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U.S. cancels $929M in California high speed rail funds after appeal rejected

212 points by petethomas 7y ago

ummonk 7y ago
Wasn’t part of the criteria of the original funding grant that the project could be scaled back to derive direct benefit from the funding without needing additional full construction of the high speed rail?
reaperducer 7y ago
As a fain of rail travel, and someone who sometimes needs to travel this corridor, I was really looking forward to riding this line. I noticed a lot of the California headlines about this have painted it along the lines of "Evil Trump administration killing California high speed rail!" The reality is, though, that California botched this project. The Federal funding was contingent on California making progress, and the amount of funding was sized for the size of the project. California has made little progress, and the size of the project has been reduced. It's only fiscally responsible for the feds to take back the money. Just like if you promise a VC a million users in the first year, but only deliver 10,000 they're going to look at you sideways. FTA: Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said on Thursday it had canceled the funding awarded in a 2010 agreement after it said the state had “repeatedly failed to comply” and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.” Fortunately, high speed rail is making (slow) progress in other states like Florida, Illinois and Texas. Hopefully the money can do some good in those places.
- duxup 7y ago
  >Illinois It would be nice if in Minnesota we didn't have Wisconsin between us and Illinois so we could do something there.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    You could cut south through Iowa. The distance is longer, but for MN it means you can pick up some southern cities along the way (Minneapolis is so close to Wisconsin that you could put the MN end in Wisconsin and still get most of your riders from Minneapolis). I expect a couple of the tiny cities in Iowa along the way would like service.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Maybe, but I'd worry about more places to possibly stop would mean ... lots of requests for stops. One thing watching folks talk about rail locally is that all these little towns that down't want it ... unless you're going to stop a 10 times a day at their town. At some point it all stops making sense then.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        True, but having trains stop in Rochester MN and Waterloo IA makes sense if the track is already close. (Note I didn't say the same train - scheduling is more complex as is the track which now needs switches, but express trains that bypass the small towns make sense) You wouldn't do the track across WI without looking that the bigger cities in the way and deciding where to stop. You wouldn't stop in every small town, but the bigger towns...
- skellington 7y ago
  It's been reduced and it goes from nowhere to nowhere. Seriously, Merced to Bakersfield? Isn't the majority of soul crushing traffic happening inside the LA and Bay Area regions?
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    yes. exactly right. the first leg should have been somewhere near the Santa Ana Freeway from LA to Orange County -- or somewhere else near a large component of California's population.
    - musicale 7y ago
      I think the right of way/real estate issue is one of the things that makes it incredibly expensive, and why it's much easier and cheaper to build a useless line from nowhere to the outskirts of nowhere. Maybe the rail line could somehow reuse the freeway right of way, but I'm not sure how that could work while retaining the roads for cars and trucks.
- asavadatti 7y ago
  >In March 2018, the state forecast project costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned costs could be as much as $98.1 billion. I love train travel as well but that is an obscene amount of money. I wish they would upgrade the existing tracks so that traveling from Emeryville-LA Union station goes from 10 hours to 4-5hrs (and runs multiple times a day)
  - ghaff 7y ago
    An Acela-like train probably wouldn't be that fast. On the Northeast Corridor, the Acela is only around an hour faster than the regional and part of that is just making fewer stops. My guess is you'd still be looking at 7+ hours in CA, at which point most people would just fly. (Very few people actually take the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC because it's pretty much a full-day trip. But New York is in about the middle so there are two popular sub-sections--unlike the case with CA.)
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      The Acela is only that slow because the rail infrastructure can't support the maximum speed of the train's rolling stock. The purchase of the rolling stock was supposed to spur the redevelopment of the tracks, but that never happened.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        My comment was mostly in the vein of wondering what a "cheap" (relatively) not-really HSR could have looked like and the answer is probably "not fast enough to get from Emeryville to LA in a timeframe where people would really use it." And, of course, the rolling stock had various problems so I'm not sure what the theoretical top speed ended up being.
  - jonahhorowitz 7y ago
    Still cheaper than widening I-5, which is the primary alternative.
- mu_killnine 7y ago
  > Illinois To the surprise of no one, things are going slower than expected: http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/February-2019/What-Happened-to-High-Speed-Rail-in-Illinois/ http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/February-2019/What-Happe...
kenneth 7y ago
Nothing quite embodies the utter failure of the US and CA in particular as this embarrassing high-speed rail project. This is something that has been pioneered, developed, and commoditized in other countries, both in Europe and Asia. The CA project had incredibly modest ambitions: a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds, using completely standard technology. This isn't a hyperloop, a maglev, a hyperfast train, a dense network, or anything else that can fail because of technology risk. It's purely a failure at execution, pretty much entirely because of politics and corruption. In the US, the process for infrastructure construction is entirely broken, and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development. This is distinctly a CA problem.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - debacle 7y ago
    And New York, and Massachusetts, and Illinois, and probably most other states.
  - dmix 7y ago
    The Boston tunnel was a pretty great example of the massive weight politics and hiring/mismanaging bad gov contractors puts on every infrastructure project (it "started" in 1982, broke ground in 1991, and finished 2007 at 200% over budget): > The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the US, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $14.6 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
inspector14 7y ago
wasn't a large amount of corruption surrounding this deal specifically a major plotline in true detective season 2?
- anderber 7y ago
  You're right about that being a plot for True Detective. Although the city of Vinci plot is very much based on the real Vernon, the high speed rail plot not so much (at least from what I understand): https://www.laweekly.com/news/just-how-ridiculous-is-true-detectives-high-speed-rail-plot-line-5774399 https://www.laweekly.com/news/just-how-ridiculous-is-true-de...
HillaryBriss 7y ago
> The ... state had [originally] planned to build a 520-mile (837 km) system ... from Los Angeles to San Francisco ... Newsom said in February the state would instead complete a 119-mile high-speed link between Merced and Bakersfield... Um... That's not really gonna help.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
It's really shitty if this is a selective action against California and not large projects overrunning costs in other states. At the same time, when the project costs 10x what was promised, saying no seems like a good thing. If this kind of cancellation was applied to all projects going as poorly as this, it'd be a really fair decision.
- Lendal 7y ago
  Oh don't worry. The Trump administration is taking its War on Government to all the states.
  - succleaf 7y ago
    Well, at least you aren't being hyperbolic
- tathougies 7y ago
  The issue isn't the cost but rather that California decided not to build it but take the money anyway. The money was set aside for a train between LA and San Francisco, two of the most important economic hubs in the States. The State of California decided to instead squander the money on a rail line between Bakersfield and Fresno, two cities that half the country have never heard of.
- LanceH 7y ago
  It was well pointed out before it started that it would cost multiple times the estimates the state was claiming. It should never had made it this far.
  - xienze 7y ago
    >It was well pointed out before it started that it would cost multiple times the estimates the state was claiming. It followed the trajectory of basically every progressive pet project: “We need to do X! It’ll only cost $Y!” >Yeah right, it’s gonna cost 10 times that and be 20 years late. “Typical Republican fear mongering! Ignore them!” Years later on HN: “It was obvious from the beginning that project X could never be done for $Y. How come no one realized that at the time?”
geogra4 7y ago
It's unbelievable how awful we are at building high speed rail, or any rail at all in this country.
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
Can't say I'm surprised. While in general the USA has had a very hard time with new infrastructure projects California has always taken it to the next level.
dberg 7y ago
77 billion for a train in 2033 ? And people wonder why we in the US think the government is completely unable to run these types of projects effectively. Total joke.
- justfor1comment 7y ago
  Even I was surprised by the timeline. A high speed train by 2033, really? China has them now, Japan has them now. India is building a bullet train with roughly the same length as SF to LA in 3 years. The US shouldn't be so slow compared to these other countries.
  - kitsunesoba 7y ago
    What I’m curious of is why we haven’t yet tried contracting the companies responsible for Japan’s train system and just letting them run the show, with our only responsibility being acquiring the required land and clearing associated political hurdles. I’m sure Japan would be willing to lend a hand and they may even be able to do it for less time and money than domestic companies could.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      I understand the issue to be dealing with three or four layers of government in each municipality as well as sourcing labor—not engineering competence.
    - tdhoot 7y ago
      Chinese and Japanese companies were filling to partially fund HSR in the US since it would open markets for their trainsets, but they all backed out because the US imposed "buy American" requirements that would make it impossible for them to use their trains.
      - fooblitzky 7y ago
        Aren't those "buy American" requirements illegal under the WTO?
jorblumesea 7y ago
