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California Bullet Train Costs Soar To $77.3 Billion, Will Take 5 Years Longer To Complete
The California High-Speed Rail Authority announced today that the cost of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would total $77.3 billion, an increase of $13 billion from estimates two years ago, and could potentially rise as high as $98.1 billion. They also said the earliest trains could operate on a partial system between San Jose and the farming town of Wasco would be 2029, five years later than the previous projection. Los Angeles Times reports: The disclosures are contained in a 114-page business plan that was issued in draft form by the rail authority and will be finalized this summer in a submission to the Legislature. The rail authority has wrestled with a more than $40-billion funding gap, which would increase sharply under the new cost estimates. The biggest immediate driver of the cost increase has been in the Central Valley, where the rail authority is building 119 miles of track between Wasco and Merced. The authority disclosed in early February that the cost of that work would jump to $10.6 billion from an original estimate of about $6 billion. Roy Hill, one of the senior consultants advising the state, told the rail authority board, "The worst-case scenario has happened." In its 2014 business plan, the rail authority optimistically projected that it could begin carrying passengers in just seven years. But the warning signs of uncontrolled cost growth had already started mounting then, even though until this year the rail authority has vehemently denied that it was facing a problem. The project began having trouble buying property for the route almost immediately after it issued its first construction contract in 2013.
... and autonomous vehicles.
Goofus starts a $100B fixed rail project that will be ready about 5 years after Gallant's work renders it completely obsolete.
Raise taxes to pay for it...
This appears to be part of a general trend, transit costs in the US have been massively subject to "cost disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease. However, the effect is much more pronounced for mass transit in the US than in Europe or elsewhere http://trrjournalonline.trb.org/doi/abs/10.3141/2541-01?journalCode=trr. While there are some arguments that how the US treats trains has advantages over Europe http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847, the cost difference in new ones is gigantic. In this particular case, it is combining very badly with other issues, including the insanely high prices of land in California.
...and the victims of "The Big Dig", we feel your pain.
I'm shocked! Next on Gov. Moonbeam's list: building a non-stop bullet train from Mexico to Cali.
The official web site of the proposed Texas bullet train, from Houston to Dallas, says that the Texas project will cost "over 12 billion" and start construction in 2019. Like the California project, the Texas project has been plagued by delays and cost increases. I wonder who succeed first, or at all.
$78B? OMG. That is like almost 8% of the cost of the Iraq war.
No way we could ever fund something that big.
I've been to a lot of different countries, and it's always ironic how much better their mass transit is than in the U.S. I have rarely had to rent a car or even take a taxi to get anywhere I want to go - outside of the U.S. And it's very rare for me to have to take a bus in another country. Train go everywhere, except in the country I live in.
Given the insane amounts we spend on airports and aircraft, and roads, there just isn't any justification for not having the good trains they have in other countries. Consider little Switzerland, and its incredible transit systems. Take the train from London to Paris. Nothing you would see in the U.S.
So-called "smart roads" (which aren't going to work except for those leased vehicles with locked-down hoods) and autonomous vehicles might work for urban transit eventually. For inter-city routes they are still molasses-slow and inefficient.
And I am not really sanguine about the hyperloop. The safety issues make my mind boggle, and companies are having trouble even getting a model to go fast in one.
Bruce Perens.
Exactly no one with any brains is surprised. This is government working the way it always does, badly.
Right. The Interstate highway system was such a complete disaster. And who could ever forget the mistake called Hoover dam. The power grid and water system never did do what it was supposed to. Private enterprise and the free market were the only reason we had no air carrier fatalities for 10 years and don't get me started on the U.S. Army. A high-school football team could probably push them over.
Too bad we didn't just leave it all up to AC. What were we thinking.
That is half the net worth of Bezos! That is a lot of money, right? He could only buy two.
Kennedy - To the Moon! Obama - Let's build trains!
What the hell are they spending 60 Billion dollars on in a single rail line? Are they laying tracks from solid gold, set with sapphires? This is nuts! In any other country of the same size you would probably build half a national railway infrastructure from scratch for that kind of money.
