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How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

43 points by phillypham 4y ago

phillypham 4y ago
Unlocked link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSFUbCibIRp8spxmHi__Vxr01w3__IyjQUi5PwuhQGYGB_wLVYq5ie9o4xHKbWNpFevcJdcBF89V-bQZrWhX65dyNgogEKCE47tm6B2o9hZmRGO1nqTKvM2DlcaIvyrGx-k-NaDXtWaTb0HIgcx134scwLSHc0nAJzqnHGuZ3y4M-ia9nXsYmMG9GMCqavPDoCAF9OcGEZnzf6go2WuJfXlLDjILWquJAIEgJVwWwHD4o6n086dhcJNsVIK3-ShYjc8H8irgVYXd6ZcZOp95qMNxAUGj-LjYmmQ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mintaka5 4y ago
  or just turn off scripts =)
- mintaka5 4y ago
  telnet works too =)
rayiner 4y ago
> Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes. I received some good advice a long time ago, which is that don’t spend too much time beating your head over your weaknesses, because then you’ll be spending your life focusing on what you’re bad at instead of what you’re good at. I feel like Americans should do this about trains and transit. We can’t do it. Just let it go. Find some other outlet that harnesses our strengths as a society instead of playing into all of our weaknesses.
- elgenie 4y ago
  Being able to build infrastructure is a core state/social capacity that has to be improved; there's nothing special about trains. There's also no alternative, because roads, bridges, pipes, water filtration plants, transmission lines, fiber, power plants, refineries, etc. are all impacted by the exact same forces. America did a spectacular job of redesigning society around maximizing car usage and continues to subsidize that pattern of land and resource use.
egberts1 4y ago
There is always that available $54 billion surplus of the California state government budget. #headduck
_fat_santa 4y ago
Big infrastructure projects I feel like is where America's democratic system starts to fall apart, and we honestly need a better solution. It seems that in the US we want both good infrastructure but also to have out hands and inputs in every project. We all need to collectively understand that you can have one or the other but not both. That new rail project may not go down the exact route you want but realize that if you start suggesting changes, it will never go down the route you want because it will never be built. This rail project could have been completed years ago if political leaders didn't always change the plan to benefit themselves.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  I used to live in Chicago. In my old neighborhood, there is a right-of-way reserved for future high-speed rail. Most of it is now “tunnel” because high rises and stores have built out around it, taking all the space except that reserved portion. The grocery store has a parking deck cantilevered over the right of way; a high rise literally has a tunnel through it, etc. it looks crazy in the present, but that’s what planning ahead looks like. The US can do big infrastructure projects. It is happening all over the place. You just don’t notice because nobody is writing about non-failures.
  - pasttense01 4y ago
    The infrastructure projects being done take much longer and cost a great deal more (even after adjusting for inflation) than a few decades ago.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Can you give an example of successful recent (say, from last 30 years) passenger rail project that, unlike your Chicago one, actually exists? I mean, it is easy to set out space for project in advance, it’s actually building it that is the hard part.
    - relwin 4y ago
      $2.1 billion 10 mile light rail extension, completed last year: https://www.sdmts.com/inside-mts/current-projects/uc-san-diego-blue-line-trolley-extension https://www.sdmts.com/inside-mts/current-projects/uc-san-die...
ncmncm 4y ago
Article misses the point that the cost and schedule overruns are really the whole point of the project. A project's nominal purpose -- train, tunnel, nuke plant -- is just there to fend off pressure to pull the plug. Sunk-cost fallacy keeps the money coming. Solar and wind megaprojects seem to avoid this fate by a combination of easy accounting -- unit cost x total units = expected cost -- and incremental delivery -- they can start delivering power almost immediately, both demonstrating progress and helping fund further work. Those that fail to deliver early and on-budget are easier to cancel. (Cancelled big solar and wind projects are called failures, but are successes of project management; and equipment can often be sold on to other projects.) For most big infrastructure projects, nobody really knows how much it ought to cost at each stage, or how far along it really is. The stakeholders who gave it the OK expect a piece of the action, continuously. They never want the money flow to cease, which would happen on completion. America's innovation is that the corrupt money flows to stakeholders are wholly legal, with no risk of indictment. This makes it easier to start projects, even though harder to finish them. The people promoting the project can't afford to buy off gatekeepers, but the project budget itself can. The bigger it is, though, the more backers it will need, so it is easier to estimate low, and overrun. Sometimes, if the money will be cut off anyway, it can be face-saving to deliver something at that point. Thus, Olkiluoto, Second Avenue, and Bay Bridge. NASA is required by law to buy a new, useless SLS every time they shoot one, but can delay launching pretty easily. The sooner SpaceX SuperHeavy starts launching cans, the sooner the obligation might be lifted. Expect to see a big new missile program approved immediately after that. Thing is, most things somebody would like government to spend $billions on really shouldn't be built. So we need gatekeepers. And, some should be, so they need to be overcome sometimes.
robomartin 4y ago
This kind of thing is what, to me, puts into doubt the idea of a full migration to electric ground transportation in anything less than a scale that could range between fifty and one hundred years. We need to double our power generation and transportation infrastructure before full electric transportation is possible. We can't build anything at scale any more. The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise. It quickly became $33 billion. Now it is at over $110 billion and no idea of when or if it will be completed. I would not be surprised if it ends-up somewhere between $250 to $500 billion dollars. People will work on this thing their entire lives, retire and die before it is finished. Cost overruns and what is indistinguishable from systemic incompetence means we cannot possibly afford both the time and cost of doubling our entire power infrastructure in support of electric transportation. In other words, before we can dream of such things and approach large projects, we have to fix the cultural, bureaucratic and structural problems this nation has. BTW, for all his faults, Trump was the first US President to seriously engaged in some of this work. I don't remember all the details. I do remember reading about such things as the permits and process to build a road or bridge being reduced from decades to perhaps a few years. We are in desperate need of more work on this front. Today electric vehicles exist in this gray area where they don't demand enough electricity to create serious problem most of the time. Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems. At some point we will start to approach various thresholds that will make electric vehicles very problematic without matching infrastructure enhancement at local, city, regional, state and national levels. Not sure we can make that happen. We can't have every project cost ten times more than planned and take ten times longer to complete. That's not a formula for success at all.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise. No, it didn’t. System cost estimate referenced in the ballot booklet for Prop 1A was $45 billion. $9.95 billion was the Prop 1A bond issue, which was explicitly never intended to represent full funding.
  - robomartin 4y ago
pid_0 4y ago
Gunax 4y ago
Even it's opponents, underestimated the cost. We knew it would never be $10 billion. It's rare that a boondoggle is such a doggle that even the opponents underestimated how much of a budget overrun it would be. https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-maps-are https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-m...