It seems that every major American infrastructure project is dominated by concerns other than building a practical, efficient forms of transportation. Transportation projects are dominated by politics, handouts, corruption and excessive opposition to transportation even existing, while ignoring practical and common sense ideas. The Cal High speed rail is a perfect example. Routes that don't serve major population centers, fights over land use, fights over whether a rail line should even exist, circuitous routes to reward political supporters, lack of transparency and auditing tools, cost overruns and corruption... There's a good write up here: https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-project https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-pro... Europe and Asia just build transit to be transit. In the US at least, if something actually gets built and used it's just a nice side effect.
- geogra4 7y ago
  It's strange to me how people imbue simple no-nonsense infrastructure projects with so much mental baggage.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  That really does embody the spirit of US infrastructure projects: "I'm here to make some money, and if {$infrastructure} gets built along the way, that's fine too, but by no means a deal-breaker."
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  When people think "political power at the highest levels" we rarely think about public works projects but that's a mistake. Public works shape our lives, and require flows of truly titanic amounts of capital to build and maintain. I'm halfway through Robert Caro's fantastic biography of Robert Moses, who had an iron grip on New York public works for nearly half a century. It's eye-opening just how much power and influence arises from being able to control these types of projects. Yet this authority flies under the radar because it's all soft power with little public accountability. Politicians vie in the public arena over relatively insubstantial things while the real significant decisions for the future of the state take place in never-attended hearings far from press scrutiny. Activists (admirably) fight tooth and nail for every inch of progress on the issue du jour but vote ambivalently on massive multibillion-dollar bond issues.
staunch 7y ago
Startups really do seem to be the best solution to problems like these. Elon Musk is leading teams that are solving some of the world's biggest problems. Those efforts greatly benefited from government subsidies, funding, etc. Let's just admit finally that governments are really only good at writing checks, that they suck at managing projects, and then just work very hard figure out where those checks should go. Our governments(s) should give a bunch of teams $10M to design projects, then a few teams $100M to prototype them, and then one or two teams the billions required to build them out. I bet there's a qualified and moral person on HN that could lead a successful high speed rail project with government backing.
- apexalpha 7y ago
  Prototype for what? All the tech for high speed rail already exists and is proven to work. Lots of governemnts around the world do proper infrastructure projects.
- sbov 7y ago
  It's not a technology problem, it's a political one.
notJim 7y ago
The US desperately needs to figure out how to do big infrastructure projects like this. High-speed rail is a critical piece of a greener economy, because it can truly compete with air travel at medium distances, and blows car travel out of the water. It's really unfortunate that the political incentives seem to be that Republicans are just outright opposed to any kind of government infrastructure spending unless it's a money-making scheme for their donors, and Democrats want to defend any project that sounds good, and damn the costs or whether it's actually successful. What we need is a willingness to do major, expensive projects (high-speed rail is just not going to cheap in California, or anywhere), and ruthless commitment to making them happen efficiently. When a project like this fails in this way, all it does it play into the hands bad-faith actors who will never support major infrastructure projects. Then, people who are acting in good faith oppose them too, because there aren't enough counter-examples of successful projects.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- elwell 7y ago
  Not enough slave labor available like in other countries. /sarcasm/
- newsoul2019 7y ago
  Everything about this is 100% spot on
- jseliger 7y ago
  Absolutely true: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/gao-report-transit-construction-costs https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/g...
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  I have yet to see a proposal for this type of infrastructure that makes intuitive sense. Not that intuition trumps engineering but the locations for these are usually head scratchingly odd.
- 7y ago
lostdog 7y ago
Newsom should have used the money to upgrade Caltrain and SF rail stations, and THEN cancel the project. At least then something useful would have gotten done.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  They'd still have to pay back funds for failing to stick to the original plan. The funding did have some requirements.
- komali2 7y ago
  Tons of federal funding is part of the reason the electrification of Caltrain is happening. If newsom had taken funding for the statewide hsr and reappropriatied it to the regional Caltrain I imagine people would have been up in arms...
pascoej 7y ago
Honestly glad. Highspeed rail is not going to work in America if it takes 77B and and over 10 years to complete one line. About 10 years ago China had only 1 high speed rail line, now look.
- manigandham 7y ago
  China can do massive infrastructure projects because it has a very efficient authoritarian government. They make a decision and get it done, for better or worse.
  - andbberger 7y ago
    Great we've identified the problem, our government is horribly inefficient. Time to fix how we organize our societies. edit: I am __not__ advocating for authoritarianism
    - kpU8efre7r 7y ago
      Would you look at that! Looks like the proposed rail is going through your property! You have a week to get the fuck out before the dozers begin clearing. China is able to do this because they trample rights.
    - eanzenberg 7y ago
      Uhhh.. so you're cool with interment camps, no free speech, and effective police surveillance?
      - ngokevin 7y ago
        Those are terrible, but realize that the only news that makes it out from China to the US are the negative, and heavily paints China as evil. Everyone I talk to have never been to China, yet think everyone there is brainwashed. People realize a lot of things are terrible about the government, just like in any other country. China has been on an economic boom and radically changing the last half century reaching Western levels of QoL...although Jinping is taking it down a notch. Imagine living in a country where media filters all about the US down to Japanese internment camps just barely over half a century ago, NSA spying, GitMo waterboarding, homeless-packed cities, and kids getting shot in schools routinely. It's probably what happens in North Korea.
mikepurvis 7y ago
Even for people who hate the "green" aspect, high volume mass transit is important for enabling the vision where autonomous taxis actually serve last mile rather than just sitting in traffic jams for hours like you do in your regular car.
- notJim 7y ago
  Yes exactly. Another aspect of this is that as soon as we can actually start completing these projects successfully, their benefits will be incredibly obvious and people will want more. As you said, not even for political reasons or whatever, but just because they're better.
- galaxyLogic 7y ago
  I'm all for this but I wonder if FLYING autonomous taxis will be a better solution in the end. And couldn't there be flying trains as well?
  - nihonde 7y ago
    I feel like a big part of the reason America fails at this is jumping from high speed rail (proven tech since the 1960s) to flying autonomous taxis (coming any day now, right after flying pigs).
  - perfmode 7y ago
    Yikes. Is this what our imagination has come to?
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    couldn't there be flying trains as well Aren't those called airplanes?
    - gumby 7y ago
      Airplanes are busses; they rarely tow another plane. Technically I suppose if you tow a sailplane into the sky then the powered aircraft is a locomotive with the sailplane in train. So yes, there can be and are flying trains.
eam 7y ago
I've seen several parts of the legs laid out already so I was wondering if they can just convert it to a highway. The current highway, route 99, which runs almost parallel to it is beginning to get congested quite often, so it could probably get repurposed for a highway, otherwise it will just be a symbol of failure.
manigandham 7y ago
This project isn't economically viable in the first place. Unless engineering and real estate costs drop by an order of magnitude, there's not enough visitor travel or transit density or cost differential where this makes sense as planned. It was doomed from the start.
rayiner 7y ago
Probably better for the environment that this failed. Construction would release so much CO2 that the California HSR would have to be as busy as the entire Northeast corridor to break even in terms of carbon impact. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-high-speed-rail/492 https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... That is basically a fantasy given that the northeast corridor passes through the densest megalopolis in the country, and connects seven major population/business centers, while the California HSR would pass through nothing.
- jonahhorowitz 7y ago
  Have you seen the number of flights daily between LAX and SFO, not to mention the other nearby airports. HSR planned to run trains every 5-12 minutes during peak hours.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    LA to SF is 3.5 million flights (edit: passengers) per year. It’s one of the busiest routes, but just 1/3 of what it would take to make HSR a net win in terms of CO2 footprint. The idea of an SF to LA HSR matching the Northeast Corridor’s passenger volume is completely laughable. You can ride the train all the way from the mountains north of NYC to exurban VA. Neither SF nor LA have the massive transit infrastructure connecting to the intercity rail that you have in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and DC.
    - kenneth 7y ago
      6 million passengers a year. 3.5M flights is about as many as the whole world has.
- asdff 7y ago
  Pollution from LAX litters South LA with small particulate with every takeoff. Rampant air travel is probably even more unsustainable than personal car use, and that's saying a lot. https://news.usc.edu/63466/new-concerns-raised-about-air-pollution-at-lax/ https://news.usc.edu/63466/new-concerns-raised-about-air-pol...
jonathankoren 7y ago