God dam! For that price I'm thinking they could have done all the necessary R&D to build a hyperloop one, and had the thing built. Well, Elon Musk might have anyway.
P.S. Yes, I believe he is a modern day hero. The only reason the alt-right doesn't is because he is going to show just what solar energy can do.
One of the older Reason Magazine articles that detailed how this project was a boondoggle from the start (and the Democrats knew it):
http://reason.com/blog/2016/06/28/the-political-class-knew-california-high
It's also been a nightmare for property owners along the route for this expensive but imaginary train, thanks to eminent domain
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-land-problems-20180204-htmlstory.html
"The project began having trouble buying property for the route almost immediately after it issued its first construction contract in 2013."
davecb@spamcop.net
Theres no way this is better than simply taking an airplane between the cities. The whole thing is a boondoggle. Cancel the whole thing. Probably a racket here, some Democrat giving kickbacks to a contractor. Would be better to subsidise an express bus service for people needing a lower cost option. Florida wanted to build something similar. It was realized it would be a wasteful boondoggle. It was cancelled by Rick Scott, the wisest decision he ever made.
Are the rails made of solid platinum?
it's under 400 miles and at $78B thats almost $200M PER MILE.
That has got to be at least a 90% profit margin on the main contractors.
While the Interstate system is a great success story, it spawned the very hurdles that CAHSR is trying to overcome. Highways were built by:
1. Siezing and demolishing everything they *might* need to use for a RoW
2. Completely ignoring anything resembling environmental impact
The only reason we have our successful system now is that by the time the legal system caught up and mechanisms to stop the "destruction" were put in place, most of it was already built.
Engineering, labor and materials costs have mostly kept up with inflation. At this point that's maybe 20% of the total cost of this project; the rest is in fighting lawsuits.
Just to Slashdottify this, an AI would have learned by now to not try high speed rail in the US ...
..shocked I tell..
Wait, no I'm not. This thing is the boondoggle of our generation and has been since the beginning.
If the legislature gave two shits about the citizens of California they would cut their losses and scrap the project. They don't and they won't.
Actually, California's train project has more in common with the Soviet's Hero Projects.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Righto. What did US private enterprise do to the electric trams that had spread across the US by a century ago? They ganged together (look closely at L.A. for one example) to get them destroyed and replaced with buses, selling engines and tires and ... and getting people to abandon them and proliferate private ownership of vehicles, and sell leaded gas. Then they got the government to foot the bill for the Interstate system (socializing the cost, privatizing the profits).
Fast forward a century and what is replacing the carbon-spewing traffic jams? Electric trams, now known as 'light rail'. NOT being paid for by private interests but by the taxpayers. Was that the best possible solution for modern mass transit? NO, but it was best for all of the private contractors ... in the same way that NASA paid out way more than SpaceX. Follow the money ... always.
'Studies' make the costs go up. 'Inventions' make the costs go down. Your choice, folks.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
It's taken longer to dredge a South Carolina harbor 5 feet deeper to accomodate the upcoming supercargo ships for the Panamax expansion than it took Teddy Roosevelt to dig the original Panama Canal itself.
When an empire stops keeping the trade routes open and instead turns to preying on its own people, it falters, and the center of empire moves to the growing regions on the edge.
It matters not how good the intentions. If the net effect is the same as massive corruption, oh well.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They have to go back.
(Immigrants? No, Californians.)
Once selfdriving electric cars become a thing. There's literally no purpose for this boondoggle anymore.
Nevada should get it together and build a 30 minute (or so) bullet train between Barstow and Las Vegas. (Barstow is the last real city between Riverside County/Los Angeles and Las Vegas).
People would flock to LV if it meant not having a 4+ hour drive there and an 8 hour drive back. Or an airport experience that's twice as long as the actual flight.
After the LV people have to expand the tracks for the second time to deal with the heavy demand, they'd get around to making a second line to Sacramento or so. Then people from San Fran could get on the train there, change in LV, arrive in Riverside, and there you go.. And it would probably be a few years faster than California's plan and not operate at a loss.
