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.

Comments

People still don't know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who didn't know this was a giant fucking scam before it even got off the ground has to be a fucking idiot.

Re:People still don't know?

[zippthorne]

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.

Re:People still don't know?

[Harlequin80]

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.

I can't help but wonder

[rsilvergun]

who's this for? 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. Maybe if we didn't all have cars, but again if you can afford to ride this you can afford a car, and you're probably going to prefer that. If it's just pork I'm surprised it made it though.

Re:I can't help but wonder

[Hadlock]

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.

Re:I can't help but wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I can't help but wonder

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:I can't help but wonder

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It is common for government to tax the hell out of things that compete effectively with their overpriced, boobdoggle, unionized government employee-loaded Peoples' Great Works.

So watch out for that. Detroit Metro airport built a giant parking structure and long-term parking lot that could not compete with private lots miles away that had to shuttle people in, so they slapped a 30% surcharge on those lots.

They also made it illegal for local hotels to let customers leave their cars in their hotel lots. Lots of outstate people would drive in and spend the night before flying out the next morning, and free parking was a service the hotels gladly provided. Now that is illegal.

The People's hatred and fear of government is well-earned.

Re:I can't help but wonder

[Hadlock]

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.

Re:I can't help but wonder

[Hadlock]

I addressed his point and covered additional issues. I don't think it's destined to go the way of Amtrak, which shares lines with Freight. Dedicated commuter rail is fast and on time. More astute way of putting it would be to say it's like European high speed rail, or Uber, where the convienience of it drives further adoption. Everywhere high speed rail is installed, it drives adoption. People said what you said about the DART rail system in Dallas, and it beat is ridership projections by 5x in the first year.

Ridiculous claim in summary

[Rei]

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,

This is absurd (and not an argument presented in the article, because the author isn't a moron). You can't just act like all tunnel building costs are the same per mile, they vary by orders of magnitude. The East Side Access project is to go through some of the most valuable, infrastructure-heavy, densely populated real estate in the US and to merge into Grand Central Terminal.

Re:Ridiculous claim in summary

[Bartles]

Show me a tunnel project that finished ahead of schedule and under budget. For that matter show me a tunnel project that finished on time, and met it's budget. It's absurd to think this tunnel will be different than every tunnel ever built in human history.

Re:Ridiculous claim in summary

[willworkforbeer]

Show me a tunnel project that finished ahead of schedule and under budget. For that matter show me a tunnel project that finished on time, and met it's budget. It's absurd to think this tunnel will be different than every tunnel ever built in human history.

Found it! http://www.cbsnews.com/picture...

Re: Ridiculous claim in summary

[Applehu Akbar]

Here's another one, in the heart of Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

America: Not allowed to dream big anymore

[Hadlock]

Fucking build it. We excel at building giant projects. This is an infrastructure project that will pay off in spades over the next 200 years. It's not like the zombie apocalypse is going to come through and wipe out 2/3rds the population of California every 25 years. Long term this is absolutely needed. Just cough up the dough and move forward with it. Dig those tunnels, lay that track.
 
Big projects need big vision, and if we don't have that kind of vision in America anymore, I don't want to live here anymore, we're just any other country.
 
P.S. Even Morocco has high speed rail now. Let's try and keep up with Northern Africa perhaps? "Oh it's such a big project we can't handle that". Well fucking fire that guy let's put someone in place that actually believes they can do their own damn job. You don't hire a guy who's afraid of heights to do your balancing wire act at the circus.

Re:America: Not allowed to dream big anymore

[Hadlock]

High speed rail is built to such exacting standards, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to throw some LIDAR down by the wheels and flag anything that throws up a yellow flag for repairs. If they're not doing that already. Generally in Japan after an earthquake they will run the trains at reduced capacity, only 50-70% advertised speeds while repairs are made. As Mitch Hedberg famously said, "we apologize, your escalators are temporarily stairs"; high speed rail can still run at regular speeds without issue. Heck, if you're willing to slow down to 5mph you can run a train over some pretty gnarly looking rails that aren't particularly flat, and then speed back up once past.

Re:America: Not allowed to dream big anymore

[CQDX]

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.

Re:Final bill

[russotto]

And while you whine about a 35 miles project, the Chinese are looking at building a similar one to connect Chine with the North American mainland. This project will have almost 9,000 miles of high speed track of which more than 100 miles would be a tunnel under the Bering Straights.

No environmental impact statements, no lawsuits from every NIMBY group along the way, no union problems, no Federal Railroad Administration applying 100-year-old rules, and no worry about worker safety. Relaxing the constraints make things much easier.

Of course this tunnel will never be built because the US isn't about to allow it (and it's a dumb idea anyway)

On the other hand

[melonman]

The article sounds remarkably like the articles written when the Anglo-French Channel Tunnel project was proposed. Various aspects of the project were allegedly impossible when digging began, including concerns about the nature of the rock under the Channel and that the air in the tunnels would overheat because of the absence of ventilation tunnels under the sea. The project did run over-budget, but it worked, and is still working, and has transformed the way people and freight travel along that route.

Compare to the Cost of Highway Projects

[McGruber]

Here in Atlanta, we are spending $1.1 Billion on widening just one highway interchange: Contractors vying to build $1.1 billion Ga. 400/I-285 interchange

IMHO, that makes the $68 billion California is spending seem like a bargain since they'll be getting 36 miles of tunnels, plus "300 miles of track, dozens of bridges or viaducts, high-voltage electrical systems, a maintenance plant and as many as six stations".