Nothing quite embodies the utter failure of the US and CA in particular as this embarrassing high-speed rail project. This is something that has been pioneered, developed, and commoditized in other countries, both in Europe and Asia.
The CA project had incredibly modest ambitions: a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds, using completely standard technology. This isn't a hyperloop, a maglev, a hyperfast train, a dense network, or anything else that can fail because of technology risk. It's purely a failure at execution, pretty much entirely because of politics and corruption. In the US, the process for infrastructure construction is entirely broken, and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development.
> a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds,
None of this is true, or remarkable.
Almost all high-speed rail lines are a single line.
This line would have been 520 miles, or about 800km. That's longer than almost every high speed rail line in the world. For point of reference, all high speed rail in the UK put together is 1,377km. All high speed rail in Japan is 2,760km. While this single line would not be close to the world's longest (China has a single high speed rail line of nearly 2300km), it's about 30% of the total length of all Japanese high-speed lines put together.
This line was planned to have a max speed of 220mph, which is faster than all but one system in the world.
Indeed, which I alluded to in my comment. There are longer rail lines, mostly in China, and mostly built over the past decade.
However, the commenter I replied to claimed that California High Speed Rail would be a short line, when in reality it would have been longer than all but a small handful of high-speed lines, almost all in China.
It’s also easier to get people to agree. In the US, people have been fighting the building of high-speed rail in California since the 1970’s, when Jerry Brown tried to build it the first time.
50 years later there are millions more people in California and infrastructure costs are astronomical.
China will have 30,000 miles of high-speed rail before we have any.
It’ll be interesting to see the benefits in China. Something to think about as your self-driving car navigates the congestion on US highways.
Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes, minimal usable electrical infrastructure, sensitive environments to protect, and seismic fault lines right where you would want to tunnel. The insane cost and complexity of the Pacheco and Tehachapi passes is the main thing that stopped the project in its tracks.
Granted, the Swiss and the Japanese have pulled off significant projects in similarly challenging terrain, but that's a testament to their competence, rather than evidence that the terrain isn't challenging.
Not pointing fingers or blaming you, this just feels like apologist rhetoric. When did America stop doing 'hard' things? Whelp, there's a hill in between here and LA, and at some points, there's not enough power lines -- let's just not bother. I watched a great special about the trains heading up the mountains in Switzerland. They designed hybrid rail and rack trackage to handle inclines of up to 25% (!!). They built corkscrew tunnels inside mountainsides to reduce the incline. I thought America in general and California specifically had the world's best engineers. [1] It's sad how paralyzed the nation has become.
All the best minds in America are devoted to either getting people to click on ads or fleecing them out of their retirement savings. There's nobody left to plan out infrastructure work or make the government function.
How many of those lines are high speed rail? I’d venture to guess that the answer is a big fat zero.
There are freight lines that go through these mountains, but they do so at very low velocities. The passes through these ranges are higher than about half the lines on that list.
The speed of the line isn't the tricky part in these Swiss tunnel projects. Switzerland's trains aren't as fast simply because Switzerland is too small and too dense to require it. The fastest Swiss trains are still pretty fast though at 200km/h.
Much more relevant are the insane projects achieved. The Gotthard Tunnel project is probably one of the hardest things humanity has ever achieved (on par with the moon landing).
>I thought America in general and California specifically had the world's best engineers.
Where on earth did you get that idea? Japan and Germany have long been known to have the world's best engineers. The only engineering that Americans have really proven themselves to be the best in the world at is software. There were times in the distant past when they were best in the world at other things, but those times are gone. There might be an exception for military technology though; no one builds aircraft carriers like the USA still.
Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?
As for when America stopped doing "hard" things, I think it was somewhere in the 80s or 90s maybe, though from what I can tell, the really big turning point in this country was 2001, but things were falling apart before that too.
No, they lost because, even with better engineering (at least for the Germans), they couldn't match America's industrial production capability. American tanks (esp. the Sherman) were total crap compared to German tanks, but they could pump them out at many times the volume the Germans could. Quantity over quality.
In addition, America was protected by two large oceans, so its industrial production capabilities were never affected by the enemy. Germany's factories were constantly being bombed.