Have they figured out how to get from Bakersfield to Los Angeles yet? Last I heard they punted on that decision until sometime after 2022... So we can move people from Fresno to Bakersfield, great! But still no plan to connect to the second largest metropolitan area in the US.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well, the army has lost 5 wars this century.
Would the riders/economic benefit of such a railway ever support the interest payments on the billions? I'm skeptical on that point.
How about we invest $80B instead in "virtual presence" and better networking technology, so that people can stay home and their avatars can go to work, and business travel becomes unnecessary and archaic?
I think California has the wrong vision. Instead of making travel cheap, California should work on developing tech to make travel obsolete.
--PeterM
CA's regular transportation needs some serious help. Roads are falling apart and have faded lines. Because cars got more efficient, there's less gas tax revenue to fix them. Fix stuff actually used first rather than invent needs.
Table-ized A.I.
There are approximately 37 million legal citizens in California, You could have just let them keep an extra $2,645 in their pocket and they can decide on the best and most economical way for them to travel rather then some fantasy train.
...you don't know politics. I suspect the costs to soar even higher than this estimate and will take 3x as long.
[a] As projected costs were rising, the decision was made to eliminate half the rails, so instead of there being a pair of tracks that would allow northbound and southbound trains to operate simultaneously in the corridor, there will be only one track.
[b] Due to the projected costs and the need to fool the public into supporting it, the decision was made to start at a rural point north of LA and not reach all the way to San Francisco. Seven years from now they claim they'll begin service between San Jose and BAKERSFIELD. Yup. LOTS of people need THAT commute. The idea is that once they start operating that line, the sunk cost fallacy will kick-in and the taxpayers will be willing to cough up many billions more to expand the line and make it useful.
[c] Due to projected costs, they decided to cut in half the number of trains they'll build and operate.
[d] To save costs and speed the initial build, they are planning to electrify a bunch of the existing rail system and route the "high speed" trains on those newly electrified segments, but this imposes a speed limit because OLD RAILS (duh!) so the system will be limited to 110mph (some people drive their CARS that fast when they are out in the middle of nowhere). it's certainly NOT a "bullet train". Of course, by using existing surface lines and rights-of-way they incur the burdens of train track crossings, risks of associated accidents, etc which another reason this will never go much faster than an Amtrak Acela and certainly never compare favorably to something like a TGV train. Every time an Amtrak hits somebody who walked on the tracks or crossed in front of a train, activity is halted for many hours for the investigation - worse if the impact is with a vehicle.
[e] There have been proposals to build a Hyperloop in CA instead, but the Brown administration has connections to "Big Rail" and insists on decades old slow "high speed trains", particularly for the contracts they can let to their friends for the heavy construction of conventional rail systems.
Did other countries pay comparable money for bullet trains?
BTW: the price will likely keep going up. Figure around $300B by the time it's finished.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He is also probably a California government employee. Wait until Goofus finds out his state is broke and Jerry Brown isn't going to give him his pension OR a train.
Wait until those 12 figures in unfunded liabilities come home to roost. Commiefornia is going to look like Detroit.
This doesn't even include the added steel cost of the proposed tariffs.
the roads are falling apart prices of shit nobody can afford.
Away wars that were deemed worth abandoning not unconditional surrender.
Free passes for CA public employees as part of pension , compensation to help fund... ;/ or some other wacky plan because a boondoggle ... which should be re considered
What I don't get - It isn't decided which train system to use but construction is already under way?
America DOES spend billions on keeping the trade routes open - for other countries. The US Navy is a subsidy for the whole world that American citizens see little benefit from. Could BRICS countries have risen if not for the Americans paying for them? But when it comes to spending at home, suddenly the purse is closed. That's globalism for you.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
An even better example might be the Erie Canal which was built by New York State in the 1820s. NY built it after private capital refused to take the chance. The Erie Canal opened up settlement of mid-continent North America a couple of decades before the railroads got to be competetive. It cut travel time from the coast to the Great Lakes from a month to nine days. It turned places like Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo into boom towns It cemented New York City's position as the nation's leading port. And it actually paid for itself.
