I think it's because in the U.S absolutely anyone can tie up this stuff in the court systems for years. There are a lot of environmentalists who have been working overtime to stop this thing. For example: https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/10/24/high-speed-rail-l... . There are seven environmental lawsuits against this thing. How much do you think the legal bills are? There will likely be many more.
Edit: There are a couple of regularly glitchy things about how American government works. They are:
#1 : Public Employees Unions who negotiate with themselves for sweet pension deals.
#2 : Suits against various government agencies by individuals that wind up being paid for by taxpayers. For example, school districts getting sued for something a janitor did and then taxpayers having to pay for it as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.
#3 : Environmental lawsuits to stop government infrastructure projects.
Are these environmental lawsuits really about protecting the environment (fighting climate change) or are they NIMBY lawsuits taking advantage of environmental laws/ordinances? In general, I would expect environmentalists to be among the major proponents of high speed rail, with the goal of getting more cars off the freeways.
This calls to mind the Faculty of Environment at my university, whose primary focus is on the urban planning degree program. Urban planning as a rule seems to be all about politics, stakeholders, and NIMBYism; not so much about fighting climate change.
> Are these environmental lawsuits really about protecting the environment (fighting climate change)
“Protecting the environment” isn’t “fighting climate change.” Regardless of one’s position on the effects of CO2, that’s like suggesting that ensuring health should be entirely about how to prevent influenza. Protecting the environment includes protecting habit, stopping (actual, toxic) pollution. Climate change isn’t the end-all be-all of environmentalism. Climate change is being used at an almost religious level to justify pretty much anything climate activists deem necessary — regardless of any unintended (or subversively intended) consequences.
Environmentalism doesn’t have to also mean “obsession with climate.” Some of us care deeply about the environment but also don’t have the audacity to think that the climate is changing because of humans. The climate has been changing for 4+ billion years.
Of course, downvote away. Heresy is expected to be punished here. It is important that the point was made: caring about the environment can be independent of the climate change gospel.
> the audacity to think that the climate is changing because of humans.
I don't understand why that's "audacity". Climate change doesn't happen only due to geological and astronomical cycles. Organisms living on the earth have managed to change the composition of the atmosphere in the past.[1]
> Climate change is being used at an almost religious level
It's funny you describe it as "religious". Religion usually demands faith and doesn't require proof. There's plenty of evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change. Whereas deniers toss out handwavey statements like "the climate has always been changing" or conspiracy theories involving academic corruption. Who's really being religious about climate change?
> Heresy is expected to be punished here
A community that prizes intellectual curiosity will take a dim view of baseless denial of scientific consensus. You need proof.
> caring about the environment can be independent of the climate change gospel.
It can, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. There’s little point in protecting an ecosystem if it isn’t going to exist in a decade or two anyway. A big construction project might have a more tangible short-term impact, but if that excuse is used in every project that’s likely to have a strong positive impact on climate change, we might be shooting ourselves in the foot.
Of course, nothing is every black-and-white; destroying countless local ecosystems is a high cost, and it’s difficult to measure whether it’s worth that cost. How many ecosystems will be saved as a result? From any single project, probably none. From all the projects combined, maybe a lot.
It’s along the lines of, “nobody else is trying to prevent calamity X, so calamity X is inevitable, and I shouldn’t try to stop it if the cost is calamity Y, where calamity Y is a more localized version of calamity X.” Well, calamity X is going to bring about calamity Y anyway if everyone has that mindset.
It reminds me of the Trolley Problem [1], except the “do nothing” outcome is a long way off, and the “do something” outcome happens immediately, thereby skewing the choices.
>There’s little point in protecting an ecosystem if it isn’t going to exist in a decade or two anyway.
You realize one of the main things that would help climate change is having healthy functioning ecosystems? They help with things like soil erosion, carbon sequestering, they supply much needed nutrients to soil, regulate temperature, and numerous other things that used to keep the earth balanced.
Cars and trucks emit more than just CO2. They also emit particulates, nitrogen oxides, and sulphur oxides in the case of diesel. Getting thousands to millions of vehicles off the road is going to dramatically reduce local pollution in addition to cutting down on CO2.
Los Angeles is infamous for being a city with a lot of air pollution (particularly smog) and so cutting down on cars commuting to/from LA should be a major priority for environmentalists.
