1/5 of the resources and in 1/3 the time. If a country like Switzerland can dig through solid granite for 35 miles under a mountain (Gotthard Base Tunnel) someone out there other than a US company should be able to lay a few hundred miles of track.
  - 55555 10y ago
    I wouldnt want China or India to build it for us, but I would offer Japan, Germany, or Switzerland a premium.
    - trome 10y ago
      Uhh, they cut corners on their train cars. Where we allow 1 inch of crush when an impact happens and limited twist, they allow a foot & change, with significantly more twist allowed. There are other safety standards they are not bound to too, unlike rail in the US.
rtpg 10y ago
We also need to focus on the right problems. I know we all want fast trains, but if we're going through major cities we likely won't get that fast (unless we do like the Shinkansen and build the entire train on a 3-story platform). If we're willing to spend $50 billion, let's spend that on some slower trains that connect cities anyways. Maybe you don't do LA-SF, but giving higher inter-connectivity is good. What happens in Japan is that train stations get built, and then the surrounding area is simultaneously developped with stores and other developments. So you build a train station in the middle of nowhere, but then build an IKEA + a mall. Suddenly people have a reason to take the train! And it helps the local economies too.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  One of the problems is that the corridor in question is underserved in passenger rail right now. The only way to get between the two cities right now involves taking a train and a bus or two, because the rail company that owns the trackage between LA and Bakersfield doesn't want passenger trains running on it, and the rail company that owns the track between Ventura and San Jose would love to see passenger trains on that section of track halted as well. With such a hostile environment, it's difficult to build the interconnections that are needed for a modern rail system. Opening the Tehachapi Loop to passenger rail would be an alternative to a full passenger buildout, but you're never going to see BNSF agree to it.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Eminent Domain. Nationalize freight rail and lease it back at a reasonable rate.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    doesn't want passenger trains running on it I think "can prioritize freight over passenger rail when schedules conflict" is a fairer description.
    - trome 10y ago
      Freight is easy, a few hour delay while you repair some trackage, move another 100 car train, etc. is far from the end of the world. Comparatively, getting BNSF or UP to switch gears and be timely for passenger rail service is very expensive, esp. since they do not have an internal culture that supports that.
Sanddancer 10y ago
There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California that the train in China didn't have to consider. For example, the high speed train in California also has to cross notoriously rugged mountain ranges. The Diablo Range has a smattering of two-lane roads winding through it because it's so difficult to build through the gnarled hills. In the south, the Sierra Pelona and Tehachapi ranges almost caused California to be split in two separate before some rather remarkable feats in roadbuilding connected the two halves of the state. As such, there is an immense amount of planning, engineering studies, etc that need to take place before construction can start. Additionally, there's a huge political element. A vocal minority of people have done everything they can to try to keep the project from taking off for various reasons. As such, there have been a rather insane amount of lawsuits filed which divert money to lawyers and time that would better be served by actually putting shovels in the ground. There are people who want it to fail for the sake of failing, because they want to bang their "government doesn't work drum" to the detriment of the taxpayers who are stuck paying for lawyers to fight their silliness.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Switzerland tunneled through the alps for $12B. The issue isn't engineering. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    That's a single 35 mile tunnel, in a comparably geographically stable area. The high speed rail project would need essentially two of those, each of which would need to cross the San Andreas fault. Additionally, a substantial amount of the remaining amount of track would need to be newly laid, because the existing rail infrastructure in the area is already near capacity, and the freight companies are hostile to any sort of improvements to passenger infrastructure. Yes, some of the issue is political, but it is an immensely challenging engineering problem to work through.
    - billions 10y ago
rjeli 10y ago
I am reminded of Thiel's op ed in the Wapo[0]: "Our government used to get things done [..] Our newest fighter jet has already been under development for more than 15 years and it costs more than 15 times as much as the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), but last year it lost a dogfight to a plane from the 1970s [..] Instead of spending a fortune, Trump won the primaries by saying things that made sense to voters. His greatest heresy was to declare that government health care can work [..] Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government [..] I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more." [0]: http://wapo.st/2ceA9DK http://wapo.st/2ceA9DK
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  That's the problem. There has been so much propaganda about the impossibility of government to do anything right that people don't even try to run an efficient government. But they also don't try to shrink it so money just gets wasted. This happens with healthcare, defense and infrastructure. I think this may get even worse with Trump. During Bush's the Republicans just cut taxes while spending a lot of money on war so I would expect the same to happen again. People like Paul Ryan only turned into deficit hawks when Obama became president. They will probably forget the deficit now that they are in power.
  - nickff 10y ago
