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California Requests Stimulus Funding For Bullet Train
marquinhocb writes "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money Friday to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. 'We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago,' the governor said. 'That is inexcusable. America must catch up.' Planners said the train would be able to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes, traveling at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. About time! There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!"
At least not in our lifetimes. Between all of the NIMBY's and environmental impact statements, this will be delayed in the courts for decades
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'm thinking a better suggestion is between Los Angeles and Tijuana.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I can fly Southwest from Sacramento to San Diego in 1:25 minutes of air time.
Add 45 minutes at Sac security and 20 in the terminal and I still get there faster than the travel time on this train which probably won't ever exist.
Not only that, but the plane ticket costs around $74 during the summer. There is no way this train could possibly compete with airfare. Crossing california is not practical on trains.
Trains are great for crossing urban centers. A train from San Diego to LA would have been great when I lived in SD and worked in LA. Fix that problem, then we can talk about bullet trains.
California High Speed Rail Authority officials said the train network would generate 600,000 construction-related jobs while it was being planned and built and that it would create another 450,000 permanent jobs during its operation.
450,000 new permanent jobs sounds an awful lot. Are they going to pay people to travel on the train or what?
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
They should do San Jose to Portland instead. The sheer volume of techies passing between these two cities would make such a railway line profitable. Intel alone runs a small fleet of private jets to ferry staff back and fourth, because it's cheaper than filling commercial flights. And that's just the internal traffic within a single company.
Also, Portland and San Jose is full of the sort of people who like trains, so the opposition would be less.
Evil people are out to get you.
Acela isn't as fast as that, but it's arguably a bigger security issue, as it runs through Boston, NYC, Philly, and DC downtowns.
It works just like a commuter rail train. You arrive at the station. The train pulls up, you've got a few minutes to get on, tops. You get on the train, grab a seat, throw your suitcase overhead or at the end of the car, and relax. Pull out your laptop, make a call, or sit in the quiet car for relaxation.
Everything in your scenario is pure FUD. I'd bet the ridership will match that of Acela on the East Coast -- lots of business riders, often going to and from on the same day.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
From the article, it says this is going to cost $45 billion to build. $45 BILLION? For 800 miles of high-speed tracks and trains? I can't see any concievable way, even if they had to purchases premium land the entire length rather than using state land, that there's any way to justify 56 million dollars per mile. International constructions have cost around one twentieth of this amount.
Lots of bridges, tunnels and filldirt.. Its already been kicked off of the SF Peninsula because they said it would be too expensive to go underground the whole way, and the only other way to have a 200+mph train go through high density residential areas is to elevate it, which the residents refused as an option. It would have shared the caltrain route, which already has long sections of elevated track (via10-20' of filldirt and fences on both sides) that effictively creates a berlin wall through neighborhoods. To keep people from "trespassing" they would have to elevate the whole line, and that pissed a bunch of people off (especially those in Atherton behind their wooden fences). Caltrain electrification will be done first, and highspeed rail, to be successful, would have to tie in to caltrain somewhere, or it would just be a train to nowhere.
-T
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It's not like the US Govt is having problems keeping a balanced budget.
Stop having so many wars... they're expensive! Iraq and Afghanistan, ~$150 billion a year. How many bullet train systems could you buy?
I'm guessing most of it would be between SF and LA, but San Diego isn't that far from LA, so adding that isn't much more.
Amtrak actually makes a little money. Unlike, say, the massive socialist US interstate system.
'We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago,' the governor said.
So trains traveled 5 mph a 100 years ago?
56 million dollars per mile
In California this breaks down to:
10 million per mile for environmental impact studies
20 million per mile in lawsuits related to the environmental impact studies
20 million per mile in kickbacks
56 million per mile in construction costs thanks to union labor wages
These will be the actual per-mile costs due to lowball estimating in order to get the project started and to take on a life of its own so it will be completed no matter what the final costs.
Amtrak is insanely costly compared to what the train service used to cost. I don't see this as being any cheaper. And the current right-of-way isn't well maintained. This would need even more in the way of maintenance than the current system.
The rail lines right-of-way is owned by the freight haulers. They put their priorities first, and passenger trains regularly get delayed. The last time I rode the train from Nevada to Berkeley (well, Emeryville...the Berkeley station was closed) the train was delayed for over four hours. With no explanation or estimate of when the problem would be fixed.
