Slashdot Mirror
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 ?
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.
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
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)
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."
Trump's border wall will be paid by raising taxes on Mexico imports. They will indirectly pay for it.
It's funny how you think tariffs and taxes on products being imported into the US will be paid for by the people exporting the goods.
#DeleteChrome
And they don't care about building it to withstand earthquakes either.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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?
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.
Here in GA they were going to build a "Northern Arc," to complement the the I285 by-pass that circles around Atlanta. It would by-pass the city even farther away, as the metro area has grown way beyond the original by-pass. Anyway, the corrupt a-holes in charge at the time bought the land that would be near the exits... and then announced the plan about where the highway would run.
In an all-too-infrequent bout of sanity, the voters elected a new governor who immediately stopped the program.
Too bad that doesn't happen more often. But yes, I agree with an earlier poster - whatever the government says it will cost, you need to at least triple it, but expect it to be even higher.
What really bothers me is the politicians at the federal level are not subject to insider trading rules dealing with companies they are examining (either for contracts, or looking to sanction them for violations of something).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Not really - as soon as they announce the project (with the current spending estimates), all the property along the route immediately increases in value.
Do you truly believe this was totally unforeseeable? There is no possible way for them to have predicted it, and taken the price rises into account when budgeting? Let's say they look at 100 past projects, and 98 of them went WAY over budget because of "land price increases", then it is perfectly reasonable for them to just assume that land prices will not be a factor for new projects?
Or do you believe that they look at those 100 past projects, and realize that they made billions and billions by intentionally lowballing the initial bid and then demanding cost overruns, and decide that it is in their financial interests to do it again?
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).