Labor costs are between 20-40% of the cost of construction. The Florida brightline project uses existing rail. The california project is all new rail and requires the purchase of land. It's also worth noting that private sector contractors in CA know how to game the bidding process and often politicians or their families have stock or personal relations with the contractors.

"It's also worth noting that private sector contractors in CA know how to game the bidding process and often politicians or their families have stock or personal relations with the contractors."

This is something that only occurs in California?

FLORIDA CONTRACTS GO TO COMPANIES THAT FLOODED RON DESANTIS CAMPAIGN FUND

https://theintercept.com/2022/09/27/florida-ron-desantis-cam...

you're right that labor is only a part of it. but part of the reason why the CA project saw huge rises in costs is because of project planning and scope increases in the planning -- both of which are politically driven.

part of the politically driven issues stem from NIMBY-ism but the other (arguably more heinous) part is how the cities can force the plan to be re-routed [1]. not only do costs rise and opening dates delay, the hypothetical "high speed" nature no longer rings true.

[1] https://youtu.be/S0dSm_ClcSw?t=129

I don’t understand, was there ever an option not to put a stop in Palmdale? Skipping Palmdale would honestly be a huge lack of vision. There are like 3-400,000 people that live in the Palmdale / Lancaster area that would be in a nice transit distance from that station. The current Antelope Valley metrolink linke services like 6000 daily commuters even though it takes like 2 hours. Shortening this distance to like 20-30 minutes will surely increase this number by a lot.

This is also the logical location for a connecting station to a future train to Las Vegas.

Also this station will have passing tracks, so not every train will stop there. Even if only 2-3 of every 10 trains stop there, it will be a huge improvement to so many people. Honestly, if they were to skip it, they would probably realize that mistake and add it as an infill station, which would be even more expensive.

I think the Palmdale station is kind of a non issue if you compare it to true cost drivers, such as UP and the city of Hanford, both of which have forced giant mega structures to the project, structures that didn’t need to be that large, but were made to be just so that existing infrastructure didn’t need to be relocated with temporary disruptions.

if the goal is having high speed transportation while minimizing cost burden to the taxpayer, palmdale and other similar cities would have been skipped.

likewise, i'm not going to stop using LAX because it's in Inglewood and not koreatown; i'll figure out how to make the commute.

if CA really wanted to build this right without succumbing to the pork granted to all these towns, CA should have probably taken a more incremental approach (eg. first build the cheapest, shortest-distance, and most environmentally-friendly path. then, build secondary rail systems that go through areas with high population density.)

I think CAHSR has been pretty explicit in what the goals of the project are, and it includes servicing under-served communities with jobs and high quality infrastructure. So you might be attacking a straw-man here, as minimizing cost and the speed of travel is only one of many goals here.

But OK lets say that speed and cost was their only goals, I’m actually not sure that the I-5 alignment straight to Bakersfield would be any cheaper. In fact it might be more expensive, as you would probably need to tunnel under most of the Tejon pass. Such a long tunnel is much more challenging—and hence expensive—then two shorter tunnels under the San Gabriel mountains and the Tehachapi. Now if you evaluate this with the benefits of a Palmdale station, this becomes a no brainier.

Bear in mind that a similar situation arises in the north, where there is an option of doing a very long and expensive tunnel under the Pacheco pass, or take a slight detour to do a cheaper Altamont tunnel. Here CAHSR decided with the expensive option. Part of the decision is probably because Altamont is already serviced with good transit options, while areas south of San José, don’t. Also note that a Tejon Pass tunnel would probably be even longer and much deeper then the Pacheco Pass tunnels.

> likewise, i'm not going to stop using LAX because it's in Inglewood and not koreatown; i'll figure out how to make the commute.

I don’t think this is comparable at all. If the CAHSR would skip Palmdale, then people in the Antelope Valley would be forced to go to either Burbank or Bakerfield. For Burbank they can take the Metrolink, but it is extremely slow and has limited runs. For Bakersfield no mass transit option exists, you have to take a bus, and it is also like 2 hours. Going from downtown LA to Inglewood is simply not the same.

> CA should have probably taken a more incremental approach

So we’ve moved the goalpost here a bit, but OK. I think CAHSR actually agrees with you here. The first portion with CASHR funding to open is going to be the Caltrain electrification and modernization from San José to San Francisco. This is the cheapest, shortest distance, most environmentally-friendly path between two very large densely populated urban centers. The only rivaling corridor is probably LA to San Diego, but CAHSR probably realized the impossibility to get funding for that in the Obama era (as the Surfliner already exists; and the extensive tunneling required would be really expensive). After that the central valley is the easiest segment, so that is where they began after Calmod.

The California project didn't have to be sold the way it was - but that was the whole point, get the boondoggle started.

They could have spend a fraction of the money on improving the capital corridor and the Santa Barbara - San Diego corridor instead, but that wasn't sexy enough.

A lot of posters are saying politics. Doesn’t that imply it did have to be sold in certain ways in order to get passed?

i.e. A modest version with a negligible risk of boondoggle would likely never have gotten enough attention in Sacramento to make it out of committee.

It got sold that way because of CA's slightly weird proposition system.

There's no real political willpower for transit in California as a state; it's all located in some of the cities, which are plodding along relatively slowly but consistently (the San Diego Trolley is miles more than it was 20 years ago).

The French company SNCF that originally was helping California with the high speed rail left in 2011 because the state wasn't listening to it's recommendations. They build a high speed rail in Morocco which took 7 years to complete and launched in 2018. They left saying that California is politically dysfunctional. https://www.yahoo.com/news/company-hoping-help-california-hi...

I expect the Moroccan project was a bit easier with respect to right if way tho.

Then again the LGV Est took a similar time per distance (took 12% longer but covers 25% more distance).

