$231 B can subsidize over 400 years of free air travel between LA and SF (assuming $200 per round trip and 2.7 million flights per year [1]).
The hope is that the high speed rail would allow way more trips between the two cities, as well as the central valley cities in between, bolstering the economy, compared to the current amount of flights. I will keep my fingers crossed for the next 30 years.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/san-francisco-los-angeles-flight-ma...
I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.
In the end we’re working for creating a form of transportation that could move people from point A to point B. However, everything from land use to infrastructure development costs a lot of money and nobody has any reason to lower their prices either.
I bet a brand new fully sustainable city could be created with that amount of money. But nimby will make it impossible, because (I believe) it’s about resource extraction and not service delivery.
> I think the end-goal is to extract resources and money from taxpayers to wealthy individuals and corporations.
Don’t forget unions. The big large union networks (like SEIU, teachers unions, etc) corrupt politics but also benefit from that corruption.
Of course, and having to pay certain land owners billions of dollars to build a couple tracts passing through their property doesn’t help either. At least the union members will spend that money within that community and not stash it in Cayman Islands or some other tax shelter.
I don't think unions are the primary problem. Maybe cal can use immeninent domain to get land for tracks. $231 billion is a stupid number whatever the goal.
Is that why other countries with substantially more unions are wildly cheaper and astoundingly faster?
Look at Spain. More unionized, 1/10th the cost and they build the entire length of the CA HSR every two years.
The fastest, cheapest construction of hsr is literally by communists...
Why is there always someone who blames unions for everything with zero empirical analysis?
With all do respect, and I mean this sincerely, it makes you look stupid.
> Is that why other countries with substantially more unions are wildly cheaper and astoundingly faster?
Unions, the laws around them, political systems, and union culture are different everywhere. In the US, unions blindly support candidates who support more government spending, more big projects, more benefits for their union or projects, etc. They get money by the forced collection of union dues from workers and use it to influence politics. They extort the public by regularly striking - for example the seasonal predictable strikes by teachers, hurting a critical service of education - all while resisting accountability and competition. The collusion inherent to industry wide unions leads to reduced competition and increased labor prices.
Unions are definitely a part of the CA HSR problem. They benefit greatly from this boondoggle, and taxpayer money is basically stolen from others and funneled to them. But I do acknowledge that they may not be the biggest problem in terms of the cost overrun.
However they play a big role in the politics of it - supporting legislation, candidates, and contracts that help them. It’s why Newsom keeps talking up the union labor involved in CA HSR and how so many union jobs are created by it.
> With all do respect, and I mean this sincerely, it makes you look stupid.
Read the site guidelines.
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While I think the project should cost less money, thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope.
The $20 I spend on feeding myself a healthy dinner could buy 10 sundaes at McDonald's, that doesn't mean I should eat 10 sundaes.
Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
> thinking purely in terms of money is a slippery slope
I agree. Flights would also be much faster and more flexible.
But flights emit co2, and a train system is electrified. It can be completely powered by renewables.
Given California's extreme susceptibility to climate related disasters, avoiding flights is a great idea.
Have you ever been to Europe?
Bingo.
Never seeing a good public transport project everyone assumes that it’s not possible. It is possible when the goal is to provide transportation services, not resource extraction from masses to limited (in the grand scheme of things) number of individuals.
Yes. Isn't Ryanair more popular for the distance this California project would cover? (800 km)
Both options exist and both are heavily utilized. Having multiple options helps alleviate congestion issues.
Not faster by enough to matter, a difference of 1 hour that airport security, taxi, boarding, and takeoff/landing easily eats up.
You also can't be productive on a flight packed in like sardines and being required to put away your laptop for for a large portion of the flight time.
in addition... you need a real id or a passport to fly. a lot of people have extreme anxiety about flying. those are big hurdles that a train does not have.
I made an appointment at the DMV, walked in, waited about 10 minutes, answered a few questions, and walked out with a piece of paper saying I'd get the real ID mailed to me, which happened.
As for getting a birth certificate, I googled how to get a birth certificate from XX state, followed the directions, and got a birth certificate in the mail.
"Works for me, WONTFIX"
Spoken like a true software engineer
True, but at these prices you could have a dedicated terminal to make the process as easy as getting on a bus.
One of the premises behind the CAHSR is that the existing airports and runways in LA and SF are nearing capacity. There's no room to expand, and the metropolitan regions are so sprawling you'd end up driving an additional hour or more to any newly built airport. Cars and buses don't solve the problem, either, precisely because of the sprawl and traffic--it can take longer to traverse Bay Area and LA sprawl than it does to zoom the hundreds of miles down I-5.
From an engineering and planning perspective HSR makes sense anyway you look at it. The problem is our inability to build major infrastructure projects. Even highway construction and expansion in these regions is becoming absurdly expensive, along with all other forms of development. Completely independent from HSR, we need to fix our regulatory policies. The ballooning price tag for CAHSR shouldn't inspire ire against HSR, it should inspire ire against our regulatory policies and governance.
Is that really true? LAX and SFO are near capacity, at least during certain times of the day. But we still have room to increase flights at SJC, STS, OAK, ONT, BUR, SNA, and LGB. With a little more work it should also be possible to shift some cargo flights to NUQ in order to free up SFO capacity.
These questions have been exhaustively studied. For example, https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/about/business_pl...
That analysis may be biased, but it does a decent job sketching out how to compare modes and capacities. Also, regulatory obstruction and cost inflation apply just as much to airport and highway expansion as it does to HSR. In some ways it's much worse. SFO should build a new runway, and it'd be incredibly cost effective, but NIMBY opposition was so intense SFO repudiated the idea years ago and dare not even speak of it, now.
No, that report doesn't address my point. Did you even read it? OAK in particular has been losing flights lately and is well below capacity. We don't need to build a new runway there, the existing ones are under utilized.
> that report doesn't address my point
It gives number for how much airport (gates and runways) and highway expansion would be needed to meet future demands without the HSR. And it does so apportioning traffic across the 3 major Bay Area airports and 5 LA airports.
The OAK situation only drives home the point. It's not as convenient, at least relative to the segment of people flying. Location matters. If you want to optimally utilize existing airports, we need more infrastructure, including better mass transit systems. OAK is connected to BaRT, but it's yet another transfer with about an extra 15 minutes of travel time, not including walking through the stations. And BaRT itself isn't an effective mass transit system; it's more commuter train than subway.
I'm traveling to LA next month from SF and still haven't decided whether to fly or drive. With CAHSR point-to-point the decision would be easier--take the train and rent a car.
There's no terminal that's going to make getting on a flight as simple or quick as getting on a bus.
Many smaller airports are comparable. Like a few minutes from parking to being at the gate.
> Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit.
Consider the embodied carbon of 500 miles of train tracks and embankment. The carbon released from producing all that cement, smelting the steel, and diesel fuel to move the earth is immense.
This claim that train infrastructure construction will negate the carbon savings of train travel is just a factually untrue argument.
You also can’t power planes with renewables like solar.
They’d probably get some good results if they spent $100 billion on coming up with more fuel-efficient ways of flying and still have enough left over for 200 years of flights
The next generation of small airliners with thin wings and open-rotor turbofans are expected to be significantly more fuel efficient. Hybrid battery-electric propulsion also holds some promise for shorter flights.