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California's Bullet Train Hurtles Towards a Multibillion-Dollar Overrun (latimes.com)
schwit1 quotes the Los Angeles Times: California's bullet train could cost taxpayers 50% more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more. And that's just for the first 118 miles through the Central Valley, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A confidential Federal Railroad Administration risk analysis, obtained by the Times, projects that building bridges, viaducts, trenches and track from Merced to Shafter, just north of Bakersfield, could cost $9.5 billion to $10 billion, compared with the original budget of $6.4 billion.
The federal document outlines far-reaching management problems: significant delays in environmental planning, lags in processing invoices for federal grants and continuing failures to acquire needed property. The California High-Speed Rail Authority originally anticipated completing the Central Valley track by this year, but the federal risk analysis estimates that that won't happen until 2024, placing the project seven years behind schedule.
The whole project is expected to cost more than $68 billion.
The federal document outlines far-reaching management problems: significant delays in environmental planning, lags in processing invoices for federal grants and continuing failures to acquire needed property. The California High-Speed Rail Authority originally anticipated completing the Central Valley track by this year, but the federal risk analysis estimates that that won't happen until 2024, placing the project seven years behind schedule.
The whole project is expected to cost more than $68 billion.
It may work eventually, but it's a boondoggle for construction companies and mayors/governors.
It will never have a single paying passenger. This has been an easy prediction since at least the year after it was approved.
It's the 21st century, not the 19th. How many airports could you build with $68 Billion ?
The word 'projection' when used by business or government s a fancy way of saying they can the future. Through enough numbers and fancy colorful graphs and people will believe anything.
Simpsons - Monorail Song
If it is viable, a private company would have funded and started it with agreements with California government entitites.
They haven't done so and would not do it, so that tells you it will NEVER BE PROFITABLE.
Let Hyperloop step up.
Big projects done by government, bad. No further information needed! You need to fly or drive yourself instead, because that is what St. Ronnie and his new top disciple The Donald want you to do.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Envy is one of the seven deadly sins, and California envied Euro/Asian rail. We tore up rail in a scandalous conversion to automobiles; but that's water under the bridge (no pun intended). Now that we've got air/auto for most of our transit, it just doesn't make sense. The Eastern corridor is an exception; but even that won't achieve the highest possible speeds cheaply because it routes through such populated areas with curvy rights-of-way that were established over 100 years ago.
California is paying the price for rail envy. It's the right idea... for the early 20th century, not the early 21st. If hyperloops work out, it'll be obsolete before it even loads its first passenger.
Meanwhile, people are getting killed and injured at grade crossings in urban areas all over the state. Grade separation is key for real high speed, so why don't you fix the grades first, Mr. Brown? I grew up in NoVA, and always associated at-grade rail with sparsly populated rural areas or totally rundown parts of DC. To see it in places like Mountain View and Redwood City--swimming with hi tech money, was just insane to me when I came out here.
If you've got any money left over after fixing all the grade crossings, then maybe build an electrified self-driving autobahn from SF to LA. You could partner with Tesla to make that work. People would actually want it, and when they disconnected from the Electrobahn somewhere outside of LA, they wouldn't have to rent a car, because they'd already be in their own car, which is what they want.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I am shocked that by LA Times writer Ralph Vartabedian's article on the supposed risk and overruns to California's ongoing high-speed rail (HSR) effort. Vartabedian is a known opponent of HSR whose every article drips with antagonism against this project, as a quick review of his past articles will clearly show. Anyone who reads the purported analysis (in fact a single Powerpoint file, taken out of context) will quickly see that the article's claims are not justified -- for example, a *possible* $3B overrun (really less, since this compares against obsolete estimates) does not equal a 50% budget problem for a project of this size. The entire state stands to benefit immensely from this project, which will connect BART, Caltrain, and VTA users in the North with Metro, Metrolink, and Amtrak users in the South --- and connect both to the isolated, ignored, economically-depressed Central Valley. Californians, and all who believe in progress, should embrace this transformative project and reject the uniformed mudslinging by the Vartabedians of the world.
in seven years nobody will need a train
Government projects spend twice as much and achieve half as planned. Because they are spending taxpayer's money, not their own money.
California has mountains, which for high speed rail means 'very expensive', especially if those mountains have complex geology, as California's do. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html
I agree that California has enough mountains to justify, if it were build on flat, undeveloped land, where building costs are cheap.