That said, To me California' HSR project iooks like an (expensive) solution in search of a problem. I lived in California much of my life and I've also travelled a bit and lived overseas. My guess is that California probably needs a transportation system based on personal transportation, not -- with a few exceptions -- public transit. But maybe "cars" don't need need to be so big, intrusive, and generally obnoxious -- at least not in the Bay Area, LA Basin and San Diego. In the hinterland -- say Mono County -- I can't imagine what you'd replace them with.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
California could buy and distribute 155 million $50 airline tickets.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/cost-of-high-speed-rail-in-china-one-third-lower-than-in-other-countries
> ... "China’s high speed rail with a maximum speed of 350 km/h has a typical infrastructure unit cost of about US$ 17-21m per km, with a high ratio of viaducts and tunnels, as compared with US$25-39 m per km in Europe and as high as US$ 56m per km currently estimated in California" ...
Who are you going to sell your shit to if you cany export?
The US only acts in its own interests, youre jusr a dribbling idiot RWNJ.
Awww, useless fat virgin fuck from 4 chan is triggered, sad.
Not really. Not if both end stations have electric cars for rent that only need a battery range of 40 to 50 miles.
Which is actually a real-world situation in switzerland, with the biggest car-sharing cooperative (Mobility) also having cars available at trains stations, including electric cars in bigger cities (Renault Zoe - currently equipped with the smaller 125km range battery, progressively getting upgraded to the bigger 250km).
This is currently successful commercially.
no need for fast charging infrastructure either. Rail plus electric cars is a beautiful combination
Actually, due to how train work, you happen to have a fast charging solution available almost for free at the train station.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It was probably a super bowl or Olympic planning committee that made the decision.
Once selfdriving electric cars become a thing. There's literally no purpose for this boondoggle anymore.
How many cars can sustain 200 miles per hour for 4 hours? And electric, self driving cars still take up far more space per passenger than trains. Electric and self driving cars aren't magic pixie dust that make everything work.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Expensive train will cost more and take longer than predicted!
-Ric Romero
The problem is clearly that the workforce involved is not diverse enough. Perhaps Caliphornia should pass a bill requiring at least 40% of the workers to be transsexual and 40% to be homosexual. The ideal worker for them is a gay, black, trans pygmy. I hope they go looking in San Francisco for the ideal workers.
That's the benefit of a one-party system that gives no fucks about citizen complaints.
I personally love large engineering projects, but they need to have a good cost/benefit analysis, be well built and be finished on time/budget. In the US (maybe its common internationally?) though we seem to blow massive amounts of money on underwhelming/badly built/poorly designed infrastructure that takes forever to finish. A (small) example of this sits less than a mile from my house, almost a half million was spent replacing a bridge a few years ago that itself wasn't 20 years old (the steel beams were rusting out). That's all well and good if it was necessary but the creek it crosses isn't more than 5' wide with little flow, a large box culvert would have cost a quarter of what was spent, took a third the time to put in place and lasted longer than any bridge. Californias High Speed Rail project seems to be the epitome of a wildly expensive project with little return, The ridership estimates have steadily been decreasing even as the cost projections have been skyrocketing. For the cost of the HSR project they could have repaired the entire road system and had money left over to bolster public transit (buses, automated taxis, etc).
The city did an expansion of "Mopac" and the cost/time overrun was crazy. Now the sound walls have a problem. A report just came in that the drainage tunnel the city put in downtown which was 161 million in the end quoted as 26 mil is structurally deficient. The did not put rebar in so buildings over it may collapse. And who can forget the boston big dig. Government has somehow become incompetent to build things on time/budget. Gov needs to start putting teeth into contracts. If you miss on quality/time/price we will recover costs and if that means that it takes out a large construction firm, so be it. Bid accurately. Today gov just throws them more money and when they bid contractors know it. The city is looking at burying 35 thru town and they actually believe it will cost only 2 bil. My guess is 50 to 100 bil. But hey whats a few bil between friends.
Iâ(TM)m confused. Is this sarcasm? It sounds like it, but it also correctly points out that the Hoover dam was a huge disaster.
