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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 ?
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.
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.
It's not the worst idea --- but the track is exceedingly curvy, speeds could never be very high, and in the end it wouldn't be much cheaper (if at all) than building a new line. Plus the large (if often ignored!) population centers in the Central Valley would be entirely bypassed by a coastal route, relegating them even more to backwater status. Further more the coastal route is anyway owned and mainly run my freight rail, who would fight to the death against any encroachment. The current HSR project builds an entirely separate and publicly-owned right-of-way with no grade crossings, for maximum speed, access to population centers, and ultimate public benefit.
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 $843M per mile of light rail. What a testament to government bloat, payola and incompetence...
California tax payers should consider themselves lucky with such a paltry number.
The word 'projection' when used by business or government s a fancy way of saying they can the future. Through enough numbers and fancy colorful graphs and people will believe anything.
But that's fine. The voters should allow the bond after a construction company has given a firm bid and demonstrated that it has insurance for up to, say, 5x cost overruns.
If no one company can cover that much, the managers can break it up into small enough pieces until the voters have a guaranteed not-to-exceed cost.
Any voter who believes initial government estimates is a fool.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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."
Why not start upgrading the track to run at 150 mph in segments and speed up the trip?
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically. We have aircraft now. Passenger rail is for short-distance commuting, and it's barely cost effective at that.
If done correctly, high speed rail could work on the west coast.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You do not take the Starlight for speed of travel.
You take it for the trip. It is amazingly beautiful and relaxing. Eat, drink, read a book, stare out the window, have sex in your sleeper car....
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically.
... except for the Northeast Corridor, which shows that high speeds and large populations make it economically effective -- just as California will.
We have aircraft now.
When San Francisco and Los Angeles build airports in their downtown cores, come back and talk to us. The trip times will be comparable and the rail journey will be more comfortable by far.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
... and this writer goes "off the rails" yet again
It's only the public's money, and no politician gives a damn about that.
Because upgrading the tracks doesn't increase average speed very much. The trains still have a lot of stops so speeds average slower than driving.
Plus we have airplanes now. Any money that could be spent on trains could be spent much more efficiently to solve whatever issues might make people want to choose rail travel over airline travel.
"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.
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.
And how is that any different from a typical IT project?
Maybe it's time they do agile infrastructure projects! I can already imagine user stories: "As a train passenger I need to get from Point A to Point B without paying $5,000 per mile and without breaking the laws of nature".
lucm, indeed.
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.
Have any reason to zip to fucking Bakersfield?
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically. We have aircraft now. Passenger rail is for short-distance commuting, and it's barely cost effective at that.
Aircraft can't bring you city center to city center. If you add up travel to and from the airport the break-even is usually 3-3.5 hours. The question is whether there's many enough passengers to justify it, laying down rail costs almost the same no matter how many travel. Airplanes are much closer tied to number of flights = cost of delivering service.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Pretty much no construction project, public or private, is done with fixed price bidding. Its done with costs+ bidding. No construction company in the world would touch a contract where they're on the hook for the overruns. And no insurance company would ever issue such insurance, for any cost.
I mean really- would you accept a software project where you're told when it has to be done, all the features in it with no changes, a fixed budget, and if it goes over you have to pay everything? Nobody would agree to that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It _is_ the worst idea.
AC has never driven highway 1. It's an insane place to put a high speed railroad. If built it would be 1/2 tunnels and 1/2 bridges.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Aircraft can't bring you city center to city center.
As planned, neither can this train.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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).
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.
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:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Again, the Acela Express IS profitable.
If you want to make an investor pitch based on cherry picking a single route, good luck. Amtrak is still a basket case.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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...
China, with less than half the GDP than the USA, is kicking your ass in high speed rail right now.
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.
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?
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.
... 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.