The internet is filled with things. Here is one of them.
Is the California High Speed Rail project reasonable?2025 Feb 9
The linked article is about how our country's new president dislikes my state's High Speed Rail project, and while his opinions aren't interesting to me, the Fresno Bee does what he can't and enumerates actual facts, detailing the issues plaguing progress. It's a bleak picture: an "abundance of lawsuits", rushing into construction purely to meet funding deadlines, a glacial pace of acquiring right-of-way, and hundreds of millions of dollars in change orders, all with an estimated final pricetag somewhere between $88.5 and $127.9 billion.
All of those issues and more set set in motion a domino-like series of circumstances that continue to plague the project, which is now not expected to begin carrying passengers between Merced and Bakersfield until sometime between 2030 and 2033. No time frame has been offered for building or operating future extensions to San Jose or Los Angeles.
Still, the rail authority said it is poised for the future. “The majority of the approximately 500-mile system from San Francisco to Los Angeles is fully environmentally cleared and stand shovel-ready for future phases of investment,” the agency’s statement said.
I would not be the first to see this and wonder, is our country no longer capable of building great big things? Not to say there's no innovation happening in America, that we're not progressing in capability, but those advances now seem to come solely from small, private teams working in isolation and not the big society-driven we're-all-in-this-together initiatives that created the groundwork for the American century.
All us Californians wanted when we voted this damned project into existence is to get from NorCal to SoCal with the ease, comfort, and simplicity of those fancy trains we get to experience when visiting Europe and Japan and China. It didn't cost $127,900,000,000 to connect Paris to Marseille in eco-friendly 200mph rail routes, did it? This report from 2011 says it costs France (at that time) €16-27 million per kilometer to lay track, with this updated map on Wikimedia Commons showing what's been completed since, going from approximately 1,800km to 2,800km of TGV's LGV rail in the same timespan since CAHSR was greenlit. That 1000km is coincidentally about the same length as the proposed rail between SF and LA, and it cost France (using the estimate above) a total spend of €16-27 billion. My math is very rough (people argue over all these numbers) but even if I'm only in the ballpark, there's a staggering difference between the 1,000km of track that France has actually built in the last 14 years and the 0km that California has built for spending in the same rough-order-of-magnitude.
I'm hoping I can one day get to LA via high speed rail, but between the project's slow progress and my sincere doubt that our current president's "investigation" will do anything to actually help it, that hope is withering.
The linked article is about how our country's new president dislikes my state's High Speed Rail project, and while his opinions aren't interesting to me, the Fresno Bee does what he can't and enumerates actual facts, detailing the issues plaguing progress. It's a bleak picture: an "abundance of lawsuits", rushing into construction purely to meet funding deadlines, a glacial pace of acquiring right-of-way, and hundreds of millions of dollars in change orders, all with an estimated final pricetag somewhere between $88.5 and $127.9 billion. I would not be the first to see this and wonder, is our country no longer capable of building great big things? Not to say there's no innovation happening in America, that we're not progressing in capability, but those advances now seem to come solely from small, private teams working in isolation and not the big society-driven we're-all-in-this-together initiatives that created the groundwork for the American century.
All us Californians wanted when we voted this damned project into existence is to get from NorCal to SoCal with the ease, comfort, and simplicity of those fancy trains we get to experience when visiting Europe and Japan and China. It didn't cost $127,900,000,000 to connect Paris to Marseille in eco-friendly 200mph rail routes, did it? This report from 2011 says it costs France (at that time) €16-27 million per kilometer to lay track, with this updated map on Wikimedia Commons showing what's been completed since, going from approximately 1,800km to 2,800km of TGV's LGV rail in the same timespan since CAHSR was greenlit. That 1000km is coincidentally about the same length as the proposed rail between SF and LA, and it cost France (using the estimate above) a total spend of €16-27 billion. My math is very rough (people argue over all these numbers) but even if I'm only in the ballpark, there's a staggering difference between the 1,000km of track that France has actually built in the last 14 years and the 0km that California has built for spending in the same rough-order-of-magnitude.
I'm hoping I can one day get to LA via high speed rail, but between the project's slow progress and my sincere doubt that our current president's "investigation" will do anything to actually help it, that hope is withering.