> Climate change is being used at an almost religious level to justify pretty much anything climate activists deem necessary — regardless of any unintended (or subversively intended) consequences.
Such as? Apart from some investment in renewables and more fuel efficient cars climate change activists haven't exactly achieved much.
> as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.
Theoretically that's the case. Practically, the taxpayer ends up owning the downsides, and the government nomenklatura ends up owning the upsides. If you have stock in the company that does that, you can sell. If you have government like that, you can vote for another government, but somehow people never do.
The California HSR has a lot of problems not matched in Taiwan.
Firstly, once you get from San Jose to Bakersfield, then what? We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end. What happens when you get to San Jose? You still need a car or another slow train.
If you want to get from San Francisco to Disneyland via HSR, the entire trip would probably take you about six hours with all the train changes and car rides and waiting. You could do the drive in six hours too and then have your car at the other end.
Even today, if I want to visit my parents in the suburbs of LA coming from the suburbs of San Jose, I can make the drive in five hours, or spend five hours getting there by plane, assuming someone picks me up at the other end. The only reason I fly is if I happen to be going somewhere right near the airport or it will be rush hour at one end or another when I arrive because I don't have scheduling flexibility.
Secondly, the original proposal was to build Stockton to Fresno first. That would be the least used section of the line. Not a lot of people move between Stockton and Fresno. The train would be bankrupt before it ever got to phase two. At least they finally changed their mind on that, but not for a much better route.
To be remotely viable, they need to build the most trafficked parts first -- San Jose to Stockton and Bakersfield to Los Angeles. But even those lines would still suffer from problem one unless/until the local transit was vastly improved.
I would love to see a viable HSR in California, but the current proposal is not that.
Let's build up our local transit first in LA and the Bay Area so that when we connect them with a high speed rail, the rail is actually useful.
This argument just doesn't make sense. You can make the exact point about airports as well.
What's the point of an airport? It is hard to get there, you have to rent a car, parking is expensive, too much trafic, busses are not that often... etc... etc..
Build the train, and have stations close to downtown, while local government can start/extend local transportation as well.
Ideally you have both local and inter-urban rail at the same time, but if you don't, then you have to start somewhere. It is harder to build a major station, then several small tram station. Start with the harder part, and let the local government fill out the smaller parts.
The beauty of the train, that it can get very close to downtown, or even in the center of it with minimal disruption (if built underground).
You just can't do that with an airport.
The single LAX-SFO pair is about 10% of LAX's daily takeoffs, completely ignoring SJC and OAK. Throw in BUR and HSR effectively amounts to a significant capacity increase for non-short haul flights.
Except that the HSR wouldn't get close to LAX or SFO. It at best would replace SJC to BUR, and even then not really since it will only go to Bakersfield.
So most of those flights would probably stay, because why take the HSR if you still have to drive an hour on each end?
Nope, the airlines hate running those routes. They're highly competitive and thus terrible uses of very expensive assets. They'll be kept for expensive international connections, but the frequency will be dramatically cut.
Also, who cares about actually going to an airport? It's only a means to getting where you need to go, which is probably downtown SF or LA
I was just using the airport as a proxy. But sure let's look at where people actually want to go. If you arrive in San Jose on HSR, and want to go to downtown, you still have to drive an hour or take a train for 90 minutes. And if you arrive in Bakersfield and want to go downtown, you're looking at two hours in the car or three on a bus.
> the airlines hate running those routes. They're highly competitive and thus terrible uses of very expensive assets.
So why exactly should California spend 20 billion dollars so they can remove those flights? Sounds like we already have a system that works and is subsidizing other flights as well.
I think local public transport might be just a lot more efficient than longer-distance HSR. So if there isn't even a basic solution for the local transport, it seems odd to start with HSR. That impression is mostly based on comparison to Germany though.
We don't have good public transit in LA, much less to Bakersfield. But even if the train went all the way to Union Station in Los Angeles, you'd still need to rent a car to get anywhere useful, or take Uber/Lyft. And same thing on the other end.
I have. It's very comparable to BART now, where it works like commuter rail except in downtown. But you still need to drive to a station or take a bus that doesn't run on time.
Could that not be a chicken and egg issue? There's no reason to build bus lines to a nonexistent train station. And without the attractive high-speed train option, who's going to take these buses in meantime? Sounds like the train could be a catalyst.