    I once heard a comment from a (George W Bush) White House staffer who said something to the effect of: 'there is no point trying to save money while we are in power, because the democrats will just come in and spend it; we should just spend it on our favorite programs.' This is somewhat aligned with Bruce Buena de Mesquita's theories on how politicians act to retain power. I think that the Bush administration's largest impact on the budget was definitely Medicare Part D, which is not as obvious as the war in Iraq, but is much more expensive (>> $100 billion/year), and will probably last much longer (10 years so far).
imjustsaying 10y ago
You are comparing California labor construction costs to the costs of third world laborers. What's the cost difference here; 10 to 1? Surely 5 to 1 at the least? Then you gotta figure the cost of compliance with all the different bureaus and regulations that don't exist in China or India to make something like this happen in California. And then there's the litigious cost amplifier that is another distinctly American feature. This is the reality we live in.
- dmoy 10y ago
  Less than a tenth. The laborers in Beijing building subway lines are not pulling in that much. More like $4/hr. Edit: original Parent post was taking about $100:$10, I'm agreeing and saying even less, more like $4/hr in Beijing.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  You're missing one of the biggest costs, which is obtaining the right of way from existing property holders. There's plenty of prime real estate in California that the route would need to pass through, and every local community is going to try to negotiate the best deal along the route.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  So let's import Chinese and Indians and have them build it. If American labor can't get the job done, let's not use it. The goal is getting train service rather than funneling money to unions, right?
  - trome 10y ago
    We actually did this with the Chinese and Irish immigrants [1], and some rail lines would kill off workers to avoid paying them once a rail line was complete. That being said, American labor isn't the issue, Chinese already cost $4/hr and importing them costs quite a bit, whereas the labor market stateside is pretty soft in that segment. It likely would not make sense unless your good with mass executions to cut costs. 1 - http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/timeline/ http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpr... Edit: dmoy states labor is $4/hr in China, not $3/hr.
Animats 10y ago
The most expensive line under construction is the Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line, at $50 billion for only 286km. It's maglev at 500km/hr, and it's 90% in tunnels. They're going straight through the Japanese Alps. Under construction since 2013, opening scheduled for 2027. 43km of track is already in operation as a test track. Here's a ride video.[1] JR expects it to be profitable. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKwchJKTYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKwchJKTYU
- akiselev 10y ago
  That is an early cost estimate and tunneling estimates are by far some of the most innacurate in civil engineering because you never know how much the geology will differ from what the estimate assumed. Construction on the first tunnel segment started a year ago and won't be complete until the 2020s so it'll take a while before the developer knows how bad the overrun will be on that section, let alone for the whole line.
  - trome 10y ago
    Sooo crunchy there, jeez! Tunneling isn't as unpredictable as you suggest, rail lines are often completed on time and under budget[1]. When you do crazy stuff like try and build the largest tunnel ever built with cutting edge technology and don't plan for failure[2], that is when things go bad. Luckily, rail doesn't need giant tunnels, tunnel boring machines for that size tunnel are a known quantity. 1 - https://www.ch2m.com/newsroom/news/new-seattle-light-rail-line-opens-ahead-of-schedule-and-under-budget https://www.ch2m.com/newsroom/news/new-seattle-light-rail-li... 2 - http://q13fox.com/2016/07/21/bertha-seattle-tunnel-project-223-million-over-budget/ http://q13fox.com/2016/07/21/bertha-seattle-tunnel-project-2...
  - Animats 10y ago
    They already have 40Km of tunnel open with trains running.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Not a single yard of track has been laid. True but misleading. Actually laying track is the cheap and easy final part of construction; building the viaducts, grade separations, etc., and doing the other construction which prepares the route for track to be laid.is the time consuming, expensive part, and plenty of that has been done and is being done in the initial segment. > Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. Which is a very different problem than a regional transit system. And, in any case, acquiring right of way is cheaper in India, due to land prices. > That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction. > Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious. Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.
- trome 10y ago
  The right of way, design, and labor differences are the main differentiator, besides the fact that this is high speed rail over a few hundred miles, not a few dozen mile light rail alignment. That being said, here in Seattle we approved nearly as much money to build out our light rail network, and in the context of the US and what it costs to build bridges, freeways and rail here, that cost isn't far out of line. Considering the state of our region currently, even if the economy imploded tomorrow it'd still be a sound investment to do, especially since we are connecting all the way from Tacoma to Everett, with 116 miles of rail.
- jack9 10y ago
  > California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction. That's irrelevant. There is no planned path, just patches and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree (or sold off, which is basically the same thing). > Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious. The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years (procedurally discussed, not legislatively enforced). Much like Federal budgets and projects, anything extended beyond the current administration's term limits means it's someone else's problem. Putting people on Mars and this project, should become a reality about the same time.
coredog64 10y ago