Yes, we definitely need better train service. But lets go for improvements that we know can reasonably be made. Like the Dept. of Transportation in charge of the right of way, so that freight trains can't arbitrarily pre-empt the lines from passengers. (I'm not thrilled with how the DOT maintains highways, but it does a better job than the railways do with their right of way.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You know, you might have missed this key fact, but the Simpsons monorail episode is a sixteen-year-old CARTOON. When the hell are the anti-rail twits going to stop treating it like a serious guide to transportation issues?
Oh, right, we still have people who think Frankenstein was a guide to science. Never mind. Carry on, then.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Actually, it hasn't been kicked off of the SF Peninsula... http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/map.htm Quite the opposite, in fact.
As pointed out in previous posts: Airlines are already subsidized. (As are the Auto makers). I would like to go as far as to say that a railroad would be competitive if you were to take out ALL subsidies given to the auto makers (road construction and direct subsidies) and Airlines (Airports, cheap planes due to defense contracts).
Putting public money to work to build a railroad network is a good way to invest public money. it's a hell of a lot better than subsidizing bankrupt companies. It will make the US more competitive in manufacturing (cheaper freight transport), services (cheaper people transport). And building the whole system will provide a lot of meaning full jobs.
There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!"
There also comes a point when "let's have another horrendously expensive tax-sucking boondoggle" is no longer a viable option.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think it would operate a lot like amtrak... the us govt will sink tons of money into it and it will never come close to breaking even.
Kind of like airports and highways, yep.
Oh, but those are somehow magically different!
[sigh]
Actually, there is a difference. The federal government sinks tons of money into air and road travel, but it doesn't demand the kind of insane restrictions it imposes on rail (freight trains always get right-of-way over passenger trains, that kind of thing.) IOW, those systems aren't set up to fail the way Amtrak is. It's pretty impressive how well Amtrak manages to keep its major lines going when it has to deal with a system that is specifically designed not to work by anti-rail ideologues.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That's becasue it's not your area of expertise.
Civil project are expensive, very expensive.
They have to deal with roads, mountains , bridges, tunnels.
It's very expensive to build roads of any type. If you want them to last.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not really, no. At least not in California. New freeways here cost $1 billion per mile, and that was an estimate from ten years ago. A project to add one lane in each direction to the 91 freeway between the 71 (a freeway) and 241 (a tollway) is nearly $100 million for a mere five miles, and that's in an area where not much has to happen in the way of eminent domain. When you get into city areas with houses and businesses, the numbers skyrocket.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Portland and San Jose is full of the sort of people who like trains, so the opposition would be less.
Unemployed semiconductor engineers like trains?
Semiconductor engineer? What is that - some guy who pilots a monorail? Or maybe he only collects half the tickets....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Just fly larger aircraft. An airbus A340 seats up to 800 and will do the same trip in 75 fewer minutes.
You've assumed time for security screening will be the same. You've assumed delays will be the same. You've assumed the ticket cost will be the same.
All three assumptions are only true if the train is managed -extremely- poorly. Given that this is California, that might be the case, but they are still huge assumptions.
And pollutes like crazy. When you consider the coming wave of environmentally driven taxes, if negative externalities are realistically factored in, it won't be that cheap for much longer.
This has got to be the stupidest idea yet. If we assume 30 dollars one way as a reasonable fair, and it does not go into cost overruns, and it costs ZERO dollars to operate once it is built, it will take 156,000,000 trips to pay for itself. At 50 dollars one way, it is still 94 million trips. How many people make that commute? How long will it take to pay for itself? Of course, we know it WILL go into cost over runs, and it will cost a great deal of money to keep going, for maintenance, employees, power, etc. Can anyone explain to me how this will be economically feasible? Anyone? Arnold?
I think you may be mistaking California for Massachusetts.
And I think you may have your head up your ass and have no idea what you're talking about.
MA is 23rd as of 2008. Damn near dead average.
Please help metamoderate.
And of course despite your Insightful rating, Amtrak loses money, over a billion dollars a year.
http://www.amtrak.com/pdf/08financial.pdf
Typical Bay Aryan.
You are the chosen ones.
In fact all that high speed rail needs to do is hook up with CalTrain or BART.
Just send the bay area people down Amtrack to BART from Sacramento and call the project complete if the bay area non-sense is taking too long.
The best part about the central valley route is it's relative cheapness and flatness.
I can't see a route more or less down I-5 costing as much as (much less more then) a route in fucking France (spit).
Land in Europe is insanely expensive and every square inch is someones ancestral home.