San Jose has plenty of good meeting points for urban transit. It's likely the same points HSR would be using anyway. What it doesn't have is the proper urban transit - the one that exists takes hours instead of minutes to get anywhere and virtually nobody who can afford not using it uses it. Having HSR wouldn't solve any of it.
LA and the Bay Area have many other needs that can be met with good transit. It may not go exactly to the hypothetical train station, but if it already exists its a lot easier to extend to said station.
So the argument would be "they tried it in Taiwan and it ended up with all the problems opponents predicted it would have, so we have to reproduce it in California"?
Having HSR is not a goal. It's a tool. The goal should be having efficient (both monetarily, time-wise and people suffering wise) means of getting people from point A to point B. If California spends $100b of taxpayer money and doesn't get closer to the goal - that means every single person in California just because couple of thousands bucks poorer just so somebody could be proud of California having HSR. Thanks but no thanks.
The article gives a good reason for why it works in Taiwan, despite its problems:
> Taiwan’s high-speed rail system proved reliably profitable — and popular, with 64 million riders last year.
Aside from talking about the (potential) cost, you didn't make any other point for why there shouldn't be a HSR. It's fine if you don't think we should have one because it's becoming too expensive, but I don't see any argument for why it wouldn't be useful.
Yes? There's more than 200 bus routes, many with frequent service, versus ~80 routes for all of Santa Clara County, many of which have very infrequent service. There's a functional regional train system with more frequent service than Caltrain... A functional regional bus system that is far better than e.g. Greyhound...
Plus, Taichung is building a metro which will open mid-next year...
There really is no reason picking up a rental needs to be as time consuming as it is (could be dropped off like an Uber near to the station) and I’m amazed there isn’t a version of Uber that combines short hops from public transport somewhere timed for when the train arrives. These problems are actually opportunities in my opinion, I’m surprised Uber isn’t onto them...
If you place the reservation ahead-of-time, it doesn't take that long at the desk (besides the line, if there is one). Sure, it could be faster, but I've rented plenty of cars from a lot of different companies (with City Rent-A-Car being my preference in SF, and Enterprise everywhere else) and it's pretty tolerable.
Hell, my first ever car rental (to go from DC to Harrisburg because that leg of my flight got cancelled) was a walk-in with Hertz, and the slowest part was picking out a car.
Re: getting to the car in the first place, just about every airport I've been to has a bunch of rental agencies onsite (either walkable or via a shuttle bus), and I suspect HSR stations would be no different.
If you have status with the rental car companies, a lot of them have express pickup where you just walk up to a designated spot number that's listed in the app and drive away. I have no idea why they go thru the whole charade of retyping everything on the computer at the rental car location if you don't have status, when they obviously know how to save data for other people.
> I have no idea why they go thru the whole charade of retyping everything on the computer at the rental car location if you don't have status
It's a security feature. It's more secure for them to retype everything then to try and verify that everything you typed matches the ID you put in front of them.
When you have status they've already done all that once and they trust you because you've successfully rented from them before. Without status, they have no reason to trust you, so they have to verify everything.
HSR failed in California largely because building effective mass transit is a secondary goal. If you look at the route, and how the process unfolded, the focus was mostly on who was going to get paid, and helping out political friends. In the US, large transit projects are mostly about pork barrel politics and spending, and if something actually usable comes out of it, then that was a great but secondary effect. If you look at how other countries build transit, politics is more subdued and the goal is to actually build a functional system. Republicans block most transit projects as it is antithetical to their political views, and the Democrats uses it as a social spending policy and political handouts largely ignoring the needs of an actual transit system.
Basically, US politics just doesn't care to build things properly because the incentives are totally off.
I think any talk about HSRs in the US should be able to explain US highways. American highway system is arguably one of the best in the world - it's also a gigantic government project, and it's constantly being extended.
So how come America, with its proven track record of great highways, is totally impotent with high speed rails? The answer can't be just "American government doesn't work" or "the country is too big." Irrational mistrust against railways?
> American highway system is arguably one of the best in the world
No, I'd say the German Autobahn system is the best in the world, followed by France (expensive) then UK, before USA.
USA is good because they tend to go to central cities, where European motorways deliver to a ring road. You can commute to work on a US motorway, but between cities they aren't special.