And finally, on top of all that, America entered the war late, and by that time Germany was already softened a lot from fighting with France, Britain, Russia, etc. If they hadn't been stupid enough to invade Russia, we might not be having this exchange.
The US has by far the best engineers in the world. It also has the best scientists by a wide margin. Its top 50 universities embarrass the rest of the world in research output, save for a few foreign universities. The US tech industry, biotech, pharma, farming, aerospace and manufacturing segments are either the best in the world or among the best. The US also still has by far the leading semi conductor industry, you can't do anything in that segment without utilizing US companies.
Intel, nVidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple, Micron, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, LAM Research, Analog Devices - the US has the best hardware and semi engineers of any nation. What do Germany and Japan have that competes that small list?
There is no other country that could enable SpaceX, NASA, Blue Origin, et al. to exist.
There's a reason why it was Tesla of California that pushed the auto industry forward, not Germany or Japan.
Nearly every piece of modern technology that you use today was invented by US engineers. There are few exceptions. From the lithium battery, to modern solar cells, to the smartphone or cellphone, to the microprocessor, to the LED & LCD, to the router, computer networks, and everything inbetween. The modern laser, fiber optics, PDAs, spreadsheets, the relational database, a dozen major programming languages, ethernet, ram/dram, the personal computer, streaming media, DPS, the cable modem, the hard drive, SSD, the GUI, the mouse, email, 3D graphics, the digital camera, the optical disc, and dozens of other critical elements the modern world has relied upon.
The modern world hardly exists save for what US engineers invented.
Most of the tech related to the satellite industry - including GPS - was invented by US engineers, by a fat margin. There's a reason it's SpaceX that is going to lead in global Internet access via satellite, not a company from Russia, China, Germany or Japan. The US has by far the best satellite tech and engineers.
The entire AI industry has been trailblazed by US engineers.
The US is so far ahead on autonomous driving tech that every foreign auto company has had to set up shop in Silicon Valley, because none of them can compete. That includes China, Japan and Germany. Auto Germany's biggest fear is being turned into a cheap box commodity, while Silicon Valley takes over the industry via software - their fear is valid, that's exactly what is going to happen.
Europe is so far behind in biotech, they constantly have to buy US companies to try to keep up. All of their best biotech products and companies have been acquired from the US. Asia isn't remotely competitive in pharma or biotech, they're 20 years behind on most things. Japan has one or two relevant companies there, China is only just now starting to make a dent.
The US has been far ahead on genomics tech for decades. It's US companies like Illumina that lead the way, not hardware from Japan. How about robotic surgery? That has been dominated by another US company for two decades, Intuitive Surgical.
It was the US - Broad and Berkeley in particular - that was responsible for about 3/4 of all progress on CRISPR, which China has aggressively copied from. Once again, elite US engineers and scientists blazing the way.
> Remember the Apollo rocket program? How did America do that? They brought in a bunch of Nazi engineers, remember?
That's dramatically false. Slander in fact. Apollo involved thousands of engineers. It was not largely made up of Nazi engineers.
And Japan? The country that hasn't done anything of consequence in 25 years in engineering or technology. Not only did they entirely lose their hardware industry to South Korea, Taiwan and China, but they can't do software at all. There's a reason their economy hasn't expanded since the early 1990s.
Germany, the country that can't do software, can barely do hardware, can't do mobile, has mediocre military tech, rarely invents anything of consequence, and whose last great remaining industry - the auto business - is about to implode. Yeah sure. Germany certainly used to have vaunted engineers, decades ago. There's nothing special about a BMW or Volkswagen today, and it shows in their stagnation. The future of the auto industry is cheap boxes from China and American software.
Accordingly, von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would propel Americans to the Moon. At Marshall, the group continued work on the Redstone-Mercury, the rocket that sent the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. Shortly after Shepard’s successful flight, President John F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. With the July 20, 1969 moon landing, the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled both Kennedy’s mission and Dr. Von Braun’s lifelong dream.
> Crossing the California Coast Ranges is very challenging! They have huge elevation changes,
The project scaled back its goals significantly. There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield, where the elevation changes consist primarily of overpass abutments. Everything else is placed on definite hold. This is the equivalent of trying to put a man on the moon and settling for watching Star Wars on Netflix.
