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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.
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.
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"?
The above post suggests that money should instead be spend on Bay Area or Southern California transit projects, but this is a false dichotomy (trichotomy?) -- the public benefits from spending money on all three of these areas (North, South, and HSR to connect them). In the North: BART is extending south from Fremont to San Jose (coming end of 2017!), Caltrain is electrifying to boost capacity and speed, giving frequent, fully electrified, and high-capacity transit all around the Bay. In the South, Los Angeles Metro now has more miles of public rail transport than any other region: lines are being build through downtown, to the airport, through the heart of the Wilshire corridor, and to East LA and the San Gabriel Valley. High speed rail will tie these two great regions even closer together, compensate for our overcrowded highways and airports, and benefit the entire state.
mass transportation needs to be able to pay its own way or it isn't something we should be putting in.
So if I could spend $10 on mass transit that reduced the road budget by $20 and got people where they wanted to go, we shouldn't save money, because that doesn't hate mass transit enough?
Learn to love Alaska
"LAX is right on the coast, as far from the city center as one can get. It's a half-hour ride through traffic to downtown."
Yup. LAX is about 30 mins away from the center of downtown. Union station is about 10 min away from the center. Clearly we must spend billions and billions of dollars to turn a 60-90 min flight in to a 3 hour train ride that costs more and breaks the bank so a few people who can afford it can travel in comfort and shave 20 mins off their cab ride.
Makes perfect sense.
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.
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.