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Someone PLEASE explain to me WHY the governing bodies on this project decided to start with Merced -> Bakersfield. I'm seriously dumfounded. I have lost a ton

Someone PLEASE explain to me WHY the governing bodies on this project decided to start with Merced -> Bakersfield. I'm seriously dumfounded. I have lost a ton of faith, what little I already had, with this government. Does ANYONE have a reasonable explanation?

RyJones 8y ago
Who owned the land that was purchased or acquired for the project? Which campaigns do they donate to? Are the areas of concern toxic waste dumps, old gas stations, or contain old pipelines that would be expensive to remediate?
- Varcht 8y ago
  Yes, these are the questions to ask, related [0]. In the article they mention the number of parcels needed grew by 500, did owners subdivide in order to increase returns? [0] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
  - RyJones 8y ago
    excellent, thanks. I was not cynical enough, I see
Diggity 8y ago
That region is flat and has few physical obstacles to a rail line (like mountains, major inclines, major declines etc) Getting a rail line between a major city (LA/San Jose/San Diego/SF etc) requires going through pretty serious mountain ranges. There is already rail line between them in their own geographical pockets (LA-San Diego, SF-San Jose-Oakland)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- btilly 8y ago
  The number of physical obstacles is less important than the number of legal obstacles. If it has to go somewhere, everyone wants the high speed rail to go through someone else's house, preferably a long ways away.
  - Diggity 8y ago
    For land rights issues it is easy enough to create stations that are sufficiently distanced from the city centers but close enough to tap into local Bus/Uber-ish/car rental options. Most Californian metropolis' have an area distanced enough but accessible where land is still relatively cheap, the exception being LA which has sprawled into Orange County and completely enveloped other regions. However going through mountain in an environmentally conscious way gets radically expensive in very short order. Additionally this style of construction tends to have its own legally contentious issues. (Dam construction for water management being comparative)
    - btilly 8y ago
      I disbelieve in your "easy enough". Certainly it is a problem that the plans for high speed rail never solved. You already pointed out that Los Angeles was a problem. For San Francisco the route chosen ran into problems 30 miles south of San Jose, where they were planning to use existing rails (at slower speeds). And once you're in San Jose, you still have a long ways to go to get into San Francisco. See https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-slow-track-20180315-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... for verification.
- briandear 8y ago
  They could build a train in central Nevada too. That’s “easy” — doesn’t mean it actually useful. I’d be happy with a Maglev replacing Caltrain to get from Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes. More people could use that than a train to Bakersfield.
  - masonic 8y ago
    Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes That would be awesome for the 3 people looking to go specifically from Mountain View to SFO at a given time... but not so awesome for the 300 people wanting to get on or off somewhere in between.
empath75 8y ago
Probably easiest to get right of way and eminent domain through, and environment studies and yadda yadda yadda.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lmkg 8y ago
In a word, NIMBYs. In many places in California, the people already living their have both the inclination and the means to tie up the construction project in court until 2145. They don't want the construction, or they don't want the influx of commuters, or whatever. To a first approximation, the places that will accept the project happening are the ones looking for a train that goes somewhere else.
bonestamp2 8y ago
It's probably the cheapest and easiest section to build, so they could at least get the easiest part up and running the quickest... find flaws, make changes where it's cheap before starting on the very expensive sections. It's also probably the section of the track where the train can go the fastest, which would give them impressive numbers that might help keep the project rolling.
secabeen 8y ago
Because that is the part of the track that doesn't have significant geographic/tunneling requirements, nor does it require seizure via eminent domain of significant amounts of urban property to cut new tracks through LA/SF, nor does it require building hundreds of overpasses/tunnels through cities to eliminate level crossings. You can't run a train at 210 mph through a city at the level of the road. There's too much risk of collision. Instead you have to tunnel under or bridge over every single road. All of those things take time to design, negotiate, fight legal challenges, etc. The idea was to start building in the empty central valley now, while they work through non-building work in the urban and mountainous areas.
- niftich 8y ago
  This project is already grade-separated in the sense that there are no level crossings: even though they're in the "empty" central valley, there's still hundreds of grade-separated crossings that need to be built, not just through the cities, but also rural roads as well. So while it's cheaper out in the Valley than in LA or SF, it's still significantly more expensive than a non-grade-separated, say, ~75-100 mph-rated track would entail, the sorts of which are common in Europe and do a decent job moving people around cities spaced at such distances.
- solatic 8y ago
  I think your comment serves as great proof why building large public works projects in the US is now impossible. Rationally speaking, you're 100% right. Those are all true impediments. From a realpolitik perspective, it makes total sense to start building where it's not controversial so that parallel non-engineering work can be undertaken. There are rational reasons why labor is so expensive, why planning committees take so much time, and why things take as much time as they do. But this isn't how large public works can get done quickly. Any sufficiently large project is less technocratic and more political. Allowing large projects to be governed entirely technocratically has shown that timelines stretch so far out as to render the project impossibly expensive to finance and too limited in scope by project's end. There needs to be a single authority (with checks on it...) that can get things done, governed by a politician who can ensure that the authority's efforts are directed to popular projects. An agency with a planning body that makes community-approved blueprints ready before funding comes in, and with the authority to exercise eminent domain on approved plans and start work quickly and immediately.
Varcht 8y ago
Because Moonbeam's buddies could buy 1000's of acres of worthless desert for pennies and then sell it back for a nice little profit[1]. [1] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
- rrdharan 8y ago
  For those who don't know (I didn't) - Governor Moonbeam is a nickname for Jerry Brown, former governor of California: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
  - Varcht 8y ago
    How Jerry Brown Became ‘Governor Moonbeam’? [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- whyisthewhat 8y ago
  For those without the time to read - there is literally nothing in this article suggesting or alleging any corrupt dealings on the part of former governor Jerry Brown or anyone else. It is about the difficulty and expensive of purchasing all the parcels needed for the right of way, but, again, literally nothing in the article that ties into the parent comments assertion
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Because Moonbeam's buddies could buy 1000's of acres of worthless desert for pennies and then sell it back for a nice little profit IIRC, the valley-first alignment was part of the application for federal funds made when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, so it's unlikely it was motivated by concern for friends of the (at the time) once-and-future Governor Brown.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
adrianmonk 8y ago
I honestly think they may have felt that if they built part of it, it would be easier to convince everyone to finish it. There might be some validity to this thinking: (1) If you build part of it and show that it works, it makes it more of a concrete reality. Instead of asking people in urban areas to give up precious right-of-way to build something hypothetical, you're asking them to give it up to build something they can see. (2) You're also asking the urban areas to wait less time between when they give up the right-of-way and when the system is built. By pushing the rural areas to the earlier part of the schedule, you can move the urban areas to the later part of it. (3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it. (4) While the sunk cost fallacy isn't rational, "we've spent this much and we're half done already" will still convince some people. I'm not saying that overall this was a good strategy, but I can see some advantages. In any case, it seems like the main issue was massive cost overruns.
- dave5104 8y ago
  > (3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it. Hah, do you live in the Bay Area? With the amount of NIMBYism, I don't think peer pressure would help with getting it built to connect the SF/SJ connections. It's why we do not have BART going for a full loop around the bay. Santa Clara county voted it down.
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    Oh yeah, I used to live there and am well acquainted with the NIMBY craziness. I was approaching it more from the other side, which is that you need every weapon you can possibly get that will help twist their arms.
  - masonic 8y ago
    Santa Clara county voted it down. San Mateo and Marin counties already weren't participating anyway, so that circumnavigation dream was DOA.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Someone PLEASE explain to me WHY the governing bodies on this project decided to start with Merced -> Bakersfield. A couple reasons; pragmatically, there were issues toward both termini, but an initial route in the Valley would be useful to connect to either terminus and start getting real benefit (the valley stretch alone is of very little, though non-zero, utility) Politically, the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans, and putting the initial construction and operation, with associated jobs and benefits in one of the more Republican areas of the route was a mechanism to mitigate that.
- masonic 8y ago
  the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans Republicans have had no power in the CA legislature for many years. Democrats had not only control of all committees but also constant supermajorities for much of Brown's term (except for the timeframe where three Democrats were ousted in the same term for criminal activity). Except for single-vote majorities in 1969-70 and of just the Assembly for just part of 1995-6, the Republicans haven't had a majority in either house in the past sixty years.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Republicans have had no power in the CA legislature for many years. They had, and used as a lever on every other issue, a veto pretty much forever on the budget up until Prop 25 in 2010 dropped the 2/3 supermajority for passing the budget. (Despite the current situation, 2/3 supermajority for either party in either house, much less both houses, of the legislature is historically extremely uncommon.) They also had and used a similar power with regard to tax realignment since there was (and remains) a similar requirement for tax increases, but that's been a weaker power both since Dems went around them to the voters on tax increases in 2012 and because the Dems have actually had 2/3 supermajorities in the legislature at some times recently, including right now. But, both of those powers were in full bloom when the funding application to the federal government (which needed budgeted state funds) was made (by, it must be noted, a Republican administration in Sacramento, with whom legislative Republicans had more pull than their hard power in the legislature would suggest, though given the quirkiness of the Schwarzenegger adminstration, probably less than would be typical of a Republican governor.)

RyJones 8y ago

Who owned the land that was purchased or acquired for the project? Which campaigns do they donate to? Are the areas of concern toxic waste dumps, old gas stations, or contain old pipelines that would be expensive to remediate?

Varcht 8y ago
Yes, these are the questions to ask, related [0]. In the article they mention the number of parcels needed grew by 500, did owners subdivide in order to increase returns? [0] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
- RyJones 8y ago
  excellent, thanks. I was not cynical enough, I see

Diggity 8y ago

That region is flat and has few physical obstacles to a rail line (like mountains, major inclines, major declines etc) Getting a rail line between a major city (LA/San Jose/San Diego/SF etc) requires going through pretty serious mountain ranges. There is already rail line between them in their own geographical pockets (LA-San Diego, SF-San Jose-Oakland)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
btilly 8y ago
The number of physical obstacles is less important than the number of legal obstacles. If it has to go somewhere, everyone wants the high speed rail to go through someone else's house, preferably a long ways away.
- Diggity 8y ago
  For land rights issues it is easy enough to create stations that are sufficiently distanced from the city centers but close enough to tap into local Bus/Uber-ish/car rental options. Most Californian metropolis' have an area distanced enough but accessible where land is still relatively cheap, the exception being LA which has sprawled into Orange County and completely enveloped other regions. However going through mountain in an environmentally conscious way gets radically expensive in very short order. Additionally this style of construction tends to have its own legally contentious issues. (Dam construction for water management being comparative)
  - btilly 8y ago
    I disbelieve in your "easy enough". Certainly it is a problem that the plans for high speed rail never solved. You already pointed out that Los Angeles was a problem. For San Francisco the route chosen ran into problems 30 miles south of San Jose, where they were planning to use existing rails (at slower speeds). And once you're in San Jose, you still have a long ways to go to get into San Francisco. See https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-slow-track-20180315-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... for verification.
briandear 8y ago
They could build a train in central Nevada too. That’s “easy” — doesn’t mean it actually useful. I’d be happy with a Maglev replacing Caltrain to get from Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes. More people could use that than a train to Bakersfield.
- masonic 8y ago
  Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes That would be awesome for the 3 people looking to go specifically from Mountain View to SFO at a given time... but not so awesome for the 300 people wanting to get on or off somewhere in between.

empath75 8y ago

Probably easiest to get right of way and eminent domain through, and environment studies and yadda yadda yadda.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lmkg 8y ago

In a word, NIMBYs. In many places in California, the people already living their have both the inclination and the means to tie up the construction project in court until 2145. They don't want the construction, or they don't want the influx of commuters, or whatever. To a first approximation, the places that will accept the project happening are the ones looking for a train that goes somewhere else.

bonestamp2 8y ago

It's probably the cheapest and easiest section to build, so they could at least get the easiest part up and running the quickest... find flaws, make changes where it's cheap before starting on the very expensive sections. It's also probably the section of the track where the train can go the fastest, which would give them impressive numbers that might help keep the project rolling.

secabeen 8y ago

Because that is the part of the track that doesn't have significant geographic/tunneling requirements, nor does it require seizure via eminent domain of significant amounts of urban property to cut new tracks through LA/SF, nor does it require building hundreds of overpasses/tunnels through cities to eliminate level crossings. You can't run a train at 210 mph through a city at the level of the road. There's too much risk of collision. Instead you have to tunnel under or bridge over every single road. All of those things take time to design, negotiate, fight legal challenges, etc. The idea was to start building in the empty central valley now, while they work through non-building work in the urban and mountainous areas.

niftich 8y ago
This project is already grade-separated in the sense that there are no level crossings: even though they're in the "empty" central valley, there's still hundreds of grade-separated crossings that need to be built, not just through the cities, but also rural roads as well. So while it's cheaper out in the Valley than in LA or SF, it's still significantly more expensive than a non-grade-separated, say, ~75-100 mph-rated track would entail, the sorts of which are common in Europe and do a decent job moving people around cities spaced at such distances.
solatic 8y ago
I think your comment serves as great proof why building large public works projects in the US is now impossible. Rationally speaking, you're 100% right. Those are all true impediments. From a realpolitik perspective, it makes total sense to start building where it's not controversial so that parallel non-engineering work can be undertaken. There are rational reasons why labor is so expensive, why planning committees take so much time, and why things take as much time as they do. But this isn't how large public works can get done quickly. Any sufficiently large project is less technocratic and more political. Allowing large projects to be governed entirely technocratically has shown that timelines stretch so far out as to render the project impossibly expensive to finance and too limited in scope by project's end. There needs to be a single authority (with checks on it...) that can get things done, governed by a politician who can ensure that the authority's efforts are directed to popular projects. An agency with a planning body that makes community-approved blueprints ready before funding comes in, and with the authority to exercise eminent domain on approved plans and start work quickly and immediately.