What was your point?
The train system will cost $10bln the rest is on the insane cost of labour all public works in California has. Prevailing wage law ($40 / hour to be a cleaner on public works anyone?) and the union are sucking up the rest.
Zero suprises in a public works project inflating like this. The question is, how much will they sink into it before the whole project goes belly up?
This is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.
Democrats and other leftists are obsessed with trains for some reason.
The Bullet Train will *NEVER* be completed. Ever.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Your contempt for Uber drivers doesn't change the fact that Governor Moonbeam's Spiffy Boondoggle Express costs about as much as it would take to fly 700 million people from LAX to SFO on a typical budget airline. There are 39 million people in this state. If Moonbeam is allowed to continue, then we will each pay the equivalent of about 17 trips to line the pockets of Moonbeam and his cronies instead of spending that money in pursuit of our own goals.
If passenger rail still made any sense economically, it wouldn't take tax money to make it happen.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is government working the way it always does, badly.
Once you realize that the purpose of this project is to loot the taxpayers for the benefit of Moonbeam and his friends, you'll see that government is doing precisely what it was always intended to do.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So your theory is that private enterprise is responsible for every poor decision the government makes? Therefore we need what, more government deciders running more things?
It sounds like you have your causation and solution a little bit backwards, there....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
At this point CA should just start building a teleporter. It will be cheaper and has about the same chance of being completed.
The only reason we have our successful system now is that by the time the legal system caught up and mechanisms to stop the "destruction" were put in place, most of it was already built.
You say that like it's a good thing. It sound's trite, but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. We used to know and accept this, now we are paralyzed into inaction. The courts are an incredibly BAD place to balance cost against benefit.
(Opinion)
You see, it's really not that simple, because you need to make sure that all tracks use the same gauge and we didnt do that when we put the tracks down the first time. In fact, its also a common problem in Europe as some countries operate using "non-standard" gauges for track. In some places, the differences are small and within tolerable limits, like Finland.......but in most cases, the trains simply cant go on the tracks.
So, the statement works as a generalization but really, each inch of track and transfer need to be assessed to determine what upgrades, if any, are possible and necessary. The use of narrow gauge track in most of the Midwestern and Western US mean that you either need to re-lay all that track or re-engineer these trains you want to order.
(Evidence)
The vast majority of North American railroads are standard gauge (4 ft 8 12 in/1,435 mm). Exceptions include some streetcar, subway and rapid transit systems, mining and tunneling operations, and some narrow-gauge lines particularly in the west, e.g. the isolated White Pass and Yukon Route system, and the former Newfoundland Railway.
Most railways in Europe use the standard gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8 12 in). Some countries use broad gauge, of which there are three types. Narrow gauges are also in use.
Standard gauge was favored for railway construction in the United States, although a fairly large narrow-gauge system developed in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Utah. Isolated narrow-gauge lines were built in many areas to minimize construction costs for industrial transport or resort access, and some of these lines offered common carrier service. Outside Colorado, these isolated lines evolved into regional narrow-gauge systems in Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Hawaii, and Alaska.
You could have a school with a capacity of 100,000 where the average student had a BSc/BA by 18 and 15% had PhDs by then, and teachers and researchers were paid a decent salary, and run it for 40 years on the same money. That includes the cost of building it. The benefit to the economy would be infinitely greater than the train system, which should have been built for far, far less. Maybe set the design of its replacement to the kids.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The first section being built through drought ravaged Central Valley farmland may be over time and budget, but they'll make it up when they get into the much more reasonably priced urban centers at either end.
There's a time to give fucks, and a time to withhold them. The USA gives too many, China gives too few. Europe and Japan seem to have struck the right balance; we need to see where we went wrong.
It all depends on what you focus on. The US uses rails where they make the most sense (for cargo) and planes where they make sense (people).
The US handed all passenger rail traffic off to a government outfit called Amtrak many years ago, and then spun that off into a supposedly commercial company that gets huge subsidies. Unfortunately, that scheme gave Amtrak certain monopoly legal control over all passenger rail service in the US and like any monopoly Amtrak got fat, dumb, and happy blocking all innovation and competition.
