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Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

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Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#131

Post by mlyle »

acollins1331 wrote: post #95
jedberg wrote: post #39

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 stil…

Have you been to Taiwan? All the problems you just listed exist but even worse. You think Taichung has better public transportation than San Jose?

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...

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#132

Post by phlakaton »

SomeOtherThrow wrote: post #14
throwawaytoday5 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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.

> Wasn't it Newsom who canceled the project?

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.

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#133

Post by phlakaton »

jcranmer wrote: post #53
jccooper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> 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…

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. ;-)

This describes in more detail how it was done: https://www.epi.org/publication/bp166/

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#134

Post by grawprog »

zenexer wrote: post #125
briandear wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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-w…

>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.

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#135

Post by qwhelan »

jedberg wrote: post #48
ardit33 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-urba…

The airports are already there for longer flights, we just happen to use them for the short flights too. That's the main difference. This train would be to replace a single short flight route.

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.

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#136

Post by phlakaton »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #15
haunter wrote: post #12

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 t…

Californians voted for the high speed rail project in a ballot initiative.

Would they have if it had been, say, a $29B proposition instead of a $9B one, and not to be completed until all the baby boomers were 90+ years old?

This project has been facing stiff headwinds from the moment it began. If we had that vote again, knowing what we know now, I doubt it would pass.

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#137

Post by jedberg »

qwhelan wrote: post #135
jedberg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The airports are already there for longer flights, we just happen to use them for the short flights too. That's the main difference. This train would be to replace a single short flight route.

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?

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#138

Post by jedberg »

sct202 wrote: post #121
andy_ppp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

It's a risk/reward trade off for them.

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#139

Post by SomeOtherThrow »

phlakaton wrote: post #132
SomeOtherThrow wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Wasn't it Newsom who canceled the project? 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 proj…

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.

Re: Taiwan managed to build high-speed rail. Why can't California?

#140

Post by bobthepanda »

slededit wrote: post #126
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't completely solve the problem, but it would be much harder to evacuate the cities without the highway system in place.

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.
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