And connecting Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield by train is not a billion dollar priority. These towns are already connected by train, and nobody uses it. The reason the California HSR project was interesting is because it replaces the bus route which currently connects the Bay Area to the LA metro area, not because it upgrades the current rail system which already connects these much, much smaller Central Valley towns. Merced has a population of 80k people. Bakersfield is 380k. Who cares?
> There's a lot of talk about SF<->LA, but the only concrete plan is (was?) Merced<->Bakersfield
No, the only place construction is actively underway is Merced-Bakersfield. The whole SF-LA line is just as much actively doing planning and environmental clearance and seeking funding for actual construction as ever.
> "Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were," he said. "However, we do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield."
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think most of the difficulty in the CAHSR project didn't come from technical challenges. It came from mismanagement and NIMBYs, in particular NIMBYs in Atherton, Palo Alto, the Tehachapi pass, and other segments that blocked construction and put the project into a death spiral.
We've warned you before about personal attacks in comments here. We ban accounts that post like this, and I don't want to ban you. Would you please review the site guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart?
It's in your interest to do so, because preventing this place from destroying itself is the only way to keep it interesting. Also, when your comment is flagged because of a guidelines violation, it sucks that most users don't get to know that there is an aqueduct under Pacheco Pass that was built in the 1950s.
You can prove that your OP was not aware of the existence of the aquaduct?
And what is the purpose of pointing this out? "I was stating facts" seems a flimsy defense. Do you thus claim that the statement of facts is morally acceptable, in all circumstances, at all times? I hope you'd find this suggestion as absurd as I do - imagine walking up to someone at a funeral and saying, "in two months your mother will be wormfood." Facts? Yes. Necessary? I wonder.
> This is something that has been pioneered, developed, and commoditized in other countries, both in Europe and Asia.
Not this length directly along a highly active earthquake fault line and including a massive tunnel underneath an entire mountain range that is exceptionally tectonically active.
> incredibly modest ambitions
I would describe it as hopelessly arrogant ambitions, bordering on technically impossible, and definitely technically impossible within two orders of magnitude of the originally proposed funding.
Exactly. I just rode the Shinkansen in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto. The train peaks at 185mph, and a significant portion of the route is straight through mountains, in tunnels. And don't forget just how prone to earthquakes Japan is. Finally, this line was first built in the 1960s!
California is just pathetic if they can't build something that's much less ambitious than that in the 2010s/20s through terrain that's much easier.
Oh, and that's just one Shinkansen line (and the most heavily-used one). They have them all across the country. I rode another one to the west coast, and saw yet another line under construction; that one was elevated.
Finally, about Japan in general from what I saw there: there was lots of construction of all kinds going on. New buildings, renovated buildings, new train lines, construction on subway stations, etc. When they need something, they just seem to build it. Over here, we just argue about stuff and then never get any kind of public-works projects done.
While I'm not going to dispute Japanese engineering prowess, I do have to note that a lot of the construction going on in Japan is pure pork-barrel politics. The Chuo Maglev under construction from Tokyo to Nagoya is never expected to recoup its exorbitant construction costs, and all new Shinkansen lines & expressways under construction or opened in the last 20 years are bleeding red ink.
>The Chuo Maglev under construction from Tokyo to Nagoya is never expected to recoup its exorbitant construction costs, and all new Shinkansen lines & expressways under construction or opened in the last 20 years are bleeding red ink.
Exactly how profitable is the American Interstate highway system? How much money does America's highways earn per year in fares?
Tell that to the Swiss who built railways to handle 25% inclines, or the Japanese who are also on fault lines. The California ambitions were absolutely modest. Nothing proposed hasn't been done before, in worse conditions, crazier terrain, longer distances -- all of it.
It's now a single-party rule state. For most of the history of the HSR, it was a dual-party state where the minority Republicans exercised veto power over various attempts to speed up the HSR, make fundamental changes, etc. It's crazy, but the HSR is actually in better shape now than when the Republicans were vetoing everything just to make sure it failed.
Also, the HSR as planned goes through 90% Republican territory, and it has been the local Republicans and their former counterparts in the CA legislature that fucked things up.