Then then again, the LGV est was largely in the “empty diagonal”…

The SF area already has rail corridors that ran from all major cities (San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, etc) to Los Angeles. Most of that project is over farm land, where right of way / imminent domain should be straightforward.

Instead, we get the redundant Bart to San Jose (Amtrak has been continuously providing that route for a century or something.), and SF to SFO (caltrain covers that already).

They need to pick one rail technology and move the entire region to it, then dictate the legacy systems operate in a unified way (allowing regional, independent rail authorities to completely override city councils, sacramento and DC), with the understanding that they will be fired if the transition to a unified system takes more than 5-10 years.

Instead, they are doing the exact opposite of everything I just recommended, and all the systems are falling into disrepair.

Bart to SFO provided a valuable connection from Western SF/Daly City to Caltrain/SFO. It also provides the actual only connection between Caltrain and BART, giving better connectivity to the East Bay.

Yes, but replace either BART or Caltrain with the other one, and the system would be strictly better than it is today.

For one thing, it would cut 15-30 minutes of travel time between Silicon Valley and SFO, and Silicon Valley and Oakland.

the technology is irrelevant, it's purely mismanagement and lack of coordination amongst agencies. modern main line EMUs are perfectly capable of matching BARTs performance.

there are many, many problems with BART's SFO extension (courtesy of quentin kopp), redundancy is not one of them. there was no BART to caltrain connection prior to the SFO extension, and caltrain is a completely unserious transit agency running hour headways.

genuine problems with the transit system in the bay area abound, you should pick one of those to complain about instead of some weird fixation on incompatible gauges

Although I'm a fan, Brightline also leveraged a bunch of existing rail, whereas the California project is almost entirely new right of way. That makes it hard to compare the projects apples to apples in my eyes. It seems intuitive that building a new rail line from scratch is going to cost more and take longer than building off an existing rail line.

I believe this is also the core of why Brightline has so many level crossings, and thus accident casualties as Floridians become accustomed to at-grade high speed trains. California high speed rail probably won't ever have to reckon with that grim issue, as it's been engineered out.

> people vocally want certain things (eg. prevailing wages) more than they want efficient costs so there's little incentive to make things cheaper

If you look the database they linked you'll see that there's no correlation at all with GDP/capita and $/km of rail line built. Some of the most efficient on costs are countries like Finland, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, It's clearly not all about the wages.

https://transitcosts.com/new-data/

Brightline is basically a conventional (slow) train, whereas the CA project goes 2-3x as fast... totally different design constraints. Amtrak in California is already as fast as the Brightline.

Paris-Bordeaux was €15m per mile for electrified 200mph capable line. $20m / mile doesn't sound amazing for a non electrified line that operates at 79mph now and might have sections that operate at 125mph in the future.

> Paris-Bordeaux was €15m per mile for electrified 200mph capable line.

is that the LGV Sud Europe Atlantique between Tours and Bordeaux that opened in 2017? looks like thats €9B for 188 miles new track or €47M per mile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud_Europe_Atlantique

> The consortium invested €3.8 billion, French government, local authorities and the European Union paid €3 billion and €1 billion was contributed by SNCF Réseau (subsidiary of SNCF). Another €1.2 billion was spent by SNCF Réseau on the construction of interconnecting lines, control centres, capacity enhancements at Bordeaux and remodelling the track layout at Gare Montparnasse.

Brightline goes exceptionally faster than the CA line, right now.

Is the current speed differential just because of the rock slides?

No, it's because Brightline exists and CA HSR doesn't, yet. So the speed is 125 mph to zero.

Right now it looks like the current top speed of Brightline is the same as most Amtrak lines in California (79mph). Brightline claims in the future it will have speeds up to 125mph. Conventional Amtrak trains already can go 110mph on sections of high quality track, and do in some places in the USA.

True, but the only place Amtrak gets close to that I know of in California is through Camp Pendleton, and there it maxes out at 90.

A "bright line" style upgrade to the SAN-LAX route would have been entirely worth it, and they're struggling along with it, but at pennies compared to what has been spent on HSR so far.

It is not about legitimate costs. It is about legalized corruption. Projects are super-expensive because the overwhelming majority of money spent goes to line pockets instead of building.

The US's innovation has been to make corruption wholly legal, proof against indictment

Other than government interference in the route planning, all private projects seem to be susceptible to all the same issues as government projects in North America. Like, NIMBY-ism affects private projects too (see: all home construction).

Sidenote: California HSR is slated to travel at about twice the speed as Brightline, I'm guessing that has some non-linear ramifications on cost.

Without even looking into it I am going to say huge price differences between different rail projects are something I really would expect to see. Building, planning and permitting a meter of track in a dense urban center is going to cost magnitudes more than building the same track with the same people through a more rural route even if it was done by the same people in the same system and state.

That aside the trains might run through different terrain and might have to run at different speeds. Building a dirt path through a flat desert is surely more cheap per meter than building a tunnel through a mountain.

So to compare such projects to each other in way that you can draw meaningful insights from the comparison means you have to ganular data science and compare how much of each track is going through which type of environment.

I am not saying your point is not valid, but just comparing the final numbers is not going to cut it here.

That rail line is half the speed and built in one of the flattest parts of the country?

> $1B per mile vs. <$20M per mile

Once again, California inflating the national average to insane proportions.

I understand that the issue you're speaking to is farther reaching than just California, but I think we can all agree that it's one of, if not the absolute worst offender.

NYC second avenue subway is worse by far. CA almost looks reasonable

Is the Brightline also high speed rail?

This certainly is a political issue, but privatization isn't the solution, it is the problem. US governments at all levels are so ideologically opposed to the idea of doing anything in-house that they overpay for consultants and contractors to do even the most basic things.