11 ms·

California bullet train contractors botched bridge project

87 points by gok 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jeffbee 6y ago
The bridge is for cars. The rail authority really should not build it. They should budget for it and block-grant the money to a local authority who can then take responsibility for building it. That way the LA Times can write a scathing article about how Caltrans went over budget, except they would never do that because they never have done that, even when the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge went 800% over budget. When you look at the budget of this project, a lot of the cost and complexity is due to accommodating cars and drivers. The rail authority really needs better strategic PR so the public begins to understand what's being spent on what.
- shuckles 6y ago
  The rail authority builds very little. The article discusses how it has only 220 employees and vacancies at key positions. As with many horribly over budget and shoddy civil engineering projects in California, general contractor Tutor Perini is at the center of this mess.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Sure, but the point is they need to insulate themselves from cost overruns on these pieces which aren't critical path for the train. If Merced County takes a grant of $50m to build a bridge and it doesn't end up costing $50m, that shouldn't be the railroad's problem. Tutor Perini can go take their change orders to some broke county and try to squeeze blood out of those stones.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      Why would a county or the state legislators ever let counties, a coherent polity, be turned into a shell company to cover for the rail authority, an incoherent polity?
- coderintherye 6y ago
  Uh except they did: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-springs-hundreds-of-leaks-20140210-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-spri... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2014-jan-24-la-me-bay-bridge-20140126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2014-jan-24-la-me-bay-b... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-reports-20140731-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-repo... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-jul-08-la-me-bay-bridge-delay-20130709-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-jul-08-la-me-bay-b... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-report-20140123-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-repo... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-bay-bridge-troll-20130901-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-bay-bridge-troll-2013090...
  - gok 6y ago
    And even if they didn't...why would an LA paper be writing about SFBA much anyway?
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Nothing is more LA than freeway Stockholm Syndrome. Regardless, LA Times is more than happy to criticize Caltrans https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-06/waste-fraud-audit-california-transportation-spending https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-06/waste-fr... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-17-me-22481-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-17-me-22481... https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/12/caltrans----not.html https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/12/caltrans----n... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-26-mn-59080-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-26-mn-59080-... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-03-mn-402-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-03-mn-402-st... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-28-mn-21927-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-28-mn-21927...
jrockway 6y ago
> The company declined to answer a series of written questions or to make a statement. Clearly this is because they're being sued, and they want to minimize their losses. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead -- no legal liability, just a thorough public review that everyone could read and learn from. We see this in other fields, like aviation; the NTSB investigates and publishes their finding of facts. The field learns from the mistakes, and as a result it's incredibly safe. (Even if you account for random chance, like MH370 or the whole 787MAX debacle, we're still doing better than we were 10 years ago.) Instead we just keep making the same mistakes again and again. Everyone pretty much expects to get on a plane and arrive at their destination alive. Everyone also expects their megaproject to be delayed and be finished over budget. When are we going to fix this?
- csdreamer7 6y ago
  Wouldn't that also be the responsibility of the NTSB? NTSB means National Transportation Safety Board. Doesn't the state have their own equivalent that can publish facts as well?
- Simulacra 6y ago
  When we get politicians who care more about government responsibility than re-election
- netcan 6y ago
  >Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead. I think this way of thinking is crucial. Ultimately, these projects start to take this shape at conception... long before the failures are realized. The heads-i-win-tails-you lose games. The liability avoidance. The negotiation of guilt for the expected failures down the road. It's a similar game in the corporate world, like with enterprise software. Everyone knows that an ERP project will blow the budget and timeline. Lots of lawyerly hours are spent creating liability frameworks for it. The result is always ambiguous, pinning failures on specification failures, changing requirements or whatnot. Systems respond to incentives in many ways, but institutional (government, commercial, NGO, charity...) response to liability is rarely a positive sum game. Not saying I have the answers, just that the obvious ones have been tried and failed. This isn't a marginal issue. As it stands now, there is are huge categories if things we need and can't have... because the systems for getting them are horribly ineffective. If trains cost 5X what they could cost, we effectively can't have new public transport systems. That's not sustainable.
mschuster91 6y ago
> The California High-Speed Rail Authority has long wrestled with its dependence on consultants and outside experts, with a 2018 state audit faulting the agency for being overly reliant on these private interests. So it's the same problem that plagues government and megacorp IT and construction worldwide: they depend on external entities for oversight, QA and controlling of the vendors instead of having the appropriate knowledge and staff in-house. That's what happens when public sector employees get gutted to "save costs". The politicians who decided this decades ago are no longer there and cannot be held accountable for the consequences, and we are stuck with the fallout.
- dmix 6y ago
