6 ms·

Scaled-Down California Bullet Train Project $10B over Budget

33 points by everybodyknows 4y ago

enahs-sf 4y ago
Losing money but doing it at scale.
cassac 4y ago
39k per foot, that’s impressive!
- AustinDev 4y ago
  We'll never have a modern train infrastructure in this country at that rate. How does it cost so much?
  - cassac 4y ago
    At 35 billion, you could buy 700k teslas, and then just let everyone drive themselves. It’s probably because the bribes are compounding at each level.
    - guelo 4y ago
      The roads for 700k teslas to drive on aren't free.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Also 700k Tesla aren't enough for 40 million people. This math seems easy to me.
        cassac 4y ago
        It’s a ride share service, so you rent it one way, with the expectation it goes each way per day. So that’s 700k * 2 trips * 365 days = 511 million rides annually. Even more if people bring passengers.
        cassac 4y ago
        But… maybe you are right? Maybe they give everyone in the state a bike and then just make a 1 billion dollar bike path?
        maximus-decimus 4y ago
        There's a joke Canadian political party that proposed decades ago to build a giant sloped bike path across the country so you could "coast from coast to coast". I wonder how much that would actually cost.
        randyrand 4y ago
        neither is a single train line.
      - cassac 4y ago
        No, but the roads are already budgeted to be maintained. Also the expected ridership is I assume to be composed of, at least partially, people who are already using the roads. I just found it funny as a number because 35 bil is such a ridiculous amount for a 171 mile train.
        asdff 4y ago
        If you think thats high, second avenue subway extension in nyc is looking to spend 6 billion to extend 1.5 miles.
        Bluestrike2 4y ago
        For what it's worth, roads clearly aren't budgeted to be maintained. At best, some of them are, with the interstate system more likely to be better maintained than other types of roads. The American Society of Civil Engineers annual report card reports that over 43% of our existing road system is in either poor or mediocre condition as of 2021, and an over $435 billion backlog for repairing existing roads and $125 billion for bridge repairs.[0] Worse yet, as existing infrastructure reaches its planned lifespans, we have to dump more money into repairing, extending, and replacing it. Adding more cars only makes the existing challenges worse, and accelerates infrastructure aging due to increased wear-and-tear. Those added cars also means increased congestion, and we have decades of solid empirical evidence to show that increasing capacity through road widening only creates induced demand. You literally cannot build your way out of congestion. The mess that defines California's HSR project is an international embarrassment. We need to fix the legal and institutional roadblocks that have helped its costs balloon and schedule disintegrate, because the alternatives are terrible. 0. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastructure/ https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastr...
      - Fatnino 4y ago
        You could take those 700k tesla, and just lay them out 12 wide and 171miles long... Based on a model y being 187"
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Not sure, but here in Japan, they're spending USD$67.3k per foot (290km at USD$64B according to the latest news report I could find which reported a big cost overrun) for the new Chuo Shinkansen bullet train line between Tokyo and Nagoya. However, there's some big differences: this new line is going to be a 500km/h maglev line with a ~50-minute travel time, not a normal rail line like California's, and 90% of it is underground since there's a bunch of mountains in the way. Somehow, America these days always manages to spend absurd amounts of money on infrastructure, far more than peer nations. Another big factor is profitability: will California's system actually pay for itself? The shinkansen bullet