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California Will Not Complete $77 Billion High-Speed Rail Project (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday the state will not complete a $77.3 billion planned high-speed rail project, but will finish a smaller section of the line. "The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency," Newsom said in his first State of the State Address Tuesday to lawmakers. "Right now, there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to (Los Angeles). I wish there were," he said. Newsom said the state will complete a 110-mile (177 km) high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield. In March 2018, the state forecast the costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned that the costs could be as much as $98.1 billion.
California planned to build a 520-mile system in the first phase that would allow trains to travel at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour in the traffic-choked state from Los Angeles to San Francisco and begin full operations by 2033. Newsom said he would not give up entirely on the effort. "Abandoning high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it," he said. "And by the way, I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump."
California planned to build a 520-mile system in the first phase that would allow trains to travel at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour in the traffic-choked state from Los Angeles to San Francisco and begin full operations by 2033. Newsom said he would not give up entirely on the effort. "Abandoning high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it," he said. "And by the way, I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump."
>> would cost too much and take too long. There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency
That's usually a feature, not a bug, in government projects. How can you pay off your buddies if people can see who's getting paid?
Because EVERYONE wants to be in Merded!
The really sad part is it won't even make it to Shelbyville.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
Ironically, many of the cost overruns are for dealing with things like environmental impact, routing through areas that don't want it, then routing around those areas that have the political clout to get excluded, etc.
Why can China figure out how to construct 18,000 miles of high speed rail, and we can't even figure out how to connect LA to SF?
High speed rail... dark side of the moon... mass production of consumer goods... America is failing repeatedly, with or without Trump.
I see this as High Speed Rail is simply not in the mindset of Americans regardless of their political alignment. Perhaps how it got this far is something unusual. We have no problem of spending trillions on "infrastructure" in Iraq and Afghanistan with nothing to show for it, but trying to spend a small fraction of that ***here*** on our own country, everyone screams it's so expensive!
mfwright@batnet.com
create a contract that penalizes the other party for late delivery? If you give the contractor 5x the base price and still have nothing to show for it, you should be jailed.
Government contracts are not supposed to be an endless trough of money.
"In January 2017, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office said by several measures California is, indeed, a donor state, but just barely. It receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid"
So, it's about dead even. Since California based companies and individuals have written off so many state and local taxes on their federal income tax returns for so long, they effectively short out the federal government in favor of state and local taxes. Since the TCJA, there has been a cap on the SALT (state and local taxes) deductions you can make. So it will likely change in the future.
Before TCJA, if you made $100,000 a year and you lived in California, you paid to Uncle Sam less than if you made $100,000 a year and lived in Kentucky (since Kentucky had lower state and local taxes). In fact, California is the highest SALT state, so it paid the lowest to Uncle Sam, all else being equal.
Now, it's closer to normal.
But don't let \ stupid little things like facts keep you from getting angry.
The original route: Sacramento/LA. Why? California's two big population centers are LA and the SF Bay Area. That should have been the target route from the outset.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
As much of a fan of high speed rail as I am, this project from the beginning was plagued by many issues:
- Distance of SF-LA being just beyond the edge of air/rail travel decision break point
- Lots of intractable property rights issues along the route (and lack of political willingness to exert eminent domain for a more reasonable route)
- High required labor and engineering cost (union requirements)
- Backwards approach to do the easiest part / least useful segment first
- Management team that kept moving the target (or was deceived) on cost, geotechnical feasibility, political backing
As a result, I concluded that despite how good it would be as a showcase project, this was not anywhere near the top of the list of cost-effective things you would invest in to improve CA transportation issues. And now they've had to embrace reality.
I would even say, the whole thing should be canned rather than continuing to dump money into a stupid central valley rail that no one will use. Bakersfield to Modesto? Tell me who's going to take that train...
The worst thing is that this will set a bad example / leave people burned and resistant to trying it again. Sometimes, we really do need authoritarian-style government to clear out resistance when a good project is identified but individual interests bog it down.
whenever a taxpayer funded operation is, ahem, railroaded into poor planing, cost overruns and all the other excessive wastage. Burn that fucker to the ground and walk away from it. It's not worth another cent.
Every modern country I ever visited has extensive passenger rail systems that everybody uses. But we can't afford it.
Military adventures in the Middle east costing hundreds of billions? No problem. But no new infrastructure. That's socialism or something.
The problem is that there is no geographical representation of California. The coastal cities have 100% of the power, with the countryside east of the coast having zero voice. Well, except for Federal lawsuits.
We can look at things like the Salton Sea, where nothing is done about it until the mass fishkills are so great, LA smells it, then once people have to deal with the stank (people who actually have sway over the state), then stuff gets done. Or, the general water crisis where you have rice paddies on one side, perma-droughts on the other.
California should be split up. Let the coast be one state, let everything east of it be another. That way, someone might see something from the state government other than higher taxes, more middle fingers from Sacramento, and more feel good laws. It is amazing how little that state does, with the highest tax rates in the US, be it the highest income tax, highest property tax, and highest salex tax.
No wonder why hick towns like Austin get 300 Californians a day moving there, and there is a diaspora going on away from that state.
When a recession hits, where will that state get their income? They won't be touching the well-heeled people, and the proles are already taxed out, causing more people to flee.
CA's politics amaze me. Can the politicos do any more to run people out of that state?
Three words: Interstate Highway System.
It's not the lack of Chinese authoritarianism that's preventing us from making it work. It's our inability to align all our interests and resources to make it happen.
Back in 1956, we passed something called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. In 35 years, we constructed over 48,000 miles of dedicated highway, three times as much Chinese high speed rail in only double the time. How did it all come together? Simple: the threat of war. Eisenhower was inspired by the national highway system of Germany and how it served as vital military infrastructure for them during World War II. Investing in that infrastructure for the homeland would be a strategic military asset in case of invasion. So far, it's yet to be used that way, but it's contributed tremendous returns to our nation's GDP.
The only thing preventing us from making it happen is a lack of will.
You are confusing wealth with income. Most people become very wealthy when their investments, such as stocks, increase in value. While shares can provide yearly income in the form of dividends payed out by the company, the majority of the value resides in the shares themselves. Until the shares are sold it is not considered income nor does it get taxed, even then, if has been held for more then a year it only gets taxed at the max capital gain rate of %20. Amazon has never paid a dividend so if Bezo's didn't sell any shares (and ignoring other sources) his income would be just his salary of $82.000.
Too much traffic, easy fix, do it without spending any tax money, just strict regulation, enforcement and major penalties. How to reduce traffic, easy require all major new high rise construction to have the first series of floors as retail and the next series of floors as commercial and then a bunch of floors as residential. All new high rise construction and effectively distribute the flow of people, even live work and play in the one building. This forced through the entire city a 3D planned city. Retail with the most traffic for the first five floors and the commercial with reduced traffic the next five floor and then ten floors of residential, least traffic, as an example in terms of number of floors but the transition should be of similar height throughout in terms of noise transmissions, exposure and privacy and foot traffic flows in terms of elevated walkways from structure to structure, above street level traffic.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Here are the facts:
Paris to Marseille is a 482 mile drive, compared to 479 miles to Liechtenstein. Today I can buy a Ouigo TGV ticket for 35 euros that will take me from Paris to Marseille in 3h21min.
For comparison:
Compared to the developed world the US is doing poorly in this regard. We have no excuse for these failures other than incompetence and corruption.
> why on earth the project is not a multi-state and multi-nation venture
Because other states and countries don't want to waste billions and billions of dollars on something that isn't working?
The USA needs WAR to get them to pay for anything. I should have figured that the highway system was a form of military spending.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
By your standard of rail being 1800s technology, wheels on roads are 10th century B.C. technology. The neat thing about rail is that it stays on the "road" at 150 mph or more, regardless of weather conditions. It's also easy to power electrically, since steel rails provide a current return path with no worries about charging batteries or maintaining them.
The ideal system would actually be a hybrid of your system and rail -- driverless vehicles to bring passengers to stations, where shorter (2 or 3 car) driverless trains would run frequently between stations. Low-speed buses for shorter trips, higher-speed rail for longer hauls. Trains should be long enough to have a bathroom, some food service, ability to get up and walk around between stations, etc.
The main problem with "first floor retail" is that most downtown areas don't have blocks that are large enough. The next time you go to Best Buy, Target, or Walmart, note just how HUGE the store's footprint is... then compare that to the size of an average square block downtown. In most cities, you'd need at least two square blocks... three, after you add in the loading docks, ramps to the parking garage, required means of egress, at least some minimal first-floor lobby for the residential floors above, and service areas for things like trash. And most of the streetscape you end up with will be utterly and completely dead. At BEST, you'll end up with a streetscape that's 95% glass window with stuff behind it, but someone on the wrong side of the building might easily have to walk the equivalent of 2 or 3 current blocks just to get to the store's actual entrance. Retail stores, especially big-box stores, HATE having to deal with multiple entrances and exits... they want to funnel everyone through a single point, because it makes it easier to prevent shoplifting and reduces the cashier staffing demands.
For stores like Target and Walmart, spanning multiple floors is something they try to avoid at all costs. For a store like Walgreens or CVS, the second floor is where they stick the prescriptions and ostomy supplies. Even in mall anchor stores, you usually end up with a situation where the floors that open directly onto a major floor of the mall concourse get lots of foot traffic, and the remaining floors end up looking like a ghost town. In the US, at least, VERY few malls -- even in dense urban areas -- can pull off more than 3 stories before the additional floors look more like virtual ghost towns where they put the bridal stores, tuxedo rental places, movie theater lobby, storefront churches, and other places where people go as an intentional destination instead of casually walking by end up.
Downtown Miami illustrates this problem perfectly. As a matter of law and zoning, every single new skyscraper that's gotten built over the past 25 years has first-floor empty... most of which is in a state of perpetual vacancy because the spaces are too small, or the parking is too inadequate or expensive. In Chicago, there are skyscrapers with big-box stores occupying the basements... but even then, most of those buildings have at least one or two sides that are dead to pedestrians.
In Miami, you'd have a HELL of a time trying to convince a retailer like Walmart to build a store in a skyscraper's basement in downtown Miami, because their insurance costs would KILL them. No, it's not due to the water table... groundwater is a fact of life in almost EVERY big city. Dig a large 25 foot deep hole in London or lower Manhattan, and you'll find at LEAST as much groundwater as you'll encounter in Miami. The REAL problem is storm surge and/or storm-drain failure that leaves the street under a few inches of water for hours or days at a time. It might cause minimal damage to a flooded underground garage that's mostly just bare concrete that needs to drain and dry out, but would cause literally MILLIONS of dollars in damage to a flooded-out store like Walmart full of merchandise. Miami's storm drains fail ALL THE GODDAMN TIME, and half the time it's not even due to a "real" storm... it's because the county doesn't do proper storm-drain maintenance, so the storm drains get clogged with rotting vegetation & trash until we get a week or two of downpours that leave a random square mile with the streets and sidewalks under at least an inch or two of water. The problem is, it might only be an inch of water at the sidewalk, but that inch of water is enough to leave a basement retail store under literally 16-25 feet of water (because once the water gets high enough to pour into an opening, it's going to KEEP pouring in until the water level inside matches the water level outside).
Your supporting points don't actually support your thesis statement. Economic power != income.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I foresee no problem, no problem at all with issues like water rights in that case. No sir-ee!
Except that California is one of the wealthiest states with the highest wages, where as the poorer ones where most people are making under $50k are the ones that vote Republican, i.e. for tax and benefit cuts.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You probably meant "flouted", not "flaunted".
But when I say "fucktard", like I'm doing right now, that's exactly what I mean.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, they don't. Hyperloop doesn't exist, it's a theoretical project with some extremely limited proofs of concept built that, currently, don't even prove it can run faster than HSR. If it's viable at all it'll be 20 years or so before we can see it, and in the mean time it suffers ABSOLUTELY EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM THAT HSR DOES.
Yes, I said it. Remember how Musk pretended it was "cheaper" than HSR? He did that by connecting two points that were 50-100 miles away from LA and SF, and by only "connecting" (if you call building stations 50-100 miles away "connecting") those two cities. He also handwaved about the costs, and ignored the fact that many of the things he proposed such as some way of building cheaper viaducts would also improve the costs for HSR if they were actually practical and cost that little.
Add to that the reality that it's probably a horrible way to travel even if it works, and ultimately it's not easy to understand why so many people are for it, beyond misunderstanding it and/or having the classic American prejudice against HSR because it's what those damned furry-ners do.
Musk was never proposing Hyperloop because it was a good idea, he was proposing it because he's a fucking car manufacturer.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Elon Musk proposed a far better and cheaper plan and they ignored it.
Get back to us when he has his idea actually working and with actual cost figures - ones which he has not pulled out of his backside.
The idea that the 1% has all the power is a myth. The IRS tax stats are freely available for anyone to see and analyze. The 1% (everyone making approx $500k per year or more) only accounts for 19% of total income in the U.S. The vast majority of economic power in the U.S. (64% of all income) rests with those making $50k-$500k per year.
Who care about income? Wealth is where the power is.
The top 1% in net worth in the U.S. hold 40% of the nation's wealth. The bottom 50% in net worth of the U.S. population combined hold 1% of the nation's wealth.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (First paragraph and first chart.)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
rail/subway public transport is a technology who's time has come and gone. It requires too large of a footprint
Do you even know what a subway is? It is under the ground - footprint zero. As for surface rail, it requires a far smaller footprint than equivalent road. Each London Underground track for example can carry the equivalent of a three lane motorway, comparing both at full capapcity.
I find it amusing how a solution that works just fine the world over somehow can't possibly work in the US.
Based on 2107 numbers, if you confiscate all wealth of all 400, you would pick up $2.7 trillion, enough to run the US government for about two-thirds of one year.
Once.
Of course, there's the issue that virtually all of that wealth is in equities, which would have to be sold to covert to spendable dollars, and who are you going to sell $2T of stock to once you've just confiscated 100% of the wealth from the people who could afford to buy it?