> For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent. In looking at a relief map, the terrain between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang is flat, or mostly so. Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains. The easiest route between LA & Bakersfield requires traversing a mountain range where the pass elevation is 4000+ feet. In itself that wouldn't be bad (e.g. out east to Riverside and Palm Springs the elevation change is similar), but Grapevine is also twisty as all get out. The Central Valley portion isn't too bad, but then you've still got to get over the southern coast range that separates the Central Valley from the Bay Area. On top of that, you have to do it in an environment where all the easiest routes are already taken by the rich and powerful and you're building on/near/around a major earthquake fault that regularly sees large earthquakes.
trome 10y ago
Good luck with that, our safety standards for train cars in the US are head and shoulders above Europe, and in a whole different universe than India & China. Add to that that it is illegal to buy up all the land around rail lines and lease it out to subsidize the rail company, and its no wonder we have to spend more! This is before we even talk about fault lines, soil conditions, land cost, lawsuits, etc. that are involved in building High Speed Rail. You need a dead straight alignment for HSR, and as it stands there are businesses and homes in the way right now, which means a large legal mess to even start to clear up, before we even get into preliminary system design.
- tazjin 10y ago
  > our safety standards for train cars in the US are head and shoulders above Europe It's strange to regulate something you don't have. Maybe Europe has learned from actual experience with trains what standards are needed? Lets see what President Trump does with these sorts of things in his $1tn infrastructure package.
  - trome 10y ago
    We do have rail currently, passenger rail is a thing all over the US, whether it be commuter rail, light rail, or Amtrak. Its a common misconception, I had to explain to a MS exec the other day that passenger rail service from Seattle to Portland already exists, and her plans she was going to go push had been implemented a decade ago already. Re: Trump's infrastructure plan, I highly doubt we'll see any rail improvements, whether it be light rail or heavy gauge rail in West Virgina to unbottleneck their coal exports. He is very happy to walk back on promises he made on the campaign trail it seems, which is quite sad.
objclxt 10y ago
> (Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.) You think Paris has worker costs closer to India than the US? I think you might be the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. The minimum wage in France is $10.11 per hour (at the exchange rate right now), compared with $7.25 for the US. It is at at best 50% more than China or India (where minimum wage varies by location), and labour in France is highly unionized so workers are on more than the minimum as-is. The current Paris - Lyon HSR link in France is budgeted at $12.5 billion [1]. Your idea that a California HSR project could be done for $2-4 billion is simply unreasonable. It can't be done. You're off by an order of magnitude. Is $64 billion a lot of money? Yes. Is it too much? Probably. Can it be done for $2 billion? Absolutely not. Go look at comparable mega-projects in western Europe. Crossrail in London is about $18 billion. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was $12 billion. The Moscow-Kazan HSR railway is going to cost at least $29 billion, and that's being built with Chinese assistance. [1] http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-makes-rail-a-priority.html http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-mak... [2] https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-billion-in-moscow-kazan-high-speed-railway-39208 https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-bil...
nkoren 10y ago
I don't have the study readily at hand, but per-kilometer costs for rail infrastructure are 5-10 times higher in the US than in developed countries like Spain and Germany, and 20-40 times higher than in developing countries like China and India. Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US. That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal. Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors". Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough. So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree. (FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)
hyperbovine 10y ago
I dont think the comparison with China is fair. A big chunk of that $64b is due to permitting and land acquisition costs; China's solution when building the Three Gorges Dam was to forcibly relocate over a million people. Totalitarian states have options that are not available to a functioning democracy when it comes to constructing huge infrastructure projects.
maattdd 10y ago
I think you are a bit off for the average price of this kind of project in developed countries. Let's take France which have a strong history in HSL (thus a lot of experience, which helps reducing the costs): the new Tours-Bordeaux line (302km) will cost 8B euros, for a line which is "simple" on an engineering point of view (no mountains, no urbanized area) for 6 years of work. Considering the length and difficulty of the HSL in California, you can multiply the cost at least 3 times, so something around $30B. You add the fact that the US labor is more expensive than France (contrary to common knowledge), the fact that it's the first HSL in the US..etc.. and the $64B figure is not too crazy anymore. Your estimate of $2-4B in 4 years is imho absolutely unrealistic.
rayiner 10y ago
I kinda agree with you that we should rethink the cost of infrastructure projects in the US relative to European countries. But I find the China and India comparisons disingenuous. Construction is cheap in those countries because human labor there lives at the edge. Construction laborers in America have a standard of living that rivals that of the top 5% of Indians. They are commensurately more expensive. That's a good thing.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Then let's have Indians and Chinese build our transit for cheap. We can separately debate whether we should funnel tens of billion$ to unions if that's so important to you. But if we insist on tying the two policies together, that's evidence of disastrously bad governance and a good reason to do neither.