As someone who voted for the the $10B bond, and would love to see HSR, all I have to say is: Good. We have to admit that CalHSR is a failure, and building a train between Bakersfield and Merced is stupid. The United States has some systematic problems when it comes to infrastructure. We see it at both the micro and macro level. At the micro level, it takes four guys more than a month to fix an escalator at a BART station. Months to paint lanes on a street in San Jose. At the macro level, $13B becomes $98B. CityLab ran a story about why NYC stopped building subways.[0] In it, it plotted the cost subway construction cost per mile at different times in constant 2017 dollars. First line cost $125M/mile in 1904. In 1944 it went up to <$500M, and even in 1988, it was just above $500M. Not bad for 44 years. Then cost go exponential in 2017 and 2019, ending at $4000M/mile! This is stupid. Another article (which I have sadly lost) compared the cost of construction in the US to France. I think they compared a Boston subway line to a Parisian one. The Boston one costs twice as much, and requires twice as many people for “safety”. I’m sorry, but this is grift. Then of course there’s all the environmental and neighborhood reviews that cost more, and stymie everything. If we want to make any progress, I’m thinking we’re going to just have to bust all of this up. Cut the red tape, and go with closed price bids. Hell, use foreign contractors. The French are apparently half the cost, faster, and high quality. Just hire them and be done with it. [0] http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-building-subways http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-...
- asdff 7y ago
  Contractors have been hobbling this project, the last thing we need is to bring in more piranhas but that might now be inevitable unfortunately. Caltrans should have had complete control over this project and plowed through the engineering and construction in house. Instead a new agency was created with nearly zero staff, and was forced to buddy up with a private sector all to eager to milk every public dollar possible out of this project and give the littlest return possible, as in their eyes doing anything short of that is leaving money on the table.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  The causes of the NYC subway cost issues are pretty well documented, and egregious: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
docker_up 7y ago
A train between Merced and Bakersfield? The talks of Bridges to Nowhere dwarf the ridiculousness of this Train To and From Nowhere. Who the hell would use this to make it profitable enough to justify?
- newsoul2019 7y ago
  You do know the ultimate goal was to connect the Bay Area with LA...
- asdff 7y ago
  The plan is still to link SF and LA once a clearer funding situation materializes, the project has since been scaled back as work has already started between Merced and Bakersfield. If you want to blame someone, don't blame the politicians who are trying to make this happen, blame the local politicians along the route and private contractors who've been hobbling and sucking the blood out of this project since it was announced.
  - docker_up 7y ago
    No, Newsom killed that plan. It's insane to think that this would actually be completed. It's more like the stealth fighter project that should never have gotten funding, or should have had its funding cut decades previous at this point.
noonespecial 7y ago
The really humbling thing about visiting things like the Hoover Dam is realizing that things like this are impossible today. If they started that dam today, they'd spend 20 years and twice the money the dam actually cost just on lawsuits and papers and have nothing to show for it decades later.
- potiuper 7y ago
  The Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams were also impossible in their day due to so called environmentalists and in order to replace the power that would have been provided by them, the worse coal-fired Navajo Generating Station option was completed near Page, Arizona in 1976 for the the Central Arizona Project.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  96 people died building the Hoover Dam [1]. It was built 'on time and on budget' to a great extent at the expense of lives. That's a lot of deaths. For comparison, only 147 total coalition deaths as a result of combat with the enemy [2] in the 1991 Gulf war, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, the liberation of Kuwait and the overrunning of most of Iraq. And that's saying nothing of the comp, overtime and other externalized issues. Of course, the failure of rail is pretty bad and we need to learn, but we can't hold the Hoover Dam up as 'the example'. [1] https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fatal.html https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fatal.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
  - eanzenberg 7y ago
    Underrated comment. People yearn for the "good old days" when shit got done, fast and cheap! Let's just forget all the progress in safety and reduced deaths since then..
    - Leader2light 7y ago
      Honestly, who cares about 10000 deaths(friends and family aside). Cost of doing business. The human race will soon be shedding lives by the billions as we collapse.
rsync 7y ago
Good. I want an actual high speed train from the new downtown SF transit station to Union Station LA in two hours or less. I would like a high speed train that won't be obsolete the day it is opened. What was being (haltingly) built was a ridiculous route-by-committee with time consuming (and sprawl inducing) stops in whichever districts had an assertive rep willing to sacrifice a project of national importance for their little town. All you needed to know about CA HSR could be learned by seeing it was not built on the I-5 corridor. Fresno and Palmdale should be spurs - not route benders.
- martinald 7y ago
  No, it really wasn't. Have you looked at a map of topography of California? I5 was built that route for a reason - it is the easiest route unless you want the route to be in 100s of km of incredibly expensive tunnel.
  - briandear 7y ago
    “Easy” isn’t the project. The project is to connect the two major population centers. Nobody cares about Merced to Bakersfield. And expensive? Building a hundred miles of line that nobody cares about is more expensive than building a train people would actually use. Why would I spend 4 hours riding to LA via Bakersfield when I can spend 45 min on an airplane. I live 12 minutes from the San Jose Airport. Facilitating air shuttles wouldn’t require billions of dollars and I wouldn’t have to waste time transiting the Central Valley for no good reason other than politics.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent comment.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Look at a map. I5 is NOT where the rail was going to be built.
- njepa 7y ago
  High speed rail isn't that good for what you want. It will churn through too much infrastructure for too little value for point-to-point. What it is good at is creating regions. Done correctly it can open up a lot of land and opportunities. (I don't know the specifics of this project however).
dantheman 7y ago
This project didn't make sense from the start - look at where the construction is and what's been done. It should be SF to LA not all this other nonsense.
- martinald 7y ago
  Huh? SF to LA is literally the project. Federal fund restrictions meant CA has to pay for SF->SJ (which is being done under the caltrain modernization project) and Bakersfield to LA (which is completely unfunded) as this is AFIAK considered 'commuter rail' so is not eligible for federal funding.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield section was indefinitely postponed by Newsom's last State of the State address. The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield section was indefinitely postponed by Newsom's last State of the State address. Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield initial construction segment, other than the environmental clearance and planning work that was explicitly stated to be continuing in Newsome's State of the State address, was never actually scheduled because funding had not been secured; the state was actively seeking funding before the address, and all the address said was that the State would continue seeking funding and would not do work until it had secured it. The address literally was waving around the status quo as news. It didn't do anything (which it wouldn't even if it had announced a policy change, because actual policy is made by laws, regulations, executive orders, and a number of other vehicles, the State of the State address not being one of them.) > The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless. The Merced to Bakersfield segment is the one for which the federal government had specifically designated funding. Cancelling the funding on the basis that the state was, as always explicitly planned, building only the funded part until securing additional funding is beyond ludicrous. (Of course, Newsome's statement in the State of the State address which was clearly designed to appear to be announcing significant policy while actually announcing the status quo was also beyond ludicrous, and politically played into opponents of the project and opponents of the state as a whole -- and the Trump Administration may or may not be the former, but has pretty openly shown itself to be the latter.)
jedberg 7y ago
Good. It was a huge waste of money anyway. It was being built in the wrong order (why would you build the parts that would get the least ridership first?!), it was going to the wrong places, and at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA. We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that.
- martinald 7y ago
  It was built in the "wrong order" because the areas near cities had existing commuter rail, and therefore weren't eligible for federal "new start" grants. Of course, FAA grant money is available to expand SFO, OAK and LAX... no questions asked.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Because airlines have a ticker and a public train does not, unfortunately.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It was being built in the wrong order (why would you build the parts that would get the least ridership first?!) Because the initial operating segment needed to be near one of the endpoints (San Jose to Bakersfield was the plan) in order to maximize ridership, meaning the initial construction segment should be, at least largely, part of such a segment (the ICS was Bakersfield to Merced), and the ICS was specifically select because of relative ease of construction and federal funding being available for work that could start relatively soon at the time with a priority to economically hard hit areas for economic development purposes, which the valley end of the planned IOS fit. > at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA. Yes, it would have. > We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that. The economic case for the train was made on the bases of expected displaced road traffic and reduced funds dedicated to highway construction and maintenance with it versus without it, not replacing air travel.
  - 7y ago
SubiculumCode 7y ago
I can't help but feel that the solution to overblown infrastructure costs would involve less contracting and more of construction directly with state employees and resources. Sure government is less efficient than the private sphere, but government contractors have awful incentives when it comes to cost effectiveness...bilking the state for more hours/supplies is more much profitable than doing a job quickly and cost-effectively, and contractors are very efficient at doing that.
calebgilbert 7y ago
