Longtime readers know that I'm dedicated to bringing you every negative news report on California's bullet train. This is fairly easy since every news report about the bullet train is negative. Here's the latest:
The California bullet train authority will seek a $4.1-billion appropriation to complete construction in the Central Valley, as costs and schedules continue to grow.
....The disclosures by the rail authority include an update on the cost of the Central Valley system. Newsom originally said the estimated cost would not exceed $20.4 billion and that it would be operating by 2028. The new cost includes an upper limit of $22.8 billion, a 10% increase, and an operational date of 2030, a two-year slip.
....The $4.1-billion appropriation would substantially deplete the bond fund. At the time it was approved, the full 500-mile bullet train system from Los Angeles to San Francisco was supposed to cost $33 billion and the bonds would cover a third of it.
The idea here is to use up all the bond money on the "starter" segment between Bakersfield and Merced, and then pretend that more money will be found for the final links to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This will never happen, which means that a decade from now California will have a bullet train that takes people from Bakersfield to Merced.
You may be wondering how many people want to take a train from Bakersfield (pop. 400,000) to Merced (pop. 100,000) by way of Fresno (pop. 500,000), shaving maybe an hour or so off the 2½-hour drive by car. The answer is not very many, and it's hardly worth the time to quantify this any further.
Remember how much we all mocked the "bridge to nowhere"? Hell, that was only $400 million and it never got built anyway. It's nothing compared to our $20-30 billion bullet train to nowhere.¹
¹I don't mean to imply that Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced are "nowhere." But I guess that's what I'm doing. However, I say this in a spirit of cameraderie with my friends in the Central Valley, not as some snotty liberal elite who's lived his entire life in Southern California.
It'd probably be a lot cheaper just to add an extra lane to the highways whenever possible, that's kept as a dedicated "high speed bus" lane to be occupied by electric buses doing transit routes (in places where that's not possible, they'd have to just run on regular roads). More flexible as well.
I remember Matt Yglesias talking about this type of construction policy, and I hate it so much. It's basically starting a project and hoping that by the time it needs more money, you're so far in that Loss Aversion gets you the rest of the way. All it does is jack up costs and delay times.
It's basically starting a project and hoping that by the time it needs more money, you're so far in that Loss Aversion gets you the rest of the way.
This was the entire theory behind California HSR. They presented a bunch of false, lowballed cost estimates to the public, but figured at the end of the day people wouldn't want a fast train that started and ended in the San Joaquin Valley and would approve the money necessary to go the rest of the way. It's really a form of blackmailing the taxpayers.
The saddest thing about this is how it discredits HSR generally. There's several places in the country that are just perfect for HSR. The Northeast Corridor, most obviously. But also Miami-Orlando-Atlanta, Houston-Dallas, Chicago-St. Louis, Chicago-Cleveland, Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-Minneapolis, and Vancouver-Seattle-Portland. But people will be less willing to commit the upfront costs to build it after this debacle.
I think people make the mistake of falling in love with one mode of transportation. Trains are very romantic and create an emotional attachment. High speed trains are futuristic and a mainstay in Europe and Asia. But they only really work as intercity transportation when you have a specific set of conditions- (1) very big cities, (2) close enough together that the ride is short and people will get off airplanes and take the train, and (3) in the case of high speed rail, relatively flat or at least not steep terrain with room for wide curves. In contrast, buses can run on alternative fuels and traverse just about anywhere where there's a road, but there's no romance in a bus.
It also helps not to have to engineer routes through some of the most seismically and tectonically complex geology on the planet.
Yep.
It's easy to draw lines on a map but very hard to get from Bakersfield to Los Angeles.
And yet somehow we managed to build various roads between those two points, even one with the massive footprint of an Interstate highway.
The Interstate highway goes up a narrow canyon with a steep grade and sharp curves. You can't run a train up there.
The way you run a train is by skirting around the mountain range. But (1) it's still really steep, (2) it adds a lot of mileage to the trip, (3) there are still a lot of curves, and (4) if you want to surmount all the engineering challenges, it's still super-expensive.