  I’m a relatively pro-market person and even I admit public-private ventures are almost always worse than purely public or purely private. It always seems to combine the worst features of both. You don’t have ‘real’ private firms doing work, you end up with these professional gov contractor companies (who focus entirely on gov projects) which act like half baked gov agencies themselves with none of the public oversight/responsibility to tax payers and government agencies acting like profit seeking entities with no competition and bottom feeding talent pools/lowest price contracts (which almost always ends up being flakey organizations mentioned earlier who are entirely designed to get gov contracts as mentioned earlier). Beyond that, the inherent structure of using a patchwork of consultancies with broken responsibility chains and corrupted incentive structures also kills many over-capitalized tech startups too. It’s a poor way to build any business. Much like Apple the only things that should be outsourced are manageable isolated pieces, not core parts of the project. You also can see why people are pro-gutting public agencies when these disasters are all they can produce - while at the same time there are certain areas private firms won’t naturally account for. The whole thing needs a rethinking.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > I’m a relatively pro-market person and even I admit public-private ventures are almost always worse than purely public or purely private. With public infrastructure projects like roads and railways, why should one go for a purely private infrastructure? The only reason for this is if corrupt politicians want kickbacks from rent seekers (for example like the private prison which paid off a judge). > Much like Apple the only things that should be outsourced are manageable isolated pieces, not core parts of the project. Actually Apple proves that you can outsource the core part (manufacturing) - provided you have the in house staff for management and oversight of the project. The only lapse in quality stemming from a lack of oversight is the NVIDIA GPU debacle back a decade ago, but to be fair: that one bit the whole industry. > You also can see why people are pro-gutting public agencies when these disasters are all they can produce - while at the same time there are certain areas private firms won’t naturally account for. The reason for people (in practice: Republicans) wanting to gut and then privatize public agencies is, as I wrote above, corruption. Demolish the funding during the last days of a Republican presidency, have it take effect during the Democrat term, then campaign with "we should privatize XYZ, it doesn't work", win the vote, privatize XYZ, get kickbacks / "donations". An old, tried and tested playbook, and for what it's worth not even US-specific - our German Conservative party is a real expert at that, too...
brnt 6y ago
Merced to Bakersfield? Can someone explain why a HSR project is between nowhere and nowhere? Or will the train be on regular tracks the rest of the way? (LA<>SF I presume.)
- pirocks 6y ago
  Because going from San Francisco to LA was too expensive(I would assume high nimby density as you get closer to both those cities), but the doing a high speed train thing was already decided. Apparently there will be extensions to SF and LA at some point.
  - brnt 6y ago
    But the train won't stop at these places I hope?
    - adammunich 6y ago
      It probably will be something stupid like the e-bart transfer in Antioch is
    - vinay427 6y ago
      It would. The main benefit of trains is that they stop at cities along the way, making many route combinations possible that planes wouldn't be able to service. You don't save much time by not stopping at a a few cities. For example, note that almost every long distance train in every country (I know of) , including the most "express" trains, still stop at smaller cities.
      - burfog 6y ago
        It would be better to give all the cities nonstop advance ticketed service, complete with luggage handling and seat reservations. (just like aircraft) It's possible with rail. You just need to avoid stopping trains on the main line. Switch off on to a siding to serve the station. Switching should be at the fastest safe speed; slow trains do not belong on the main line.
pech0rin 6y ago
How much the US botches large scale infrastructure projects is mind blowing. What is the purpose of having 5 different layers of agencies etc? Just to cover liability? Is there no company in the US that can build a high speed rail? And if so why not hire a Japanese or Chinese company that is obviously proficient at building these types of rail systems?
- oritsnile 6y ago
  There is a buy america act, which requires the government in buying from American companies, there are also federal similar laws which might be the reason here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act
  - Retric 6y ago
    The other consideration is why the government doesn’t just build bridges with government workers. Nobody gets rich when government workers do something, it’s outsourcing which enables significant wealth transfer from government to private individuals. That creates huge incentives and means it’s those same companies try very hard to influence the rules.
    - oritsnile 6y ago
      Government companies are not famous for cost efficient work, at least not in Germany. So I'm not sure if there is anything to gain, but could be different in the US.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >Nobody gets rich when government workers do something, A fraction of those government workers are people for whom the politicians intervened to alter the hiring process in their favor. You're heads in the sand if you think the politicians aren't getting favors in return either up front or later. The difference between in-house and contracting out is only the difference between lump sum and a monthly check.
tr33house 6y ago
As someone who studied civil engineering but then turned to computer science, I'm surprised the bridge wasn't designed to fail more gracefully. Designing how structures failed was emphasized over and over again in my classes. Unfortunately, I'm also reminded of some of the reasons why I left the field: takes forever to do anything and getting any new major projects is more politicking than anything else, nowadays.
monadic2 6y ago
Ultimately the us government and states cannot be trusted with basic infrastructure.
Cyberdog 6y ago
The last election I voted in was in 2008, voting in California against this stupid boondoggle-in-the-making. At the time, I lived in the northern third of the state which won't even share a line of latitude with a roadmapped high-speed rail line, but I knew my taxes would have to pay and pay and pay for this anyway. But I've since been fortunate to move out of the state so now I get to witness the predictable from afar. I know we are all in love with the idea of high speed rail. I've been to Japan and have ridden the shinkansen alongside Mt Fuji (which is even larger in real life than it looks in pictures), so I definitely get the appeal. But I have zero faith in any state agency to be able to do it sensibly. Get private investors to do it. They will do it affordably, financially sustainably, and safely, and they won't steal money from all the citizens of the state to build something which won't be of use to many of them.