I don't see for all the world how this isn't an utter failure for both the management for this project and the ultra combative style that the previous and current California gubernatorial administrations approach just about any and all dealing with the feds since Trump was elected. Have a feeling this might be where 'more red meat for the base' might have met it's match in terms of cognitive dissonance for at least some California voters. UPDATE - : CA Governor Newsom this afternoon (via Sacbee): "The Trump Administration’s action is illegal and a direct assault on California, our green infrastructure, and the thousands of Central Valley workers who are building this project,” he said. “Just as we have seen from the Trump Administration’s attacks on our clean air standards, our immigrant communities and in countless other areas, the Trump Administration is trying to exact political retribution on our state. “This is California’s money, appropriated by Congress, and we will vigorously defend it in court" Exactly the type of rhetoric, attitude, and threats that help push this situation in the first place (well, along with the gross mismanagement by the state for years) and he still can't quit digging.
- succleaf 7y ago
  Pelosi's nephew attacking President Trump, who would have predicted that!
starpilot 7y ago
Hyperloop seriously has a better chance of building an SF-LA line than the state of CA, and also SpaceX has a better chance of reaching Mars before 2024 than NASA returning the moon in that time (in 2004, GWB announced NASA would return to the moon by 2020). Government just can't do big projects any more.
- andbberger 7y ago
  an idea has a better chance of building rail infrastructure than a nation-state? Dubious. You seem to be drawing an impossibly broad conclusion. I have taken the liberty of editing your concluding statement by adding an appropriate amount of uncertainty and removing overly general statements. Here's what it says: ''
  - loceng 7y ago
    An idea that Elon is actively implementing with The Boring Company. There was also the idea of reusable rockets and he believed it was possible as well - and that has been done too. I'm curious how much or little you know about The Boring Company's efforts so far?
    - andbberger 7y ago
      musk is not implementing anything. I find the consistency with which the asshole figure heads (musk, jobs) are idolized deeply troubling. cool yeah, new tech, wooh. very exciting. but you know what's more important than that? being a good, kind person. which you definitely are not if you are heading a large organization designed to systematically squeeeeeeeze everything it can get out of its peons while giving them as little as possible in return. and also definitely if you like to do things such as publicly call someone risking their life to save strangers a pedophile.
      - loceng 7y ago
        Well you're clearly being absurd, and it looks like you don't have a balanced view and you've bought into negative press that's heavily been propaganda generated by media for click views and by short sellers. Would be a useful exercise, if you can manage, to make a list of positives of what Elon and his companies have accomplished so far. Maybe work on your negativity and emotional reactions so you can understand things more clearly, develop compassion by developing balanced logic which includes full perspective more than just hate.
tomohawk 7y ago
Pretty massive blow to CA style politics / governance. This was a feather in the cap of the Democrat party and they turned it into an anchor. Complete failure to execute.
nabakin 7y ago
> The largest U.S. state has repeatedly sued the Trump administration and officials expect the state will sue over the rescinding of rail funding. Um..did we forget about Texas and Alaska?
- esilver 7y ago
  I think they meant in terms of population and, transitively, users of infrastructure. California (39.5 MM) will likely be “larger” than Texas (28.7 MM) for some time, despite a much lower growth rate. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimates-national-state.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...
  - nabakin 7y ago
    That makes sense ty
esilver 7y ago
Merced to Bakersfield will probably be the fastest-growing corridor in the state for the foreseeable future, however, the state received HSR funding contingent on the development of a San Francisco to Los Angeles route. It’s completely unsurprising that the Department of Transportation wants the funding back after the state downsized the project from nationally-significant to regionally-significant.
Leader2light 7y ago
The USA faces collapse. We see this day by day.
lchengify 7y ago
Having lived for 6 years in the rail transport capital of the US (NYC / Philly / Northeast Corridor) and 4 years in SF, I can honestly say that I don't think there is a world where this was going to work. Let me state for the record that I am a huge fan of rail and public transit in general, but the forces and timing working against this project were too large to be overcome even with $10B in backing. Here are some of the reasons: 1. Lots of people here are comparing this project to projects in China. I think it's hard to overstate how one of the most expensive process (land acquisition by the government) is fundamentally different in China vs the US. The idea of "land ownership" in China is entirely different: Most private entities don't "own" land in the US sense, they may lease it for a long time (~99) years but ultimately its incredibly easy for local and national governments to execute eminent domain with little or no regard for land rights. Yes, this make public transport easier, but land rights are fundamental for the continuation of a democracy. It's not something we want to mess with. 2. Culturally, California is just not a train state. In the Northeast Corridor, trains and public transit are just more engrained in the culture. Kids learn at the age of 5 that NJ Transit, LIRR, or Metro North is the best way in and out of NYC. Most of my friends in NYC don't even have drivers licenses. Things are closer together, land is flatter, there aren't huge swaths of nature in between things, and there's such a high density of people and economic activity that trains have made sense for a long time. Yes, the NYC subway has its problems, but I can always bet that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I can get from Manhattan to JFK in an hour. In SF it's hard to even tell if I can get across the Bay past Midnight. 3. The small decisions made about stops, contracting, and procurement for the high speed rail were more about making the project politically palpable than actual need or engineering practicality. Taking a weird detour to Palmdale, as detailed in the Vox article below, is the best example of this [1]. The Palmdale route alone made the north-south trip 12 minutes slower while costing $5 billion in extra spending. If you're going to make that kind of decision over and over again and stack turtles until everyone's happy, you're going to make a great piece of paper but nothing that will ever turn on. 4. The decision to do this wasn't organic. If you take a look at regional transit needs in CA generally, no one was stack ranking high speed rail at the top. In LA you have basic problems with inaccessibility within most of the city, the most egregious being the lack of connectivity to LAX (which just started getting built last year). In SF you have gridlock where we can't add diesel trains to CalTrain because it needs to get Electrified first by law, but that process won't happen until 2022 [2]. If we can't upgrade a regional rail that serves 1/3rd of the economic activity of the state, what makes us think we can build a high speed rail that is (back of the envelope) 10x as long? At least in the northeast, trains systems were built where there was (1) incredible demand and (2) an understanding that it could be built where value would be opened up as it was happening. Which is why those rail lines start in major metro areas and extend outward, rather than building in the central valley and working backwards. 5. Air and car travel, despite its (obvious) climate change problems, just works. It's relatively cheap, it's well understood, and given the vast distance and significant nature features between population areas, it's a good solution to a hard problem. LAX sucks, but LA has 4 regional airports that can be used once you understand how. Flights are frequent, have lots of type options, and can be purchased for $50 one way. Roads and cars work better on mountain terrain than rail, and can better serve a dispersed population. Yes, we cannot run on gasoline forever if we want to save the planet, but right now it's easy to understand why California has stuck with this solution so long given its difference to other major areas that use trains. Overall, I was rooting for this, but this end was inevitable. But it's not the end of the world. We will learn from this and find a way, and I'm convinced in the end it will be more economical and fit California's unique parameters better than a $90B train. The solution may be something we can't see now (self-driving battery-powered cars on isolated freeway lanes, anyone?), but we'll find it. I know we will [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/california-high-speed-rail-canceled https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/c... [2] https://calmod.org/ https://calmod.org/
paxys 7y ago
Kinda happy this shitshow is put to rest. I just hope this doesn't have any effects on Caltrain electrification funding.
pelemele 7y ago
...and next step should a proper audit of the while train fiasco...
musicale 7y ago
Looks like Bakersfield won't become that booming metropolis that everyone was expecting it to be. ;-/ More seriously, the feds seem to be kind of right; it has been 9 years and California hasn't made much if any progress.
tomatotomato37 7y ago
See, this is kinda my problem with the whole push for nationalized healthcare in the US; it's not the nationalized healthcare part that's the problem. The Germans can do national healthcare beautifully. The Swedes can do national healthcare beautifully. The UK can do national healthcare... competently. But if the current US bureaucracy was put up to the task, than in a year we'll end up having serious articles about the resurgence of the plaque in Kentucky. I'm not sure how, but we really need to fix the current bureaucratic situation before we give them any more responsibility in the manner
- bgroins 7y ago
  A bit hyperbolic don't you think? We've had Medicare since 1966 and despite the bad press the VA gets it has the highest rate of satisfaction of any system in the US. https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-health-plans-satisfied.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-hea...
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Medicare the system with an unfunded liability of $37 trillion?
    - tptacek 7y ago
      Is that really a meaningful number? Isn't that projecting out something like 50 years and assuming no changes to allocations?
- mnm1 7y ago
  Medicare and Medicaid work pretty damn well. Why wouldn't nationalized care for everyone work the same? Your argument is irrational and overlooks two major healthcare systems that the US government is handling fairly well. Either could be expanded to cover everyone.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
I agree. Merced to Bakersfield - really who cares? LA to SF is the only route that makes sense. Do that or do nothing. Who the heck needs high speed rail line between Merced and Bakersfield? That being said, this was very politicly motivated, of that I have no doubt.
rurban 7y ago
This really cries for Elon, cutting out the expensive middle men. Wonder if he dares.
viktorvamos 7y ago
It's more of a Shelbyville idea...