> USA is good because they tend to go to central cities
This is great if your only metric to measure is "could I possibly get there in a car."
This is terrible for pretty much every other factor, including
- neighborhood desirability: highways are terrible neighbors to live next to due to all the air pollution, noise pollution, visual impacts, and traffic impacts
- transport capacity: roads become congested far faster than other modes of transportation. Another issue is that pre-automobile neighborhoods are generally designed to distribute traffic across a grid, not concentrate it at highway exits and offramps.
- public health: the prioritization of the highway has caused a lot of asthma in high-density, low-income areas. The absolute primacy of the car and the creation of car-centric environments have also decimated active modes like walking and biking, or walking to transit, and this is probably a big factor in why Americans are less healthy than other developed countries' citizens.
- equity: highways today mostly run through low land value areas, because they were the cheapest to build and the citizens living there generally had the least political power. This was also intentional; many cities had the policy where bulldozing and splitting existing poor or minority neighborhoods to build highways was an "improvement" to remove "urban blight". As such, the impacts of highways in the US tend to fall disproportionately on the poor and minorities.
Lobbying is another problem. For example, the Koch brothers have been involved in lobbying against (and placing public advertisements against) local public transportation improvements in a number of cities because it will hurt their oil industry companies and investments.
1. The highways are such good competition that they make the already-dubious capital and operating cost picture of passenger rail even worse.
2. The US has the best freight and logistics rail system in the world. Existing rail right of way favors freight uses at the expense of passenger trains, which makes the passenger trains even less palatable. This is a feedback loop, where in turn rail ridership is low and gets even less resource share.
It’s because we already have highways and our car culture is hard to change. Highways were also originally built for national defense with the economic benefits as a secondary force. Defense projects traditionally get tons of funding in the US.
Convincing a generation that witnessed two world wars to back a massive defense project wasn’t difficult.
>Highways were also originally built for national defense with the economic benefits as a secondary force.
That's the standard story. From what I've read though, Eisenhower wanted to build the Interstate Highway System for a number of reasons of which defense was only one--and possibly a fairly minor one. But he knew that playing up the defense angle was a good strategy to get the plan passed.
The only reason that I-95, for instance, extends as far as it does, is because of the Strategic Air Command bomber base in Limestone, ME. A lot of the other more nonsensical routings of the interstate system make sense when you take into consideration where strategic bases were located in the 50s and 60s.
Evacuating cities in the event of an atomic attack was also cited as a reason though that obviously seems questionable as well. As I wrote in another comment, the defense justification was probably mostly just a way to get the help get the act passed.
Katrina and Harvey showed that at best, evacuating cities with highways is an extremely long, drawn out process that will most likely leave the most poor and destitute (who don't have cars) totally stranded.
Yes. Basically you can't rapidly evacuate cities. Maybe highways help a bit but, if you can barely handle commuter traffic on a given workday, you're certainly not going to completely and quickly evacuate a city if there's some threat--and that's before you even get to the issue of people who don't own cars.
So the idea that highways would be useful if there were an imminent threat of nuclear attack looks pretty silly.
Rail has upper capacity in the ranges of 60-90k passengers per hour, whereas car lanes are in the range of 2-3K passengers per hour in free flowing conditions. Granted that 60-90K figure doesn't involve people trying to shove furniture, pets etc. into their vehicles, but you could move quite a lot more with rail.
Rail is also used as part of the evacuation, but most people will want their car so they can carry enough supplies to last for the evacuation period. In fact one of the most egregious aspects of the Katrina disaster was New Orleans explicitly told Amtrak their trains were unnecessary [1].
>"We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."
Or lack of experience. Want to go from Denver to Albuquerque? The shortest route goes through Illinois. I'd love to take Amtrak -- there's even a station in my city -- but anywhere I want to go, it's faster and cheaper to fly.
That's a nonsequitur. The California coast is pretty dense, the rest of the state has large amounts of empty space and national parks. Nobody would build a high-speed rail through Yosemite or Death Valley.
The reddest areas on the California map would be orange on the Taiwan map.
A San Jose to Bakersfield route (comparable in length to the Taiwan route) has a huge low-population density area around the middle, so basically there's no prospect of using the rail for shorter trips. And the number of daily trips between San Jose and Bakersfield is likely to be limited.
It's not a non-sequitur, it matters a lot in the end it implies on average considerably longer distances through less density.It matters in the calculation.