trains in Japan are profitable, and have been for a long time. During a normal day, one train leaves Tokyo station every few minutes on the Tokaido line towards Nagoya and Osaka. So while the new maglev train looks horrifically expensive for initial costs, with the huge ridership the existing trains already have, it's a very sound investment and is sure to be profitable before too long because Japanese are used to taking trains for traveling between cities. I can't say the same for Americans, especially when this California line is taking some long, meandering route to a bunch of unimportant towns instead of just going straight from LA to SanFran like it should, which means it won't even be that fast.
    - twelve40 4y ago
      It's not even going from LA to SanFran anymore, they sort of quietly abandoned this part, for now at least. Which adds a whole new layer of absurdity to this endeavor.
riffic 4y ago
great, now tell us how much money goes to California highway expansion and externalities. https://cal.streetsblog.org/2023/02/15/legislative-analyst-studies-newsoms-transportation-budget-solutions/ https://cal.streetsblog.org/2023/02/15/legislative-analyst-s...
- guelo 4y ago
  For a 6-lane Interstate highway it costs about $7 million per mile in rural areas, $11 million or more per mile in urban areas. So $1-2 Billion for a 151 mile segment. So this train is 15-30x comparable highway cost.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - asdff 4y ago
    You also have to factor in the cost of land acquisition not just construction.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    A highway is not a complete system. Drivers have to bring their own cars.
  - Tanoc 4y ago
    Cost of maintenance and use is much higher than a train line, though. The cost of maintenance per year for a four lane highway is something like $300,000 per mile, and repaving is $2,000,000 per mile. Meanwhile in Europe in a high speed rail line costs about €160,000 per kilometer, or $99,420 per mile. The distance between the proposed ends is 353 miles. So a highway along the same route per year would cost $105,900,000 to maintain. Meanwhile the rail line would cost $35,095,260 per year to maintain. And the road cost doesn't include the personal cost incurred to the user per year due to vehicle maintenance. So yes, the upfront cost of a high speed rail line will always be higher simply because of the type of infrastructure being built. But the running costs will be much lower, both to the state and to the individual users.
abeppu 4y ago
Is there a way that the state could fund it but give control of the project to some other governing body? The California High-Speed Rail Authority does not seem up to the task and has made a number of questionable decisions. Other countries manage to build these kinds of systems and I can't tell if we're struggling because we're less competent or more corrupt. I'd be down to declare the land under the tracks to be French or Spanish or Japanese if we could get them to build the system.
- Mayzie 4y ago
  Vox had a good video on the problem: https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/7/29/23283654/california-high-speed-rail-palmdale-warning https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/7/29/23283654/california-hig...
- Drunk_Engineer 4y ago
  "I can't tell if we're struggling because we're less competent or more corrupt..." It is obviously corruption. All project "management" was turned over to private consultants. The longer the project drag out, the more money they earn. Failure is its own reward. This is why there have been so many "questionable" decisions. All those pergolas, trenches, moving entire highways, building aerials through Bakersfield seem like batshit insane decisions -- until you realize who profits from all this.
  - Incipient 4y ago
    This is why the future of effective government is not privatisation, but enacting proper employee management in government departments and roles.
jeffbee 4y ago