43 points by phillypham 4y ago

Unlocked link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSFUbCibIRp8spxmHi__Vxr01w3__IyjQUi5PwuhQGYGB_wLVYq5ie9o4xHKbWNpFevcJdcBF89V-bQZrWhX65dyNgogEKCE47tm6B2o9hZmRGO1nqTKvM2DlcaIvyrGx-k-NaDXtWaTb0HIgcx134scwLSHc0nAJzqnHGuZ3y4M-ia9nXsYmMG9GMCqavPDoCAF9OcGEZnzf6go2WuJfXlLDjILWquJAIEgJVwWwHD4o6n086dhcJNsVIK3-ShYjc8H8irgVYXd6ZcZOp95qMNxAUGj-LjYmmQ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mintaka5 4y ago
or just turn off scripts =)
mintaka5 4y ago
telnet works too =)

rayiner 4y ago

> Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes. I received some good advice a long time ago, which is that don’t spend too much time beating your head over your weaknesses, because then you’ll be spending your life focusing on what you’re bad at instead of what you’re good at. I feel like Americans should do this about trains and transit. We can’t do it. Just let it go. Find some other outlet that harnesses our strengths as a society instead of playing into all of our weaknesses.

elgenie 4y ago
Being able to build infrastructure is a core state/social capacity that has to be improved; there's nothing special about trains. There's also no alternative, because roads, bridges, pipes, water filtration plants, transmission lines, fiber, power plants, refineries, etc. are all impacted by the exact same forces. America did a spectacular job of redesigning society around maximizing car usage and continues to subsidize that pattern of land and resource use.

egberts1 4y ago

There is always that available $54 billion surplus of the California state government budget. #headduck

_fat_santa 4y ago

Big infrastructure projects I feel like is where America's democratic system starts to fall apart, and we honestly need a better solution. It seems that in the US we want both good infrastructure but also to have out hands and inputs in every project. We all need to collectively understand that you can have one or the other but not both. That new rail project may not go down the exact route you want but realize that if you start suggesting changes, it will never go down the route you want because it will never be built. This rail project could have been completed years ago if political leaders didn't always change the plan to benefit themselves.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
I used to live in Chicago. In my old neighborhood, there is a right-of-way reserved for future high-speed rail. Most of it is now “tunnel” because high rises and stores have built out around it, taking all the space except that reserved portion. The grocery store has a parking deck cantilevered over the right of way; a high rise literally has a tunnel through it, etc. it looks crazy in the present, but that’s what planning ahead looks like. The US can do big infrastructure projects. It is happening all over the place. You just don’t notice because nobody is writing about non-failures.
- pasttense01 4y ago
  The infrastructure projects being done take much longer and cost a great deal more (even after adjusting for inflation) than a few decades ago.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Can you give an example of successful recent (say, from last 30 years) passenger rail project that, unlike your Chicago one, actually exists? I mean, it is easy to set out space for project in advance, it’s actually building it that is the hard part.
  - relwin 4y ago
    $2.1 billion 10 mile light rail extension, completed last year: https://www.sdmts.com/inside-mts/current-projects/uc-san-diego-blue-line-trolley-extension https://www.sdmts.com/inside-mts/current-projects/uc-san-die...

ncmncm 4y ago

Article misses the point that the cost and schedule overruns are really the whole point of the project. A project's nominal purpose -- train, tunnel, nuke plant -- is just there to fend off pressure to pull the plug. Sunk-cost fallacy keeps the money coming. Solar and wind megaprojects seem to avoid this fate by a combination of easy accounting -- unit cost x total units = expected cost -- and incremental delivery -- they can start delivering power almost immediately, both demonstrating progress and helping fund further work. Those that fail to deliver early and on-budget are easier to cancel. (Cancelled big solar and wind projects are called failures, but are successes of project management; and equipment can often be sold on to other projects.) For most big infrastructure projects, nobody really knows how much it ought to cost at each stage, or how far along it really is. The stakeholders who gave it the OK expect a piece of the action, continuously. They never want the money flow to cease, which would happen on completion. America's innovation is that the corrupt money flows to stakeholders are wholly legal, with no risk of indictment. This makes it easier to start projects, even though harder to finish them. The people promoting the project can't afford to buy off gatekeepers, but the project budget itself can. The bigger it is, though, the more backers it will need, so it is easier to estimate low, and overrun. Sometimes, if the money will be cut off anyway, it can be face-saving to deliver something at that point. Thus, Olkiluoto, Second Avenue, and Bay Bridge. NASA is required by law to buy a new, useless SLS every time they shoot one, but can delay launching pretty easily. The sooner SpaceX SuperHeavy starts launching cans, the sooner the obligation might be lifted. Expect to see a big new missile program approved immediately after that. Thing is, most things somebody would like government to spend $billions on really shouldn't be built. So we need gatekeepers. And, some should be, so they need to be overcome sometimes.

robomartin 4y ago

This kind of thing is what, to me, puts into doubt the idea of a full migration to electric ground transportation in anything less than a scale that could range between fifty and one hundred years. We need to double our power generation and transportation infrastructure before full electric transportation is possible. We can't build anything at scale any more. The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise. It quickly became $33 billion. Now it is at over $110 billion and no idea of when or if it will be completed. I would not be surprised if it ends-up somewhere between $250 to $500 billion dollars. People will work on this thing their entire lives, retire and die before it is finished. Cost overruns and what is indistinguishable from systemic incompetence means we cannot possibly afford both the time and cost of doubling our entire power infrastructure in support of electric transportation. In other words, before we can dream of such things and approach large projects, we have to fix the cultural, bureaucratic and structural problems this nation has. BTW, for all his faults, Trump was the first US President to seriously engaged in some of this work. I don't remember all the details. I do remember reading about such things as the permits and process to build a road or bridge being reduced from decades to perhaps a few years. We are in desperate need of more work on this front. Today electric vehicles exist in this gray area where they don't demand enough electricity to create serious problem most of the time. Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems. At some point we will start to approach various thresholds that will make electric vehicles very problematic without matching infrastructure enhancement at local, city, regional, state and national levels. Not sure we can make that happen. We can't have every project cost ten times more than planned and take ten times longer to complete. That's not a formula for success at all.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise. No, it didn’t. System cost estimate referenced in the ballot booklet for Prop 1A was $45 billion. $9.95 billion was the Prop 1A bond issue, which was explicitly never intended to represent full funding.
- robomartin 4y ago

pid_0 4y ago

Gunax 4y ago

Even it's opponents, underestimated the cost. We knew it would never be $10 billion. It's rare that a boondoggle is such a doggle that even the opponents underestimated how much of a budget overrun it would be. https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-maps-are https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-m...