The total area of the state isn't too relevant, since California isn't exactly proposing to build HSR to Eureka or Redding.
It's true that California's project is larger-scale, but by 2x: Taiwan has a single 200-mile HSR line, and California is trying to build a single 400-mile line.
How many potential riders live along each respective corridor? How many people want to travel between San Jose and Bakersfield vs Taipei and Kaohsiung?
I’d guesstimate an order of magnitude lower as proposed; the California plan doesn’t make much sense to me without extending the line 100 miles further from Bakersfield to LA.
Well, the original proposal that voters passed was SF–LA, which has very large populations at both ends, and makes a bit more sense (this is also what I was counting as 400 miles). The (maybe temporary, maybe not) scale-back seems to be due to rapidly ballooning estimates of construction cost. I agree that a Merced–Bakersfield line is less compelling, to put it mildly.
Which points to what I think is the main issue, both here and with most other US transit projects: US rail construction costs are very high, even compared to other high-wage countries. If we could get subway and rail projects done at the per-mile costs that Japan, Denmark, France, or Germany manage, I think we'd both have more things already successfully built, and more public appetite to fund more.
Also keep in mind the topography. There is about 50-ish miles of mountains standing between Los Angeles and the Central Valley (15 fewer if you deter via Palmsdale), and you have a similar conundrum going from the Central Valley to the Bay Area. By contrast in Taiwan, you can travel mostly via coastal flats.
Most of Taiwan is fairly mountainous and empty. Most of the population is in a few cities (Kaohsiung
Taichung
Tainan
Taipei
Taoyuan). It's enough to connect them with high-speed trains, and that's what happened.
Side observation, non-related but was brought up in the article:
"Taiwan is a far poorer place than California — with median household income just one-fourth of ours — but still it managed to afford high-speed rail."
The author seems to be ignorant of some context when describing Taiwan in this way -- I learned recently that wages in Taiwan were artificially and structurally depressed in order to enable a competitive export economy. Taiwan is actually not a palpably poorer place except maybe in an absolute dollar sense. Taipei has top notch infrastructure, superior to every large U.S. city in my view (I've visited and seen for myself) The highways are beautiful. They don't skimp on infra spend.
Notwithstanding the fact that median household income is rarely good indication of how "poor" a place is, especially when comparing across countries because of local cost of living assumptions.
If we compare poverty rates, Taiwan's is 1.78% whereas California's is 18.2%.
Taiwan's GDP per capita (PPP) -- not household income -- was $53k in 2018. California's was $66k in 2016. Not that different.
Looks like the author was trying to use a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand there to make his point.
1. It resulted from the era of rapid economic growth.
2. East Asian countries generally value the greater good for all more.
3. There was no stereotype against train travel, and having HSRs was generally considered as a national pride.
Nowadays, it's also difficult to do any large scale infrastructure project in Taiwan, because the economy stagnates and the two-party political system is kinda gridlocked .
The real issue is that gas is too cheap in the US. Everywhere else, except oil rich middle east, gas is expensive enough to discourage people from driving everywhere. They end up taking public transport. In US driving almost always comes out cheaper unless the distance is too great to be convenient to drive.
Simply put, even if all the environmental / lobbying / no-car-at-the-destination issues were resolved, the distances of California (and population densities) would still make it economically challenging to have HSR a slam dunk compared to flying.
HSR breaks even with flying at about _200-300 miles_ journey. That is, if the planned journey is within that range, for similar pricing, people will choose 50-50 rail over flying (in aggregate, in Europe, Asia). New York to Washington/Boston distances. Greater than that, flying has the advantage. (People will incrementally choose flying the longer the distance). This takes into account typical traffic, getting to the airport, check-in, all that stuff.
San Francisco to Los Angeles is 380 miles. Add to that the destination rental car issues, etc. And we haven't even talked pricing yet.
Even if you got that all out of the way, flying is still often better than rail. Even on Tokyo-Osaka route, one of the pinnacles of HSR, there are almost comparable flights serving the route as shinkansen.
I know we all wish for high speed rail as a demonstration of our technological prowess. But in recent years even I've soured on it for California, given how incompetent we seem to be on top of rail's structural disadvantage in the state. The money would bring far more benefits if spent elsewhere to solve our traffic, commute, suburban issues.