Every other country in the world recognizes that there is no other way except by dedicated rail or comparable track system to get people from one point to another within roughly 500 miles by land at a speed in excess of 100 mph. Driving is a pain-in-the-butt because (1) you can't go 120 or 150 or 200 mph even in the vastest expanses, not even in dedicated bus lanes, and (2) in cities you have no idea how long it will take you to drive the last ten miles to your destination. Air travel is OK for about 750 miles or more, but it's a pain-in-the ass for anything shorter because traveling to and from the airport takes as long as the plane flight if not more, and so does the time you need to arrive at the airport, what with security, walking a mile to a gate, boarding, etc. Population will grow, but you can't build any more airports in those cities, and you can't build any more Interstates between them. It has nothing to do with romance. It's totally about what will work and what won't.
If HSR gets you from LA to SF in under four safe, smooth, stress-free, absolutely predictable hours in comfortable seats, while also allowing you to get up and walk around, it will be a massive hit -- for the next 500 years or so. (We are already closing in on 150 years of transcontinental rail with no end in sight, and Japan is heading towards a century of its fatality-free bullet trains).
HSR between LA and SFO (and San Diego eventually) will put California light-years ahead of every other state. It is simply a superior form of transportation. The motto should be, whatever it takes, because the cost you are incurring really can be considered to be spread over 100 years or more. If it ends up costing $100 billion for the whole system, that's $1 billion per year paid by about 15 million taxpayers -- i.e., less than $70 per year per taxpayer. One wonders what the country would have looked like if these troglodytic attitudes had prevailed from the beginning. We would still be battling over building the Erie Canal.
Actually, many many countries on earth (including a number that have high speed rail systems) rely on a lot of air and road travel for distances in the range you are talking about.
Further, while you said it has "nothing to do with romance", you then immediately used the language of how "smooth" and "stress free" it is, which is the language of a train enthusiast. It's smooth and stress free if you like trains. And by the way, the general guideline is 3 hours not 4, and that's one reason. A lot of people DO get stressed out by long train rides.
And the "if" is everything. I agree, if you could magically will a Los Angeles to San Francisco high speed train into existence, it would be wonderful. Unfortunately, in the real world, there are gigantic cost overruns and huge engineering challenges that have not been solved.
As for amortization of costs, the state can't really do that. We can sell bonds, which are not paid off over 100 years. Or we can hope the federal government comes up with cash. Or we can raise taxes and pay for it now. So the issue of what we can afford now or in the near future is, in fact, an extremely relevant issue. And remember, a lot of Californians are poor or working class and won't use this train. Instead of talking about hypothetical people 100 years from now, you need to deal with the priorities and trade-offs of the state as it stands now.
Smooth is what it is. It is stress free because you aren't 36,000 feet in the air in a 17-inch wide seat, you aren't stuck in that seat, and you know exactly when you will get there. Comfort and certainty are not romance. Demand will be huge for anything under 4 hours, which will be vastly superior in all respects to any automotive mode, and probably better than most air trips counting all elements of a trip. There will be intermediate destinations, too.
OK, loans paid off in 20 years, so you are looking at maybe $375 per year per taxpayer, less cost than your morning Starbucks. And then you have a system for the next 500 years, a big increase in inter-city travel -- which I believe you see in Europe and Japan -- and your descendants will praise you for your foresight.
This is what happens when the Jewish space lasers aren't allowed to complete their job of clearing the forest and destroying neighborhoods.
I hope no one's feelings are hurt by "bullet train to nowhere." As you explained it, this is just short for "bullet train to nowhere you can't get pretty easily by car anyway."
Or, actually, by train. The thing is that the Bakersfield-Fresno-Merced market, FWIW, is actually already served by pretty good intercity rail. Amtrak's San Joaquins run 6 times a day in each direction, and while it's standard speed and not high speed, the travel times are reasonable and it's a viable alternative to Highway 99.
So basically we spent an astronomical sum of money to upgrade a train route that was already reasonably good the way it was.
Thanks for the added information.