- growlist 6y ago
  > I definitely get the appeal. But I have zero faith in any state agency to be able to do it sensibly This is how I feel about goverment in general - I want a country that spends enough to look after the less fortunate, but with the administrators' incompetent/thieving/malign hands removed from the till (preferably by slamming it shut on them).
- xorcist 6y ago
  > Get private investors to do it [...] they won't steal money from all the citizens Yes, that's completely unheard of.
- apexalpha 6y ago
  >Get private investors to do it. They will do it affordably, financially sustainably, and safely, and they won't steal money from all the citizens of the state to build something which won't be of use to many of them. This is such a weird position to hold. Are Japanese high speed trains build by private investors? Are American interstate highways? Highways are build by the government because they are enablers of society. They don't need to make a profit themselves, they lift society as a whole. Similar with high speed train. It's infrastructure, not an investment portfolio.
supernova87a 6y ago
Sigh, well this is a generalization, but I think this is what happens when a country gets out of practice with building big infrastructure things. They have to learn the mistakes again because the capabilities and knowledge fade across time and across the sparse workforce. In China (put aside all the political issues at the moment), they were building elevated track to the tune of something like a mile a day at the peak. (On the order of that magnitude -- elevated! Not even just plain track on bare earth) What does that produce? A rail-building skilled workforce (10,000+ engineers) that has lots of practice, expertise, and templates to stamp out that stuff like it's their business. Here, we do this now, what, once per decade? Are there even 1000 such engineers that US companies could muster together to work on a project, not even to speak of the necessary contributing industries supplying the specialized tooling, materials, expertise for such a project? I realize the story in question here was about a road bridge, but still it involves coordination and management with the rail component, and the point still stands I think. Industry-wide skills and personnel fade and atrophy when a country doesn't do these things any more, or go overseas to where there are projects for them. These generational shifts in capabilities happen, unfortunately, while a country is not looking.
- hackerman123469 6y ago
  China is a poor example, especially for bullet trains as they literally just did bad copying from Japan. They have a lot more accidents than ex. Japan. Japan would be a prime example and it's a shame you didn't use it.
  - paledot 6y ago
    I feel like that makes China a better example than it otherwise would be, because it shows that the Japanese model can work elsewhere too. Although this is also the country that built a hospital in Wuhan in a weekend. Perhaps European comparisons would be more apt.
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      that collapsed a month later...
supernova87a 6y ago
I was a big supporter of CA high speed rail until the mismanagement situation became clear, and the costs became apparent that the value for money was not materializing for this project. In the beginning, when I tried a back of the envelope calculation that the distances were just beyond economical for high speed rail systems (versus air travel), I was willing to support it. However, the gradual resistance to acquiring the right of way cheaply, and the financial mismanagement (along with engineering mismanagement) caused me to lose faith in the CAHSR leadership capabilities. And now honestly, I think the money would be much more efficiently spent to solve some of our other many traffic/transportation problems. One of the worst times that convinced me the management was not being honest (with themselves even) was when the linked reporter's story came out about the geotechnical problems about crossing the Tehachapi/San Gabriel range, and how this major (really major!) problem had not been solved yet. The CAHSR CEO kept on going on about how they'd saved $1B or something on the current Central Valley construction costs -- as if saving a few pennies on the cost of a bolt on the Space Shuttle they didn't know how to design the rest of, was a great achievement. Anyway, this is all wrapped up in the larger story of how major projects in the US simply cannot build things cheaply and efficiently any more. It's a big problem for our infrastructure in general... We are getting 1/3 to 1/2 of what we could build (or maintain properly) because it's so expensive to do this now.
jaclaz 6y ago
At face value, the corrosion makes no sense whatsoever. This is central California, there is no way an un-grouted steel cable can develop such a serious corrosion issue and in such a short time. If it was some place with acid rains, exposed to the sea, etc, that would take tens of years, AND it would have needed traffic on the bridge, possibly above the theoretical allowance. Disclaimer: I have been site manager in the construction of several pre- and post- tensioned reinforced concrete bridges, I have dealt with this stuff for years, but of course I know nothing of the specific project and/or exact type of cables used in it.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Say the governor finally appoints a chief engineer who manages to drive the project to completion - by working 18 hours a day, ignoring his (or her?) family and ruining his health. What's in it for him? Recognition? Nope. He'll be blamed in problems with minorities, unions, views from someone's mansion and for all other deadly sins somehow related to the construction. A railroad built on time and within the budget? Come on, folks, it's just his job! Money? Nope. Government jobs don't pay that well. Interesting engineering project? Again, nope. It will be a political fight, PR project, bookkeeping exercise, endless lawsuits - whatever, but not the engineering project. Why bother?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
You have to assume a 10% mistake rate in all large projects.
anamax 6y ago
Why shouldn't they botch the bridge? The folks who did the financial projections botched those. (The projected ridership times the promised fare was never enough to pay the bonds. Since it will cost money to run and maintain...) Other than getting the bonds approved, what has worked? It's not about the train and never was.