For cargo, however, the US maintained its older commercial competative arrangements. As a result, the natural tendency of market economics and money flowing to where it's most-efficiently used did its job and the result is that the US moves an absolutely astonishing amount of goods with an extremely reliable delivery schedule over its immense rail system with an amazing safety record and a relatively tiny workforce - and does it so well and reliably and efficiently that most people are not even aware it is happening. People who are interested and have some spare time to burn should educate themselves on the matter. Here's a couple of starting points: the Bailey Yard, the Bailey Yard 'hump' in action, the ever-increasing freight 'ton-miles' in the US system, and in case you think the Bailey yard is an isolated thing, consult wikipedia's List of rail yards and note how much of that list is within the US compared to so many countries whose rail systems are presumed superior simply because of a few fast passenger trains.
Trains are obsolete for the US. The future is automated, convoyed electric automobiles driving at 120+ mph. And that future will be here before the CA bullet train. The technology's inevitable, just a matter of time.
Going, say, from LAX to SFO is 380 miles, so call it 3.25 hrs @ 120 mph, realistically 3.5 - 4.0 to allow for slower urban traffic at each end. Faster in the future as the tech improves. Hell, we already drive 80 - 85 on that stretch of road most of the time.
Cars convoying almost bumper-to-bumper can be impressively energy efficient, especially electric ones, and they don't travel when they're empty. Vehicle efficiency just keeps going up and up. Speaking of schedules, individual cars don't have 'em. They leave when it's convenient for you and run door to door. Don't have a car? Take a 120 mph convoying bus, Uber, or Uber Pool.
Look at the numbers: trains aren't that energy-efficient per passenger mile IRL since they don't usually run full. They're also a very inefficient way to use land if you don't happen to already own the rights of way. Trains have high recurring costs: they require crew, people at the stations, management, sales & marketing, parking, their own dedicated maintenance operation, etc, etc. Maintaining RRs is very expensive, especially to bullet-train standards.
We already have the real estate to do convoying. A reserved lane on the I-5 would do the trick. We already pay to maintain that road quite nicely, so no extra recurring cost there. If you want to get fancy, widen the I-5 to add a special lane for convoyed vehicles for pennies on the dollar we're spending for the bullet train.
Which would you prefer? i) Sit down in your autonomous car, work or sleep *uninterrupted* for 3 - 4 hours and you're there, or ii) Shop for dececently-priced tickets, drive to station stressed because you're late as usual, go thru security, hang around waiting room, board the train and find a place, work or sleep for a while, find transportation to your final destination. Don't forget, you're messing with your luggage the whole while.
We're going to end up implementing this, train or no train, if only to relieve commuter-traffic congestion. It's just a matter of time. Seeing as bullet-trains are 50-year investments, does this train make any sense at this stage of technology?
I lived in Japan for two years. Loved the trains and other mass transit, but the HUGE difference is that Japanese cities are fundamentally pedestrian cities. Once you get off the train at the appropriate stop you can WALK anywhere you need to go. Japanese and European cities evolved as pedestrian/horse cities, US cities did not. This will be a difficult problem to solve and it needs to be fixed with the zoning first. How many bedroom communities are there with virtually zero industrial, commercial or even retail? How many commercial districts have significant residential? Until you solve the problem of needing a car once you get there, trains are going to be the second choice of travel.
Sheldon, you're raising an objection that is not relevant to high speed train operation. Tracks and right-of-way have to be rebuilt for high speed, such as reducing curve radii, in any case.
When you take the regular train from Barcelona into France, it stops at the old pre-EU border between Portbou and Cerbère for about a half hour of people running around outside the train and hammering on the wheels. What they're doing is changing the train gauge from the broad Spanish standard to the narrower EU standard. This has not stopped the Spanish AVE bullet train system from being the longest in the world outside China.
My Kingdom For An Edit Button: ...increasing curve radii.