The press can't report on this with straight facts. $35b for the central valley segment is the highest estimate in the report. The central estimate is a bit less. Also, inflation is a thing. The other thing the press is incapable of is putting the project into context. The context is that Catrans has a $22b budget per year to build freeways, and unlike Caltrans CAHSR has a business plan, ridership projections, and so forth. $100b on a statewide high-speed rail is a much, much better use of my money than any Caltrans project in my lifetime.
- Drunk_Engineer 4y ago
  That Caltrans budget is for maintaining a huge network of roads/highways across the entire state, as well as paying for various public transit programs and the highway patrol.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    CHP has its own separate $3b budget, and DMV is also separate and it gets $1.4b. https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24/#/Agency/2500 https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24/#/Agency/2500
- twelve40 4y ago
  > $100b on a statewide high-speed rail is a much, much better use of my money than any Caltrans project in my lifetime. I get out and use Caltrans-maintained roads every single day of my life, but have a need to go to LA maybe once a year tops, so would really have to disagree with this. That is, if this train ever gets past Bakersfield, which i think is not even planned anymore?
- opportune 4y ago
  I support HSR but does it not seem like $100b (about $3k per Californian) for this project is a bit too much? If it’s $100b or nothing I’ll take the $100b but it seems like we could probably have paid less. At these costs it makes HSR a hard sell in the rest of the country except the NoVa-Boston corridor
yalogin 4y ago
Is the economic justification for the project available anywhere to read?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  https://hsr.ca.gov/about/high-speed-rail-business-plans/ https://hsr.ca.gov/about/high-speed-rail-business-plans/
  - yalogin 4y ago
    This is good. Thanks for the r pointer. Didn’t know they produce a report like this.
- istillwritecode 4y ago
  There are ridership estimates but I am very skeptical. Fares are expected to be 80% of airfares but airfares to Fresno aren't cheap.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ciabattabread 4y ago
I don’t understand why they couldn’t start building this route in Los Angeles instead of the middle of nowhere, and have something useful operating.
- steponlego 4y ago
  Because they'll get more money regardless of whether or not there's even a single yard of track laid.
pylua 4y ago
They Probably need to hire a high priced agile consultant that will suggest putting 10k people on it to get it done in a month.
jmpman 4y ago
I voted for it before I left California, as I knew I wouldn’t have to pay for the overruns and might be able to use it sometime on vacation. Was so predictable, and I remember laughing while voting for it.
credit_guy 4y ago
> Bakersfield native and now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has long called the project, which would serve his own district, a boondoggle. This is interesting. An extremely powerful politician taking a stance against a project that would bring pork to his own district. The project must be indeed quite awful.
Tanoc 4y ago
Between them having to buy right of way for nearly the entire length, having to fight ridiculous regulations put in place in the 1960s to stop the planned Los Angeles monorail, having to fight the NIMBYs in and around San Franciso and Burbank, having to fight the environmentalists who mistakenly think a rail line is more damaging than several thousand miles of pavement, having to fight misinformation from the Reason Foundation, and having to fight Union Pacific for routing along a thirty mile section I'm surprised they stuck it out for this long. This rail line has been proposed since 1949 in various forms with public support, and to kill this better option because people keep putting up roadblocks is a waste of resources larger than can be justified but still lesser than what goes into maintaining the rat's nest of highways.