87 points by gok 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

The bridge is for cars. The rail authority really should not build it. They should budget for it and block-grant the money to a local authority who can then take responsibility for building it. That way the LA Times can write a scathing article about how Caltrans went over budget, except they would never do that because they never have done that, even when the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge went 800% over budget. When you look at the budget of this project, a lot of the cost and complexity is due to accommodating cars and drivers. The rail authority really needs better strategic PR so the public begins to understand what's being spent on what.

shuckles 6y ago
The rail authority builds very little. The article discusses how it has only 220 employees and vacancies at key positions. As with many horribly over budget and shoddy civil engineering projects in California, general contractor Tutor Perini is at the center of this mess.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Sure, but the point is they need to insulate themselves from cost overruns on these pieces which aren't critical path for the train. If Merced County takes a grant of $50m to build a bridge and it doesn't end up costing $50m, that shouldn't be the railroad's problem. Tutor Perini can go take their change orders to some broke county and try to squeeze blood out of those stones.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    Why would a county or the state legislators ever let counties, a coherent polity, be turned into a shell company to cover for the rail authority, an incoherent polity?
coderintherye 6y ago
Uh except they did: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-springs-hundreds-of-leaks-20140210-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-spri... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2014-jan-24-la-me-bay-bridge-20140126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2014-jan-24-la-me-bay-b... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-reports-20140731-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-repo... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-jul-08-la-me-bay-bridge-delay-20130709-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-jul-08-la-me-bay-b... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-report-20140123-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bay-bridge-repo... and again: https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-bay-bridge-troll-20130901-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-bay-bridge-troll-2013090...
- gok 6y ago
  And even if they didn't...why would an LA paper be writing about SFBA much anyway?
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Nothing is more LA than freeway Stockholm Syndrome. Regardless, LA Times is more than happy to criticize Caltrans https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-06/waste-fraud-audit-california-transportation-spending https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-06/waste-fr... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-17-me-22481-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-17-me-22481... https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/12/caltrans----not.html https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/12/caltrans----n... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-26-mn-59080-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-26-mn-59080-... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-03-mn-402-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-03-mn-402-st... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-28-mn-21927-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-28-mn-21927...