You can't plant a garden, much less run a rail line, without hitting ancent relics.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
After spending $4.7 trillion, not billion, they will have a light rail between San Diego and Santa Barbara that travels at 50 MPH.
Fixed that for you.
:/ In Japan I could travel 600km in 3hours for 120$. With no ticket before hand and trains leaving every 15minutes. The whole time I was there I probably traveled 2500km on local and high speed lines. Likely 30 trips. And I spent a large amount of time in train stations for all these trips, In every station there are boards saying whether the trains are late or on time delayed. So I probably saw times for nearly 500 trains. I only saw one delay the whole time. The timer said it would be 48seconds late due to weather.
Being used to transportation in North America, this amazed me more than any of the technology involved in the trains. Also the things were sparkly clean. I think it comes down to respect. They are willing to keep the trains and buses clean out of respect. I believe they make sure they are on time for the same reason.
We aren't incompetent or too corrupt to get it done. North America simply isn't respectful enough for public transit.
ok now lets go to math class. 156,000,000/365 = roughly 43000. 43000/20 years is roughly 2150 people a day. 2150 people a day is next to nothing In NYC over a million people take the subway a day.....http://gothamist.com/2009/09/22/subway_yearbook.php....That being said I have no idea if it will make money. Probably depends on how well it its managed. But the numbers clearly indicate that it is possible. And yes I realize i didnt find the number of people who take the train INTO nyc but its the closest number i could find in 2 minutes.
High speed trains like the german ICE (used in a variety of countries, including China), the french TGV or the japanese bullet trains do not run on regular rails. Rails for speeds exceeding 200km/h need to be specially built. In Germany we have a high speed rail network, next to rails for slower moving trains. Similarly to a highway, you sometimes have 4 rails next to each other. Two for every direction and high or low speed. In cases where there are only 2 rails, the rains usually only go slow. So there should be no delay by freight trains or other slow trains on the high speed network.
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"Unlike, say, the massive socialist US interstate system."
Which facilitates massive movement of goods and people in a way rail never can.
Rail currently handles 40% of all goods shipping in the U.S. Before NAFTA this figure was much higher, close to 75%, but it has dropped because of the difficulty rail has crossing borders. So you're wrong; rail is a very efficient method for massive movement of goods that has lost ground to more expensive truck freight because of political restrictions on its use.
Why tear up land for something like this? I've used trains a number of times, and although interesting rail is just not as good a solution as buses or, especially, air travel.
Trains use much less land than highways to transport an equivalent number of passengers and are more energy efficient than other forms of transportation.
And here I'm not just talking big planes. I'm talking regional airports that, if funded to the same level, could provide an amazing degree of flexibility in travel, to places all over and not just two fixed points.
Regional airports in California aren't equipped to handle large planes nor additional air or ground traffic. They have issues with noise and safety issues and are typically underfunded. They also have insufficient linkage with the local public transit systems.
Airplane travel is not even that much different in terms of fuel consumption than trains, and could be improved if we spent R&D money on that instead of more train follies. For a nation as spread out as America, it's more important to cover more area.
We're not talking about putting bullet trains all across America...only through California's highly populated, highly trafficked west coast transportation corridor. This is one of the busiest transportation corridors in a state with a population of 36,756,666, over 12% of the U.S. population.
Operating airplanes and airports is VERY expensive. Airplanes require carefully formulated, costly, high energy-density fuels. Bullet Trains operate on electricity which can be generated through many technologies. Airport terminals are expensive. Airplane baggage handling and safety precautions are expensive. Many existing California airports are overtaxed and cannot easily be expanded. Our air traffic control system is old, dangerously out of date and frequently understaffed and overstressed.
Not to justify the war in Iraq, but $150 billion a year isn't shit compared to the $2 trillion the government's spent on bailouts in the last year. Even going by the (likely biased) http://costofwar.com/, that's twice the amount spent on the entire Iraq and Afgahnistan wars. And that's just one year.
The point is, you can't just point out one thing and say, "It's because of that." The government's spending crazy amounts of money all over the place, on a TON of shit that it shouldn't be spending money on. I'm kinda surprised we keep voting in these morons. First Bush, now Obama. I'm almost scared to think about who's gonna be next.
Maybe not
Where's your source for this claim that it's been kicked off the Peninsula? Yeah, there's been flack from some communities about elevated tracks, but kicking it off the Peninsula would make the project practically useless, since that would destroy any travel benefits to all those people (like me) who live between San Francisco and San Jose.