212 points by petethomas 7y ago

Wasn’t part of the criteria of the original funding grant that the project could be scaled back to derive direct benefit from the funding without needing additional full construction of the high speed rail?

reaperducer 7y ago

As a fain of rail travel, and someone who sometimes needs to travel this corridor, I was really looking forward to riding this line. I noticed a lot of the California headlines about this have painted it along the lines of "Evil Trump administration killing California high speed rail!" The reality is, though, that California botched this project. The Federal funding was contingent on California making progress, and the amount of funding was sized for the size of the project. California has made little progress, and the size of the project has been reduced. It's only fiscally responsible for the feds to take back the money. Just like if you promise a VC a million users in the first year, but only deliver 10,000 they're going to look at you sideways. FTA: Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said on Thursday it had canceled the funding awarded in a 2010 agreement after it said the state had “repeatedly failed to comply” and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.” Fortunately, high speed rail is making (slow) progress in other states like Florida, Illinois and Texas. Hopefully the money can do some good in those places.

duxup 7y ago
>Illinois It would be nice if in Minnesota we didn't have Wisconsin between us and Illinois so we could do something there.
- bluGill 7y ago
  You could cut south through Iowa. The distance is longer, but for MN it means you can pick up some southern cities along the way (Minneapolis is so close to Wisconsin that you could put the MN end in Wisconsin and still get most of your riders from Minneapolis). I expect a couple of the tiny cities in Iowa along the way would like service.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Maybe, but I'd worry about more places to possibly stop would mean ... lots of requests for stops. One thing watching folks talk about rail locally is that all these little towns that down't want it ... unless you're going to stop a 10 times a day at their town. At some point it all stops making sense then.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      True, but having trains stop in Rochester MN and Waterloo IA makes sense if the track is already close. (Note I didn't say the same train - scheduling is more complex as is the track which now needs switches, but express trains that bypass the small towns make sense) You wouldn't do the track across WI without looking that the bigger cities in the way and deciding where to stop. You wouldn't stop in every small town, but the bigger towns...
skellington 7y ago
It's been reduced and it goes from nowhere to nowhere. Seriously, Merced to Bakersfield? Isn't the majority of soul crushing traffic happening inside the LA and Bay Area regions?
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  yes. exactly right. the first leg should have been somewhere near the Santa Ana Freeway from LA to Orange County -- or somewhere else near a large component of California's population.
  - musicale 7y ago
    I think the right of way/real estate issue is one of the things that makes it incredibly expensive, and why it's much easier and cheaper to build a useless line from nowhere to the outskirts of nowhere. Maybe the rail line could somehow reuse the freeway right of way, but I'm not sure how that could work while retaining the roads for cars and trucks.
asavadatti 7y ago
>In March 2018, the state forecast project costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned costs could be as much as $98.1 billion. I love train travel as well but that is an obscene amount of money. I wish they would upgrade the existing tracks so that traveling from Emeryville-LA Union station goes from 10 hours to 4-5hrs (and runs multiple times a day)
- ghaff 7y ago
  An Acela-like train probably wouldn't be that fast. On the Northeast Corridor, the Acela is only around an hour faster than the regional and part of that is just making fewer stops. My guess is you'd still be looking at 7+ hours in CA, at which point most people would just fly. (Very few people actually take the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC because it's pretty much a full-day trip. But New York is in about the middle so there are two popular sub-sections--unlike the case with CA.)
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    The Acela is only that slow because the rail infrastructure can't support the maximum speed of the train's rolling stock. The purchase of the rolling stock was supposed to spur the redevelopment of the tracks, but that never happened.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      My comment was mostly in the vein of wondering what a "cheap" (relatively) not-really HSR could have looked like and the answer is probably "not fast enough to get from Emeryville to LA in a timeframe where people would really use it." And, of course, the rolling stock had various problems so I'm not sure what the theoretical top speed ended up being.
- jonahhorowitz 7y ago
  Still cheaper than widening I-5, which is the primary alternative.
mu_killnine 7y ago
> Illinois To the surprise of no one, things are going slower than expected: http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/February-2019/What-Happened-to-High-Speed-Rail-in-Illinois/ http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/February-2019/What-Happe...

kenneth 7y ago

Nothing quite embodies the utter failure of the US and CA in particular as this embarrassing high-speed rail project. This is something that has been pioneered, developed, and commoditized in other countries, both in Europe and Asia. The CA project had incredibly modest ambitions: a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds, using completely standard technology. This isn't a hyperloop, a maglev, a hyperfast train, a dense network, or anything else that can fail because of technology risk. It's purely a failure at execution, pretty much entirely because of politics and corruption. In the US, the process for infrastructure construction is entirely broken, and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development. This is distinctly a CA problem.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- debacle 7y ago
  And New York, and Massachusetts, and Illinois, and probably most other states.
- dmix 7y ago
  The Boston tunnel was a pretty great example of the massive weight politics and hiring/mismanaging bad gov contractors puts on every infrastructure project (it "started" in 1982, broke ground in 1991, and finished 2007 at 200% over budget): > The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the US, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $14.6 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

inspector14 7y ago

wasn't a large amount of corruption surrounding this deal specifically a major plotline in true detective season 2?

anderber 7y ago
You're right about that being a plot for True Detective. Although the city of Vinci plot is very much based on the real Vernon, the high speed rail plot not so much (at least from what I understand): https://www.laweekly.com/news/just-how-ridiculous-is-true-detectives-high-speed-rail-plot-line-5774399 https://www.laweekly.com/news/just-how-ridiculous-is-true-de...

HillaryBriss 7y ago

> The ... state had [originally] planned to build a 520-mile (837 km) system ... from Los Angeles to San Francisco ... Newsom said in February the state would instead complete a 119-mile high-speed link between Merced and Bakersfield... Um... That's not really gonna help.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

It's really shitty if this is a selective action against California and not large projects overrunning costs in other states. At the same time, when the project costs 10x what was promised, saying no seems like a good thing. If this kind of cancellation was applied to all projects going as poorly as this, it'd be a really fair decision.

Lendal 7y ago
Oh don't worry. The Trump administration is taking its War on Government to all the states.
- succleaf 7y ago
  Well, at least you aren't being hyperbolic
tathougies 7y ago
The issue isn't the cost but rather that California decided not to build it but take the money anyway. The money was set aside for a train between LA and San Francisco, two of the most important economic hubs in the States. The State of California decided to instead squander the money on a rail line between Bakersfield and Fresno, two cities that half the country have never heard of.
LanceH 7y ago
It was well pointed out before it started that it would cost multiple times the estimates the state was claiming. It should never had made it this far.
- xienze 7y ago
  >It was well pointed out before it started that it would cost multiple times the estimates the state was claiming. It followed the trajectory of basically every progressive pet project: “We need to do X! It’ll only cost $Y!” >Yeah right, it’s gonna cost 10 times that and be 20 years late. “Typical Republican fear mongering! Ignore them!” Years later on HN: “It was obvious from the beginning that project X could never be done for $Y. How come no one realized that at the time?”

geogra4 7y ago

It's unbelievable how awful we are at building high speed rail, or any rail at all in this country.

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

Can't say I'm surprised. While in general the USA has had a very hard time with new infrastructure projects California has always taken it to the next level.

dberg 7y ago

77 billion for a train in 2033 ? And people wonder why we in the US think the government is completely unable to run these types of projects effectively. Total joke.

justfor1comment 7y ago
Even I was surprised by the timeline. A high speed train by 2033, really? China has them now, Japan has them now. India is building a bullet train with roughly the same length as SF to LA in 3 years. The US shouldn't be so slow compared to these other countries.
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  What I’m curious of is why we haven’t yet tried contracting the companies responsible for Japan’s train system and just letting them run the show, with our only responsibility being acquiring the required land and clearing associated political hurdles. I’m sure Japan would be willing to lend a hand and they may even be able to do it for less time and money than domestic companies could.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    I understand the issue to be dealing with three or four layers of government in each municipality as well as sourcing labor—not engineering competence.
  - tdhoot 7y ago
    Chinese and Japanese companies were filling to partially fund HSR in the US since it would open markets for their trainsets, but they all backed out because the US imposed "buy American" requirements that would make it impossible for them to use their trains.
    - fooblitzky 7y ago
      Aren't those "buy American" requirements illegal under the WTO?

jorblumesea 7y ago

It seems that every major American infrastructure project is dominated by concerns other than building a practical, efficient forms of transportation. Transportation projects are dominated by politics, handouts, corruption and excessive opposition to transportation even existing, while ignoring practical and common sense ideas. The Cal High speed rail is a perfect example. Routes that don't serve major population centers, fights over land use, fights over whether a rail line should even exist, circuitous routes to reward political supporters, lack of transparency and auditing tools, cost overruns and corruption... There's a good write up here: https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-project https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-pro... Europe and Asia just build transit to be transit. In the US at least, if something actually gets built and used it's just a nice side effect.