Oh I do. But you have an existing federal body willing to hide/distribute the cost of that runway, control tower, staff, weather forecasters, etc. Not as much for rail.
The route chosen for CA high speed rail guaranteed failure. SF out to the Central Valley and then in to LA meant a really expensive project which would result in a slow train. This single route through everywhere was necessary for political, particularly Congressional, backing. I'm glad Gavin Newsom cancelled it and I still want HSR. They should start with SLO to San Diego and then a Central Valley line. Finally, connect SFO (yup, San Francisco International Airport) to SLO.
It's not just California, it's every state and every city in the US. People have an aversion to public works projects often crying about taxes or how the service is useless or not good enough. We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.
Is it any wonder when you have evil groups of people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell people that they should vote against their interests?
> We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.
Wasn’t it Newsom who canceled the project? Most high ranking Democrats are certainly rich from things like “energy” and “weapons” via k street and international analogues. We are bipartisan in our corruption and failure to build infrastructure.
No. Newsom was the messenger saying what was already pretty evident: the project had run itself into a logistic and financial corner that there was no feasible path out of (at least for now).
Note that HSR planning and construction is still taking place. The current public assumption seems to be that the "train from nowhere to nowhere" is all we'll ever get out of the project, but Newsom was actually pretty careful not to say this.
Fair enough! I think my assessment on the partisanship of infrastructure development stands. My understanding is that the underlying reasons for cost inflation are non-partisan.
> People have an aversion to public works projects
People have aversion to public works projects because they routinely see public works projects being mismanaged, hugely overbudget, delayed to geological times, used as source to appropriate public money into private pockets, and paraded for political influence while being badly maintained and chronically broken. I am far from being a millionaire, but I would require a lot of convincing to see how it actually benefits me and doesn't turn into another boondoggle for politicians and contractors. Maybe spending serious chunk of my income on a project that would not happen for decades, would be poorly maintained and I probably won't end up using because they'd screw up something like not having proper access to the endpoints is actually not my interests?
Major highway and road projects in the US are often completed with minimal fuss. You don't really hear about these, because they go off smoothly. The difference may perhaps be that there's plenty of experience and precedent in doing these, both in government and industry, as road projects are constantly executed.
Major rail construction has basically been absent in the US for a generation or more. Does the lack of experience and support, combined with a general reluctance to bring in foreign expertise, explain the difference? Maybe. The Texas HSR project may be instructive, as it's bringing in a Japanese firm.
> Major highway and road projects in the US are often completed with minimal fuss. You don't really hear about these, because they go off smoothly. The difference may perhaps be that there's plenty of experience and precedent in doing these, both in government and industry, as road projects are constantly executed.
... yeah, I don't think that's true. Major road projects in the US often have exactly the same kinds of hemorrhaging cost overruns and other issues that rail projects do: look at Seattle's Alaska Way Viaduct replacement project, the Bay Area's Bay Bridge replacement project, or Boston's Big Dig for infamous cost overruns that are measured in large integer multiples.
The major difference, I believe, is that there is often massive public pressure to force through road projects when they hit snags, whereas rail projects tend to get cancelled at first opportunity.
On the flip side, the reconstruction of LA freeways after the Northridge earthquake was a resounding success, finishing a month or more ahead of schedule. How? By offering financial incentives to complete early. ;-)
That's only a small number of the hundreds of major road projects. Most of them you don't hear about because nothing interesting happens.
FWIW, my experience with smaller-scale local projects in my area is that they are completed generally on time, competently, and achieve the desired aims.
More centralised authority, no local counter initiatives that bog them down, less political gridlock and stronger consensus mechanisms, less influence by third parties through lobbying which the US glamorises as free speech, no bias against public transportation and so on.
The US almost prides itself in the fact that its government is dysfunctional, that individuals can stop projects at the expense of the general public. One just needs to look at the countless of Hollywood movies where some lone Erin Brockovich-esque hero stands up to 'the machine', with the question rarely being raised what the collective costs and trade-offs are, or whether there's even a rational case to be made for the resistance.
There is no big problem with going through courts to make sure the project has sufficiently good cost-benefit ratios.
The problem is, that alternatives are not priced comparably, thus the economics simply favors them. (Such as driving or flying.)
