A few comments on items throughout this thread:
1.) The claim that construction started before the ROW was secured is probably false. If you can get through the paywall, it would be worth reading this article from last Sunday’s New York Times about the CAHSR ROW acquisition efforts. Take the analysis with a grain of salt (the story primarily gives the perspective of the landowners’ attorneys), but it notes that CAHSR already POSSESSES all of the land that is currently in litigation, it just doesn’t have TITLE. This is typical of a kind of condemnation used for linear corridor projects called “quick-take”, where the condemning agency gets possession and the right to start construction up front, BEFORE a price has been determined. So the dozens (hundreds?) of ROW cases currently being litigated are NOT preventing construction from proceeding - they are just arguing about the level of compensation.
That’s not to stay that ROW issues haven’t caused delays. Obviously a good designer will attempt to minimize ROW costs, and so designs will be tweaked as information comes out about those costs (e.g. once you learn that the land that appeared to be vacant actually has an underground septic field, etc.). That can cause change orders. But it’s not the same as saying that they started before having the ROW. And as I said, it is a common approach in states that have quick-take laws.
2.) Someone in passing mentioned that the condemnor is usually willing to pay above-market value in order to get things resolved quickly. On government projects this is usually not allowed. The rules will probably vary based on the state and on which federal agency is funding things, but for the most part agencies are only allowed to pay assessed value for land, even if there is good reason to pay more. I assume that this is to prevent kickback schemes, and is another example of how the government will often spend a dollar to prevent a dime’s worth of fraud or theft. Sometimes it’s possible to be creative and find a way to reach a satisfactory agreement while staying within procurement rules. Sometimes that is easier if it can be done earlier in the process before designs are locked in. But when you have to acquire hundreds of parcels, and you don’t know which ones you’ll be able to resolve, the quick-take process makes more sense.
3.) Handing the whole process over to a design-build team early on would not have worked any better. The problems that have plagued the project are all from things that would have been outside the D/B team’s control, and represent risks to a D/B bidder. Bidders would lightly-capitalized LLC’s formed specifically for the project, and would all have fallen into one of three categories: a.) people who understood the risks and unknowns involved, and who would provide a ridiculously inflated cost; b.) people who didn’t really know what they were getting into, and would go bankrupt partway through the project, causing enormous waste and delay, or c.) politically-savvy people who would have figured out a way to pass all that risk (both for cost and delay) right back to the state, leaving us right where are today.
OK, that’s my useful contribution to this thread. Now here are my semi-informed opinions as someone who has been on BNSF’s negotiating team for several large public projects but has NOT been involved at all in CAHSR.
I don’t claim to know what went wrong with CAHSR (other than the obvious fact that the portion of the project that was “shovel-ready” for federal stimulus funding in 2009 is not a viable stand-alone project, and also wasn’t shovel-ready). But the problem is not with the engineering design or the contractors The costs are largely driven by decisions, constraints, and tradeoffs that happen in the political and legal realm.
Consider, for instance, the Wasco Viaduct. Once you’ve accepted the fact that the state can’t take freight railroad land without the railroad’s consent, and that you can only afford X seconds of HSR delay at this location while meeting the timetable goals, the bridge may be a fairly elegant solution. Would it have been done this way in Europe, where the government owns the existing rail lines? Probably not.
Or for that matter, take the Poso Ave. grade separation also in Wasco, just north of the flyover. I can only imagine how much it cost to get the HSR across this two-lane roadway whose pavement ended a few hundred feet east of the railroad corridor. But it required 1,000’ feet of grade change on the roadway (which is now widened to 4 lanes), railroad bridges for both the HSR and BNSF lines, a roadway bridge for Wasco Ave., and 2,000’ of new paved highway on Poso Ave. and J St. - so it wasn’t cheap. Would it have been better to route the HSR east of town a little ways (through active, prosperous farms rather than a few blighted city blocks)? Or to build a highway-over instead of highway-under grade sep at the cost of a half-dozen residential properties and poorer access to some businesses? I don’t know, but those decisions were fixed back when the environmental documents were finalized, and probably before the full cost implications of the bridges were understood. To change them would have meant re-doing some of the environmental clearances and obtaining new properties, which would have delayed the whole project in Wasco by a couple more years. And that’s just one little town of 25,000 people.
I do think Balt is correct that project advocates tend to undersell the cost of large projects in the assumption that, once they get started, they will get completed regardless of cost overruns. I don’t know that I’d call it fraud, because nobody really knows for sure how things will turn out in the future. Let’s call it tactical optimism. It worked for many years (Boston’s Big Dig, Minneapolis Southwest Light Rail to name two projects I’ve lived through). It may be reaching its limits with CAHSR.
The other “problem” that makes it hard to do these projects is our decentralized government. The CAHSR authority doesn’t have much power over the towns, highways, railroads, utilities, state and federal environmental agencies, federal landowners, etc. that need to be on board to make the project work. The project doesn’t just have to benefit society overall, it has to benefit (or at least not harm) every single stakeholder that holds a veto. That’s exactly the problem that condemnation is supposed to solve, but that only works on private landowners.
Half a century ago we saw what happens when transportation agencies have to much power and too little accountability (Robert Moses). Today we see what happens when they don’t have enough power and are accountable to too many people. The good news is that neighborhoods don’t get plowed under for misguided projects nearly as often. The bad news is that good projects aren’t achievable either. It’s a tradeoff.
Dan
