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California's $68 Billion Bullet Train Project Faces Major Hurdles (latimes.com)
New submitter willworkforbeer writes: The proposed US$68B high speed rail project in California faces extraordinary hurdles, both in terms of budget and timeframe. Even Einstein (no, not that one; Herbert Einstein, an MIT civil engineer and top tunneling expert) says the schedule is probably not possible. "Having looked at a number of these long tunnels, [the California] plan is aggressive," said Einstein, who has consulted on a 35-mile-long tunnel under the Swiss Alps. "From a civil engineering perspective it is very, very ambitious — to put it mildly."
New York's 11-mile East Side Access tunnel project is 14 years late and about 2.5x its original budget. If California's 72 miles of tunnels (twin tunnels of 36 miles) go like New York's, that would be over US$160B spent, with an opening date sometime in the 2030s. The article goes through a number of complicating factors for the tunnels, from the major faults they must cross to the melange of rock types they must drill through.
New York's 11-mile East Side Access tunnel project is 14 years late and about 2.5x its original budget. If California's 72 miles of tunnels (twin tunnels of 36 miles) go like New York's, that would be over US$160B spent, with an opening date sometime in the 2030s. The article goes through a number of complicating factors for the tunnels, from the major faults they must cross to the melange of rock types they must drill through.
It's for the people who come after us, for the next couple hundred years, either until Earth becomes uninhabitable or we build a better more comfortable transport technology. I know it's hard to think more than 15 years in to the future, but the first rail lines from the 1850s are still in continuous use 170 years later, NOW, and I don't hear anyone talking about the death knell of rail. We gave highways a whirl and while they're super convenient, it's obvious that they don't scale nearly as well as we had imagined they would. And also we realized that most people are too dumb for flying cars, so we're back to rail. Unless you come up with something else, a long term transportation solution needs to be put in place. Right now it's looking like high speed electric rail between population centers, and then self driving uber/google/apple cars between the high speed rail and your final destination. But first we need that high speed rail. It works pretty fantastically over in Europe, you should try it some time.
moox. for a new generation.
By the sound of it It's going to be so expensive that if I could afford to take it I'd just take a plane instead.
This project will take decades to complete. By then there will be self-driving battery powered buses on I-5, for 1/3 the price of a ticket on this train. If you divide the likely cost of this train by the number of seats, it will cost about $500,000 PER SEAT. That is just the construction and capital cost. The operating cost will add even more. Nobody will be able to afford it without big on-going subsidies. Meanwhile, for the cost of a single train seat, you could buy several buses with over a hundred seats in total.
The solution is obvious: We need to ban the buses.
If they wanted to have a chance for this to work, and to have some reasonable number of passengers, they should have built it along the coast along the Coast Sub route connecting LA, Simi Valley, Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, up to Monterrey and into San Jose. There is splits to SF and Sacramento. There are already tracks there that used to be the main passenger route when trains were king. Today there is little freight or passenger traffic north of Santa Barbara. There are fewer and shorter tunnels so the work is probably orders of magnitude easier.
Additionally CA should be upgrading the Hwy 5 corridor in the SJ valley. It's two lanes each way but with the amount of commercial traffic it should be 4.
Finally, spending money on expanding the reservoir system should be the top priority. Often times we get a decent amount of rain but it just runs off into the ocean. Are main reserve is the snow pack in the Sierras but if global warming is true, there is going to be less and less each year.
The purpose of an infrastructure job shouldn't be the construction jobs that will result from creating it. The purpose should be to reduce cost (in time or resources) of transportation of people and goods to points within the covered area.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Right...... Because the private sector will always allocate resources into areas that are needed for society to function.
Seriously even the most crazy anti-government person has to admit that there are places where the needs of a community and the needs of corporations don't align and hence a government is required to divert funds towards projects that the private sector would not have built.