The problem with your argument is that it fails to take into account marginal tax rates. While I agree with your point of view - there is a lot of overlap between our world views here - the facts are that you are confusing effective tax rates with top marginal tax rates. A 90% top marginal rate on income over $1M means that the lower brackets apply to the first $X of income. That 90% only kicks in against money after the first $1M. So if total taxable income is $1,000,001, that 90% marginal rate only applies to that single dollar.
Regardless, though, your argument is reinforced by this - it will pull in even less money than your argument referenced a few posts ago.
Bullshit. The railroad would have been cost effective. If the Chinese can make a line from Beijing to Shanghai cost effective so could you. Heck, the line to Urumqui was built and it's literally from nowhere to nowhere and twice as long as Beijing to Shanghai. The problem was typical California. NIMBYism and inflated right of way land costs.
Not in California, where every construction project comes with multiple lawsuits and environmental policies will bankrupt you before the first shovel hits the ground.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
> Why do the stores need to be so big?
The realities of 21st-century retail, if you want to compete against Amazon & Walmart without going broke.
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to buy a TV, you'd go to a small store downtown that sold nothing but TVs... often, a single brand of TVs. Distributors bought TVs from the manufacturer for $n, marked them up 100%, and sold them to local dealers for 2 x $n. Those local dealers marked them up another 100%, and sold them to consumers for 4 x $n.
Today, you go to Walmart or Best Buy. They're their own vertically-integrated distributor. They buy a TV from Samsung for $n, then turn around and sell it at a price that makes them a net profit of about $5 per TV... after turning the screws on Samsung and getting them to shave a few more dollars from the price Samsung wanted to charge in the first place. Half the time, a TV on sale at Walmart or Best Buy costs less than someone attempting to emulate the old dealer model would have paid the equivalent of to purchase the TV wholesale in the first place. Instead of trying to make a few hundred dollars from the sale of a TV, Walmart & Best Buy try to make the money by getting you to pay $75 for a 24-cent HDMI cable, buy a service contract you're unlikely to ever use, or purchase $2,000 worth of videogames, Blu-Ray discs, and whatever else they sell over the next few months. You're also spared having to deal with high-pressure salespeople who'd otherwise be trying to sell sand to Bedouins. You'll still have to swat down their attempts to sell you accessories, but at least they won't waste your time trying to talk you into buying an inferior TV just because it's what they were told to sell that week.
I personally *prefer* ambivalent salespeople who don't care what I buy, or even whether I buy it from them... when they aren't clueless, they tend to be fairly honest about pointing out things that aren't necessarily obvious from the marketing materials (like, "oh, you want a TV that can do 720p120 over HDMI? You'll want one of these three... but not this one, because the manufacturer fucked up its HDMI audio passthrough & DD+7.1 doesn't actually work properly... or this one, because their motion-interpolation algorithm sucks for 1080i60 live-action content"). As a practical matter, the salespeople at a store like Best Buy aren't "salespeople", so much as "bright high school and college students who are into whatever department they're working in, and will happily point out the flaws and warts of every TV in stock if you're nice to them".
Plus, every store you shop at involves standing in a different line to pay. It's a lot more convenient to shop at a 500,000 square foot Publix whose meat department is bigger than a typical grocery store was 50 years ago & where nearly every permutation of size and meat I might want is already packed, priced, and laid out for me to grab myself instead of having to wait in line. Plus a "chips" aisle with every permutation of type and flavor known to exist today, in a half-dozen sizes ranging from "individual single-serving package" to "multi-pack" to "normal bag" to "jesus god, where do I get one of the mini-forklifts to load it into my SUV?". Ditto for pasta sauce, breakfast cereal, and everything else. Corner grocery stores might be OK for buying a gallon of milk, but they simply can't offer the sheer breadth and depth of products as a modern suburban grocery store the size of an entire 1960s-era mall.
Hell, even though the dining room sizes have gotten smaller, have you seen just how HUGE an average new McDonalds is behind the counter? Or a busy Pizza Hut or Domino's? The Pizza Hut take out/delivery store by my house has literally four separate ovens and assembly lines, and averages 10-20 people waiting to pick up online on almost any random weekend evening. Sure, they could probably run four smaller locations... but being huge like that gives them the headroom they need to absorb random orders for 24 large pizzas for a bowling league, softball team, or o
That's the history of western American water rights law, wrapped up in one question.
In practice, it's cheaper to blow up a dam than build it. So the law is: If someone downstream is using the water, you can't divert it, because when it was allowed it led to literal range wars. e.g. LA's right to the Colorado river legally prevents Coloradans from collecting rainwater.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I find delicious irony in someone speaking sanctimoniously about "facts" in a discussion about tax legislation based on the idea of trickle down economics, and that slashing taxes for corporations results in higher wages for employees. What do they call that again? Voodoo economics? Have a great one, champ!