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

451–460 of 476 posts

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

#451

Post by inferiorhuman »

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”.

Disagree. Waiting for San Francisco to get its act together would potentially doom CAHSR. Building something now even if it means no downtown SF service could still reap benefits. Even Millbrae to LA would be very useful.

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

#452

Post by huhcat »

andbberger wrote: post #83
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.

the opportunity cost isn't a 7% increase in length, it's the tens of billions in extra infrastructure to build 350km/h right of way straight through the middle of every town all the way down the central valley, and the massive hit to SF-LA run time that will come with that. beyond the stop penalty, HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.

> HSR just doesn't run at full speed through city centers anywhere in the world. doesn't happen.

Wrong. It's most definitely a thing in quite a few mid-sized Japanese cities. Here's a compilation video taken at Fukushima Station (https://youtu.be/K-wkX3vFU_A?t=403) on the fastest 320 km/h line for example. You can check for yourself that the station is dead smack downtown in a city of 275,000.

At the world level it doesn't tend to happen because existing developments in cities usually strongly inhibit the construction of straight rail alignments that can support high-speed operations. But that's not a problem in the Central Valley – they're blessed with excellent existing rights-of-way.

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

#453

Post by agent281 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #424
agent281 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California can't raise property taxes unless Prop 13 is repealed and that's a very high bar to pass.

I mean, majority vote for a certain candidates should do it. If enough people bothered to vote, it could happen.

You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.

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

#454

Post by steve_gh »

mapt wrote: post #392
aylmao wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systematic underbidding + cost overruns is the rule, and is expected by all parties except the naive public. Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted…

Here in the UK all Gov tenders are on a combination of price and quality - typically 40-60% quality. If you want a long term relationship as a Gov supplier, you need to demonstrate quality and bid the pricing fairly, without chronic underpinning.

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

#455

Post by inferiorhuman »

SllX wrote: post #450
Eridrus wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dug into this a bit since these comments were just confusing, but apparently Prop 13 required tax increases to get a 2/3 majority of the legislature. So it seems like Prop 13 just fucked California.

Correct. What is the point of having a representative government with a legislature if you just forcibly remove the lynchpin of power for that type of government?

That's the point. Props 13 and 8 were part of the republican anti-government movement often memorialized by Norquist's remark about making government small enough to drown.

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

#456

Post by inferiorhuman »

trollbridge wrote: post #252
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has a massive ecosystem advantage in terms of the tech industry, no other state comes close. If California can't build, America can't build.

Well, let's not get too pessimistic. Brightline built rail from Tampa/Orlando to Miami, and it seems to be pretty popular, although it's not high speed rail.

If we're not talking about high speed rail, Amtrak provides service from Oakland to Seattle and Oakland to LA already. The best part is that Amtrak has a dramatically lower fatality rate than Brightline.

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

#457

Post by stuaxo »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #411
jltsiren wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the short direct line might also not get built, if the projections show passenger volume will not be high enough to justify the costs. Passenger rail has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Even with high-speed rail, you generally want to maximize the number of passengers rather than speed. Making detours to nearby major cities often makes sense, while stopping at smaller cities the route already passes thro…

At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route. Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost…

That will come round again in the future.

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

#458

Post by stuaxo »

ta1243 wrote: post #394
arrowsmith wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk about Canada, but what you usually see in the UK is that tens of millions of pounds get spend before a single brick is laid. Money disappears into consultations, reviews, studies and reports of dubious value, the paperwork keeps piling up and it takes years before the public sees anything tangible, if the project ever gets built at all. Someone somewhere is getting very rich off this, but it ain't the taxpayer.

Tens of millions? £1.2 BILLION before a single spade in the ground for the lower thames crossing https://www.ft.com/content/917d4b7f-318e-46fe-ba44-664551ebc... The planning document alone was 350,000 pages long, and cost about £1000 per page (£350m). What western countries lack is someone empowered enough to just say "fuck it, make it happen", and be held accountable once it's built.

How did France and Spain build their high speed rail?

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

#459

Post by stuaxo »

scop wrote: post #403
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…

- plan is presented - (the many) stakeholders issue critiques - new plan is presented that includes all the worst elements of said stakeholders but achieves unity across teams - stakeholders toast and have an expensive dinner at achievement of unified plan

This is not a California or public sector thing, it's applies across all big organisations.

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

#460

Post by inferiorhuman »

georgeecollins wrote: post #194

I remember when BART was first built and San Mateo county opted out of BART. You couldn't take BART to SFO or even South San Francisco. Now they are talking about extending it to San Jose? This may sound very Californian, but I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away and eventually you get more that makes the train even more useful.

  once you have it it doesn't go away
That's not true in the slightest. In the context of BART, we've lost the Key System. We've lost quite a bit of SamTrans bus service too because BART is expensive to run. Plenty of small towns in the northeast lost rail service since the inception of Amtrak.
Post reply on HN