What security? You currently board the 150mph Boston-NYC-DC trains without all that nonsense -- this isn't changing anytime soon. No x-ray, no metal detector, no shoe carnival. Even less need for security if Calexit happens and California withdraws from the endless wars that have been making people hate the US for the past 70 years.
Trains have two major advantages:
(1) They can be powered on the fly, from the tracks and/or overhead lines. No need for millions of environmentally nasty batteries which may or may not end up being recycled.
(2) Guidance/keeping on the "road"is mechanical and more reliable than a computer in a self-driving car will ever dream of being. Rolling friction of steel-to-steel is also much lower than rubber to concrete.
Also, they tend to be maintained to high standards. All it takes is a part falling off one vehicle to turn a "train" of self-driving cars going bumper-to-bumper at 120mph into a large deadly pileup.
Hyperloop, as originally envisioned, is like the privately-funded Texas rain project: ABOVE GRADE.
When you place the track/tube on pillars above the ground you do not need to buy all the land along the route, you just need the dirt where the columns are and the right-of-way to be up in the air above the other dirt along the way (which in addition to being far cheaper is also far less objectional to the affected land owners. Consider the track in a rural area. In the Texas or Hyperloop scheme, the farmer/rancher can keep using most of his land, can farm under the track, easily operate vehicles between parts of his land on either side of the track and so forth. In the California model, the rancher/farmer loses a solid strip of land and also gets huge permanent inconveniences getting between what remains of his land on one side of the route and his land on the other side of the route.
The California scheme of surface-level rails is the worst possible option for private land owners and therefore is the one that naturally attracts the most protest and legal action - all while being the slowest performing and the most likely to have crashes with fatalities. It will mix speeding car speed trains with slow trains on the same rails and then temp collisions at numerous crossings with pedestrians and surface vehicles. Jerry Brown chose the stuck-on-stupid model of big government offensive infrastructure, and without a single positive feature (other than political graft) to justify all the negatives. It will be most expensive, least safe, slowest, and more dangerous while offending the most people.
The California mess was not just 100% predictable, it WAS in fact predicted over and over and the stupidity of the thing was part of the inspiration for Musk's Hyperloop (which governor Jerry "moonbeam" Brown lacked the inspiration and forward-thinking to embrace).
Security checks: sooner or later trains'll have their own 9/11 on US soil. Stuff happening in far-off lands is one thing, but a single major US incident is all it'll take. Security checks will then become imperative just to get people back to riding the trains.
In California, the majority of people have cars. I'd guess the rate of car ownership is over 90% for the top 90% of San Francisco - LA travellers. Those nasty cars & batteries are going to be produced whether people take their cars or the train to travel North-South.
Rails are far from foolproof. Trains are currently only 10x safer per mile than human-guided cars. This will improve very significantly with automation, But forget all that: people have long ago made up their minds that auto safety is acceptable.
Note that the quality of train maintenance has its ups & downs, depending on availability of money due to sporadic budget cuts, ridership, recency of accidents, subsidies, government policy, etc.
At 100+ mph, rolling resistance of rubber vs. steel is the least of your efficiency concerns. Air resistance is well over an order of magnitude more important. The big efficiency for rail in CA is ridership, and a 75% empty train cannot be efficient. The "build it and they will come" gamble sure hasn't panned out for the LA subway!
It's a safe assumption that autonomous cars will be networked very soon. I fully expect that network to allow exchanging some kind of maintenance info or other proxy for reliability. I don't know about you, but I'd instruct my car to never join any convoys with substandard vehicles in it. Likewise, I'd expect a pack would get to decide on which other cars will be allowed to join it.
Large-scale pileups? Like train derailments? Doubtful. (a) You only need 10 - 15 cars in a pack to get almost all your efficiency. Obviously you limit pack size to make them generally more manageable & also limit pileups, especially when the tech is young. Packs are intentionally separated by some distance for the same reasons. (b) Our current understanding of freeway pileups is not useful in this context. Convoying functions of the cars will act to greatly limit the extent of any pileup. Don't forget, we're discussing cars with very fast "reflexes." And they're all networked -- not watching the tail lights of the car in front of them. Let's say a car in the middle of the pack misbehaves. Or danger increases for any reason. Every car in the network knows instantly. This allows cars at the rear to very quickly brake in a coordinated manner, and the pack spreads apart almost instantly.