geogra4 7y ago
It's strange to me how people imbue simple no-nonsense infrastructure projects with so much mental baggage.
arcticbull 7y ago
That really does embody the spirit of US infrastructure projects: "I'm here to make some money, and if {$infrastructure} gets built along the way, that's fine too, but by no means a deal-breaker."
brianpgordon 7y ago
When people think "political power at the highest levels" we rarely think about public works projects but that's a mistake. Public works shape our lives, and require flows of truly titanic amounts of capital to build and maintain. I'm halfway through Robert Caro's fantastic biography of Robert Moses, who had an iron grip on New York public works for nearly half a century. It's eye-opening just how much power and influence arises from being able to control these types of projects. Yet this authority flies under the radar because it's all soft power with little public accountability. Politicians vie in the public arena over relatively insubstantial things while the real significant decisions for the future of the state take place in never-attended hearings far from press scrutiny. Activists (admirably) fight tooth and nail for every inch of progress on the issue du jour but vote ambivalently on massive multibillion-dollar bond issues.

staunch 7y ago

Startups really do seem to be the best solution to problems like these. Elon Musk is leading teams that are solving some of the world's biggest problems. Those efforts greatly benefited from government subsidies, funding, etc. Let's just admit finally that governments are really only good at writing checks, that they suck at managing projects, and then just work very hard figure out where those checks should go. Our governments(s) should give a bunch of teams $10M to design projects, then a few teams $100M to prototype them, and then one or two teams the billions required to build them out. I bet there's a qualified and moral person on HN that could lead a successful high speed rail project with government backing.

apexalpha 7y ago
Prototype for what? All the tech for high speed rail already exists and is proven to work. Lots of governemnts around the world do proper infrastructure projects.
sbov 7y ago
It's not a technology problem, it's a political one.

notJim 7y ago

The US desperately needs to figure out how to do big infrastructure projects like this. High-speed rail is a critical piece of a greener economy, because it can truly compete with air travel at medium distances, and blows car travel out of the water. It's really unfortunate that the political incentives seem to be that Republicans are just outright opposed to any kind of government infrastructure spending unless it's a money-making scheme for their donors, and Democrats want to defend any project that sounds good, and damn the costs or whether it's actually successful. What we need is a willingness to do major, expensive projects (high-speed rail is just not going to cheap in California, or anywhere), and ruthless commitment to making them happen efficiently. When a project like this fails in this way, all it does it play into the hands bad-faith actors who will never support major infrastructure projects. Then, people who are acting in good faith oppose them too, because there aren't enough counter-examples of successful projects.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
elwell 7y ago
Not enough slave labor available like in other countries. /sarcasm/
newsoul2019 7y ago
Everything about this is 100% spot on
jseliger 7y ago
Absolutely true: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/gao-report-transit-construction-costs https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/g...
thatoneuser 7y ago
I have yet to see a proposal for this type of infrastructure that makes intuitive sense. Not that intuition trumps engineering but the locations for these are usually head scratchingly odd.
7y ago

lostdog 7y ago

Newsom should have used the money to upgrade Caltrain and SF rail stations, and THEN cancel the project. At least then something useful would have gotten done.

dawnerd 7y ago
They'd still have to pay back funds for failing to stick to the original plan. The funding did have some requirements.
komali2 7y ago
Tons of federal funding is part of the reason the electrification of Caltrain is happening. If newsom had taken funding for the statewide hsr and reappropriatied it to the regional Caltrain I imagine people would have been up in arms...

pascoej 7y ago

Honestly glad. Highspeed rail is not going to work in America if it takes 77B and and over 10 years to complete one line. About 10 years ago China had only 1 high speed rail line, now look.

manigandham 7y ago
China can do massive infrastructure projects because it has a very efficient authoritarian government. They make a decision and get it done, for better or worse.
- andbberger 7y ago
  Great we've identified the problem, our government is horribly inefficient. Time to fix how we organize our societies. edit: I am __not__ advocating for authoritarianism
  - kpU8efre7r 7y ago
    Would you look at that! Looks like the proposed rail is going through your property! You have a week to get the fuck out before the dozers begin clearing. China is able to do this because they trample rights.
  - eanzenberg 7y ago
    Uhhh.. so you're cool with interment camps, no free speech, and effective police surveillance?
    - ngokevin 7y ago
      Those are terrible, but realize that the only news that makes it out from China to the US are the negative, and heavily paints China as evil. Everyone I talk to have never been to China, yet think everyone there is brainwashed. People realize a lot of things are terrible about the government, just like in any other country. China has been on an economic boom and radically changing the last half century reaching Western levels of QoL...although Jinping is taking it down a notch. Imagine living in a country where media filters all about the US down to Japanese internment camps just barely over half a century ago, NSA spying, GitMo waterboarding, homeless-packed cities, and kids getting shot in schools routinely. It's probably what happens in North Korea.

mikepurvis 7y ago

Even for people who hate the "green" aspect, high volume mass transit is important for enabling the vision where autonomous taxis actually serve last mile rather than just sitting in traffic jams for hours like you do in your regular car.

notJim 7y ago
Yes exactly. Another aspect of this is that as soon as we can actually start completing these projects successfully, their benefits will be incredibly obvious and people will want more. As you said, not even for political reasons or whatever, but just because they're better.
galaxyLogic 7y ago
I'm all for this but I wonder if FLYING autonomous taxis will be a better solution in the end. And couldn't there be flying trains as well?
- nihonde 7y ago
  I feel like a big part of the reason America fails at this is jumping from high speed rail (proven tech since the 1960s) to flying autonomous taxis (coming any day now, right after flying pigs).
- perfmode 7y ago
  Yikes. Is this what our imagination has come to?
- Johnny555 7y ago
  couldn't there be flying trains as well Aren't those called airplanes?
  - gumby 7y ago
    Airplanes are busses; they rarely tow another plane. Technically I suppose if you tow a sailplane into the sky then the powered aircraft is a locomotive with the sailplane in train. So yes, there can be and are flying trains.

eam 7y ago

I've seen several parts of the legs laid out already so I was wondering if they can just convert it to a highway. The current highway, route 99, which runs almost parallel to it is beginning to get congested quite often, so it could probably get repurposed for a highway, otherwise it will just be a symbol of failure.

manigandham 7y ago

This project isn't economically viable in the first place. Unless engineering and real estate costs drop by an order of magnitude, there's not enough visitor travel or transit density or cost differential where this makes sense as planned. It was doomed from the start.

rayiner 7y ago

Probably better for the environment that this failed. Construction would release so much CO2 that the California HSR would have to be as busy as the entire Northeast corridor to break even in terms of carbon impact. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-high-speed-rail/492 https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... That is basically a fantasy given that the northeast corridor passes through the densest megalopolis in the country, and connects seven major population/business centers, while the California HSR would pass through nothing.

jonahhorowitz 7y ago
Have you seen the number of flights daily between LAX and SFO, not to mention the other nearby airports. HSR planned to run trains every 5-12 minutes during peak hours.
- rayiner 7y ago
  LA to SF is 3.5 million flights (edit: passengers) per year. It’s one of the busiest routes, but just 1/3 of what it would take to make HSR a net win in terms of CO2 footprint. The idea of an SF to LA HSR matching the Northeast Corridor’s passenger volume is completely laughable. You can ride the train all the way from the mountains north of NYC to exurban VA. Neither SF nor LA have the massive transit infrastructure connecting to the intercity rail that you have in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and DC.
  - kenneth 7y ago
    6 million passengers a year. 3.5M flights is about as many as the whole world has.
asdff 7y ago
Pollution from LAX litters South LA with small particulate with every takeoff. Rampant air travel is probably even more unsustainable than personal car use, and that's saying a lot. https://news.usc.edu/63466/new-concerns-raised-about-air-pollution-at-lax/ https://news.usc.edu/63466/new-concerns-raised-about-air-pol...