We (Republicans) are often opposed to this stuff not because we are against infrastructure, but $200 billion being spent on a 500 mile train. If it were cost efficient and managed correctly, more of us would be on board. We watch as massive infrastructure projects such as the Second Avenue subway and other similar projects turn into boondoggles. If a private company can build rockets and go to space, why can’t a private company build trains? XpressWest and Virgin have been interested in an LA-Vegas line. We in California were told that this train would be profitable: if that’s the case, then why the need for hundreds of billions in taxpayer money? My California taxes are high enough and they can’t even fix potholes in the freeways, and they expect us to trust them with an ultra-expensive train? My dad just visited and was amazed at how bad the freeways were compared to Texas. What does California spend all those tax dollars on?
California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003 and from 2011 until now. So in the last 8 years of Democrat control, the train problems are somehow Republican? That’s nonsense. The rail project wasn’t even approved by voters until 2008 and construction didn’t begin until 2015 — years after Republicans had any say in state government. The project has been in an almost continual “environmental review” — certainly not at the behest of the Republicans. The rail debacle isn’t Republican: they haven’t had any power since 2011. And Gavin Newsome was the one that postponed everything except the Merced-Bakersfield line. If Republicans ran the state, taxpayers would be billions richer and we have exactly the same amount of train we have now.
> California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003 and from 2011 until now.
No, it didn't, by any reasonable definition: Democrats, without Republican votes, couldn't pass the required annual budget, so they did not have complete control, from 1999-2003.
> And Gavin Newsome was the one that postponed everything except the Merced-Bakersfield line
Newsome didn't postpone a thing; he restated the status quo that the things for which funding had not been secured for construction would not be constructed until funding was secured as if it were a new development.
> If Republicans ran the state, taxpayers would be billions richer
No, they wouldn't, since the construction spending was largely federal and bond funding (so money not from current taxpayers), and much of it has gone to people who happen to be state taxpayers.
CA doesn't have a Second Avenue Subway...that's an entirely different state...
The LA-Vegas line has never been built because the private companies that would build it modeled their financials on the assumption of getting billions of dollars of free land or easements so they could build it and tax breaks on their first few decades of operation. Without the free government incentives worth billions...incidentally, roughly the same value as it would cost the government to build an HSR to Vegas...the private companies have gotten nowhere.
Texas' freeways are just as bad as California's freeways. The difference is that our freeways are used about 10x-100x as much, so there's a reason that our freeways have potholes for a few days. What's Texas' excuse? They ran out of budget to fix their basic infrastructure again?
CA has not had total Democratic control during the time periods listed. The Republicans maintained enough seats in the Legislature to block tax and spending bills, effectively a legislative veto. They only lost those seats in the most recent elections.
If Republicans ran the state, then CA would be deeply in the red like it was the last time a Republican governor ran the state...namely, Pete Wilson, who did such a bad job that he effectively turned CA from a a red-leaning state into one of the bluest states in the nation. (Schwarzenegger was governor during the recession so that won't be held against him, but notably CA was also in the red during most of his tenure, including the time when Republicans actually had enough Legislative seats to enact legislation and not just veto Democratic bills.)
California had total Democrat control of the government from 1999-2003
Technically, Republicans controlled the Assembly for parts of 1995-6. Willie Brown bought off three different Assembly members to try to keep control, but each was recalled by his/her district.
CA has a 2/3rd threshold for passing many bills, especially bills affecting taxes, and until recently Republicans had just enough seats to block such bills. They only fell below that threshold within the past few years.
So yes, until recently CA was a dual-party state in the way that actually matters.
The Boston tunnel was a pretty great example of the massive weight politics and hiring/mismanaging bad gov contractors puts on every infrastructure project (it "started" in 1982, broke ground in 1991, and finished 2007 at 200% over budget):
> The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the US, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $14.6 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006.
OTOH, it was eventually completed and it is a big improvement for a variety of reasons (including the elimination of an ugly deteriorating elevated highway) even though Boston traffic is mostly as bad as it's ever been.
even though Boston traffic is mostly as bad as it's ever been
Boston traffic is not even close to being as bad as it was during the mid-to-late '90s. Back in those days, Medford to Dorchester would a 60-to-90 minute odyssey between 6am to 10am and 3pm too 7pm. Yeah, there is stop-and-go traffic at peak hours, but back in the day, it was often faster to take 128 to travel between the northern and southern burbs, right now it's just normal rush hour traffic.