enahs-sf 4y ago

Losing money but doing it at scale.

cassac 4y ago

39k per foot, that’s impressive!

AustinDev 4y ago
We'll never have a modern train infrastructure in this country at that rate. How does it cost so much?
- cassac 4y ago
  At 35 billion, you could buy 700k teslas, and then just let everyone drive themselves. It’s probably because the bribes are compounding at each level.
  - guelo 4y ago
    The roads for 700k teslas to drive on aren't free.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Also 700k Tesla aren't enough for 40 million people. This math seems easy to me.
      - cassac 4y ago
        It’s a ride share service, so you rent it one way, with the expectation it goes each way per day. So that’s 700k * 2 trips * 365 days = 511 million rides annually. Even more if people bring passengers.
      - cassac 4y ago
        But… maybe you are right? Maybe they give everyone in the state a bike and then just make a 1 billion dollar bike path?
        maximus-decimus 4y ago
        There's a joke Canadian political party that proposed decades ago to build a giant sloped bike path across the country so you could "coast from coast to coast". I wonder how much that would actually cost.
      - randyrand 4y ago
        neither is a single train line.
    - cassac 4y ago
      No, but the roads are already budgeted to be maintained. Also the expected ridership is I assume to be composed of, at least partially, people who are already using the roads. I just found it funny as a number because 35 bil is such a ridiculous amount for a 171 mile train.
      - asdff 4y ago
        If you think thats high, second avenue subway extension in nyc is looking to spend 6 billion to extend 1.5 miles.
      - Bluestrike2 4y ago
        For what it's worth, roads clearly aren't budgeted to be maintained. At best, some of them are, with the interstate system more likely to be better maintained than other types of roads. The American Society of Civil Engineers annual report card reports that over 43% of our existing road system is in either poor or mediocre condition as of 2021, and an over $435 billion backlog for repairing existing roads and $125 billion for bridge repairs.[0] Worse yet, as existing infrastructure reaches its planned lifespans, we have to dump more money into repairing, extending, and replacing it. Adding more cars only makes the existing challenges worse, and accelerates infrastructure aging due to increased wear-and-tear. Those added cars also means increased congestion, and we have decades of solid empirical evidence to show that increasing capacity through road widening only creates induced demand. You literally cannot build your way out of congestion. The mess that defines California's HSR project is an international embarrassment. We need to fix the legal and institutional roadblocks that have helped its costs balloon and schedule disintegrate, because the alternatives are terrible. 0. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastructure/ https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastr...
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      You could take those 700k tesla, and just lay them out 12 wide and 171miles long... Based on a model y being 187"
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Not sure, but here in Japan, they're spending USD$67.3k per foot (290km at USD$64B according to the latest news report I could find which reported a big cost overrun) for the new Chuo Shinkansen bullet train line between Tokyo and Nagoya. However, there's some big differences: this new line is going to be a 500km/h maglev line with a ~50-minute travel time, not a normal rail line like California's, and 90% of it is underground since there's a bunch of mountains in the way. Somehow, America these days always manages to spend absurd amounts of money on infrastructure, far more than peer nations. Another big factor is profitability: will California's system actually pay for itself? The shinkansen bullet trains in Japan are profitable, and have been for a long time. During a normal day, one train leaves Tokyo station every few minutes on the Tokaido line towards Nagoya and Osaka. So while the new maglev train looks horrifically expensive for initial costs, with the huge ridership the existing trains already have, it's a very sound investment and is sure to be profitable before too long because Japanese are used to taking trains for traveling between cities. I can't say the same for Americans, especially when this California line is taking some long, meandering route to a bunch of unimportant towns instead of just going straight from LA to SanFran like it should, which means it won't even be that fast.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    It's not even going from LA to SanFran anymore, they sort of quietly abandoned this part, for now at least. Which adds a whole new layer of absurdity to this endeavor.

riffic 4y ago

great, now tell us how much money goes to California highway expansion and externalities. https://cal.streetsblog.org/2023/02/15/legislative-analyst-studies-newsoms-transportation-budget-solutions/ https://cal.streetsblog.org/2023/02/15/legislative-analyst-s...

guelo 4y ago
For a 6-lane Interstate highway it costs about $7 million per mile in rural areas, $11 million or more per mile in urban areas. So $1-2 Billion for a 151 mile segment. So this train is 15-30x comparable highway cost.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  [flagged]
- asdff 4y ago
  You also have to factor in the cost of land acquisition not just construction.
- supertrope 4y ago
  A highway is not a complete system. Drivers have to bring their own cars.
- Tanoc 4y ago
  Cost of maintenance and use is much higher than a train line, though. The cost of maintenance per year for a four lane highway is something like $300,000 per mile, and repaving is $2,000,000 per mile. Meanwhile in Europe in a high speed rail line costs about €160,000 per kilometer, or $99,420 per mile. The distance between the proposed ends is 353 miles. So a highway along the same route per year would cost $105,900,000 to maintain. Meanwhile the rail line would cost $35,095,260 per year to maintain. And the road cost doesn't include the personal cost incurred to the user per year due to vehicle maintenance. So yes, the upfront cost of a high speed rail line will always be higher simply because of the type of infrastructure being built. But the running costs will be much lower, both to the state and to the individual users.

abeppu 4y ago

Is there a way that the state could fund it but give control of the project to some other governing body? The California High-Speed Rail Authority does not seem up to the task and has made a number of questionable decisions. Other countries manage to build these kinds of systems and I can't tell if we're struggling because we're less competent or more corrupt. I'd be down to declare the land under the tracks to be French or Spanish or Japanese if we could get them to build the system.

