Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

asteriskmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 476 posts

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#291

Post by pfdietz »

rayiner wrote: post #189
woodruffw wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nowhere near done" seems like a bit of an exaggeration, given that the link at the top of your linked page suggests that it's over 3/4ths done[1]. It's also, to my understanding, not grade-separated in various important places. I was in College Park two weeks ago and saw lots of at-grade development on the line, which presumably gets bogged down by Route 1 and the other high-traffic roads nearby. (This isn't to impl…

The last 10-20% of these projects always takes surprisingly long. The 2027 opening date is already looking questionable: https://wjla.com/news/local/purple-line-construction-project... . And it was supposed to open in 2022.

The 80/80 rule of project management: the first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time, and the other 20% takes the other 80% of the time.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#292

Post by EasyMark »

aylmao wrote: post #219
pj_mukh wrote: post #141

This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central V…

In my region (Latin America) when a "boondoggle" of such high monetary cost happens, we call it for what it usually is— corruption. All those billions of dollars are going to someone's pockets. There's a lot of money to be made from inefficient infrastructure projects.

Yeah it happens a lot here as well. It goes into contractors pocket who dig/drill/build -> stop -> dig/drill/build -> stop and get their $$ on partially completed work and milk the system for all it will give them. Quite often they are friends/relatives of the politicians.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#293

Post by suzzer99 »

trollbridge wrote: post #269
blackguardx wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but infrastructure is often built to expand future regions. Before the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, there was a lot less commuting to SF. They only had ferries. Building the bridges allowed the broader region to expand and prosper.

Well, Bakersfield at al is not exactly a "future region" - it's been there for a long time with a giant freeway into it (and railroads, too, including rail service from Bakersfield all the way to Stockton with connections to San Francisco and Sacramento) and it has remained a sleepy agricultural corridor. The weather is awful and it's just not where most people in California want to live.

Meth-heads seem to love it.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#294

Post by andbberger »

opo wrote: post #208
andbberger wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the inflation adjusted cost of the interstate system is closer to a trillion

There hasn't been that much inflation. >The construction of the Interstate Highway System cost approximately $114 billion (equivalent to $618 billion in 2023). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#:~:t...

618B is indeed closer to a trillion

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#295

Post by p_j_w »

janalsncm wrote: post #157
legitster wrote: post #58

The reality is for every government constraint, there are even more difficult economic constraints that it has to work against. A 90-minute flight between these SF and LA can be had for ~$80 or less. A 7-hour bus ticket between these two cities is ~$50. To put it another way, the train would have to be only half-again more expensive per passenger to operate than a bus to beat a flight on price. I get it that there ar…

90 minutes in the air + 1 hour on each end at the airport. On a train I can work the entire time with internet.

You can do that in the air if you're willing to pay out the nose! That's another reason we need rail like this: air carriers won't be able to get away with quite as much bullshit as they do with the added competition.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#296

Post by andbberger »

slt2021 wrote: post #182
andbberger wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this statement has little bearing on how this project is actually playing out, but if it were true - why would we want to manage massive infrastructure projects in the same way bad software projects are managed? via a method regarded by everyone except middle managers with a massive eye roll and a sigh

imagine the opposite situation: boring tunnels costs like 60 blns+. and taxpayer won't see a penny of the benefit from some tunnel somewhere in mountain ranges that nothing else connects to

ok? my point was that you have projected your notions of project management on to the actions of CAHSR. there was nothing intentional or "agile" about the way the project was executed so far. that caltrain electrification has already been completed (at an exorbitant cost relative to the developed world) is more a consequence of how poorly things are going in the valley than anything

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#297

Post by gaoshan »

rsync wrote: post #13

One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed". We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved: "California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1] The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is…

FWIW a train I've taken a few times in China (Hangzhou to Shanghai) would do San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than 2 hours (possibly 1 hour 45 minutes). This would be an express with no extra stops.

With a handful of stops and the corresponding loss of speed (I'm extrapolating as it hits speeds of 350/kph but still takes about 45+ minutes to go roughly 186km) it would probably realistically take more like 2.5 hours.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#298

Post by stephen_g »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #19
jeffbee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the piece points out, the lack of rail is pretty much irrelevant. Once all the guideways are in place, there is a machine that you just drive along that poops out perfect rails at ~1km/hr. It is the most trivial part of the project.

I’ve heard so many business guys running startups say the same thing about their brilliant idea. Once the plan is in place you just do daily standups and your engineers poop out perfect features at the rate of 1 ticket/day.

False equivalence - railways are things we know how to build pretty well by now. The hard bit is building a corridor straight and level enough to lay the rails. Once you have that, the sleepers are literally just dropped on, rails fed out and then it's all clipped in and welded, and ballast dropped on and tamped with machines.

This is a normal thing done every day around the world, since track has to be periodically re-ballasted and sleepers eventually upgraded and rails renewed as normal maintenance. It truly is the easy bit.

Rail overhead line equipment and signalling systems are much more tricky work, but the rail laying itself is easy. The vast majority of the work though is building cuttings, embankments, bridges, viaducts and stations.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#299

Post by ImJamal »

ActorNightly wrote: post #88
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #17

It's absolutely critical that a country with California's GDP learns how to rearchitect itself to build again -- literally critical for America's progression. Nothing in this article makes me feel any better about the prospects of that happening.

More young people need to actually start voting to get all the NIMBYism out of the government, and then change can happen.

Every one is anti-NIMBY until they own a backyard, then they don't want their house to be eminent domained or have a noisy train running near them.

Re: Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated

#300

Post by andbberger »

nostrademons wrote: post #143
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The route through Fresno is only 50 km longer than the I-5 route. It's a difference of 7% in total length. Going through the two biggest cities in the Central Valley is worth a 7% increase in track length.

It’s also less than that in travel time, since CAHSR goes at its full 350 km/h on the Central Valley vs just 130 km/h on the Caltrain corridor from SF to Gilroy. It adds about 10 minutes to non-stop travel time. The real benefit is opening the Central Valley to commuter development. San Jose to Madeira on CAHSR is around 45 minutes, not much more than commuting from Palo Alto with current traffic on 101, and so it’d…

CAHSR is almost certain to not be priced competitively for commuting. it is far more valuable to have that seat full all the way to LA.

OTOH had altamont been selected, it would have been extremely useful for commuting from sacramento to the bay (branch line, no seats to displace)

Post reply on HN