Fair enough. I'm more familiar with East-West driving than North-South on 93. My perception is that the morning commute into Cambridge/Boston (and the reverse commute) via either the Pike or Route 2 is worse than it was ten years ago. But that may just reflect how relatively built-up Cambridge has become. TBH, the issue is mostly how long it takes to move on surface streets within the city.
2 is worse than ever because the density of rich people from Littleton on east is too high for the state to steamroll them which is what would need to happen for those lights to turn into overpasses and additional lanes to appear.
90 is terrible but that has more to do with the fact that Worcester is a much cheaper place to live.
Traffic may be as bad as it’s ever been, but the areas that formerly were elevated roads are now wonderful green spaces. So thankful they did it, and wish it could be done more both in Boston and elsewhere, but the gigantic cost must make it overwhelming for anywhere to consider doing that again.
At least Boston is finally digging that green line extension!
Absolutely. I'm sure that traffic would be even worse without it having been done. Certainly getting to the airport is more straightforward than it used to be. But the green spaces are such a huge improvement over traversing the dirty underbelly of the elevated road to get between parts of the city.
(Now if they could only tear down City Hall and do something useful with the space.)
Only twice the over run is not bad these days. Nuclear is a fantastic idea on paper. Then that paper gets shredded.
"In the United States, the cost of Georgia Power’s newest twin Vogtle reactors may top initial estimates of $14 billion and reach $21 billion, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission testimony. Of course, the first two Vogtle Units begun in 1971 took 18 years to build (a decade over schedule) at a final price of $9 billion — ten times the original price tag. BloombergBusiness wrote last fall, “Even as sympathetic an observer as John Rowe [former chair of the U.S.’s largest nuclear utility] warns that the new units at Vogtle will be uneconomical when — or if — they’re completed.”
And New York, where the Second Avenue subway cost 5-7x as much per mile as systems in London or Paris. And DC, where a well funded Metro system had to be taken into federal oversight because deferred maintenance caused it to kill people.
In California it is caused by enabling local municipalities to have a say and pretending you will ever get a consensus, instead of just saying "hey, we are the state, we're doin it, tough crap".
(the NIMBY lawsuits part is separate from this)
That failure mode definitely exists in other states.
This. Looking at the route through the SF peninsula, it seemed like every other city wanted a completely different system. Palo Alto wants a trench! Menlo Park wants it elevated! Burlingame wants it at grade! Hell, the damn thing would have had more hills than a rollercoaster.
Exactly what LA dealt with regarding the expo line. Parts are elevated through LA past USC and you zip through with a beautiful view of the hills, then back at grade in santa monica and the train has to sit in traffic because it doesn't have priority. The purple line extension almost didn't happen because the brilliant citizen-scientists of beverly hills were convinced there would be too much underground vibration or the city would explode or something, hard to say what particular grievance they are on these days.
Oh please, just stop with the romanticism of high speed rail. It has little viability outside of very select areas and even the EU isn't exactly being well served by it. This loss of funds is probably the best result for California because now they can blame Trump for its collapse. The sheer audacity of continuing the project with a limited route between two small cities shows just how much political weight is invested in this. [1]
The ECA's new report [2] shows that it suffers from cost over runs, little inter connectivity, and has issues achieving the speeds promised. Can it be fixed, not without a lot of time, money, and cooperation between competing groups. That last is probably impossible.
Yet we must understand that is the smaller areas needed to travel it is far more suited to Europe than America except in very narrow corridors and even that is stretching the truth. Where it works is where the population numbers are large enough to support and other travel options are highly limited. However in the US and EU it servers mostly well to do people. higher middle income and up and rarely if ever the lower ends of society who don't have the means for travel. It is a political toy that results in lots of press opportunities and largess spread among supporters, both in the US and EU
The cost of HSR would make it an alternative to flying, not driving. SF to LA is a $50 of gas. HSR tickets would be at least $100, and maybe $50 of Uber’s. For a family of four, a $50 trip turns into a $500 trip.
We know all that because we have inter-city rail on the east coast. It’s an alternative to air travel, not driving. Normal people can’t afford $500+ round trip for a family trip from NYC to DC.
SF to LA is the second most trafficked air route in the U.S. carrying 3,507,702 in 2017, only roughly 20,000 flyers fewer than JFK to LA which is number one. This is very much supposed to be an alternative to flying and the resulting pollution.
3.5 million passengers per year isn’t enough to overcome the carbon footprint of building HSR in the first place. To just break even in that front, HSR has to replace every SF-LA flight, and also seven million car trips a year on top of that: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig...
Have you read your own article that you've been promoting all over this thread? They are projecting carrying between 30-40m people by 2040, the buck doesn't stop at 10m a year at all. A nice quote:
"In short, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the California line will eventually offset the environmental damage caused by its construction, and then some."
The damage from air traffic isn't just from the greenhouse gasses they emit, but from the ultrafine particulate pollution that is currently unregulated. This pollution is too fine to be blocked by your lungs, enters your bloodstream, and are shown to be more toxic than large particulate in animal and cellular models.
The article makes two points. One, it presents the results of a study that shows HSR requires 10 million passengers per year to break even in terms of CO2 emissions. The second is to reiterate California’s projection that HSR will have 30-40 million riders by 2040. The former is a mathematical analysis. The latter is speculation, and completely unrealistic speculation. It is completely unreasonable to conclude that HSR will have more riders than the Northeast Corridor, which connects the densest and most transit rich corridor in the entire country. It’s completely unreasonable to assume it will have triple the passengers annually of all flights between SF and LA, given that the estimated ticket price would be just a little lower than airfare. (Transit projections are routinely completely wrong. The Silver Line projections in DC were way too high, even though that was a relatively easy calculation since Metro had existing suburban lines to base the estimate on.)
> And almost none of those people have decent public transit to get to a rail station in the city.
The umbrella of the CA HSR project has involved, and continues to involve, considerable spending on local transit improvements for exactly that reason.
SF to LA is probably one of the most traveled domestic air routes and airport pollution is devastating for cities. It's not sustainable environmentally and in terms of public health.
Airport pollution is not “devastating” for cities. Studies show that particulates, etc., are higher near airports but still within legal limits.
California HSR, by contrast, would have been a CO2 disaster: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... It would need to have 10 million riders per year to break even in terms of CO2 footprint. The SF-LA flight traffic is just a third of that.
Normally transportation projects seek to complement existing mode of transport. CA HSR was doomed to fail it was envision as an alternative to driving and flying. The lack of synergy means benefits would come at too high a cost and to too few people.
If the money had been spent on a mag-lev line connecting SF and SJ instead, I imagine it'd be close to completion already.
I basically agree, but one thing I've begun to wonder about is the "through terrain that isn't too challenging" part, given that the Central Valley has been sinking in parts because of aquifer depletion.
Most of the system follows 150 year old rail right of ways.
Places where it doesn't is through Pacheco Pass and the San Gabriels. Pacheco Pass already has a aqueduct tunnel. Boring a tunnel through that just costs money.
San Gabriels are trickier, really depends engineering vs money vs how fast do you want to go vs surface disruption.
Yeah... this is a CA problem not a US problem. Had a similar amount of money been given to say... ND or MT to build some other structure it would have been done before the money was ever divided out.
To be honest I would be surprised if any land-intensive project gets completed in the Texas/NMexico/Arizona area; those ranchers are really territoral
I mean given all the adversity and polarization in current US culture we still haven't escalated to the armed siege of government buildings, yet those guys have already done that twice this decade over fucking cows
Au contraire, the biggest issue that HSR faced was landowners fighting it every step of the way. Between fighting eminent domain and fighting with CEQA (California environmental quality act) it's surprising anything got done.
Could ND or MT allocate 30-100bn in state funds for this? The federal grant was a huge loss but a drop in the bucket for how much this project has derailed due to the use of private contractors instead of public engineering.
How is that even remotely the same? If anything that proves my point. Despite massive setbacks that were 100% out of their control the company building that pipeline still got it built in time and under budget...
The CA project had incredibly modest ambitions: a single line, over a relatively short distance, through terrain that isn't too challenging, going at moderate speeds, using completely standard technology. This isn't a hyperloop, a maglev, a hyperfast train, a dense network, or anything else that can fail because of technology risk. It's purely a failure at execution, pretty much entirely because of politics and corruption. In the US, the process for infrastructure construction is entirely broken, and the never-ending political battles that pop up with every project completely incapacitate development.