I can confidently asset that the fleecing of the taxpayers has hardly begun. Already over seven years late and fifty per cent over budget, they have found a good vein and are going to suck it dry. Look for Trump to try to pull the federal funds, or contain them to the railroad subsidy to get the eastern states squealing too.
1. Compensatory mitigation banking.
2. 70 mph SUV crossings.
3. Land acquisition.
4. Legal fees related to condemnation.
5. Lack of Chinese slave labor.
Amtrak runs the Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to Seattle. Why not start upgrading the track to run at 150 mph in segments and speed up the trip? You don't need it to run at those speeds everywhere, but even updating the portions of the track where it's cheaper could be a big improvement. If done right, it could be very profitable. The east coast version of this is the Acela Express, which is one of the few profitable routes for Amtrak. If done correctly, high speed rail could work on the west coast. Unfortunately, California seems to have no clue how to do so. It would have been far smarter to allocate funding to improve the speeds of the Amtrak trains that already run there.
a mere $3B? no big deal, chump change
The liberal voters in Seattle pushed through a $54B transportation bill for only 64 MILES of track....Ya, with "B"..
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Every property owner in 2 counties will get the benefit of higher taxes ($400+ per year) on top of our already 10+% sales tax.
Sure, traffic is awful, but I can't fathom over $843M per mile of light rail. What a testament to government bloat, payola and incompetence...
California tax payers should consider themselves lucky with such a paltry number.
America's modern motto, "No, we can't!"
:T:R:A:N:S:
I know people are gasping at the $68b possible price tag. I would like to point out that Boston's Big Dig, basically a tunnel an inner-city highway ended up costing $22b. So, a state-of-the-art high-speed rail line from LA to San Fransisco will only cost 3x what a 2 mile tunnel and urban highway cost. Oh and they highway did nothing to reduce congestion, all it did was induce demand for more drivers and push bottle necks outside the city.
Put that way, this is a relative bargain.
In other news, water remains wet.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's zero reason to be surprised. If you want mass transit you put up with this stuff. I'd like to see some real mass transit in this country. It's absolutely ridiculous how many people drive into California or drive around it when they could just rent a car for the last few miles. You clog roads, drive up the cost of everything and create smog. It's insane.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's only the public's money, and no politician gives a damn about that.
The story of the Detroit People mover is hilarious. It started out with wonderful promises. A lot of money was spent. In the end, it ended up being a silly loop in downtown Detroit that was known for its empty cars.
Mass transit projects promise a lot, pay a lot to connected political construction companies, and take a long to complete so that nobody remembers the original promises.
"lags in processing invoices for federal grants": "We can't be bothered to catch the money that's falling down on us".
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
It's a lot more simple than that. When buying land for a project is a significant part of the project cost the fluctuating cost of that land is going to make it really hard to work out how much the project is going to cost.
Why should there be a 150% overspend? Scotland had the same problem with the Edinburgh Tram line.
What is so difficult anout doing ground radar surveys so that you know in advance what you are going to encounter (old cables, undocumented pipes, fault lines, fracture planes, cavities and solid boulders)? Seems a case of "If we knew what the problems were going to be, we wouldn't be able to bill for overtime".
The problems aren't *physical* obstacles, they are bureaucratic and legal.
Most of those US states used to have railways that were working fine until GM had its way.
Then the automotive became the countr's biggest leach.
Yeah, some of us saw this coming long before the ink was dry on the environmental impact study.
This thing will be over $100B before it's done.
Have any reason to zip to fucking Bakersfield?
Budget over-Runs? Normal for USA.
China is going to build their Silk Road Bullet Train at what pricing for each mile?
Would it be better to stand at the AirPort for 4 hours during the holidays and wait for your flight?
Would it be better to hop on a Bullet Train @ 800mph an get to your destination in let's say 2 to 3 hours?
The initial Infrastructure cost is huge and normal if you look at the instant cost, but if you look down the road like 20 to 30 years the cost will seem to be small.
If it costs $68 Billion dollars from West Coast to East Coast and if you calculate the total products shipped within the 20 to 30 year plan then it seems that the Bullet Train will be much cheaper than let's say FedEx, UPS, DHS via Cargo Planes and Trucks.
** The Bullet Train I'm sure is going to create a New Revenue Stream for Companies.
** As a CEO, I'd rather have my products shipped via Bullet Train then put the cargo on the ship and waiting 3 to 4 months to get to it's destination.