Mayzie 4y ago
Vox had a good video on the problem: https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/7/29/23283654/california-high-speed-rail-palmdale-warning https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/7/29/23283654/california-hig...
Drunk_Engineer 4y ago
"I can't tell if we're struggling because we're less competent or more corrupt..." It is obviously corruption. All project "management" was turned over to private consultants. The longer the project drag out, the more money they earn. Failure is its own reward. This is why there have been so many "questionable" decisions. All those pergolas, trenches, moving entire highways, building aerials through Bakersfield seem like batshit insane decisions -- until you realize who profits from all this.
- Incipient 4y ago
  This is why the future of effective government is not privatisation, but enacting proper employee management in government departments and roles.

jeffbee 4y ago

The press can't report on this with straight facts. $35b for the central valley segment is the highest estimate in the report. The central estimate is a bit less. Also, inflation is a thing. The other thing the press is incapable of is putting the project into context. The context is that Catrans has a $22b budget per year to build freeways, and unlike Caltrans CAHSR has a business plan, ridership projections, and so forth. $100b on a statewide high-speed rail is a much, much better use of my money than any Caltrans project in my lifetime.

Drunk_Engineer 4y ago
That Caltrans budget is for maintaining a huge network of roads/highways across the entire state, as well as paying for various public transit programs and the highway patrol.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  CHP has its own separate $3b budget, and DMV is also separate and it gets $1.4b. https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24/#/Agency/2500 https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24/#/Agency/2500
twelve40 4y ago
> $100b on a statewide high-speed rail is a much, much better use of my money than any Caltrans project in my lifetime. I get out and use Caltrans-maintained roads every single day of my life, but have a need to go to LA maybe once a year tops, so would really have to disagree with this. That is, if this train ever gets past Bakersfield, which i think is not even planned anymore?
opportune 4y ago
I support HSR but does it not seem like $100b (about $3k per Californian) for this project is a bit too much? If it’s $100b or nothing I’ll take the $100b but it seems like we could probably have paid less. At these costs it makes HSR a hard sell in the rest of the country except the NoVa-Boston corridor

yalogin 4y ago

Is the economic justification for the project available anywhere to read?

jeffbee 4y ago
https://hsr.ca.gov/about/high-speed-rail-business-plans/ https://hsr.ca.gov/about/high-speed-rail-business-plans/
- yalogin 4y ago
  This is good. Thanks for the r pointer. Didn’t know they produce a report like this.
istillwritecode 4y ago
There are ridership estimates but I am very skeptical. Fares are expected to be 80% of airfares but airfares to Fresno aren't cheap.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ciabattabread 4y ago

I don’t understand why they couldn’t start building this route in Los Angeles instead of the middle of nowhere, and have something useful operating.

steponlego 4y ago
Because they'll get more money regardless of whether or not there's even a single yard of track laid.

pylua 4y ago

They Probably need to hire a high priced agile consultant that will suggest putting 10k people on it to get it done in a month.

jmpman 4y ago

I voted for it before I left California, as I knew I wouldn’t have to pay for the overruns and might be able to use it sometime on vacation. Was so predictable, and I remember laughing while voting for it.

credit_guy 4y ago

> Bakersfield native and now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has long called the project, which would serve his own district, a boondoggle. This is interesting. An extremely powerful politician taking a stance against a project that would bring pork to his own district. The project must be indeed quite awful.

Tanoc 4y ago

Between them having to buy right of way for nearly the entire length, having to fight ridiculous regulations put in place in the 1960s to stop the planned Los Angeles monorail, having to fight the NIMBYs in and around San Franciso and Burbank, having to fight the environmentalists who mistakenly think a rail line is more damaging than several thousand miles of pavement, having to fight misinformation from the Reason Foundation, and having to fight Union Pacific for routing along a thirty mile section I'm surprised they stuck it out for this long. This rail line has been proposed since 1949 in various forms with public support, and to kill this better option because people keep putting up roadblocks is a waste of resources larger than can be justified but still lesser than what goes into maintaining the rat's nest of highways.