api 10y ago

What is this actually being spent on? Studies to study the feasibility of a feasibility study to begin a study?

adrenalinelol 10y ago
Construction workers in the U.S. are decently paid (compared to the foreign counter-parts) and there are a lot of lawyers and consultants who all need a cookie out of the government contract cookie jar.
- api 10y ago
  Are construction workers paid 50X? I doubt it.
woogiewonka 10y ago
Probably eminent domain action. At California's real estate prices I don't imagine property will be cheap to acquire.

antimatter 10y ago

It is an embarrassment for the state and this country that we are unable to build something so trivial for other countries without such massive costs.

hueving 10y ago
Well most of the citizens in the US don't care about public transit. The lack of seriousness about it logically follows.
melling 10y ago
What is the cost breakdown to build it? Equipment, labor, land? My understanding is that buying the land is extremely expensive. The original path of the train was changed so it could run through cheaper land but it's still expensive.
hourislate 10y ago
Maybe it's best that this doesn't happen because it will just turn into a boondoggle and the tax payers will be on the hook for it. It would make sense hiring a European or Asian country to come in and build it for us with 1/5 of the resources and in 1/3 the time. If a country like Switzerland can dig through solid granite for 35 miles under a mountain (Gotthard Base Tunnel) someone out there other than a US company should be able to lay a few hundred miles of track.
- 55555 10y ago
  I wouldnt want China or India to build it for us, but I would offer Japan, Germany, or Switzerland a premium.
  - trome 10y ago
    Uhh, they cut corners on their train cars. Where we allow 1 inch of crush when an impact happens and limited twist, they allow a foot & change, with significantly more twist allowed. There are other safety standards they are not bound to too, unlike rail in the US.

rtpg 10y ago

We also need to focus on the right problems. I know we all want fast trains, but if we're going through major cities we likely won't get that fast (unless we do like the Shinkansen and build the entire train on a 3-story platform). If we're willing to spend $50 billion, let's spend that on some slower trains that connect cities anyways. Maybe you don't do LA-SF, but giving higher inter-connectivity is good. What happens in Japan is that train stations get built, and then the surrounding area is simultaneously developped with stores and other developments. So you build a train station in the middle of nowhere, but then build an IKEA + a mall. Suddenly people have a reason to take the train! And it helps the local economies too.

Sanddancer 10y ago
One of the problems is that the corridor in question is underserved in passenger rail right now. The only way to get between the two cities right now involves taking a train and a bus or two, because the rail company that owns the trackage between LA and Bakersfield doesn't want passenger trains running on it, and the rail company that owns the track between Ventura and San Jose would love to see passenger trains on that section of track halted as well. With such a hostile environment, it's difficult to build the interconnections that are needed for a modern rail system. Opening the Tehachapi Loop to passenger rail would be an alternative to a full passenger buildout, but you're never going to see BNSF agree to it.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Eminent Domain. Nationalize freight rail and lease it back at a reasonable rate.
- DrScump 10y ago
  doesn't want passenger trains running on it I think "can prioritize freight over passenger rail when schedules conflict" is a fairer description.
  - trome 10y ago
    Freight is easy, a few hour delay while you repair some trackage, move another 100 car train, etc. is far from the end of the world. Comparatively, getting BNSF or UP to switch gears and be timely for passenger rail service is very expensive, esp. since they do not have an internal culture that supports that.

Sanddancer 10y ago

There are also a lot of rather substantial engineering issues that have to be overcome in California that the train in China didn't have to consider. For example, the high speed train in California also has to cross notoriously rugged mountain ranges. The Diablo Range has a smattering of two-lane roads winding through it because it's so difficult to build through the gnarled hills. In the south, the Sierra Pelona and Tehachapi ranges almost caused California to be split in two separate before some rather remarkable feats in roadbuilding connected the two halves of the state. As such, there is an immense amount of planning, engineering studies, etc that need to take place before construction can start. Additionally, there's a huge political element. A vocal minority of people have done everything they can to try to keep the project from taking off for various reasons. As such, there have been a rather insane amount of lawsuits filed which divert money to lawyers and time that would better be served by actually putting shovels in the ground. There are people who want it to fail for the sake of failing, because they want to bang their "government doesn't work drum" to the detriment of the taxpayers who are stuck paying for lawyers to fight their silliness.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Switzerland tunneled through the alps for $12B. The issue isn't engineering. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  That's a single 35 mile tunnel, in a comparably geographically stable area. The high speed rail project would need essentially two of those, each of which would need to cross the San Andreas fault. Additionally, a substantial amount of the remaining amount of track would need to be newly laid, because the existing rail infrastructure in the area is already near capacity, and the freight companies are hostile to any sort of improvements to passenger infrastructure. Yes, some of the issue is political, but it is an immensely challenging engineering problem to work through.
  - billions 10y ago

rjeli 10y ago

I am reminded of Thiel's op ed in the Wapo[0]: "Our government used to get things done [..] Our newest fighter jet has already been under development for more than 15 years and it costs more than 15 times as much as the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), but last year it lost a dogfight to a plane from the 1970s [..] Instead of spending a fortune, Trump won the primaries by saying things that made sense to voters. His greatest heresy was to declare that government health care can work [..] Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government [..] I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more." [0]: http://wapo.st/2ceA9DK http://wapo.st/2ceA9DK

maxxxxx 10y ago
That's the problem. There has been so much propaganda about the impossibility of government to do anything right that people don't even try to run an efficient government. But they also don't try to shrink it so money just gets wasted. This happens with healthcare, defense and infrastructure. I think this may get even worse with Trump. During Bush's the Republicans just cut taxes while spending a lot of money on war so I would expect the same to happen again. People like Paul Ryan only turned into deficit hawks when Obama became president. They will probably forget the deficit now that they are in power.
- nickff 10y ago
  I once heard a comment from a (George W Bush) White House staffer who said something to the effect of: 'there is no point trying to save money while we are in power, because the democrats will just come in and spend it; we should just spend it on our favorite programs.' This is somewhat aligned with Bruce Buena de Mesquita's theories on how politicians act to retain power. I think that the Bush administration's largest impact on the budget was definitely Medicare Part D, which is not as obvious as the war in Iraq, but is much more expensive (>> $100 billion/year), and will probably last much longer (10 years so far).

imjustsaying 10y ago

You are comparing California labor construction costs to the costs of third world laborers. What's the cost difference here; 10 to 1? Surely 5 to 1 at the least? Then you gotta figure the cost of compliance with all the different bureaus and regulations that don't exist in China or India to make something like this happen in California. And then there's the litigious cost amplifier that is another distinctly American feature. This is the reality we live in.

dmoy 10y ago
Less than a tenth. The laborers in Beijing building subway lines are not pulling in that much. More like $4/hr. Edit: original Parent post was taking about $100:$10, I'm agreeing and saying even less, more like $4/hr in Beijing.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
smallnamespace 10y ago
You're missing one of the biggest costs, which is obtaining the right of way from existing property holders. There's plenty of prime real estate in California that the route would need to pass through, and every local community is going to try to negotiate the best deal along the route.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
So let's import Chinese and Indians and have them build it. If American labor can't get the job done, let's not use it. The goal is getting train service rather than funneling money to unions, right?
- trome 10y ago
  We actually did this with the Chinese and Irish immigrants [1], and some rail lines would kill off workers to avoid paying them once a rail line was complete. That being said, American labor isn't the issue, Chinese already cost $4/hr and importing them costs quite a bit, whereas the labor market stateside is pretty soft in that segment. It likely would not make sense unless your good with mass executions to cut costs. 1 - http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/timeline/ http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpr... Edit: dmoy states labor is $4/hr in China, not $3/hr.

Animats 10y ago

The most expensive line under construction is the Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line, at $50 billion for only 286km. It's maglev at 500km/hr, and it's 90% in tunnels. They're going straight through the Japanese Alps. Under construction since 2013, opening scheduled for 2027. 43km of track is already in operation as a test track. Here's a ride video.[1] JR expects it to be profitable. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKwchJKTYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKwchJKTYU

akiselev 10y ago
That is an early cost estimate and tunneling estimates are by far some of the most innacurate in civil engineering because you never know how much the geology will differ from what the estimate assumed. Construction on the first tunnel segment started a year ago and won't be complete until the 2020s so it'll take a while before the developer knows how bad the overrun will be on that section, let alone for the whole line.
- trome 10y ago
  Sooo crunchy there, jeez! Tunneling isn't as unpredictable as you suggest, rail lines are often completed on time and under budget[1]. When you do crazy stuff like try and build the largest tunnel ever built with cutting edge technology and don't plan for failure[2], that is when things go bad. Luckily, rail doesn't need giant tunnels, tunnel boring machines for that size tunnel are a known quantity. 1 - https://www.ch2m.com/newsroom/news/new-seattle-light-rail-line-opens-ahead-of-schedule-and-under-budget https://www.ch2m.com/newsroom/news/new-seattle-light-rail-li... 2 - http://q13fox.com/2016/07/21/bertha-seattle-tunnel-project-223-million-over-budget/ http://q13fox.com/2016/07/21/bertha-seattle-tunnel-project-2...
- Animats 10y ago
  They already have 40Km of tunnel open with trains running.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Not a single yard of track has been laid. True but misleading. Actually laying track is the cheap and easy final part of construction; building the viaducts, grade separations, etc., and doing the other construction which prepares the route for track to be laid.is the time consuming, expensive part, and plenty of that has been done and is being done in the initial segment. > Here in India, we've built an entire city Metro system for about $6B. Which is a very different problem than a regional transit system. And, in any case, acquiring right of way is cheaper in India, due to land prices. > That's twice what it cost California to explore the idea of maybe someday laying track California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction. > Anyone who talks about finding $64B and 12 years for what should be a $2-4B railway in 4 years is fundamentally unserious. Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious.

trome 10y ago
The right of way, design, and labor differences are the main differentiator, besides the fact that this is high speed rail over a few hundred miles, not a few dozen mile light rail alignment. That being said, here in Seattle we approved nearly as much money to build out our light rail network, and in the context of the US and what it costs to build bridges, freeways and rail here, that cost isn't far out of line. Considering the state of our region currently, even if the economy imploded tomorrow it'd still be a sound investment to do, especially since we are connecting all the way from Tacoma to Everett, with 116 miles of rail.
jack9 10y ago
> California's done a lot more than explore the idea of construction. That's irrelevant. There is no planned path, just patches and the project is going to be scaled back to an absurd degree (or sold off, which is basically the same thing). > Anyone who thinks that a statewide high speed rail system in California should be $2-$4 billion dollars in 4 years is fundamentally unserious. The project start, Prop 1A, was for almost 10 billion in 10 years (procedurally discussed, not legislatively enforced). Much like Federal budgets and projects, anything extended beyond the current administration's term limits means it's someone else's problem. Putting people on Mars and this project, should become a reality about the same time.

coredog64 10y ago

> For comparison, China build the Qinhuangdao–Shenyang line in 4 years (approx half the SF->LA distance). The cost was $1.9B, which is less than what California has already spent. In looking at a relief map, the terrain between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang is flat, or mostly so. Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains. The easiest route between LA & Bakersfield requires traversing a mountain range where the pass elevation is 4000+ feet. In itself that wouldn't be bad (e.g. out east to Riverside and Palm Springs the elevation change is similar), but Grapevine is also twisty as all get out. The Central Valley portion isn't too bad, but then you've still got to get over the southern coast range that separates the Central Valley from the Bay Area. On top of that, you have to do it in an environment where all the easiest routes are already taken by the rich and powerful and you're building on/near/around a major earthquake fault that regularly sees large earthquakes.