Varcht 8y ago

Because Moonbeam's buddies could buy 1000's of acres of worthless desert for pennies and then sell it back for a nice little profit[1]. [1] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html

rrdharan 8y ago
For those who don't know (I didn't) - Governor Moonbeam is a nickname for Jerry Brown, former governor of California: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
- Varcht 8y ago
  How Jerry Brown Became ‘Governor Moonbeam’? [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
whyisthewhat 8y ago
For those without the time to read - there is literally nothing in this article suggesting or alleging any corrupt dealings on the part of former governor Jerry Brown or anyone else. It is about the difficulty and expensive of purchasing all the parcels needed for the right of way, but, again, literally nothing in the article that ties into the parent comments assertion
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Because Moonbeam's buddies could buy 1000's of acres of worthless desert for pennies and then sell it back for a nice little profit IIRC, the valley-first alignment was part of the application for federal funds made when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, so it's unlikely it was motivated by concern for friends of the (at the time) once-and-future Governor Brown.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

adrianmonk 8y ago

I honestly think they may have felt that if they built part of it, it would be easier to convince everyone to finish it. There might be some validity to this thinking: (1) If you build part of it and show that it works, it makes it more of a concrete reality. Instead of asking people in urban areas to give up precious right-of-way to build something hypothetical, you're asking them to give it up to build something they can see. (2) You're also asking the urban areas to wait less time between when they give up the right-of-way and when the system is built. By pushing the rural areas to the earlier part of the schedule, you can move the urban areas to the later part of it. (3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it. (4) While the sunk cost fallacy isn't rational, "we've spent this much and we're half done already" will still convince some people. I'm not saying that overall this was a good strategy, but I can see some advantages. In any case, it seems like the main issue was massive cost overruns.

dave5104 8y ago
> (3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it. Hah, do you live in the Bay Area? With the amount of NIMBYism, I don't think peer pressure would help with getting it built to connect the SF/SJ connections. It's why we do not have BART going for a full loop around the bay. Santa Clara county voted it down.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  Oh yeah, I used to live there and am well acquainted with the NIMBY craziness. I was approaching it more from the other side, which is that you need every weapon you can possibly get that will help twist their arms.
- masonic 8y ago
  Santa Clara county voted it down. San Mateo and Marin counties already weren't participating anyway, so that circumnavigation dream was DOA.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Someone PLEASE explain to me WHY the governing bodies on this project decided to start with Merced -> Bakersfield. A couple reasons; pragmatically, there were issues toward both termini, but an initial route in the Valley would be useful to connect to either terminus and start getting real benefit (the valley stretch alone is of very little, though non-zero, utility) Politically, the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans, and putting the initial construction and operation, with associated jobs and benefits in one of the more Republican areas of the route was a mechanism to mitigate that.

masonic 8y ago
the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans Republicans have had no power in the CA legislature for many years. Democrats had not only control of all committees but also constant supermajorities for much of Brown's term (except for the timeframe where three Democrats were ousted in the same term for criminal activity). Except for single-vote majorities in 1969-70 and of just the Assembly for just part of 1995-6, the Republicans haven't had a majority in either house in the past sixty years.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Republicans have had no power in the CA legislature for many years. They had, and used as a lever on every other issue, a veto pretty much forever on the budget up until Prop 25 in 2010 dropped the 2/3 supermajority for passing the budget. (Despite the current situation, 2/3 supermajority for either party in either house, much less both houses, of the legislature is historically extremely uncommon.) They also had and used a similar power with regard to tax realignment since there was (and remains) a similar requirement for tax increases, but that's been a weaker power both since Dems went around them to the voters on tax increases in 2012 and because the Dems have actually had 2/3 supermajorities in the legislature at some times recently, including right now. But, both of those powers were in full bloom when the funding application to the federal government (which needed budgeted state funds) was made (by, it must be noted, a Republican administration in Sacramento, with whom legislative Republicans had more pull than their hard power in the legislature would suggest, though given the quirkiness of the Schwarzenegger adminstration, probably less than would be typical of a Republican governor.)