The $77 billion price tag was the most recent year-of-expenditure estimate (which kept going up,in no small part because the year of expenditures kept getting later) for the whole originally planned system (well, the SF to LA part, not including the Sacramento and San Diego connections that were to be done afterwards.)
The small segment Newsome refers to isn't anywhere close to $77B.
Operating & maintenance costs would also be critical to determining whether this actually makes any sense.
How much do the roadways cost?
I mean, the Prius isn't an all-terrain vehicle. You need nice roads to run, and freeways to go somewhere fast. Without them you can't go anywhere in your Prius.
So how much do the roads you need to exist to drive around in those Prius cost?
There is no law of the universe that says a multiplier must be greater than 1.0. It is entirely possible, and indeed, easy to build a piece of infrastructure that will never pay back.
That's not how the math works with infrastructure projects.
With infrastructure projects there is the upfront cost and immediate returns, but there are also all other externalities and savings from shift in consumer demand and, for example, urban renewal and requalification.
For instance, how much would you save if you cut on the number of cars entering a urban center? This means less pollution, less traffic, less commutting times, etc etc etc
Does that have no value?
Just because there’s no law of the universe that prevents you from throwing money down the drain, doesn’t mean you ought to do so.
But the real advantage would be home buyers. Instead of saving up for a 800 sq foot house without a garage that cost $1.2 million they could ride the train a half hour where the same house would cost what $400K in Fresno?
This new de-scoped HSR project is basically "the part of HSR phase 1 that doesn't require us to cross any mountains". In California that's obviously very limiting.
New train station? Congrats. Now you're finding a new place because your landlord is selling.
Perhaps its better to never buy the rolling stock or hire staff? Otherwise there will be stories in the press about trains running where the staff outnumbers the passengers?
And that's ok because you can get onto that same train and look for affordable appartments anywhere in the train's catchment area, which now is far larger than when you first started looking for a rental.
ride the train a half hour
I'm seriously dumfounded. I have lost a ton of faith, what little I already had, with this government.
Does ANYONE have a reasonable explanation?
Rationally speaking, you're 100% right. Those are all true impediments. From a realpolitik perspective, it makes total sense to start building where it's not controversial so that parallel non-engineering work can be undertaken. There are rational reasons why labor is so expensive, why planning committees take so much time, and why things take as much time as they do.
But this isn't how large public works can get done quickly. Any sufficiently large project is less technocratic and more political. Allowing large projects to be governed entirely technocratically has shown that timelines stretch so far out as to render the project impossibly expensive to finance and too limited in scope by project's end. There needs to be a single authority (with checks on it...) that can get things done, governed by a politician who can ensure that the authority's efforts are directed to popular projects. An agency with a planning body that makes community-approved blueprints ready before funding comes in, and with the authority to exercise eminent domain on approved plans and start work quickly and immediately.
So while it's cheaper out in the Valley than in LA or SF, it's still significantly more expensive than a non-grade-separated, say, ~75-100 mph-rated track would entail, the sorts of which are common in Europe and do a decent job moving people around cities spaced at such distances.
There might be some validity to this thinking:
(1) If you build part of it and show that it works, it makes it more of a concrete reality. Instead of asking people in urban areas to give up precious right-of-way to build something hypothetical, you're asking them to give it up to build something they can see.
(2) You're also asking the urban areas to wait less time between when they give up the right-of-way and when the system is built. By pushing the rural areas to the earlier part of the schedule, you can move the urban areas to the later part of it.
(3) If it's built in one part of the state, it creates peer pressure for other parts of the state to build it. It looks bad to be the one part of the state that is blocking it.
(4) While the sunk cost fallacy isn't rational, "we've spent this much and we're half done already" will still convince some people.
I'm not saying that overall this was a good strategy, but I can see some advantages. In any case, it seems like the main issue was massive cost overruns.
Hah, do you live in the Bay Area? With the amount of NIMBYism, I don't think peer pressure would help with getting it built to connect the SF/SJ connections. It's why we do not have BART going for a full loop around the bay. Santa Clara county voted it down.
Santa Clara county voted it down.
It's also probably the section of the track where the train can go the fastest, which would give them impressive numbers that might help keep the project rolling.
A couple reasons; pragmatically, there were issues toward both termini, but an initial route in the Valley would be useful to connect to either terminus and start getting real benefit (the valley stretch alone is of very little, though non-zero, utility)
Politically, the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans, and putting the initial construction and operation, with associated jobs and benefits in one of the more Republican areas of the route was a mechanism to mitigate that.
the program faced state-internal opposition from Republicans
Except for single-vote majorities in 1969-70 and of just the Assembly for just part of 1995-6, the Republicans haven't had a majority in either house in the past sixty years.
They had, and used as a lever on every other issue, a veto pretty much forever on the budget up until Prop 25 in 2010 dropped the 2/3 supermajority for passing the budget. (Despite the current situation, 2/3 supermajority for either party in either house, much less both houses, of the legislature is historically extremely uncommon.)
They also had and used a similar power with regard to tax realignment since there was (and remains) a similar requirement for tax increases, but that's been a weaker power both since Dems went around them to the voters on tax increases in 2012 and because the Dems have actually had 2/3 supermajorities in the legislature at some times recently, including right now.
But, both of those powers were in full bloom when the funding application to the federal government (which needed budgeted state funds) was made (by, it must be noted, a Republican administration in Sacramento, with whom legislative Republicans had more pull than their hard power in the legislature would suggest, though given the quirkiness of the Schwarzenegger adminstration, probably less than would be typical of a Republican governor.)