trome 10y ago

Good luck with that, our safety standards for train cars in the US are head and shoulders above Europe, and in a whole different universe than India & China. Add to that that it is illegal to buy up all the land around rail lines and lease it out to subsidize the rail company, and its no wonder we have to spend more! This is before we even talk about fault lines, soil conditions, land cost, lawsuits, etc. that are involved in building High Speed Rail. You need a dead straight alignment for HSR, and as it stands there are businesses and homes in the way right now, which means a large legal mess to even start to clear up, before we even get into preliminary system design.

tazjin 10y ago
> our safety standards for train cars in the US are head and shoulders above Europe It's strange to regulate something you don't have. Maybe Europe has learned from actual experience with trains what standards are needed? Lets see what President Trump does with these sorts of things in his $1tn infrastructure package.
- trome 10y ago
  We do have rail currently, passenger rail is a thing all over the US, whether it be commuter rail, light rail, or Amtrak. Its a common misconception, I had to explain to a MS exec the other day that passenger rail service from Seattle to Portland already exists, and her plans she was going to go push had been implemented a decade ago already. Re: Trump's infrastructure plan, I highly doubt we'll see any rail improvements, whether it be light rail or heavy gauge rail in West Virgina to unbottleneck their coal exports. He is very happy to walk back on promises he made on the campaign trail it seems, which is quite sad.

objclxt 10y ago

> (Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.) You think Paris has worker costs closer to India than the US? I think you might be the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. The minimum wage in France is $10.11 per hour (at the exchange rate right now), compared with $7.25 for the US. It is at at best 50% more than China or India (where minimum wage varies by location), and labour in France is highly unionized so workers are on more than the minimum as-is. The current Paris - Lyon HSR link in France is budgeted at $12.5 billion [1]. Your idea that a California HSR project could be done for $2-4 billion is simply unreasonable. It can't be done. You're off by an order of magnitude. Is $64 billion a lot of money? Yes. Is it too much? Probably. Can it be done for $2 billion? Absolutely not. Go look at comparable mega-projects in western Europe. Crossrail in London is about $18 billion. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was $12 billion. The Moscow-Kazan HSR railway is going to cost at least $29 billion, and that's being built with Chinese assistance. [1] http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-makes-rail-a-priority.html http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-mak... [2] https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-billion-in-moscow-kazan-high-speed-railway-39208 https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-bil...

nkoren 10y ago

I don't have the study readily at hand, but per-kilometer costs for rail infrastructure are 5-10 times higher in the US than in developed countries like Spain and Germany, and 20-40 times higher than in developing countries like China and India. Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US. That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal. Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors". Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough. So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree. (FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)

hyperbovine 10y ago

I dont think the comparison with China is fair. A big chunk of that $64b is due to permitting and land acquisition costs; China's solution when building the Three Gorges Dam was to forcibly relocate over a million people. Totalitarian states have options that are not available to a functioning democracy when it comes to constructing huge infrastructure projects.

maattdd 10y ago

I think you are a bit off for the average price of this kind of project in developed countries. Let's take France which have a strong history in HSL (thus a lot of experience, which helps reducing the costs): the new Tours-Bordeaux line (302km) will cost 8B euros, for a line which is "simple" on an engineering point of view (no mountains, no urbanized area) for 6 years of work. Considering the length and difficulty of the HSL in California, you can multiply the cost at least 3 times, so something around $30B. You add the fact that the US labor is more expensive than France (contrary to common knowledge), the fact that it's the first HSL in the US..etc.. and the $64B figure is not too crazy anymore. Your estimate of $2-4B in 4 years is imho absolutely unrealistic.

rayiner 10y ago

I kinda agree with you that we should rethink the cost of infrastructure projects in the US relative to European countries. But I find the China and India comparisons disingenuous. Construction is cheap in those countries because human labor there lives at the edge. Construction laborers in America have a standard of living that rivals that of the top 5% of Indians. They are commensurately more expensive. That's a good thing.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Then let's have Indians and Chinese build our transit for cheap. We can separately debate whether we should funnel tens of billion$ to unions if that's so important to you. But if we insist on tying the two policies together, that's evidence of disastrously bad governance and a good reason to do neither.