California High Speed Rail - Boondoggle or Boon? (Los Angeles, San Francisco: bankrupt, pros and cons)

[Bill the Butcher]

Originally Posted by Dave_n_Tenn

If you read this you may be offended, or enlightened... either way you should at least look.
https://catalyst.independent.org/202...ia-brightline/

Brightline vs. CHSR seems to be an apple to oranges comparison. The Brightline in Florida is not an electric HSR. That said, we still majorly screwed up our CHSR. The fact that a single segment hasn't been completed and up and running yet is ridiculous. Like others said, probably should have started with and LA to SD segment.

[Dave_n_Tenn]

Originally Posted by Bill the Butcher

Brightline vs. CHSR seems to be an apple to oranges comparison. The Brightline in Florida is not an electric HSR. That said, we still majorly screwed up our CHSR. The fact that a single segment hasn't been completed and up and running yet is ridiculous. Like others said, probably should have started with and LA to SD segment.

Sometimes we miss the concept, 'cause were thinking about the product. "Brightline, a private company, is proving that market-based rail travel is possible"

That is the intended point.

[Bill the Butcher]

Originally Posted by Dave_n_Tenn

Sometimes we miss the concept, 'cause were thinking about the product. "Brightline, a private company, is proving that market-based rail travel is possible"

That is the intended point.

Okay, but is market based clean energy HSR travel possible? It probably was but California screwed it up. Brightline didn't prove it one way or the other though if they never attempted it.

[davdaven]

People who suggest HSR should be built up the I-5 corridor are very LA/SF centric. Following the SR-99 corridor rather than I-5 allows HSR to serve 2 major metro areas with a total population of 2 million people. Bakersfield and Fresno aren't small towns.

[Bill the Butcher]

Originally Posted by davdaven

People who suggest HSR should be built up the I-5 corridor are very LA/SF centric. Following the SR-99 corridor rather than I-5 allows HSR to serve 2 major metro areas with a total population of 2 million people. Bakersfield and Fresno aren't small towns.

You do realize Bakersfield is very close to the I-5 right? In fact Bakersfield continues to expand further west towards the 5 every year. Putting a stop at the I-5 and Stockdale Hwy would serve Bakersfield. That's less than a 20 minute drive for probably over half the population of Bakersfield, basically everyone living west of the 99.

[Dave_n_Tenn]

Originally Posted by Bill the Butcher

Okay, but is market based clean energy HSR travel possible? It probably was but California screwed it up. Brightline didn't prove it one way or the other though if they never attempted it.

Well, it could be electrified, but think how programs with the best of intentions, run by government officials, with what seems like unlimited access to tax payer cash, who over regulate projects with social justice requirements and other assorted sundries, always seem to 'flounder' in the regulatory mud & BS they CREATE!

Did NASA start out trying to go to the moon? If you don't see 'it'... well

[MechAndy]

I don’t have much faith in the government when it comes to common sense thinking.
When they built the BART system they thought an oddball rail spacing was the was to go.
It actually made some things cost 4 times as much because almost everything had to be custom made per order.
We lost a lot of the discounts that the main railroads received when everything is uniform and plenty are made.
I have the idea that this might be the case as well here if not a simple spec or a route you can bet they will figure out how to screw the pooch once again one way or another.

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by Bill the Butcher

We should have outsourced the entire planning, both engineering and environmental, and actual construction to Japan. The entire thing would have been completed by the end of this year and far more efficient.

IMO it should only have two stops in the Central Valley. One on both ends to serve Bakersfield and the Manteca/Modesto/Tracy/Patterson area. Sorry, Fresno, Madera, Visalia and Tulare would be left without a seat at the table. But still even if you are in those central CV cities it could still be worth a 45min to 1hr drive to the high speed rail station to catch a train going all the way down to Orange County or San Diego.

Yea, but mass transit in the US, and infrastructure in general including highways, has Buy American clauses attached to them. That's another can of worms.

Having Japanese firms do it would have skirted a lot of the issues, but not all of them, namely NIMBYs as well as people for some reason ideologically opposed or conveniently opposed to such projects to pander to their base and have a ready tool in using CEQA among other things to greatly stall and thus add to the cost of these projects. After all, opposing these projects and racking up the costs for them by extending the timeline is great political fodder since having in hand in greatly increasing the timeline and budget by mounting as much opposition as you can muster for a fairly low cost of opposition then racks up a lot of points with your political base as doing so just helps increase that burn rate so you have even better fodder. CEQA does need reform and Japan can't help with that unless we also just decided to have them also lend us their legal framework for land use (or even general governance). Eh, perhaps we should do that as well. I rather like Japan!

I think Fresno should have its own stop if it's going to serve the Central Valley. I think the egregiously weird one is actually Palmdale unless we're super sure that Central Valley to Las Vegas is really going to be a thing and even then it's not that compelling of a case. I also don't think the intermediate stops are that much of a killer because CAHSR is almost certainly going to run local/express services when SF-LA is in place. You can look at page 4-1 in this report to see what the intermediate stops are like. These have the tracks going from two to four tracks (so from one in each direction to two in each direction) with side platforms so that express trains can overtake local trains. If you want to reference back to Japan, that's exactly what their high-speed rail lines do as well with quite a few smaller city/metropolitan area stops and local / express service patterns. At least on this bit of things, CAHSR is doing some pretty standard practice for HSR and rail in general.

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by MechAndy

I don’t have much faith in the government when it comes to common sense thinking.
When they built the BART system they thought an oddball rail spacing was the was to go.
It actually made some things cost 4 times as much because almost everything had to be custom made per order.
We lost a lot of the discounts that the main railroads received when everything is uniform and plenty are made.
I have the idea that this might be the case as well here if not a simple spec or a route you can bet they will figure out how to screw the pooch once again one way or another.

Yea, BART using broad gauge was an incredible blunder. The idea was that BART was going to one day be extended across the Golden Gate likely along the bridge and so needed greater stability with a broader gauge given how strongly the wind buffets the bridge and that's how they got to that point. Except BART never extended through the Golden Gate Bridge and that's nowhere on the road map for BART. What's more, further more advanced modeling also showed that it wasn't even necessary, but now that so much of the system has been built out, it'd be an incredibly expensive mess to try to re-gauge BART.

If BART had been standard gauge, then Caltrain and ACE as they are probably could have been incorporated into one system with BART and the Bay Area really could have a really efficient ring line operation and the idea of a second Transbay Tube probably would have gotten off the ground by now.

I do sometimes wonder if perhaps it *is* actually worth it to re-gauge everything in both the track gauge as well as the loading gauge (and electrification) to get all the heavy rail systems to be interoperable and have through-running. The stations would certainly have enough clearance and you can have the platforms extended out. Fairly large train operations have been re-gauged in the past, and oftentimes with the much more expensive re-gauging of narrow gauge up to standard rather than broad gauge down to standard.

[Logicist027]

It's obvious this thing is a boondoggle. Here is what a reasonable and basic map (it obviously won't be perfectly straight) of what rail should look like in the southwest.




I'm fine with going up the central valley. However there would be stops in Bakersfield, Fresno & Stockton as the junction between the bay & Sacramento. Once again, I think they should have started in the large metro areas first and connected them to nearby places. That means LA-SD, LA-Vegas & maybe SF-Sacramento. Then they could have spanned the large central valley after the main parts had been built.

If this thing doesn't pay for itself in literally one of the best places to build it in the US, it's definitely a boondoggle. I would bet at this time it won't even be able to pay for its operating expenses because of all the weird design choices.