Besides that, I figure they'll have to elevate or bury the lines eventually anyway, because too many trains are being delayed by people who use them as a suicide mechanism.
Los Angeles to San Francisco is the busiest air corridor in the United States with an estimated 60 million passengers per year expected by 2020. It is one of the top 20 corridors in the world.
The airports can't handle much more traffic and it costs a substantial amount of money to build new ones (upwards of $20 billion), connect highways, etc.
So high speed rail makes real sense. There isn't even a place to put another airport in the bay area unless you stick it way out of the way.
The links to San Diego and Sacramento don't cost anywhere near the price of the main segment of LA to SF and are just there to complete the system. I don't even think they are part of the first stage and may never end up being built.
That's right. A lot of it got sent to Iraq on pallets that disappeared, or went to the executives of companies like Halliburton who get to charge whatever they like for faulty wiring that electrocutes our soldiers because of the no-bid contracts.
Next to burning piles of money to make smores, the war in Iraq has probably been the least effective use of our money that one could conceive of.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
some of the hardest working US citizens
Which makes it even worse. Some of the hardest working US citizens, and they spend all their time doing unproductive stuff. So yes, most of that trillion was basically set on fire.
And that is where everyone is so wrong about stimulating the economy. There is no point spending money on doing unproductive work A, just so the worker can buy productive work B. In that case you should just buy productive work B immediately and avoid work A. Stimulating the economy only works if you can spend the money on something actually productive.
This is btw very similar to the (intentional) "mistake" that the US government has been doing with the bank bailouts. They claim that they have to pump the money into those bad banks so that they can lend to main street. But in that case, the government would be better off just pumping the money directly into main street. Everyone knows it, but very few actually says it out loud. Financial industries are never worth saving by the government for the simple reason that they don't do any productive work. They are simply conduits that help other sectors do productive work, and as such are easier to just replace.
Indeed, that's not a bad analogy for money spent on bombs. More blew up than burnt, but anyway... Don't confuse Money with Wealth. Money is an abstraction. You can print as much as you like, it's value remains backed by the wealth of the country (ultimately, anyway) which is why you can have US$1 = 47 Indian Rupees. When the GP points out that a trillion dollars has been spent on military adventures, it doesn't matter so much that a lot of the money bought things from american arms companies, paying soldiers' (and mercenaries') wages, as much as it represents that portion of the country's wealth which is represented by 1 trillion dollars being ploughed into unreclaimables such as keep a navy active in the area, building temporary bases, firing ammunition and detonating bombs, flights, supply deliveries... oh, and medical care for the many wounded US soldiers.
So no, the government didn't set money on fire - that would actually increase the value of the dollar. Instead, they effectively set a lot of your country's wealth on fire and thus devalued the dollar even more. In real terms, yes, you would have retained wealth better if you had invested it in infrastructure such as trains, rather than in flying hundreds of thousands of people back and forth around the world.
I'd go into the ethical side of the Iraq invasion - the lies about WMD and how Saddam was a threat to the US, the thousands of deaths resulting and the pillaging of a foreign country's natural resources under threat of military action, but I think the economic argument is the only one that will resonate with some people.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
High speed trains like the german ICE (used in a variety of countries, including China), the french TGV or the japanese bullet trains do not run on regular rails.
Not correct for the ICE: it can run on 'regular' rails - however, only with a reduced speed; indeed, for "high speed" it needs special rails. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercity-Express#Route_planning_and_network_layout)
In 2004, the Japan was hit by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. As you are probably aware, Japan has an extensive Shinkansen system, with trains running at around 200mph. One train derailed near a station but there were no fatalities (154 passengers). The eathquake warning system, introduced in 1992, can detect the early tremors around ten seconds before the main shock and and automatically bring trains to an emergency stop before it hits in most cases (deceleration of 9m/s/s; just under 1g). Presumably good old American engineering can replicate something that the Japanese could do almost two decades ago.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
.That being said I have no idea if it will make money. Probably depends on how well it its managed.
The concern about making money is touching. How much money does
Interstate 5 make each year? Oh. Wait. Other than a gas tax of perhaps a couple
of cents a mile Interstate 5 (which is the major N/S route in California)
the driver is not paying anything (other than income taxes and the like).
Why do we expect basic transport to make money? What makes you think the
Airlines have (net, over their history) made any money? (without the subsidies
in the airports etc airlines would be out of business). We need to get folks
off of Interstate 5 and a sensibly priced choice will do that and save lots
of energy for the country and make a safer trip. A big win. Build the bullet train!