Vegas? So last century.
Casinos are everywhere, should be even more common, no reason for Indians to have exclusive rights.
Vagas is a shithole, just a bigger, even shittyier version of Reno.
CA should make gambling legal, everywhere. Close Vegas down. Keep the taxes in state.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Okay, my estimate is that they will have the first part done by 2050 at a cost of 200 Billion. They will fund this monster with increased property taxes (not that California has had enough people moving to other states), and of course, legalized pot will be taxed a little heavier, to right around $1000 per ounce. Once again bringing pot trafficking from Mexico via illegal methods back. Meanwhile, a couple hundred thousand people will continue to be homeless, just like the good little socialists want it. The train project does have a name "The Venezuela Solution". I only hope that California is no longer a part of the US at that time.
Train security: there have been incidents on trains in the US. Rail security is still a bad joke, fortunately.
Outside the US, in Madrid, they x-ray luggage before boarding high-speed trains. But the line moves quickly -- the level of security is comparable to 1980s airlines. No big deal. They're not concerned about hijacking, only about large bombs or guns, since the driver's cab is separate from the rest of the train, and they'd just cut the overhead line power if someone "stole" a train.
Same with the Chunnel trains, where they check passports and x-ray luggage due to border security. Fast, easy, and not stupid compared to airlines.
As far as cars in a pack, it would be very difficult to maintain a following distance of a meter or so in all road conditions without ever hitting. A steel coupler between train cars, does that job wonderfully, without worrying about friction differences on the road, objects on the road, failure of a car ahead causing a rear-ender that cascades through the pack, etc.
BTW - the idea is not to get rid of cars. Just to relegate them to shorter trips, where they can be electric and not lug around a large battery, and where they can take their time recharging.
Your post smells of tech hubris.
Hubris? I'll thank you to skip the personal stuff, though I'll admit I thought the same thing about the idea of soft-landing rocket boosters with folding legs. On a rolling and pitching barge.
However, I'll point out that several companies are demonstrating (Tesla claims to be actually selling) exactly this for interstate 18-wheelers. They will make this work; the payoff is just too huge.
Note that there's a whole continuum between "shorter" and "longer" trips. Flying LA to NYC is a clear-cut win, but with any scheduled mass transit there's a whole set of tradeoffs due to the fixed overheads and allowances for delays between legs involved in actually going door to door. Even flying commercial jets where the actual flight takes only 1 hour, I have to leave my house in LA well before 6 to reliably make a 10 AM meeting in San Jose. Yet, it's not quite a 5 hour drive. And those 4+ hours are shot into little pieces. That might be different if I could afford to fly private, but an autonomous car will certainly be within my budget before too long.
Hubris. An unmanned rocket booster can plop in the ocean one out of 100 landings and still be economical. A car full of people can't crash that often and still be useful.
Should be significantly shorter than a commercial jet flight. Boarding will be 10-15 min at most. Trains will run every 30 minutes if NYC-DC is any guide. You'd have at most a 45-min wait with a 2:00 to 2:15 travel time from LA to SJ, and no taxiing and waiting for a gate on either end.h
Hubris? Nah... Reusable rocket boosters landing on retractable stilts -- on a pitching & rolling barge -- now, THAT'S tech hubris. Silly, unrealistic 1940's pulp science fiction. It'll never, ever happen.
Seriously, several real manufacturers have announced (and Tesla claims to be actually selling) convoying 18-wheelers. They will make it work 'coz the payoff is too huge to ignore.
The trailing trucks just contain cargo and will be driverless. The booster is just a booster. Neither will be tragic (in the human sense) if they crash.
Golly! Who could have predicted that?
Anyone who knows the meaning of the word "boondoggle" and can cite an example.
If it were possible, I would have bet on this happening.
But I'm sure politicians have made that illegal. For some reason.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
and go with SkyTran instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran