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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.
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...
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
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 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.
Virtually serving coffee
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.