** What if my customers decided after 2 1/2 months that they decided to go with the competitor? Hell, I'd rather use a Bullet Train before my customers change their minds. [Yeah, (Hell). That's where they tried to put me.]
What is so difficult anout doing ground radar surveys so that you know in advance what you are going to encounter
Because if you identify all the problems upfront, and give an accurate estimate, then YOUR PROJECT WILL NOT BE APPROVED. It is much smarter to drastically lowball, and then start jacking up the costs after enough has been spent to invoke the "sunk cost" argument. Business people are taught to ignore sunk costs, but in politics, sunk costs are never ignored.
They'll have no problem just stopping when money runs out. Govt has to include real penalties in contract for non completion, including dissolution of company and reaching into pockets of top managers and owners for restitution - if they go bankrupt cheating the public that's ok, others will learn and we will eventually get the change we need.
Anyone who's been stuck in the bumper-to-bumper tractor traffic on CA 43 into Shafter knows that the Bullet Train is going to be awesome!
I don't even see that ground radar should be needed. One should able to look at previous projects in California and get a pretty good idea how many obstructions per mile is average. To estimate the cost, you don't need to know exactly how many boulders, how many pipes, etc - you can expect X obstructions per mile, on average.
For me, when I started working for the government, one problem I had was that it was hard to get used to everyone slacking off so much. Previously I worked for a company I own, so any slacking off hit me directly in theb pocketbook. It was frustrating when government employees would come into my office and chit-chat about nothing for an hour.
I eventually got used to it, relaxed, and enjoyed my stress-free job. The less-stressed approach didn't hurt productivity *as much* as I would have expected because it fostered communication between employees and didn't lead to rushing through work, cutting corners on quality because you're rushing. Our quality problems were instead due to lack of competence, because nobody got fired for failing to update their skills in 20 years.
Back in private sector now, I'm glad I had that experience. It reinforced something from working for companies I owned: I don't accept unrealistic deadlines, then deliver crappy trying to meet a deadline that doesn't allow quality work. I can and do tell the boss "no, I don't think we can do project X in a month, and I'm not going to promise you it'll be done in that time." So far, management has appreciated, or at least accepted, being told the truth. They know what "technical debt" is, and they don't want more of it. Actually, MOST of the time they don't want more technical debt. Sometimes, incurring technical debt makes sense, just like monetary debt (borrowing) sometimes makes sense. One instance springs to mind - we wanted to replace an annual contract with an in-house solution. It made sense to use duct tape and baling wire where needed to get the job done before the yearly cost was renewed, then replace the duct tape with bolts afterwards.
And let's not forget the politicians that allow it to happen... putting it to a referendum doesn't absolve them of responsibility to do the right thing. There need to be real consequences for officials who push for what is later found to have been a deliberate scam.
You have some very good managers. My private sector experience has been different. If I tell them that we can't do project "X" in a month, and I won't be promising that, the managers in my experience will immediately say, "do it at a far shorter time, or we will find someone who will." The concept of "technical debt" is ignored, because what matters is getting the product out -now-, so the next round of VC funding can be approved, because it is far more important to ship -something- and clinch the sales... than to ship something release worthy and be behind. If the shortcuts taken with coding cause major problems, the company just axes devs and makes the call to Tata or Infosys.
On the other hand, I'm very thankful I'm in the public sector. My boss will ask for a solution that will work for five years. Not something that is duct taped together that will make the lash-bearers in this financial quarter happy and not spawn shareholder lawsuits (but require exponentially more work each time until the axe swings and it just goes offshore), but something that can be implemented and maintained for a good amount of time, then things moved to the next solution.
My experience is that the private sector doesn't want an Engineer Scott who gets the job on time, but is conservative about the scheduling estimates. They want a Captain Cass Mason who can promise anything and everything, with the steam engines always overdriven. When the ship blows, no big deal, stuff gets offshored, and the execs get their bonuses anyway because it was supposed to be offshored anyway.
Almost a hundred years ago, Henry Flagler had the Florida East Coast Railroad built from Jacksonville to Miami to Key West in approximately the same time it now takes **just** to do the environmental impact studies.
It's taking longer to re-double-track FEC along a roadbed built decades ago between WEST PALM BEACH & Miami (for the new Tri-Rail) than it took to build the entire original railroad across a mostly-uninhabited swamp literally a hundred miles from the nearest real city (in 1900, Miami's population was barely 100).
In effect, the peasants living around America are paying taxes so that the courtiers, intellectuals, and bureaucrats in the American capitals can zip comfortably between their palaces.
Example: Paul Ryan
It's going to lauch service with Acela-type trains at 79-110mph running along existing corridors between San Diego & Bakersfield, accelerate to 180mph @ Bakersfield, then slow back down at the northern end & run at 79-110mph along existing Caltrain tracks into San Francisco & UnionPacific tracks to Sacramento... then upgrade the remainder of the route until it's all HSR (I believe the new tracks are spec'ed to 220mph geometry). So no, it won't be a "train to nowhere". It'll be more like the first stretch of I-5 running through rural central California that dumped into existing roads on the outskirts of LA & SJ. Or the first stretch of I-4 between the western outskirts of Orlando and the undeveloped countryside east of Tampa. When it first opened, *I-4* was called a boondoggle & 'road to nowhere', too... now, it's 8-10 lanes for most of that same route, and gridlocked with traffic every morning & afternoon (due to all the married couples who work in Tampa & Orlando & moved to Lakeland as a compromise.
Don't worry, that money stays there.
If it gets built, it will lose money on every ticket. But don't worry, they'll make it up in volume.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Train can do bulk transport that the airplanes cannot, in passengers and cargo too, on the same rail. And train deserve also "more" local stations, at least compared to airport.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Look at how many millions are spent only on maintaining highways. In comparison, this rail project is peanuts.
Don't forget that the Swiss completed the project on cheque and on budget.
So you're physically at work just to protect your job? Sounds boring. If your job can be easily outsourced you need to make yourself more valuable or switch jobs and acquire more skills. Chair warming underproducers can also be outsourced.
Ask Mark Zuckerberg for some money to build this thing, he hates traffic.
Is this the kind like "where will this runoff go" which is real or is this the kind like "how do we avoid driving this salamander to extinction, let's argue about it while the world burns"?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At first it sounded like you had found a bad place to work or two. Then you mentioned VC funding. When a startup is trying to grab market share in a rapidly growing market, borrowing is the correct strategy. Management intentionally spends to get market share now and pays the debt back later, when the company is bigger. Borrowing includes technical debt.
For example, I worked for a company that was growing 80% per year, becoming a leader in a new business segment. They would quickly duct tape together some software that would allow them to expand into another chunk of the market, a chunk that will be worth $20 million in four years. Later, they can spend $1 million to go back and fix the duct tape mess. They net $19 million that way, incurring $1 million in technical debt to quickly grab $20 million of the market before competitors do.
Now, growth is slowing just a bit for that company and they want to go public, offer their stock on the stock exchange. To do that, they have to clean things up, be more stable. Over the years the technical people have used the term "technical debt" often to remind management it's there. Now management wants to start cleaning up the technical debt before going public and settling down just a bit.
I don't like the "rush it through with duct tape and baling wire" approach, but by understanding when that approach is correct I can tolerate it much better. I have to remember management *knows* they are creating a million dollar problem - in order to get a $10 million benefit. That helps me not get as frustrated. If understanding that doesn't do the trick for a particular developer, they'll probably enjoy an established, stable company better. General Mills, Walmart, and SC Johnson aren't looking at the next round of VC funding in 60 days, so they should plan IT projects on a 5-10 year time scale.
68 billion? The airport in Osaka cost $20 and the new one in Dubai is $33 billion.
By waiting and literally pouring money and concrete into roads and more waiting and pouring even more money and concrete into automobile projects (roads, etc), we have almost priced mass transportation out of reach of even Federal Government's coffers. The delays that have started at the very beginning of this project may doom the whole thing to the same state of the federal Interstate Highway system, incomplete thru the most congested areas. A prime example is I-95 thru NJ which will probably NEVER be completed. Unless we have steely resolve we are forced to drive in automobiles everywhere. Buses and light rail were killed by Detroit. Look at the trolley system in Los Angeles. Detroit bought up the trolley companies and relegated the trolley cars to the scrap heap. The boom in selling autos made this "investment" profitable for a long while. But in the long run the city fathers screwed themselves and society as a whole. I can see the horrid orange green-yellow haze over the New York and Los Angeles areas. Smog alerts are common and people with breathing problems are warned to stay indoors. We CANNOT allow our infrastructure to crumble beneath our feet. Monies from taxes for bridges and roads have been squandered to shore up budget gaps from fraud, double dealing ( we call them good business men), incompetence, stupidity, and just excesses in spending we can't afford. Without saying NO to delays and NO to cost overruns, we will never complete another rail project nor bridge nor tunnel in America again! We cannot say no to this project's idea even if we must use global resources to get the job done.
So this wasn't expected? I think it surely was.
"Floridaâ(TM)s Governor Rejects High-Speed Rail Line, Fearing Cost to Taxpayers...Mr. Scott said at a news conference in Tallahassee on Wednesday that cost overruns related to the Tampa-to-Orlando line could leave Florida taxpayers stuck with a $3 billion tab."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02...
when the government changes from lowest wins, to something else then it will change.
The winning company will lose money on the contract as bid so it holds the government to a very tight scope and any change no matter how small is done as a change order, and that is where they make their money.
Since no scope of work is ever detailed enough or can plan for every contingency (or simple change of mind) there is always wiggle room to turn a lowest bid money losing bid not a very profitable job.
left over from the 19th century. Another liberal, statist boondoggle that was predicted to be a failure from the get-go.
Almost a hundred years ago, Henry Flagler had the Florida East Coast Railroad built from Jacksonville to Miami to Key West in approximately the same time it now takes **just** to do the environmental impact studies.
So? Railroads are different than they used to be, and we care a hell of a lot more about the environment now.
I hope and pray the collective consciousness of California voters and U.S. Senators realize the economic train wreck they're heading to and will stop Cal Train before their names are permanently etched in the Economic Halls of Idiocy.
However, if they do not stop Cal Train, and Cal Train is in fact built, I predict the following:
By the time it is first capable of even 25% of its promised distances, no one will choose to use it given a free market choice of the alternatives: car, auto-driving car, commercial aircraft, private aircraft, or Hyperloop. Or even something cooler that doesn't exist yet!
The State of California Legislature, filled with Dems overflowing with good intentions and little economic understanding, will be forced to cover for the economic unsustainable nature of the failing Cal Rail because of their embarrassment, forcing them to prop it up economically with subsidies, and thereby parasiting on the California economy so severely as to be the laughing stock of the world.
They will have to come up with a use for the the thing in a sad attempt of saving their reputation. And so:
The Cal Rail system will only be used for hauling water from Northern California down to Southern California.
It will become the water pipeline of Gerry Brown's father's design that Gerry Brown tried so desperately to stop.
Almost deliciously economically natural political and economic punishment for such arrogance against reality.
So sad too since Cal Rail was all so completely unnecessary: the Rail Bill could have been designed properly: an X prize for example: cash rewards for those completing an economically sustainable way of getting people from point A to point B. But no, the Cal Train bill authors wanted their European and Chinese style *trains*, because those have huge budgets the State gets to control, and they like to think of themselves as such 'visionaries' ha ha ha! More importantly, in California, they know they can milk the emotions of the good intention-ed people of California to get those budgets.
If you think you are 'Progressive', but refuse to deal with the economics of your plans, you are really just a functional idiot and lemming, politically.
Two words: population density.
Railroads involve land. Lots of land. Every landowner on the route has the potential to blow out your costs, one way or another. When the railroads were first being built, there were countless miles of open land that either had no owner, or was owned by a handful of immensely rich people. Now, all that land has been claimed and subdivided, and you have to deal with 3000 separate owners to cover the distance that was previously one guy and a family of gators.
More people = more cost. It's that simple.
But it is being built by contractors not the government. Business, not government. Free market hands trump all others! It is madness to think that the private sector would do wrong. Clearly we need less regulation, lower taxes, or to bomb a country in the mid east to fix this. At least Trump will fix it all next week.
Winston said it best with "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Was that in an extended edition of Ghostbusters or something? ;)
So require a guarantee bond be paid or insured. It'll add a bit to the cost. But no more than the overrun would have been and impact bad actors more than good actors.
Government using money taken by threat is the opposite of the free market. It isn't even close to a profitable idea, and will be an eternal high-cost loss.
Enjoy!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
1. None of the entities supporting it are willing to pay higher taxes THEMSELVES for it. They are always trying to make EVERYBODY in the state pay more for it (even thoiugh most will NEVER ride on it) or get more Federal Funds (trying to make people in OTHER STATES pay for it). Where are Jerry Brown's backers on this? Why are they not willing to chip-in their own funds for this much-needed wonder of the modern world????
2. The turn-over rate of management at the CA high speed rail entity is quite high, and lots of the work has been outsourced to various vendors tied to Brown and his cronies. It seems less about successfully running a plan to build a rail line, and more about funnelling tons of tax dollars to "connected" entities who will skulk away with big bank account balances after the boondoggle collapses.
3. As a clearly not-properly-planned-and-executed scheme, the people driving this hot mess keep moving the goal posts. First, they eliminated dual tracks to save money (so there will not be 2 sets ofr tracks, allowing trains to be going both north-south and south-north at the same time). Then they decided they would save money on tunnelling by boring tunnels of a smaller diameter (reducing maximum speed becuause of the aerodynamics of air+objects moving in tubes (something Musk dealt with properly on hyperloop). Now they have HALVED the number of cars each train can have (halving the capacity) in order to make the stations and sigings etc shorter and thus lower initial construction costs. They just keep changing things for the worse in order to claim the project is advancing, all the while still being unable to get it done with the cash available and having no path to more money.
High speed rail is a religion to some people. It works in a few places where huge populations are squeezed into very dense cities and the traffic between those cities is high. Elsewhere, it's a boondoggle and aircraft are [a] cheaper [b] faster [c] more efficient overall, and [d] capable of changing routes to meet changes in demands. Rail is often just a way to funnel tax money to special interests (including things like rail workers unions) change the value of land to suit special interests (make somebody's cheaply-purchased land suddenld valuable by building a station nearby) and manipulate societey by driving the masses to use trains rather than their own individual transports and controlling the routes, schedules, and ticket prices.
could be in the remake, haven't found anyone willing to endure it to find out yet though ;-)
In any major project like this, there are a number of figures. One of them is a basic estimated cost, taking into account overruns of previous projects. Bridges typically cost X, track costs Y, tunnels cost Z.
But this is always an estimate. No major survey has been done. 50% of the time the project will be under this budget and 50% it will be over. It seems less because we rarely hear of projects completed on time and under budget. It's useful to work out how much it will cost on average because in aggregate, all major projects will work out fairly close to this.
We have a second estimate. Perhaps when we do more thorough surveys, we'll find that bridges need better foundations, or tunnels are going through some particularly difficult rock. We can estimate the probability here, and come up with a higher figure. This is a useful figure because it tells us how much we might conceivably need for this particular project, and gives us a point at which we know it's time to take action.
Since this is a federal risk analysis, I presume this is going to be as pessimistic as possible. The point of these analyses is to identify where things might go wrong, after all.
So yes, it could cost that much. But is anyone - aside from the usual negative spin the media loves to put on major infrastructure projects - suggesting it actually will?
The other option is that due to the risk of cost overrurns bankrupting the company without a completion bonus, established companies will not bid and either infrastructure is not built, or only less experienced companies take that risk, partly because they lack the experience to properly assess it.
It's a conundrum and the only solution I see is the party issuing the contract doing a lot more, potentially expensive, work to better estimate the cost, rather than the cost being partly or wholly determined by the funding available. That would mean significant costs for projects that, once likely cost is known, are never built. Obviously that goes on to some extent now, but it might be hard to get voters to accept much more of this sort of diligence at rather higher cost unless it could be convincingly demonstrated it would save money overall.
But it is being built by contractors not the government.
Who let us note are much better than government agencies at scoring contracts. You have to realize here that businesses will take the fast route to profit. If I give a business a million cars, I don't expect them to become good at driving and making their profit that way. I expect them to become good at selling cars because that's the more profitable way.
And what's this bit about a "free market"? Where's the other competing high speed rails?
For example, I worked for a company that was growing 80% per year, becoming a leader in a new business segment. They would quickly duct tape together some software that would allow them to expand into another chunk of the market, a chunk that will be worth $20 million in four years. Later, they can spend $1 million to go back and fix the duct tape mess. They net $19 million that way, incurring $1 million in technical debt to quickly grab $20 million of the market before competitors do.
While I agree the above is completely logical, the difference between technical debt and financial debt is that there is no one holding you accountable for paying back the former. There's also the problem that technical debt has its own interest expenses... you'll find that your initial shortcuts have been built upon, and those things have themselves been built upon, and you can't simply fix the original problem without incurring FAR more cost. Even if the costs to fix the problem haven't ballooned, the money people have no desire to "waste" that million dollars to retire technical debt. They'd rather spend by investing in another new market, or paying bonuses, or dividends.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The scenario you describe is something I fear, so just last night I worked to avoid it. Management is very concerned about some problems we had and they want to know what went wrong. Without going into detail, we had some bad code which caused a problem they noticed, problems that could affect revenue. I told them I would find the problem and report on how we can prevent a recurrence.
So this weekend I identified the problems in the code. I didn't start by telling top management the details of the bug; I my message to management starts with "last week, we paid some interest on our technical debt, previously known quality issues caused the situation. Recurrence of similar problems can be avoided by investing in correcting known issues in the code, rather than deferring this work as 'not high priority'. Specifically, the following known issues were involved in causing the problem, other issues may have also played a part. ..."
Management from the president down really want to make sure that problems like we had last week don't happen again. After hearing that the cause is various forms of technical debt, I expect management will decide we need to get rid of this nasty technical debt, to the extent that we can.
You insightfully identified the issue as "there is no one holding you accountable for paying back the former", part of my job, therefore, is to honestly inform them about the costs, so that the president of company holds middle managers responsible for addressing the issue. Another, similar, issue with tech debt is that it's normally not measured and doesn't appear on reports. Wise management, when they decide to incur tech debt (rush systems development) could write down a number for how much engineers estimate it will cost to a) maintain the less-robust system and b) eventually clean it up, making it more robust.
All high speed rail in the world is a lot more expensive to ride than "regular speed" rail, which is generally faster than "US speed" rail. This means that if the Calif project ever ends up connecting points that have a market, it will cater only to the rich and those on expense accounts, not the grubby hoi-polloi, who, strangely enough are the ones paying for it.
In addition to the fake bond money that every taxpayer in Calif has to pay for, right-thinking Jerry arranged for his rail project to be subsidized by cap-and-trade funds that were promised to be delivered back to the ratepayers paying for them, who will never get to ride this rail fantasy. That involves another fantasy: that this rail project will reduce greenhouse gases. That will never happen, because it will never take a large fraction of the traffic. Of course, the greenhouse gas fantasy is based on another fantasy, that Calif's reducing its greenhouse gas emissions is going to have any significant effect on worldwide global warming. It's nothing more than Calif wearing a hair shirt to atone for its evil use of fossil fuel.
But wait, there's more. Jerry is going to spend Calif taxpayer money to send up satellites to poke Trump in the eye, while unable to find the money to maintain existing roads. Religion now drives pulbic policy. On all sides. Idiots all around.
They can do this to you because you let them. You are so afraid of losing your job that you've enslaved yourself.
If you say "Go ahead, find someone who will" they will get their fingers burned badly enough that they will stop touching the stove.
But you are enabling them, and making us all suffer, by being weak and giving in. Grow a pair!
"I don't shoot my mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about" - by raymorris (2726007) on Thursday December 31, 2015 @09:29AM (#51215379)
Raymorris you shoot your mouth off f'ing up in 2 security fuckups https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47379233/ & https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47374033/ + raymorris = scriptkiddie https://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8895203&cid=51726265/
&
Tell us how ONLY 'newer script kiddie tools' have stringlength built in (when PASCAL had it for ages - my fav tool) https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8472509&cid=51114383/ YOU BLUNDERING WANNABE!
APK
P.S.=> You like to talk behind others' backs like the gossiping bitch TROLL you are raymorris https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9880997&cid=53312265/ well, here I am letting YOU TALK in those links, showing your FAILS wannabe ... apk
... For example, I worked for a company that was growing 80% per year, becoming a leader in a new business segment. They would quickly duct tape together some software that would allow them to expand into another chunk of the market, a chunk that will be worth $20 million in four years. Later, they can spend $1 million to go back and fix the duct tape mess. They net $19 million that way, incurring $1 million in technical debt to quickly grab $20 million of the market before competitors do. ...
This is true.
But everyone involved should remember that if the heap of duck tape and bailing wire collapses just before the big demo, then they have all failed anyway.
This is the real cause of all those last second "disasters", like the blue screen of death at the Microsoft big reveal of a version of Windows some years back.
And at demos of some very promising new companies, that are no longer even heard of...
> This is the real cause of all those last second "disasters", like the blue screen of death at the Microsoft big reveal of a version of Windows some years back.
I don't know the cause of that example, but it's powerful example. I did something similar once and lost a new account that would have doubled our revenue.
Another light rail project producing trains that nobody will ride on and then need to be subsidized. Welcome to another black hole for taxpayers.