In the article they mention the number of parcels needed grew by 500, did owners subdivide in order to increase returns?
[0] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
[1] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article218398575.html
IIRC, the valley-first alignment was part of the application for federal funds made when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, so it's unlikely it was motivated by concern for friends of the (at the time) once-and-future Governor Brown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.h...
In many places in California, the people already living their have both the inclination and the means to tie up the construction project in court until 2145. They don't want the construction, or they don't want the influx of commuters, or whatever. To a first approximation, the places that will accept the project happening are the ones looking for a train that goes somewhere else.
Getting a rail line between a major city (LA/San Jose/San Diego/SF etc) requires going through pretty serious mountain ranges. There is already rail line between them in their own geographical pockets (LA-San Diego, SF-San Jose-Oakland)
Mountain View to SFO in 5 minutes
If it has to go somewhere, everyone wants the high speed rail to go through someone else's house, preferably a long ways away.
However going through mountain in an environmentally conscious way gets radically expensive in very short order. Additionally this style of construction tends to have its own legally contentious issues. (Dam construction for water management being comparative)
You already pointed out that Los Angeles was a problem. For San Francisco the route chosen ran into problems 30 miles south of San Jose, where they were planning to use existing rails (at slower speeds). And once you're in San Jose, you still have a long ways to go to get into San Francisco.
See https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... for verification.
> “Abandoning high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it,” he said. “And by the way, I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump.”
Transportation systems rarely deliver the bulk of their benefits to direct users. The indirect effects of increased activity, commerce, industry, trade, opportunities, etc., accrue to the entire region, and not just the users of the system.
This is why, historically, transit projects have tended to be heavily funded by indirect beneficiaries. In cities: merchants and employers, both of whom benefit by increased customer and worker populations.
The case of Denver, Colorado shows the impacts improved transport can have on an otherwise remote city. Prior to the construction a connecting line to the Transcontinental Railroad, the city had fewer than 5,000 residents. A decade later, that rose to over 35,000. Mind, at the time, this was the best, cheapest, and fastest transport option available, but improved mobility can have tremendous impacts on growth and activity patterns.
https://www.uncovercolorado.com/historic-colorado-railroad-d...
Similarly, automobile drivers pay only a relatively small fraction of the direct costs of highway transport, with much else provided through general funds, property taxes (for state/local construction), income, and fuel taxes (the latter at least an indirect contribution).
Imposing a 100% farebox recovery obligation is highly flawed policy.
You can't just build a train in the middle of nowhere. You need some level of connection to population centers.
A lot of stuff is already built on this route, many viaducts and bridges etc.
Put a couple tunnels under the bay, one just north of the bay bridge and the other at SFO. Connect them, staying safely east of the San Andreas fault. Try to route the tunnel to allow stopping at at least one of the other airports in the area.
No, it isn't cheap.
so with regards to American implementation, even the urban light rail systems are all follies outside of NYC simply because they are not where the people want to be but instead where planners want people to be. then to top it off they cannot be volume adjusted because you cannot just reroute a train. buses are by far more economical and flexible, they just aren't sexy for ribbon cutting whores that politicians are.
on a side note, one hole in California's budget is the same in every high tax state. The law change to the Federal Tax system to have the rich pay more of their share by not letting them deduct as much from the Federal Taxes. This did two things, for the rich to pay more of their money in taxes and keep high tax states from off loading their taxes indirectly to lower tax states.
California has a homeless problem that is incredible and needs to get its prison population numbers down. spending the money to help the poor is a far better solution than funding a rich man's train.
That is not in any way how you plan trains. You don't build them for variable load. The baseline load becomes what the trains can supply, and the economy grows around that. I'd love to know where there is underutilized commuter rail in the US for cheap I can take advantage of by moving to for an unnaturally low cost of living - because that is what legitimately misplanned trains do. They self-correct by creating a cheap transit hub to pull people and business towards.
Progressive and developing economies the world over have reaped the benefits of high speed rail a thousand times over now. Saying "heavy rail doesn't work" is ignorant of how almost every first world nation and many others have a comprehensive commuter rail network outside the US and Canada.
> California has a homeless problem that is incredible and needs to get its prison population numbers down. spending the money to help the poor is a far better solution than funding a rich man's train.
State investment isn't a zero sum game, or one where you have a fixed absolute finite amount of money and can only allocate one central budget one way. There are absolutely limits to how much you can tax your economy, even selectively, without having negative consequences on your economy - and there are definitely plenty of arguments California is already past that threshold. But its way too simplistic to be in a discussion about state budgets and say "spend this money on X instead".
California high speed rail is a great idea if they commit to it and deliver the full product. If that would be prohibitively expensive, take a step back, figure out why this country can't build things anymore, and address the blockers you can while swallowing the cost of the blockers you can't address. Either that, or give up. There's no damn point building a multi-billion-dollar monument to the decline of American civilization.
It looks like someone tried to make an actually useful SF<->LA route and couldn't figure out how to make it work near the city. While it would no doubt be way more expensive and difficult, getting this into the big cities would at least give it a reason to exist.
Newsom explains in a quote given in the article: not spending the money means "giving it back to Donald Trump."
Wow. Merced to Bakersfield. I mean, why not light the money on fire instead?
The point of something like this is to essentially warp the topology regarding what constitutes "nearby" between smaller cities and large metro areas. If you can do that, you've massively changed how both labor costs, real estate prices, and even tourism/recreation work.
OK, "light the money on fire" is probably overstating the case -- there's probably some multiplying effect in making the central valley more connected, and maybe it's also the easiest segment to actually get built. But the magnitude of positive effects is also probably an order down.