jonathankoren 7y ago

As someone who voted for the the $10B bond, and would love to see HSR, all I have to say is: Good. We have to admit that CalHSR is a failure, and building a train between Bakersfield and Merced is stupid. The United States has some systematic problems when it comes to infrastructure. We see it at both the micro and macro level. At the micro level, it takes four guys more than a month to fix an escalator at a BART station. Months to paint lanes on a street in San Jose. At the macro level, $13B becomes $98B. CityLab ran a story about why NYC stopped building subways.[0] In it, it plotted the cost subway construction cost per mile at different times in constant 2017 dollars. First line cost $125M/mile in 1904. In 1944 it went up to <$500M, and even in 1988, it was just above $500M. Not bad for 44 years. Then cost go exponential in 2017 and 2019, ending at $4000M/mile! This is stupid. Another article (which I have sadly lost) compared the cost of construction in the US to France. I think they compared a Boston subway line to a Parisian one. The Boston one costs twice as much, and requires twice as many people for “safety”. I’m sorry, but this is grift. Then of course there’s all the environmental and neighborhood reviews that cost more, and stymie everything. If we want to make any progress, I’m thinking we’re going to just have to bust all of this up. Cut the red tape, and go with closed price bids. Hell, use foreign contractors. The French are apparently half the cost, faster, and high quality. Just hire them and be done with it. [0] http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-building-subways http://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-new-york-city-stopped-...

asdff 7y ago
Contractors have been hobbling this project, the last thing we need is to bring in more piranhas but that might now be inevitable unfortunately. Caltrans should have had complete control over this project and plowed through the engineering and construction in house. Instead a new agency was created with nearly zero staff, and was forced to buddy up with a private sector all to eager to milk every public dollar possible out of this project and give the littlest return possible, as in their eyes doing anything short of that is leaving money on the table.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
The causes of the NYC subway cost issues are pretty well documented, and egregious: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

docker_up 7y ago

A train between Merced and Bakersfield? The talks of Bridges to Nowhere dwarf the ridiculousness of this Train To and From Nowhere. Who the hell would use this to make it profitable enough to justify?

newsoul2019 7y ago
You do know the ultimate goal was to connect the Bay Area with LA...
asdff 7y ago
The plan is still to link SF and LA once a clearer funding situation materializes, the project has since been scaled back as work has already started between Merced and Bakersfield. If you want to blame someone, don't blame the politicians who are trying to make this happen, blame the local politicians along the route and private contractors who've been hobbling and sucking the blood out of this project since it was announced.
- docker_up 7y ago
  No, Newsom killed that plan. It's insane to think that this would actually be completed. It's more like the stealth fighter project that should never have gotten funding, or should have had its funding cut decades previous at this point.

noonespecial 7y ago

The really humbling thing about visiting things like the Hoover Dam is realizing that things like this are impossible today. If they started that dam today, they'd spend 20 years and twice the money the dam actually cost just on lawsuits and papers and have nothing to show for it decades later.

potiuper 7y ago
The Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams were also impossible in their day due to so called environmentalists and in order to replace the power that would have been provided by them, the worse coal-fired Navajo Generating Station option was completed near Page, Arizona in 1976 for the the Central Arizona Project.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
96 people died building the Hoover Dam [1]. It was built 'on time and on budget' to a great extent at the expense of lives. That's a lot of deaths. For comparison, only 147 total coalition deaths as a result of combat with the enemy [2] in the 1991 Gulf war, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, the liberation of Kuwait and the overrunning of most of Iraq. And that's saying nothing of the comp, overtime and other externalized issues. Of course, the failure of rail is pretty bad and we need to learn, but we can't hold the Hoover Dam up as 'the example'. [1] https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fatal.html https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/fatal.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  Underrated comment. People yearn for the "good old days" when shit got done, fast and cheap! Let's just forget all the progress in safety and reduced deaths since then..
  - Leader2light 7y ago
    Honestly, who cares about 10000 deaths(friends and family aside). Cost of doing business. The human race will soon be shedding lives by the billions as we collapse.

rsync 7y ago

Good. I want an actual high speed train from the new downtown SF transit station to Union Station LA in two hours or less. I would like a high speed train that won't be obsolete the day it is opened. What was being (haltingly) built was a ridiculous route-by-committee with time consuming (and sprawl inducing) stops in whichever districts had an assertive rep willing to sacrifice a project of national importance for their little town. All you needed to know about CA HSR could be learned by seeing it was not built on the I-5 corridor. Fresno and Palmdale should be spurs - not route benders.

martinald 7y ago
No, it really wasn't. Have you looked at a map of topography of California? I5 was built that route for a reason - it is the easiest route unless you want the route to be in 100s of km of incredibly expensive tunnel.
- briandear 7y ago
  “Easy” isn’t the project. The project is to connect the two major population centers. Nobody cares about Merced to Bakersfield. And expensive? Building a hundred miles of line that nobody cares about is more expensive than building a train people would actually use. Why would I spend 4 hours riding to LA via Bakersfield when I can spend 45 min on an airplane. I live 12 minutes from the San Jose Airport. Facilitating air shuttles wouldn’t require billions of dollars and I wouldn’t have to waste time transiting the Central Valley for no good reason other than politics.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent comment.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Look at a map. I5 is NOT where the rail was going to be built.
njepa 7y ago
High speed rail isn't that good for what you want. It will churn through too much infrastructure for too little value for point-to-point. What it is good at is creating regions. Done correctly it can open up a lot of land and opportunities. (I don't know the specifics of this project however).

dantheman 7y ago

This project didn't make sense from the start - look at where the construction is and what's been done. It should be SF to LA not all this other nonsense.

martinald 7y ago
Huh? SF to LA is literally the project. Federal fund restrictions meant CA has to pay for SF->SJ (which is being done under the caltrain modernization project) and Bakersfield to LA (which is completely unfunded) as this is AFIAK considered 'commuter rail' so is not eligible for federal funding.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield section was indefinitely postponed by Newsom's last State of the State address. The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield section was indefinitely postponed by Newsom's last State of the State address. Work on everything other than the Merced to Bakersfield initial construction segment, other than the environmental clearance and planning work that was explicitly stated to be continuing in Newsome's State of the State address, was never actually scheduled because funding had not been secured; the state was actively seeking funding before the address, and all the address said was that the State would continue seeking funding and would not do work until it had secured it. The address literally was waving around the status quo as news. It didn't do anything (which it wouldn't even if it had announced a policy change, because actual policy is made by laws, regulations, executive orders, and a number of other vehicles, the State of the State address not being one of them.) > The Merced to Bakersfield segment, by itself, is nearly useless. The Merced to Bakersfield segment is the one for which the federal government had specifically designated funding. Cancelling the funding on the basis that the state was, as always explicitly planned, building only the funded part until securing additional funding is beyond ludicrous. (Of course, Newsome's statement in the State of the State address which was clearly designed to appear to be announcing significant policy while actually announcing the status quo was also beyond ludicrous, and politically played into opponents of the project and opponents of the state as a whole -- and the Trump Administration may or may not be the former, but has pretty openly shown itself to be the latter.)

jedberg 7y ago

Good. It was a huge waste of money anyway. It was being built in the wrong order (why would you build the parts that would get the least ridership first?!), it was going to the wrong places, and at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA. We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that.

martinald 7y ago
It was built in the "wrong order" because the areas near cities had existing commuter rail, and therefore weren't eligible for federal "new start" grants. Of course, FAA grant money is available to expand SFO, OAK and LAX... no questions asked.
- asdff 7y ago
  Because airlines have a ticker and a public train does not, unfortunately.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> It was being built in the wrong order (why would you build the parts that would get the least ridership first?!) Because the initial operating segment needed to be near one of the endpoints (San Jose to Bakersfield was the plan) in order to maximize ridership, meaning the initial construction segment should be, at least largely, part of such a segment (the ICS was Bakersfield to Merced), and the ICS was specifically select because of relative ease of construction and federal funding being available for work that could start relatively soon at the time with a priority to economically hard hit areas for economic development purposes, which the valley end of the planned IOS fit. > at the end of the day, it would not have helped the poor communities between SF and LA. Yes, it would have. > We have hundreds of flights a day between SF and LA. We don't need a train to replace that. The economic case for the train was made on the bases of expected displaced road traffic and reduced funds dedicated to highway construction and maintenance with it versus without it, not replacing air travel.
- 7y ago

SubiculumCode 7y ago

I can't help but feel that the solution to overblown infrastructure costs would involve less contracting and more of construction directly with state employees and resources. Sure government is less efficient than the private sphere, but government contractors have awful incentives when it comes to cost effectiveness...bilking the state for more hours/supplies is more much profitable than doing a job quickly and cost-effectively, and contractors are very efficient at doing that.

calebgilbert 7y ago

I don't see for all the world how this isn't an utter failure for both the management for this project and the ultra combative style that the previous and current California gubernatorial administrations approach just about any and all dealing with the feds since Trump was elected. Have a feeling this might be where 'more red meat for the base' might have met it's match in terms of cognitive dissonance for at least some California voters. UPDATE - : CA Governor Newsom this afternoon (via Sacbee): "The Trump Administration’s action is illegal and a direct assault on California, our green infrastructure, and the thousands of Central Valley workers who are building this project,” he said. “Just as we have seen from the Trump Administration’s attacks on our clean air standards, our immigrant communities and in countless other areas, the Trump Administration is trying to exact political retribution on our state. “This is California’s money, appropriated by Congress, and we will vigorously defend it in court" Exactly the type of rhetoric, attitude, and threats that help push this situation in the first place (well, along with the gross mismanagement by the state for years) and he still can't quit digging.