> pretty good intercity rail. Amtrak's
rofl.
I've taken the San Joaquins. As a means of transportation between, e.g., Bakersfield and Fresno, it's perfectly good and reliable and a reasonable substitute for the freeway.
Gee Kevin, I sure wish you wouldn’t perpetuate the “Bridge to Nowhere” lie. The Bridge would have gone from Ketchikan to Gravina Island. As presented by John McCain Gravina Island was a “Nowhere” and almost no one lived on it. In reality it is where the International airport that serves Ketchikan is located. Ketchikan sits on a small strip of land at the bottom of a mountain. The airport is on the Island and passengers take a ferry to cross from the airport to the city. The cost of a bridge was very high because cruise ships traveling the Northwest Passage would have to go under it. I suppose you could make the case that the cost of the bridge was too high for the number of people that would use it but calling it a “Bridge to Nowhere” was just as dishonest as calling the projected for a planetarium a “slide projector”.
Oops, I forgot the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
And the problem with the inability to edit is “projected” not being modified to the intended “projector”.
Gee, Mr. 4man, I sure wish you wouldn't perpetuate the myth that the bridge from Ketchikan to the KTN airport was anything other than a bald-faced boondoggle.
The city of Ketchikan has about 8,000 population. The borough has about 14,000. KTN has about a dozen flights per day. For that population, and that airport, they run a ferry every half-hour from 6:15 AM to 9:30 PM. The ferry ride is seven minutes.
So please dry those crocodile tears and save them for something serious, like how California will dry up and blow away unless they hurry up and finish the train to nowhere.
The argument that it was a “Bridge to Nowhere” was utterly dishonest. It wasn't a bridge to nowhere, it was a bridge to the airport. Besides the local population the airport serves a large number of tourists. And it’s not as if they could move the airport, there just isn’t any other place for it. As I said, you could make the argument that it was overpriced or not worth the price. Or that the ferry works just fine. But acting like you don’t need a bridge to the island because so few people live there was just playing to the geographically challenged crowd.
Although I support a bullet train from LA to San Francisco a bullet train from Bakersfield to Merced is worthless.
I think the HSR commission's assumption that people would sell large tracts of the most productive farmland on the planet, in a state with already eye-watteringly high real estate prices, for pennies on the dollar, or meekly submit to eminent domain confiscation, for a rail project like this was also a little, shall we say, misplaced.
Why is the bullet train so much more expensive - or the cost so much more unbearable - than an interstate highway - say I-5? Is it cost relative to passenger/freight miles?
A few responses:
1. If you tried to build I-5 now, it would be a lot more expensive than it was in 1967-71 when it was built through the San Joaquin Valley.
2. Interstate 5 goes through less valuable, basically empty land on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley. Now, you could, in theory, build your LA-SF High Speed Rail line there as well (provided you somehow overcame the massive technical obstacles to the project), but then you would be skipping a bunch of potential intermediate stops, pissing off legislators in Bakersfield and Fresno and Modesto (who would have legitimate gripes, because these places are growing and are totally reasonable places for an LA-San Francisco train to stop at).
3. High speed rail costs a lot more to build than an Interstate. The technology (concrete and steel roadbed and catenaries) is more complicated, there are more safety concerns (vehicles going 150+mph rather than 70), you have to build out wider curves and slower inclines (although that's not an issue within the San Joaquin Valley), you have to build station infrastructure, etc.
> every news report about the bullet train is negative
? We're going to spend more on our guaranteed jobs campaign. What's not to like about that?
I remember taking the maglev train from Shanghai Pudong airport to Shanghai. Except it stopped in the middle of nowhere on the Pudong side and you had to take a cab the rest of the way. This feels exactly like this.
The irony is you could have frequent relatively high speed rail for a fraction of the cost. Amtrak has several stretches of 100mph+ travel outside the Northeast Corridor, and getting to 125mph+ isn't that hard. But dreams die hard.
I understand why Newsome chose that place. Land acquisition is way cheaper than around LA or SF. But a train that goes from nowhere to nowhere is a train no one will ride.