If tunneling would be cheaper (in concrete construction costs), then those could go ahead, because there's not much issue about it, it's about as straightforward as flying. (Of course below a certain depth, so no noise and structural concerns arise.)
The people managing these projects are often hired based on political connections, not expertise. And cost overruns usually lead to higher profits, so there is little incentive to keep costs down.
While I’m always a fan of remembering that incentives matter (and believe that some degree citizen attention is a price for a well-functioning government), I would think that a forum full of software engineers could think of other reasons projects go over budget than graft.
It's not graft exactly, but simply the project structure leads to enormous inefficiencies. Eg subcontractors cannot work/meet/organize/plan directly with each other, because financial interests put silly lines in the sand. (Just think about how slow/dumb things can become if the backend, frontend and ops are completely separated, plus there's a middle layer (the general contractor) between them and the stakeholders.)
Plus, it seems that the main problem is that there's simply not enough experience/expertise at governments for managing/planning/executing these projects. Because too few people are in-house (or on payroll/retainer with the right/aligned incentives), and too few projects are done, so no competent team forms over time.
> I would think that a forum full of software engineers could think of other reasons projects go over budget than graft.
We're not talking about projects in the private domain. We're talking about government projects. Look at the Obamacare website boondoggle. Or the recent lack of backups in Baltimore when hit with ransomware. When it's a government project, it's very fair to consider graft and corruption as the primary causes, especially as they often lead to favoring incompetent people in charge of executing the project.
Sort of. The US is big and rich (so small mistakes compound into really big expensive errors fast/eventually) and sort of refuses to shop abroad for expertise, because. Reasons.
I'd say in the US at least it's hard for a politician to devote money toward a multi-year program that their constituents won't see the benefit of for quite some time (or in the case of upkeep and maintenance, at all).
The politician isn't looking to do what's right, they're looking to get reelected.
Why are politicians in other countries able to accomplish this while those in the US can't? Are American politicians just lower quality than those in other countries? Or is that their constituents are more prone to short-term thinking than their counterparts elsewhere?
Fund rail like we do highways. Establish an agency to incrementally purchase ROW or track rights and incrementally upgrade services. And to tie all these services together into a cohesive network.
This would mean first all the lines in NoCal and separately SoCal would reach speeds of 120mph, electrified, with regular high quality service. That first supports the massive need for transit within these separate mega regions. You’d have a fast enough train from Sacramento to San Jose. Or from San Diego to LA. So on. This already provides good economic benefits.
Second, starting a rail renaissance this way around means you have laid out everything you need to get support for the 180+ mph HSR line that would later link these two networks into one statewide network.
At that point you would not only have support from the public because it’s obvious what the benefits will be, but you also have all the construction and project management experience built up over the years of buying/fixing/upgrading lines in these northern and southern networks.
And instead of this inside out (outside in?), stand-alone plan we had with CAHSR. You now all the way through are making peoples lives better AS YOU GO with your capital investments.
The Central Valley construction right now for example is ridiculous as everyone knows. (We know it was done because there was federal money for it, but still.)
Imagine instead that same capital expenditure had gone to making the Sacramento to San Jose Capitol Corridor route a high quality electrified 120mph line? It would’ve had immediate economic benefits and people would ride the trains and be like holy shit give me more of this now!!
As an outsider from Europe: what I see that americans hate any publicly funded projects. "If it doesn't benefit me why should I pay taxes for that?" See the whole healthcare system. "I'm healthy, never sick why should I pay the cancer treatment of those who are obese and smoke all the time?" That's totally different in Europe. Not just in the nordic countries but generally everywhere. So the same applies for public transport and such as well. Also add on the top of that the lowest gas prices in the western world https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/
And they aren’t going to get what they were promised. With boondoggles like these, it shouldn’t be a surprise why American’s are against infrastructure projects. It’s all over promising and under delivering
The same thing happened with the East span of the Bay Bridge.
> As an outsider from Europe: what I see that americans hate any publicly funded projects. [...]
America has become a rat-ship. It is filled with folks that have amazing ideas of how to spend other people's money. Don't be disdainful when the people whose money you have pissed away start getting upset at "grand ideas". We see it as more of the same mostly: corruption, shitty-quality infrastructure, and handouts ("jobs" programs). Rarely do these "grand ideas" translate into real benefits over the long term.