succleaf 7y ago
Pelosi's nephew attacking President Trump, who would have predicted that!

starpilot 7y ago

Hyperloop seriously has a better chance of building an SF-LA line than the state of CA, and also SpaceX has a better chance of reaching Mars before 2024 than NASA returning the moon in that time (in 2004, GWB announced NASA would return to the moon by 2020). Government just can't do big projects any more.

andbberger 7y ago
an idea has a better chance of building rail infrastructure than a nation-state? Dubious. You seem to be drawing an impossibly broad conclusion. I have taken the liberty of editing your concluding statement by adding an appropriate amount of uncertainty and removing overly general statements. Here's what it says: ''
- loceng 7y ago
  An idea that Elon is actively implementing with The Boring Company. There was also the idea of reusable rockets and he believed it was possible as well - and that has been done too. I'm curious how much or little you know about The Boring Company's efforts so far?
  - andbberger 7y ago
    musk is not implementing anything. I find the consistency with which the asshole figure heads (musk, jobs) are idolized deeply troubling. cool yeah, new tech, wooh. very exciting. but you know what's more important than that? being a good, kind person. which you definitely are not if you are heading a large organization designed to systematically squeeeeeeeze everything it can get out of its peons while giving them as little as possible in return. and also definitely if you like to do things such as publicly call someone risking their life to save strangers a pedophile.
    - loceng 7y ago
      Well you're clearly being absurd, and it looks like you don't have a balanced view and you've bought into negative press that's heavily been propaganda generated by media for click views and by short sellers. Would be a useful exercise, if you can manage, to make a list of positives of what Elon and his companies have accomplished so far. Maybe work on your negativity and emotional reactions so you can understand things more clearly, develop compassion by developing balanced logic which includes full perspective more than just hate.

tomohawk 7y ago

Pretty massive blow to CA style politics / governance. This was a feather in the cap of the Democrat party and they turned it into an anchor. Complete failure to execute.

nabakin 7y ago

> The largest U.S. state has repeatedly sued the Trump administration and officials expect the state will sue over the rescinding of rail funding. Um..did we forget about Texas and Alaska?

esilver 7y ago
I think they meant in terms of population and, transitively, users of infrastructure. California (39.5 MM) will likely be “larger” than Texas (28.7 MM) for some time, despite a much lower growth rate. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimates-national-state.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...
- nabakin 7y ago
  That makes sense ty

esilver 7y ago

Merced to Bakersfield will probably be the fastest-growing corridor in the state for the foreseeable future, however, the state received HSR funding contingent on the development of a San Francisco to Los Angeles route. It’s completely unsurprising that the Department of Transportation wants the funding back after the state downsized the project from nationally-significant to regionally-significant.

Leader2light 7y ago

The USA faces collapse. We see this day by day.

lchengify 7y ago

Having lived for 6 years in the rail transport capital of the US (NYC / Philly / Northeast Corridor) and 4 years in SF, I can honestly say that I don't think there is a world where this was going to work. Let me state for the record that I am a huge fan of rail and public transit in general, but the forces and timing working against this project were too large to be overcome even with $10B in backing. Here are some of the reasons: 1. Lots of people here are comparing this project to projects in China. I think it's hard to overstate how one of the most expensive process (land acquisition by the government) is fundamentally different in China vs the US. The idea of "land ownership" in China is entirely different: Most private entities don't "own" land in the US sense, they may lease it for a long time (~99) years but ultimately its incredibly easy for local and national governments to execute eminent domain with little or no regard for land rights. Yes, this make public transport easier, but land rights are fundamental for the continuation of a democracy. It's not something we want to mess with. 2. Culturally, California is just not a train state. In the Northeast Corridor, trains and public transit are just more engrained in the culture. Kids learn at the age of 5 that NJ Transit, LIRR, or Metro North is the best way in and out of NYC. Most of my friends in NYC don't even have drivers licenses. Things are closer together, land is flatter, there aren't huge swaths of nature in between things, and there's such a high density of people and economic activity that trains have made sense for a long time. Yes, the NYC subway has its problems, but I can always bet that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I can get from Manhattan to JFK in an hour. In SF it's hard to even tell if I can get across the Bay past Midnight. 3. The small decisions made about stops, contracting, and procurement for the high speed rail were more about making the project politically palpable than actual need or engineering practicality. Taking a weird detour to Palmdale, as detailed in the Vox article below, is the best example of this [1]. The Palmdale route alone made the north-south trip 12 minutes slower while costing $5 billion in extra spending. If you're going to make that kind of decision over and over again and stack turtles until everyone's happy, you're going to make a great piece of paper but nothing that will ever turn on. 4. The decision to do this wasn't organic. If you take a look at regional transit needs in CA generally, no one was stack ranking high speed rail at the top. In LA you have basic problems with inaccessibility within most of the city, the most egregious being the lack of connectivity to LAX (which just started getting built last year). In SF you have gridlock where we can't add diesel trains to CalTrain because it needs to get Electrified first by law, but that process won't happen until 2022 [2]. If we can't upgrade a regional rail that serves 1/3rd of the economic activity of the state, what makes us think we can build a high speed rail that is (back of the envelope) 10x as long? At least in the northeast, trains systems were built where there was (1) incredible demand and (2) an understanding that it could be built where value would be opened up as it was happening. Which is why those rail lines start in major metro areas and extend outward, rather than building in the central valley and working backwards. 5. Air and car travel, despite its (obvious) climate change problems, just works. It's relatively cheap, it's well understood, and given the vast distance and significant nature features between population areas, it's a good solution to a hard problem. LAX sucks, but LA has 4 regional airports that can be used once you understand how. Flights are frequent, have lots of type options, and can be purchased for $50 one way. Roads and cars work better on mountain terrain than rail, and can better serve a dispersed population. Yes, we cannot run on gasoline forever if we want to save the planet, but right now it's easy to understand why California has stuck with this solution so long given its difference to other major areas that use trains. Overall, I was rooting for this, but this end was inevitable. But it's not the end of the world. We will learn from this and find a way, and I'm convinced in the end it will be more economical and fit California's unique parameters better than a $90B train. The solution may be something we can't see now (self-driving battery-powered cars on isolated freeway lanes, anyone?), but we'll find it. I know we will [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/california-high-speed-rail-canceled https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/18224717/c... [2] https://calmod.org/ https://calmod.org/

paxys 7y ago

Kinda happy this shitshow is put to rest. I just hope this doesn't have any effects on Caltrain electrification funding.

pelemele 7y ago

...and next step should a proper audit of the while train fiasco...

musicale 7y ago

Looks like Bakersfield won't become that booming metropolis that everyone was expecting it to be. ;-/ More seriously, the feds seem to be kind of right; it has been 9 years and California hasn't made much if any progress.

tomatotomato37 7y ago

See, this is kinda my problem with the whole push for nationalized healthcare in the US; it's not the nationalized healthcare part that's the problem. The Germans can do national healthcare beautifully. The Swedes can do national healthcare beautifully. The UK can do national healthcare... competently. But if the current US bureaucracy was put up to the task, than in a year we'll end up having serious articles about the resurgence of the plaque in Kentucky. I'm not sure how, but we really need to fix the current bureaucratic situation before we give them any more responsibility in the manner

bgroins 7y ago
A bit hyperbolic don't you think? We've had Medicare since 1966 and despite the bad press the VA gets it has the highest rate of satisfaction of any system in the US. https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-health-plans-satisfied.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-hea...
- rayiner 7y ago
  Medicare the system with an unfunded liability of $37 trillion?
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Is that really a meaningful number? Isn't that projecting out something like 50 years and assuming no changes to allocations?
mnm1 7y ago
Medicare and Medicaid work pretty damn well. Why wouldn't nationalized care for everyone work the same? Your argument is irrational and overlooks two major healthcare systems that the US government is handling fairly well. Either could be expanded to cover everyone.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

I agree. Merced to Bakersfield - really who cares? LA to SF is the only route that makes sense. Do that or do nothing. Who the heck needs high speed rail line between Merced and Bakersfield? That being said, this was very politicly motivated, of that I have no doubt.

rurban 7y ago

This really cries for Elon, cutting out the expensive middle men. Wonder if he dares.

viktorvamos 7y ago

It's more of a Shelbyville idea...