jrockway 6y ago

> The company declined to answer a series of written questions or to make a statement. Clearly this is because they're being sued, and they want to minimize their losses. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead -- no legal liability, just a thorough public review that everyone could read and learn from. We see this in other fields, like aviation; the NTSB investigates and publishes their finding of facts. The field learns from the mistakes, and as a result it's incredibly safe. (Even if you account for random chance, like MH370 or the whole 787MAX debacle, we're still doing better than we were 10 years ago.) Instead we just keep making the same mistakes again and again. Everyone pretty much expects to get on a plane and arrive at their destination alive. Everyone also expects their megaproject to be delayed and be finished over budget. When are we going to fix this?

csdreamer7 6y ago
Wouldn't that also be the responsibility of the NTSB? NTSB means National Transportation Safety Board. Doesn't the state have their own equivalent that can publish facts as well?
Simulacra 6y ago
When we get politicians who care more about government responsibility than re-election
netcan 6y ago
>Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead. I think this way of thinking is crucial. Ultimately, these projects start to take this shape at conception... long before the failures are realized. The heads-i-win-tails-you lose games. The liability avoidance. The negotiation of guilt for the expected failures down the road. It's a similar game in the corporate world, like with enterprise software. Everyone knows that an ERP project will blow the budget and timeline. Lots of lawyerly hours are spent creating liability frameworks for it. The result is always ambiguous, pinning failures on specification failures, changing requirements or whatnot. Systems respond to incentives in many ways, but institutional (government, commercial, NGO, charity...) response to liability is rarely a positive sum game. Not saying I have the answers, just that the obvious ones have been tried and failed. This isn't a marginal issue. As it stands now, there is are huge categories if things we need and can't have... because the systems for getting them are horribly ineffective. If trains cost 5X what they could cost, we effectively can't have new public transport systems. That's not sustainable.

mschuster91 6y ago

> The California High-Speed Rail Authority has long wrestled with its dependence on consultants and outside experts, with a 2018 state audit faulting the agency for being overly reliant on these private interests. So it's the same problem that plagues government and megacorp IT and construction worldwide: they depend on external entities for oversight, QA and controlling of the vendors instead of having the appropriate knowledge and staff in-house. That's what happens when public sector employees get gutted to "save costs". The politicians who decided this decades ago are no longer there and cannot be held accountable for the consequences, and we are stuck with the fallout.

dmix 6y ago
I’m a relatively pro-market person and even I admit public-private ventures are almost always worse than purely public or purely private. It always seems to combine the worst features of both. You don’t have ‘real’ private firms doing work, you end up with these professional gov contractor companies (who focus entirely on gov projects) which act like half baked gov agencies themselves with none of the public oversight/responsibility to tax payers and government agencies acting like profit seeking entities with no competition and bottom feeding talent pools/lowest price contracts (which almost always ends up being flakey organizations mentioned earlier who are entirely designed to get gov contracts as mentioned earlier). Beyond that, the inherent structure of using a patchwork of consultancies with broken responsibility chains and corrupted incentive structures also kills many over-capitalized tech startups too. It’s a poor way to build any business. Much like Apple the only things that should be outsourced are manageable isolated pieces, not core parts of the project. You also can see why people are pro-gutting public agencies when these disasters are all they can produce - while at the same time there are certain areas private firms won’t naturally account for. The whole thing needs a rethinking.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > I’m a relatively pro-market person and even I admit public-private ventures are almost always worse than purely public or purely private. With public infrastructure projects like roads and railways, why should one go for a purely private infrastructure? The only reason for this is if corrupt politicians want kickbacks from rent seekers (for example like the private prison which paid off a judge). > Much like Apple the only things that should be outsourced are manageable isolated pieces, not core parts of the project. Actually Apple proves that you can outsource the core part (manufacturing) - provided you have the in house staff for management and oversight of the project. The only lapse in quality stemming from a lack of oversight is the NVIDIA GPU debacle back a decade ago, but to be fair: that one bit the whole industry. > You also can see why people are pro-gutting public agencies when these disasters are all they can produce - while at the same time there are certain areas private firms won’t naturally account for. The reason for people (in practice: Republicans) wanting to gut and then privatize public agencies is, as I wrote above, corruption. Demolish the funding during the last days of a Republican presidency, have it take effect during the Democrat term, then campaign with "we should privatize XYZ, it doesn't work", win the vote, privatize XYZ, get kickbacks / "donations". An old, tried and tested playbook, and for what it's worth not even US-specific - our German Conservative party is a real expert at that, too...