But the agricultural industry doesn't face "Buy American" provisions in their funding requirements that prohibit them from using too much foreign stuff, which is the norm in infrastructure projects.
Answer: cars and highways. It's really hard to spend a lot of money replacing something that already works, even if it works really, really badly. High speed rail will only happen with a federal mandate.
>While California established an underfinanced government authority to lead the project, Taiwan’s biggest businesses came together to create a private corporation.
I used to be more in favor of CA HSR, but I read an argument that said cities are congested, rural I-5 isn't, so we'd be better off building a second BART tunnel and electrifying Caltrain.
High speed rail is a bad investment. Rail systematizes discrimination, typically loses money, and struggles to provide a last mile solution.
$60B can buy at least 600,000 electric vehicles with 3 million seats. Semi-autonomous vehicles are already capable of operating as a “train” in a dedicated freeway lane and autonomous operation is likely by 2033 (when California’s HSR would begin operation). This solution could be deployed incrementally, with a smaller fleet of human-driven, semi-autonomous EVs in the first phase.
600,000 vehicles may not sound like a lot, but the whole United States had 370,400 taxi & ride share drivers in 2018! [1].
We need to turn the HOV lane into an autonomous car lane & build the future we want instead of tying ourselves to a romanticized version of the past.
Edit: I failed to acknowledge that autonomous vehicles are not available today, so have updated my post. Note, high speed rail isn’t available either & won’t be until, at earliest, 2033.
$60B can buy zero autonomous vehicles, because there aren't any working ones! And won't be for years, regardless of the wrong predictions [1] Elon Musk keeps making.
Autonomous vehicles won't solve the congestion problem and would likely make it worse. The fundamental attraction of autonomous vehicles is to externalize the cost of congestion. It's like cars in general, great it's just you. Not great if it's everyone else too.
If that actually works, I'm fine with it. I don't care that much about the tech... the Paris Metro uses rubber tires instead of steel rails, but it's functionally the same as any other metro system from a customer's perspective. If LA-SF comes up with a "high-speed rail" solution that runs on rubber wheels on asphalt, but has fast, frequent, and reliable schedules, then sure, sounds good to me! That's the key though... will I be able to buy these tickets the way I can buy TGV tickets in France?
The Paris metro system actually has both rubber and rail lines. :-)
Autopilot got deployed since the 60s, and 100% driverless lines since the late 90s (currently line 1 and 14 are automatic, and line 4 is becoming automatic too)
Not to argue, but this doesn’t exist. Not really. Not on the market. Rail, however does exist. Further, what is the mileage equivalent of cars vs rail? I don’t know, but I think it would favor mass transit rail.
You also compared electric cars to taxi drivers - that’s odd.
Railways are fixed route. People who rely on rail can only go where the rail goes & have limited freedom to access other destinations. The people who pay for rail (via taxes) are often not the people who use it (since people with extra money tend to purchase cars). Wealthy people tend to not want heavy rail in their back yard, so lobby to have it other places. That means wealthy places lack rail access.
Edit: For example this case in Seattle asking if building light rail above ground discriminates against poor communities when rail is built below ground in richer communities. They dropped the suit because they couldn’t afford to keep fighting.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...
Caveat, I did my primary research for a single grad school course in 2006, so new data may be available.
> autonomous electric vehicles... Not to argue, but this doesn’t exist.
That’s a fair critique. The original version of my comment assumed a lot & I’ve hopefully restated it in more achievable terms.
I don’t think we can turn on autonomy today & it would work. I do think investing in getting an autonomous transit system in place by the 2030s is a better use of my CA tax dollars than a train.
The difference between small, point to point vehicles that operate like taxis and rail is that taxis actually get cars off the road.
I attended Hack for LA a couple years back and 1/3 of the traffic in downtown LA is drivers looking for parking. Switching to shared ride transit will decongest the roads.
If the city was charging enough for parking, every block would have at least one free space. If 1/3 of traffic is people looking for parking, they're not charging enough.
Edit: There are a couple of regularly glitchy things about how American government works. They are:
#1 : Public Employees Unions who negotiate with themselves for sweet pension deals.
#2 : Suits against various government agencies by individuals that wind up being paid for by taxpayers. For example, school districts getting sued for something a janitor did and then taxpayers having to pay for it as if they were a private business and the taxpayer is the owner.
#3 : Environmental lawsuits to stop government infrastructure projects.