“We have no plan, we have a good likelihood it’s going to get worse, and we have a short time to solve the problem,” said Assemblyman Steven Bennett, D-Ventura. “That’s not a good place for government to put itself into.”
https://www.kcra.com/article/california-high-speed-rail-project-needs-7-billion/64302207
Train to nowhere. Newsomes folly. No more Obama & Biden handouts? Awwwww……
Those of us that know about California and their screwups saw this coming from the orbit of Neptune when it was announced. This is the same state that spent millions of dollars trying to find a fish no one had seen in freaking decades then decided that they needed to divert millions of acre feet of water away from farmers costing them billions of dollars in revenue.
This is the same state that literally has a regulatory policy that well they consider just about anything that we touch literally can cause cancer.
My impression was that the “planning” was more decisions of a political nature rather than actually doing detailed analysis of various options for routing. In particular, no one higher up in the planning group seemed to have a good grasp of what’s involved with underground utilities.
The French group with TGV experience recommended that the route follow I-5 as it would result in shorter travel times and be significantly cheaper to build.
And the French serve the intermediate stations downtown with existing or newly built low cost spurs or loops. Their infrastructure costs are fractions of the US (or UK which seem to have planning policies like ours).
Europe has much more dense urbanization and higher gasoline costs than the U.S.
Europe also has policies limiting short distance airline flights to encourage rail use.
Until the U. S. is in a similar circumstance, there is little incentive to use rail.
As long as there is little rail use, rail systems such as CHSR will remain “social programs” is search of progressive “utopias”.
I suggest you look at some population maps. There are plenty of areas in US with population concentrations within 250-400 mile radius.
Ohio 288 llinois 250 PA 288 New York 429 California 251 France 315 Italy 521 Spain 249 people per square mile and urban areas of states like Il CA and NY are much denser concentrations.
Further, in those areas Interstate travel is crowded and often slowish. And airports are very congested.
The problem is not “making the case for regional rail” – there are plenty of organizations that do that effectively.
The problem is in getting the necessary capital to establish the service, and then the combination of political will and access to subsidy to assure the service on a scheduled basis at a satisfactory price to use it. (These being necessary even before we take up quality of service as transportation, amenities, feeders or other synergies, etc.)
A major failure of CAHSR is that true high-speed is ill-suited to most of the services California seems to have envisioned. The actual parts that will now be built will be slackadaisical links between cities in the Central Valley and the capital – something that good regional rail could do ‘as well’ with four or more orders of magnitude lower outlay. No high-speed by any effective definition directly between LA and SF I can see (it goes down the Peninsula between the Caltrain commuter operations and then turns sharply north) – and it’s just never going to compete with air on the conditions California has established (all costs to be paid back from operations with no subsidies, but fares fixed ‘fairly’ for riders…)
Granted that California distances are among the most suitable, objectively, to be given high-speed corridors. But that some features of California geology and seismology are among the more difficult for LGV construction.
Ironically, the Chinese have solved most, if not all, the objective challenges to building out and operating an effective CAHSR. Won’t help much.
Yeah, the State with an Economy larger than Russia’s cannot afford to build a High Speed Rail route on it’s own. Sorry but cry me a river. At least divert some of the money that California should be spending on water retention to HSR? Where is that money going? What about the money that should be spent on wildfire prevention? Where is that money going?
Tangental issue but while I am on my soap box: We do need to start cutting back on disaster relief to the state of California when it is found the disaster impact is magnified by California not being prudent in budgeting or planning. C’mon the collapsing bluffs onto the surf line to San Diego? That is just a completely natural event that just started to happen out of the blue? Nobody anticipated that ever happening in the past?
In my view the suspension of Federal Participation in the HSR program might be the best thing to happen to California HSR since the project was started. I wish the Feds would have done so for Illinois instead of bailing out the state of Illinois on it’s Chicago to St. Louis route. Illinois violated the terms of the original HSR grant given and should have been made to pay the money back (the terms of the grant) instead it was given a waiver for political purposes. I am not even sure Illinois met the original goals of the Chicago to St. Louis project. The Chicago to St. Louis HSR project way exceeded the projected timeline of the project (waiver granted by Feds and probably more than one waiver). Nobody held accountable for how many years it was late?
I think rail enthusiasts as a whole need to start holding HSR projects accountable in the area of goals, objectives and project timelines. Too much of the look the other way and ignore what is clearly in front of them. If we want more responsible Federal spending we need to look in the mirrior.
I think California HSR should continue to completion but the whole project needs a look again. I think they also need to return back to the original private / public partnership which I thought was one of the first goals that were in place before the project even broke ground…which appears to have been abandoned entirely.
Recently repeated with the New Orleans to Mobile, AL startup service. Oh gee there are underground utilities under the planned layover track we intend to build in Mobile for Amtrak. Go figure! Another 7-8 month delay. How many times does this underground utilities lesson need to be learned with rail projects across the country, over and over again.
DOD project overruns dwarf the overruns of HSR and HrSR.
One thing I observed over the years about project creation. The financial estimates of the costs of the project are ALWAYS low balled. Those pushing the project want it to be approved and will do everything possible to see that the project goes forward. The way of the world is that once a project is started, nobody is going to stop it because it is becoming more expensive. The projects are approved based more upon their need for the society rather than their ultimate cost; so the name of the game is get the project started with shovels and boots in the ground.
But we’re talking CHSR here, that traverses through a scantly populated California Central Valley…not analogous to the areas you cite ….
It ultimately links LA metro and San Jose and onto SF metro areas. Doesn’t it also pass through Bakersfield metro area pop.900,000 +?
It does, but at the cost of a somewhat longer and much more expensive route than following I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley.
If someone put out a stock prospectus as wildly off-base as the initiative that led to the CAHSR program, they would be spending a number of years behind bars. The estimated cost was at least an order of magnitude too low. An HSR proposal to link the cities of the Central Valley with Acela technology and a ROW that allowed the Acela’s to make full use of the capabilities would have been cheaper and likely more useful.
Read my post about Project Creation. The aim of those pushing the project is to get it approved and moving dirt, not to present a real world estimate of the costs and the overruns. If the big numbers are presented up front - the project never gets approved.
I’m beginning to think that the CA HSR project team are the same people that did the budgeting for the Jayne Bryne interchange construction in Chicago recently. We were told 4 years it took 9 years 500 million dollars nope just over 800 million that they blamed on poor soil the same soil types the had built on 50 years ago.
Not always.
The original San Diego Trolley was done on-time and under budget, though with the caveat that no Federal funding was involved. ISTR that at least one of the Utah rail transit projects came in on time and under budget. In both cases the proposals were presented to people who had a realistic idea of how much projects should cost. The number of those people has declined a lot since the SD Trolley planning work was done in 1978.
The CaHSR route follows US-99, not I-5.
What’s the incentive to take HSR from SoCal to the Bay Area when air travel times have run as low as 1 hour for over a half century? To be honest, air travel times a half century ago where shorter than now. PSA nonstop SAN to OAK was 1 hour, SWA for same route is 1.5 hours.
Metro populations 2020 census
Bakersfield 909k
Fresno 1.008m
Modesto 553k
Stockton 779k