brnt 6y ago

Merced to Bakersfield? Can someone explain why a HSR project is between nowhere and nowhere? Or will the train be on regular tracks the rest of the way? (LA<>SF I presume.)

pirocks 6y ago
Because going from San Francisco to LA was too expensive(I would assume high nimby density as you get closer to both those cities), but the doing a high speed train thing was already decided. Apparently there will be extensions to SF and LA at some point.
- brnt 6y ago
  But the train won't stop at these places I hope?
  - adammunich 6y ago
    It probably will be something stupid like the e-bart transfer in Antioch is
  - vinay427 6y ago
    It would. The main benefit of trains is that they stop at cities along the way, making many route combinations possible that planes wouldn't be able to service. You don't save much time by not stopping at a a few cities. For example, note that almost every long distance train in every country (I know of) , including the most "express" trains, still stop at smaller cities.
    - burfog 6y ago
      It would be better to give all the cities nonstop advance ticketed service, complete with luggage handling and seat reservations. (just like aircraft) It's possible with rail. You just need to avoid stopping trains on the main line. Switch off on to a siding to serve the station. Switching should be at the fastest safe speed; slow trains do not belong on the main line.

pech0rin 6y ago

How much the US botches large scale infrastructure projects is mind blowing. What is the purpose of having 5 different layers of agencies etc? Just to cover liability? Is there no company in the US that can build a high speed rail? And if so why not hire a Japanese or Chinese company that is obviously proficient at building these types of rail systems?

oritsnile 6y ago
There is a buy america act, which requires the government in buying from American companies, there are also federal similar laws which might be the reason here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_American_Act
- Retric 6y ago
  The other consideration is why the government doesn’t just build bridges with government workers. Nobody gets rich when government workers do something, it’s outsourcing which enables significant wealth transfer from government to private individuals. That creates huge incentives and means it’s those same companies try very hard to influence the rules.
  - oritsnile 6y ago
    Government companies are not famous for cost efficient work, at least not in Germany. So I'm not sure if there is anything to gain, but could be different in the US.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >Nobody gets rich when government workers do something, A fraction of those government workers are people for whom the politicians intervened to alter the hiring process in their favor. You're heads in the sand if you think the politicians aren't getting favors in return either up front or later. The difference between in-house and contracting out is only the difference between lump sum and a monthly check.

tr33house 6y ago

As someone who studied civil engineering but then turned to computer science, I'm surprised the bridge wasn't designed to fail more gracefully. Designing how structures failed was emphasized over and over again in my classes. Unfortunately, I'm also reminded of some of the reasons why I left the field: takes forever to do anything and getting any new major projects is more politicking than anything else, nowadays.

monadic2 6y ago

Ultimately the us government and states cannot be trusted with basic infrastructure.

Cyberdog 6y ago

The last election I voted in was in 2008, voting in California against this stupid boondoggle-in-the-making. At the time, I lived in the northern third of the state which won't even share a line of latitude with a roadmapped high-speed rail line, but I knew my taxes would have to pay and pay and pay for this anyway. But I've since been fortunate to move out of the state so now I get to witness the predictable from afar. I know we are all in love with the idea of high speed rail. I've been to Japan and have ridden the shinkansen alongside Mt Fuji (which is even larger in real life than it looks in pictures), so I definitely get the appeal. But I have zero faith in any state agency to be able to do it sensibly. Get private investors to do it. They will do it affordably, financially sustainably, and safely, and they won't steal money from all the citizens of the state to build something which won't be of use to many of them.

growlist 6y ago
> I definitely get the appeal. But I have zero faith in any state agency to be able to do it sensibly This is how I feel about goverment in general - I want a country that spends enough to look after the less fortunate, but with the administrators' incompetent/thieving/malign hands removed from the till (preferably by slamming it shut on them).
xorcist 6y ago
> Get private investors to do it [...] they won't steal money from all the citizens Yes, that's completely unheard of.
apexalpha 6y ago
>Get private investors to do it. They will do it affordably, financially sustainably, and safely, and they won't steal money from all the citizens of the state to build something which won't be of use to many of them. This is such a weird position to hold. Are Japanese high speed trains build by private investors? Are American interstate highways? Highways are build by the government because they are enablers of society. They don't need to make a profit themselves, they lift society as a whole. Similar with high speed train. It's infrastructure, not an investment portfolio.

