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

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

#431

Post by tpdly »

apexalpha wrote: post #340

Critics: wow this is a great example of government dysfunction through excessive regulations and political steering of a engineering project. Author: Actually, you are entirely wrong. Let me explain to you in 3000 words how this project failed due to political interference and excessive regulations in California while pretending this is somehow not CAHSR fault and also not providing any path forward to fix it. ??? Wh…

You totally missed the point.

Critics: CAHSR is a bad idea and should be killed.

Author: Here's the story of how hard it is to build this novel type of large scale infrastructure, especially when people don't strongly support it.

The dysfunction is real, but the actual point was, "How much of this dysfunction and how much was just what you get with half-assed support?"

You're interpretation of that "no track has been laid" quote betrays that you aren't evaluating this fairly. You really don't understand that laying rocks and steel on a path is easier than building whole bridges and viaducts.

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

#432

Post by GeekyBear »

dragonwriter wrote: post #418
vlovich123 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said another way, that SF/San Jose stretch accounts for 25-30% of the total time. That’s similarly true for the last stretch of LA meaning a truly engineering driven design could have done it within ~1h50. And note that the 2h40 goal is admitted as a pipe dream by everyone involved, particularly because of the last mile issues and the circuitous route.

> a truly engineering driven design If by “engineering-driven” you mean “focussed on speed alone and not the actual project goals”, but...

So ignore the "High Speed" part in addition to ignoring the part where you build the tracks in a location where there are people who can use them?

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

#433

Post by GeekyBear »

vlovich123 wrote: post #410
inferiorhuman wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgraded signaling along the Caltrain ROW is in the works, but again you've got to balance the egos of the three big stakeholders. Caltrain is a far smaller problem to CAHSR than e..g Metro North is to Acela. The big issue is going to be the approach to downtown SF — which is still a ridiculous political football.

Something something something “solve the hard problems first”.

I agree.

Starting the build out from either SF or LA would have at least resulted in an initial segment that people could use.

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

#434

Post by danans »

rangestransform wrote: post #414
danans wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has some of the top universities in the world. Why shouldn’t it have a higher caliber of public official than say Denmark? Many officials in the current administration who are wreaking havoc on the US economy went to the top universities, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. Attending those universities doesn't imply responsibility or sense of duty to public service at all. CA does have "high caliber" public officials,…

Many of the same things could be said about Singapore, yet they have a public service that is ridiculously competent compared to western countries I would rather California be a Singapore for high achievers than a more egalitarian Denmark

Singapore and Denmark are far more similar to each other than either is to California. Not only are they far smaller, but both countries socially invest heavily in their citizens' quality of life, and by American standards both are egalitarian.

Singapore carefully manages housing, with the majority of the population living in public housing. Of course, both countries also have excellent public transportation.

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

#435

Post by nostrademons »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #353
nostrademons wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The geology of the Bay Area would make that difficult. The Peninsula flats are mostly loosely-consolidated sediment, and in some areas you have less than half a mile between the mountains and the Bay. And it's less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault. You'd likely have significant problems with flooding [1], and all the difficulties that the Pacheco Pass segment is having tunneling through an active fault would b…

The Japanese would probably say 'Hold my beer.' to that. Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

I mean, the Seikan tunnel was pretty difficult too:

> Following several decades of planning and construction, the tunnel opened on 13 March 1988.

> The construction cost of the tunnel itself was 538.4 billion yen at the planning stage, but it actually cost 745.5 billion yen. The construction cost of the strait line, including the attachment line, was 689 billion yen at the planning stage, but ended up costing 900 billion yen. During the construction, 34 workers were killed in the Seikan Tunnel, mostly in transportation accidents

> In addition, the tunnel faced criticism for its high maintenance costs, the need to pump a large amount of spring water even after completion, and that the large investment to build it is regarded as a sunk cost, and it is said that it is more economical to abandon it. It was ridiculed variously as "Showa's Three Idiots Assessment", "useless long things", and "quagmire tunnel".

We're complaining about CAHSR being decades in the making and billions over budget, but this does not seem to be unique to CAHSR. At least nobody's died during construction yet.

It's good evidence that all civil engineering projects are failures right up until they're done and everybody uses them, and then they just become critical infrastructure.

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

#436

Post by nostrademons »

andbberger wrote: post #300
nostrademons wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.

https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-BP-Servic...

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

#437

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #396
ergsef wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership. The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profit…

A lot of being "car brained" is because even the best transit sucks compared to a Taxi. 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, awesome…

>requires more mental energy to plan your route

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.

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

#438

Post by nayuki »

api wrote: post #389
ergsef wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is that politicians are insanely car-brained and nobody has any enthusiasm for improving rail infrastructure. Via Rail is trapped in this insane spiral of service cuts where it's miserable for staff and riders, and the solution is to cut more to make up for declining ridership. The new HSR is only happening because with the innovation of P3 deals the government can pay for the project but give all the profit…

Cars employ more people. 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.

Make-work is not a virtue - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window . People want transportation, not necessarily cars.

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.

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

#439

Post by 418tpot »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #202
legitster wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to know for sure, but the majority of these flights are probably going to be transfers. I've never set foot in LA but I've taken that flight several times. Even so, there are only ~20k daily seats between the two cities. The ridership on successful high speed rail lines elsewhere in the world are measured in the hundreds of thousands per day.

Why couldn't one part of the journey be by rail, and the other by air? There is a already a lot of shared planning to allow this to happen, with some railway stations even having IATA codes.

I agree this is the ideal situation, but as it stands CAHSR is planned to terminate at union station in LA, quite far from LAX. Ideally LA metro or metrolink would build a direct connection between union station and LAX, but that hasn't begun to be planned and unfortunately it's very difficult to get transit built in LA. For instance the Sepulveda line— one of the most important lines for LA— is at risk of being killed because ticket master's ex-CEO doesn't want a train line running under his house.

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

#440

Post by gamblor956 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #324
gamblor956 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x. Ignoring private land rights also generally helps but costs.

> Building in earthquake territory generally increases costs by at least 2x Japan. Most of Europe.

Japan, sure. But Japan deals with it by going in the opposite direction: most new structures are intended to be temporary, replaced with a few decades.

Most of Europe? No, just the southern part near the tectonic plate boundaries. Which also just happen to be the most expensive parts to build in Europe...so thanks for helping to prove my point.

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