Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.
Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)
The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.
Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.
The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profits to their private-sector pals. Suddenly investing in public infrastructure is appealing again (as long as the public doesn't actually get to own it!)
A lot of the opposition you hear from EVs comes from the fact that they require less maintenance and upkeep and so they employ fewer people.
Cars also contribute to an immense amount of misery in society - the financial burden, being stuck in traffic, road expansions demolishing houses, noise and pollution, injuries.
People objectively don't want to share space with the masses. Even in Singapore or Japan, the stress of being in crowds is simply not worth it. Its slower, requires far more mental energy to plan your route, and requires a lot of physical movement which is hard for fatass americans.
Especially when America has quite cheap, awesomely fast and fun cars (your local C8 Corvette can be had for 15% off MSRP from the factory right now).
Cars are freedom. Mass transit is biopolitics/biopower. Big ass off road capable trucks literally don't even need roads.
A lot of third world countries exist almost entierly off of gas subsidies from the government. Go look at what Libyans paid per liter of gas during the Gadaffi years.
Americans already pay a "fair price". No, no one in the world properly accounts for "externalities" of consumption.
The stress of 2 ton machines flying around at 120 km/hr and operated by the angry and impatient-- that is simply not worth it. You think automated trains with 2 minute headways in a network covering 85% of local journeys at $3/ride would be worse than a Taxi at $1/minute with traffic?!!
A lot of being "car brained" is not realizing that even decent transit by global standards would be far far better than the subsidized freeway only-if-you-can-drive $8,000/year horrorshow of the US/Canada. No one's going to take away your fun cars, but a system maximizing freedom needs to account for the young, old, disabled, drunk, poor, and motivated to read instead of drive. Mass transit is freedom. Cars are consumption-politics/corporate-power.
It’s unarguable that driving requires more mental energy. Which is exactly why we have licensing, sobriety requirements, age floors and limits, etc.
Route planning itself is a mostly solved problem for an average pedestrian in any developed city. You type in your destination in maps and go.
Cars are only freedom to able bodied people of a certain financial means and age. Or when you live rurally. To everyone else in a city, they make it harder to get around.
Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes through might not.
A direct connection between Toronto and Montreal would serve one pair of major cities, while a Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal – Quebec City route would serve six. The longer route could be economically more viable, even if the costs are twice as high, as the number of potential passengers is much higher.
Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.
Roads generally don't pay for themselves
And the amount of track to connect the 4 cities together is double the simple Montreal-Toronto route -- on paper. In reality it's much larger, because most of the track along the Montreal-Toronto corridor is useable for HSR, but the proposed Ottawa-Toronto stretch is the one that needs a lot of new track.
There already are trains connecting to all of these cities, so HSR would still benefit people trying to get from, say, Toronto to Quebec City (the current rail service has a ~30 min stop in Montreal anyway, a transfer wouldn't add any real delay in that respect, and you'd cut down several hours of the journey with HSR service for the first leg). I'm simply saying that it would be great to just lay the damn track for HSR between the two largest Canadian cities, and deal with the smaller ones down the road.
Great for former government employees who want to be a consultant.
No one is accountable for the waste so politicians can just promise to spend more next time.
Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.
> One regular snipe is that it’s “easier to build rail in Morocco than in California.”
> 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.
So, uh... it is easier to build rail in Morocco than in California. And California is part of the cause. It's not even a "snipe", it's just the truth.
California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to name them. At the same time, it should've been completely federally funded.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe, too. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70
From what I can tell, these train sets are as off-the-shelf as can be reasonably expected, although apparently LINK has ordered their trains to run on 1500 volts as that’s what their catenaries use. Perhaps you’re thinking of BART?
-An occasional S700 passenger
Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.
To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge
withstand wind shear
BART never operated on the Golden Gate Bridge (or any of the other Bay Area bridges).
What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, followed by a sparsely populated mountain range and then a very large amount of farmland.
The nearest city to California with more than a million people is Phoenix, AZ which is "only" a couple hours from the California border. The next nearest is San Antonio, TX. The distance between Phoenix and San Antonio is about a thousand miles. Neither of those cities themselves have a functional mass transit system for anyone to use even if you put a rail stop there.
California itself constitutes more than half the population of the entire western US, which is otherwise enormous with a very low population density. It doesn't make sense to put high speed rail anywhere in the western US outside of California because there aren't enough people there to use it.
https://www.dot.nv.gov/projects-programs/transportation-proj...
It's cheaper to make more of stuff, even if it's not in the same place
It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.
If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.
Because the biggest threat to any rail project in Cali is political protest and "environmental" lawsuits ("this construction will destroy my view of the landscape!") and the second biggest threat is being forced to buy land from a bunch of people who've had years to collude in only offering ludicrously high prices.
Any sensible project will do its level best to avoid any developed rural land; it's the only way to avoid the massive delays and cost overruns you're complaining about. And besides, once it's built, the land around it will be developed because of the HSR line itself.
With Congress Gridlocked over issues that really should he bipartisan, it'd unironically take less time for the States to figure it out instead.
All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.
Money disappears into consultations, reviews, studies and reports of dubious value, the paperwork keeps piling up and it takes years before the public sees anything tangible, if the project ever gets built at all.
Someone somewhere is getting very rich off this, but it ain't the taxpayer.
£1.2 BILLION before a single spade in the ground for the lower thames crossing
https://www.ft.com/content/917d4b7f-318e-46fe-ba44-664551ebc...
The planning document alone was 350,000 pages long, and cost about £1000 per page (£350m).
What western countries lack is someone empowered enough to just say "fuck it, make it happen", and be held accountable once it's built.
Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.
Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted", 'Cheems mindset' failures of liberalism, and high-pressure demands from a federal government whose legislators are eager to sabotage projects outside of purple states.
Then don't build it. That money would have been far better spent improving urban metro and regional rail. (And airports and roads and charging stations, et cetera.)
...only literally anything else!
CA HSR was the political lever to get funding to improve urban metro and regional rail, so, in a sense, the money was spent doing that.
Highly recommend Paradise Lost by Peter Schrag. Raising revenue requires supermajority voter approval in most cases. A huge chunk of the budget is already allocated by voter mandates and the legislature fights over the scraps.
So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.
Yes.
> Could the CA legislature not have passed a law?
To fund a long-term capital project? No, for a number of reasons. First, at that time, the CA legislature couldn't practically fund anything reliably (budget process is Constitutionally mandated to be annual, and at that time required a 2/3 supermajority to pass, which caused regular budget crises.) Second, and more importantly, structurally, to fund major capital projects, debt financing is required, and California cannot, Constitutionally, issue bonds without voter approval. Prop 1A was a legislative initiative amendment -- that is, the legislature had to pass a bill to put it on the ballot -- to secure that approval.
My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the monkey there is no point in making the music box (something you know can be made).
Her point was people delude themselves into thinking they're making progress on a project by starting with the easy stuff. But the easy stuff is pointless if the hard stuff is impossible.
She gave the example of the California high-speed rail. They're building the flat easy part first but engineers have not figured out how they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains. Until they've figured that out the flat part is a waste of time and a false example of progress.
note: I'm not arguing whether it does or does not.
Making the route from San Diego to LA high-speed is perfectly doable (the route exists already), and would be a great stepping stone.
Even if it turns out the Tehachapi is basically the mountains of Mordor and the project ends, you'd still have a valuable high-speed corridor.
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/new-study-...
e.g. If you live above a tube line in London (London Underground) then you may hear/feel rumbling every time a train passes under you.
If Spain, with 33 500 USD GDP per capita, can do it, then so should California, whose GDP per capita exceeds 100 000 USD.
But yeah, better private sector does not necessarily buy better public sector.
OMG, just join the I-5 after Bakersfield. It's right there. Why are we barreling through the mountains?
[1] https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/23106/what-d...
Just look at this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wiedtalbrücke_Blickricht...
which is used at 300kph by electric multiple units like the german Inter City Expres.
I've rode over this at about 330kph shortly after opening, it's slightly noticable, but not like a roller-coaster at all, as one might think.
Meanwhile this is also used by more conventional electrical engines for passenger trains up to 250kph, also in 'pusher' mode,
and short freight trains, no longer than 700m, at anything between 160 to 200kph during nights.
According to Wikipedia 'the Bakersfield–Palmdale section of the line will cross Tehachapi Pass, roughly parallelling the Union Pacific Railroad's Mojave Subdivision. Due to its heavy freight traffic and sharp curves (including the famous Tehachapi Loop), there is no current passenger service through the pass. While the proposed high-speed rail alignment will not include any long tunnels comparable to those in Pacheco Pass, it has nine shorter tunnels and several viaducts more than 200 feet (61 m) high. The maximum grade through the pass would be - 2.8 - percent, making it the steepest portion of the Phase 1 route.'
Easy peasy.
Edit: TL;DR? All of this is explained here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline_West
They have distributed traction, meaning powered bogies in every second wagon for the current variants. There is no 'engine/locomotive' in the classical sense. All of these also have electronic anti-slip/traction control.
Edit: Even if a quarter of the powered bogies are defect for whichever reason, the remaining ones still suffice to accelerate from full stop at 4% grade. By design. For current variants. It's a variable platform. They could use more powered bogies. Stronger motors. Whatever.
For instance, brushing over the “possible original sin” of the project was way underestimating cost. Yea, no shit, that’s like 95% of the problem voters have with it, that and how long it’s taken with very little usable progress. Author spends very little time on this.
And you are right the extra cost is minimal. It's probably $10-15 billion.
My thought about the grade separation costs and my beef is. One is those grade separation projects need to be done anyways. The beef is why is the high speed rail project paying for road infrastructure. That should come out of gas taxes or something.
Holding up 25M people to try and include 1M more while bloating costs and showing no progress is the essence of how you kill a project.
No, they wouldn't. Because Prop 1A funds are a tiny drop in the system funding requirements, and choosing the I-5 alignment would not have sped up any of the issues that make the things around the termini more time consuming, and not having a ready-to-work initial construction segment that actually formed part of an initial operating segment that actually connects populated areas (even if they are much smaller than the termini) would have meant no federal ARRA funding (not to mention the weaker in-state political support), so what actually would have happened is that the project would take longer and, in the year-of-expenditure way CA HSR costs are always estimated and quoted, cost much more before anything got built or operational.
California is owned by boomer homeowners, real estate speculators, and the auto industry, and the first commandment of all California planning is "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 1972." In the event that the first commandment fails, the second is "make anything new as expensive as possible so there's as much potential for graft as possible, and so existing home values aren't threatened."
Maybe things will change when there's a generational transition, but unfortunately it may just pass power on to the SV neoreactionary VC set who will proceed to implement their own different set of bizarre schemes that don't work like planned charter cities in the middle of nowhere. Or they might just turn into fuddy-duddies in their old age and change it to "allow nothing to change from the way it was in 2003 when I moved here and got rich."
California is the fourth largest economy, so clearly something is working, but I don't think California's urban planning culture is it. Places, companies, and people can all be extremely successful in spite of massive dysfunction.
- (the many) stakeholders issue critiques
- new plan is presented that includes all the worst elements of said stakeholders but achieves unity across teams
- stakeholders toast and have an expensive dinner at achievement of unified plan
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.