supernova87a 6y ago

Sigh, well this is a generalization, but I think this is what happens when a country gets out of practice with building big infrastructure things. They have to learn the mistakes again because the capabilities and knowledge fade across time and across the sparse workforce. In China (put aside all the political issues at the moment), they were building elevated track to the tune of something like a mile a day at the peak. (On the order of that magnitude -- elevated! Not even just plain track on bare earth) What does that produce? A rail-building skilled workforce (10,000+ engineers) that has lots of practice, expertise, and templates to stamp out that stuff like it's their business. Here, we do this now, what, once per decade? Are there even 1000 such engineers that US companies could muster together to work on a project, not even to speak of the necessary contributing industries supplying the specialized tooling, materials, expertise for such a project? I realize the story in question here was about a road bridge, but still it involves coordination and management with the rail component, and the point still stands I think. Industry-wide skills and personnel fade and atrophy when a country doesn't do these things any more, or go overseas to where there are projects for them. These generational shifts in capabilities happen, unfortunately, while a country is not looking.

hackerman123469 6y ago
China is a poor example, especially for bullet trains as they literally just did bad copying from Japan. They have a lot more accidents than ex. Japan. Japan would be a prime example and it's a shame you didn't use it.
- paledot 6y ago
  I feel like that makes China a better example than it otherwise would be, because it shows that the Japanese model can work elsewhere too. Although this is also the country that built a hospital in Wuhan in a weekend. Perhaps European comparisons would be more apt.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    that collapsed a month later...

supernova87a 6y ago

I was a big supporter of CA high speed rail until the mismanagement situation became clear, and the costs became apparent that the value for money was not materializing for this project. In the beginning, when I tried a back of the envelope calculation that the distances were just beyond economical for high speed rail systems (versus air travel), I was willing to support it. However, the gradual resistance to acquiring the right of way cheaply, and the financial mismanagement (along with engineering mismanagement) caused me to lose faith in the CAHSR leadership capabilities. And now honestly, I think the money would be much more efficiently spent to solve some of our other many traffic/transportation problems. One of the worst times that convinced me the management was not being honest (with themselves even) was when the linked reporter's story came out about the geotechnical problems about crossing the Tehachapi/San Gabriel range, and how this major (really major!) problem had not been solved yet. The CAHSR CEO kept on going on about how they'd saved $1B or something on the current Central Valley construction costs -- as if saving a few pennies on the cost of a bolt on the Space Shuttle they didn't know how to design the rest of, was a great achievement. Anyway, this is all wrapped up in the larger story of how major projects in the US simply cannot build things cheaply and efficiently any more. It's a big problem for our infrastructure in general... We are getting 1/3 to 1/2 of what we could build (or maintain properly) because it's so expensive to do this now.

jaclaz 6y ago

At face value, the corrosion makes no sense whatsoever. This is central California, there is no way an un-grouted steel cable can develop such a serious corrosion issue and in such a short time. If it was some place with acid rains, exposed to the sea, etc, that would take tens of years, AND it would have needed traffic on the bridge, possibly above the theoretical allowance. Disclaimer: I have been site manager in the construction of several pre- and post- tensioned reinforced concrete bridges, I have dealt with this stuff for years, but of course I know nothing of the specific project and/or exact type of cables used in it.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

Say the governor finally appoints a chief engineer who manages to drive the project to completion - by working 18 hours a day, ignoring his (or her?) family and ruining his health. What's in it for him? Recognition? Nope. He'll be blamed in problems with minorities, unions, views from someone's mansion and for all other deadly sins somehow related to the construction. A railroad built on time and within the budget? Come on, folks, it's just his job! Money? Nope. Government jobs don't pay that well. Interesting engineering project? Again, nope. It will be a political fight, PR project, bookkeeping exercise, endless lawsuits - whatever, but not the engineering project. Why bother?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

You have to assume a 10% mistake rate in all large projects.

anamax 6y ago

Why shouldn't they botch the bridge? The folks who did the financial projections botched those. (The projected ridership times the promised fare was never enough to pay the bonds. Since it will cost money to run and maintain...) Other than getting the bonds approved, what has worked? It's not about the train and never was.