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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.
... I can state two things:
- it's buying the land that shifts the schedule. Definitely true, to the extent the south-east is not covered by our 'bullet-trains' 20 years after going operational elsewhere (TGV is for 'hi-speed-train' in french, over 300Km/h)
- when the rails are done, then, it's over for train/airplane competition. Definitely. 90% of the air traffic switches to rail.
Even when the rail stations are not close to cities.
When adding every delay, car/parking/x-ray/plane and the same at the other hand, generally the bullet train is at least as fast, and way less of a bother (no X-ray, you can take metallic objects, load your computer, walk and get decent coffee in a decent train bar...)
So, to me it's a matter of patience but the switch is unavoidable. The only thing is, for people in their fifties like me, one has to be aware this in some places is just an investment for our children, not for us.
The point of HSR is to make valuable real estate less concentrated. Build the 'home' stations in areas where land will appreciate and the 'work' stations in areas with high-paying jobs. The commuters using HSR daily/weekly will be the people who work in the expensive cities and who have the money to buy housing close to their home station.
My thinking is it is because California property taxes are capped to a fixed percentage, so they either need property values to grow faster than inflation or to scale-out the building of properties of the same value since they can't all be in SF.
This is the way it was done in Japan. This is the way it was done in Taiwan. I don't know if the other HSR projects around the world were done with the same land-value development in mind.
This may shock you, but most people aren't robots, and you still can't replace human interaction with video conferencing. Most people would frown at the idea of eating thanksgiving dinner around a table surrounded by glowing screens. Video conferencing only exists as a bandaid that fixes the problem that existing transportation methods suck. Fix the root issue and the need for video conferencing goes away. Your argument still doesn't solve the problem that college students will want to go home on some weekends, holidays will not evaporate, and not all problems can be fixed remotely.
moox. for a new generation.
The Japanese got it to work but they connected larger population centres than Santa Fe and Albuquerque - just as the Californians are going to do.
It is a bit annoying that the last time a train did 100MpH near where I live was a century ago - on steam FFS.