SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.
Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.
It makes a lot of sense to connect San Diego/LA/Sacramento/San Francisco.
It makes a lot less sense to try to connect Merced, Bakersfield, Fresno, et al. People there like to have cars, like to drive, there isn't a lot of traffic. Once you arrive in those places, there is very little transit infrastructure. You basically need a car. And they're far more centred around ag or industry, so more reason to have commercial / truck traffic and a lot less for just passenger cars.
Meanwhile, there are over 100 flights a day between LA area and SF. Meanwhile, Merced has 2 flights a day to LA on a tiny prop, Bakersfield has 2 to SF, and Fresno around 5 a day. There aren't any flights at all between Bakersfield/Sacramento/Fresno/Merced.
Whereas SF/LA/San Diego make complete sense to have a train station with plenty of transit options to get around once you arrive.
(To get an idea of what I'm talking about - traffic on I-5 is so heavy, we would often take 99 instead, when going between SD/LA and Sacramento. 99 is 2 miles farther than I-5.)
San Diego/LA/SF/Sacramento is one of the few markets in America that could reasonably support high speed rail. And it's sad to see it being strangled in the crib.
We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF <-> LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved:
"California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1]
The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is the spine of California and should be leveraged for all additional infrastructure build-out ... which would yield economies of scale and network effects for rail, network lines, water transmission, electrical distribution and (eventually) autonomous trucking.
Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
> This criticism also misunderstands one of the main challenges that CAHSR has faced. Al Boraq had full funding lined up before the project began. CAHSR did not. This led to delays that reduced support and encouraged critics, which starved it of funding commitments and thus led to further delays. California undermined CAHSR from the start.
That just sounds like describing dysfunctional government using more words. Either the government can get it done or they can’t. Allowing endless vetos and delays to gum up the process is a political decision.
I'm not sure that's much of an endorsement.
Author: Actually, you are entirely wrong. Let me explain to you in 3000 words how this project failed due to political interference and excessive regulations in California while pretending this is somehow not CAHSR fault and also not providing any path forward to fix it.
???
While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route.
This author isn't evaluating this project fairly, this author seems to be in first stage of grief: denial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...
The high speed rail project is serving a similar redistributive purpose to act as middle class welfare for people who work from home, go to zoom meetings and produce and review reports. Living in California is already as good as it gets, nothing needs to improve, but it sure is expensive so the governments job is to take tech money and dig and fill up holes in the ground and use homeless crackheads who randomly attack people and are never put in prison to terrorize the normies into continuing to pay for it all. If any of these projects got finished or there was a reasonable resolution to the homeless issue, all those middle class liberal arts degree meeting attenders would be out of a job and couldn't afford to live here.
Can't wait to pay $400 per trip to visit all of these lovely places: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220427-Agend...
- No need to worry about how much luggage I have. It will likely be a minimal charge if there is even one
- Trains are more comfortable with larger seats, usually
- Trains will make tickets cheaper, putting downward pressure on flight tickets as well (competition)
- Less security theatre and less worrying about what I can and can't carry
- You can still have good internet access
This is in addition to the environmental benefits of trains.
Perfect is the enemy of good. More sections and branches can be added. Piecemeal is how transportation infrastructure grows everywhere. It does not come to fulfill everyone's needs all at once.
Or, for another example, yes, the current Central Valley routing is practically just as hard (per mile) as a direct I5 route which would actually serve the largest population centers in CA. But, the piece argues, this would leave "more than a million people" in the Central Valley underserved. Uh... and? The I5 route would have served over twenty million people.
your guess is as good as mine as to why things like water infrastructure and telecoms are quietly built to requirements in the background while rail infrastructure is opened to the public forum, but the inability or unwillingness of the state government to go full climate stalin on this project and design it without compromise killed it.
Where is that fourth biggest economy of the world talk now? The fifth biggest economy of the world can build things without federal funding.
It feels almost humiliating at this point reading any story about a public works/transportation project in the US, just endless delays, comically high costs, and a strangely small focus on the actual material realities of the matter and a failure to deliver promises on time.
A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price.
I get it that there are niche reasons some individuals would prefer a train. But the economies of scale that they need to achieve here is ridiculous.
What I wish- although it may not be feasible- was a straight shot from Burbank to San Jose- as a single tunnel.
It's the perpetually never-happening, chicken-vs-egg aspirational project for mass transit in an area dominated by urban sprawl and car-first infrastructure that would need massive investment in local mass transit like Japan first.
It also shows that mandating the speed in the amendment was probably a bad idea as it's greatly increased the cost projections.
China has a command economy so simply doesn't have to deal with eminent domain (and challenges thereto), environmental challenges (as much as environmental protection is a nobel goal, laws in California like CEQA have really been weaponized and the sole purpose is to stop any development whatsoever by local property interests), etc.
The route is being changed so include towns of 30,000 in the Central Valley. It's running down the I-5 corridor last I heard because that's where these small towns are vs the faster route to the west.
Just build connecting lines if connections to small communities are important. The primary purpose should be LA to SF&SJ.
If the HSR runs a train from LA to SF before 2050 I'll be shocked.
The problem with high speed rail, then, is that it is always going to be a local (=state) infrastructure project. America is far, far, far too large for high speed rail to be feasible at a national level, and so we have invested in airports. This is largely a success; much of the year you can travel from NYC to Miami (~1200 mi, roughly UK -> Spain) for $100-200 in a few hours. There are, of course, many issues with air travel that we are still working on, but unless there is a breakthrough to make supersonic land travel affordable, we are stuck with air travel at a national level.
But where do we go from here? We know the federal process is too bloated to succeed with infrastructure projects, and when it is forced to it ends up being prohibitively expensive. We know the state process is doomed to fail and similarly be very expensive. We have already tried privatizing it and failed, and even when subsidizing private industry we get subpar results at best. What options are even left at this point?
The model shouldn't be the TGV. It should be the New York metro area's Metro-North and LIRR. I'd also argue for a significant amount of motorail [1] stock, but that offends the train purists.
> While no final track has yet been laid, this constitutes the vast majority of the work to prepare the route
Right, that's the problem. Invisible work gobbles up time and money due to a broken process that prorioritises bullshit over tangible results.
> The project has sufficient California funds only to last through the Trump administration, complete and electrify the existing 120 miles, purchase train sets, and begin construction of the Merced and Bakersfield extensions — but not fully complete them
Don't start shit you can't finish. Electrify and expand the regional rail and pause work in the Central Valley. Because you know who could catch the Trump administration's sympathy? Central Valley farmers.
Reality: Zero miles of high-speed rail deployed.
Many such cases.
Edit: Downvote all you want, that still won't make the rails appear, lmao.
Planes, by comparison, are an absolute bargain. Travel between almost any two cities quickly and affordably. By most calculations, planes also have less environmental impact because you don't need to build hundreds of miles of concrete and steel tracks.
Trains are great for bulk freight, but have very few sensible applications in the US. California would be better off with bus service if they really want a public option.